COGS IN THE CULTURE MACHINE: A CHANGING PRODUCER-AUDIENCE RELATIONSHIP IN SOUTH KOREAN POPULAR CULTURE

BY AMANDA NG The relationships between the producer, product, and audience have long been studied in the larger context of consumption practices and the social factors that affect them. In this paper, I will examine these relationships as articulated in the South Korean pop music industry to provide a check on Adorno and Horkheimer’s view of the culture industry as being an all-powerful, ubiquitous menace to the creative individual. First, I will briefly outline Adorno’s invectives of the culture industry and provide a brief overview of the South Korean pop culture industry. I argue that initially, through highly streamlined and rationalized corporate strategies, SM did hold considerable ideological sway over the production of popular music and culture. However, as I attempt to show in the second part of my paper, such a balance of power is undergoing a fundamental shift, as the corporate machine, which manufactures popular culture, is increasingly confronted and opposed by the users of its products. Through this study, I hope to gain insights into the nature of the pop music industry and the pop idol phenomenon in South Korean society, as well as to call into question Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimistic conception of a society dominated by the culture industry.

In “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”, Adorno and Horkheimer present a clear stance regarding the balance of power between producers and consumers of cultural products. From Adorno’s perspective, the culture industry is an oppressive and impenetrable entity that works to homogenize culture. In a society where “something is provided for everyone so that no one can escape,” the individual is effectively marginalized within the economic structures imposed by the dominant capitalist order. All decisions regarding the production and classification of cultural commodities are made by corporate executives before any product reaches store shelves or screens, leading consumers to be passive and unquestioning of the status quo. Any perceived differences within a type of popular culture product are superficial and are only there to provide the illusion of choice. With the commodification of music, consumers are at no less of a disadvantage. Adorno views consumers of popular culture as powerless spectators whose passive intake of entertainment commodities requires no thought on their part and only serves to perpetuate the dominance of certain corporate interests. He writes, “Entertainment is the prolongation of work,” in that people seek it as a relief from the daily grind of work, yet it only serves to compel them to work more in order to retain their leisure hours. The work of the culture industry ultimately results in “the abolition of the individual”. By reducing individuals into customers and employees, it renders humans as “absolutely replaceable, pure nothingness.” From Adorno’s perspective, individuals are hopelessly disempowered and serve as mere material for those in control to use and manipulate to their sole benefit. Thus, he positions the culture industry as an indomitable entity and leaves very little room to consider consumer agency.

Before going on to discuss the dynamics of a particular producer-audience relationship in the South Korean music industry, some background information to the pop culture industry would help to situate that relationship in a larger historical and social context. The origins of popular music and a popular music industry in South Korea can be traced back to the 1920’s during the period of Japanese occupation. The term, yuhaengga, meaning “song in fashion” was first used in 1926 when the song “Adoration of Death” became an immensely popular hit. From then on, as more people recognized the profits that could be realized through a popular song market, recording companies emerged to capitalize on the demand. Initially, subsidiaries of foreign companies like Columbia and Victor produced the majority of recordings of Korean popular songs, and it was not until the 1930’s that Korean-owned recording companies would appear. In the years after World War II and through the Korean War, America’s presence was felt in most parts of South Korean society, not least in the significant influx and widespread popularity of Western pop songs, which would come to have a lasting influence on domestic pop culture. From the early 1960’s on, supported by the United States and Japan, South Korea embarked on an ambitious project of modernization in hopes to stimulate economic growth. Along with rapid industrial development from the early 1960’s on, the South Korean economy underwent a significant transformation to Western-style capitalism. During the 1960’s, the state began to see Western pop music as a corrupting influence on society and the rise of individualism promoted by globalization as potentially destabilizing, causing popular culture to be subject to strict censorship. When Chun Doo Hwan staged a military coup in 1979 and made himself head of state, he actively sought to control the media, shutting down commercial television stations and maintaining the practices of media censorship, effectively delimiting the kinds of music considered suitable for broadcast and airplay. During the 1980’s the “star system” also emerged, wherein singers who were perceived to have the suitable qualities for TV presentation were selected through contests and by talent scouts. After Chun Doo Hwan left office in 1987, anti-authoritarian activists succeeded in bringing democracy to Korea and the 1988 Olympics held in Seoul opened up Korea to a myriad of outside influences. As a result, state censorship of many forms of cultural expression was eased significantly, and the music industry, which had been resting in a rather uncomfortable slumber, was reinvigorated. The 1990’s saw a marked growth in the domestic music industry, with most of the growth attributed to domestic pop music rather than foreign popular music.

