Adorno and Horkheimer's Critique: Culture Industry's Deceptive Enlightenment, Study Guides, Projects, Research of Art

Download Adorno and Horkheimer's Critique: Culture Industry's Deceptive Enlightenment and more Study Guides, Projects, Research Art in PDF only on Docsity! The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer Editing and footnotes in process by Arun Chandra THE sociological theory that the loss of the sup- port of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of precapitalism, together with technological and social differentia- tion or specialization, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and maga- zines 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 obe- dience to the rhythm of the iron system. The deco- rative industrial management buildings and exhibi- tion centers in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else. The huge gleaming tow- ers that shoot up everywhere are outward signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, to- ward 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 de- mand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans. Yet the city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly inde- pendent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary—the abso- lute power of capitalism. Because the inhabitants, as producers and as consumers, are drawn into the center in search of work and pleasure, all the liv- ing 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 mil- lions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identi- cal goods. The technical contrast between the few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand or- ganization and planning by management. Further- more, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that rea- son 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 so- ciety 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 ADORNO/HORKNEIMER 1 The Culture Industry nature of society alienated from itself. Automo- biles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing to- gether 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 pro- duction, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the so- cial system. This is the result not of a law of move- ment in technology as such but of its function in today’s economy. The need which might resist cen- tral control has already been suppressed by the con- trol 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 democratic: it turns all participants into listen- ers and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same. No ma- chinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are con- fined to the apocryphal1 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 per- formers belong to the industry long before it dis- plays 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 indus- try, 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 imita- tion; 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, it- self forms part of the economic mechanism of se- lection. 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 in- carnate in the hidden subjective purposes of com- pany directors, the foremost among whom are in the most powerful sectors of industry—steel, petroleum, electricity, and chemicals. Culture mo- nopolies 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 producing a specific type of commodity which anyhow is still too closely bound up with easygoing liberalism and Jewish intellectu- als) is not to undergo a series of purges. The de- pendence of the most powerful broadcasting com- pany on the electrical industry, or of the motion pic- ture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are them- selves economically interwoven. All are in such close contact that the extreme concentration of men- tal forces allows demarcation lines between differ- ent firms and technical branches to be ignored. The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will happen in politics. Marked differentia- tions 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, organiz- ing, and labeling 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 prod- ucts of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previ- ously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type. Consumers appear as statistics on research organi- zation charts, and are divided by income groups into 1Apocryphal: of doubtful authenticity: spurious ADORNO/HORKNEIMER 2 The Culture Industry 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 stereo- typed appropriation of everything, even the in- choate2, for the purposes of mechanical repro- duction surpasses the rigor and general currency of any “real style,” in the sense in which cul- tural cognoscenti3 celebrate the organic precapital- ist past. No Palestrina could be more of a purist in eliminating every unprepared and unresolved dis- cord than the jazz arranger in suppressing any de- velopment 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 the- ologian could have determined the degree of the tor- ment 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, exoteric4 and esoteric5 catalog of the forbidden and tolerated is so exten- sive 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 counter- part, avant-garde art, the entertainment industry de- termines its own language, down to its very syntax and vocabulary, by the use of anathema6. The con- stant 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 be- comes 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 musi- cian who is playing a piece of serious music, one of Beethoven’s simplest minuets, syncopates it invol- untarily 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.”7 The universal imposition of this stylized mode can even go beyond what is quasi-officially sanc- tioned or forbidden; today a hit song is more read- ily 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 sys- tem. The constraint of the technically-conditioned idiom which stars and directors have to produce as “nature” so that the people can appropriate it, ex- tends 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 2Inchoate: being only partly in existence or operation; imperfectly formed or formulated 3Cognoscenti: People especially knowledgeable in a subject: connoisseurs. 4Exoteric: belonging to the outer or less initiate circle 5Esoteric: designed for or understood by the specially initiated alone. 