Culture industry reconsidered [622811]

THEODOR ADORNO
Culture industry reconsidered
(from "The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture"
London: Routledge, 1991)
The term culture industry was perhaps used for the first time in the
book Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and I published
in Amsterdam in 1947. In our drafts we spoke of 'mass culture'. We
replaced that expression with 'culture industry' in order to excludefrom the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it
is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from
the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. Fromthe latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme.The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In
all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by
masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan. The
individual branches are similar in structure or at least fit into each
other, ordering themselves into a system almost without a gap. Thisis made possible by contemporary technical capabilities as well as by
economic and administrative concentration. The culture industry
intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment ofboth it forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated forthousands of years. The seriousness of high art is destroyed in
speculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with
the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistanceinherent within it as long as social control was not yet total. Thus,
although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious
and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, themasses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of
calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the
culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.The very word mass-media, specially honed for the culture industry,
already shifts the accent onto harmless terrain. Neither is it a
question of primary concern for the masses, nor of the techniques of communication as such, but of the spirit which sufllates them, their master's voice. The culture industry misuses its con
cern for the masses in order to duplicate, reinforce and strengthen
their mentality, which it presumes is given and unchangeable. How this

mentality might be changed is excluded throughout. The masses are not
the measure but the ideology of the culture industry, even though the culture industry itself could scarcely exist without adapting to the masses. The cultural commodities of the industry are governed, as Brechtand Suhrkamp expressed it thirty years ago, by the principle of theirrealization as value, and not by their own specific content and harmonious formation. The entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms. Ever since thesecultural forms first began to earn a living for their creators as commodities in the market-place they had already possessed somethingof this quality. But then they sought after profit only indirectly, overand above their autonomous essence. New on the part of the cultureindustry is the direct and undisguised primacy of a precisely and thoroughly calculated efficacy in its most typical products. The autonomyof works of art, which of course rarely ever predominated in an entirelypure form, and was always permeated by a constellation of effects, istendentially eliminated by the culture industry, with or without the conscious will of those in control. The latter include both those whocarry out directives as well as those who hold the power. In economicterms they are or were in search of new opportunities for the realization of capital in the most economically developed countries. Theold opportunities became increasingly more precarious as a result ofthe same concentration process which alone makes the culture industry possible as an omnipresent phenomenon. Culture, in the truesense, did not simply accommodate itself to human beings; but it always simultaneously raised a protest against the petrified relationsunder which they lived, thereby honoring them. In so far as culturebecomes wholly assimilated to and integrated in those petrified relations, human beings are once more debased. Cultural entities typicalof the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through. This quantitative shift is so great thatit calls forth entirely new phenomena. Ultimately, the culture industry no longer even needs to directly pursue everywhere the profit interests from which it originated. These interests have becomeobjectified in its ideology and have even made themselves independent of the compulsion to sell the cultural commodities whichmust be swallowed anyway. The culture industry turns into public relations, the manufacturing of 'goodwill' per se, without regard forparticular firms or saleable objects. Brought to bear is a general uncritical consensus, advertisements produced for the world, so thateach product of the culture industry becomes its own advertisement.
Nevertheless, those characteristics which originally stamped the

transformation of literature into a commodity are maintained in this
process. More than anything in the world, the culture industry has itsontology, a scaffolding of rigidly conservative basic categories whichcan be gleaned, for example, from the commercial English novels ofthe late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. What paradesas progress in the culture industry, as the incessantly new which it offersup, remains the disguise for an eternal sameness; everywhere thechanges mask a skeleton which has changed just as little as theprofit motive itself since the time it first gained its predominanceover culture. Thus, the expression 'industry' is not to be taken too literally. Itrefers to the standardization of the thing itself – such as that of theWestern, familiar to every movie-goer – and to the rationalization ofdistribution techniques, but not strictly to the production process.Although in film, the central sector of the culture industry, theproduction process resembles technical modes of operation in theextensive division of labor, the employment of machines andthe separation of the laborers from the means of production -expressed in the perennial conflict between artists active in theculture industry and those who control it – individual forms of production are nevertheless maintained. Each product affects an individual air; individuality itself serves to reinforce ideology, in so far asthe illusion is conjured up that the completely reified and mediatedis a sanctuary from immediacy and life. Now, as ever, the culture industry exists in the 'service' of third persons, maintaining its affinityto the declining circulation process of capital, to the commerce fromwhich it came into being. Its ideology above all makes use of the starsystem, borrowed from individualistic art and its commercial exploitation. The more dehumanized its methods of operation and content,the more diligently and successfully the culture industry propagatessupposedly great personalities and operates with heart-throbs. It isindustrial more in a sociological sense, in the incorporation of industrial forms of organization even when nothing is manufactured – asin the rationalization of office work – rather than in the sense of anything really and actually produced by technological rationality.Accordingly, the misinvestments of the culture industry are considerable, throwing those branches rendered obsolete by new techniquesinto crises, which seldom lead to changes for the better. The concept of technique in the culture industry is only in nameidentical with technique in works of art. In the latter, technique isconcerned with the internal organization of the object itself, with itsinner logic. In contrast, the technique of the culture industry is, fromthe beginning, one of distribution and mechanical reproduction, and

