1. THE CULTURE INDUSTRY
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

2. THEORIES OF THE CULTURE INDUSTRY
Note: this article was written in 1944
‘Culture Industry’ refers to the set of corporations that
produce culture (as compared to the oil industry, the
financial industry, etc.)
Dominant theory that the authors refute: the collapse of
church power, combined with new technologies, is making
the world more fragments and chaotic.
Horkheimer and Adorno argue that popular culture ("films,
radio and magazines") has replaced the church as the key
institution that socializes us and gives us the norms we
live by.
The power and conformity of popular culture prevents the
social world from falling into chaos and fragmentation.

3. MASS CULTURE
 Characteristics of mass culture: identical, artificial, inartistic, just
business, rubbish, standardized, mass produced, no real variety,
formulaic, interchangeable, repetitive
 Key characteristic of the culture industry: monopoly. Technically
this isn't true because there is competition between companies.
But the authors saw a system that was very hard to challenge and
difficult to enter. They see this system as very powerful, infused
with lot of money, and positioned to exert a lot of power over mass
audiences.
 They see consumers as having no particular power because they
are given limited options that reflect the interests of the wealthy
cohort that control industry.
 Agreement across corporations to conform.

4. DOMINANT IDEOLOGY
 Culture has become something manufactured, which we purchase
or passively consumer. Not something collectively produced.
 The industry presents a dominant ideology that keeps society
ordered. The authors suggest that the order imposed by the
culture industry in pre-war Germany allowed the holocaust and the
rise of Nazism to seem legitimate and acceptable.
 "The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture
industry" (42).
 "Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies" (42).
 "The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it
perpetually promises" (44).