Mass Media as Social Cement and virtual enslavement

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944)

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

Source: Dialectic of Enlightenment;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden 1998; proofed and corrected Feb. 2005.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/adorno.h
tm


THE sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively 
established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-
capitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or 
specialisation, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; 
for 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. Even the aesthetic activities of political 
opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of 
the iron system. The decorative industrial management buildings and 
exhibition centers in authoritarian countries are much the same as 
anywhere else. The huge gleaming towers that shoot up everywhere are 
outward signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, 
toward which the unleashed entrepreneurial system (whose monuments 
are a mass of gloomy houses and business premises in grimy, 
spiritless cities) was already hastening. Even now the older houses 
just outside the concrete city centres look like slums, and the new 
bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy structures of 
world fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in 
demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans. 

Yet the city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual 
as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make 
him all the more subservient to his adversary ? the absolute power of 
capitalism. Because the inhabitants, as producers and as consumers, 
are drawn into the center in search of work and pleasure, all the 
living units crystallise into well-organised complexes. The striking 
unity of microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their 
culture: the false identity of the general and the particular. Under 
monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its 
artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are 
no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence 
becomes more open, so its power grows. 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. They call themselves industries; and when their 
directors' incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility 
of the finished products is removed.

Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological 
terms. It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain 
reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require 
identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical 
goods. The technical contrast between the few production centers and 
the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to 
demand organisation and planning by management. Furthermore, it is 
claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers' 
needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. 
The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in 
which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention is made 
of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over 
society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is 
greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of 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. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more 
than the achievement of standardisation and mass production, 
sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the 
work and that of the social system. 

This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but 
of its function in today's economy. The need which might resist 
central control has already been suppressed by the control of the 
individual consciousness. The step from the telephone to the radio 
has clearly distinguished the roles. The former still allowed the 
subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter 
is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and 
authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all 
exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and 
private broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are confined to the 
apocryphal field of the "amateur," and also have to accept 
organisation from above. 

But any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting 
is controlled and absorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and 
official programs of every kind selected by professionals. Talented 
performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; 
otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in. The attitude of the 
public, which ostensibly and actually favours the system of the 
culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it. 
If one branch of art follows the same formula as one with a very 
different medium and content; if the dramatic intrigue of broadcast 
soap operas becomes no more than useful material for showing how to 
master technical problems at both ends of the scale of musical 
experience ? real jazz or a cheap imitation; or if a movement from a 
Beethoven symphony is crudely "adapted" for a film sound-track in the 
same way as a Tolstoy novel is garbled in a film script: then the 
claim that this is done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the 
public is no more than hot air.

We are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena as inherent 
in the technical and personnel apparatus which, down to its last cog, 
itself forms part of the economic mechanism of selection. In addition 
there is the agreement ? or at least the determination ? of all 
executive authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any 
way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or 
above all themselves.

In our age the objective social tendency is incarnate in the hidden 
subjective purposes of company directors, the foremost among whom are 
in the most powerful sectors of industry ? steel, petroleum, 
electricity, and chemicals. Culture monopolies are weak and dependent 
in comparison. They cannot afford to neglect their appeasement of the 
real holders of power if their sphere of activity in mass society (a 
sphere producing a specific type of commodity which anyhow is still 
too closely bound up with easy-going liberalism and Jewish 
intellectuals) is not to undergo a series of purges. 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. All are in such close contact that the 
extreme concentration of mental forces allows demarcation lines 
between different firms and technical branches to be ignored. 

The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will 
happen in politics. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B 
films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend 
not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organising, and 
labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may 
escape; the distinctions are emphasised and extended. The public is 
catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of 
varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. 
Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his 
previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of 
mass product turned out for his type. Consumers appear as statistics 
on research organisation charts, and are divided by income groups 
into red, green, and blue areas; the technique is that used for any 
type of propaganda.

How formalised the procedure is can be seen when the mechanically 
differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end. That the 
difference between the Chrysler range and General Motors products is 
basically illusory strikes every child with a keen interest in 
varieties. What connoisseurs discuss as good or bad points serve only 
to perpetuate the semblance of competition and range of choice. The 
same applies to the Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer 
productions. But even the differences between the more expensive and 
cheaper models put out by the same firm steadily diminish: for 
automobiles, there are such differences as the number of cylinders, 
cubic capacity, details of patented gadgets; and for films there are 
the number of stars, the extravagant use of technology, labor, and 
equipment, and the introduction of the latest psychological formulas. 
The universal criterion of merit is the amount of "conspicuous 
production," of blatant cash investment. The varying budgets in the 
culture industry do not bear the slightest relation to factual 
values, to the meaning of the products themselves. 

Even the technical media are relentlessly forced into uniformity. 
Television aims at a synthesis of radio and film, and is held up only 
because the interested parties have not yet reached agreement, but 
its consequences will be quite enormous and promise to intensify the 
impoverishment of aesthetic matter so drastically, that by tomorrow 
the thinly veiled identity of all industrial culture products can 
come triumphantly out into the open, derisively fulfilling the 
Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk ? the fusion of all the arts 
in one work. 

The alliance of word, image, and music is all the more perfect than 
in Tristan because the sensuous elements which all approvingly 
reflect the surface of social reality are in principle embodied in 
the same technical process, the unity of which becomes its 
distinctive content. This 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 the 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 man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufacturers 
offer him. Kant's formalism still expected a contribution from the 
individual, who was thought to relate the varied experiences of the 
senses to fundamental concepts; but industry robs the individual of 
his function. Its prime service to the customer is to do his 
schematising for him. 

Kant said that there was a secret mechanism in the soul which 
prepared direct intuitions in such a way that they could be fitted 
into the system of pure reason. But today that secret has been 
deciphered. While the mechanism is to all appearances planned by 
those who serve up the data of experience, that is, by the culture 
industry, it is in fact forced upon the latter by the power of 
society, which remains irrational, however we may try to rationalise 
it; and this inescapable force is processed by commercial agencies so 
that they give an artificial impression of being in command. 

