Adorno & Horkheimer - The Culture Industry - Enlightenment as Mass Deception.pdf - Adorno - MKTK

The Culture Industry:

Enlightenment as Mass Deception

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer 1

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

the last remnants of precapitalism, 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. Even the

aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron

system. The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian countries

are much the same as anywhere else. The huge gleaming towers that shoot up everywhere are outward

signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, toward which the unleashed entrepreneurial

system (whose monuments are a mass of gloomy houses and business premises in grimy, spiritless cities)

was already hastening. Even now the older houses just outside the concrete city centers look like slums,

and the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the ﬂimsy structures of world fairs in their praise

of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans.

Yet the city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in

a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary—the absolute power of

capitalism. Because the inhabitants, as producers and as consumers, are drawn into the center in search

of work and pleasure, all the living units crystallize into well-organized complexes. The striking unity of

microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general

and the particular. 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. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt

about the social utility of the ﬁnished products is removed.

Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that because millions

participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in

innumerable places to be satisﬁed with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production

centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organization

and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the ﬁrst place on

consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of

manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention is

made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those

whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination

itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the

whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered.

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. This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in

today’s economy. The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control

of the individual consciousness. The step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the

roles. The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is

1 from Dialectic of Enlightenment , New York: Continuum,1993). (Originally published as Dialektik der Aufklarung , 1944)

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkneimer

The Culture Industry

democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs

which are all exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private broadcasters

are denied any freedom. They are conﬁned to the apocryphal 2 ﬁeld of the “amateur,” and also have to

accept organization from above. But any trace of spontaneity from the public in ofﬁcial broadcasting is

controlled and absorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and ofﬁcial programs of every kind selected

by professionals. Talented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they

would not be so eager to ﬁt in. 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. If one branch of art follows the

same formula as one with a very different medium and content; if the dramatic intrigue of broadcast soap

operas becomes no more than useful material for showing how to master technical problems at both ends

of the scale of musical experience—real jazz or a cheap imitation; or if a movement from a Beethoven

symphony is crudely “adapted” for a ﬁlm sound-track in the same way as a Tolstoy novel is garbled in a

ﬁlm script: then the claim that this is done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than

hot air. We are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena as inherent in the technical and personnel

apparatus which, down to its last cog, itself forms part of the economic mechanism of selection. In

addition there is the agreement—or at least the determination—of all executive authorities not to produce

or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules,their own ideas about consumers, or

above all themselves.

In our age the objective social tendency is incarnate in the hidden subjective purposes of company direc-

tors, the foremost among whom are in the most powerful sectors of industry—steel, petroleum, electricity,

and chemicals. Culture monopolies are weak and dependent in comparison. They cannot afford to neglect

their appeasement of the real holders of power if their sphere of activity in mass society (a sphere produc-

ing a speciﬁc type of commodity which anyhow is still too closely bound up with easygoing liberalism

and Jewish intellectuals) is not to undergo a series of purges. The dependence of the most powerful broad-

casting company on the electrical industry, or of the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic

of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven. All are in such

close contact that the extreme concentration of mental forces allows demarcation lines between different

ﬁrms and technical branches to be ignored. The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what

will happen in politics. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B ﬁlms, or of stories in magazines

in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing, and label-

ing 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

2 Apocryphal: of doubtful authenticity: spurious

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkneimer

The Culture Industry

“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. Even the technical

media are relentlessly forced into uniformity. Television aims at a synthesis of radio and ﬁlm, and is

held up only because the interested parties have not yet reached agreement, but its consequences will

be quite enormous and promise to intensify the impoverishment of aesthetic matter so drastically, that

by tomorrow the thinly veiled identity of all industrial culture products can come triumphantly out into

the open, derisively fulﬁlling the Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk —the fusion of all the arts

in one work. The alliance of word, image, and music is all the more perfect than in Tristan because the

sensuous elements which all approvingly reﬂect the surface of social reality are in principle embodied in

the same technical process, the unity of which becomes its distinctive content. This process integrates

all the elements of the production, from the novel (shaped with an eye to the ﬁlm) to the last sound

effect. It is the triumph of invested capital, whose title as absolute master is etched deep into the hearts

of the dispossessed in the employment line; it is the meaningful content of every ﬁlm, whatever plot the

production team may have selected.

