The Culture Industry:

Enlightenment as Mass Deception

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

Summary

Aina Singh
Second year

Adorno and Horkheimer, in this piece, emphasize upon the monotony and uniformity of
present culture- radio, films, magazines etc. - and how it operates as an industry. Under monopoly,
all mass culture is identical. As capitalism strengthens its hold on the individual, the people in power
become less interested in concealing monopoly and its violence becomes more open. Art no longer
pretends to be any more than business made into an ideology that justifies the same. The apologists
for the standardization of the culture industry claim that it is based on consumers’ needs. But the
entire system depends upon whose economic hold is the strongest. The attitude of the public is part
of the system, not an excuse for it.

The television turns all into passive recipients of broadcasted programmes that are all
the same. Clichés abound in mass deception. The so-called dominant idea ensures order but not
coherence. There is no scope for imagination. The culture industry as a whole has moulded men as a
type unfailingly reproduced in every product. Everything is stereotypically appropriated for the
purposes of mechanical reproduction. The individual has an illusion of choice. But any deviation
from the norm makes the deviant a stranger to the system, rendering him powerless. Even marked
differences between films, or stories in magazines, depend not on subject matter but on classifying
and labelling consumers. The technique is that used for any type of propaganda. Invested capital
becomes the absolute master.

Bourgeois art has always claimed to create a world of freedom. But from the beginning,
it has depended upon the exclusion of the lower classes. The deceived masses are today captivated
by the myth of success of capitalism even more than the successful are. Amusement under late
capitalism is the prolongation of work, with mechanization of the work place finding its parallel in
the mechanisation of the culture industry. The pleasure apparatus adds no dignity to men’s lives.
They rush in lest they miss something- though exactly what, it is not clear. By repeatedly exposing
the objects of desire, which are unachievable, it only stimulates those who are habitually deprived.
Even when the public does rebel against the pleasure industry, all it can muster is feeble resistance
which that very industry has inculcated in it. Mass culture does not avoid showing the sufferings of
sections of society; instead it creates a spectacle out of it, without admitting that it is itself
instrumental in the continuation of this suffering.

The culture industry dresses works of art like political slogans and forces them upon a
resistant public at reduced prices. The language and gestures of the audience and spectators are
coloured more strongly than ever before by the imposed standardization. All are free to dance and
enjoy themselves. But freedom to choose an ideology (since ideology always reflects economic
coercion) everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same. The triumph of
advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even
though they see through them.