The Culture Industry:
Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer1
The sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of
the last remnants of precapitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialization,
have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.
Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the
aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron
system. The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian countries
are much the same as anywhere else. The huge gleaming towers that shoot up everywhere are outward
signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, toward which the unleashed entrepreneurial
system (whose monuments are a mass of gloomy houses and business premises in grimy, spiritless cities)
was already hastening. Even now the older houses just outside the concrete city centers look like slums,
and the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the ﬂimsy structures of world fairs in their praise
of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans.
Yet the city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in
a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary—the absolute power of
capitalism. Because the inhabitants, as producers and as consumers, are drawn into the center in search
of work and pleasure, all the living units crystallize into well-organized complexes. The striking unity of
microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general
and the particular. Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artiﬁcial framework
begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its
violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need 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. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt
about the social utility of the ﬁnished products is removed.
Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that because millions
participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in
innumerable places to be satisﬁed with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production
centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organization
and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the ﬁrst place on
consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of
manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. 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. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the
whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered.
It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardization and
mass production, sacriﬁcing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the
social system. This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in
today’s economy. The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control
of the individual consciousness. The step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the
roles. The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is
1
from Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Continuum,1993). (Originally published as Dialektik der Aufklarung, 1944)
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkneimer 1 The Culture Industry
democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs
which are all exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private broadcasters
are denied any freedom. They are conﬁned to the apocryphal2
ﬁeld of the “amateur,” and also have to
accept organization from above. But any trace of spontaneity from the public in ofﬁcial broadcasting is
controlled and absorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and ofﬁcial programs of every kind selected
by professionals. Talented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they
would not be so eager to ﬁt in. 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. If one branch of art follows the
same formula as one with a very different medium and content; if the dramatic intrigue of broadcast soap
operas becomes no more than useful material for showing how to master technical problems at both ends
of the scale of musical experience—real jazz or a cheap imitation; or if a movement from a Beethoven
symphony is crudely “adapted” for a ﬁlm sound-track in the same way as a Tolstoy novel is garbled in a
ﬁlm script: then the claim that this is done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than
hot air. We are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena as inherent in the technical and personnel
apparatus which, down to its last cog, itself forms part of the economic mechanism of selection. In
addition there is the agreement—or at least the determination—of all executive authorities not to produce
or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules,their own ideas about consumers, or
above all themselves.
In our age the objective social tendency is incarnate in the hidden subjective purposes of company directors,
the foremost among whom are in the most powerful sectors of industry—steel, petroleum, electricity,
and chemicals. Culture monopolies are weak and dependent in comparison. They cannot afford to neglect
their appeasement of the real holders of power if their sphere of activity in mass society (a sphere producing
a speciﬁc type of commodity which anyhow is still too closely bound up with easygoing liberalism
and Jewish intellectuals) is not to undergo a series of purges. The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting
company on the electrical industry, or of the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic
of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven. All are in such
close contact that the extreme concentration of mental forces allows demarcation lines between different
ﬁrms and technical branches to be ignored. The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what
will happen in politics. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B ﬁlms, or of stories in magazines
in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing, and labeling
consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasized
and extended. The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying
quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantiﬁcation. Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously)
in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product
turned out for his type. Consumers appear as statistics on research organization charts, and are divided by
income groups into red, green, and blue areas; the technique is that used for any type of propaganda.
