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Introduction to Theodor Adorno's "The Culture Industry Reconsidered"
In this selection, Adorno discusses how the culture industry has furthered the collapse o -Equating culture with the "high arts," Adorno describes culture as a form of protest "against iV^l . fled relations" (Adorno 1991:100) under which individuals live. The purpose of culture is u't'J^' the impossible possible, to offer alternatives to existing social conditions. To the extent tha.     , 1 (art) is free from the profit motive, it is able to develop according to its own internal logic ,i:id voice essential social critiques. "    '1 " :i
In advanced societies, however, culture has become synonymous with industry and hence s i r .c. the rule of efficient production and standardization that is its hallmark. The relationship betwivrn \'" culture and the individual is one akin to that of seller and buyer. However, "the customer is i as the culture industry would like to have us believe, not its subject but its object" (ibidem Individuals, themselves objects of production, are left to consume mass-produced, prepackaged ideas that instill an uncritical consensus that strengthens established authority. Hit songs and movies arenfl " the making of popular tastes but of marketing campaigns that predetermine what will be heard and se™ while excluding potentially "disruptive" alternatives. Because culture is now a product of the ri, f,"^ and."0t the ima=in?tiol!'_i_tis incapable of negating the oppressive conformity churned out by iLj 'fure industry. Nor can masFcfflture critique prevailing patterns of social relations that, li :.v. '", reflection of machine production. Culture no longer prods—it pacifies:
The categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedi proclaims: You shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway, and i which everyone thinks anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the cultinc industry"' ■ is that conformity has replaced consciousness. The order that springs from it is never confronted with v. claims to be or with die real interests ofliumati beings, (ibid.: 104)
While the culture industry claims to be a producer of choice, freedom, and individual identity, it instead provides its customers with a totalitarian, conformist social landscape. It thus "cheats its consumers out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects" (ibid.: 106). So while we are repeatedly . instructed to "Just Do It," it is never truthfully revealed what "it" is: BUY. *:.
"The Culture Industry Reconsidered" (1975)
Theodor Adorno
The term culture industry was perhaps used for the first time in the book Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and 1 published in Amsterdam in 1947. In our drafts we spoke of "mass culture." We replaced that expression with "culture industry" in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves,
the contemporary form of popular art. From (be latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme. The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In all its branches, products which ■ are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a ■. great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan. The : individual branches are similar in structure or at least fit ■
SOURCE: "The Culture Industry Reconsidered" by Theodor Adorno in New German Critique. 6, Fall 1975, pp. 52-19. Copyright <Sl 1975. Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Books, UK.
each other, ordering themselves into a system "l^^t without a gap. This is made possible by "^temporary technical capabilities as well as by C-onomlc an^ administrative concentration. The culture '^ijustry intentionally integrates its consumers from above- To the detriment of both it forces together the nheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of ears. The seriousness of high art is destroyed in peculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with the civilizational constraints Imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it as long as social control was not yet total. Thus, although the culture industry undeniably speculates on j|je conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, jjnt secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The custodier is not kin,;., as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object. The very word mass-media, specially honed for the culture industry, already shifts the accent onto harmless terrain. Neither is it a question ofprimary concern for the masses, nor of the techniques of communication as such, but of the spirit which sufflates them, their master's voice. The culture industry misuses its concent for the masses in order to duplicate, reinforce and strengthen their mentality, which it presumes is given and unchangeable. How this mentality might be changed is excluded throughout. The masses are not the measure but the ideology of the culture industry, even though the culture industry itself could scarcely exist without adapting to the masses. : The cultural commodities of the industry are governed, as Brecht and Suhrkamp expressed it thirty years ago, by the principle of their realization as value, and not by their own specific content and harmonious formation. The entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms. Ever since these cultural forms first began to earn a living for their creators as commodities in the market-place they had already possessed something of this quality. But then they sought after profit only indirectly, over and above their autonomous essence. New on the part of the culture industry is the direct and undisguised primacy of a precisely and thoroughly calculated efficacy in its most typical products. The autonomy of works of art, which of course rarely ever predominated in an entirely pure form, and was always permeated by a constellation of effects, is tendentially eliminated by the culture industry, with or without the conscious will of those in control. The latter include both those who carry out
directives as well as those who hold the power. In economic terms they are or were in search of new opportunities for the realization of capital in the most economically developed countries. The old opportunities became increasingly more precarious as a result of the same concentration process which alone makes the culture industry possible as an omni-present phenomenon. Culture, in the true sense, did not simply accommodate itself to human beings; but it always simultaneously raised a protest against the petrified relations under which they lived, thereby honouring them. In so far as culture becomes wholly assimilated to and integrated in those petrified relations, human beings are once more debased. Cultural entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through. This quantitative shift is so great that it calls forth entirely new phenomena. Ultimately, the culture industry no longer even needs to directly pursue everywhere the profit interests from which it originated. These interests have become objectified in its ideology and have even made themselves independent of the compulsion to sell the cultural commodities which must be swallowed anyway. The culture industry turns into public relations, the manufacturing of "goodwill" per se, without regard for particular firms or saleable objects. Brought to bear is a general uncritical consensus, advertisements produced for the world, so that each product of the culture industry becomes its own advertisement.