therefore always remains external to its object. The culture industry
finds ideological support precisely in so far as it carefully shields it-self from the full potential of the techniques contained in its pro-ducts. It lives parasitically from the extra-artistic technique of thematerial production of goods, without regard for the obligation tothe internal artistic whole implied by its functionality (Sachlichkeit),but also without concern for the laws of form demanded by aestheticautonomy. The result for the physiognomy of the culture industry isessentially a mixture of streamlining, photographic hardness andprecision on the one hand, and individualistic residues, sentimentality and an already rationally disposed and adapted romanticism onthe other. Adopting Benjamin's designation of the traditional workof art by the concept of aura, the presence of that which is not present, the culture industry is defined by the fact that it does not strictlycounterpose another principle to that of aura, but rather by the factthat it conserves the decaying aura as a foggy mist. By this means theculture industry betrays its own ideological abuses. It has recently become customary among cultural officials as wellas sociologists to warn against underestimating the culture industrywhile pointing to its great importance for the development of theconsciousness of its consumers. It is to be taken seriously, withoutcultured snobbism. In actuality the culture industry is important as amoment of the spirit which dominates today. Whoever ignores its influence out of skepticism for what it stuffs into people would benaive. Yet there is a deceptive glitter about the admonition to take itseriously. Because of its social role, disturbing questions about itsquality, about truth or untruth, and about the aesthetic niveau of theculture industry's emissions are repressed, or at least excluded fromthe so-called sociology of communications. The critic is accused oftaking refuge in arrogant esoterica. It would be advisable first toindicate the double meaning of importance that slowly worms its wayin unnoticed. Even if it touches the lives of innumerable people, thefunction of something is no guarantee of its particular quality. Theblending of aesthetics with its residual communicative aspects leadsart, as a social phenomenon, not to its rightful position in oppositionto alleged artistic snobbism, but rather in a variety of ways to thedefense of its baneful social consequences. The importance of theculture industry in the spiritual constitution of the masses is no dispensation for reflection on its objective legitimation, its essentialbeing, least of all by a science which thinks itself pragmatic. On thecontrary: such reflection becomes necessary precisely for this reason.To take the culture industry as seriously as its unquestioned roledemands, means to take it seriously critically, and not to cower in the

face of its monopolistic character.
Among those intellectuals anxious to reconcile themselves with
the phenomenon and eager to find a common formula to expressboth their reservations against it and their respect for its power, atone of ironic toleration prevails unless they have already created anew mythos of the twentieth century from the imposed regression.After all, those intellectuals maintain, everyone knows what pocketnovels, films off the rack, family television shows rolled out into serials and hit parades, advice to the lovelorn and horoscope columns areall about. All of this, however, is harmless and, according to them,even democratic since it responds to a demand, albeit a stimulatedone. It also bestows all kinds of blessings, they point out, for example,through the dissemination of information, advice and stress reducingpatterns of behavior. Of course, as every sociological study measuring something as elementary as how politically informed the public ishas proven, the information is meager or indifferent. Moreover, theadvice to be gained from manifestations of the culture industry is vacuous, banal or worse, and the behavior patterns are shamelesslyconformist. The two-faced irony in the relationship of servile intellectuals tothe culture industry is not restricted to them alone. It may also besupposed that the consciousness of the consumers themselves is splitbetween the prescribed fun which is supplied to them by the cultureindustry and a not particularly well-hidden doubt about its blessings.The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer thanhad ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent tothem. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purposefor which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense thattheir lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longerclung to satisfactions which are none at all. The most ambitious defense of the culture industry today celebrates its spirit, which might be safely called ideology, as an orderingfactor. In a supposedly chaotic world it provides human beings withsomething like standards for orientation, and that alone seemsworthy of approval. However, what its defenders imagine ispreserved by the culture industry is in fact all the more thoroughlydestroyed by it. The color film demolishes the genial old tavern to agreater extent than bombs ever could: the film exterminates itsimago. No homeland can survive being processed by the films which