How formalized the procedure is can be seen when the mechanically differentiated products prove to
be all alike in the end. That the difference between the Chrysler range and General Motors products
is basically illusory strikes every child with a keen interest in varieties. What connoisseurs discuss as
good or bad points serve only to perpetuate the semblance of competition and range of choice. The same
applies to the Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer productions. But even the differences between
the more expensive and cheaper models put out by the same ﬁrm steadily diminish: for automobiles,
there are such differences as the number of cylinders, cubic capacity, details of patented gadgets; and
for ﬁlms there are the number of stars, the extravagant use of technology, labor, and equipment, and
the introduction of the latest psychological formulas. The universal criterion of merit is the amount of
2
Apocryphal: of doubtful authenticity: spurious
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkneimer 2 The Culture Industry
“conspicuous production,” of blatant cash investment. The varying budgets in the culture industry do not
bear the slightest relation to factual values, to the meaning of the products themselves. Even the technical
media are relentlessly forced into uniformity. Television aims at a synthesis of radio and ﬁlm, and is
held up only because the interested parties have not yet reached agreement, but its consequences will
be quite enormous and promise to intensify the impoverishment of aesthetic matter so drastically, that
by tomorrow the thinly veiled identity of all industrial culture products can come triumphantly out into
the open, derisively fulﬁlling the Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk—the fusion of all the arts
in one work. The alliance of word, image, and music is all the more perfect than in Tristan because the
sensuous elements which all approvingly reﬂect the surface of social reality are in principle embodied in
the same technical process, the unity of which becomes its distinctive content. This process integrates
all the elements of the production, from the novel (shaped with an eye to the ﬁlm) to the last sound
effect. It is the triumph of invested capital, whose title as absolute master is etched deep into the hearts
of the dispossessed in the employment line; it is the meaningful content of every ﬁlm, whatever plot the
production team may have selected.
The man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him. Kant’s formalism still
expected a contribution from the individual, who was thought to relate the varied experiences of the senses
to fundamental concepts; but industry robs the individual of his function. Its prime service to the customer
is to do his schematizing for him. Kant said that there was a secret mechanism in the soul which prepared
direct intuitions in such a way that they could be ﬁtted into the system of pure reason. But today that secret
has been deciphered. While the mechanism is to all appearances planned by those who serve up the data
of experience, that is, by the culture industry, it is in fact forced upon the latter by the power of society,
which remains irrational, however we may try to rationalize it; and this inescapable force is processed by
commercial agencies so that they give an artiﬁcial impression of being in command. There is nothing left
for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him. Art for the masses has destroyed the dream
but still conforms to the tenets of that dreaming idealism which critical idealism balked at. Everything
derives from consciousness: for Malebranche and Berkeley, from the consciousness of God; in mass art,
from the consciousness of the production team. Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically
recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the speciﬁc content of the entertainment itself is derived from
them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was
effective in a hit song, the hero’s momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough
treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter’s rugged deﬁance of the spoilt heiress,
are, like all the other details, ready-made clich´es to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more
than fulﬁll the purpose allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d’ˆetre is to conﬁrm it by
being its constituent parts. As soon as the ﬁlm begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be
rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has heard the ﬁrst notes of the hit
song, it can guess what is coming and feel ﬂattered when it does come. The average length of the short
story has to be rigidly adhered to. Even gags, effects, and jokes are calculated like the setting in which
they are placed. They are the responsibility of special experts and their narrow range makes it easy for
them to be apportioned in the ofﬁce. The development of the culture industry has led to the predominance
of the effect, the obvious touch, and the technical detail over the work itself—which once expressed an
idea, but was liquidated together with the idea. When the detail won its freedom, it became rebellious
and, in the period from Romanticism to Expressionism, asserted itself as free expression, as a vehicle of
protest against the organization. In music the single harmonic effect obliterated the awareness of form
as a whole; in painting the individual color was stressed at the expense of pictorial composition; and in
the novel psychology became more important than structure. The totality of the culture industry has put
an end to this. Though concerned exclusively with effects, it crushes their insubordination and makes
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkneimer 3 The Culture Industry
them subserve the formula, which replaces the work. The same fate is inﬂicted on whole and parts alike.