Nevertheless, those characteristics which originally stamped the transformation of literature into a commodity are maintained in this process. More than anything in the world, the culture industry has its ontology, a scaffolding of rigidly conservative basic categories which can be gleaned, for example, from the commercial English novels of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. What parades as progress in the culture industry, as the incessantly new which it offers up, remains the disguise for an eternal sameness; everywhere the changes mask a skeleton which has changed just as little as the profit motive itself since the time it first gained its predominance over culture.
Thus, the expression "industry" is not to be taken too literally. It refers to the standardization of the thing itself—such as that of the Western, familiar to every movie-goer—and to the rationalization of distribution techniques, but not strictly to the production process. Although in film, the central sector of the culture industry, the production process resembles technical modes of operation in the extensive division of labour, the
402 I! TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOCIOLOGICAL TRADITIONS
Critical Theory ™ 403
employment of machines and the separation of the labourers from the means of production—expressed in the perennial conflict between artists active in the culture industry and those who control it—individual forms of production are nevertheless maintained. Each product affects an individual air; individuality itself serves to reinforce ideology, in so far as the illusion is conjured up that the completely reified and mediated is a sanctuary from immediacy and life. Now, as ever, the culture industry exists in the "service" of third persons, maintaining its affinity to the declining circulation process of capital, to the commerce from which it came into being. Its ideology above all makes use of the star system, borrowed from individualistic art and its commercial exploitation. The more dehumanized its methods of operation and content, the more diligently and successfully the culture industry propagates supposedly
......gfearpersonS
industrial more in a sociological sense, in the incorporation of industrial forms of organization even when nothing is manufactured—as in the rationalization of office work—rather than in the sense of anything really and actually produced by technological rationality. Accordingly, the misinvestments of the culture industry are considerable, throwing those branches rendered obsolete by new techniques into crises, which seldom lead to changes for the better . , ,
It has recently become customary among cultural officials as well as sociologists to warn against underestimating the culture industry while pointing to its great importance for the development of the consciousness of its consumers. It is to be taken seriously, without cultured snobbism. in actuality the culture industry is important as a moment of the spirit which dominates today. Whoever ignores its influence out of scepticism for what it stuffs into people would be naive. Yet there is a deceptive glitter about the admonition to take it seriously. Because of its social role, disturbing questions about its quality, about truth or untruth, and about the aesthetic niveau of the culture industry's emissions are repressed, or at least excluded from the so-called sociology of communications. The critic is accused of taking refuge in arrogant esoterica. It would be advisable first to indicate the double meaning of importance that slowly worms its way in unnoticed. Even if it touches the lives of innumerable people, the function of something is no guarantee of its particular quality. The blending of aesthetics with its residual communicative aspects leads art, as a social phenomenon, not to its rightful position in opposition to alleged artistic snobbism, but
rather in a variety of ways to the defence of iis Da social consequences. The importance of the
nefui
•jtie most ambitious defence of the culture industry
industry in the spiritual constitution of the masses is dispensation For reflection on its objective 3caitimatiD'J^ its essential being, least of all by a science which thinly " itself pragmatic. On the contrary: such reflection becomes necessary precisely for this reason. To take th-culture industry as seriously as its unquestioned role demands, means to take it seriously critically, and tlolfo cower in the face of its monopolistic character.
Among those intellectuals anxious to reconcile themselves with the phenomenon and eager <i a common formula to express both their reservations against it and their respect for its power, a tor.- - 'i:T. toleration prevails unless they have alreadv /.ciU-d a new mythos of the twentieth century from the imposed regression. After all, those intellectuals maintain, everv-
one knows what pocket novels, films offtEe rack. fam- ••
ily television shows rolled out into serials and hit parades, advice to the lovelorn and horoscope columns are all about. All of this, however, is harmless and, according to them, even democratic since it responds to a demand, albeit a stimulated one. It also bestows all kinds of blessings, they point out, for example, through the dissemination of information, advice i.:.J sre;, reducing patterns of behaviour. Of course, a; .-.on sociological study measuring something as elementary as how politically informed the public is has proven, the. information is meagre or indifferent. Moreover, the ■ advice to be gained from manifestations of the culture industry is vacuous, banal or worse, and the behaviour" patterns are shamelessly conformist.
The two-faced irony in the relationship of servile' intellectuals to the culture industry is not restricted (6 ' them alone. It may also be supposed that tlie consciousness of the consumers themselves is split between the prescribed fun which is supplied to them by the culture industry and a not particularly well-hidden doubt about its blessings. The phrase, the world wanls : to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their j>.-5 shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they, sense that their lives would be completely intolerable-as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which., are none at all.
; today
celebrates its spirit, which might be safely called ■ ■geology* as an ordering factor. In a supposedly chaotic yorld it provides human beings with something like ^landards for orientation, and that alone seems worthy : ^approval. However, what its defenders imagine is ' reserved by the culture industry is in fact all the more :jj,0roughly destroyed by it. The colour film demolishes the denial old tavern to a greater extent than bombs ever could: the film exterminates its imago. No homeland can survive being processed by the films which celebrate it. and which thereby turn the unique character on which it thrives into an interchangeable sameness.