The man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him. Kant’s formalism still

expected a contribution from the individual, who was thought to relate the varied experiences of the senses

to fundamental concepts; but industry robs the individual of his function. Its prime service to the customer

is to do his schematizing for him. Kant said that there was a secret mechanism in the soul which prepared

direct intuitions in such a way that they could be ﬁtted into the system of pure reason. But today that secret

has been deciphered. While the mechanism is to all appearances planned by those who serve up the data

of experience, that is, by the culture industry, it is in fact forced upon the latter by the power of society,

which remains irrational, however we may try to rationalize it; and this inescapable force is processed by

commercial agencies so that they give an artiﬁcial impression of being in command. There is nothing left

for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him. Art for the masses has destroyed the dream

but still conforms to the tenets of that dreaming idealism which critical idealism balked at. Everything

derives from consciousness: for Malebranche and Berkeley, from the consciousness of God; in mass art,

from the consciousness of the production team. 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 cliches to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more

than fulﬁll the purpose allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d’ etre 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. The average length of the short

story has to be rigidly adhered to. Even gags, effects, and jokes are calculated like the setting in which

they are placed. They are the responsibility of special experts and their narrow range makes it easy for

them to be apportioned in the ofﬁce. The development of the culture industry has led to the predominance

of the effect, the obvious touch, and the technical detail over the work itself—which once expressed an

idea, but was liquidated together with the idea. When the detail won its freedom, it became rebellious

and, in the period from Romanticism to Expressionism, asserted itself as free expression, as a vehicle of

protest against the organization. In music the single harmonic effect obliterated the awareness of form

as a whole; in painting the individual color was stressed at the expense of pictorial composition; and in

the novel psychology became more important than structure. The totality of the culture industry has put

an end to this. Though concerned exclusively with effects, it crushes their insubordination and makes

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkneimer

The Culture Industry

them subserve the formula, which replaces the work. The same fate is inﬂicted on whole and parts alike.

The whole inevitably bears no relation to the details—just like the career of a successful man into which

everything is made to ﬁt as an illustration or a proof, whereas it is nothing more than the sum of all those

idiotic events. The so-called dominant idea is like a ﬁle which ensures order but not coherence. The

whole and the parts are alike; there is no antithesis and no connection. Their prearranged harmony is a

mockery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works of art. In Germany the graveyard

stillness of the dictatorship already hung over the gayest ﬁlms of the democratic era. The whole world is

made to pass through the ﬁlter of the culture industry. The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees

the world outside as an extension of the ﬁlm he has just left (because the latter is intent upon reproducing

the world of everyday perceptions), is now the producer’s guideline. The more intensely and ﬂawlessly

his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the outside

world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen. This purpose has been furthered

by mechanical reproduction since the lightning takeover by the sound ﬁlm.

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 re-

spond 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 re-

quired 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 entertain-

ment manufacturers know that their products will be consumed with alertness even when the customer is

distraught, for each of them is a model of the huge economic machinery which has always sustained the

masses, whether at work or at leisure—which is akin to work. From every sound ﬁlm and every broadcast

program the social effect can be inferred which is exclusive to none but is shared by all alike. The culture

industry as a whole has molded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product. All the agents of

this process, from the producer to the women’s clubs, take good care that the simple reproduction of this

mental state is not nuanced or extended in any way.