It was at the end of what has been a turbulent century in terms of Korean and South Korean history that the SM Entertainment Corporation emerged to become one of the leading manufacturers of pop culture. Officially founded by former singer and TV and radio host Lee Soo-Man in 1995, SM can trace its roots back to a small studio in Seoul in which Lee had first opened SM Studio in 1988. After Lee nearly lost SM because of the drug scandal involving one of his first protégées in the mid-1990’s, he was determined not to expose himself to the same risks of laboriously promoting a new artist only to have them fail to deliver on his investments later on. Lee set out to systematize his idol-making business. He modified and extended the scope of the “star system” which had emerged during the 1980’s to create his own system for training and developing young people into stars. After a student passed the audition process, they would be subject to training in a range of entertainment fields including singing, dancing, and acting. The aspects of personality, character, and looks thus become just as important, if not more, than their ability to sing and dance, since any minor shortcomings in the latter areas would be made up for by the rigorous training process that all SM trainees had to undergo in order to debut under the SM label. Thus, Lee effectively rationalized and industrialized the process of developing an idol star. In his efforts to minimize risk, he molded his trainees with a series of standardized procedures, just as factory machines manipulate and shape raw material: as a result, he created standardized cultural products, which were roughly interchangeable and also disposable, since there were always more copies coming down the production line. This type of star-production system has since become a norm among the companies that dominate the Korean music industry, such as YG and JYP Entertainment. In 2005, producers estimated the average cost of grooming and launching a new artist to be around $400,000, including music and dance training, the stars’ costumes, cars, managers, and other expenses. Since its inception, the idol-making machine has changed little besides becoming further streamlined with the help of information technologies, which help to identify what kind of pop star is currently in demand. SM has since begun to hold global auditions annually, and has moved to merge with or buy out other media companies, including a DVD distributor, a karaoke machine distributor, a music video channel, new media platforms, and more.

As a prime model of the rationalization and bureacratization that characterizes the modern production of culture in a capitalist framework, SM is an apt representation of the culture industry as characterized by Adorno. In his conception of a society where the “control of consumers is mediated by entertainment,” SM is a leading producer of pop culture products that serve to both pacify and suppress the masses. As Keith Negus writes on the nature of the Western pop music industry, corporate strategy “provides a means of rationalizing and ordering the activities of consumers and audiences. Record companies maintain extensive collections of consumer data, gathered from sources such as electronic monitoring of sales, consumer panels, and publications of industry-wide figures. They then utilize this data to develop and promote new stars and songs. Under such corporate strategy, consumers are reduced to charts and graphs, which is another aspect of the culture industry that Adorno rails against. With its assembly-line method of churning out the next idol stars, SM is also responsible for infecting everything with the homogeneity that Adorno sees as detrimental to the creative individual. Although it attempts to differentiate its idol stars from each other, such as by marketing them as purveyors of different genres (TRAX is marketed as a rock band, while Dong Bang Shin Ki is marketed as an acappella group), it hardly hides the fact that all these idol stars are products of the standardized SM training process. Any differences between them are therefore fabricated and intended to delude consumers. In some ways, the manufacturing process does not even end at the idol’s debut. The company often controls what costumes they wear in performances, their casual clothing, and even the kind of car they will drive. SM has to constantly monitor, shape, and repackage its idols according to current fads. With its recent evolution from a music label into a full-fledged media conglomerate, SM seems to be moving further to homogenize the experience of popular culture as well. From Adorno’s perspective, the commodification of music that is carried out by large media corporations like SM only serves to “intensify the impoverishment of the aesthetic material so radically that the identity of all industrial cultural products...will triumph openly tomorrow.” In many ways, SM’s cultural clout seems to have exceeded that point. Nowadays, it is rare to find someone who is at least somewhat immersed in Korean pop culture and cannot trace SM’s idol groups back to SM. Videos and pictures showing idols during their auditions and pre-debut training are widely circulated online and can be found on Youtube. By extensively marketing the audition process, SM even presents the opportunity to be an SM trainee as something desirable. In being widely identified with the idol-making machine, SM’s cultural products already seem to be recognized for what they really are: the products of an industrial process that are mass-produced for mass consumption.

