Culture Industry Reconsidered Author(s): Theodor W. Adorno and Anson G. Rabinbach Source: New German Critique, No. 6 (Autumn, 1975), pp. 12-19 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/487650 Accessed: 06-03-2017 17:23 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New German Critique This content downloaded from 216.165.95.66 on Mon, 06 Mar 2017 17:23:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Culture Industry Reconsidered * by Theodor W. Adorno The term culture industry was perhaps used for the first time in the book Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and I published in Amsterdam in 1947. In our drafts we spoke of "mass culture." We replaced that expression with "culture industry" in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme. The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan. The individual branches are similar in structure or at least fit into each other, ordering themselves into a system almost without a gap. This is made possible by contemporary technical capabilities as well as by economic and administrative concentration. The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years. The seriousness of high art is destroyed in speculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it as long as social control was not yet total. Thus, although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would like to have us believe, not its subject but its object. The very word mass-media, specially honed for the culture industry, already shifts the accent onto harmless terrain. Neither is it a question of primary concern for the masses, nor of the techniques of communication as such, but of the spirit which sufflates them, their master's voice. The culture industry misuses its concern for the masses in order to duplicate, reinforce and strengthen their mentality, which it presumes is given and unchangeable. How this mentality might be changed is excluded throughout. The masses are not the measure but the ideology of the culture industry, even though the culture industry itself could scarcely exist without adapting to the masses. *This essay was published in Theodor W. Adorno, Ohne Leitbild (Frankfurt am Main, 1967). It appears here in English with the permission of Suhrkamp Verlag. An inaccurate and abridged translation appeared in Cindaste, Vol. V, No. 1 (Winter 1971-72). This content downloaded from 216.165.95.66 on Mon, 06 Mar 2017 17:23:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CULTURE INDUSTR Y RECONSIDERED 13 The cultural commodities of the industry are governed, as Suhrkamp expressed it thirty years ago, by the principle of their value, and not by their own specific content and harmonious form entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motiv cultural forms. Ever since these cultural forms first began to earn their creators as commodities in the marketplace they had alre something of this quality. But then they sought after profit only over and above their autonomous essence. New on the part of industry is the direct and undisguised primacy of a precisely and calculated efficacy in its most typical products. The autonomy of w which of course rarely ever predominated in an entirely pure form always permeated by a constellation of effects, is tendentially elim the culture industry, with or without the conscious will of those The latter include both those who carry out directives as well hold the power. In economic terms they are or were in se opportunities for the realization of capital in the most ec developed countries. The old opportunities became increas precarious as a result of the same concentration process which the culture industry possible as an omnipresent phenomenon. Cult true sense, did not simply accomodate itself to human beings; b simultaneously raised a protest against the petrified relations u they lived, thereby honoring them. Insofar as culture becom assimilated to and integrated in those petrified relations, huma once more debased. Cultural entities typical of the culture indu longer also commodities, they are commodities through and th quantitative shift is so great that it calls forth entirely new p Ultimately, the culture industry no longer even needs to dire everywhere the profit interests from which it originated. These i become objectified in its ideology and have even made t independent of the compulsion to sell the cultural commodities be swallowed anyway. The culture industry turns into public r manufacturing of "good will" per se, without regard for particular saleable objects. Brought to bear is a general uncritical c advertisements produced for the world, so that each product o industry becomes its own advertisement. Nevertheless, those characteristics which originally stam transformation of literature into a commodity are maintained in t More than anything in the world, the culture industry has it scaffolding of rigidly conservative basic categories which can be g example, from the commercial English novels of the late 17th and This content downloaded from 216.165.95.66 on Mon, 06 Mar 2017 17:23:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 14 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE centuries. What parades as progress in the culture industry, as the incessantly new which it offers up, remains the disguise for an eternal sameness; everywhere the changes mask a skeleton which has changed just as little as the profit motive itself since the time it first gained its predominance over culture. Thus, the expression "industry" is not to be taken literally. It refers to the standardization of the thing itself--such as that of the Western, familiar to every movie-goer--and to the rationalization of distribution techniques, but not strictly to the production process. Although in film, the central sector of the culture industry, the production process resembles technical modes of operation in the extensive division of labor, the employment of machines and the separation of the laborers from the means of production-expressed in the perennial conflict between artists active in the culture industry and those who control it--individual forms of production are nevertheless maintained. Each product affects an individual air; individuality itself serves to reinforce ideology, insofar as the illusion is conjured up that the completely reified and mediated is a sanctuary from immediacy and life. Now, as ever, the culture industry exists in the "service" of third persons, maintaining its affinity to the declining circulation process of capital, to the commerce from which it came into being. Its ideology above all makes use of the star