레이먼드 월리엄스의 이데올로기와 아도르노

Raymond Williams"s Ideology and Adorno

&nbsp;&nbsp;Raymond Williams&quot;s fundamental notion, "culture is ordinary," has been very influential to cultural studies. His idea is that literary works are treated under the illusion that they are superior to any other forms of culture, although literature is nothing but a part of culture. His attack against the values of taste and sensibility for assessing literary works has resulted in attributing to popular culture including film, TV, and advertising, the same value as high culture had. Despite the positive result of reconsidering the underestimated value of popular culture, he missed the fact that popular culture is not created by ordinary people themselves but rather by culture industry, which tries to produce as much profit as possible out of it.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Theodor Adorno, however, differentiates -culture from culture industry which tries to standardize culture in order to facilitate mass production. Standardization, according to him, brings the destruction of autonomy, spontaneity, and criticism that culture used to possess. As a result, culture industry, a distorted form of culture, manipulates people into doing and enjoying things that they would not like unless they were misled. For him, culture is like a work of art which resists against the status quo and unveils the reality distorted by the dominant ideology. in this sense, popular culture is not ordinary any more because that culture has already been distorted by standardization, and culture, which is not affected by it, is the place where we can see the truth.