6Anathema: someone or something intensely disliked or loathed 7Nietzsche, Unzeirgemfisse Betrachtungen, Werke, Vol. I (Leipzig, 1917), p. 187. ADORNO/HORKNEIMER 5 The Culture Industry to fulfill the obligations of the natural idiom in all branches of the culture industry becomes the crite- rion 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 cul- ture 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 ten- sion as of a divergence of interests. The reputation of the specialist, in which a last remnant of objec- tive independence sometimes finds refuge, conflicts with the business politics of the Church, or the con- cern which is manufacturing the cultural commod- ity. But the thing itself has been essentially objecti- fied and made viable before the established author- ities began to argue about it. Even before Zanuck acquired her, Saint Bernadette was regarded by her latter-day hagiographer8 as brilliant propaganda for all interested parties. That is what became of the emotions of the character. Hence the style of the culture industry, which no longer has to test itself against any refractory material, is also the nega- tion of style. The reconciliation of the general and particular, of the rule and the specific demands of the subject matter, the achievement of which alone gives essential, meaningful content to style, is futile because there has ceased to be the slightest tension between opposite poles: these concordant extremes are dismally identical; the general can replace the particular, and vice versa. Nevertheless, this caricature of style does not amount to something beyond the genuine style of the past. In the culture industry the notion of gen- uine style is seen to be the aesthetic equivalent of domination. Style considered as mere aesthetic reg- ularity is a romantic dream of the past. The unity of style not only of the Christian Middle Ages but of the Renaissance expresses in each case the different structure of social power, and not the obscure expe- rience of the oppressed in which the general was en- closed. The great artists were never those who em- bodied a wholly flawless and perfect style, but those who used style as a way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a neg- ative truth. The style of their works gave what was expressed that force without which life flows away unheard. Those very art forms which are known as classical, such as Mozart’s music, contain objective trends which represent something different to the style which they incarnate. As late as Schönberg and Picasso, the great artists have retained a mistrust of style, and at crucial points have subordinated it to the logic of the matter. What Dadaists and Ex- pressionists called the untruth of style as such tri- umphs today in the sung jargon of a crooner, in the carefully contrived elegance of a film star, and even in the admirable expertise of a photograph of a peasant’s squalid hut. Style represents a promise in every work of art. That which is expressed is subsumed through style into the dominant forms of generality, into the language of music, painting, or words, in the hope that it will be reconciled thus with the idea of true generality. This promise held out by the work of art that it will create truth by lending new shape to the conventional social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical. It uncondition- ally posits the real forms of life as it is by suggesting that fulfillment lies in their aesthetic derivatives. To this extent the claim of art is always ideology too. However, only in this confrontation with tradition of which style is the record can art express suffer- ing. That factor in a work of art which enables it to transcend reality certainly cannot be detached from style; but it does not consist of the harmony actually realized, of any doubtful unity of form and content, within and without, of individual and society; it is to be found in those features in which discrepancy appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. Instead of exposing itself to 8Hagiographer: a writer of an idealizing or idolizing biography. ADORNO/HORKNEIMER 6 The Culture Industry this failure in which the style of the great work of art has always achieved self-negation, the inferior work has always relied on its similarity with others—on a surrogate identity. In the culture industry this imitation finally be- comes absolute. Having ceased to be anything but style, it reveals the latter’s secret: obedience to the social hierarchy. Today aesthetic barbarity com- pletes what has threatened the creations of the spirit since they were gathered together as culture and neutralized. To speak of culture was always con- trary to culture. Culture as a common denominator already contains in embryo that schematization and process of cataloging and classification which bring culture within the sphere of administration. And it is precisely the industrialized, the consequent, sub- sumption9 which entirely accords with this notion of culture. By subordinating in the same way and to the same end all areas of intellectual creation, by occupying men’s senses from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the labor process they themselves have to sustain throughout the day, this subsump- tion mockingly satisfies the concept of a unified culture which the philosophers of personality con- trasted with mass culture. AND so the culture industry, the most rigid of all styles, proves to be the goal of liberalism, which is reproached for its lack of style. Not only do its categories and contents derive from liberalism— domesticated naturalism as well as operetta and revue—but the modern culture monopolies form the economic area in which, together with the corre- sponding entrepreneurial types, for the time being some part of its sphere of operation survives, de- spite the process of disintegration elsewhere. It is still possible to make one’s way in entertainment, if one is not too obstinate about one’s own concerns, and proves appropriately pliable. Anyone who re- sists can only survive by fitting in. Once his par- ticular brand of deviation from the norm has been noted by the industry, he belongs to it as does the land-reformer to capitalism. Realistic dissidence10 is the trademark of anyone who has a new idea in business. In the public voice of modern society ac- cusations are seldom audible; if they are, the per- ceptive can already detect signs that the dissident will soon be reconciled. The more immeasurable the gap between chorus and leaders, the more cer- tainly there is room at the top for everybody who demonstrates his superiority by well-planned origi- nality. Hence, in the culture industry, too, the lib- eral tendency to give full scope to its able men sur- vives. To do this for the efficient today is still the function of the market, which is otherwise profi- ciently controlled; as for the market’s freedom, in the high period of art as elsewhere, it was freedom for the stupid to starve. Significantly, the system of the culture industry comes from the more lib- eral industrial nations, and all its characteristic me- dia, such as movies, radio, jazz, and magazines, flourish there. Its progress, to be sure, had its ori- gin in the general laws of capital. Gaumont and Pathe, Ullstein and Hugenberg followed the interna- tional trend with some success; Europe’s economic dependence on the United States after war and in- flation was a contributory factor. The belief that the barbarity of the culture industry is a result of “cultural lag,” of the fact that the American con- sciousness did not keep up with the growth of tech- nology, is quite wrong. It was pre-Fascist Europe which did not keep up with the trend toward the culture monopoly. But it was this very lag which left intellect and creativity some degree of indepen- dence and enabled its last representatives to exist— however dismally. In Germany the failure of demo- cratic control to permeate life had led to a paradox- ical situation. Many things were exempt from the market mechanism which had invaded the Western countries. The German educational system, univer- sities, theaters with artistic standards, great orches- tras, and museums enjoyed protection. The political powers, state and municipalities, which had inher- ited such institutions from absolutism, had left them with a measure of the freedom from the forces of 9Subsumption: the act or process of including or placing within something larger or more comprehensive. 