THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION
THEODOR ADORNO AND MAX HORKHEIMER
(from "Dialectic of Enlightenment" New York: Continuum,1993. Originally published as "Dialektik der Aufklarung", 1944)
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 individuals 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 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 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 apocryphal 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 of 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's 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 "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 clichés to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfill the purpose allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d'etre 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 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 entertainments 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 style-determining power are wrong. The stereotyped appropriation of everything, even the inchoate, for the purposes of mechanical reproduction surpasses the rigor and general currency of any "real style," in the sense in which cultural cognoscenti 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 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, exoteric and esoteric 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 anathema. 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 tums 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."1The 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 Wells 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 Bemadette was regarded by her latter-day hagiographer as brilliant propaganda for all interested parties. That is what became of the emotions of the character. Hence 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 away of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth. The style of their works gave whatwas expressed that force without which life flows away unheard. Those very art forms which are known as classical, suchas Mozart's music, contain objective trends which represent something different to the style which they incamate. As late asSchonberg and Picasso, the great artists have retained a mistrustof style, and at crucial points have subordinated it to the logic ofthe 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 ideaof true generality. This promise held out by the work of art thatit will create truth by lending new shape to the conventionalsocial 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 claimof art is always ideology too. However, only in this confrontation with tradition of which style is the record can art expresssuffering. 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 Ñ 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 aestheticbarbarity completes what has threatened the creations of thespirit 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 thatschematization and process of cataloging and classificationwhich bring culture within the sphere of administration. Andit is precisely the industrialized, the consequent, subsumptionwhich 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 theyleave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in againthe next moming with matter that bears the impress of thelabor process they themselves have to sustain throughout theday, this subsumption mockingly satisfies the concept of a unified culture which the philosophers of personality contrastedwith mass culture.And so the culture industry, the most rigid of all styles, provesto be the goal of liberalism, which is reproached for its lack ofstyle. Not only do its categories and contents derive from liberalismÑdomesticated naturalism as well as operetta and revueÑbut the modern culture monopolies form the economic areain 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 possibleto make one's way in entertainment, if one is not too obstinateabout one's own concems, 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 theindustry, he belongs to it as does the land-refommer to capitalism. Realistic dissidence is the trademark of anyone who has anew idea in business. In the public voice of modern societyaccusations are seldom audible; if they are, the perceptive canalready 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 whodemonstrates his superiority by well-planned originality. Hence,in the culture industry, too, the liberal tendency to give fullscope to its able men survives. To do this for the efficient today is still the function of the market, which is otherwise proficientlycontrolled; 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 themore 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 existÑhowever dismally. In Germany the failure of democratic control topemmeate 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, andmuseums 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 theforces of power which dominates the market, just as princes andfeudal lords had done up to the nineteenth century. Thisstrengthened art in this late phase against the verdict of supplyand demand, and increased its resistance far beyond the actualdegree of protection. In the market itse]f the tribute of a quality for which no use had been found was tumed into purchasingpower; in this way, respectable literary and music publisherscould help authors who yielded little more in the way of profitthan the