There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have 
done it for him. Art for the masses has destroyed the dream but still 
conforms to the tenets of that dreaming idealism which critical 
idealism baulked at. Everything derives from consciousness: for 
Malebranche and Berkeley, from the consciousness of God; in mass art, 
from the consciousness of the production team. Not only are the hit 
songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly 
invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment 
itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details 
are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective 
in a hit song, the hero's momentary fall from grace (which he accepts 
as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the 
male star, the latter's rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, 
like all the other details, ready-made clichés to be slotted in 
anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfil the purpose 
allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d'être is to 
confirm it by being its constituent parts. As soon as the film 
begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, 
punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has 
heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming 
and feel flattered when it does come. The average length of the short 
story has to be rigidly adhered to. Even gags, effects, and jokes are 
calculated like the setting in which they are placed. They are the 
responsibility of special experts and their narrow range makes it 
easy for them to be apportioned in the office. 

The development of the culture industry has led to the predominance 
of the effect, the obvious touch, and the technical detail over the 
work itself ? which once expressed an idea, but was liquidated 
together with the idea. When the detail won its freedom, it became 
rebellious and, in the period from Romanticism to Expressionism, 
asserted itself as free expression, as a vehicle of protest against 
the organisation. In music the single harmonic effect obliterated the 
awareness of form as a whole; in painting the individual colour was 
stressed at the expense of pictorial composition; and in the novel 
psychology became more important than structure. The totality of the 
culture industry has put an end to this. 

Though concerned exclusively with effects, it crushes their 
insubordination and makes them subserve the formula, which replaces 
the work. The same fate is inflicted on whole and parts alike. The 
whole inevitably bears no relation to the details ? just like the 
career of a successful man into which everything is made to fit as an 
illustration or a proof, whereas it is nothing more than the sum of 
all those idiotic events. The so-called dominant idea is like a file 
which ensures order but not coherence. The whole and the parts are 
alike; there is no antithesis and no connection. Their prearranged 
harmony is a mockery of what had to be striven after in the great 
bourgeois works of art. In Germany the graveyard stillness of the 
dictatorship already hung over the gayest films of the democratic era.

The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture 
industry. The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees the world 
outside as an extension of the film he has just left (because the 
latter is intent upon reproducing the world of everyday perceptions), 
is now the producer's guideline. The more intensely and flawlessly 
his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today 
for the illusion to prevail that the outside world is the 
straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen. This 
purpose has been furthered by mechanical reproduction since the 
lightning takeover by the sound film.

Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound 
film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for 
imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable 
to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its 
precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film 
forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting 
of the mass-media consumer's powers of imagination and spontaneity 
does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he 
must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of 
the products themselves, especially to the most characteristic of 
them, the sound film. They are so designed that quickness, powers of 
observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them 
at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator 
is not to miss the relentless rush of facts. 

Even though the effort required for his response is semi-automatic, 
no scope is left for the imagination. Those who are so absorbed by 
the world of the movie ? by its images, gestures, and words ? that 
they are unable to supply what really makes it a world, do not have 
to dwell on particular points of its mechanics during a screening. 
All the other films and products of the entertainment industry which 
they have seen have taught them what to expect; they react 
automatically. 

The might of industrial society is lodged in men's minds. The 
entertainments manufacturers know that their products will be 
consumed with alertness even when the customer is distraught, for 
each of them is a model of the huge economic machinery which has 
always sustained the masses, whether at work or at leisure ? which is 
akin to work. From every sound film and every broadcast program the 
social effect can be inferred which is exclusive to none but is 
shared by all alike. The culture industry as a whole has moulded men 
as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product. All the agents of 
this process, from the producer to the women's clubs, take good care 
that the simple reproduction of this mental state is not nuanced or 
extended in any way.

The art historians and guardians of culture who complain of the 
extinction in the West of a basic style-determining power are wrong. 
The stereotyped appropriation of everything, even the inchoate, for 
the purposes of mechanical reproduction surpasses the rigour and 
general currency of any "real style," in the sense in which cultural 
cognoscenti celebrate the organic pre-capitalist past. No Palestrina 
could be more of a purist in eliminating every unprepared and 
unresolved discord than the jazz arranger in suppressing any 
development which does not conform to the jargon. When jazzing up 
Mozart he changes him not only when he is too serious or too 
difficult but when he harmonises the melody in a different way, 
perhaps more simply, than is customary now. No medieval builder can 
have scrutinised the subjects for church windows and sculptures more 
suspiciously than the studio hierarchy scrutinises a work by Balzac 
or Hugo before finally approving it. No medieval theologian could 
have determined the degree of the torment to be suffered by the 
damned in accordance with the order of divine love more meticulously 
than the producers of shoddy epics calculate the torture to be 
undergone by the hero or the exact point to which the leading lady's 
hemline shall be raised. The explicit and implicit, exoteric and 
esoteric catalogue of the forbidden and tolerated is so extensive 
that it not only defines the area of freedom but is all-powerful 
inside it. Everything down to the last detail is shaped accordingly. 

Like its counterpart, avant-garde art, the entertainment industry 
determines its own language, down to its very syntax and vocabulary, 
by the use of anathema. The constant pressure to produce new effects 
(which must conform to the old pattern) serves merely as another rule 
to increase the power of the conventions when any single effect 
threatens to slip through the net. Every detail is so firmly stamped 
with sameness that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth, 
or does not meet with approval at first sight. And the star 
performers, whether they produce or reproduce, use this jargon as 
freely and fluently and with as much gusto as if it were the very 
language which it silenced long ago. Such is the ideal of what is 
natural in this field of activity, and its influence becomes all the 
more powerful, the more technique is perfected and diminishes the 
tension between the finished product and everyday life. The paradox 
of this routine, which is essentially travesty, can be detected and 
is often predominant in everything that the culture industry turns 
out. A jazz musician who is playing a piece of serious music, one of 
Beethoven's simplest minuets, syncopates it involuntarily and will 
smile superciliously when asked to follow the normal divisions of the 
beat. This is the "nature" which, complicated by the ever-present and 
extravagant demands of the specific medium, constitutes the new style 
and is a "system of non-culture, to which one might even concede a 
certain `unity of style' if it really made any sense to speak of 
stylised barbarity." [Nietzsche]

The universal imposition of this stylised mode can even go beyond 
what is quasi-officially sanctioned or forbidden; today a hit song is 
more readily forgiven for not observing the 32 beats or the compass 
of the ninth than for containing even the most clandestine melodic or 
harmonic detail which does not conform to the idiom. Whenever Orson 
Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is forgiven 
because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated 
mutations which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity 
of the system. The constraint of the technically-conditioned idiom 
which stars and directors have to produce as "nature" so that the 
people can appropriate it, extends to such fine nuances that they 
almost attain the subtlety of the devices of an avant-garde work as 
against those of truth. The rare capacity minutely to fulfil the 
obligations of the natural idiom in all branches of the culture 
industry becomes the criterion of efficiency. What and how they say 
it must be measurable by everyday language, as in logical positivism. 