That which legitimately could be called culture attempted, as an expression of suffering and contradiction* to maintain a grasp on the idea of the good life. 'Culture cannot represent either that which merely exists pr.j;e'-(nvein::'tinl and 1.11 Ningi^-himlir.!; e.mvorios of oirder which the culture industry drapes over the idea of ihe- good life as if existing reality were the good life, arid, as if those categories were its true measure. If the response of the culture industry's representatives is that jtdoes not deliver art at all, this is itself the ideology with which they evade responsibility for that from which the business lives. No misdeed is ever righted by explaining it as such.
Tiic appeal to order alone, without concrete specificity; is futile; the appeal to the dissemination of norms, without these ever proving themselves in reality or before consciousness, is equally futile. The idea of an objectively binding order, huckstered to people because it is so lacking for them, has no claims if it does not prove itself internally and in confrontation with human beings. But this is precisely what no product of the culture industry would engage in. The concepts of order which it hammers into human beings are always those of the status quo. They remain unquestioned, unana-lysed and undialectically presupposed, even if they no longer have any substance for those who accept them. In contrast to the Kantian, the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway, and to that which everyone thinks anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. The order that springs from it is never confronted with what it claims to be or with the real interests of human beings. Order, however, is not goad in itself. It would be so only as a good order. The
fact that the culture industry is oblivious to this and extols order in abstracto, bears witness to the impotence and untruth of the messages it conveys. While it claims to lead the perplexed, it deludes them with false conflicts which they are to exchange for their own. It solves conflicts for them only in appearance, in a way that they can hardly be solved in their real lives. In the products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble only so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually by representatives of a benevolent collective; and then in empty harmony, they are reconciled with the general, whose demands they had experienced at the outset as irreconcilable with their interests. For this purpose the culture industry has developed formulas which even reach into such non-conceptual areas as light musical entertainment. Here too one gets into a "jam," into rhythmic problems, which can be instantly disentangled by the triumph of the basic beat.
Even its defenders, however, would hardly contradict Plato openly who maintained that what is objectively and intrinsically untrue cannot also be subjectively good and true for human beings. The concoctions of the culture industry are neither guides for a blissful life, nor a new art of moral responsibility, but rather exhortations to toe the line, behind which stand the most powerful interests. The consensus which it propagates strengthens blind, opaque authority. If the culture industry is measured not by its own substance and logic, but by its efficacy, by its position in reality and its explicit pretensions; if the focus of serious concern is with the efficacy to which it always appeals, the potential of its effect becomes twice as weighty. This potential, however, lies in the promotion and exploitation of the ego-weakness to which the powerless members of contemporary society, with its concentration of power, are condemned. Their consciousness is further developed retrogressively. It is no coincidence that cynical American film producers are heard to say that their pictures must take into consideration the level of eleven-year-olds. In doing so they would very much like to make adults into eleven-year-olds.
It is true that thorough research has not, for the time being, produced an airtight case proving the regressive effects of particular products of the culture industry. No doubt an imaginatively designed experiment could achieve this more successfully than the powerful financial interests concerned would find comfortable. In any case, it can be assumed without hesitation that steady drops hollow the stone, especially since the system of the culture industry that surrounds the masses tolerates
404
TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOCIOLOGICAL TRADITIONS
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405
hardly any deviation and incessantly drills the same formulas on behaviour. Only their deep unconscious mistrust, the last residue of the difference between art and empirical reality in the spiritual make-up of the masses explains why they have not, to a person, long since perceived and accepted the world as it is constructed for them by the culture industry. Even if its messages were as harmless as they are made out to be—on countless occasions they are obviously not harmless, like the movies which chime in with currently popular hate campaigns against intellectuals by portraying them with the usual stereotypes—the attitudes which the culture industry calls forth are anything but harmless. If an astrologer urges his readers to drive carefully on a particular day, that certainly hurts no one; they will, however, be harmed indeed by the stupefica-tion which lies in the claim that advice which is valid "everydaysM"'wfiicrTlsTl]er^ approval of the stars.
Human dependence and servitude, the vanishing point of the culture industry, could scarcely be more faithfully described than by the American interviewee who was of the opinion that the dilemmas of the
contemporary epoch would end if people would simply ■ follow the lead of prominent personalities. In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being n-'i the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which i> prepares for human beings cheats them out nf the same happiness which it deceitfully projects. The total .„■: li t of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment, in which, as Horkheimer and I have noted, enlipY.;r. ment, that is the progressive technical domination of ■ nature, becomes mass deception and is turned'-ir.tj t means for fettering consciousness. It impedes the"" development of autonomous, independent intlivltii Is who judge and decide consciously for themsLV, These, however, would be the precondition for a democratic society which needs adults who have come op-age in order to sustain itself and develop. If the masses haveTjeeri imjusAjTrevileaiBm above as masses, the culture industry is not among the least responsib'e .c-making them into masses and then despising ti^-p. while obstructing the emancipation for which h'ir.K:i beings are as ripe as the productive forces of the epoch . permit.