The art historians and guardians of culture who complain of the extinction in the West of a basic style-

determining power are wrong. The stereotyped appropriation of everything, even the inchoate 3 , for the

purposes of mechanical reproduction surpasses the rigor and general currency of any “real style,” in the

sense in which cultural cognoscenti 4 celebrate the organic precapitalist past. No Palestrina could be more

of a purist in eliminating every unprepared and unresolved discord than the jazz arranger in suppressing

any development which does not conform to the jargon. When jazzing up Mozart he changes him not

only when he is too serious or too difﬁcult but when he harmonizes the melody in a different way, perhaps

more simply, than is customary now. No medieval builder can have scrutinized the subjects for church

windows and sculptures more suspiciously than the studio hierarchy scrutinizes a work by Balzac or Hugo

before ﬁnally approving it. No medieval theologian could have determined the degree of the torment

3 Inchoate: being only partly in existence or operation; imperfectly formed or formulated

4 Cognoscenti : People especially knowledgeable in a subject: connoisseurs.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkneimer

The Culture Industry

to be suffered by the damned in accordance with the ordo of divine love more meticulously than the

producers of shoddy epics calculate the torture to be undergone by the hero or the exact point to which

the leading lady’s hemline shall be raised. The explicit and implicit, exoteric 5 and esoteric 6 catalog of

the forbidden and tolerated is so extensive that it not only deﬁnes the area of freedom but is all-powerful

inside it. Everything down to the last detail is shaped accordingly. Like its counterpart, avant-garde art,

the entertainment industry determines its own language, down to its very syntax and vocabulary, by the

use of anathema 7 . 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. And the star performers, whether

they produce or reproduce, use this jargon as freely and ﬂuently and with as much gusto as if it were the

very language which it silenced long ago. Such is the ideal of what is natural in this ﬁeld of activity, and

its inﬂuence becomes all the more powerful, the more technique is perfected and diminishes the tension

between the ﬁnished product and everyday life. The paradox of this routine, which is essentially travesty,

can be detected and is often predominant in everything that the culture industry turns out. A jazz musician

who is playing a piece of serious music, one of Beethoven’s simplest minuets, syncopates it involuntarily

and will smile superciliously when asked to follow the normal divisions of the beat. This is the “nature”

which, complicated by the ever-present and extravagant demands of the speciﬁc medium, constitutes the

new style and is a “system of non-culture, to which one might even concede a certain ’unity of style’ if it

really made any sense to speak of stylized barbarity.” 8

The universal imposition of this stylized mode can even go beyond what is quasi-ofﬁcially sanctioned or

forbidden; today a hit song is more readily forgiven for not observing the 32 beats or the compass of the

ninth than for containing even the most clandestine melodic or harmonic detail which does not conform

to the idiom. Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is forgiven because his

departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the more strongly to conﬁrm

the validity of the system. The constraint of the technically-conditioned idiom which stars and directors

have to produce as “nature” so that the people can appropriate it, extends to such ﬁne nuances that they

almost attain the subtlety of the devices of an avant-garde work as against those of truth. The rare capacity

minutely to fulﬁll the obligations of the natural idiom in all branches of the culture industry becomes

the criterion of efﬁciency. What and how they say it must be measurable by everyday language, as in

logical positivism. The producers are experts. The idiom demands an astounding productive power, which

it absorbs and squanders. In a diabolical way it has overreached the culturally conservative distinction

between genuine and artiﬁcial style. A style might be called artiﬁcial which is imposed from without on

the refractory impulses of a form. But in the culture industry every element of the subject matter has its

origin in the same apparatus as that jargon whose stamp it bears. The quarrels in which the artistic experts

become involved with sponsor and censor about a lie going beyond the bounds of credibility are evidence

not so much of an inner aesthetic tension as of a divergence of interests. The reputation of the specialist,

in which a last remnant of objective independence sometimes ﬁnds refuge, conﬂicts with the business

politics of the Church, or the concern which is manufacturing the cultural commodity. But the thing itself

has been essentially objectiﬁed and made viable before the established authorities began to argue about

it. Even before Zanuck acquired her, Saint Bernadette was regarded by her latter-day hagiographer 9 as

brilliant propaganda for all interested parties. That is what became of the emotions of the character. Hence

5 Exoteric: belonging to the outer or less initiate circle

6 Esoteric: designed for or understood by the specially initiated alone.

7 Anathema: someone or something intensely disliked or loathed

8 Nietzsche, Unzeirgemﬁsse Betrachtungen , Werke , Vol. I (Leipzig, 1917), p. 187.

9 Hagiographer: a writer of an idealizing or idolizing biography.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkneimer

The Culture Industry

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