respect of the connoisseur. But what completely fettered the artist was the pressure (and the accompanying drasticthreats), always to fit into business life as an aesthetic expert.Fommerly, like Kant and Hume, they signed their letters "Yourmost humble and obedient servant," and undemlined 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. Hesays: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property,everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are astranger among us."2 Not to conform means to be renderedpowerless, economically and therefore spirituallyÑto be "self-employed." When the outsider is excluded from the concem, hecan only too easily be accused of incompetence. Whereas todayin material production the mechanism of supply and demand isdisintegrating, in the superstructure it still operates as a checkin the rulers' favor. The consumers are the workers and employees, the fammers 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 whichis done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities. It is stronger even than the rigorism of the Hays Office, justas in certain great times in history it has inflamed greater forcesthat were tumed 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 submitsto the vote which it has itself inspired. What is a loss for thefimm which cannot fully exploit a contract with a declining staris a legitimate expense for the system as a whole. By craftilysanctioning 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 govems the relationship to the past aswell. What is new about the phase of mass culture comparedwith the late liberal stage is the exclusion of the new. Themachine rotates on the same spot. While detemmining consumption it excludes the untried as a risk. The movie-makers distrustany 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 neverexisted. Tempo and dynamics serve this trend. Nothing remainsas of old; everything has to run incessantly, to keep moving. Foronly 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 formsÑsuch as the sketch, short story, problem film, or hit songÑare the standardized average of late liberal taste, dictated with threats from above. The people at the top in theculture agencies, who work in harmony as only one managercan with another, whether he comes from the rag trade or fromcollege, have long since reorganized and rationalized the objective spirit. One might think that an omnipresent authority hadsifted the material and drawn up an official catalog of culturalcommodities to provide a smooth supply of available mass-produced lines. The ideas are written in the cultural firmamentwhere they had already been numbered by PlatoÑand 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 forcingevery outsider either into bankruptcy or into a syndicate, andbecame more refined and elevatedÑuntil it ended up as a synthesis of Beethoven and the Casino de Paris. It enjoys a doublevictory: the truth it extinguishes without it can reproduce atwill as a lie within. "Light" art as such, distraction, is not adecadent form. Anyone who complains that it is a betrayal ofthe ideal of pure expression is under an illusion about society.The purity of bourgeois art, which hypostasized itself as a worldof freedom in contrast to what was happening in the materialworld, was from the beginning bought with the exclusion of thelower classesÑwith whose cause, the real universality, art keepsfaith precisely by its freedom from the ends of the false universality. Serious art has been withheld from those for whom thehardship 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 going. Light art has been the shadowof autonomous art. It is the social bad conscience of serious art.The truth which the latter necessarily lacked because of itssocial premises gives the other the semblance of legitimacy. Thedivision itself is the truth: it does at least express the negativityof the culture which the different spheres constitute. Least of allcan the antithesis be reconciled by absorbing light into seriousart, 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 Schonberg and Karl Kraus. And sothe jazz musician Benny Goodman appears with the Budapeststring quartet, more pedantic rhythrffically than any philharmonic clarinettist, while the style of the Budapest players is asuniform 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 anythingmore than improvements of mass reproduction is not extemalto the system. It is with good reason that the interest of innumerable consumers is directed to the technique, and not to thecontentsÑwhich are stubbomly repeated, outwom, and by nowhalf-discredited. The social power which the spectators worshipshows itself more effectively in the omnipresence of the stereotype imposed by technical skill than in the stale ideologies forwhich the ephemeral contents stand in.Nevertheless the culture industry remains the entertainmentbusiness. Its influence over the consumers is established by entertainment; that will ultimately be broken not by an outrightdecree, but by the hostility inherent in the principle of entertainment to what is greater than itself. Since all the trends of theculture industry are profoundly embedded in the public by thewhole social process, they are encouraged by the survival ofthe market in this area. Demand has not yet been replaced bysimple obedience. As is well known, the major reorganizationof the film industry shortly before World War I, the materialprerequisite