Culture Industries

Adorno and Horkheimer's Critical Theory

Based on their observations in the United States in the 1940s, and published in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1979), Adorno and Horkheimer laid out a radical critique of the rapidly emerging mass entertainment industry, a critique that linked together the production of standardized cultural goods, the development of mass culture, and a particular form of social domination. In this critique, Adorno and Horkheimer posited that at stake in the development of the mass entertainment industry was a bringing together of previously differentiated art and commercial worlds, a dedifferentiation in which, rather than functioning as an autonomous sphere, culture is produced much like any other commodity, according to the principles of industrial production.

As Adorno and Horkheimer saw it, this merging of cultural and commercial worlds—or the emergence of the culture industry—had a number of deleterious effects. First, instead of being unique and elevated, culture becomes debased and impoverished by its commodification and commercialization, not least because in this process, it becomes standardized and reproducible. Put differently, in this process, culture loses its aura or singularity. Hollywood movies, for example, follow a particular script even when plots, characters, and actors are different. Similarly, popular songs follow a standard set of musical and lyrical conventions even as they may appear novel.

Second, and as this suggests, the commercialization of culture creates a mass culture that is an undifferentiated and standardized culture, in which basic competence rather than connoisseurship is demanded from audiences for the consumption of cultural goods. In such a culture, pleasure rather than self-improvement is the consumption rationale.

Third, this undemanding culture gives rise to and creates a passive mass audience, an audience whose passivity enables their subsumption into the capitalist machine. More particularly, the passive and acquiescent audience that mass culture fosters uncritically accepts the status quo of capitalist society and the conditions of their own existence. For Adorno and Horkheimer, therefore, the culture industry not only produced an impoverished culture stripped of singularity, originality, and authenticity, but also worked to deceive the masses and obstruct emancipation from capitalist processes. As Adorno succinctly put it, the culture industry “impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves” (Adorno 1991, 92; Oswell 2006, 83).

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