10Dissidence: dissent ADORNO/HORKNEIMER 7 The Culture Industry the material prerequisite of its expansion, was pre- cisely its deliberate acceptance of the public’s needs as recorded at the box-office—a procedure which was hardly thought necessary in the pioneering days of the screen. The same opinion is held today by the captains of the film industry, who take as their criterion the more or less phenomenal song hits but wisely never have recourse to the judgment of truth, the opposite criterion. Business is their ideology. It is quite correct that the power of the culture in- dustry resides in its identification with a manufac- tured need, and not in simple contrast to it, even if this contrast were one of complete power and com- plete powerlessness. Amusement under late cap- italism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work pro- cess, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mecha- nization has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the man- ufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process it- self. The ostensible content is merely a faded fore- ground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardized operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time. All amusement suffers from this incurable malady. Pleasure hardens into boredom because, if it is to remain pleasure, it must not demand any effort and therefore moves rigorously in the worn grooves of association. No independent thinking must be ex- pected from the audience: the product prescribes every reaction: not by its natural structure (which collapses under reflection), but by signals. Any log- ical connection calling for mental effort is painstak- ingly avoided. As far as possible, developments must follow from the immediately preceding situ- ation and never from the idea of the whole. For the attentive movie-goer any individual scene will give him the whole thing. Even the set pattern itself still seems dangerous, offering some meaning— wretched as it might be—where only meaningless- ness is acceptable. Often the plot is maliciously de- prived of the development demanded by characters and matter according to the old pattern. Instead, the next step is what the script writer takes to be the most striking effect in the particular situation. Ba- nal though elaborate surprise interrupts the story- line. The tendency mischievously to fall back on pure nonsense, which was a legitimate part of pop- ular art, farce and clowning, right up to Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, is most obvious in the unpre- tentious kinds. This tendency has completely as- serted itself in the text of the novelty song, in the thriller movie, and in cartoons, although in films starring Greer Garson and Bette Davis the unity of the socio-psychological case study provides some- thing approximating a claim to a consistent plot. The idea itself, together with the objects of comedy and terror, is massacred and fragmented. Novelty songs have always existed on a contempt for mean- ing which, as predecessors and successors of psy- choanalysis, they reduce to the monotony of sexual symbolism. Today detective and adventure films no longer give the audience the opportunity to experi- ence the resolution. In the non-ironic varieties of the genre, it has also to rest content with the simple horror of situations which have almost ceased to be linked in any way. Cartoons were once exponents of fantasy as op- posed to rationalism. They ensured that justice was done to the creatures and objects they electrified, by giving the maimed specimens a second life. All they do today is to confirm the victory of techno- logical reason over truth. A few years ago they had a consistent plot which only broke up in the final moments in a crazy chase, and thus resembled the old slapstick comedy. Now, however, time relations have shifted. In the very first sequence a motive is stated so that in the course of the action destruc- tion can get to work on it: with the audience in pur- suit, the protagonist becomes the worthless object of general violence. The quantity of organized amuse- ment changes into the quality of organized cruelty. The self-elected censors of the film industry (with whom it enjoys a close relationship) watch over the unfolding of the crime, which is as drawn-out as a hunt. Fun replaces the pleasure which the sight of an embrace would allegedly afford, and postpones sat- isfaction till the day of the pogrom. Insofar as car- toons do any more than accustom the senses to the ADORNO/HORKNEIMER 10 The Culture Industry new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment. The enjoyment of the violence suffered by the movie character turns into violence against the spec- tator, and distraction into exertion. Nothing that the experts have devised as a stimulant must escape the weary eye; no stupidity is allowed in the face of all the trickery; one has to follow everything and even display the smart responses shown and recom- mended in the film. This raises the question whether the culture industry fulfills the function of diverting minds which it boasts about so loudly. If most of the radio stations and movie theaters were closed down, the consumers would probably not lose so very much. To walk from the street into the movie theater is no longer to enter a world of dream; as soon as the very existence of these institutions no longer made it obligatory to use them, there would be no great urge to do so. Such closures would not be reactionary machine wrecking. The disappoint- ment would be felt not so much by the enthusiasts as by the slow-witted, who are the ones who suffer for everything anyhow. In spite of the films which are intended to complete her integration, the house- wife finds in the darkness of the movie theater a place of refuge where she can sit for a few hours with nobody watching, just as she used to look out of the window when there were still homes and rest in the evening. The unemployed in the great