The producers are experts. The idiom demands an astounding productive 
power, which it absorbs and squanders. In a diabolical way it has 
overreached the culturally conservative distinction between genuine 
and artificial style. A style might be called artificial which is 
imposed from without on the refractory impulses of a form. But in the 
culture industry every element of the subject matter has its origin 
in the same apparatus as that jargon whose stamp it bears. The 
quarrels in which the artistic experts become involved with sponsor 
and censor about a lie going beyond the bounds of credibility are 
evidence not so much of an inner aesthetic tension as of a divergence 
of interests. The reputation of the specialist, in which a last 
remnant of objective independence sometimes finds refuge, conflicts 
with the business politics of the Church, or the concern which is 
manufacturing the cultural commodity. But the thing itself has been 
essentially objectified and made viable before the established 
authorities began to argue about it. Even before Zanuck acquired her, 
Saint Bernadette was regarded by her latter-day hagiographer as 
brilliant propaganda for all interested parties. That is what became 
of the emotions of the character. Hence the style of the culture 
industry, which no longer has to test itself against any refractory 
material, is also the negation of style. The reconciliation of the 
general and particular, of the rule and the specific demands of the 
subject matter, the achievement of which alone gives essential, 
meaningful content to style, is futile because there has ceased to be 
the slightest tension between opposite poles: these concordant 
extremes are dismally identical; the general can replace the 
particular, and vice versa.

Nevertheless, this caricature of style does not amount to something 
beyond the genuine style of the past. In the culture industry the 
notion of genuine style is seen to be the aesthetic equivalent of 
domination. Style considered as mere aesthetic regularity is a 
romantic dream of the past. The unity of style not only of the 
Christian Middle Ages but of the Renaissance expresses in each case 
the different structure of social power, and not the obscure 
experience of the oppressed in which the general was enclosed. The 
great artists were never those who embodied a wholly flawless and 
perfect style, but those who used style as a way of hardening 
themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative 
truth. The style of their works gave what was expressed that force 
without which life flows away unheard. Those very art forms which are 
known as classical, such as Mozart's music, contain objective trends 
which represent something different to the style which they 
incarnate. 

As late as Schönberg and Picasso, the great artists have retained a 
mistrust of style, and at crucial points have subordinated it to the 
logic of the matter. What Dadaists and Expressionists called the 
untruth of style as such triumphs today in the sung jargon of a 
crooner, in the carefully contrived elegance of a film star, and even 
in the admirable expertise of a photograph of a peasant's squalid 
hut. Style represents a promise in every work of art. That which is 
expressed is subsumed through style into the dominant forms of 
generality, into the language of music, painting, or words, in the 
hope that it will be reconciled thus with the idea of true 
generality. This promise held out by the work of art that it will 
create truth by lending new shape to the conventional social forms is 
as necessary as it is hypocritical. It unconditionally posits the 
real forms of life as it is by suggesting that fulfilment lies in 
their aesthetic derivatives. To this extent the claim of art is 
always ideology too. 

However, only in this confrontation with tradition of which style is 
the record can art express suffering. That factor in a work of art 
which enables it to transcend reality certainly cannot be detached 
from style; but it does not consist of the harmony actually realised, 
of any doubtful unity of form and content, within and without, of 
individual and society; it is to be found in those features in which 
discrepancy appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate 
striving for identity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure in 
which the style of the great work of art has always achieved self-
negation, the inferior work has always relied on its similarity with 
others ? on a surrogate identity.

In the culture industry this imitation finally becomes absolute. 
Having ceased to be anything but style, it reveals the latter's 
secret: obedience to the social hierarchy. Today aesthetic barbarity 
completes what has threatened the creations of the spirit since they 
were gathered together as culture and neutralised. To speak of 
culture was always contrary to culture. Culture as a common 
denominator already contains in embryo that schematisation and 
process of cataloguing and classification which bring culture within 
the sphere of administration. And it is precisely the industrialised, 
the consequent, subsumption which entirely accords with this notion 
of culture. By subordinating in the same way and to the same end all 
areas of intellectual creation, by occupying men's senses from the 
time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in 
again the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the 
labor process they themselves have to sustain throughout the day, 
this subsumption mockingly satisfies the concept of a unified culture 
which the philosophers of personality contrasted with mass culture.

And so the culture industry, the most rigid of all styles, proves to 
be the goal of liberalism, which is reproached for its lack of style. 
Not only do its categories and contents derive from liberalism ? 
domesticated naturalism as well as operetta and revue ? but the 
modern culture monopolies form the economic area in which, together 
with the corresponding entrepreneurial types, for the time being some 
part of its sphere of operation survives, despite the process of 
disintegration elsewhere. 

It is still possible to make one's way in entertainment, if one is 
not too obstinate about one's own concerns, and proves appropriately 
pliable. Anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in. Once his 
particular brand of deviation from the norm has been noted by the 
industry, he belongs to it as does the land-reformer to capitalism. 
Realistic dissidence is the trademark of anyone who has a new idea in 
business. In the public voice of modern society accusations are 
seldom audible; if they are, the perceptive can already detect signs 
that the dissident will soon be reconciled. The more immeasurable the 
gap between chorus and leaders, the more certainly there is room at 
the top for everybody who demonstrates his superiority by well-
planned originality. Hence, in the culture industry, too, the liberal 
tendency to give full scope to its able men survives. 

