"The Culture Industry: Enlightenment
as Mass Deception"
--Adorno
& Horkheimer
The essay published in mid-1940s.
"Adorno and Horkheimer were refugees from Nazi Germany living in the U.S.
Hitler's totalitarianism and American market system are fused in their
thought--all the more easily because, for them as members of the German
(or rather secularized German Jewish) bourgeoisie, high culture, particularly
drama and music, is powerful vehicle of civil values" (editor 29).
standardization:
A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercise nature of society alienated from itself. The technical and personnel apparatus . . . itself forms part of the economic mechanism of selection. Culture molopolies are weak and dependent in comparison. They cannot afford to neglect their appeasement of the real holders of power.
integration of different media: The varying budgets in the culture industry do not bear the slightest relation to factual values, to the meaning of the products themselves. Even the technical media are relentlessly forced into uniformity.
[The movies] 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. . . they react automatically. The culture industry as a whole has moulded men as a type unfailingly produced in every product. (34) There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at. . . .The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe [fun]. It makes laghter the instrument of the fraud practised on happiness. (39) Pseudo individuality is rife: from the standardized jazz improvization to the exceptional film star whose hair curls over her eye to demonstrate her originality. (41)
The secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representation of fulfillment as a broken promise. (38) (v.s. culture industry, which does not sublimite; which represses.) More on Adorno's view on Art. |