cities find coolness in summer and warmth in winter in these temperature-controlled locations. Otherwise, despite its size, this bloated pleasure apparatus adds no dignity to man’s lives. The idea of “fully exploit- ing” available technical resources and the facilities for aesthetic mass consumption is part of the eco- nomic system which refuses to exploit resources to abolish hunger. The culture industry perpetually cheats its con- sumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note13 which, with its plots and stag- ing, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. In front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to es- cape. Of course works of art were not sexual ex- hibitions either. However, by representing depriva- tion as negative, they retracted, as it were, the pros- titution of the impulse and rescued by mediation what was denied. The secret of aesthetic sublima- tion is its representation of fulfillment as a broken promise. The culture industry does not sublimate; it represses. By repeatedly exposing the objects of desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the athletic hero, it only stimulates the un- sublimated forepleasure which habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a masochistic semblance. There is no erotic situation which, while insinuating and exciting, does not fail to indicate unmistakably that things can never go that far. The Hays Office merely confirms the ritual of Tantalus that the cul- ture industry has established anyway. Works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish. Love is downgraded to romance. And, after the descent, much is permitted; even license as a marketable speciality has its quota bearing the trade description “daring.” The mass production of the sexual automatically achieves its repression. Because of his ubiquity, the film star with whom one is meant to fall in love is from the outset a copy of himself. Every tenor voice comes to sound like a Caruso record, and the “natural” faces of Texas girls are like the successful models by whom Hollywood has typecast them. The me- chanical reproduction of beauty, which reactionary cultural fanaticism wholeheartedly serves in its me- thodical idolization of individuality, leaves no room for that unconscious idolatry which was once essen- tial to beauty. The triumph over beauty is celebrated by humor—the Schadenfreude that every successful deprivation calls forth. There is laughter because 13Promissory Note: a written promise to pay at a fixed future time a sum of money to an individual ADORNO/HORKNEIMER 11 The Culture Industry there is nothing to laugh at. Laughter, whether con- ciliatory or terrible, always occurs when some fear passes. It indicates liberation either from physical danger or from the grip of logic. Conciliatory laugh- ter is heard as the echo of an escape from power; the wrong kind overcomes fear by capitulating to the forces which are to be feared. It is the echo of power as something inescapable. Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud practised on happiness. Moments of happiness are without laughter; only operettas and films portray sex to the accompaniment of resounding laughter. But Baudelaire is as devoid of humour as Holderlin. In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is drawing it into its worth- less totality. To laugh at something is always to de- ride it, and the life which, according to Bergson, in laughter breaks through the barrier, is actually an invading barbaric life, self-assertion prepared to pa- rade its liberation from any scruple when the social occasion arises. Such a laughing audience is a par- ody of humanity. Its members are monads, all ded- icated to the pleasure of being ready for anything at the expense of everyone else. Their harmony is a caricature of solidarity. What is fiendish about this false laughter is that it is a compelling parody of the best, which is conciliatory. Delight is austere: res severa verum gaudium14. The monastic theory that not asceticism but the sexual act denotes the re- nunciation of attainable bliss receives negative con- firmation in the gravity of the lover who with fore- boding commits his life to the fleeting moment. In the culture industry, jovial denial takes the place of the pain found in ecstasy and in asceticism. The supreme law is that they shall not satisfy their de- sires at any price; they must laugh and be content with laughter. In every product of the culture indus- try, the permanent denial imposed by civilization is once again unmistakably demonstrated and inflicted on its victims. To offer and to deprive them of some- thing is one and the same. This is what happens in erotic films. Precisely because it must never take place, everything centers upon copulation. In films it is more strictly forbidden for an illegitimate re- lationship to be admitted without the parties being punished than for a millionaire’s future son-in-law to be active in the labor movement. In contrast to the liberal era, industrialized as well as popular cul- ture may wax indignant at capitalism, but it cannot renounce the threat of castration. This is fundamen- tal. It outlasts the organized acceptance of the uni- formed seen in the films which are produced to that end, and in reality. What is decisive today is no longer puritanism, although it still asserts itself in the form of women’s organizations, but the neces- sity inherent in the system not to leave the customer alone, not for a moment to allow him any suspi- cion that resistance is possible. The principle dic- tates that he should be shown all his needs as capa- ble of-fulfillment, but that those needs should be so predetermined that he feels himself to be the eter- nal consumer, the object of the culture industry. Not only does it make him believe that the deception it practices is satisfaction, but it goes further and im- plies that, whatever the state of affairs, he must put up with what is offered. The escape from everyday drudgery which the whole culture industry promises may be compared to the daughter’s abduction in the cartoon: the father is holding the ladder in the dark. The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point. Plea- sure promotes the resignation which it ought to help to forget. Amusement, if released from every restraint, would not only be the antithesis of art but its ex- treme role. The Mark Twain absurdity with which the American culture industry flirts at times might be a corrective of art. The more seriously the lat- ter regards the incompatibility with life, the more it resembles the seriousness of life, its antithesis; the more effort it devotes to developing wholly from its own formal law, the more effort it demands from the intelligence to neutralize its burden. In some revue films, and especially in the grotesque and the fun- nies, the possibility of this negation does glimmer for a few moments. But of course it cannot hap- 14Res severa