They must always be accurate but never true
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The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.
Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry
Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), the consummate critic of mass culture, has much to offer us in our continuous interrogation and examination of the debasement of the individual by the status quo, the usurpation of humanism by the profit motive, and the cynical machinations of corporate media culture.
Recognizing the insipid content of popular culture seven decades ago, Adorno calls upon his philosophical dynamism and biting hostility to convey to us the real, true shape of what we take for granted as ‘culture’, and indeed, ‘reality’.
In tandem with his revelations about mass culture and how it imprisons and imposes itself upon us, are his cogent critiques of the work-labour-leisure trinity, and how these concepts are themselves perpetuated and reified by the culture industry. Labour and leisure, in Adorno’s estimation, are contrived by the mandarins of mass culture as dual cuffs by which to stifle our individual will and imagination. Drawing on Marx, but never totally beholden to him, Adorno reinvigorates the argument of ‘labour’ as ideology within the schema of mass culture.
Collected here are seventy two of his most timeless, provocative, incendiary ideas and concepts on the themes of cultural hegemony, the tyranny of mass culture, and the impotence of the worker under the ideological strata erected and reinforced by the faceless, omnipotent ‘culture industry’.
Leisure as after-Image of the Work Process
Because mechanisation has such power over man’s leisure, and so ‘profoundly determines the manufacture of leisure goods’ experiences of mass culture are ‘inevitably after-images of the work process itself
The Reduction of People to Silence
It can be asked whom music for entertainment still entertains. Rather, it seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work, and undemanding docility
Manufactured Preference for Light Music
The illusion of a social preference for light music as against serious is based on that passivity of the masses which makes the consumption of light music contradict the objective interests of those who consume it
The Fetish Character of the Commodity
Marx defines the fetish character of the commodity as the veneration of the thing made by oneself which, as exchange-value, simultaneously alienates itself from producer to consumer – ‘human beings’. A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.
Worshipping Money, Not the Experiences Money can Buy
The consumer is really worshipping the money that he himself has paid for the concert. He has literally ‘made’ the success which he reifies and accepts as an objective criterion, without recognizing himself in it. But he has not ‘made’ it by liking the concert, but rather by buying the ticket.
Intoxicated by the Act of Buying
It has been asked what the cement is which still holds the world of commodities together. The answer is that the transfer of the use value of consumption goods to their exchange value contributes to a general order in which every pleasure which emancipates itself from exchange value takes on subversive features. The appearance of exchange value in commodities has taken on a specific cohesive function. The person who has money with which to buy is intoxicated by the act of buying.
Temple Slaves to Consumerism
Before the theological caprices of commodities, the consumers become temple slaves. Those who sacrifice themselves nowhere else can do so here, and here they are fully betrayed
Integrating Oneself with the Machinery of the Culture Industry
It suffices to remember how many sorrows he is spared who no longer thinks too many thoughts, how much more ‘in accordance with reality’ a person behaves when he affirms that the real is right, how much more capacity to use the machinery falls to the person who integrates himself with it uncomplainingly
Capitulation Before the Force of Advertisers
Regressive listening is tied to production by the machinery of distribution, and particularly by advertising. Regressive listening appears as soon as advertising turns into a terror, as soon as nothing is left for the consciousness but to capitulate before the superior power of the advertised stuff and purchase spiritual peace by making the imposed goods literally its own thing. IN regressive listening, advertising takes on a compulsory character
Identifying Oneself with an Inescapable Product
They overcome the feeling of impotence that creeps over them in the face of monopolistic production by identifying themselves with the inescapable product.