To do this for the efficient today is still the function of the 
market, which is otherwise proficiently controlled; as for the 
market's freedom, in the high period of art as elsewhere, it was 
freedom for the stupid to starve. Significantly, the system of the 
culture industry comes from the more liberal industrial nations, and 
all its characteristic media, such as movies, radio, jazz, and 
magazines, flourish there. Its progress, to be sure, had its origin 
in the general laws of capital. Gaumont and Pathe, Ullstein and 
Hugenberg followed the international trend with some success; 
Europe's economic dependence on the United States after war and 
inflation was a contributory factor. The belief that the barbarity of 
the culture industry is a result of "cultural lag," of the fact that 
the American consciousness did not keep up with the growth of 
technology, is quite wrong. It was pre-Fascist Europe which did not 
keep up with the trend toward the culture monopoly. 

But it was this very lag which left intellect and creativity some 
degree of independence and enabled its last representatives to exist ?
 however dismally. In Germany the failure of democratic control to 
permeate life had led to a paradoxical situation. Many things were 
exempt from the market mechanism which had invaded the Western 
countries. The German educational system, universities, theatres with 
artistic standards, great orchestras, and museums enjoyed protection. 
The political powers, state and municipalities, which had inherited 
such institutions from absolutism, had left them with a measure of 
the freedom from the forces of power which dominates the market, just 
as princes and feudal lords had done up to the nineteenth century. 
This strengthened art in this late phase against the verdict of 
supply and demand, and increased its resistance far beyond the actual 
degree of protection. In the market itself the tribute of a quality 
for which no use had been found was turned into purchasing power; in 
this way, respectable literary and music publishers could help 
authors who yielded little more in the way of profit than the respect 
of the connoisseur.

But what completely fettered the artist was the pressure (and the 
accompanying drastic threats), always to fit into business life as an 
aesthetic expert. Formerly, like Kant and Hume, they signed their 
letters "Your most humble and obedient servant," and undermined the 
foundations of throne and altar. Today they address heads of 
government by their first names, yet in every artistic activity they 
are subject to their illiterate masters.

The analysis Tocqueville offered a century ago has in the meantime 
proved wholly accurate. Under the private culture monopoly it is a 
fact that "tyranny leaves the body free and directs its attack at the 
soul. The ruler no longer says: You must think as I do or die. He 
says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property, 
everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a 
stranger among us." Not to conform means to be rendered powerless, 
economically and therefore spiritually ? to be "self-employed." When 
the outsider is excluded from the concern, he can only too easily be 
accused of incompetence.

Whereas today in material production the mechanism of supply and 
demand is disintegrating, in the superstructure it still operates as 
a check in the rulers' favour. The consumers are the workers and 
employees, the farmers and lower middle class. Capitalist production 
so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to 
what is offered them. As naturally as the ruled always took the 
morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers 
themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of 
success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on 
the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the 
common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force 
than the cunning of the authorities. It is stronger even than the 
rigorism of the Hays Office, just as in certain great times in 
history it has inflamed greater forces that were turned against it, 
namely, the terror of the tribunals. It calls for Mickey Rooney in 
preference to the tragic Garbo, for Donald Duck instead of Betty 
Boop. The industry submits to the vote which it has itself inspired. 
What is a loss for the firm which cannot fully exploit a contract 
with a declining star is a legitimate expense for the system as a 
whole. By craftily sanctioning the demand for rubbish it inaugurates 
total harmony. The connoisseur and the expert are despised for their 
pretentious claim to know better than the others, even though culture 
is democratic and distributes its privileges to all. In view of the 
ideological truce, the conformism of the buyers and the effrontery of 
the producers who supply them prevail. The result is a constant 
reproduction of the same thing.

A constant sameness governs the relationship to the past as well. 
What is new about the phase of mass culture compared with the late 
liberal stage is the exclusion of the new. The machine rotates on the 
same spot. While determining consumption it excludes the untried as a 
risk. The movie-makers distrust any manuscript which is not 
reassuringly backed by a bestseller. Yet for this very reason there 
is never-ending talk of ideas, novelty, and surprise, of what is 
taken for granted but has never existed. Tempo and dynamics serve 
this trend. Nothing remains as of old; everything has to run 
incessantly, to keep moving. For only the universal triumph of the 
rhythm of mechanical production and reproduction promises that 
nothing changes, and nothing unsuitable will appear. Any additions to 
the well-proven culture inventory are too much of a speculation. The 
ossified forms ? such as the sketch, short story, problem film, or 
hit song ? are the standardised average of late liberal taste, 
dictated with threats from above. The people at the top in the 
culture agencies, who work in harmony as only one manager can with 
another, whether he comes from the rag trade or from college, have 
long since reorganised and rationalised the objective spirit. One 
might think that an omnipresent authority had sifted the material and 
drawn up an official catalogue of cultural commodities to provide a 
smooth supply of available mass-produced lines. The ideas are written 
in the cultural firmament where they had already been numbered by 
Plato ? and were indeed numbers, incapable of increase and immutable.

Amusement and all the elements of the culture industry existed long 
before the latter came into existence. Now they are taken over from 
above and brought up to date. The culture industry can pride itself 
on having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition 
of art into the sphere of consumption, on making this a principle, on 
divesting amusement of its obtrusive naïvetes and improving the type 
of commodities. The more absolute it became, the more ruthless it was 
in forcing every outsider either into bankruptcy or into a syndicate, 
and became more refined and elevated ? until it ended up as a 
synthesis of Beethoven and the Casino de Paris. It enjoys a double 
victory: the truth it extinguishes without it can reproduce at will 
as a lie within. "Light" art as such, distraction, is not a decadent 
form. Anyone who complains that it is a betrayal of the ideal of pure 
expression is under an illusion about society. The purity of 
bourgeois art, which hypostasised itself as a world of freedom in 
contrast to what was happening in the material world, was from the 
beginning bought with 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. Serious art has been 
withheld from those for whom the hardship and oppression of life make 
a mockery of seriousness, and who must be glad if they can use time 
not spent at the production line just to keep going. Light art has 
been the shadow of autonomous art. It is the social bad conscience of 
serious art. The truth which the latter necessarily lacked because of 
its social premises gives the other the semblance of legitimacy. The 
division itself is the truth: it does at least express the negativity 
of the culture which the different spheres constitute. Least of all 
can the antithesis be reconciled by absorbing light into serious art, 
or vice versa. But that is what the culture industry attempts.