The whole inevitably bears no relation to the details—just like the career of a successful man into which
everything is made to ﬁt as an illustration or a proof, whereas it is nothing more than the sum of all those
idiotic events. The so-called dominant idea is like a ﬁle which ensures order but not coherence. The
whole and the parts are alike; there is no antithesis and no connection. Their prearranged harmony is a
mockery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works of art. In Germany the graveyard
stillness of the dictatorship already hung over the gayest ﬁlms of the democratic era. The whole world is
made to pass through the ﬁlter of the culture industry. The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees
the world outside as an extension of the ﬁlm he has just left (because the latter is intent upon reproducing
the world of everyday perceptions), is now the producer’s guideline. The more intensely and ﬂawlessly
his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the outside
world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen. This purpose has been furthered
by mechanical reproduction since the lightning takeover by the sound ﬁlm.
Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound ﬁlm, far surpassing the theater of
illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reﬂection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond
within the structure of the ﬁlm, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the
story; hence the ﬁlm forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting of the mass-media
consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological
mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves,
especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound ﬁlm. They are so designed that quickness, powers
of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is
out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts. Even though the effort required
for his response is semi-automatic, no scope is left for the imagination. Those who are so absorbed
by the world of the movie—by its images, gestures, and words—that they are unable to supply what really
makes it a world, do not have to dwell on particular points of its mechanics during a screening. All the
other ﬁlms and products of the entertainment industry which they have seen have taught them what to
expect; they react automatically. The might of industrial society is lodged in men’s minds. The entertainment
manufacturers know that 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 at leisure—which is akin to work. From every sound ﬁlm and every broadcast
program the social effect can be inferred which is exclusive to none but is shared by all alike. The culture
industry as a whole has molded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product. All the agents of
this process, from the producer to the women’s clubs, take good care that the simple reproduction of this
mental state is not nuanced or extended in any way.
The art historians and guardians of culture who complain of the extinction in the West of a basic styledetermining
power are wrong. The stereotyped appropriation of everything, even the inchoate3
, for the
purposes of mechanical reproduction surpasses the rigor and general currency of any “real style,” in the
sense in which cultural cognoscenti4
celebrate the organic precapitalist past. No Palestrina could be more
of a purist in eliminating every unprepared and unresolved discord than the jazz arranger in suppressing
any development which does not conform to the jargon. When jazzing up Mozart he changes him not
only when he is too serious or too difﬁcult but when he harmonizes the melody in a different way, perhaps
more simply, than is customary now. No medieval builder can have scrutinized the subjects for church
windows and sculptures more suspiciously than the studio hierarchy scrutinizes a work by Balzac or Hugo
before ﬁnally approving it. No medieval theologian could have determined the degree of the torment
3
Inchoate: being only partly in existence or operation; imperfectly formed or formulated
4
Cognoscenti: People especially knowledgeable in a subject: connoisseurs.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkneimer 4 The Culture Industry
to be suffered by the damned in accordance with the ordo of divine love more meticulously than the
producers of shoddy epics calculate the torture to be undergone by the hero or the exact point to which
the leading lady’s hemline shall be raised. The explicit and implicit, exoteric5
and esoteric6
catalog of
the forbidden and tolerated is so extensive that it not only deﬁnes the area of freedom but is all-powerful
inside it. Everything down to the last detail is shaped accordingly. Like its counterpart, avant-garde art,
the entertainment industry determines its own language, down to its very syntax and vocabulary, by the
use of anathema7
. The constant pressure to produce new effects (which must conform to the old pattern)
serves merely as another rule to increase the power of the conventions when any single effect threatens
to slip through the net. Every detail is so ﬁrmly stamped with sameness that nothing can appear which
is not marked at birth, or does not meet with approval at ﬁrst sight. And the star performers, whether