system, borrowed from individualistic art and its commercial exploitation. The more dehumanized its methods of operation and content, the more diligently and successfully the culture industry propagates supposedly great personalities and operates with heart-throbs. It is industrial more in a sociological sense, in the incorporation of industrial forms of organization even where nothing is manufactured--as in the rationalization of office work-rather than in the sense of anything really and actually produced by technological rationality. Accordingly, the misinvestments of the culture industry are considerable, throwing those branches rendered obsolete by new techniques into crises, which seldom lead to changes for the better. The concept of technique in the culture industry is only in name identical with technique in works of art. In the latter, technique is concerned with the internal organization of the object itself, with its inner logic. In contrast, the technique of the culture industry is, from the beginning, one of distribution and mechanical reproduction, and therefore always remains external to its object. The culture industry finds ideological support precisely insofar as it carefully shields itself from the full potential of the techniques contained in its products. It lives parasitically from the extra-artistic technique of the material production of goods, without regard for the obligation to the internal artistic whole implied by its functionality (Sachlichkeit), but also without concern for the laws of form demanded by aesthetic autonomy. The This content downloaded from 216.165.95.66 on Mon, 06 Mar 2017 17:23:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CULTURE INDUSTRY RECONSIDERED 15 result for the physiognomy of the culture industry is essentia streamlining, photographic hardness and precision on the individualistic residues, sentimentality and an already rationall adapted romanticism on the other. Adopting Benjamin's de traditional work of art by the concept of aura, the presence o not present, the culture industry is defined by the fact that it counterpose another principle to that of aura, but rather by t conserves the decaying aura as a foggy mist. By this mea industry betrays its own ideological abuses. It has recently become customary among cultural offici sociologists to warn against underestimating the culture pointing to its great importance for the development of the c its consumers. It is to be taken seriously, without culture actuality the culture industry is important as a moment of th dominates today. Whoever ignores its influence out of skeptici stuffs into people would be naive. Yet there is a deceptive g admonition to take it seriously. Because of its social role, distu about its quality, about truth or untruth, and about the ae the culture industry's emissions are repressed, or at least exclud called sociology of communications. The critic is accused of arrogant esoterica. It would be advisable first to indicate the d of importance that slowly worms its way in unnoticed. Even if lives of innumerable people, the function of something is no g particular quality. The blending of aesthetics with its residual aspects leads art, as a social phenomenon, not to its right opposition to alleged artistic snobbism, but rather in a variety defense of its baneful social consequences. The importanc industry in the spiritual constitution of the masses is no d reflection on its objective legitimation, its essential being, science which thinks itself pragmatic. On the contrary: s becomes necessary precisely for this reason. To take the cul seriously as its unquestioned role demands, means to t critically, and not to cower in the face of its monopolistic Among those intellectuals anxious to reconcile thems phenomenon and eager to find a common formula to exp reservations against it and their respect for its power, a toleration prevails unless they have already created a new myt century from the imposed regression. After all, those intellect everyone knows what pocket novels, films off the rack, family rolled out into serials and hit parades, advice to the lovelor This content downloaded from 216.165.95.66 on Mon, 06 Mar 2017 17:23:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 16 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE columns are all about. All of this, however, is harmless and, according to them, even democratic since it responds to a demand, albeit a stimulated one. It also bestows all kinds of blessings, they point out, for example, through th dissemination of information, advice and stress reducing patterns o behavior. Of course, as every sociological study measuring something as elementary as how politically informed the public is has proven, th information is meager or indifferent. Moreover, the advice to be gained from manifestations of the culture industry is vacuous, banal or worse, and th behavior patterns are shamelessly conformist. The two-faced irony in the relationship of servile intellectuals to the cultur industry is not restricted to them alone. It may also be supposed that th consciousness of the consumers themselves is split between the prescribed fun which is supplied to them by the culture industry and a not particularly wellhidden doubt about its blessings. The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as th saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for whic it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all. The most ambitious defense of the culture industry today celebrate spirit, which might safely be called ideology, as an ordering factor supposedly chaotic world it provides human beings with something standards for orientation, and that alone seems worthy of approval. Howe what its defenders imagine is preserved by the culture industry is in fact a more thoroughly destroyed by it. The color film demolishes the genia tavern to a greater extent than bombs ever could: the film exterminates i imago. No homeland can survive being processed by the films which celeb it, and which thereby turn the unique character on which it thrives into interchangeable sameness. That which legitimately could be called culture attempted, as expression of suffering and contradiction, to maintain a grasp on the idea the good life. Culture cannot represent either that which merely exists or conventional and no longer binding categories of order which the cul industry drapes over the idea of the good life as if existing reality were t good life, and as if those categories were its true measure. If the response the culture industry's representatives is that it does not deliver art at all, t