of its expansion, was precisely its deliberate acceptance of the public's needs as recorded at the box-officeÑa 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, andnot in simple contrast to it, even if this contrast were one ofcomplete power and complete powerlessness. Amusement underlate capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after asan escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruitstrength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at thesame time mechanization has such power over a man's leisureand happiness, and so profoundly detemlines the manufactureof amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content ismerely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardized operations. What happens at work, inthe factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one's leisure time. All amusement suffersfrom this incurable malady. Pleasure hardens into boredom because, if it is to remain pleasure, it must not demand any effortand therefore moves rigorously in the wom 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 scenewill give him the whole thing. Even the set pattem itself stillseems dangerous, offering some meaningÑwretched as it mightbeÑwhere only meaninglessness is acceptable. Often the plotis maliciously deprived of the development demanded by characters and matter according to the old pattem. Instead, the next step is 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 textof the noveltysong, in the thriller movie, and in cartoons, although in filmsstarring Greer Garson and Bette Davis the unity of the socio-psychological case study provides something approximating aclaim 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 confimm 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. Thequantity of organized amusement changes into the quality oforganized 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 theold lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of allindividual resistance, is the condition of life in this society.Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life gettheir thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their ownpunishment.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 theface of all the trickery; one has to follow everything and evendisplay the smart responses shown and recommended in thefilm. This raises the question whether the culture industry fulfills the function of diverting minds which it boasts about soloudly. If most of the radio stations and movie theaters wereclosed down, the consumers would probably not lose so verymuch. To walk from the street into the movie theater is nolonger to enter a world of dream; as soon as the very existenceof these institutions no longer made it obligatory to use them,there would be no great urge to do so. Such closures would notbe reactionary machine wrecking. The disappointment wouldbe felt not so much by the enthusiasts as by the slow-witted,who are the ones who suffer for everything anyhow. In spite ofthe films which are intended to complete her integration, thehousewife finds in the darkness of the movie theater a place ofrefuge where she can sit for a few hours with nobody watching,just as she used to look out of the window when there were stillhomes and rest in the evening. The unemployed in the greatcities find coolness in summer and warmth in winter in thesetemperature-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 andthe 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 whatit perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with itsplots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged;the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, isillusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will neverbe reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. Infront of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names andimages there is finally set no more than a commendation of thedepressing everyday world it sought to escape. Of course worksof art were not sexual exhibitions either. However, by representing deprivation as negative, they retracted, as it were, theprostitution of the impulse and rescued by mediation what wasdenied. The secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representationof fulfillment as a broken promise. The culture industry doesnot sublimate; it represses. By repeatedly exposing the objectsof desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of theathletic hero, it only stimulates the unsublimated forepleasurewhich habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a masochistic semblance. There is no erotic situation which, whileinsinuating and exciting, does not fail to indicate unmistakablythat things can never go that far. The Hays Offlce merely confirms the ritual of Tantalus that the culture industry has established anyway. Works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish. Love is downgraded to romance. And, after the descent, much is permitted;even license as a marketable speciality has its quota bearingthe trade description "daring." The mass production of thesexual automatically achieves its repression. Because of hisubiquity, the film star with whom one is meant to fall in love isfrom the outset a copy of himself. Every tenor voice comes tosound like a Caruso record, and the "natural" faces of Texasgirls are like the successful models by whom Hollywood hastypecast them. The mechanical reproduction of beauty, whichreactionary cultural fanaticism wholeheartedly serves in its methodical idolization of individuality, leaves no room for thatunconscious idolatry which was once essential to beauty. Thetriumph over beauty is celebrated by humorÑthe Schadenfreude that every successful deprivation calls forth. There islaughter because there is nothing to laugh at. Laughter, whetherconciliatory or terrible, always occurs when some fear passes.It indicates liberation either from physical danger or from thegrip of logic. Conciliatory laughter is heard as the echo of anescape from power; the wrong kind overcomes fear by capitulating to the forces which are to be feared. It is the echo of power as something inescapable. Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud practised on happiness. Moments of happiness are without laughter; only operettas and films portray sex to the accompaniment of resounding laughter. But Baudelaire is as devoid of humour as Holderlin. In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is drawing it into its worthless totality. To laugh at something is always to deride it, and the life which, according to Bergson, in laughter breaks through the barrier, is actually an invading barbaric life, self-assertion prepared to parade its liberation from anyscruple when the social occasion arises. Such a laughing audience is a parody of humanity. Its members are monads, alldedicated to the pleasure of being ready for anything at the expense of everyone else. Their harmony is a caricature of solidarity. What is fiendish about this false laughter is that it is a compelling parody of the best, which is conciliatory. Delight is austere: res severa verum gaudium. The monastic theory that not asceticism but the sexual act denotes the renunciation of attainable bliss receives negative confirmation in the gravity of the lover who with foreboding commits his life to the fleeting moment. In the culture industry, jovial denial takes the place of the pain found in ecstasy and in asceticism. The supremelaw is that they shall not satisfy their desires at any price; they must laugh and be content with laughter. In every product ofthe culture industry, the permanent denial imposed by civilization is once again unmistakably demonstrated and inflicted onits victims. To offer and to deprive them of something is one and the same. This is what happens in erotic films. Precisely because it must never take place, everything centers upon copulation. In films it is more strictly forbidden for an illegitimate relationship to be admitted without the parties being punished than for a millionaire's future son-in-law to be active in the labor movement. In contrast to the liberal era, industrialized as well as popular culture may wax indignant at capitalism, but it cannot renounce the threat of castration. This is fundamental. It outlasts the organized acceptance of the uniformed seen in the films which are produced to that end, and in reality. What is decisive today is no longer puritanism, although it still asserts itself in the form of women's organizations, but the necessity inherent in the system not to leave the customer alone, not for a moment to allow him any suspicion that resistance is possible. The principle dictates that he should be shown all his needs as capable of-fulfillment, but that those needs should be so predetermined that he feels himself to be the eternal consumer, the object of the culture industry. Not only does it make him believe that the deception it practices is satisfaction, but it goes further and implies that, whatever the state of affairs, he must put up with what is offered. The escape from everyday drudgery which the whole culture industry promises may be compared to the daughter's abduction in the cartoon: the father is holding the ladder in the dark. The paradise offered by the culture industryis the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotesthe resignation which it ought to help to forget. Amusement, if released from every restraint, would not onlybe the antithesis of art but its extreme role. The Mark Twainabsurdity with which the American culture industry flirts attimes might be a corrective of art. The more seriously the latterregards the incompatibility with life, the more it resembles theseriousness of life, its antithesis; the more effort it devotes todeveloping wholly from its own formal law, the more effortit demands from the intelligence to neutralize its burden. Insome revue films, and especially in the grotesque and the funnies, the possibility of this negation does glimmer for a few moments. But of course it cannot happen. Pure amusement in its consequence, relaxed self-surrender to all kinds of associations and happy nonsense, is cut short by the amusement on the market: instead, it is interrupted by a surrogate overall meaning which the culture industry insists on giving to its products, andyet misuses as a mere pretext for bringing in the stars. Biographies and other simple stories patch the fragments of nonsense into an idiotic plot. We do not have the cap and bells of the jester but the bunch of keys of capitalist reason, which even screens the pleasure of achieving success. Every kiss in the revue film has to contribute to the career of the boxer, or some hit song expert or other whose rise to fame is being glorified. The deception is not that the culture industry supplies amusement but that it ruins the fun by allowing