The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture

The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, Theodor W. Adorno
Edited by J.M. Bernstein, 1991, Routledge

Introduction



pg. 2 - '...in his letter to Walter Benjamin of 3 March 1936. There he states that both high art as well as industrially produced consumer art 'bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change. Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up'

pg. 3 - 'The culture industry, which involves the production of works for reproduction and mass consumption, thereby organizing 'free' time, the remnant domain of freedom under capital in accordance with the same principles of exchange and equivalence that reign in the sphere of production outside leisure, presents culture as the realization of the right of all to the gratification of desire which in reality continuing the negative integration of society.'

pg. 4 - 'Under capitalism all production is for the market; goods are produced not in order to meet human needs and desires, but for the sake of profit, for the sake of acquiring further capital.'

pg. 6 - 'Art is the cognition of ends and of sensuous particularity cut off from practice. Pre-modern art hoped to alter reality, while autonomous art is the quintessence of the division between mental and manual labour in a class society.'

'High art is bought at the price of the exclusion of the lower classes - 'with whose cause, the real universality, art keeps faith precisely by its freedom from the ends of the false universality'

'Illusory universality is the universality of the art of the culture industry, it is the universality of the homogeneous same, an art which no longer even promises happiness but only provides easy amusement as relief from labour: 'Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again.'

'Adorno emphasizes the dialectical entwinement of high and low art'

pg. 7 - 'The 'Culture Industry' chapter opens with the claim that, while sociologically it would appear that with the decline of established religions, the growth of technological and social differentiation, and the dissolution of the last remnants of precapitalism that cultural chaos should reign, yet, this is not so...

...Never has culture been more unified or integrated: '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.'

pg. 8 - 'Culture hs become openly, and defiantly, an industry obeying the same rules of production as any other producer of commodities.'

'Culture is no longer the repository of a reflective comprehension of the present in terms of a redeemed future; the culture industry forsakes the promise of happiness in the same of the degraded utopia of the present.'

'Its degradation, since it does not appear as overt oppression or naked domination, can only be captured in conceptual terms as the 'false identity of the general and the particular.'

pg. 9 - 'The culture industry does not sublimate; it represses... Works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish.'

'The purposelessness of pure works of art, which denies the utility and instrumentality that reign in the world outside art, is premised on commodity production. The 'autonomy', the freedom from external purposes, of pure works derives from their being produced 'privately' and not on demand for a particular consumer (church, state, patron).'

'Works of art are commodities just the same, indeed pure commodities since they are valuable only to the extent that they can be exchanged. Works' non-utility, their 'unsaleability', is the hypocritical source of their value'

'The culture industry is the societal realization of the defeat of reflection; it is the realization of subsumptive reason, the unification of the many under the one/'

pg. 11 - 'The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.'

pg. 15 - 'Consumer culture is the degradation of culture'

'He perceives the end of culture as the suspension of its reified status, its resubmersion in the actual life-process of society. And this final joining of culture and society would token the realignment of mental and manual labour, to whose radical separation culture owes its existence.'

pg. 17 - 'Adorno states that the 'culture industry is the purposeful integration of its consumers from above. It also forces a reconciliation of high and low art, which have been separated for thousands of years, a reconciliation which damages them both.'

'High art is deprived of its seriousness because its effect is programmed; low art is put in chains and deprived of the unruly resistance inherent in it when social control was not yet total.'

pg. 18 - 'Since mass media mediate social conflict and negotiate social change, they can be said to 'reflect, express, and articulate social reality in a mediated fashion.'

'The culture industry is no longer the purveyor of a monolithic ideology but, however unwittingly or unintentionally, includes moments of conflict, rebellion, opposition and the drive for emancipation and utopia.'

'While pop music, for example, may exhibit the features of commodification, reification and standardization, it can equally 'express emotions of pain, rage, joy, rebellion, sexuality, etc.'

pg. 20 - 'Life-styles', the culture industry's recycling of style in art, represent the transformation of an aesthetic category, which once possessed a moment of negativity, into a quality of commodity consumption.'

'The expansion of the role of competing life-styles, the permeation of these styles into the home, the pervasiveness of music, the way in which products have become a direct extension of their advertising image, all these phenomena token a closing of the gap between the culture industry and everyday life itself, and a consequent aestheticization of social reality.'

'Just as art works become commodities and are enjoyed as such, the commodity itself in consumer society has become image, representation, spectacle. Use value has been replaced by a packaging and advertising. The commodification of art ends up in the aestheticization of the commodity.'

'...consumer Odysseus blissfully plunges into the sea of commodities, hoping to find gratification but finding none.'