Adorno and Horkheimer - The Culture Industry

Theorist: Adorno and Horkheimer /Frankfurt School

Origin: Germany

Influences : Marx

Peers: Marcuse

Elements:
Standardisation - Standardization was a species of technical rationality, in which culture was purged of all spontaneity AND novelty. Intrinsic worth was calculated in advance for the sole purpose of achieving maximum profitability. Eliminates originality, challenge and authenticity in its products.

Pseudo individualization- Pseudo- individualization is a phenomenon he saw of mass-produced culture to be a danger to the high arts which is more difficult to understand. This false needs in the culture industries was created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs are freedom, creativity or genuine happiness. Marketing industry refers this term as "product differentiation". Something provided for all.

Commodity fetishism - commodity fetishism tends to replace inter-human relationships with relationships between humans and objects: for example, the relationship between producer and consumer is obscured. The producer can only see his relationship with the object he produces, being unaware of the people who will ultimately use that object

Cultural Dupes Key to the concept of the culture industry in relation to media is the idea of a passive audience, Adorno’s assertion that through false individualism, and standardised products, we are a ‘cultural dupe’: an irrational slave to the trivial, material desires, who can be manipulated into mass conformity; a fool seduced by advertising and fashion




Concepts of the culture industry:

• Adorno’s theory of the culture industry being used by the ruling class to lull the masses into a false sense of individualism in which they are passive receivers

• it operates to channel and subvert oppositional conciousness of the working class, thereby eliminating any threat to capitalism
  
• Culture industries may cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness.
  
• Top Down Culture created and manufactured by the ruling class to be consumed by the proletariat.
  
• media culture by and large keeps individuals gratified and subservient to the logic and practices of market capitalism, that the culture industry has become thoroughly commodified and absorbs and deflects all oppositional culture to subservient ends
• Boiled down to its most obvious modern-day application, the argument would be that television leads people away from talking to each other or questioning the oppression in their lives. Instead they get up and go to work (if they are employed), come home and switch on TV, absorb TV's nonsense until bedtime, and then the daily cycle starts again.
  
  
  

Art:

• works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish.

• Art pushing the conventions, self creating , not predetermined