business considerations to involve it in the ideological cliches of a culture in the process of self-liquidation. Ethics and taste cut short unrestrained amusement as "naive"Ñnaivete is thought to be as bad as intellectualismÑand even restrict technical possibilities. The culture industry is corrupt; not because it is a sinful Babylon but because it is a cathedral dedicated to elevated pleasure. On all levels, from Hemingway to Emil Ludwig, from Mrs. Miniver to the Lone Ranger, from Toscanini to Guy Lombardo, there isuntruth in the intellectual content taken ready-made from art and science. The culture industry does retain a trace of some-thing better in those features which bring it close to the circus, in the self-justifying and nonsensical skill of riders, acrobats and clowns, in the "defense and justification of physical as against intellectual art."3 But the refuges of a mindless artistry which represents what is human as opposed to the social mechanism are being relentlessly hunted down by a schematic reason which compels everything to prove its significance and effect. The consequence is that the nonsensical at the bottom disappears as utterly as the sense in works of art at the top. The fusion of culture and entertainment that is taking place oday leads not only to a depravation of culture, but inevitably to an intellectualization of amusement. This is evident from the fact that only the copy appears: in the movie theater, the photograph; on the radio, the recording. In the age of liberal expansion, amusement lived on the unshaken belief in the future: things would remain as they were and even improve. Today this belief is once more intellectualized; it becomes so faint that it loses sight of any goal and is little more than a magic-lantern show for those with their backs to reality. It consists of the meaningful emphases which, parallel to life itself, the screen play puts on the smart fellow, the engineer, the capable girl, ruthlessness disguised as character, interest in sport, and finally automobiles and cigarettes, even where the entertainment is not put down to the advertising account of the immediate producers but to that of the system as a whole. Amusement itself becomes an ideal, taking the place of the higher things of which it completely deprives the masses by repeating them in a manner even more stereotyped than the slogans paid for by advertising interests. Inwardness, the subjectively restricted form of truth, was always more at the mercy of the outwardly powerful than they imagined. The culture industry turns it into an open lie. It has now become mere twaddle which is acceptable in religious best-sellers, psychological films, and women's serials as an embarrassingly agreeable garnish, so that genuine personal emotion in real life can be all the more reliably controlled. In this sense amusement carries out that purgation of the emotions which Aristotle once attributed to tragedy and Mortimer Adler now allows to movies. The culture industry reveals the truth about catharsis as it did about style. The stronger the positions of the culture industry become, the more summarily it can deal with consumers' needs, producing them, controlling them, disciplining them, and even withdrawing amusement: no limits are set to cultural progress of this kind. But the tendency is immanent in the principle of amusement itself, which is enlightened in a bourgeois sense. If the need for amusement was in large measure the creation of industry, which used the subject as a means of recommending the work to the massesÑthe oleograph by the dainty morsel it depicted, or the cake mix by a picture of a cako amusement always reveals the influence of business, the sales talk, the quack's spiel. But the original affinity of business and amusement is shown in the latter's specific significance: to defend society. To be pleased means to say Yes. It is possible only by insulationfrom the totality of the social process, by desensitization and,from the first, by senselessly sacrificing the inescapable claim ofevery work, however inane, within its limits to reflect the whole.Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forgetsuffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. Itis flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from he last remaining thought of resistance. The liberation whichamusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation.The effrontery of the rhetorical question, "What do people deprived of this individuality. Even when the public doesÑexceptionallyÑrebel against the pleasure industry, all it can muster is that feeble resistance which that very industry has inculcated in it. Nevertheless, it has become increasingly difflcult to keep people in this condition. The rate at which they are reduced to stupidity must not fall behind the rate at which their intelligence is increasing. In this age of statistics the masses are too sharp to identify themselves with the millionaire on the screen, and too slow-witted to ignore the law of the largest number. Ideology conceals itself in the calculation of probabilities. Not everyone will be lucky one dayÑbut the person who draws the winning ticket, or rather the one who is marked out to do so by a higher powerÑusually by the pleasure industry itself, which is represented as unceasingly in search of talent. Those discovered by talent scouts and then publicized on a vast scale by the studio are ideal types of the new