they produce or reproduce, use this jargon as freely and ﬂuently and with as much gusto as if it were the
very language which it silenced long ago. Such is the ideal of what is natural in this ﬁeld of activity, and
its inﬂuence becomes all the more powerful, the more technique is perfected and diminishes the tension
between the ﬁnished product and everyday life. The paradox of this routine, which is essentially travesty,
can be detected and is often predominant in everything that the culture industry turns out. A jazz musician
who is playing a piece of serious music, one of Beethoven’s simplest minuets, syncopates it involuntarily
and will smile superciliously when asked to follow the normal divisions of the beat. This is the “nature”
which, complicated by the ever-present and extravagant demands of the speciﬁc medium, constitutes the
new style and is a “system of non-culture, to which one might even concede a certain ’unity of style’ if it
really made any sense to speak of stylized barbarity.”8
The universal imposition of this stylized mode can even go beyond what is quasi-ofﬁcially sanctioned or
forbidden; today a hit song is more readily forgiven for not observing the 32 beats or the compass of the
ninth than for containing even the most clandestine melodic or harmonic detail which does not conform
to the idiom. Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is forgiven because his
departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the more strongly to conﬁrm
the validity of the system. The constraint of the technically-conditioned idiom which stars and directors
have to produce as “nature” so that the people can appropriate it, extends to such ﬁne nuances that they
almost attain the subtlety of the devices of an avant-garde work as against those of truth. The rare capacity
minutely to fulﬁll the obligations of the natural idiom in all branches of the culture industry becomes
the criterion of efﬁciency. What and how they say it must be measurable by everyday language, as in
logical positivism. The producers are experts. The idiom demands an astounding productive power, which
it absorbs and squanders. In a diabolical way it has overreached the culturally conservative distinction
between genuine and artiﬁcial style. A style might be called artiﬁcial which is imposed from without on
the refractory impulses of a form. But in the culture industry every element of the subject matter has its
origin in the same apparatus as that jargon whose stamp it bears. The quarrels in which the artistic experts
become involved with sponsor and censor about a lie going beyond the bounds of credibility are evidence
not so much of an inner aesthetic tension as of a divergence of interests. The reputation of the specialist,
in which a last remnant of objective independence sometimes ﬁnds refuge, conﬂicts with the business
politics of the Church, or the concern which is manufacturing the cultural commodity. But the thing itself
has been essentially objectiﬁed and made viable before the established authorities began to argue about
it. Even before Zanuck acquired her, Saint Bernadette was regarded by her latter-day hagiographer9
as
brilliant propaganda for all interested parties. That is what became of the emotions of the character. Hence
5
Exoteric: belonging to the outer or less initiate circle
6
Esoteric: designed for or understood by the specially initiated alone.
7
Anathema: someone or something intensely disliked or loathed
8
Nietzsche, Unzeirgemﬁsse Betrachtungen, Werke, Vol. I (Leipzig, 1917), p. 187.
9
Hagiographer: a writer of an idealizing or idolizing biography.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkneimer 5 The Culture Industry
the style of the culture industry, which no longer has to test itself against any refractory material, is also
the negation of style. The reconciliation of the general and particular, of the rule and the speciﬁc demands
of the subject matter, the achievement of which alone gives essential, meaningful content to style, is futile
because there has ceased to be the slightest tension between opposite poles: these concordant extremes are
dismally identical; the general can replace the particular, and vice versa.
Nevertheless, this caricature of style does not amount to something beyond the genuine style of the past.
In the culture industry the notion of genuine style is seen to be the aesthetic equivalent of domination.
Style considered as mere aesthetic regularity is a romantic dream of the past. The unity of style not only
of the Christian Middle Ages but of the Renaissance expresses in each case the different structure of social
power, and not the obscure experience of the oppressed in which the general was enclosed. The great
artists were never those who embodied a wholly ﬂawless and perfect style, but those who used style as
a way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth. The style
of their works gave what was expressed that force without which life ﬂows away unheard. Those very
art forms which are known as classical, such as Mozart’s music, contain objective trends which represent
something different to the style which they incarnate. As late as Sch¨onberg and Picasso, the great artists
have retained a mistrust of style, and at crucial points have subordinated it to the logic of the matter.
