1. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer
This essay, first published in 1944, was republished as part of Dialektik der Aufklärung (The Dialectic of Enlightenment) in The version we’re reading: is in English translation is an abridged version

2. Frankfurt School Basics
Adorno & Horkheimer belonged to the
Frankfurt School
They espoused what’s known as
“Critical Theory”
Which opposed
capitalism, revolutionary socialism (or communism), and fascism
and sought
to develop a theory of society that would offer people an alternative to these three big “isms”

3. Political Situation of The Frankfurt School
Hitler’s rise forced Adorno and Horkheimer out of Germany in the early thirties Both men relocated to Los Angeles in the early forties. In their eyes: U.S mass culture was the product of an authoritarian society that was potentially fascist in nature.

4. The Western Philosophical Tradition and Adorno and Horkheimer
Three broad ideas are central to their argument:
The relationship between the particular and the general
2. The thinking individual and the autonomy of art
3. The power of negation
To understand where Adorno and Horkheimer get these ideas and how they use them in their argument, it is necessary to see how they are drawing on—and revising--the theories of Hegel, Marx and Kant.

5. Important Related Concepts
Hegel’s Philosophy of History
The human spirit’s struggle for freedom
The human soul or spirit struggles through time to realize the meaning of its own freedom in the form of self-knowledge or self-realization.
The uplifting role of national culture
Through the creation of a national culture, individual citizens can advance their own struggle for self-realization while giving back to the general culture the fruits of their own creative activity.
Creating a global culture of freedom
a) As nations gradually advance the human spirit’s struggle for freedom a time will come when we are able to create a global culture of perfect freedom through complete self- realization.
b) At that time all particular individuals will enjoy the same general state of freedom and self-realization equally.

6. Important Related Concepts Marx
1) The struggle for human freedom is material, not spiritual, in nature. 2) The path to true freedom is one of revolution against capitalism, to be spearheaded by the working class. 3) Adorno is also a strong critic of capitalism but he rejects Marx’s faith in the revolutionary potential of the working class. 4) Instead, he believes the fate of human freedom lies with the thinking individual, whose very existence is put in jeopardy by the culture industry.

7. Important Related Concepts Kant
Kant posits that the realm of art is autonomous and that aesthetic judgment is disinterested.
As such, the realm of true or great art stands outside the realm of self- interest and the pursuit of profits that defines everyday life in a capitalist society.
For Adorno, this means that the realm of great art provides a place from which to critique the capitalist status quo.

8. The Power of Negation
1. Great art can measure the gap between our current capitalist society and the ideal society—the society of universal freedom through universal self-realization-- for which all human beings are striving. 2. That gap is void or negative in nature. 3. One of the ways we become aware of that gap is through suffering; thus, Adorno argues that “suffering” is a “negative truth” (7). 4. By linking a record of our suffering with a sense for the beautiful (expressed through style), great art can keep the dream of a better society alive. 5. At the same time, great art shows us that the society we have now is not all there is. It is not enough.

9. Thus, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that great art spurs the thinking individual to question the status quo because it strives to reconcile its message of suffering with the ruling style of its day, but never completely conforms to that style.
They write:
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. (8)

10. The Culture Industry destroys the individual by destroying the autonomous status of art
1. The culture industry equates art with business. 2. When art loses its autonomy, the thinking individual becomes completely subject to the governing ideology of a profit-driven society. 3. The products of the culture industry offer us a false satisfaction by convincing us that we’re getting the best there is. 4. We lose the opportunity, provided by great art, to feel the discrepancy between our current society and an ideal society of universal freedom and universal self-realization.

11. In other words, great art succeeds because it fails to create a false identity between the particular work of art and the general--or ruling-- style of its time when that identity does not exist as a real possibility for all particular individuals and the general culture of freedom and self-realization in which they are said to take part.
When the thinking individual contemplates great art, he or she can discover the gap between the ideal society that we all want to achieve and our present society, which calls itself the best there is but which continues to make people suffer.

12. The Culture Industry and an authoritarian society that calls itself free
Adorno argues that the culture industry threatens to destroy the quest for universal human freedom by accomplishing “the false identity of the general and the particular” (1).
1. Mass cultural products are formulaic. Each particular item conforms to the general formulas for making a profit that generate them all.
2. The individuals who consume these products conform to one another and to the whole society through the act of consumption.

13. Through the act of consumption, we unwittingly obey the dictates of an authoritarian society that calls itself free.
Thus Adorno and Horkheimer write:
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 (7).

14. The Culture Industry negates the power of negation
As Adorno and Horkheimer write in their original essay:
The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation.
And:
The enemy who is already defeated, the thinking individual, is the enemy fought.

15. If consumption makes us all alike, why do Adorno and Horkheimer talk about the “differentiation” of cultural products into distinct categories and levels?
Marked differentiations [between products] depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing and labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape (3).

16. What are they saying here?
All are free to dance and enjoy themselves, just as they have been free, since the historical neutralization 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 (19).
In the original essay, they add:
That false identity of society and individual […] signifies Fascism.

17. The Culture Industry manufactures our needs for us—so it can satisfy them.
Adorno refutes the idea that
“certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods” (1).
He replaces the idea of consumers’ “identical needs” with the concept of “retroactive need” (2), “predetermined” need (14), or “manufactured need” (11).
Consumers buy cultural products that fill a need they didn’t know they had until they bought the product.
Identical products create identical needs rather than the other way around.

18. The Culture Industry squashes an awareness of discontent
The culture industry destroys our awareness that what society provides for us— what it allows us to realize in ourselves-- is neither all there is nor all there should be. He writes: The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness (2). What is decisive today is […] 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 fulfillment, 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 (14).

19. For the Culture Industry Art =Reality and Leisure=Work
Adorno and Horkheimer make two points that seem particularly pertinent to the world today, as seen in Frontline’s “Generation Like.” 
They write:
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 screenm(5).

20. And:
Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theater 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 (5).

21. And:
Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanization has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably afterimages of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded background; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardized 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 (11).

22. We’re not individuals anymore; we’re advertisements
Everything connected with the culture industry turns into an advertisement for itself and, more generally, for the way things are.
Thus, we too are becoming:
indistinguishable from the people we see in advertisements, both mentally and physically;
advertisements of ourselves.

23. Thus:
The assembly-line character of the culture industry, the synthetic planned method of turning out its products […] 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. […] 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 a propaganda slogan. In both cases the insistent demand for effectiveness makes technology into psycho-technology, into a procedure for manipulating men (19).

24. And:
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 […] 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 odor 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 ( ).

25. Overview of critical responses to this essay
While this essay has been hugely influential, it has also attracted a lot of disagreement and debate.
Some critics argue that Adorno and Horkheimer’s conception of autonomous art is elitist
Their constant disparagement of jazz and of women’s magazines and movie genres also comes across to some as racist and misogynist.

26. With the emergence of British cultural studies, many academics have rejected Adorno and Horkheimer’s view of mass cultural consumers as uncritical. We can and often do think about, debate, and criticize the mass cultural products we consume. We sometimes re-appropriate mass cultural products for new uses and/or give them new meanings. .

27. The development of the internet and social media also raise critical questions that Adorno and Horkheimer only partially address. Does this new culture turn cultural consumers into cultural producers? Does our (possible) new status as cultural consumer-producers turn our leisure into work? Are we better understood as walking advertisements than as individuals now? Can the new internet culture ignite, possibly through its own failures, a sense that we are not getting what we want from it and thus will have to make what we want for ourselves?