dependent average. Of course, the starlet is meant to symbolize the typist in such a way that the splendid evening dress seems meant for the actress as distinct from the real girl. The girls in the audience not only feel that hey could be on the screen, but realize the great gulf separating them from it. Only one girl can draw the lucky ticket, only one man can win the prize, and if, mathematically, all have thesame chance, yet this is so infinitesimal for each one that he or she will do best to write it off and rejoice in the other's success,which might just as well have been his or hers, and somehownever is. Whenever the culture industry still issues an invitationnaively to identify, it is immediately withdrawn. No one canescape from himself any more. Once a member of the audiencecould see his own wedding in the one shown in the film. Now the lucky actors on the screen are copies of the same category as every member of the public, but such equality only demonstrates the insurmountable separation of the human elements. The perfect similarity is the absolute difference. The identity ofthe categoq forbids that of the individual cases. Ironically, manas a member of a species has been made a reality by the cultureindustry. Now any person signifies only those attributes bywhich he can replace everybody else: he is interchangeable, acopy. As an individual he is completely expendable and utterlyinsignificant, and this is just what he finds out when time deprives him of this similarity. This changes the inner structure ofthe religion of successÑotherwise strictly maintained. Increasing emphasis is laid not on the path per aspera ad astra (whichpresupposes hardship and effort), but on winning a prize. Theelement of blind chance in the routine decision about whichsong deserves to be a hit and which e~tra a heroine is stressedby the ideology. Movies emphasize chance. By stopping at nothing to ensure that all the characters are essentially alike, witht he exception of the villain, and by excluding non-conformingfaces (for example, those which, like Garbo's, do not look asif you could say "Hello sister!" to them), life is made easier formovie-goers at first. They are assured that they are all right asthey are, that they could do just as well and that nothing beyond their powers will be asked of them. But at the same time they are given a hint that any effort would be useless because even bourgeois luck no longer has any connection with the calculable effect of their own work. They take the hint. Fundamentally they all recognize chance (by which one occasionally makes his fortune) as the other side of planning. Precisely because the forces of society are so deployed in the direction of rationality that anyone might become an engineer or manager, it has ceased entirely to be a rational matter who the one will be in whom society will invest training or confidence for such functions. Chance and planning become one and the same thing, because, given men's equality, individual success and failureÑright up to the topÑlose any economic meaning. Chance itself is planned, not because it affects any particular individual but precisely because it is believed to play a vital part. It serves the planners as an alibi, and makes it seem that the complex of transactions and measures into which life has been transformedleaves scope for spontaneous and direct relations between man.This freedom is symbolized in the various media of the cultureindustry by the arbitrary selection of average individuals. In amagazine's detailed accounts of the modestly magnificent pleasure-trips it has arranged for the lucky person, preferably a stenotypist (who has probably won the competition because of her contacts with local bigwigs), the powerlessness of all is reflected. They are mere matterÑso much so that those in control can take someone up into their heaven and throw him out again: his rights and his work count for nothing. Industry is interested in people merely as customers and employees, and has in fact reduced mankind as a whole and each of its elements to this all-embracing formula. According to the ruling aspect atthe time, ideology emphasizes plan or chance, technology orlife, civilization or nature. As employees, men are reminded ofthe rational organization and urged to fit in like sensible people.As customers, the freedom of choice, the charm of novelty, isdemonstrated to them on the screen or in the press by means ofthe human and personal anecdote. In either case they remainobjects.The less the culture industry has to promise, the less it canoffer a meaningful explanation of life, and the emptier is theideology it disseminates. Even the abstract ideals of the harmony and beneficence of society are too concrete in this age ofuniversal publicity. We have even learned how to identify abstract concepts as sales propaganda. Language based entirely on truth simply arouses impatience to get on with the business dealit is probably advancing. The words that are not means appearsenseless; the others seem to be fiction, untrue. Value judgments are taken either as advertising or as empty talk. Accordingly ideology has been made vague and noncommittal, and thus neither clearer nor weaker. Its very vagueness, its almost scientific aversion from committing itself to anything which cannot be verified, acts as an instrument of domination. It becomes a vigorous and prearranged promulgation of the statusquo. The culture industry tends to make