verum gaudium: A harsh thing is a real joy. ADORNO/HORKNEIMER 12 The Culture Industry they are all right as they are, that they could do just as well and that nothing beyond their powers will be asked of them. But at the same time they are given a hint that any effort would be useless be- cause even bourgeois luck no longer has any con- nection with the calculable effect of their own work. They take the hint. Fundamentally they all recog- nize chance (by which one occasionally makes his fortune) as the other side of planning. Precisely be- cause the forces of society are so deployed in the direction of rationality that anyone might become an engineer or manager, it has ceased entirely to be a rational matter who the one will be in whom society will invest training or confidence for such functions. Chance and planning become one and the same thing, because, given men’s equality, individ- ual success and failure—right up to the top—lose any economic meaning. Chance itself is planned, not because it affects any particular individual but precisely because it is believed to play a vital part. It serves the planners as an alibi, and makes it seem that the complex of transactions and measures into which life has been transformed leaves scope for spontaneous and direct relations between man. This freedom is symbolized in the various media of the culture industry by the arbitrary selection of aver- age individuals. In a magazine’s detailed accounts of the modestly magnificent pleasure-trips it has ar- ranged for the lucky person, preferably a stenotypist (who has probably won the competition because of her contacts with local bigwigs), the powerlessness of all is reflected. They are mere matter—so much so that those in control can take someone up into their heaven and throw him out again: his rights and his work count for nothing. Industry is interested in people merely as customers and employees, and has in fact reduced mankind as a whole and each of its elements to this all-embracing formula. Accord- ing to the ruling aspect at the time, ideology empha- sizes plan or chance, technology or life, civilization or nature. As employees, men are reminded of the rational organization and urged to fit in like sensi- ble people. As customers, the freedom of choice, the charm of novelty, is demonstrated to them on the screen or in the press by means of the human and personal anecdote. In either case they remain objects. The less the culture industry has to promise, the less it can offer a meaningful explanation of life, and the emptier is the ideology it disseminates. Even the abstract ideals of the harmony and beneficence of society are too concrete in this age of universal pub- licity. We have even learned how to identify abstract concepts as sales propaganda. Language based en- tirely on truth simply arouses impatience to get on with the business deal it is probably advancing. The words that are not means appear senseless; the oth- ers seem to be fiction, untrue. Value judgments are taken either as advertising or as empty talk. Accord- ingly ideology has been made vague and noncom- mittal, and thus neither clearer nor weaker. Its very vagueness, its almost scientific aversion from com- mitting itself to anything which cannot be verified, acts as an instrument of domination. It becomes a vigorous and prearranged promulgation of the sta- tus quo. The culture industry tends to make itself the embodiment of authoritative pronouncements, and thus the irrefutable prophet of the prevailing or- der. It skillfully steers a winding course between the cliffs of demonstrable misinformation and man- ifest truth, faithfully reproducing the phenomenon whose opaqueness blocks any insight and installs the ubiquitous and intact phenomenon as ideal. Ide- ology is split into the photograph of stubborn life and the naked lie about its meaning—which is not expressed but suggested and yet drummed in. To demonstrate its divine nature, reality is always re- peated in a purely cynical way. Such a photological proof is of course not stringent, but it is overpower- ing. Anyone who doubts the power of monotony is a fool. The culture industry refutes the objec- tion made against it just as well as that against the world which it impartially duplicates. The only choice is either to join in or to be left behind: those provincials who have recourse to eternal beauty and the amateur stage in preference to the cinema and the radio are already—politically—at the point to which mass culture drives its supporters. It is suf- ficiently hardened to deride as ideology, if need be, the old wish-fulfillments, the father-ideal and abso- lute feeling. The new ideology has as its objects the world as such. It makes use of the worship ADORNO/HORKNEIMER 15 The Culture Industry of facts by no more than elevating a disagreeable existence into the world of facts in representing it meticulously. This transference makes existence it- self a substitute for meaning and right. Whatever the camera reproduces is beautiful. The disappoint- ment of the prospect that one might be the typist who wins the world trip is matched by the disap- pointing appearance of the accurately photographed areas which the voyage might include. Not Italy is offered, but evidence that it exists. A film can even go so far as to show the Paris in which the American girl thinks she will still her desire as a hopelessly desolate place, thus driving her the more inexorably into the arms of the smart American boy she could have met at home anyhow. That this goes on, that, in its most recent phase, the system itself reproduces the life of those of whom it consists instead of im- mediately doing away with them, is even put down to its credit as giving it meaning and worth. Contin- uing and continuing to join in are given as justifica- tion for the blind persistence of the system and even for its immutability. What repeats itself is healthy, like the natural or industrial cycle. The same ba- bies grin eternally out of the magazines; the jazz machine will pound away for ever. In spite of all the progress in reproduction techniques, in controls and the specialities, and in spite of all the restless industry, the bread which the culture industry of- fers man is the stone of the stereotype. It draws on the life cycle, on the well-founded amazement that mothers, in spite of everything, still go on bearing children and that the wheels still do not grind to a halt. This serves to confirm the immutability of cir- cumstances. The ears of corn blowing in the wind at the end of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator give the lie to the anti-Fascist plea for freedom. They are like the blond hair of the German girl whose camp life is photographed by the Nazi film company in the sum- mer breeze. Nature is viewed by the mechanism of social domination as a healthy contrast to society, and is therefore denatured. Pictures showing green trees, a blue sky, and moving clouds make these