At the root of this social union lies the fabrication of new "needs" that maintain the existing way of [ife. Such needs do not spring from the consciousness of the individual; instead, they are a product of technological advances. (Do you really "need" a BlackBerry or five-disc CD changer?) While the satisfaction of these false needs is advertised to be a path for happiness, they further the repression of true needs. Technology, then, is not neutral; rather, it is a means for preserving domination. Indeed, its effectiveness as a dominating force resides in the fact that it appears to be neutral while it actually enslaves individuality. The creation of needs and the products dispensed to meet them serve to
■ ■= indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood. And ::: as these beneficial products become available to more individuals in more social classes, the indoctrination they carry ceases to be publicity; it becomes a way oflife. It is a good way of life—much better than before— and as a good way of fife it militates against qualitative change. Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the ;. established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe. (Marcuse ■ [964:12: emphasis in original)
: This one-dimensional society intensifies repressive or institutionalized desublimation in which all ^osTBoW^hethaiiatid^rcdtaralrorinstinctualr^ absorbed' and thus defused by the very apparatus that it intended to oppose. With the range of alternative ideas and actions reduced to one, the indoctrination of the "Happy Consciousness" leaves individuals unable to grasp the essential unfreedom that characterizes advanced industrial society. Satisfied with the offerings and "liberties" of the established order, their loss of conscience leads to acceptance of the status quo and rampant conformity. As Marcuse argues,
Introduction to Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man
Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man was one of the most widely read and influential books among advocates ■ for social change during the 1960s. Although his message to the New Left was written more than, forty years ago, Marcuse's insights ring just as powerfully today.
As we outlined previously, Marcuse describes contemporary, advanced societies—whether capitalist, ■ communist, or socialist—as totalitarian social orders, for "totalitarian" does not refer only to a particular type of government. It "is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a nonterroristic economic-political coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests. It thus precludes the emergence of an effective opposition against the whole" (Marcuse 1964:3). Totalitarian . societies are thus characterized by coordinated systems of domination that render all protest ("sol-lc. Instead of being based on fear of external coercion or force, however, the methods of domination in advanced societies are based more on the manipulation of consciousness.
With the development of the industrial capacity to free individuals from want, the working class; the . source of revolutionary change under Marxist theory, has been assimilated into the prevailing social order. Under the dominion of technological rationality and the benefits it offers, "the intellectual and emotional ■ refusal 'to go along' appears neurotic and impotent" (ibid,:9). For why would anyone contest the satisfactions that the apparatus delivers through the progress of science and technology? The claim that the working class is alienated now becomes questionable as its members identify with and literally buy into the very system that is the source of their oppression. Once adversaries who harbored conflicting interests, capitalists and workers are united in their unquestioned, welcomed perpetuation of the status quo.
Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual..,. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear. (ibid.:7, 8; emphasis in original)
One-Dimensional Man (1964)
Herbert Marcuse
The New Forms of Control
A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress. Indeed, what could be more rational than the suppression of individuality in the mechanization of socially necessary but painful performances; the concentration of individual enterprises in more effective, more productive corporations; the regulation of free competition among unequally equipped economic subjects; the curtailment of prerogatives and national sovereignties which impede the
international organization of resources. That this technological order also involves a political and intellectual coordination may be a regrettable and yet promising development.
The rights and liberties which were such vital factors in the origins and earlier stages of industrial society yield to a higher stage of this society: they are losing their traditional rationale and content. Freedom of thought, speech, and conscience were—just as free enterprise, which they served to promote and protect—essentially critical ideas, designed to replace an obsolescent material and intellectual culture by a more productive and
SOURCE: Excerpts from One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology' of Advanced Industrial Society by Herbert Marcuse. Copyright © 1964 by Beacon Press. Reproduced with permission of Beacon Pres via Copyright Clearance Center.
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407
rationa! one. Once institutionalized, these rights and liberties shared the fate of the society of which they had become an integral part. The achievement cancels the premises.
To the degree to which freedom from want, the concrete substance of all freedom, is becoming a real possibility, the liberties which pertain to a state of lower productivity are losing their former content. Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical function in a society which seems increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the individuals through the way in which it is organized. Such a society may justly demand acceptance of its principles and institutions, and reduce the opposition to the discussion and promotion of alternative policies within the status quo. In this respect, it seems to make little dif-TeYencFwheK
accomplished by an authoritarian or a non-authoritarian system. Under the conditions of a rising standard of living, non-conformity with the system itself appears to be socially useless, and the more so when it entails tangible economic and political disadvantages and threatens the smooth operation of the whole. Indeed, at least in so far as the necessities of life are involved, there seems to be no reason why the production and distribution of goods and services should proceed through the competitive concurrence of individual liberties.
Freedom of enterprise was from the beginning not altogether a blessing. As the liberty to work or to starve, it spelled toil, insecurity, and fear for the vast majority of the population. If the individual were no longer compelled to prove himself on the market, as a free economic subject, the disappearance of this kind of freedom would be one of the greatest achievements of civilization. The technological processes of mechanization and standardization might release individual energy into a yet uncharted realm of freedom beyond necessity. The very structure of human existence would be altered; the individual would be liberated from the work world's imposing upon him alien needs and alien possibilities. The individual would be free to exert autonomy over a life that would be his own. If the productive apparatus could be organized and directed toward the satisfaction of the vital needs, its control might well be centralized; such control would not prevent individual autonomy, but render it possible.