itself the embodiment of authoritative pronouncements, and thus the irrefutableprophet of the prevailing order. It skilfully steers a windingcourse between the cliffs of demonstrable misinformation andmanifest truth, faithfully reproducing the phenomenon whoseopaqueness blocks any insight and installs the ubiquitous andintact phenomenon as ideal. Ideology is split into the photographof stubborn life and the naked lie about its meaningÑwhich isnot expressed but suggested and yet drummed in. To demonstrate its divine nature, reality is always repeated in a purely cynical way. Such a photological proof is of course not stringent, but it is overpowering. Anyone who doubts the power of monotony is a fool. The culture industry refutes the objection made against it just as well as that against the world which it impartially duplicates. The only choice is either to join in or to be left behind: those provincials who have recourse to eternalbeauty and the amateur stage in preference to the cinema andthe radio are alreadyÑpoliticallyÑat the point to which massculture drives its supporters. It is sufficiently hardened to deride as ideology, if need be, the old wish-fulfillments, the father-ideal and absolute feeling. The new ideology has as its objects the world as such. It makes use of the worship of facts by no more than elevating a disagreeable existence into the world of facts in representing it meticulously. This transference makes existence itself a substitute for meaning and right. Whatever the camera reproduces is beautiful. The disappointment of the prospect that one might be the typist who wins the world trip is matched by the disappointing appearance of the accuratelyphotographed areas which the voyage might include. Not Italyis offered, but evidence that it exists. A film can even go so faras to show the Paris in which the American girl thinks she willstill her desire as a hopelessly desolate place, thus driving herthe more inexorably into the arms of the smart American boyshe could have met at home anyhow. That this goes on, that, inits most recent phase, the system itself reproduces the life ofthose of whom it consists instead of immediately doing awaywith them, is even put down to its credit as giving it meaningand worth. Continuing and continuing to join in are given asjustification for the blind persistence of the system and even forits immutability. What repeats itself is healthy, like the naturalor industrial cycle. The same babies grin eternally out of themagazines; the jazz machine will pound away for ever. In spiteof all the progress in reproduction techniques, in controls andthe specialities, and in spite of all the restless industry, the breadwhich the culture industry offers man is the stone of the stereotype. It draws on the life cycle, on the well-founded amazement that mothers, in spite of everything, still go on bearing children and that the wheels still do not grind to a halt. This serves to confirm the immutability of circumstances. The ears of corn blowing in the wind at the end of Chaplin's The Great Dictator give the lie to the anti-Fascist plea for freedom. They are like the blond hair of the German girl whose camp life is photographed by the Nazi film company in the summer breeze. Nature is viewed by the mechanism of social domination as a healthy contrast to society, and is theNfore denatured. Pictures showing green trees, a blue sky, and moving clouds make these aspects of nature into so many cryptograms for factory chimneys and service stations. On the other hand, wheels and machine components must seem expressive, having been degradedto the status of agents of the spirit of trees and clouds. Natureand technology are mobilized against all opposition; and wehave a falsified memento of liberal society, in which people supposedly wallowed in erotic plush-lined bedrooms instead of taking open-air baths as in the case today, or experiencing breakdowns in prehistoric Benz models instead of shooting off with the speed of a rocket from A (where one is anyhow) to B (where everything is just the same). The triumph of the gigantic concern over the initiative of the entrepreneur is praised bythe culture industry as the persistence of entrepreneurial initiative. The enemy who is already defeated, the thinking individual,is the enemy fought. The resurrection in Germany of the anti-bourgeois "Haus Sonnenstosser," and the pleasure felt whenwatching Life with Father, have one and the same meaning.In one respect, admittedly, this hollow ideology is in deadlyearnest: everyone is provided for. "No one must go hungry orthirsty; if anyone does, he's for the concentration camp!" Thisjoke from Hitler's Germany might shine forth as a maxim fromabove all the portals of the culture industry. With sly naivete,it presupposes the most recent characteristic of society: that itcan easily find out who its supporters are. Everybody is guaranteed formal freedom. No one is officially responsible for whathe thinks. Instead everyone is enclosed at an early age in a system of churches, clubs, professional associations, and other suchconcerns, which constitute the most sensitive instrument of social control. Anyone who wants to avoid ruin must see that he is not found wanting when weighed in the scales of this apparatus. Otherwise he will lag behind in life, and finally perish. In every career, and especially in the liberal professions, expert knowledge is linked with prescribed standards of conduct; this can