the culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception (1944)

(385): "under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through..."

(386): "movies and radio no longer pretend to be art. the truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce."

(386): "no mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. a technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. it is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself."

(386): "the step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the roles. the former stillallowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. the latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listerners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same."

(386): interesting, and possibly problematic--"the attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favors the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it."

(387): "the whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry."

(387): brilliant--"the entertainments manufacturers know what their products will be consumed with alertness even when the customer is distraught, for each of them is a model of the huge economic machinery which has always sustained the masses, whether at work or t leisure -- which is akin to work."

(387): "this promise held out by the work of art that it will create truth by lending new shape to the conventional social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical."

(388): "to speak of culture was always contrary to culture. culture as a common denominator already contains in embryo that schematization and process of cataloging and classification which bring culture within the sphere of adminstration."

(388): yes--"in front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape... the secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representation of fulfillment as a broken promise."

(389): brilliant--"but the original affinity of business and amusment is shown in the latter's specific significance: to defend society. to be pleased means to say Yes. it is possible only by insulation from the totality of the social process... Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, bur from the last remaining thought of resistance. the liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation."

(389): but this verges on indulging what is worst in the intellectual--"even when the public does--exceptionally--rebel against the pleasure industry, all it can muster is that feeble resistance which that very industry has inculcated in it."

(389): "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."