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The Cultural Industry Summary

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The chapter of the cultural industry refers first of all to the growing film and media industry, especially to Hollywood cinema and private radio stations in the United States. Adorno and Horkheimer, in a totally different way from his colleague Walter Benjamin or Bertolt Brecht - who held ambivalent perspectives about the problems and possibilities that came with technical reproducibility, the mass media and the multiple aspects of production and the reception under the new conditions- valued the cultural industry directly in a negative way: as a growing totalizing spiral of systematic manipulation with the "retroactive demand" to adapt more and more to this system. "Cinema, radio and magazines constitute a system. Each sector is harmonized …show more content…

" This infinite vicious circle of promise, which projects a desire and keeps it in a form of unproductive dependence, constitutes the core of the idea of cultural industry as an …show more content…

In contrast to the most powerful sectors of the industry - steel, oil, electricity and chemistry - cultural monopolies would be weak and dependent. Also the last remnants of resistance against Fordism - again here we find reminiscences of the ancient heroic function of autonomous art - were turned into factories. The new factories of creativity (the field of newspapers, cinema, radio and television) were adapted to the criteria of the Fordist factory. The character of the assembly line ordered the creative production of the cultural industry in a similar way as it had done before with agriculture and metal work: through serialization, standardization and total mastery of creativity. "But, at the same time, mechanization has acquired such power over the man who enjoys free time and his happiness, determines so completely the manufacture of products for fun, that the subject can no longer experience anything other than copies. or reproductions of the work process itself. " Therefore, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, the function of the factories of creativity consists, on the one hand, in the mechanized manufacture of entertainment goods and, on the other, in the fixation and control - beyond the traditional

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