The eccentricity of the circus, peepshow, and brothel is as 
embarrassing to it as that of Schönberg and Karl Kraus. And so the 
jazz musician Benny Goodman appears with the Budapest string quartet, 
more pedantic rhythmically than any philharmonic clarinettist, while 
the style of the Budapest players is as uniform and sugary as that of 
Guy Lombardo. But what is significant is not vulgarity, stupidity, 
and lack of polish. 

The culture industry did away with yesterday's rubbish by its own 
perfection, and by forbidding and domesticating the amateurish, 
although it constantly allows gross blunders without which the 
standard of the exalted style cannot be perceived. But what is new is 
that the irreconcilable elements of culture, art and distraction, are 
subordinated to one end and subsumed under one false formula: the 
totality of the culture industry. It consists of repetition. That its 
characteristic innovations are never anything more than improvements 
of mass reproduction is not external to the system. It is with good 
reason that the interest of innumerable consumers is directed to the 
technique, and not to the contents ? which are stubbornly repeated, 
outworn, and by now half-discredited. The social power which the 
spectators worship shows itself more effectively in the omnipresence 
of the stereotype imposed by technical skill than in the stale 
ideologies for which the ephemeral contents stand in.

Nevertheless the culture industry remains the entertainment business. 
Its influence over the consumers is established by entertainment; 
that will ultimately be broken not by an outright decree, but by the 
hostility inherent in the principle of entertainment to what is 
greater than itself. Since all the trends of the culture industry are 
profoundly embedded in the public by the whole social process, they 
are encouraged by the survival of the market in this area. Demand has 
not yet been replaced by simple obedience. As is well known, the 
major reorganisation of the film industry shortly before World War I, 
the material prerequisite of its expansion, was precisely its 
deliberate acceptance of the public's needs as recorded at the box-
office ? a procedure which was hardly thought necessary in the 
pioneering days of the screen. The same opinion is held today by the 
captains of the film industry, who take as their criterion the more 
or less phenomenal song hits but wisely never have recourse to the 
judgment of truth, the opposite criterion. Business is their 
ideology. It is quite correct that the power of the culture industry 
resides in its identification with a manufactured need, and not in 
simple contrast to it, even if this contrast were one of complete 
power and complete powerlessness. 

Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is 
sought after as an escape from the mechanised work process, and to 
recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at 
the same time mechanisation has such power over a man's leisure and 
happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement 
goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work 
process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; 
what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardised operations. 
What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be 
escaped from by approximation to it in one's leisure time. 

All amusement suffers from this incurable malady. Pleasure hardens 
into boredom because, if it is to remain pleasure, it must not demand 
any effort and therefore moves rigorously in the worn grooves of 
association. No independent thinking must be expected from the 
audience: the product prescribes every reaction: not by its natural 
structure (which collapses under reflection), but by signals. Any 
logical connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly 
avoided. As far as possible, developments must follow from the 
immediately preceding situation and never from the idea of the whole. 
For the attentive movie-goer any individual scene will give him the 
whole thing. Even the set pattern itself still seems dangerous, 
offering some meaning ? wretched as it might be ? where only 
meaninglessness is acceptable. Often the plot is maliciously deprived 
of the development demanded by characters and matter according to the 
old pattern. Instead, the next step is what the script writer takes 
to be the most striking effect in the particular situation. Banal 
though elaborate surprise interrupts the story-line. 

The tendency mischievously to fall back on pure nonsense, which was a 
legitimate part of popular art, farce and clowning, right up to 
Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, is most obvious in the unpretentious 
kinds. This tendency has completely asserted itself in the text of 
the novelty song, in the thriller movie, and in cartoons, although in 
films starring Greer Garson and Bette Davis the unity of the socio-
psychological case study provides something approximating a claim to 
a consistent plot. The idea itself, together with the objects of 
comedy and terror, is massacred and fragmented. Novelty songs have 
always existed on a contempt for meaning which, as predecessors and 
successors of psychoanalysis, they reduce to the monotony of sexual 
symbolism. Today, detective and adventure films no longer give the 
audience the opportunity to experience the resolution. In the non-
ironic varieties of the genre, it has also to rest content with the 
simple horror of situations which have almost ceased to be linked in 
any way.

Cartoons were once exponents of fantasy as opposed to rationalism. 
They ensured that justice was done to the creatures and objects they 
electrified, by giving the maimed specimens a second life. All they 
do today is to confirm the victory of technological reason over 
truth. A few years ago they had a consistent plot which only broke up 
in the final moments in a crazy chase, and thus resembled the old 
slapstick comedy. Now, however, time relations have shifted. In the 
very first sequence a motive is stated so that in the course of the 
action destruction can get to work on it: with the audience in 
pursuit, the protagonist becomes the worthless object of general 
violence. The quantity of organised amusement changes into the 
quality of organised cruelty. The self-elected censors of the film 
industry (with whom it enjoys a close relationship) watch over the 
unfolding of the crime, which is as drawn-out as a hunt. Fun replaces 
the pleasure which the sight of an embrace would allegedly afford, 
and postpones satisfaction till the day of the pogrom. Insofar as 
cartoons do any more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they 
hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the 
breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life 
in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in 
real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take 
their own punishment.

The enjoyment of the violence suffered by the movie character turns 
into violence against the spectator, and distraction into exertion. 
Nothing that the experts have devised as a stimulant must escape the 
weary eye; no stupidity is allowed in the face of all the trickery; 
one has to follow everything and even display the smart responses 
shown and recommended in the film. This raises the question whether 
the culture industry fulfils the function of diverting minds which it 
boasts about so loudly. If most of the radio stations and movie 
theatres were closed down, the consumers would probably not lose so 
very much. To walk from the street into the movie theatre is no 
longer to enter a world of dream; as soon as the very existence of 
these institutions no longer made it obligatory to use them, there 
would be no great urge to do so. Such closures would not be 
reactionary machine wrecking. The disappointment would be felt not so 
much by the enthusiasts as by the slow-witted, who are the ones who 
suffer for everything anyhow. In spite of the films which are 
intended to complete her integration, the housewife finds in the 
darkness of the movie theatre a place of refuge where she can sit for 
a few hours with nobody watching, just as she used to look out of the 
window when there were still homes and rest in the evening. The 
unemployed in the great cities find coolness in summer and warmth in 
winter in these temperature-controlled locations. Otherwise, despite 
its size, this bloated pleasure apparatus adds no dignity to man's 
lives. The idea of "fully exploiting" available technical resources 
and the facilities for aesthetic mass consumption is part of the 
economic system which refuses to exploit resources to abolish hunger.