This is a goal within the capabilities of advanced industrial civilization, the "end" of technological
rationality. In actual fact, however, the contrary ir, operates: the apparatus imposes its economic Bnj political requirements for defense and l\t :.,. labor time and free time, on [he material and inte!li.-| culture. By virtue of the way it has organized its ■ nological base, contemporary industrial soc:.'-, i.., t!. j, be totalitarian. For "totalitarian" is not only a terrorise political coordination of society, but also a nnn-terroris tic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interest? It thus precludes the emergence of an effect-"..'.-. „ ^ tion against the whole. Not only a specific form of government or party rule makes for totalitarianism, but also a specific system of production and distribution which may well be compatible with a "pluralism" of parties, newspapers, "countervailing powers." etc. Today political power asserts itself tinough ils power
oreaiv~
ization of the apparatus. The government ol'^n.irc^ and advancing industrial societies can mai-n r _r! secure itself only when it succeeds in mobilizing, organizing, and exploiting the technical, scientific, and mechanical productivity available to industrial civ.!:/;■-tion. And this productivity mobilizes society as a whole, above and beyond any particular individual or' group interests. The brute fact that the machi.ic'. S:.\.~ ical (only physical?) power surpasses that of the indi- , vidual, and of any particular group of individuals, makes the machine the most effective political instru- ■ ment in any society whose basic organization is that of the machine process. But the political trend may be reversed; essentially the power of the machine is only the stored-up and projected power of man. To the c\;j..l to which the work world is conceived of as a machine, and mechanized accordingly, it becomes the potential, basis of a new freedom for man.
Contemporary industrial civilization demonstrates' that it has reached the stage at which "the free sol1 ji>" can no longer be adequately defined in the traditional terms of economic, political, and intellectual l!L-."i <s not because these liberties have become insignificant.but. because they are too significant to be confined .' :.l::' "ij traditional forms. New modes of realization i =c i:.'lJ'.I corresponding to the new capabilities of society.
Such new modes can be indicated only in negative.. terms because they would amount to the negation of the prevailing modes. Thus economic freedom would mean freedom from the economy—from being controlled by economic forces and relationships; freedom from !-<■' daily struggle for existence, from earning a living.
politic freedom would mean liberation of the individuals/''0"' politics over which they have no effective control- Similarly, intellectual freedom would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass co(rinjUnication and indoctrination, abolition of "public opinion" together with its makers. The unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative, not of their
Utopian
character, but of the strength of the forces
which prevent their realization. The most effective and enduring form of warfare against liberation is the implanting of material and intellectual needs that perpetuate obsolete forms of the struggle for existence.
The intensity, the satisfaction and even the character 0f human needs, beyond the biological level, have always been preconditioned. Whether or not the possibility of doing or leaving, enjoying or destroying, possessing or rejecting something is seized as a need
"depends on whether or not it can be seen as desirable and necessary for the prevailing societal institutions and interests. In this sense, human needs are historical ■needs and, to the extent to which the society demands the repressive development of the individual, his needs ^themselves and their claim for satisfaction are subject to overriding critical standards.
We may distinguish both true and false needs. "False" are those which are superimposed upon the .individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs.
Such needs have a societal content and function which are determined by external powers over which
... the individual has no control; the development and satisfaction of these needs is heteronomous. No matter
■■■how much such needs may have become the individual's own, reproduced and fortified by the conditions of his existence; no matter how much he identifies himself with them and finds himself in their satisfaction, they continue to be what they were from the beginning— products of a society whose dominant interest demands
. repression.
The prevalence of repressive needs is an accomplished fact, accepted in ignorance and defeat, but a fact that must be undone in the interest of the happy individual as well as all those whose misery is the price of his satisfaction. The only needs that have an unqualified claim for satisfaction are the vital ones—nourishment, clothing, lodging at the attainable level of culture. The satisfaction of these needs is the prerequisite for the realization of all needs, of the unsublimated as well as the sublimated ones.
For any consciousness and conscience, for any experience which does not accept the prevailing societal interest as the supreme law of thought and behavior, the established universe of needs and satisfactions is a fact to be questioned—questioned in terms of truth and falsehood. These terms are historical throughout and their objectivity is historical. The judgment of needs and their satisfaction, under the given conditions, involves standards of priority—standards which refer to the optimal development of the individual, of all individuals, under the optimal utilization of the material and intellectual resources available to man. The resources are calculable. "Truth" and "falsehood" of needs designate objective conditions to the extent to which the universal satisfaction of vital needs and, beyond it, the progressive alleviation of toil and poverty, are universally valid standards. But as historical standards, they do not only vary according to area and stage of development, they also can be defined only in (greater or lesser) contradiction to the prevailing ones. What tribunal can possibly claim the authority of decision?
In the last analysis, the question of what are true and false needs must be answered by the individuals themselves, but only in the last analysis; that is, if and when they are free to give their own answer. As long as they are kept incapable of being autonomous, as long as they are indoctrinated and manipulated (down to their very instincts), their answer to this question cannot be taken as their own. By the same token, however, no tribunal can justly arrogate to itself the right to decide which needs should be developed and satisfied. Any such tribunal is reprehensible, although our revulsion does not do away with the question: how can the people who have been the object of effective and productive domination by themselves create the conditions of freedom?
