Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1944) group exercise group exercise 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 selected.” “ 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 selected.” Busby Berkley, dir., 1933

“ 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 consumer’s 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 thoughtpromoted cultural standardization and uniformity of thought also broadened horizons, forged a national culturealso broadened horizons, forged a national culture