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it 
perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and 
staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, 
which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it 
actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that 
the diner must be satisfied with the menu. In front of the appetite 
stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally 
set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it 
sought to escape. Of course works of art were not sexual exhibitions 
either. However, by representing deprivation as negative, they 
retracted, as it were, the prostitution of the impulse and rescued by 
mediation what was denied. 

The secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representation of 
fulfilment as a broken promise. The culture industry does not 
sublimate; it represses. By repeatedly exposing the objects of 
desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the 
athletic hero, it only stimulates the unsublimated forepleasure which 
habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a masochistic 
semblance. There is no erotic situation which, while insinuating and 
exciting, does not fail to indicate unmistakably that things can 
never go that far. The Hays Office merely confirms the ritual of 
Tantalus that the culture industry has established anyway. Works of 
art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic 
and prudish. Love is downgraded to romance. And, after the descent, 
much is permitted; even license as a marketable speciality has its 
quota bearing the trade description "daring." The mass production of 
the sexual automatically achieves its repression. Because of his 
ubiquity, the film star with whom one is meant to fall in love is 
from the outset a copy of himself. Every tenor voice comes to sound 
like a Caruso record, and the "natural" faces of Texas girls are like 
the successful models by whom Hollywood has typecast them. The 
mechanical reproduction of beauty, which reactionary cultural 
fanaticism wholeheartedly serves in its methodical idolisation of 
individuality, leaves no room for that unconscious idolatry which was 
once essential to beauty. 

The triumph over beauty is celebrated by humour ? the Schadenfreude 
that every successful deprivation calls forth. There is laughter 
because there is nothing to laugh at. Laughter, whether conciliatory 
or terrible, always occurs when some fear passes. It indicates 
liberation either from physical danger or from the grip of logic. 
Conciliatory laughter is heard as the echo of an escape from power; 
the wrong kind overcomes fear by capitulating to the forces which are 
to be feared. It is the echo of power as something inescapable. Fun 
is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe 
it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud practised on 
happiness. Moments of happiness are without laughter; only operettas 
and films portray sex to the accompaniment of resounding laughter. 
But Baudelaire is as devoid of humour as Hölderlin. In the false 
society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is 
drawing it into its worthless totality. To laugh at something is 
always to deride it, and the life which, according to Bergson, in 
laughter breaks through the barrier, is actually an invading barbaric 
life, self-assertion prepared to parade its liberation from any 
scruple when the social occasion arises. Such a laughing audience is 
a parody of humanity. Its members are monads, all dedicated to the 
pleasure of being ready for anything at the expense of everyone else. 
Their harmony is a caricature of solidarity. What is fiendish about 
this false laughter is that it is a compelling parody of the best, 
which is conciliatory. Delight is austere: res severa verum gaudium. 
The monastic theory that not asceticism but the sexual act denotes 
the renunciation of attainable bliss receives negative confirmation 
in the gravity of the lover who with foreboding commits his life to 
the fleeting moment. In the culture industry, jovial denial takes the 
place of the pain found in ecstasy and in asceticism. The supreme law 
is that they shall not satisfy their desires at any price; they must 
laugh and be content with laughter. In every product of the culture 
industry, the permanent denial imposed by civilisation is once again 
unmistakably demonstrated and inflicted on its victims. To offer and 
to deprive them of something is one and the same. This is what 
happens in erotic films. Precisely because it must never take place, 
everything centres upon copulation. In films it is more strictly 
forbidden for an illegitimate relationship to be admitted without the 
parties being punished than for a millionaire's future son-in-law to 
be active in the labour movement. In contrast to the liberal era, 
industrialised as well as popular culture may wax indignant at 
capitalism, but it cannot renounce the threat of castration. This is 
fundamental. It outlasts the organised acceptance of the uniformed 
seen in the films which are produced to that end, and in reality. 
What is decisive today is no longer puritanism, although it still 
asserts itself in the form of women's organisations, but the 
necessity inherent in the system not to leave the customer alone, not 
for a moment to allow him any suspicion that resistance is possible. 

The principle dictates that he should be shown all his needs as 
capable of-fulfilment, but that those needs should be so 
predetermined that he feels himself to be the eternal consumer, the 
object of the culture industry. Not only does it make him believe 
that the deception it practices is satisfaction, but it goes further 
and implies that, whatever the state of affairs, he must put up with 
what is offered. The escape from everyday drudgery which the whole 
culture industry promises may be compared to the daughter's abduction 
in the cartoon: the father is holding the ladder in the dark. The 
paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. 
Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the 
starting point. Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought to 
help to forget.

...

Even today the culture industry dresses works of art like political 
slogans and forces them upon a resistant public at reduced prices; 
they are as accessible for public enjoyment as a park. But the 
disappearance of their genuine commodity character does not mean that 
they have been abolished in the life of a free society, but that the 
last defence against their reduction to culture goods has fallen. The 
abolition of educational privilege by the device of clearance sales 
does not open for the masses the spheres from which they were 
formerly excluded, but, given existing social conditions, contributes 
directly to the decay of education and the progress of barbaric 
meaninglessness. Those who spent their money in the nineteenth or the 
early twentieth century to see a play or to go to a concert respected 
the performance as much as the money they spent. The bourgeois who 
wanted to get something out of it tried occasionally to establish 
some rapport with the work. Evidence for this is to be found in the 
literary "introductions" to works, or in the commentaries on Faust. 
These were the first steps toward the biographical coating and other 
practices to which a work of art is subjected today. 