The more rational, productive, technical, and total the repressive administration of society becomes, the more un-imaginable the means and ways by which the administered individuals might break their servitude
408 S TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOCIOLOGICAL TRADITIONS
and seize their own liberation. To be sure, to impose Reason upon an entire society is a paradoxical and scandalous idea—although one might dispute the righteousness of a society which ridicules this idea while making its own population into objects of total administration. All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude, and the emergence of this consciousness is always hampered by the predominance of needs and satisfactions which, to a great extent, have become the individual's own. The process always replaces one system of preconditioning by another; the optimal goal is the replacement of false needs by true ones, the abandonment of repressive satisfaction.
The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation—liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable—while it sus-
.......taius'andabs^
function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stu-pefication; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets.
Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual. The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative. Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear—that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls.
Our insistence on the depth and efficacy of these controls is open to the objection that we overrate greatly the indoctrinating power of the "media," and that by themselves the people would feel and satisfy the needs which are now imposed upon them. The objection misses the point. The preconditioning does not start with the mass production of radio and television and with the centralization of their control. The people enter
this stage as preconditioned receptacles of long S[. ing; the decisive difference is in the flattening out of contrast (or conflict) between the given and u> ° ble, between the satisfied and the unsatisfied Here, the so-called equalization of class distin^^"5' reveals its ideological function. If the >■.: i|..\ boss enjoy the same television program a n- ..; j, "'! same resort places, if the typist is as attractively up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro ow B a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes" but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that sen-e the preservation of the Establishment arc shared by the underlying population.
Indeed, in the most highly developed areas ofcon-temporary society, the transplantation of social into individual needs is so effective thai the difference "between them seems 1o~be purely ffieoreticoTCan one" really distinguish between the mass mediu .p j:l<.-ments of information and entertainment, and us aeenls of manipulation and indoctrination? Between the automobile as nuisance and as convenience? Between the horrors and the comforts of functional architecture? Between the work for national defense and the work for ■ corporate gain? Between the private pleasure and die commercial and political utility involved in increasing ■ the birth rate?
We are again confronted with one of the most vciing aspects of advanced industrial civilization: the rational character of its irrationality. Its productivity and effi-ciency, its capacity to increase and spread conilorts to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction, the extent to which this civilization transtotnis the object world into an extension of man's mind and body makes the very notion of alienation questionable. The people recognize themselves in their commodities. '.I ™. find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set. split-level." home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which . ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it lias produced.
The prevailing forms of social control are technological in a new sense. To be sure, the technical slruc-,: ture and efficacy of the productive and destructive apparatus has been a major instrumentality for subjecting the population to the established social division of labor throughout the modern period. Moreover, such integration has always been accompanied by more.., obvious forms of compulsion: loss of livelihood, the administration of justice, the police, the armed forces It
•ij is But in the contemporary period, the technologi-controls appear to be the very embodiment of Tson ft>r me benefit of a" social groups and inter-to such an extent that all contradiction seems ^rational and all counteraction impossible. ' fj0 wonder then that, in the most advanced areas of 0 civilization, the social controls have been intro-Ncted to the point where even individual protest is fleeted at its roots. The intellectual and emotional i^fiisal "to go along" appears neurotic and impotent. j1,;s is the socio-psychological aspect of the political event that marks the contemporary period: the passing of the historical forces which, at the preceding stage of industrial society, seemed to represent the possibility of Hew forms of existence.
But the term "introjection" perhaps no longer describes the way in which the individual by himself 'reproduces and perpetuates the external controls exercised by this society. Introjection suggests a variety of relatively spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the "outer" into the "inner." Thus introjection implies the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the externa! exigencies—an individual consciousness and an indi-r. vidua! unconscious apart from public opinion and behavior.' The idea of "inner freedom" here has its reality: it designates the private space in which man may ■became and remain "himself."
Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions. The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, : Ihrough it, with the society as a whole.
This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization; its new "immediacy," however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organization. In this process, the "inner" dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking—the critical power of Reason—is
Critical Theory 5S 409
at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition. The impact of progress turns Reason into submission to the facts of life, and to the dynamic capability of producing more and bigger facts of the same sort of life. The efficiency of the system blunts the individuals' recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the whole. If the individuals find themselves in the things which shape their life, they do so, not by giving, but by accepting the law of things—not the law of physics but the law of their society.
1 have just suggested that the concept of alienation seems to become questionable when the individuals identify themselves with the existence which is imposed upon them and have in it their own development and satisfaction. This identification is not illusion but reality. However, the: reality constitutes a more progressive stage of alienation. The latter has become entirely objective; the subject which is alienated is swallowed up by its alienated existence. There is only one dimension, and it is everywhere and in all forms. The achievements of progress defy ideological indictment as well as justification; before their tribunal, the "false consciousness" of their rationality becomes the true consciousness.
This absorption of ideology into reality does not, however, signify the "end of ideology." On the contrary, in a specific sense advanced industrial culture is more ideological than its predecessor, inasmuch as today the ideology is in the process of production itself. In a provocative form, this proposition reveals the political aspects of the prevailing technological rationality. The productive apparatus and the goods and services which it produces "sell" or impose the social system as a whole. The means of mass transportation and communication, the commodities of lodging, food, and clothing, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers and, through the latter, to the whole. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood. And as these beneficial products become available to more individuals in more social classes, the
'The change in the function of the family here plays a decisive role: its "socializing" functions are increasingly taken over by outside groups and media.