What Dadaists and Expressionists called the untruth of style as such triumphs today in the sung jargon
of a crooner, in the carefully contrived elegance of a ﬁlm star, and even in the admirable expertise of a
photograph of a peasant’s squalid hut. Style represents a promise in every work of art. That which is
expressed is subsumed through style into the dominant forms of generality, into the language of music,
painting, or words, in the hope that it will be reconciled thus with the idea of true generality. 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. It unconditionally posits the real forms of life as it is by suggesting
that fulﬁllment lies in their aesthetic derivatives. To this extent the claim of art is always ideology too.
However, only in this confrontation with tradition of which style is the record can art express suffering.
That factor in a work of art which enables it to transcend reality certainly cannot be detached from style;
but it does not consist of the harmony actually realized, of any doubtful unity of form and content, within
and without, of individual and society; it is to be found in those features in which discrepancy appears:
in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure in
which the style of the great work of art has always achieved self-negation, the inferior work has always
relied on its similarity with others—on a surrogate identity.
In the culture industry this imitation ﬁnally becomes absolute. Having ceased to be anything but style, it
reveals the latter’s secret: obedience to the social hierarchy. Today aesthetic barbarity completes what has
threatened the creations of the spirit since they were gathered together as culture and neutralized. 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 administration. And it is precisely the industrialized, the consequent, subsumption10
which entirely
accords with this notion of culture. By subordinating in the same way and to the same end all areas of
intellectual creation, by occupying men’s senses from the time they leave the factory in the evening to
the time they clock in again the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the labor process
they themselves have to sustain throughout the day, this subsumption mockingly satisﬁes the concept of a
uniﬁed culture which the philosophers of personality contrasted with mass culture.
10
Subsumption: the act or process of including or placing within something larger or more comprehensive.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkneimer 6 The Culture Industry
And so the culture industry, the most rigid of all styles, proves to be the goal of liberalism, which is reproached
for its lack of style. Not only do its categories and contents derive from liberalism—domesticated
naturalism as well as operetta and revue—but the modern culture monopolies form the economic area in
which, together with the corresponding entrepreneurial types, for the time being some part of its sphere of
operation survives, despite the process of disintegration elsewhere. It is still possible to make one’s way
in entertainment, if one is not too obstinate about one’s own concerns, and proves appropriately pliable.
Anyone who resists can only survive by ﬁtting in. Once his particular brand of deviation from the norm
has been noted by the industry, he belongs to it as does the land-reformer to capitalism. Realistic dissi-
dence11
is the trademark of anyone who has a new idea in business. In the public voice of modern society
accusations are seldom audible; if they are, the perceptive can already detect signs that the dissident will
soon be reconciled. The more immeasurable the gap between chorus and leaders, the more certainly there
is room at the top for everybody who demonstrates his superiority by well-planned originality. Hence,
in the culture industry, too, the liberal tendency to give full scope to its able men survives. To do this
for the efﬁcient today is still the function of the market, which is otherwise proﬁciently controlled; as
for the market’s freedom, in the high period of art as elsewhere, it was freedom for the stupid to starve.
Signiﬁcantly, the system of the culture industry comes from the more liberal industrial nations, and all its
characteristic media, such as movies, radio, jazz, and magazines, ﬂourish there. Its progress, to be sure,
had its origin in the general laws of capital. Gaumont and Pathe, Ullstein and Hugenberg followed the
international trend with some success; Europe’s economic dependence on the United States after war and
inﬂation was a contributory factor. The belief that the barbarity of the culture industry is a result of “cultural
lag,” of the fact that the American consciousness did not keep up with the growth of technology, is
quite wrong. It was pre-Fascist Europe which did not keep up with the trend toward the culture monopoly.