SM is in the business of actualizing Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle. In the context of this corporate strategy, music plays a minor role in the success of its cultural products, although idols put out scores of music albums. As Debord writes, a spectacle is “the omnipresent celebration of a choice already made in the sphere of production, and the consummate result of that choice.” It is “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” The dissemination and control of images is paramount in SM’s corporate strategy. Whether through music videos, magazine spreads, TV advertisements, or guest appearances on game shows, SM consistently manages to impose a pre-packaged, meticulously tailored image of their idol stars on their audiences. Because it establishes and maintains social relationships with its customers through images, SM can essentially hide the fact of an unequal power relationship between it and its customers. In accordance with Adorno’s characterization of the culture industry, Debord’s notion of the spectacle deemphasizes any notion of consumer agency, and individuals are depicted as powerless in the face of the spectacle and all the economic capital it embodies.

Manufactured to be spectacles, the cultural products, which SM puts out in the form of cute boy bands and spunky girl groups, often become objects of fetishization, especially among South Korean youth, to the extent that consumers develop solid, verging on obsessive, loyalties to particular artists. These loyalties manifest themselves in the formation of large fan clubs, each self-proclaimed to be exclusively devoted to a certain product of the idol-making machine. For the purposes of this study, I am only focusing on the fan club of Dong Bang Shin Ki, a boy band under the SM label, although many other SM idol groups, such as SHINee and Super Junior, have also gained significant followings since their debut.

All five members of the popular boy band, Dong Bang Shin Ki (officially abbreviated by SM as TVXQ), are products of SM’s star system. Each member was individually scouted out through auditions and then subjected to training in singing, dancing, and acting in the years leading up to their debut. TVXQ debuted in 2003, performing their hit single “Hug” during a showcase featuring Britney Spears and BoA, another pop star under SM. Since the release of their first single, they have rapidly acquired an impressive fan base. The fan site devoted to them on the Daum website, a large online community, now boasts nearly 760,000 fan members, comfortably beating the second largest fan page by more than 300,000 members. A quick Google search easily turns up more TVXQ fan communities based in countries around the world, including Malaysia, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates. Despite geographical and linguistic barriers, all these various fan communities are self-consciously united under one name: Cassiopeia. In 2008, Cassiopeia made the Guinness Book of World Records for being the largest fan club of any artist, numbering at around 800,000 members, according to KBS, the state-owned television station.

Members of Cassiopeia, known as Cassiopeians and Cassies, are mostly internally organized and managed on many different fan sites and forums. There is no single website that claims to unite all 800,000 plus Cassiopeians within its servers, although the Daum fan cafe certainly comes close to it. These online gathering spaces for fans often demonstrate an impressive level of organization. The Daum fan site, for example, is housed in a neatly organized webpage, on which each member’s picture, date of birth, height, weight, and blood type are listed. In order to be a member, you must fill out the application and be accepted. Members of the fan site are organized hierarchically. Depending on various factors, such as the frequency with which you post and the nature of your posts, the president of the cafe can choose to upgrade your status within the club. The current president of the Daum fan cafe goes by the screen name of Cha-Jun. A series of tabs and links on the left side of the page direct you to the various divisions of the cafe. There is a forum where the daily schedules of each of the members are listed and another one about news of the members’ activities outside Korea. Pictures and cuts from television dramas are also provided and organized by members of the fan page. Another TVXQ fan site, Cassiopeia-Family, exhibits a similar structure of organization. Each of its nearly 14,000 members is given a rank based on the number of posts they have contributed. The rankings range from Dust (0 posts) to Red Giant (300 posts) to Cassiopeia (4000 posts). The structure of these rankings are detailed in a thread named “CSSPF Laws,” which was posted by the founder of the site to provide a comprehensive list of guidelines to govern the behaviors of members on the site. These rules range from dealing with etiquette issues, such as the use of vulgar language and personal attacks, to stipulating the dimensions of avatar and banner images.

Through their large numbers and sound organizational methods, Cassiopeians are able to carry out many of the promotional activities that normally would be left to SM and its marketing department. One forum of the Daum fan cafe organizes members to vote together on weekly music shows as well as international polls where TVXQ is featured, helping to increase TVXQ’s visibility at home and abroad. When Ellen DeGeneres uploaded a blog post on “The Ellen DeGeneres’ Show” website asking for international music suggestions, comments from Cassiopeians flooded the site recommending their favorite idol group. Cassiopeians also work to disseminate the images of TVXQ to a wider audience. In addition to providing pictures and clips on fan sites, Cassiopeians also add subtitles to many of TVXQ’s videos on Youtube. Whereas the official music video of “Mirotic” that is provided on SM’s official channel is only in Korean, further searching turns up versions with subtitles in English, Spanish, Thai, Chinese, and French. The noticeable group presence that they exert wherever they go helps to increase TVXQ’s presence in online discussions about Korean pop music. On Soompi.com, one of the largest English-language online communities dedicated to Korean pop culture, there are a total of five threads devoted to TVXQ while most other groups only have one. Cassiopeians also create avatars and banners using their favorite members of TVXQ and use these on other non-TVXQ forums, such as Soompi.com, as proclamations of their loyalties as well as advertisements for their idols. Cassiopeians have also helped improve the images of their favorite members. Last year, Cassiopeians donated a large sum of money under the name of Xiah Junsu (a TVXQ member) to Adra Korea, an international development and relief agency, to help them rebuild a small village in Cambodia. In gratitude, villagers named it Xiah Junsu Village.

