Theodore Adorno The Culture Industry Analysis

Theodore Adorno attempted to explain many different sociological and philosophical matters but it is in his extensive critique of mass entertainment where his most prominent and most controversial ideas come to light. He was one of the first intellectuals to identify the possible social power of the entertainment industry. He also saw the social phenomena that arose from mass entertainment as signs of domination. These concepts that Adorno began to develop lead him to coin maybe his most famous idea. This is known as “The Culture Industry”. Within capitalists societies he observed the culture industry as a primary source of domination. With his ideas on the culture industry, Adorno’s goal was to showcase that within certain areas of

He claims that the culture industry promotes domination by destabilizing the psychological development of the mass of people who primarily live in capitalist societies. Adrono’s writing on individuality is relevant here as he assumed that within the culture industry, the idea of individualism was a myth, “In the culture industry the individual is an illusion not merely because of the standardization of the means of production. He is tolerated only so long as his complete identification with the generality is unquestioned. Pseudo individuality is rife…” (Max HorkHeimer and Theodore W. Adorno, 1977, “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, New York, Continuum, Page 154). This quote shows us that Adorno strongly held that within the culture industry people must conform to the “generality”. It is not just a person being part of the generality; Adorno says that the individual’s entire identity must be given up to the generality. This can be viewed as evidence for the destabilizing of peoples psychological

Here he took an analytical approach to the production and consumption of music. He did this in a way in which one could distinguish the prime features and effects of the culture industry. Adorno’s held that the make-up of musical commodities and the way in which they are met by the masses, has changed due to the expansion in the manufacturing methods of production. Adorno held that because people consistently come face to face with similar, compositionally simplistic music, the audience do not need to make much of an interpretative effort in order to accept the product, “The familiarity of the piece is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. An approach in terms of value judgements has become a fiction for the person who finds himself hemmed in by the standardized musical goods”. (Theodore, Adorno, Edited by J.M Bernstein, 1991, “The Culture Industry: Selected essays on mass culture” New York, Routledge, Page