But it was this very lag which left intellect and creativity some degree of independence and enabled its
last representatives to exist—however dismally. In Germany the failure of democratic control to permeate
life had led to a paradoxical situation. Many things were exempt from the market mechanism which
had invaded the Western countries. The German educational system, universities, theaters with artistic
standards, great orchestras, and museums enjoyed protection. The political powers, state and municipalities,
which had inherited such institutions from absolutism, had left them with a measure of the freedom
from the forces of power which dominates the market, just as princes and feudal lords had done up to
the nineteenth century. This strengthened art in this late phase against the verdict of supply and demand,
and increased its resistance far beyond the actual degree of protection. In the market itself the tribute of
a quality for which no use had been found was turned into purchasing power; in this way, respectable
literary and music publishers could help authors who yielded little more in the way of proﬁt than the respect
of the connoisseur. But what completely fettered the artist was the pressure (and the accompanying
drastic threats), always to ﬁt into business life as an aesthetic expert. Formerly, like Kant and Hume, they
signed their letters “Your most humble and obedient servant,” and undermined the foundations of throne
and altar. Today they address heads of government by their ﬁrst names, yet in every artistic activity they
are subject to their illiterate masters. The analysis Tocqueville offered a century ago has in the meantime
proved wholly accurate. Under the private culture monopoly it is a fact that “tyranny leaves the body free
and directs its attack at the soul. The ruler no longer says: You must think as I do or die. He says: You are
free not to think as I do; your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you
are a stranger among us.”12
Not to conform means to be rendered powerless, economically and therefore
spiritually—to be “self-employed.” When the outsider is excluded from the concern, he can only too easily
be accused of incompetence. Whereas today in material production the mechanism of supply and demand
is disintegrating, in the superstructure it still operates as a check in the rulers’ favor. The consumers are
11
Dissidence: dissent
12
Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Democracie en Amerique, Vol. II (Paris, 1864), p. 151.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkneimer 7 The Culture Industry
the workers and employees, the farmers and lower middle class. Capitalist production so conﬁnes them,
body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them. As naturally as the ruled always
took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses
are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on
the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is
done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities. It is stronger even than the rigorism of the
Hays Ofﬁce, just as in certain great times in history it has inﬂamed greater forces that were turned against
it, namely, the terror of the tribunals. It calls for Mickey Rooney in preference to the tragic Garbo, for
Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop. The industry submits to the vote which it has itself inspired. What
is a loss for the ﬁrm which cannot fully exploit a contract with a declining star is a legitimate expense
for the system as a whole. By craftily sanctioning the demand for rubbish it inaugurates total harmony.
The connoisseur and the expert are despised for their pretentious claim to know better than the others,
even though culture is democratic and distributes its privileges to all. In view of the ideological truce, the
conformism of the buyers and the effrontery of the producers who supply them prevail. The result is a
constant reproduction of the same thing.
A constant sameness governs the relationship to the past as well. What is new about the phase of mass
culture compared with the late liberal stage is the exclusion of the new. The machine rotates on the same
spot. While determining consumption it excludes the untried as a risk. The movie-makers distrust any
manuscript which is not reassuringly backed by a bestseller. Yet for this very reason there is never-ending
talk of ideas, novelty, and surprise, of what is taken for granted but has never existed. Tempo and dynamics
serve this trend. Nothing remains as of old; everything has to run incessantly, to keep moving. For only
the universal triumph of the rhythm of mechanical production and reproduction promises that nothing
changes, and nothing unsuitable will appear. Any additions to the well-proven culture inventory are too
much of a speculation. The ossiﬁed forms—such as the sketch, short story, problem ﬁlm, or hit song—are
the standardized average of late liberal taste, dictated with threats from above. The people at the top in the
culture agencies, who work in harmony as only one manager can with another, whether he comes from
the rag trade or from college, have long since reorganized and rationalized the objective spirit. One might
think that an omnipresent authority had sifted the material and drawn up an ofﬁcial catalog of cultural
commodities to provide a smooth supply of available mass-produced lines. The ideas are written in the
cultural ﬁrmament where they had already been numbered by Plato—and were indeed numbers, incapable
of increase and immutable.
Amusement and all the elements of the culture industry existed long before the latter came into existence.