Even in the early, prosperous days of business, exchange-value did 
carry use value as a mere appendix but had developed it as a 
prerequisite for its own existence; this was socially helpful for 
works of art. Art exercised some restraint on the bourgeois as long 
as it cost money. That is now a thing of the past. Now that it has 
lost every restraint and there is no need to pay any money, the 
proximity of art to those who are exposed to it completes the 
alienation and assimilates one to the other under the banner of 
triumphant objectivity. Criticism and respect disappear in the 
culture industry; the former becomes a mechanical expertise, the 
latter is succeeded by a shallow cult of leading personalities. 
Consumers now find nothing expensive. Nevertheless, they suspect that 
the less anything costs, the less it is being given them. The double 
mistrust of traditional culture as ideology is combined with mistrust 
of industrialised culture as a swindle. When thrown in free, the now 
debased works of art, together with the rubbish to which the medium 
assimilates them, are secretly rejected by the fortunate recipients, 
who are supposed to be satisfied by the mere fact that there is so 
much to be seen and heard. Everything can be obtained. The screenos 
and vaudevilles in the movie theatre, the competitions for guessing 
music, the free books, rewards and gifts offered on certain radio 
programs, are not mere accidents but a continuation of the practice 
obtaining with culture products. The symphony becomes a reward for 
listening to the radio, and ? if technology had its way - the film 
would be delivered to people's homes as happens with the radio. It is 
moving toward the commercial system. Television points the way to a 
development which might easily enough force the Warner Brothers into 
what would certainly be the unwelcome position of serious musicians 
and cultural conservatives. But the gift system has already taken 
hold among consumers. As culture is represented as a bonus with 
undoubted private and social advantages, they have to seize the 
chance. They rush in lest they miss something. Exactly what, is not 
clear, but in any case the only ones with a chance are the 
participants. Fascism, however, hopes to use the training the culture 
industry has given these recipients of gifts, in order to organise 
them into its own forced battalions.

Culture is a paradoxical commodity. So completely is it subject to 
the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly 
consumed in use that it can no longer be used. Therefore it 
amalgamates with advertising. The more meaningless the latter seems 
to be under a monopoly, the more omnipotent it becomes. The motives 
are markedly economic. 

One could certainly live without the culture industry, therefore it 
necessarily creates too much satiation and apathy. In itself, it has 
few resources itself to correct this. Advertising is its elixir of 
life. But as its product never fails to reduce to a mere promise the 
enjoyment which it promises as a commodity, it eventually coincides 
with publicity, which it needs because it cannot be enjoyed. In a 
competitive society, advertising performed the social service of 
informing the buyer about the market; it made choice easier and 
helped the unknown but more efficient supplier to dispose of his 
goods. Far from costing time, it saved it. 

Today, when the free market is coming to an end, those who control 
the system are entrenching themselves in it. It strengthens the firm 
bond between the consumers and the big combines. Only those who can 
pay the exorbitant rates charged by the advertising agencies, chief 
of which are the radio networks themselves; that is, only those who 
are already in a position to do so, or are co-opted by the decision 
of the banks and industrial capital, can enter the pseudo-market as 
sellers. The costs of advertising, which finally flow back into the 
pockets of the combines, make it unnecessary to defeat unwelcome 
outsiders by laborious competition. They guarantee that power will 
remain in the same hands ? not unlike those economic decisions by 
which the establishment and running of undertakings is controlled in 
a totalitarian state. Advertising today is a negative principle, a 
blocking device: everything that does not bear its stamp is 
economically suspect. Universal publicity is in no way necessary for 
people to get to know the kinds of goods ? whose supply is restricted 
anyway. It helps sales only indirectly. For a particular firm, to 
phase out a current advertising practice constitutes a loss of 
prestige, and a breach of the discipline imposed by the influential 
clique on its members. In wartime, goods which are unobtainable are 
still advertised, merely to keep industrial power in view. 
Subsidising ideological media is more important than the repetition 
of the name. Because the system obliges every product to use 
advertising, it has permeated the idiom ? the "style" ? of the 
culture industry. Its victory is so complete that it is no longer 
evident in the key positions: the huge buildings of the top men, 
floodlit stone advertisements, are free of advertising; at most they 
exhibit on the rooftops, in monumental brilliance and without any 
self-glorification, the firm's initials. But, in contrast, the 
nineteenth-century houses, whose architecture still shamefully 
indicates that they can be used as a consumption commodity and are 
intended to be lived in, are covered with posters and inscriptions 
from the ground right up to and beyond the roof: until they become no 
more than backgrounds for bills and sign-boards. Advertising becomes 
art and nothing else, just as Goebbels ? with foresight ? combines 
them: l'art pour l'art, advertising for its own sake, a pure 
representation of social power. In the most influential American 
magazines, Life and Fortune, a quick glance can now scarcely 
distinguish advertising from editorial picture and text. The latter 
features an enthusiastic and gratuitous account of the great man 
(with illustrations of his life and grooming habits) which will bring 
him new fans, while the advertisement pages use so many factual 
photographs and details that they represent the ideal of information 
which the editorial part has only begun to try to achieve. 

The assembly-line character of the culture industry, the synthetic, 
planned method of turning out its products (factory-like not only in 
the studio but, more or less, in the compilation of cheap 
biographies, pseudo-documentary novels, and hit songs) is very suited 
to advertising: the important individual points, by becoming 
detachable, interchangeable, and even technically alienated from any 
connected meaning, lend themselves to ends external to the work. The 
effect, the trick, the isolated repeatable device, have always been 
used to exhibit goods for advertising purposes, and today every 
monster close-up of a star is an advertisement for her name, and 
every hit song a plug for its tune. Advertising and the culture 
industry merge technically as well as economically. In both cases the 
same thing can be seen in innumerable places, and the mechanical 
repetition of the same culture product has come to be the same as 
that of the propaganda slogan. In both cases the insistent demand for 
effectiveness makes technology into psycho-technology, into a 
procedure for manipulating men. In both cases the standards are the 
striking yet familiar, the easy yet catchy, the skilful yet simple; 
the object is to overpower the customer, who is conceived as absent-
minded or resistant. 

By the language he speaks, he makes his own contribution to culture 
as publicity. The more completely language is lost in the 
announcement, the more words are debased as substantial vehicles of 
meaning and become signs devoid of quality; the more purely and 
transparently words communicate what is intended, the more 
impenetrable they become. 