celebrate it, and which thereby turn the unique character on which it
thrives into an interchangeable sameness. That which legitimately could be called culture attempted, as anexpression of suffering and contradiction, to maintain a grasp on theidea of the good life. Culture cannot represent either that whichmerely exists or the conventional and no longer binding categories oforder which the culture industry drapes over the idea of the good lifeas if existing reality were the good life, and as if those categories wereits true measure. If the response of the culture industry's representatives is that it does not deliver art at all, this is itself the ideology with which they evade responsibility for that from which the business lives. No misdeed is ever righted by explaining it as such. The appeal to order alone, without concrete specificity, is futile;the appeal to the dissemination of norms, without these ever provingthemselves in reality or before consciousness, is equally futile. Theidea of an objectively binding order, huckstered to people because it is so lacking for them, has no claims if it does not prove itself internally and in confrontation with human beings. But this is precisely what no product of the culture industry would engage in. The concepts of order which it hammers into human beings are always those of the status quo. They remain unquestioned, unanalyzed and undialectically presupposed, even if they no longer have any substance for those who accept them. In contrast to the Kantian, the categoricalimperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in commonwith freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction asto what; conform to that which exists anyway, and to that whicheveryone thinks anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence.The power of the culture industryÕs ideology is such that conformityhas replaced consciousness. The order that springs from it is neverconfronted with what it claims to be or with the real interests ofhuman beings. Order, however, is not good in itself. It would be soonly as a good order. The fact that the culture industry is oblivious tothis and extols order in abstracto, bears witness to the impotence anduntruth of the messages it conveys. While it claims to lead the perplexed, it deludes them with false conflicts which they are to exchange for their own. It solves conflicts for them only in appearance,in a way that they can hardly be solved in their real lives. In the products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble only sothat they can be rescued unharmed, usually by representatives of abenevolent collective; and then in empty harmony, they are reconciled with the general, whose demands they had experienced at theoutset as irreconcilable with their interests. For this purpose theculture industry has developed formulas which even reach into such

non-conceptual areas as light musical entertainment. Here too one
gets into a 'jam', into rhythmic problems, which can be instantlydisentangled by the triumph of the basic beat. Even its defenders, however, would hardly contradict Plato openlywho maintained that what is objectively and intrinsically untrue cannot also be subjectively good and true for human beings. The concoctions of the culture industry are neither guides for a blissful life, nora new art of moral responsibility, but rather exhortations to toe theline, behind which stand the most powerful interests. The consensuswhich it propagates strengthens blind, opaque authority. If theculture industry is measured not by its own substance and logic, butby its efficacy, by its position in reality and its explicit pretensions; ifthe focus of serious concern is with the efficacy to which it alwaysappeals, the potential of its effect becomes twice as weighty. Thispotential, however, lies in the promotion and exploitation of the ego-weakness to which the powerless members of contemporary society,with its concentration of power, are condemned. Their consciousnessis further developed retrogressively. It is no coincidence that cynicalAmerican film producers are heard to say that their pictures musttake into consideration the level of eleven-year-olds. In doing so theywould very much like to make adults into eleven-year-olds. It is true that thorough research has not, for the time being,produced an airtight case proving the regressive effects of particularproducts of the culture industry. No doubt an imaginatively designedexperiment could achieve this more successfully than the powerfulfinancial interests concerned would find comfortable. In any case, itcan be assumed without hesitation that steady drops hollow thestone, especially since the system of the culture industry that surrounds the masses tolerates hardly any deviation and incessantly drills the same formulas on behavior. Only their deep unconsciousmistrust, the last residue of the difference between art and empiricalreality in the spiritual make-up of the masses explains why they havenot, to a person, long since perceived and accepted the world as it isconstructed for them by the culture industry. Even if its messageswere as harmless as they are made out to be – on countless occasionsthey are obviously not harmless, like the movies which chime in withcurrently popular hate campaigns against intellectuals by portrayingthem with the usual stereotypes – the attitudes which the culture industry calls forth are anything but harmless. If an astrologer urges hisreaders to drive carefully on a particular day, that certainly hurts noone; they will, however, be harmed indeed by the stupefication whichlies in the claim that advice which is valid every day and which istherefore idiotic, needs the approval of the stars.

Human dependence and servitude, the vanishing point of the
culture industry, could scarcely be more faithfully described than bythe American interviewee who was of the opinion that the dilemmasof the contemporary epoch would end if people would simply followthe lead of prominent personalities. In so far as the culture industryarouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that ordersuggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which itprepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happinesswhich it deceitfully projects. The total effect of the culture industry isone of anti-enlightenment, in which, as Horkheimer and I havenoted, enlightenment, that is the progressive technical domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves. These, however, would be the precondition for a democratic society which needs adults who have come of age in order to sustain itself and develop. If the masses have been unjustly reviled from above as masses, the culture industry is not among the least responsible for making them into masses and then despising them, while obstructing the emancipation for which human beings are as ripe as the productive forces of the epoch permit.