as- pects of nature into so many cryptograms for factory chimneys and service stations. On the other hand, wheels and machine components must seem expres- sive, having been degraded to the status of agents of the spirit of trees and clouds. Nature and tech- nology are mobilized against all opposition; and we have a falsified memento of liberal society, in which people supposedly wallowed in erotic plush-lined bedrooms instead of taking open-air baths as in the case today, or experiencing breakdowns in prehis- toric Benz models instead of shooting off with the speed of a rocket from A (where one is anyhow) to B (where everything is just the same). The triumph of the gigantic concern over the initiative of the en- trepreneur is praised by the culture industry as the persistence of entrepreneurial initiative. The enemy who is already defeated, the thinking individual, is the enemy fought. The resurrection in Germany of the anti-bourgeois “Haus Sonnenstösser,” and the pleasure felt when watching Life with Father, have one and the same meaning. IN one respect, admittedly, this hollow ideology is in deadly earnest: everyone is provided for. “No one must go hungry or thirsty; if anyone does, he’s for the concentration camp!” This joke from Hitler’s Germany might shine forth as a maxim from above all the portals of the culture industry. With sly naivete, it presupposes the most recent charac- teristic of society: that it can easily find out who its supporters are. Everybody is guaranteed formal freedom. No one is officially responsible for what he thinks. Instead everyone is enclosed at an early age in a system of churches, clubs, professional as- sociations, and other such concerns, which consti- tute the most sensitive instrument of social control. Anyone who wants to avoid ruin must see that he is not found wanting when weighed in the scales of this apparatus. Otherwise he will lag behind in life, and finally perish. In every career, and especially in the liberal professions, expert knowledge is linked with prescribed standards of conduct; this can eas- ily lead to the illusion that expert knowledge is the only thing that counts. In fact, it is part of the irra- tional planning of this society that it reproduces to a certain degree only the lives of its faithful mem- bers. The standard of life enjoyed corresponds very closely to the degree to which classes and individ- uals are essentially bound up with the system. The ADORNO/HORKNEIMER 16 The Culture Industry manager can be relied upon, as can the lesser em- ployee Dagwood—as he is in the comic pages or in real life. Anyone who goes cold and hungry, even if his prospects were once good, is branded. He is an outsider; and, apart from certain capital crimes, the most mortal of sins is to be an outsider. In films he sometimes, and as an exception, becomes an origi- nal, the object of maliciously indulgent humor; but usually he is the villain, and is identified as such at first appearance, long before the action really gets going: hence avoiding any suspicion that society would turn on those of good will. Higher up the scale, in fact, a kind of welfare state is coming into being today. In order to keep their own positions, men in top posts maintain the economy in which a highly-developed technology has in principle made the masses redundant as producers. The workers, the real bread-winners, are fed (if we are to believe the ideology) by the managers of the economy, the fed. Hence the individual’s position becomes pre- carious. Under liberalism the poor were thought to be lazy; now they are automatically objects of sus- picion. Anybody who is not provided for outside should be in a concentration camp, or at any rate in the hell of the most degrading work and the slums. The culture industry, however, reflects positive and negative welfare for those under the administrators’ control as direct human solidarity of men in a world of the efficient. No one is forgotten; everywhere there are neighbors and welfare workers, Dr. Gille- spies and parlor philosophers whose hearts are in the right place and who, by their kind intervention as of man to man, cure individual cases of socially- perpetuated distress—always provided that there is no obstacle in the personal depravity of the unfortu- nate. The promotion of a friendly atmosphere as ad- vised by management experts and adopted by every factory to increase output, brings even the last pri- vate impulse under social control precisely because it seems to relate men’s circumstances directly to production, and to reprivatize them. Such spiritual charity casts a conciliatory shadow onto the prod- ucts of the culture industry long before it emerges from the factory to invade society as a whole. Yet the great benefactors of mankind, whose scientific achievements have to be written up as acts of sym- pathy to give them an artificial human interest, are substitutes for the national leaders, who finally de- cree the abolition of sympathy and think they can prevent any recurrence when the last invalid has been exterminated. By emphasizing the “heart of gold,” society ad- mits the suffering it has created: everyone knows that he is now helpless in the system, and ideol- ogy has to take this into account. Far from con- cealing suffering under the cloak of improvised fel- lowship, the culture industry takes pride in looking it in the face like a man, however great the strain on self-control. The pathos of composure justifies the world which makes it necessary. That is life— very hard, but just because of that so wonderful and so healthy. This lie does not shrink from tragedy. Mass culture deals with it, in the same way as cen- tralized society does not abolish the suffering of its members but records and plans it. That it is why it borrows so persistently from art. This provides the tragic substance which pure amusement cannot it- self supply, but which it needs if it is somehow to remain faithful to the principle of the exact repro- duction of phenomena. Tragedy made into a care- fully calculated and accepted aspect of the world is a blessing. It is a safeguard against the reproach that truth is not respected, whereas it is really be- ing adopted with cynical regret. To the consumer who—culturally—has seen better days it offers a substitute for long-discarded profundities. It pro- vides the regular movie-goer with the scraps of cul- ture he must have for prestige. It comforts all with the thought that a tough, genuine human fate is still possible, and that it must at all costs be represented uncompromisingly. Life in all the aspects which ideology today sets out to duplicate shows up all the more gloriously, powerfully and magnificently, the more it is redolent of necessary suffering. It be- gins to resemble fate. Tragedy is reduced to the threat to destroy anyone who does not cooperate, whereas its paradoxical significance once lay in a hopeless resistance to mythic destiny. Tragic fate becomes just