Self-Flagellation
They would like to ridicule and destroy what yesterday they were intoxicated with, as if in retrospect to revenge themselves for the fact that the ecstasy was not actually such
A Poetry Nourished Upon the Work Ethic
Since the beginning of the industrial era an art has been in vogue which is adept at promoting the right attitudes and which has entered into alliance with reification insofar as it proffers precisely for a disenchanted world, for the realm of the prosaic and even the banausic, a poetry of its own nourished upon the work ethic
The Voluntary Reproduction of Bourgeois Society
Beneath the mantle of adventure they smuggle in the contraband of utility and the reader is persuaded that he does not have to renounce any of his dreams if he eventually becomes an engineer or shop assistant, those dreams which in a class society are already in thrall to the world of things…Perhaps the figure of Robinson Crusoe was already no different, who represented the very model of homo economicus, being transported by a fortunate shipwreck out of the system of bourgeois society only to reproduce it again through his own efforts
Reality as Ideology
Reality becomes its own ideology through the spell cast by its faithful duplication
The Tyranny of Simulacra
The elimination of the distinction between image and reality has already advanced to the point of a collective sickness
The Value of Poets
A great poet is almost as good as a great inventor or talent scout, just as long as the standing of the work protects us from having to read any of it
Fashionable Misfortune is Always its Own Consolation
But mass culture expressly claims to be close to reality only to betray this claim immediately by redirecting it to conflicts in the sphere of consumption where all psychology belongs today from the social point of view. The conflict which was once located in the realm of the superfluous now appears itself as a luxury: fashionable misfortune is always its own consolation. In its mirror mass culture is always the fairest in all the land
The Pre-Digested Quality of Mass, Vapid Culture
All mass culture is fundamentally adaptation. However, the adaptive character, the monopolistic filter which protects it from any external rays of influence which have not already been safely accommodated within its reified schema, represents an adjustment to the consumers as well. The pre-digested quality of the product prevails, justifies itself and establishes itself all the more firmly in so far as it constantly refers to those who cannot digest anything not already predigested. It is baby food: permanent self reflection based upon the infantile compulsion towards the repetition of needs which it creates in the first place.
The Merit of Averageness
Empathy with the object not only reconciles us with it but with every object. No one should think themselves better than they are. The viewer is persuaded of the merit of his own averageness
Trapped in the Abstract Present
The defective power of recall on the part of the consumer furnishes the point of departure: no one is trusted to remember anything that has already happened or to concentrate upon anything other than what is presented to him in the given moment. The consumer is thus reduced to the abstract present. Yet the more narrowly the moment has to vouch for itself, all the more must it also avoid being burdened with calamity. The viewer is supposed to be as incapable of looking suffering in the eye as he is of exercising thought.
Waiting for the Thing to Happen is Precisely the Thing Itself
What really constitutes the variety act, is the fact that on each occasion something happens and nothing happens as the same time. Every kind of variety act is really a kind of expectation. It subsequently transpires that waiting for the thing in question, is precisely the thing itself.
The Deceit of Variety Acts
In variety the applause always comes a fraction too late, namely when the viewer perceives that what was initially imagined to be a preparation for something else was just the event of which he has been cheated as it were
The Impotence of Film
Whatever problems of psychological fate the film may present, through parading the events past the viewer on the screen the power of the oppositions involved and the possibility of freedom within them is denied and reduced to the abstract temporal relationship of before and after. The eye of the camera which has perceived the conflict before the viewer and projected it upon the film has already taken care that the conflicts are not conflicts at all. The images have already become mere objects in advance. Subsumed as they are, they pass us impotently by.
The Curse of Predetermination
Certainly every finished work of art is already predetermined in some way but art strives to overcome its own oppressive weight as an artefact through the force of its very construction. Mass culture on the other hand simply identifies with the curse of predetermination and joyfully fulfills it
Safe Music
The performance of a symphony in which nothing can go wrong is also one in which nothing happens anymore either
The Meaningless Transience of Life
The empty passage of time, the meaningless transience of life was to be seized upon through form and brought into participation with the ‘idea’ by virtue of the totality of this form
Conflict Concentrates Past and Future
Conflict was the means by which time was overcome through sustaining intra-temporal tension within the work. Conflict concentrates past and future in the present
Art Cannot Transcend
By virtue of its overcoming of time art remains impotent really to accomplish the transcendence of existence in the mere commemoration of it.
Dialectical Unity of Temporal Moments
Mass culture which tolerates neither conflict nor any obvious form of montage must pay tribute to time in every one of its products. This is the paradox of mass culture. The more ahistorical and preordained its procedures are, the less temporal relationships become a problem for it and the less it succeeds in transposing these relationships into a dialectical unity of temporal moments, the more craftily it employs static tricks to deceive us into seeing new temporal content in what it does, then the less it has left to oppose to the time beyond itself and the more fatally does it fall victim to that time. Its ahistoricality is the tedium which it affects to relieve.
Monopoly is the Executor
Monopoly is the executor: eliminating tension, it abolishes art along with conflict. Only in this consummated conflictlessness does art wholly become one moment of material production and thus turn completely into the lie to which it has always contributed its part in the past.
Mass Culture is a System of Signals
If mass culture has already become one great exhibition, then everyone who stumbles into it feels as lonely as a stranger on an exhibition site…mass culture is a system of signals that signals itself
Visibility is Thrust Upon Everything that Can be Seen
Whatever Aristotle knew about the intrinsic desire to see, today visibility is thrust upon everything that can possibly be seen. This is the anthropological sediment of that monopolistic compulsion to handle, to manipulate, to absorb everything, the inability to leave anything beyond itself untouched
No More Secrets
Mass culture is an organized mania for connecting everything with everything else, a totality of public secrets
Nothing is Ever New
Curiosity is the enemy of the new which is not permitted to exist anyways. It lives off the claim that there cannot be anything new and that what presents itself as new is already predisposed to subsumption on the part of the well informed. The passionate intensity with which curiosity comes on the scene squanders in the process of reproduction and appropriation the very power which might have contributed to the experience or the creation of something really new.
