Theodore Adorno  1903-1969
Max Horkheimer 1897-1973


"The culture industry claims to serve the consumers' needs for entertainment, but conceals the way that it standardizes these needs, manipulating them to conform to what it produces."

The might of industrial society is lodged in men’s minds.

--Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

A.Biography:
 1. both German Jews who established Frankfort school during Weimar Republic
 2. leading critical theorists, contradictions of capitalism
 3. reacted strongly to anti-semitism of Third Reich
 4. fled Nazi Germany, came to New York
 5. like Marcuse, theorized about impact of consumer culture, suppressing dissent
 6. totalitarianism of market
   a.Marxist foundations
   b.horrified by rise of Nazism, fascism

7.wondered what happened to promise of enlightenment
  a.rationality was supposed to bring more freedom, individuality, democracy
  b. instead seemed to be creating "iron cage" of logic, imprisoning ppl

B. Critical Theory:
  1. assumption that capitalism constructs individuals to fit into their place in the economic machine
  2.focuses on impact on individual humans- alienation
    a. alienated from true nature & potential  "species being"
    b. alienated from community, isolated through technology
    c. alienated by technology from human creativity
  3. Marcuse's response is refusal to engage in system, withdrawal, negation as most positive response

C. H&A focuses more strongly on role of culture and cultural products to reinforce this mindset
  1. believes that cultural messages & ideology are reflection of economic relations
  2. cultural products reinforce status quo
  3. average worker is more and more commodified by needs of industry
      a. cultural products are 'dumbed down' to keep worker from questioning
      b. dumbing down also serves as distraction from politics
   4. media offerings are propaganda to convince public to accept status quo  id
   5. modes of resistance are suppressed by majority of popular cultural offerings  

D. Commodification of culture
  1. nothing original is presented (creates conformity)
  2. same frameworks/plotlines used and re-used
  3. "opiate" of masses, not religion, but entertainment
  4. freedom & justice viewed as realized through consumer culture
  5. mass production reinforces the 'sameness' of choices offered to mass public ba

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.


E. cultural offerings are isolating
   1. prevents organizing by masses
   2. passivity of masses
   3. standardized,  creates illusions and 'false needs' met by consumer culture
   4. "true" needs are happiness, not material things (same as Marcuse)

F. role of technology is central
  1. culture shapes society
  2. mass produced, commodification means anything can be exchanged
  3. nothing original, unique, no longer one of a kind
     a. ex. pottery, earrings, clothing
 4. ppl become consumer objects rather than freely acting subjects
 5. identity and tastes determined by advertising/cultural norms
 6. centralized ownership of media contributes to 'sameness'  ex
   a. same messages regardless of what you listen to
   b. no choices available   rs

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.

G. enlightenment project- use of reason increasingly used as system of control rather than emancipation
  1.should produce pluralism and demystification
  2. instead bureaucracy, lack of personal responsibility, impersonal authority, laws, etc.

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.

H. serious art vs popular art
   1. popular music, banal, commodifiedex   ex
      a. distracting, boring, propaganda
      b. ex. Top Ten playlists generated by industry
  2. advertising becomes synonymous w/ mass art

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.

Do political figures follow this pattern, too?   ex
  lr
 2. rebellion, imagining a different way comes only with serious art (morality)    brecht
    a.explores contradictions of capitalist culture
    b.dialectic
    c. (represents anti-thesis) shows thesis is full of holes td
    d.  creates skepticism in individual, questions reality of societyg  g
    e. agitprop   link
      1.Brecht, George Orwell  da  protest music
tk 'get by'
Low art is an advertisement for the artists ego,
High art is a gift from the artist to humankind.

Low art looks to shock, because it craves attention,
High art looks with fresh eyes, and sincerity.

Low art is easy to comprehend,
High art may challenge your thinking.

Low art is bought to impress others or because it matches the sofa,
High art stands alone, and requires something from the viewer.
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