The Dialectic of Stereotypical Integration: The Incorporation of the "Other" By the Contemporary Culture Industry in Light of Theodor Adorno's Critique of Jazz

In his critique of jazz, Theodor Adorno often emphasized how the originally heretical and disruptive element of this music, present as an expression of the Black population in America, had been violently integrated by the culture industry. Through stereotypes, clichés, and other prejudiced images, the heteronomous element present was transformed into a "myth of origin” (Negerfabel) mobilized by the industry to give jazz an eccentric atmosphere, sexually liberated yet primitive, but modern. Despite the limitations of Adorno's critique in light of the profound transformations jazz underwent starting in the 1950s, from bebop onwards, we believe his original diagnosis regarding how this music was constrained from its original transgressive impulse and integrated into mass culture still provides a valid model for analyzing current trends of neutralization of the "other" and peripheral, marginal cultural expressions by the culture industry. Today, much more than in the culture industry of the 1940s originally analyzed by the Frankfurt School, there is a hegemony of supposedly critical cultural products that allow for the inclusion of demands, groups, and struggles for recognition, but in a superficial and inconsequential manner. Potential critique ultimately transforms into a moral denunciation of capitalism without significant consequences, destined to lend a pseudodemocratic facade to an increasingly oligopolized industry. The “other”, more than before, suffers under this dialectic of "stereotypical integration," which includes them but as a facade without foundation. Echoing Adorno and Horkheimer, those who resist can only survive by integrating. On the other hand, we will see how in more radical strands of free jazz, ignored by Adorno, this seemingly unsolvable paradox finds an aesthetic response, through a different type of musical subject, now decentered, constituted through and for its collectivity, racially constituted and, for that reason, radical.