Apaixonados por carros como todo brasileiro (?) - Reflexões frankfurteanas sobre a indústria cultural contemporânea

Abstract

The objective of this article is to make a critical reflection about the “passion” enunciated by the Ipiranga ́s marketing campaign, using the theoretical contributions made by Adorno and Horkheimer, theorists of the Frankfurt School, related to the concept of “culture industry”. We emphasize that this essay is not intended to explore the Frankfurt School ́s epistemology, but to point out the topicality of the concept “culture industry”. Given the current belief, disseminated by the Publicity, that happiness can be reached by the consumption of objects, our intention is to critically reflect about the current “culture industry” and its psychosocial implications in the formation of contemporary subjectivities. We take as an example of that industry the following slogan: “Passionate by cars like all Brazilians” that discloses that "passion" as "mass culture". Methodologically, we ́ve made a review of the Frankfurt School ́s concepts linked to technical-instrumental modern rationality, pointing the topicality of the “culture industry” concept, differentiating it from a culture derived from the mass. The empirical research, whose methodological strategy was to collect testimonies of internet ́s users in 12 (twelve) sites related with the slogan above mentioned, aimed to explore the forms of adhesion / resistance to that slogan. In our theoretical-critical reading of the testimonials, despite of the fascinated adhesions are the majority, we also detected forms of resistance; which shows us that this “passion”, such as many others proclaimed by the “culture industry”, did not emerged spontaneously from Brazilians, but, in fact, it was built for Brazilians – updated form of the object ́s fetish zed form.