The Illusion of Choice
Advertising becomes information when there is no longer anything to choose from, when the recognition of brand names has taken the place of choice, when at the same time the totality forces everyone who wishes to survive into consciously going along with the process. This is what happens under monopolistic mass culture. We can distinguish three stages in the developing domination of needs: advertising, information, and command. As a form of omnipresent familiarization mass culture dissolves these stages into one another
Knowledge as Possession
The curiosity which transforms the world into objects is not objective: it is not concerned with what is known but with the fact of knowing it, with having, with knowledge as a possession
The Futile Search for Significance
For the citizen the free capacity to produce replaces the idea of a life free from domination and he seeks in the world of achievement the human significance that this realm specifically denies him
Consumers as Sportsmen
But mass culture is not interested in turning its consumers into sportsmen as such but only into howling devotees of the stadium
Sport as Relief from the Tedium of Labour
Under monopoly conditions the more life forces anyone who wishes to survive into deceit, trickery, and insinuation and the less the individual can depend any longer upon a stable profession for his living, upon the continuity of labour, then all the greater becomes the might of sport in mass culture
Our Impotence Under Monopoly Culture
The schema of mass culture now prevails as a canon of synthetically produced modes of behaviour. The following which mass culture can still count on even there where tedium and deception seem almost calculated to provoke the consumers is held together by the hope that the voice of the monopoly will tell them as they wait in line precisely what is expected of them if they wish to be clothed and fed.
The Omnipresence of Culture
The more industry exhausts what has already been perverted into commodities in the very name of culture, the more the omnipresence of culture proclaims itself.
Conform or Disappear
Today anyone who is incapable of talking in the prescribed fashion, that is of effortlessly reproducing the formulas, conventions and judgements of mass culture as if they were his own, is threatened in his very existence
Obedience as Necessity
People give their approval to mass culture because they know or suspect that this is where they are taught the mores that they will surely need as their passport in a monopolized life. This passport is only valid if paid for in blood, with the surrender of life as a whole and the impassioned obedience to a hated compulsion
Replicating the Dream of the Manufacturer
Primeval systems are constructed on the production line. The dream industry does not so much fabricate the dreams of the customers as introduce the dreams of the suppliers among the people. This is the thousand year empire of an industrial caste system governed by a stream of neverending dynasties. In the dreams of those in charge of mummifying the world mass culture represents a priestly hieroglyphic script which addresses its images to those who have been subjugated not in order that they might be enjoyed but only that they be read
The Fear of Disobedience
Participation in mass culture itself stands under the sign of terror. Enthusiasm not merely betrays an unconscious eagerness to read the commands from above but already reveals the fear of disobedience
Mass Culture’s Artificial Sun
The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death
We are Appendages to the Machinery
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 Profit Motive’s Rapacious Appetite
The entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms
The Eternal Sameness of the Culture Industry’s Products
What parades as progress in the culture industry remains the disguise for an eternal sameness; everywhere the change masks a skeleton which has changed just as little as the profit motive itself since the time it first gained its predominance over culture
The Self-Betrayal Inherent in Our Attachment to Mass Culture
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 which 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
Conformity has Replaced Consciousness
It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway, and to that which everyone thinks anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.
Promising Happiness it Cannot Deliver
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
We Are Turned into Masses, Rather than Individuals
The total effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment, in which enlightenment, that is the progressive technical domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves…If the masses have been unjustly reviled from above as masses, the culture industry is not among the least responsible for making them into masses and despising them, while obstructing the emancipation for which human beings are as ripe as the productive forces of the epoch permit
The Lifeblood of Free Time is Labour
Free time is shackled to its opposite. Indeed the oppositional relation in which it stands imbues free time with certain essential characteristics. What is more, and far more importantly, free time depends on the totality of social conditions, which continues to hold people under its spell. Neither in their work nor in their consciousness do people dispose of genuine freedom over themselves.
Do we Have Control Over our Free Time?
Even where the hold of the spell is relaxed, and people are at least subjectively convinced that they are acting of their own free will, this will itself is shaped by the very same forces which they are seeking to escape in their hours without work. The question which today would really do justice to the phenomenon of free time would be following: what becomes of free time, under relations of production into which people are born, and which prescribe the rules of human existence today just as they always have done?
