philosophy

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

Reading Questions:

• What happens when all cultural products are produced according to the logic of industry? o What happens to culture itself? o What happens to individuals as ‘consumers’ of these ‘products’?

Excerpts:

The sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the

dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism, together with technological and social

differentiation or specialization, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture

now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system

which is uniform as a whole and in every part… Under monopoly all mass culture is identical,

and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no

longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power

grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is

made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce…The result is the

circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever

stronger… It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of

standardization and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the

logic of the work and that of the social system…The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and

actually favors the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for

it…the claim that this is done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot

air…

Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different

price ranges [or the difference between indexed goods within a brand, i.e. Toyota Avalon,

Camry, Corolla--KF], depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing, and

labeling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are

emphasized and extended. The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced

products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everybody must

behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level,

and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type. Consumers appear as statistics

on research organization charts, and are divided by income groups into red, green, and blue

areas; the technique is that used for any type of propaganda. How formalized the procedure is

can be seen when the mechanically differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end. That

the difference between the Chrysler range and General Motors products is basically illusory

strikes every child with a keen interest in varieties. What connoisseurs discuss as good or bad

points serve only to perpetuate the semblance of competition and range of choice. The same

applies to the Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer productions. But even the differences

between the more expensive and cheaper models put out by the same firm steadily diminish: for

automobiles, there are such differences as the number of cylinders, cubic capacity, details of

patented gadgets; and for films there are the number of stars, the extravagant use of technology,

labor, and equipment, and the introduction of the latest psychological formulas. The universal

criterion of merit is the amount of “conspicuous production,” of blatant cash investment. The

varying budgets in the culture industry do not bear the slightest relation to factual values, to the

meaning of the products themselves.

The man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him…but industry robs the individual of his function. Its prime service to the customer is to do his schematizing for

him…There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him…Not

only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but

the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change.

The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song,

the hero’s momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment

which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter’s rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are,

like all the other details, ready-made clichés to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything

more than fulfill the purpose allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d’être is to

confirm it by being its constituent parts. As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will

end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has

heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does

come …

Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the

theater of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who

is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without

losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality.

The stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not

have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those

attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most characteristic

of them, the sound film. They are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and

experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the

question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts. Even though the effort required

for his response is semi-automatic, no scope is left for the imagination. Those who are so

absorbed by the world of the movie—by its images, gestures, and words—that they are unable to

supply what really makes it a world, do not have to dwell on particular points of its mechanics

during a screening. All the other films and products of the entertainment industry which they

have seen have taught them what to expect; they react automatically. The might of industrial

society is lodged in men’s minds…The culture industry as a whole has molded men as a type

unfailingly reproduced in every product.

The constant pressure to produce new effects (which must conform to the old pattern) serves

merely as another rule to increase the power of the conventions when any single effect threatens

to slip through the net. Every detail is so firmly stamped with sameness that nothing can appear

which is not marked at birth, or does not meet with approval at first sight…

Anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in. Once his particular brand of deviation from

the norm has been noted by the industry, he belongs to it as does the land-reformer to capitalism.

Realistic dissidence is the trademark of anyone who has a new idea in business… Not to conform

means to be rendered powerless, economically and therefore spiritually—to be “self-employed.”

When the outsider is excluded from the concern, he can only too easily be accused of

incompetence… As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more

seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of

success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which

enslaves them…

The result is a constant reproduction of the same thing. A constant sameness governs the

relationship to the past as well. What is new about the phase of mass culture compared with the

late liberal stage is the exclusion of the new. The machine rotates on the same spot. While

determining consumption it excludes the untried as a risk. The movie-makers distrust any

manuscript which is not reassuringly backed by a bestseller. Yet for this very reason there is

never-ending talk of ideas, novelty, and surprise, of what is taken for granted but has never

existed…

Business is their ideology. It is quite correct that the power of the culture industry resides in its

identification with a manufactured need, and not in simple contrast to it, even if this contrast