punishment, which is what bourgeois aesthetics always tried to turn it into. The moral- ity of mass culture is the cheap form of yesterday’s children’s books. In a first-class production, for ex- ADORNO/HORKNEIMER 17 The Culture Industry that the deceitful substitution of the stereotype for the individual will of itself become unbearable for mankind. Since Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the unity of the personality has been seen through as a pre- tense. Synthetically produced physiognomies show that the people of today have already forgotten that there was ever a notion of what human life was. For centuries society has been preparing for Victor Ma- ture and Mickey Rooney. By destroying they come to fulfill. The idolization of the cheap involves making the average the heroic. The highest-paid stars resemble pictures advertising unspecified proprietary articles. Not without good purpose are they often selected from the host of commercial models. The prevail- ing taste takes its ideal from advertising, the beauty in consumption. Hence the Socratic saying that the beautiful is the useful has now been fulfilled— ironically. The cinema makes propaganda for the culture combine as a whole; on radio, goods for whose sake the cultural commodity exists are also recommended individually. For a few coins one can see the film which cost millions, for even less one can buy the chewing gum whose manufacture in- volved immense riches—a hoard increased still fur- ther by sales. In absentia, but by universal suffrage, the treasure of armies is revealed, but prostitution is not allowed inside the country. The best orches- tras in the world—clearly not so—are brought into your living room free of charge. It is all a parody of the never-never land, just as the national society is a parody of the human society. You name it, we supply it. A man up from the country remarked at the old Berlin Metropol theater that it was astonish- ing what they could do for the money; his comment has long since been adopted by the culture industry and made the very substance of production. This is always coupled with the triumph that it is possi- ble; but this, in large measure, is the very triumph. Putting on a show means showing everybody what there is, and what can be achieved. Even today it is still a fair, but incurably sick with culture. Just as the people who had been attracted by the fairground barkers overcame their disappointment in the booths with a brave smile, because they really knew in ad- vance what would happen, so the movie-goer sticks knowingly to the institution. With the cheapness of mass-produced luxury goods and its complement, the universal swindle, a change in the character of the art commodity itself is coming about. What is new is not that it is a commodity, but that today it de- liberately admits it is one; that art renounces its own autonomy and proudly takes its place among con- sumption goods constitutes the charm of novelty. Art as a separate sphere was always possible only in a bourgeois society. Even as a negation of that social purposiveness which is spreading through the market, its freedom remains essentially bound up with the premise of a commodity economy. Pure works of art which deny the commodity society by the very fact that they obey their own law were al- ways wares all the same. In so far as, until the eigh- teenth century, the buyer’s patronage shielded the artist from the market, they were dependent on the buyer and his objectives. The purposelessness of the great modern work of art depends on the anonymity of the market. Its demands pass through so many in- termediaries that the artist is exempt from any defi- nite requirements—though admittedly only to a cer- tain degree, for throughout the whole history of the bourgeoisie his autonomy was only tolerated, and thus contained an element of untruth which ulti- mately led to the social liquidation of art. When mortally sick, Beethoven hurled away a novel by Sir Walter Scott with the cry: “Why, the fellow writes for money,” and yet proved a most experienced and stubborn businessman in disposing of the last quar- tets, which were a most extreme renunciation of the market; he is the most outstanding example of the unity of those opposites, market and independence, in bourgeois art. Those who succumb to the ide- ology are precisely those who cover up the contra- diction instead of taking it into the consciousness of their own production as Beethoven did: he went on to express in music his anger at losing a few pence, and derived the metaphysical Es Muss Sein20 (which 20Es Muss Sein: “It must be!” (A reference to Beethoven’s last string quartet, in which the last movement begins with the musical motto Es muss sein!.) ADORNO/HORKNEIMER 20 The Culture Industry attempts an aesthetic banishment of the pressure of the world by taking it into itself) from the house- keeper’s demand for her monthly wages. The prin- ciple of idealistic aesthetics—purposefulness with- out a purpose—reverses the scheme of things to which bourgeois art conforms socially: purpose- lessness for the purposes declared by the market. At last, in the demand for entertainment and relaxation, purpose has absorbed the realm of purposelessness. But as the insistence that art should be disposable in terms of money becomes absolute, a shift in the internal structure of cultural commodities begins to show itself. The use which men in this antagonistic society promise themselves from the work of art is itself, to a great extent, that very existence of the useless which is abolished by complete inclusion under use. The work of art, by completely assim- ilating itself to need, deceitfully deprives men of precisely that liberation from the principle of utility which it should inaugurate. What might be called use value in the reception of cultural commodities is replaced by exchange value; in place of enjoy- ment there are gallery-visiting and factual knowl- edge: the prestige seeker replaces the connoisseur. The consumer becomes the ideology of the pleasure industry, whose institutions he cannot escape. One simply “has to” have seen Mrs. Miniver, just as one “has to” subscribe to Life and Time. Everything is looked at from only one aspect: that it can be used for something else, however vague the notion of this use may be. No object has an inherent value; it is valuable only to the extent that it can be exchanged. The use value of art, its mode of being, is treated as a fetish; and the fetish, the work’s social rating (misinterpreted as its artistic status) becomes its use value—the only quality which is enjoyed. The com- modity function of art disappears only to be wholly realized when art becomes a species of commodity instead, marketable and interchangeable like an in- dustrial product. But art as a type of product which existed to be sold and yet to be unsaleable is wholly and hypocritically converted into “unsaleability” as soon as the transaction ceases to be