Free Time is Becoming a Parody of Itself
One could not avoid the suspicion that ‘free time’ is tending toward its own opposite, and is becoming a parody of itself. Thus unfreedom is gradually annexing ‘free time’ and the majority of unfree people are as unaware of this process as they are of the unfreedom itself
The Dream of an ‘Oasis of Unmediated Life’
If we suppose with Marx that in bourgeois society labour power has become a commodity in which labour is consequently reified, then the expression ‘hobby’ amounts to a paradox: that human condition which sees itself as the opposite of reification, the oasis of unmediated life within a completely mediated total system, has itself been reified just like the rigid distinction between labour and free time. The latter is a continuation of the forms of profit-driven social life
Leisure is an Appendage of Work, Not as Escape
Because in accordance with the predominant work ethic, time free of work should be utilized for the recreation of expended labour power, then work-less time, precisely because it is a mere appendage of work, is severed from the latter with puritanical zeal
The Contraband Work Ethic
And yet, in secret as it were, the contraband of modes of behaviour proper to the domain of work, which will not let people out of its power, is being smuggled into the realm of free time
Organized Freedom as Compulsory Freedom
The rigorous bifurcation of life enjoins the same reification, which has now almost completely subjugated free time. The subjugation can be clearly seen at work in the hobby ideology. Organized freedom is compulsory.
Boredom is Objective Desperation
Whenever behaviour in spare time is truly autonomous, boredom rarely figures…If people were able to make their own decisions about themselves and their lives, if they were not caught up in the realm of the eversame, they would not have to be bored. Boredom is the reflection of objective dullness…boredom is objective desperation
Lack of Imagination is Cultivated by Society
The lack of imagination which is cultivated and inculcated by society renders people helpless in their free time. The impertinent question of what people should do with the vast amount of free time now at their disposal is based upon this very unimaginativeness. The reason why people can actually do so little with their free time is that the truncation of their imagination deprives them of the faculty which made the state of freedom pleasurable in the first place.
We are Now Repelled by Freedom
People have been refused freedom, and its value belittled, for such a long time that people no longer like it. They need the shallow entertainment, by means of which cultural conservatism patronizes and humiliates them, in order to summon up the strength for work, which is required of them under the arrangement of society which cultural conservatism defends. This is one good reason why people have remained chained to their work, and to a system which trains them for work, long after that system has ceased to require their labour
“The Shadowy Continuation of Labour”
Free time then does not merely stand in opposition to labour. In a system where full employment itself has become the ideal, free time is nothing more than the shadowy continuation of labour
Fascism Understands us as ‘Masses’, not ‘Individuals’
It may well be the secret of fascist propaganda that it simply takes men for what they are: the true children of today’s standardized mass culture, largely robbed of autonomy and spontaneity
We Must Identify with the Status Quo
The stories teach their readers that one has to be ‘realistic’, that one has to give up romantic ideas, that one has to adjust oneself at any price, and that nothing more can be expected of any individual. The perennial middle class conflict between individuality and society has been reduced to a dim memory, and the message is invariably that of identification with the status quo
We Need to be Reminded, Lest we Forget
The constant plugging of conventional values seems to mean that these values have lost their substance, and that it is feared that people would really follow their instinctual urges and conscious insights unless continuously reassured from outside that they must not do so. The less the message is really believed and the less it is in harmony with the actual existence of the spectators, the more categorically it is maintained in modern culture. One may speculate whether its inevitable hypocrisy is concomitant with punitiveness and sadistic sternness
The Totalitarianism of Television
The majority of television shows today aim at producing, or at least reproducing, the very smugness, intellectual passivity and gullibility that seem to fit in with totalitarian creeds even if the explicit surface message of the shows may be anti-totalitarian
The Defensiveness of Chosen Ignorance
The reasoning “but we know all this” is often a defence. This defence is made in order to dismiss insights as irrelevant because they are actually uncomfortable and make life more difficult for us than it already is by shaking our conscience when we are supposed to enjoy the ‘simple pleasures of life’.
We Must Remain Consumers
The consumers are made to remain what they are: consumers. That is why the culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims. The automatic self-reproduction of the status quo in its established forms is itself an expression of domination.
Security > Autonomy
The feeling of a new security is purchased with the sacrifice of autonomous thinking
The Enduring Nature of the Conformist Ethic
My by no means new observation that even that which deviates is by no means secure from standardization has recently been used to discredit the polemic application of the concept of conformism – as if the fact that there is a second rate conformism, preceded at least by an act of resistance, somehow makes more palatable that first spineless conformism
