Adorno and

Horkheimer,
The Culture Industry:
Enlightenment as Mass
Deception (1944)

group exercise
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.
. . . [P]eople hear Beethoven in concert
halls or over a bridge game or to relax;
Cezannes are hung on walls,
reproduced, in natural wood frames; van
Gogh is the man who cut off his ear and
whose yellows became recently popular
in window decoration; Swift loved
individuals but hated the human race;
Kafka is a fad; Blake is in the Modern
Library; Freud is a Modern Library. . .
nobody reads Joyce any more; Celine is
a madman who has incurred the hearty
dislike of Alfred Kazin, reviewer for the
New York Herald-Tribune book section,
and is, moreover, a fascist; I hope I need
not mention Jesus Christ, of whom you
have managed to make a dirty gentile.
James Agee,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
1941
The dependence of the
most powerful
broadcasting 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.

Manhattan Trust Building, Wall

Street, erected 1930
The 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 a 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
Busby Berkley, dir., 1933
selected.
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
Under monopoly capitalism
all mass culture is
identical
Individuals are tolerated only
as far as their wholehearted
identity with the universal is
beyond question. From the
standardized improvisation in
jazz to the original film
personality who must have a
lock of hair straying over her
eyes so that she can be
recognized as such,
pseuodindividuality reigns.
(124-25)

Clara Bow in Man Trap (1926)

pseudoindividuality
reigns
The formulaic amusement
provided by popular culture
encourages the stunting of the
mass-media consumers
powers of imagination and
spontaneity, rendering working-
and middle- class audiences so
deluded that they overlook the
source of their exploitation as
underpaid [and] overworked
workers.
False Consciousness:
The consumers are the workers and salaried employees,
the farmers and petty bourgeois. Capitalist production
hems them in so tightly, in body and soul, that they
unresistingly succumb to whatever is proffered to them.
However, just as the ruled have always taken the morality
dispensed to them by the rulers more seriously than the
rulers themselves, the defrauded masses today cling to the
myth of success still more ardently than the successful.
They, too, have their aspirations. They insist unwaveringly
on the ideology by which they are enslaved. The
pernicious love of the common people for the harm done to
them outstrips even the cunning of the authorities. (106)
 Limits and Possibilities
of Mass Culture

promoted cultural standardization and

uniformity of thought

also broadened horizons, forged a

national culture