The demythologisation of language, taken as an element of the whole 
process of enlightenment, is a relapse into magic. Word and essential 
content were distinct yet inseparable from one another. Concepts like 
melancholy and history, even life, were recognised in the word, which 
separated them out and preserved them. Its form simultaneously 
constituted and reflected them. The absolute separation, which makes 
the moving accidental and its relation to the object arbitrary, puts 
an end to the superstitious fusion of word and thing. 

Anything in a determined literal sequence which goes beyond the 
correlation to the event is rejected as unclear and as verbal 
metaphysics. But the result is that the word, which can now be only a 
sign without any meaning, becomes so fixed to the thing that it is 
just a petrified formula. This affects language and object alike. 
Instead of making the object experiential, the purified word treats 
it as an abstract instance, and everything else (now excluded by the 
demand for ruthless clarity from expression ? itself now banished) 
fades away in reality. A left-half at football, a black-shirt, a 
member of the Hitler Youth, and so on, are no more than names. If 
before its rationalisation the word had given rise to lies as well as 
to longing, now, after its rationalisation, it is a straitjacket for 
longing more even than for lies. 

The blindness and dumbness of the data to which positivism reduces 
the world pass over into language itself, which restricts itself to 
recording those data. Terms themselves become impenetrable; they 
obtain a striking force, a power of adhesion and repulsion which 
makes them like their extreme opposite, incantations. They come to be 
a kind of trick, because the name of the prima donna is cooked up in 
the studio on a statistical basis, or because a welfare state is 
anathematised by using taboo terms such as "bureaucrats" 
or "intellectuals," or because base practice uses the name of the 
country as a charm. 

In general, the name ? to which magic most easily attaches ? is 
undergoing a chemical change: a metamorphosis into capricious, 
manipulable designations, whose effect is admittedly now calculable, 
but which for that very reason is just as despotic as that of the 
archaic name. First names, those archaic remnants, have been brought 
up to date either by stylisation as advertising trade-marks (film 
stars' surnames have become first names), or by collective 
standardisation.

In comparison, the bourgeois family name which, instead of being a 
trade-mark, once individualised its bearer by relating him to his own 
past history, seems antiquated. It arouses a strange embarrassment in 
Americans. In order to hide the awkward distance between individuals, 
they call one another "Bob" and "Harry," as interchangeable team 
members. This practice reduces relations between human beings to the 
good fellowship of the sporting community and is a defence against 
the true kind of relationship. 

Signification, which is the only function of a word admitted by 
semantics, reaches perfection in the sign. Whether folk-songs were 
rightly or wrongly called upper-class culture in decay, their 
elements have only acquired their popular form through a long process 
of repeated transmission. The spread of popular songs, on the other 
hand, takes place at lightning speed. The American expression "fad," 
used for fashions which appear like epidemics ? that is, inflamed by 
highly-concentrated economic forces ? designated this phenomenon long 
before totalitarian advertising bosses enforced the general lines of 
culture. When the German Fascists decide one day to launch a word ? 
say, "intolerable" ? over the loudspeakers the next day the whole 
nation is saying "intolerable." By the same pattern, the nations 
against whom the weight of the German blitzkrieg was thrown took the 
word into their own jargon. The general repetition of names for 
measures to be taken by the authorities makes them, so to speak, 
familiar, just as the brand name on everybody's lips increased sales 
in the era of the free market. The blind and rapidly spreading 
repetition of words with special designations links advertising with 
the totalitarian watchword. The layer of experience which created the 
words for their speakers has been removed; in this swift 
appropriation language acquires the coldness which until now it had 
only on billboards and in the advertisement columns of newspapers. 
Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either 
ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off 
conditioned reflexes; in this sense, words are trade-marks which are 
finally all the more firmly linked to the things they denote, the 
less their linguistic sense is grasped. The minister for mass 
education talks incomprehendingly of "dynamic forces," and the hit 
songs unceasingly celebrate "reverie" and "rhapsody," yet base their 
popularity precisely on the magic of the unintelligible as creating 
the thrill of a more exalted life. Other stereotypes, such as memory, 
are still partly comprehended, but escape from the experience which 
might allow them content. They appear like enclaves in the spoken 
language. On the radio of Flesch and Hitler they may be recognised 
from the affected pronunciation of the announcer when he says to the 
nation, "Good night, everybody!" or "This is the Hitler Youth," and 
even intones "the Fuehrer" in a way imitated by millions. In such 
cliches the last bond between sedimentary experience and language is 
severed which still had a reconciling effect in dialect in the 
nineteenth century. But in the prose of the journalist whose 
adaptable attitude led to his appointment as an all-German editor, 
the German words become petrified, alien terms. Every word shows how 
far it has been debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community. 

By now, of course, this kind of language is already universal, 
totalitarian. All the violence done to words is so vile that one can 
hardly bear to hear them any longer. The announcer does not need to 
speak pompously; he would indeed be impossible if his inflection were 
different from that of his particular audience. But, as against that, 
the language and gestures of the audience and spectators are coloured 
more strongly than ever before by the culture industry, even in fine 
nuances which cannot yet be explained experimentally.

Today the culture industry has taken over the civilising inheritance 
of the entrepreneurial and frontier democracy ? whose appreciation of 
intellectual deviations was never very finely attuned. All are free 
to dance and enjoy themselves, just as they have been free, since the 
historical neutralisation of religion, to join any of the innumerable 
sects. But freedom to choose an ideology ? since ideology always 
reflects economic coercion ? everywhere proves to be freedom to 
choose what is always the same. The way in which a girl accepts and 
keeps the obligatory date, the inflection on the telephone or in the 
most intimate situation, the choice of words in conversation, and the 
whole inner life as classified by the now somewhat devalued depth 
psychology, bear witness to man's attempt to make himself a 
proficient apparatus, similar (even in emotions) to the model served 
up by the culture industry.

The most intimate reactions of human beings have been so thoroughly 
reified that the idea of anything specific to themselves now persists 
only as an utterly abstract notion: personality scarcely signifies 
anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odour 
and emotions. 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.


----------------------------------------------------------------------
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Further Reading: Theodor Adorno Archive | Biography | Barthes | 
Nietzsche | Lukacs
The supramundane character of the Hegelian world spirit, from 
Negative Dialectics, 1966 

Marxist Literary Criticism
Philosophy Archive @ marxists.org





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