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Culture Industry, Enlightenment As Mass Deception

Adorno and Horkheimer criticize how the culture industry deceives people by presenting itself as serving their needs, while it is actually focused on monotonous mass production according to business interests. They argue that the culture industry has moved from producing individual works of art to industrialized mass production, standardizing content. The culture industry thrives by tricking the public into liking these industrialized products through marketing, representing individuals' unwilling submission to capitalism.

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533 views2 pages

Culture Industry, Enlightenment As Mass Deception

Adorno and Horkheimer criticize how the culture industry deceives people by presenting itself as serving their needs, while it is actually focused on monotonous mass production according to business interests. They argue that the culture industry has moved from producing individual works of art to industrialized mass production, standardizing content. The culture industry thrives by tricking the public into liking these industrialized products through marketing, representing individuals' unwilling submission to capitalism.

Uploaded by

Nancy Johnson
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Culture Industry, Enlightenment as Mass Deception

In the essay, The Culture Industry, Enlightenment as Mass Deception, Adorno, and Horkheimer

criticizes how the popular culture is a repetition of a set of elements due to standardization and

mass production. The culture industry deceives the notion of serving the best in accordance with

people's needs, while they are entrenched in the business ideology of monotonous mass

production. They criticize the notion that the industry has lost its ability to produce individuality

and a unique aura. They believe that the culture industry has moved on from the artistic stage or

individual work to mass production or industrial stage. Through the essay, they hint that the

culture industry thrives by deceiving the general public in liking the industrialized products,

which are evidence of an individual's unwilling submission to the capitalist industry.

Nowadays, almost every film or a song is a remake or remix of existing art. The culture

industry successfully disguises the originality through various marketing techniques and fancy

productions. Individuals' needs, attitudes, and desires are dictated to them through social pressure

by the industry. Day by day, the culture industry is becoming corrupted through the ideology of

mass production, which destroys the unique aura of art. The commercialization and mass

production has made art a mere subject of commodification. Capitalist society makes art costly

and internalizes the notion that art should be commodified based on the invested cash.

"Under monopoly, all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework

begin to show through." The universal criterion for success becomes the amount of clear

production of cash investment. The people on the top are no longer interested in concealing
monopoly. Movies are no longer art; they are business made into an ideology. An example of

this would be how Disney reproduces their original quality content with numerous remakes and

live-action films or animations because they are afraid to try something new; to invest a

humongous amount of money on production to do something different which may or may not

cause a failure prevents Disney from experimenting. As an industry, mass media aims to

dominate the masses by the existing power structures to prevent the communication of diverse

ideas.

On the whole, the real criticism put forward by Adorno and Horkheimer is based on the idea that

all the output produced by the mass media is the same, nothing more than just a rearrangement of

the same set of things.

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