itself the ideology with which they evade responsibility for that from whic This content downloaded from 216.165.95.66 on Mon, 06 Mar 2017 17:23:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CULTURE INDUSTRY RECONSIDERED 17 business lives. No misdeed is ever righted by explaining i The appeal to order alone, without concrete specificity, appeal to the dissemination of norms, without these ever selves in reality or before consciousness, is equally futile. The tively binding order, huckstered to people because it is so lack has no claims if it does not prove itself internally and in conf human beings. But this is precisely what no product of the cu would engage in. The concepts of order which it hammers into are always those of the status quo. They remain unquestion and undialectically presupposed, even if they no longer hav for those who accept them. In contrast to the Kantian, t imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruc conform to that which exists anyway, and to that which anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced co order that springs from it is never confronted with what it cla the real interests of human beings. Order, however, is not would be so only as a good order. The fact that the cultu oblivious to this and extols order in abstracto, bears witness to and untruth of the messages it conveys. While it claims to lea it deludes them with false conflicts which they are to exchang It solves conflicts for them only in appearance, in a way that be solved in their real lives. In the products of the culture beings get into trouble only so that they can be rescued unhar representatives of a benevolent collective; and then in empty h are reconciled with the general, whose demands they had ex outset as irreconcilable with their interests. For this pur industry has developed formulas which even reach into such areas as light musical entertainment. Here too one gets in rhythmic problems, which can be instantly disentangled by the basic beat. Even its defenders, however, would hardly contradict Plato openly who maintained that what is objectively and intrinsically untrue cannot also b subjectively good and true for human beings. The concoctions of the culture industry are neither guides for a blissful life, nor a new art of moral responsibility, but rather exhortations to toe the line, behind which stand the most powerful interests. The consensus which it propagates strengthens blind, opaque authority. If the culture industry is measured not by its own substanc and logic, but by its efficacy, by its position in reality and its explicit This content downloaded from 216.165.95.66 on Mon, 06 Mar 2017 17:23:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 18 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE pretentions; if the focus of serious concern is with the efficacy to which it always appeals, the potential of its effect becomes twice as weighty. This potential, however, lies in the promotion and exploitation of the egoweakness to which the powerless members of contemporary society, with its concentration of power, are condemned. Their consciousness is further developed retrogressively. It is no coincidence that cynical American film producers are heard to say that their pictures must take into consideration the level of eleven year olds. In doing so they would very much like to make adults into eleven year olds. It is true that thorough research has not, for the time being, produced an airtight case proving the regressive effects of particular products of the culture industry. No doubt an imaginatively designed experiment could achieve this more successfully than the powerful financial interests concerned would find comfortable. In any case, it can be assumed without hesitation that steady drops hollow the stone, especially since the system of the culture industry that surrounds the masses tolerates hardly any deviation and incessantly drills the same formulas of behavior. Only their deep unconscious mistrust, the last residue of the difference between art and empirical reality in the spiritual makeup of the masses explains why they have not, to a person, long since perceived and accepted the world as it is constructed for them by the culture industry. Even if its messages were as harmless as they are made out to be--on countless occasions they are obviously not harmless, like the movies which chime in with currently popular hate campaigns against intellectuals by portraying them with the usual stereotypes--the attitudes which the culture industry calls forth are anything but harmless. If an astrologer urges his readers to drive carefully on a particular day, that certainly hurts no one; they will, however, be harmed indeed by the stupefication which lies in the claim that advice which is valid every day and which is therefore idiotic, needs the approval of the stars. Human dependence and servitude, the vanishing point of the culture industry, could scarcely be more faithfully described than by the American interviewee who was of the opinion that the dilemmas of the contemporary epoch would end if people would simply follow the lead of prominent personalities. Insofar as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects. The total effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment, in which, as Horkheimer and I have noted, enlightenment, that is the progressive technical domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering This content downloaded from 216.165.95.66 on Mon, 06 Mar 2017 17:23:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CULTURE INDUSTRY RECONSIDERED 19 consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, inde individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves. These, h would be the precondition for a democratic society which needs have come of age in order to sustain itself and develop. If the m been unjustly reviled from above as masses, the culture industry is the least responsible for making them into masses and then despisin while obstructing the emancipation for which human beings are as r productive forces of the epoch permit. Translated by Anson G. Rabinbach TELOS a quarterly journal of radical thought TELOS 24 JAMES SCHMIDT: Lukacs Concept of Proletarian Bildung JUERGEN HABERMAS: Moral Development and Ego Identity G. MARRAMAO: Political Economy and Critical Theory G.L. ULMEN: Wittfogel's Science of Society RICHARD WINFIELD: The Dilemma of Labor ROBERT D'AMICO: Comments onJacoby's Social Amnesia JEAN COHEN: False Premises TELOS 25 GIAN ENRICO RUSCONI: Marxism in West Germany W. MUELLER, C. 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