"The Culture Industry: Englightenment as Mass Deception"
From MarxWiki
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's very pessimistic essay examining the state of modern culture. The authors believe that there are not any true, individual voices present in our culture, nor is there room for them. They 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.
Horkeimer and Adorno also state that, `there is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producer shae 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 ideas that because are culture is so heavily inundated with hegmonic ideologies which are do not so much only permeate the structures of how society is run, but rather 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.