410 I! TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOCIOLOGICAL TRADITIONS
Critical Theory SI 411
indoctrination they cany ceases to be publicity; it becomes a way of life. It is a good way of life—much better than before—and as a good way of life, it militates against qualitative change. Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe. They are redefined by the rationality of the given system and of its quantitative extension. . . .
One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hypnotic definitions or dictations. For example, "free" are the institutions which operate (and are operated on) in the countries of 'the Tree'WorT^
are by definition either anarchism, communism, or propaganda. "Socialistic" are alt encroachments on private enterprises not undertaken by private enterprise itself (or by government contracts), such as universal and comprehensive health insurance, or the protection of nature from all too sweeping commercialization, or the establishment of public services which may hurt private profit. This totalitarian logic of accomplished facts has its Eastern counterpart. There, freedom is the way of life instituted by a communist regime, and all other transcending modes of freedom are either capitalistic, or revisionist, or leftist sectarianism. In both camps, non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself. . . .
However, [earlier] accommodating concepts of Reason were always contradicted by the evident misery and injustice of the "great public bodies" and the effective, more or less conscious rebellion against them. Societal conditions existed which provoked and permitted real dissociation from the established state of affairs; a private as well as political dimension was present in which dissociation could develop into effective opposition, testing its strength and the validity of its objectives.
With the gradual closing of this dimension by the society, the self-limitation of thought assumes a larger significance. The interrelation between scientific-philosophical and societal processes, between theoretical and practical Reason, asserts itself "behind the back" of the scientists and philosophers. The society bars a whole type of oppositional operations and behavior; consequently, the concepts pertaining to them are rendered
illusory or meaningless.  Historical transcendence' appears as metaphysical transcendence, not accupiab|e to science and scientific thought. The operational aJKj '■ behavioral point of view, practiced as a "habit of thought" at large, becomes the view of the established universe of discourse and action, needs and rispiraiions The "cunning of Reason" works, as it so often did jn the interest of the powers that be. The insistence on' ' operational and behavioral concepts turns against the" efforts to free thought and behavior/"ram the given reality and for the suppressed alternatives. Theoretical and practical Reason, academic and social behaviorism'' meet on common ground: that of an advanced socieiv which makes scientific and technical progress into an-' instrument of domination.
"Progress" is not a neutral term; it moves toward-' specific ends, and these ends are defined by the possi-: ' Triiities of ameliorating the human condition. AlKinced • industrial society is approaching the stage where ;;•> tinued progress would demand the radical subversion of the prevailing direction and organization of progress.-This stage would be reached when material prod.:t.r::n (including the necessary services) becomes automated ' to the extent that all vital needs can be satisfied while necessary labor time is reduced to marginal time. From this point on, technical progress would transcend the realm of necessity, where it served as the instrument of '• domination and exploitation which thereby limited its rationality; technology would become subject to the free play of faculties in the struggle for the pacification: of nature and of society.
Such a state is envisioned in Marx's notion of the. "abolition of labor." The term "pacification of existence". seems better suited to designate the historical alternative: ' of a world which—through an international conflict-.: which transforms and suspends the contradictions within the established societies—advances on the brink.of a. global war. "Pacification of existence" means the devel-.. opment of man's struggle with man and with nature, under conditions where the competing needs, desires, and aspirations are no longer organized by vested inter-.. ests in domination and scarcity—an organization which, perpetuates the destructive forms of this struggle.
Today's fight against this historical alternative finds a firm mass basis in the underlying population, and finds its ideology in the rigid orientation of thought and behavior to the given universe of facts. Validated by the-, accomplishments of science and technology, justified, by its growing productivity, the status quo defies all transcendence. Faced with the possibility of pacification on the grounds of its technical and intellectual
t ovements, the mature industrial society closes itself - qnairist this alternative. Operationalism. in theory and practice, becomes the theory and practice of containment- Underneath its obvious dynamics, this society is 3 thoroughly static system of life: self-propelling in its ' oppressive productivity and in its beneficial coordination. Containment of technical progress goes hand in hand with its growth in the established direction. In ijiiie of the political fetters imposed by the status quo, the more technology appears capable of creating the conditions for pacification, the more are the minds and bodies of man organized against this alternative.
The most advanced areas of industrial society exhibit throughout these two features: a trend toward consummation of technological rationality, and intensive efforts to contain this trend within the established institutions. ■ Here is the internal contradiction of this civilization: the ifraEiD"fi'a"l'"eletiient "iiT'its'm
.chievements. The industrial society which makes technology and science its own is organized for the ever-.iore-erfective domination of man and nature, for the wer-more-effective utilization of its resources. It '•ecomes irrational when the success of these efforts opens new dimensions of human realization. Organization for peace is different from organization for war; the institutions which served the struggle for existence cannot serve the pacification of existence. Life as an end is qualitatively different from life as a means.
Such a qualitatively new mode of existence can never be envisaged as the mere by-product of economic and political changes, as the more or less spontaneous effect of ■s'.the new institutions which constitute the necessary prerequisite. Qualitative change also involves a change in the .technical basis on which this society rests—one which .sustains the economic and political institutions through ..which the "second nature" of man as an aggressive object of administration is stabilized. The techniques of industrialization are political techniques; as such, diey prejudge the ;■ possibilities of Reason and Freedom.