the mere in- tention and becomes its sole principle. No tick- ets could be bought when Toscanini conducted over the radio; he was heard without charge, and ev- ery sound of the symphony was accompanied, as it were, by the sublime puff that the symphony was not interrupted by any advertising: “This concert is brought to you as a public service.” The illusion was made possible by the profits of the united au- tomobile and soap manufacturers, whose payments keep the radio stations going—and, of course, by the increased sales of the electrical industry, which manufactures the radio sets. Radio, the progres- sive latecomer of mass culture, draws all the con- sequences at present denied the film by its pseudo- market. The technical structure of the commercial radio system makes it immune from liberal devia- tions such as those the movie industrialists can still permit themselves in their own sphere. It is a private enterprise which really does represent the sovereign whole and is therefore some distance ahead of the other individual combines. Chesterfield is merely the nation’s cigarette, but the radio is the voice of the nation. In bringing cultural products wholly into the sphere of commodities, radio does not try to dis- pose of its culture goods themselves as commodities straight to the consumer. In America it collects no fees from the public, and so has acquired the illu- sory form of disinterested, unbiased authority which suits Fascism admirably. The radio becomes the universal mouthpiece of the Führer; his voice rises from street loud-speakers to resemble the howling of sirens announcing panic—from which modern propaganda can scarcely be distinguished anyway. The National Socialists knew that the wireless gave shape to their cause just as the printing press did to the Reformation. The metaphysical charisma of the Führer invented by the sociology of religion has finally turned out to be no more than the omnipres- ence of his speeches on the radio, which are a de- moniacal parody of the omnipresence of the divine spirit. The gigantic fact that the speech penetrates everywhere replaces its content, just as the benefac- tion of the Toscanini broadcast takes the place of the symphony. No listener can grasp its true meaning any longer, while the Führer’s speech is lies any- way. The inherent tendency of radio is to make the speaker’s word, the false commandment, absolute. A recommendation becomes an order. The recom- mendation of the same commodities under differ- ADORNO/HORKNEIMER 21 The Culture Industry ent proprietary names, the scientifically based praise of the laxative in the announcer’s smooth voice be- tween the overture from La Traviata and that from Rienzi21 is the only thing that no longer works, be- cause of its silliness. One day the edict of produc- tion, the actual advertisement (whose actuality is at present concealed by the pretense of a choice) can turn into the open command of the Führer. In a society of huge Fascist rackets which agree among themselves what part of the social product should be allotted to the nation’s needs, it would eventually seem anachronistic to recommend the use of a par- ticular soap powder. The Führer is more up-to-date in unceremoniously giving direct orders for both the holocaust and the supply of rubbish. Even today the culture industry dresses works of art like political slogans and forces them upon a resistant public at reduced prices; they are as ac- cessible for public enjoyment as a park. But the disappearance of their genuine commodity charac- ter does not mean that they have been abolished in the life of a free society, but that the last defense against their reduction to culture goods has fallen. The abolition of educational privilege by the device of clearance sales does not open for the masses the spheres from which they were formerly excluded, but, given existing social conditions, contributes di- rectly to the decay of education and the progress of barbaric meaninglessness. Those who spent their money in the nineteenth or the early twentieth cen- tury to see a play or to go to a concert respected the performance as much as the money they spent. The bourgeois who wanted to get something out of it tried occasionally to establish some rapport with the work. Evidence for this is to be found in the literary “introductions” to works, or in the com- mentaries on Faust. These were the first steps to- ward the biographical coating and other practices to which a work of art is subjected today. Even in the early, prosperous days of business, exchange-value did carry use value as a mere appendix but had de- veloped it as a prerequisite for its own existence; this was socially helpful for works of art. Art exer- cised some restraint on the bourgeois as long as it cost money. That is now a thing of the past. Now that it has lost every restraint and there is no need to pay any money, the proximity of art to those who are exposed to it completes the alienation and assimi- lates one to the other under the banner of triumphant objectivity. Criticism and respect disappear in the culture industry; the former becomes a mechanical expertise, the latter is succeeded by a shallow cult of leading personalities. Consumers now find nothing expensive. Nevertheless, they suspect that the less anything costs, the less it is being given them. The double mistrust of traditional culture as ideology is combined with mistrust of industrialized culture as a swindle. When thrown in free, the now debased works of art, together with the rubbish to which the medium assimilates them, are secretly rejected by the fortunate recipients, who are supposed to be sat- isfied by the mere fact that there is so much to be seen and heard. Everything can be obtained. The screenos and vaudevilles in the movie theater, the competitions for guessing music, the free books, re- wards and gifts offered on certain radio programs, are not mere accidents but a continuation of the practice obtaining with culture products. The sym- phony becomes a reward for listening to the radio, and—if technology had its way—the film would be delivered to people’s homes as happens with the ra- dio. It is moving toward the commercial system. Television points the way to a development which might easily enough force the Warner Brothers into what would certainly be the unwelcome position of serious musicians and cultural conservatives. But the gift system has already taken hold among con- sumers. As culture is represented as a bonus with undoubted private and social advantages, they have to seize the chance. They rush in lest they miss something. Exactly what, is not clear, but in any case the only ones with a chance are the participants. Fascism, however, hopes to use the training the cul- ture industry has given these recipients of gifts, in order to organize them into its own forced battal- ions. 21La Traviata and Rienzi: two 19th century operas by Giuseppi Verdi. ADORNO/HORKNEIMER 22 The Culture Industry