Now they are taken over from above and brought up to date. The culture industry can pride itself on
having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consumption,
on making this a principle, on divesting amusement of its obtrusive naivetes and improving the type of
commodities. The more absolute it became, the more ruthless it was in forcing every outsider either into
bankruptcy or into a syndicate, and became more reﬁned and elevated—until it ended up as a synthesis
of Beethoven and the Casino de Paris. It enjoys a double victory: the truth it extinguishes without it can
reproduce at will as a lie within. “Light” art as such, distraction, is not a decadent form. Anyone who
complains that it is a betrayal of the ideal of pure expression is under an illusion about society. The purity
of bourgeois art, which hypostatized13
itself as a world of freedom in contrast to what was happening in
the material world, was from the beginning bought with the exclusion of the lower classes—with whose
cause, the real universality, art keeps faith precisely by its freedom from the ends of the false universality.
Serious art has been withheld from those for whom the hardship and oppression of life make a mockery
of seriousness, and who must be glad if they can use time not spent at the production line just to keep
13
Hypostatized: attributed a real identity to (a concept)
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkneimer 8 The Culture Industry
going. Light art has been the shadow of autonomous art. It is the social bad conscience of serious art. The
truth which the latter necessarily lacked because of its social premises gives the other the semblance of
legitimacy. The division itself is the truth: it does at least express the negativity of the culture which the
different spheres constitute. Least of all can the antithesis be reconciled by absorbing light into serious
art, or vice versa. But that is what the culture industry attempts. The eccentricity of the circus, peepshow,
and brothel is as embarrassing to it as that of Sch¨onberg and Karl Kraus. And so the jazz musician Benny
Goodman appears with the Budapest string quartet, more pedantic rhythmically than any philharmonic
clarinettist, while the style of the Budapest players is as uniform and sugary as that of Guy Lombardo.
But what is signiﬁcant is not vulgarity, stupidity, and lack of polish. The culture industry did away with
yesterday’s rubbish by its own perfection, and by forbidding and domesticating the amateurish, although
it constantly allows gross blunders without which the standard of the exalted style cannot be perceived.
But what is new is that the irreconcilable elements of culture, art and distraction, are subordinated to one
end and subsumed under one false formula: the totality of the culture industry. It consists of repetition.
That its characteristic innovations are never anything more than improvements of mass reproduction is not
external to the system. It is with good reason that the interest of innumerable consumers is directed to the
technique, and not to the contents—which are stubbornly repeated, outworn, and by now half-discredited.
The social power which the spectators worship shows itself more effectively in the omnipresence of the
stereotype imposed by technical skill than in the stale ideologies for which the ephemeral contents stand
in.
Nevertheless the culture industry remains the entertainment business. Its inﬂuence over the consumers is
established by entertainment; that will ultimately be broken not by an outright decree, but by the hostility
inherent in the principle of entertainment to what is greater than itself. Since all the trends of the culture
industry are profoundly embedded in the public by the whole social process, they are encouraged by the
survival of the market in this area. Demand has not yet been replaced by simple obedience. As is well
known, the major reorganization of the ﬁlm industry shortly before World War I, the material prerequisite
of its expansion, was precisely its deliberate acceptance of the public’s needs as recorded at the boxofﬁce—a
procedure which was hardly thought necessary in the pioneering days of the screen. The same
opinion is held today by the captains of the ﬁlm industry, who take as their criterion the more or less phenomenal
song hits but wisely never have recourse to the judgment of truth, the opposite criterion. Business
is their ideology. It is quite correct that the power of the culture industry resides in its identiﬁcation with
a manufactured need, and not in simple contrast to it, even if this contrast were one of complete power
and complete powerlessness. Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought
after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope
with it again. But at the same time mechanization has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and
so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably afterimages
of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is
the automatic succession of standardized operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the ofﬁce
can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time. All amusement suffers from this
incurable malady. Pleasure hardens into boredom because, if it is to remain pleasure, it must not demand
any effort and therefore moves rigorously in the worn grooves of association. No independent thinking