were one of complete power and complete powerlessness. Amusement under late capitalism is

the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and

to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanization

has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the

manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work

process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic

succession of standardized operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can

only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time [i.e. you are fried from having

worked a mindless job all day, so you just want to watch TV to turn your mind off—KF]. All

amusement suffers from this incurable malady. Pleasure hardens into boredom because, if it is to

remain pleasure, it must not demand any effort and therefore moves rigorously in the worn

grooves of association [i.e. you don’t want to have to ‘work’ at your entertainment—KF]. No

independent thinking must be expected from the audience: the product prescribes every reaction:

not by its natural structure (which collapses under reflection), but by signals. Any logical

connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly avoided. As far as possible, developments

must follow from the immediately preceding situation and never from the idea of the whole. For

the attentive movie-goer any individual scene will give him the whole thing… Often the plot is

maliciously deprived of the development demanded by characters and matter according to the

old pattern. Instead, the next step is what the script writer takes to be the most striking effect in

the particular situation…

The stronger the positions of the culture industry become, the more summarily it can deal with

consumers’ needs, producing them, controlling them, disciplining them, and even withdrawing

amusement: no limits are set to cultural progress of this kind. But the tendency is immanent in

the principle of amusement itself, which is enlightened in a bourgeois sense. If the need for

amusement was in large measure the creation of industry, which used the subject as a means of

recommending the work to the masses…amusement always reveals the influence of business, the

sales talk, the quack’s spiel. But the original affinity of business and amusement is shown in the

latter’s specific significance: to defend society. To be pleased means to say Yes. It is possible

only by insulation from the totality of the social process, by desensitization and, from the first,

by senselessly sacrificing the inescapable claim of every work, however inane, within its limits

to reflect the whole. Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even

where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a

wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance. The liberation which

amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation. The effrontery of the rhetorical

question, “What do people want?” lies in the fact that it is addressed—as if to reflective

individuals—to those very people who are deliberately to be deprived of this individuality. Even

when the public does—exceptionally—rebel against the pleasure industry, all it can muster is

that feeble resistance which that very industry has inculcated in it.

Nevertheless, it has become increasingly difficult to keep people in this condition. The rate at

which they are reduced to stupidity must not fall behind the rate at which their intelligence is

increasing. In this age of statistics the masses are too sharp to identify themselves with the

millionaire on the screen, and too slow-witted to ignore the law of the largest number. Ideology

conceals itself in the calculation of probabilities. Not everyone will be lucky one day—but the

person who draws the winning ticket, or rather the one who is marked out to do so by a higher

power—usually by the pleasure industry itself, which is represented as unceasingly in search of

talent. Those discovered by talent scouts and then publicized on a vast scale by the studio are

ideal types of the new dependent average. Of course, the starlet is meant to symbolize the typist

in such a way that the splendid evening dress seems meant for the actress as distinct from the real

girl….Now the lucky actors on the screen are copies of the same category as every member of

the public, but such equality only demonstrates the insurmountable separation of the human

elements. The perfect similarity is the absolute difference…Now any person signifies only those

attributes by which he can replace everybody else: he is interchangeable, a copy. As an

individual he is completely expendable and utterly insignificant, and this is just what he finds out

when time deprives him of this similarity.

The less the culture industry has to promise, the less it can offer a meaningful explanation of life,

and the emptier is the ideology it disseminates. Even the abstract ideals of the harmony and

beneficence of society are too concrete in this age of universal publicity. We have even learned

how to identify abstract concepts as sales propaganda. Language based entirely on truth simply

arouses impatience to get on with the business deal it is probably advancing. The words that are

not means appear senseless; the others seem to be fiction, untrue. Value judgments are taken

either as advertising or as empty talk. Accordingly ideology has been made vague and

noncommittal, and thus neither clearer nor weaker. Its very vagueness, its almost scientific

aversion from committing itself to anything which cannot be verified, acts as an instrument of

domination. It becomes a vigorous and prearranged promulgation of the status quo…