Adorno would see these Cassiopeians as a deluded mass and as the victims of an oppressive manifestation of the culture industry. However, the limits to his argument are already becoming apparent. In his scathing portrayal of the culture industry, Adorno does not consider the possibility that audiences have the power to manipulate the images of cultural products. By donating to charity in Junsu’s name and improving TVXQ’s image in the process, Cassiopeians are demonstrating that it is possible for them to shape the cultural influences of their idols. In his outline of Lisa Lewis’ insights from her studies on fans and their activities at public events, Keith Negus writes, “fans create communities with a collective shared sense of identity,” and they are able to “contribute directly to the meanings attributed to performers.” Thus, through their impressive presence, Cassiopeians are able to influence how others understand and experience TVXQ and Korean pop culture in general. One of the major scandals that came out of the Korean pop music industry in 2008 involved unruly fan behavior at the “I Love Korea 2008 Dream Concert.” According to several online forums, when it came time for Girls’ Generation, an all-female idol group under SM, to perform, other fan groups, including Cassiopeians, banded together and gave them the silent treatment. Physical violence also allegedly erupted between the fan groups of different SM idol groups. Whether or not these events are exaggerated or even happened at all, the news provoked a flood of responses on web forums. On the thread devoted to this scandal on AsianFanatics.net, many forum members expressed their horror, disbelief, and disapproval. The user ‘marmar’ writes, “what the ppl in charge of the dream concert should do for next year should just banned all sm artists for just next year. since it’s mainly there fanclubs that are immature. don’t ruin it for the other artists that would like to perform for there fans...if they do need to invite an sm artist then invite one where there fans are not as immature & crazy like the soshi heads, elfs & cassies...”. Another user, ‘hippocathy88’, adds, “i cant really see anything hostile from them lol but what they did were so immature. such bad reputation for sm fans.” These forum posts demonstrate how the actions of fan groups like Cassiopeia are taken to reflect the general nature of fans of SM’s idol groups. The image of SM thus becomes inextricably linked to and shaped by the behavior of the consumers of its products, and thus SM’s cultural influence can no longer be considered a monopoly. That most of the groups involved in the conflict were fan clubs of SM idol groups only adds to the irony of the situation. More importantly, these fans do not at all resemble Adorno’s characterization of the passive and thoughtless consumer.

Another area where Adorno’s argument falls short is that for all the concern he shows for the individual, he also de-individualizes consumers and treats them as a homogenous mass. From Adorno’s perspective, the utility of a cultural product is destroyed as it is consumed. Michel De Certeau, on the contrary, views consumption as a form of production, in which consumers use the cultural products that are imposed on them to further their own interests. De Certeau argues that “the imposed knowledge and symbolisms become objects manipulated by practitioners who have not produced them.” A tour through a Cassiopeia forum will serve to substantiate his claims. On the forum Cassiopeia-Family, besides the usual personal blurbs, all members divulge their favorite member and favorite couple within TVXQ underneath their avatar. In fact, during registration, I had to provide my favorite member and my favorite couple. Although the TVXQ images that SM puts out rarely have any homosexual insinuations (most TVXQ music videos involve a female love interest), it has been very common for fans to portray pairs of members as romantic partners. On the Cassiopeia-Family forum, we thus find a salient example of SM’s cultural products being vastly reinterpreted to pursue interests and desires divergent from that of the dominant capitalist order. These reinterpretations also serve to distinguish Cassiopeians from each other and reflect the variety of personal preferences within the TVXQ fan community. The forum also features a large collection of fan fiction written by fans, in which they use the members of TVXQ as characters in their own original stories. In the fan fiction ‘Salvation of Love’, the author reimagines Jaejoong as a vampire and recasts Yunho as his lover, clearly straying from the images that SM seeks to spread of its idols. These authors literally “select fragments [being] taken from the vast ensembles of production in order to compose new stories with them,” effectively using SM’s cultural products to pursue individual interests and desires which are reflected in the stories they write.

