Book Review: The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture by Theodor W. Adorno (Edited and with an introduction by J. M. Bernstein)

Theodor Adorno emerged as a critic from the renowned Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. I mention some of the interesting points covered in the book. He believes that all culture shares the guilt of society (p. 17). Curiosity is the enemy of the new which is not permitted to exist anyway (p. 84).

Adorno says that the power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness (p. 104). He further stresses that 'the total effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment, in which, as Horkheimer and I have noted, enlightenment, that is the progressive technical domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves' (p. 106).

Regarding fascist propaganda Adorno says that it is 'only to reproduce the existent mentality for its own purposes'... (p. 150). Adorno also writes about mass media and says that 'the more inarticulate and diffuse the audience of modern mass media seems to be the more mass media tend to achieve their 'integration' (p. 163). On page 173, Adorno states that: ….."what matters is mass media is not what happens in real life, but rather the positive and negative 'messages', prescriptions, and taboos that the spectator absorbs by means of identification with the material he is looking at." 

Writing about artistic production, the writer states that 'certainly, no artistic production can deal with ideas or political creeds in abstracto but has to present them in terms of their concrete impact upon human beings'... (p. 173). The writer is of the view that 'the consumers are made to remain what they are: consumers. That is why the culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims'... (p. 185).

Adorno discusses advertisements and political slogans, sports and mass culture, music, concepts of order, the total effect of culture industry, festivals, dance, the idea of a leader, fascist agitation, culture industry and administration, television, film and free time. Adorno's finest essays are compiled in this book which offers his thoughts on Culture. He argues that the culture industry commodified and standardized all art.  This in turn suffocated individuality and destroyed critical thinking.