"The Culture Industry: Englightenment as Mass Deception"

From MarxWiki

"The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" is Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's essay examining the state of contemporary mass culture. Horkheimer and Adorno observe a shift in mass culture and note that instead of being divided into low, middle, and high, there now exists a single marketplace for ideas in which the most popular works succeed. This concept, referred to as “the culture industry”, indicates that culture now mimics the capitalist political system and serves merely to guarantee submission of the masses to the unified market. The culture industry deprives people of their individual subjectivity and in turn treats them as objects of mass culture.

Horkheimer and Adorno believe that `Culture has always played its part in taming revolutionary and barbaric instincts` (152). There is little room for hope in their conception of culture. They also state that, `there is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producer 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 entertaintment itself is derived from them and only appears to change` (125) Their statement implies that these hit songs, the popular stars and shows of our times are all a part of this hegemonic 'culture' or ideology which consumes us. Therefore, people are not so much individuals, but rather, we are perpetuated by the ideologies inlaid through our societies.

The essay `The Culture Industry` applies the idea that because our culture is so heavily inundated with hegemonic ideologies, which do not only permeate the structures of how society is run, but also they believe them to be the basis of how different industries function. In industries such as the film industry, such variables in the different motion pictures, programs, shows, etc that are produced are interchangeable in the ways that the audience views them because they are in a sense, trained by culture to 'read' things in a certain way.

Again, the approach is deeply Marxist. The culture industry, and the alienation and homogenization it engenders, is an achievement of mass production. It is the technology itself that allows for the commodification of culture and its associated social control. Of course, the authors diverge from Marx in the obvious sense of hopelessness. Revolution is no longer inevitable, indeed it seems simply impossible according to the image they paint.