Thus, the culture industry is not without its virtues. It provides the material with which consumers can use to fulfill certain individual interests. As Dick Hebdige writes, “All aspects of culture possess a semiotic value, and the most taken-for-granted phenomena can function as signs: as elements in communication systems....” Corporate giants such as SM provide a common ideological space in which subordinate groups are able to function and interact. Cassiopeians are only able to use the images of their idols to fulfill their personal interests and share their reinterpretations with other fans because there is a corporation like SM to produce those idols and build a fanbase for them. Thus, the culture industry might serve a social function by providing a common language of signs that audiences can creatively manipulate and practice what John Fiske terms “textual productivity,” as cited in Bertha Chin’s work on East Asian cinema fandom.

Recent high profile events involving Cassiopeia and SM seem to further challenge the validity of Adorno’s threatening characterization of the culture industry. On July 31, 2009, three members of TVXQ filed an application at the Seoul Central District Court for provisional disposition to terminate their contract with SM Entertainment. Within the month, Cassiopeians mobilized a boycott of SM products. In a lengthy official statement, they detailed their main reasons: “1) SM Entertainment’s own decision of cancelling SM TOWN LIVE ‘09 that ridiculed the consumers 2) The insincerity and neglect that SM Entertainment showed for years to consumers’ complaints, and 3) SM Entertainment’s unfair treatment of TVXQ that caused a great danger [to] TVXQ’s existence”. On August 28, Cassiopeians submitted a petition of 121,083 signatures to the Korean Human Rights Commission to defend the human rights of their idols. Through their actions and their stated reasons, Cassiopeians clearly demonstrate how they think the producer-consumer relation should be. They hold SM responsible for not providing the cultural products it promised and believe that SM should be aware and responsive to the needs and opinions of consumers, needs and opinions which diverge enough from the dominant ideology to be called “complaints”. These Cassiopeians thus demonstrate a capacity for consumer agency that Adorno does not consider them to be capable of. The third and last reason provided for the boycott in the official statement also shows that their ultimate loyalty rests with their idols and not with SM. They conclude their lengthy statement with a proclamation of their everlasting loyalty: “We always support TVXQ. Please always keep the faith! =)”.

The fact that Cassiopeians’ loyalties are firmly anchored to their idols rather than to SM points to an inherent weakness in the culture industry. Being in the business of manufacturing human spectacles, SM encourages the consumer to develop strong attachments to the cultural product while simultaneously distancing itself from it. In Bertha Chin’s summary of Christine Yano’s work on fan cultures, she writes that “this sense of intimacy is centered on the fan relationship to the star rather than a specific cultural text or event”. At the same time, the nature of the spectacle involves distorting SM’s role as the producer. The typical producer-consumer relationship is obscured by the images which mediate it, to the extent that in the minds of audiences the images themselves come to take precedence over the entities which produced them. SM is increasingly seen as a separate entity from its cultural products, and the two are perceived to have divergent interests, as exhibited by the Cassiopeian efforts to defend the rights of their idols against the transgressions of SM. These intimate idol-fan relationships come to take precedence over the relationship that Cassiopeians have with SM. When an event arises where fans have to make a choice between their idols and SM, the choice is clear. Hence, SM, and the culture industry in general, can be said to be at a natural disadvantage precisely because their cultural hegemony is sustained by the production of spectacles.

Adorno’s impassioned critique of the culture industry thus seems to overlook the very thing he is trying to defend. While he mourns the loss of the individual, he ignores the capacity of the individual to exercise their creativity and agency within the economic structures imposed by the dominant capitalist order. Consumers, as per the perspectives of De Certeau and Hebdige, retain much of their creative potential despite the cultural hegemony of giant entertainment corporations like SM. The many practices carried out by Cassiopeians serve to attest to the productivity that audiences are capable of, as well as to their ability to confront and challenge those in power. Another way to view the role of the culture industry is that it provides a common context in which audiences can interact and be textually productive. Such a notion suggests that it may have some redeeming qualities that Adorno does not acknowledge. This study also reveals a fundamental weakness of the culture industry which lies in its production of spectacles. By putting forward some of the weaknesses of both Adorno’s critique and the culture industry, I hope to lend some optimism to the gloomy view that Adorno presents of modern popular culture.

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