1. Max Horkheimer & Theodor W
Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno: The Cultural Industries Lecture, Popular Culture & Medieforskningens klassikere

2. Immediate context Written in USA, 1943-44, Santa Monica
Part of the unfinished “Dialectics of Enlightenment”
Intended to be a summation of the Frankfurt school’s work in philosophy and social theory

3. Institutional context: The Frankfurt school
Institut für Sozialforschung 1923, Columbia University from 1935, reestablished in Frankfurt 1953, operative until 1960s
Dominant core in Horkheimer, Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal. Periphery: Walter Benjamin
A version of Marxism: conflict model of society, revolution versus reaction.
Critique of "objective progress", foci on aesthetics and social psychology

4. Key issues in the critical understanding of inter-war society
The tensions between democracy and authoritarianism
The swing from revolutionary tendencies toward reactionary developments
The rise of industrialism: fordism, taylorism
The industrialisation of culture
The fear of propaganda through mass communication
A/H: "How to reconcile the current with the possible"

5. Obstacles to understanding the "Cultural Industries" essay
The culture industry essay is a fragment of a fragment
The fragment genre: thought under way, partial insights real, total ones not
Tendencies toward genre mixture; the logical/strictly rational argument mixed with polemics, hyperbole and satire
No attempt at analytical proof or correction
In sum: needs to be read as experimental and many-voiced prose

6. Exemplary passage
“A technical rationale is the rationale of the domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered.”

7. Commentary to the passage
Sweeping, generalising statements rather than strictly logical propositions
Juxtapositions of disparate phenomena
Central paradox: exposure of a wrong strengthens that very wrong (contrary to the uncovering logic of critique)
General thesis: enlightenment turns into mass deception

8. The notion of enlightenment as mass deception in historical context
Critique of industrial society: production for general welfare turns into the manipulation of working life
Critique of bureaucracy: decision-making by formal procedure turns into a way of legitimising de-humanisation
Critique of antidemocracy: the appeal to regressive emotionality

9. How the cultural industries turn rationality against itself
CI rhetoric: Nothing is at stake because the cultural industries are “only entertainment”
and addressed to an actual felt need
However CI frustrates people’s real needs by promising without delivering and by sabotaging any attempt at critical distance from immediate satisfaction
By the same token CI suppresses the less saleable, more demanding logics that underlie authentic art

10. Philosophical underpinnings I
“The general and the particular”, “totalisation”
H/A: the “false union between the general and the particular”. This includes:
subordinating the subjective under the objective ("what people really want")
subordinating parts under a whole (zero tolerance for contradiction)
subordinating the accidental to the planned (factory line logic replaces individuality)

11. Philosophical underpinnings II
“Quantity” and “quality”
H/A: “the qualitative becomes quantitiative”.
Exchangeability: sameness in basic structure
Stereotyping: all popular culture simplifies and caricatures
The “pseudo-new”; novel on the surface only

12. Intellectual/academic critique of H/A
The elitism charge: H/A as defenders of modernism against mass culture
The charge of an ignorance of actual popular culture: Adorno as jazz hater
The charge of ignoring reception: H/A tend to consider the audience as an “adjunct to the machinery”
The charge of simplifying the production of culture: reliance on tendencies of monopolisation and conveyor belt production
The charge of overemphasising culture: does culture shape mentalities to the extent that H/A seem to imply?