To be sure, labor must precede the reduction of labor, and industrialization must precede the development of human needs and satisfactions. But as all freedom depends on the conquest of alien necessity, the realization of freedom depends on the techniques of this conquest. The highest productivity of labor can be used for the perpetuation of labor, and the most efficient
industrialization can serve the restriction and manipulation of needs.
When this point is reached, domination—in the guise of affluence and liberty—extends to all spheres of private and public existence, integrates all authentic opposition, absorbs all alternatives. Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truly totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe. . . .
The Closing of the Political Universe
The new technological work-world thus enforces a weakening of the negative position of the working class: the latter iio longer appears to be the living contradiction to the established society. This trend is strengthened by the effect of the technological organization of production on the other side of the fence: on management and direction. Domination is transfigured into administration. " The capitalist bosses and owners are losing their identity as responsible agents; they are assuming the function of bureaucrats in a corporate machine. Within the vast hierarchy of executive and managerial boards extending far beyond the individual establishment into the scientific laboratory and research institute, the national government and national purpose, the tangible source of exploitation disappears behind the facade of objective rationality. Hatred and frustration are deprived of their specific target, and the technological veil conceals the reproduction of inequality and enslavement. With technical progress as its instrument, unfreedom—in the sense of man's subjection to his productive apparatus—is perpetuated and intensified in the form of many liberties and comforts. The novel feature is the overwhelming rationality in this irrational enterprise, and the depth of the preconditioning which shapes the instinctual drives and aspirations of the individuals and obscures the difference between false and true consciousness. For in reality, neither the utilization of administrative rather than physical controls (hunger, personal dependence, force), nor the change in the character of heavy work, nor the assimilation of occupational classes, nor the equalization in the sphere of consumption compensate
"Is it still necessary to denounce the ideology of the "managerial revolution"? Capitalist production proceeds through the investment of private capital For ihe private extraction and appropriation of surplus value, and capital is a social instrument for the domination of man by man. The essential features of this process are in no way altered by the spread of stock-holdings, the separation of ownership from management, etc.
412 SS TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOCIOLOGICAL TRADITIONS
for the fact thai Lhe decisions over life and death, over personal and national security are made at places over which the individuals have no control. The slaves of developed industrial civilization are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves, for slavery is determined "neither by obedience nor by hardness of labor but by the status of being a mere instrument, and the reduction of man to the state of a thing."'" This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument, as a thing. And this mode of existence is not abrogated if the thing is animated and chooses its material and intellectual food, if it. does not feel its being-a-thing, if it is a pretty, clean, mobile thing. Conversely, as reification tends to become totalitarian by virtue of its technological form, the organizers and administrators themselves become increasingly dependent on the machinery which they organize and administer. And this muiual dependence is no longer the dialectical relationship between Master and Servant, which lias been broken in the struggle for mutual recognition, but rather a vicious circle which encloses both the Master and the Servant. Do the technicians rule, or is their rule that of the others, who rely on the technicians as their planners and executors?
1. Given the critical theorists' reservations regarding the scientific pursuit of knowledge- how: might a sociologist conduct "valid" research? If the scientific method is rejected, what criteria can be used to assess a researcher's findings? More generally, i f not science, what might serve as a basis.for accepting anyone's, claim; to speak the "truth"?
2. Do you think that individuals living in advanced, capitalist societies are as "pacified" as the critical theorists argue? Has individuality been "liquidated"--as- the critical theorists suggest?: What evidencecan you point to in support of your view?
3; While the critical theorists presented here deride mass culture and technology for corrupting our ability, to reason, what role, if any, might
. . . the pressures of today's highly technological iirms race have taken the initiative and the power to ma!;i; the crucial decisions out of the hands of respnu.Mhl^ government officials and placed it in the hands of technicians, planners and scientists employed by vast industrial empires and charged with responsibility ibr their employers' interests. It is their job to dre;irn Uj, new weapons systems and persuade the military that the future of their military profession, as well as the country, depends upon buying what they have dreamed up."
As the productive establishments rely on the military for self-preservation and growth, so the military relies on the corporations "not only lot iheir weapons, but also for knowledge of what kind of weapons they need, how much they will cost, and how long it will take to get them.'" A vicious circle seems indeed the proper image of a society which is self-expanding and self- perpetuating in its own preestablished direction—driven by the growing needs which it generates and. at the same time, contains.
education play in promoting a "totally administered* society"? Second, as a form of technology, do you consider the Internet a potential :source::of liberation or of domination? Why?
4. According to the critical theorists, how, in ■ modern industrial societies, does rationality lead to the oppression or alienation of the individual? Do you agree that the United States is a "totalitarian1' society? Why or why not?
5. Many musical groups express in their songs. a discontent with existing social conditions and a mistrust of those in positions of authority. What effect, if any, does such music have on the broader society? How might such "protest" songs paradoxically reinforce the very social order they aim to criticize?
"'Francois I'erroux. La Coexistence pacifiqite (Paris: Presses Universitaires. 1958), Vol. HI. p. 60Ü.
"Stewart Meacham. Labor and the Cold War (American Friends Service Committee, Philadelphia 1959), p. 9.
vIbid.
Discussion Questions