must be expected from the audience: the product prescribes every reaction: not by its natural structure
(which collapses under reﬂection), but by signals. Any logical connection calling for mental effort is
painstakingly avoided. As far as possible, developments must follow from the immediately preceding situation
and never from the idea of the whole. For the attentive movie-goer any individual scene will give
him the whole thing. Even the set pattern itself still seems dangerous, offering some meaning—wretched
as it might be—where only meaninglessness is acceptable. Often the plot is maliciously deprived of the
development demanded by characters and matter according to the old pattern. Instead, the next step is
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkneimer 9 The Culture Industry
what the script writer takes to be the most striking effect in the particular situation. Banal though elaborate
surprise interrupts the story-line. The tendency mischievously to fall back on pure nonsense, which was a
legitimate part of popular art, farce and clowning, right up to Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, is most obvious
in the unpretentious kinds. This tendency has completely asserted itself in the text of the novelty song,
in the thriller movie, and in cartoons, although in ﬁlms starring Greer Garson and Bette Davis the unity
of the socio-psychological case study provides something approximating a claim to a consistent plot. The
idea itself, together with the objects of comedy and terror, is massacred and fragmented. Novelty songs
have always existed on a contempt for meaning which, as predecessors and successors of psychoanalysis,
they reduce to the monotony of sexual symbolism. Today detective and adventure ﬁlms no longer give the
audience the opportunity to experience the resolution. In the non-ironic varieties of the genre, it has also
to rest content with the simple horror of situations which have almost ceased to be linked in any way.
Cartoons were once exponents of fantasy as opposed to rationalism. They ensured that justice was done
to the creatures and objects they electriﬁed, by giving the maimed specimens a second life. All they do
today is to conﬁrm the victory of technological reason over truth. A few years ago they had a consistent
plot which only broke up in the ﬁnal moments in a crazy chase, and thus resembled the old slapstick
comedy. Now, however, time relations have shifted. In the very ﬁrst sequence a motive is stated so that
in the course of the action destruction can get to work on it: with the audience in pursuit, the protagonist
becomes the worthless object of general violence. The quantity of organized amusement changes into the
quality of organized cruelty. The self-elected censors of the ﬁlm industry (with whom it enjoys a close
relationship) watch over the unfolding of the crime, which is as drawn-out as a hunt. Fun replaces the
pleasure which the sight of an embrace would allegedly afford, and postpones satisfaction till the day of
the pogrom. Insofar as cartoons do any more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they hammer
into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is
the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their
thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment.
The enjoyment of the violence suffered by the movie character turns into violence against the spectator,
and distraction into exertion. Nothing that the experts have devised as a stimulant must escape the weary
eye; no stupidity is allowed in the face of all the trickery; one has to follow everything and even display
the smart responses shown and recommended in the ﬁlm. This raises the question whether the culture
industry fulﬁlls the function of diverting minds which it boasts about so loudly. If most of the radio
stations and movie theaters were closed down, the consumers would probably not lose so very much. To
walk from the street into the movie theater is no longer to enter a world of dream; as soon as the very
existence of these institutions no longer made it obligatory to use them, there would be no great urge to
do so. Such closures would not be reactionary machine wrecking. The disappointment would be felt not
so much by the enthusiasts as by the slow-witted, who are the ones who suffer for everything anyhow. In
spite of the ﬁlms which are intended to complete her integration, the housewife ﬁnds in the darkness of
the movie theater a place of refuge where she can sit for a few hours with nobody watching, just as she
used to look out of the window when there were still homes and rest in the evening. The unemployed in
the great cities ﬁnd coolness in summer and warmth in winter in these temperature-controlled locations.
Otherwise, despite its size, this bloated pleasure apparatus adds no dignity to man’s lives. The idea of
“fully exploiting” available technical resources and the facilities for aesthetic mass consumption is part of
the economic system which refuses to exploit resources to abolish hunger.
The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory
note14
which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which
14
Promissory Note: a written promise to pay at a ﬁxed future time a sum of money to an individual
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkneimer 10 The Culture Industry