easily lead to the illusion that expert knowledge is the only thing that counts. In fact, it is part of the irrational planning of this society that it reproduces to a certain degree only the lives of its faithful members. The standard of life enjoyed corresponds very closely to the degree to which classes and individuals are essentially bound up with the system. The manager can be relied upon, as can the lesser employee DagwoodÑas he is in the comic pages or in real life. Anyone who goes cold and hungry, even if his prospects were once good, is branded. He is an outsider; and, apart from certain capital crimes, the most mortal of sins is to be an outsider. In films he sometimes, and as an exception, becomes an original, the object of maliciously indulgent humor; but usually he is the villain, and is identified as such at first appearance, long before the action really getsgoing: hence avoiding any suspicion that society would turn onthose of good will. Higher up the scale, in fact, a kind of welfare state is coming into being today. In order to keep theirown positions, men in top posts maintain the economy in whicha highly-developed technology has in principle made the massesredundant as producers. The workers, the real bread-winners,are fed (if we are to believe the ideology) by the managers ofthe economy, the fed. Hence the individual's position becomesprecarious. Under liberalism the poor were thought to be lazy;now they are automatically objects of suspicion. Anybody whois not provided for outside should be in a concentration camp,or at any rate in the hell of the most degrading work and theslums. The culture industry, however, reflects positive and negative welfare for those under the administrators' control as directhuman solidarity of men in a world of the efficient. No one isforgotten; everywhere there are neighbors and welfare workers,Dr. Gillespies and parlor philosophers whose hearts are in theright place and who, by their kind intervention as of man toman, cure individual cases of socially-perpetuated distressÑalways provided that there is no obstacle in the personal depravity of the unfortunate. The promotion of a friendly atmosphere as advised by management experts and adopted by every factory to increase output, brings even the last private impulse under social control precisely because it seems to relate men's circumstances directly to production, and to reprivatize them. Such spiritual charity casts a conciliatory shadow onto the products of the culture industry long before it emerges fromthe factory to invade society as a whole. Yet the great benefactors of mankind, whose scientific achievements have to be written up as acts of sympathy to give them an artificial human interest, are substitutes for the national leaders, who finally decree the abolition of sympathy and think they can prevent any recurrence when the last invalid has been exterminated.By emphasizing the "heart of gold," society admits the suffering it has created: everyone knows that he is now helpless in the system, and ideology has to take this into account. Far from concealing suffering under the cloak of improvised fellowship, the culture industry takes pride in looking it in the face like a man, however great the strain on self-control. The pathos of composure justifies the world which makes it necessary. That is lifeÑvery hard, but just because of that so wonderful and so healthy. This lie does not shrink from tragedy. Mass culturedeals with it, in the same way as centralized society does notabolish the suffering of its members but records and plans it.That it is why it borrows so persistently from art. This providesthe tragic substance which pure amusement cannot itself supply,but which it needs if it is somehow to remain faithful to theprinciple of the exact reproduction of phenomena. Tragedymade into a carefully calculated and accepted aspect of theworld is a blessing. It is a safeguard against the reproach thattruth is not respected, whereas it is really being adopted withcynical re~ret. To the consumer whoÑculturallyÑhas seenbetter days it offers a substitute for long-discarded profundities.It provides the regular movie-goer with the scraps of culture hemust have for prestige. It comforts all with the thought that atough, genuine human fate is still possible, and that it must atall costs be represented uncompromisingly. Life in all the aspects which ideology today sets out to duplicate shows up allthe more gloriously, powerfully and magnificently, the more itis redolent of necessary suffering. It begins to resemble fate.Tragedy is reduced to the threat to destroy anyone who doesnot cooperate, whereas its paradoxical significance once lay in ahopeless resistance to mythic destiny. Tragic fate becomes justpunishment, which is what bourgeois aesthetics always tried toturn it into. The morality of mass culture is the cheap form ofyesterday's children's books. In a first-class production, for example, the villainous character appears as a hysterical womanwho (with presumed clinical accuracy) tries to ruin the happiness of her opposite number, who is truer to reality, and herself suffers a quite untheatrical death. So much learning is ofcourse found only at the top. Lower down less trouble is taken.Tragedy is made harmless without recourse to social psychology.Just as every Viennese operetta worthy of the name had to haveits tragic finale in the second act, which left nothing for thethird except to clear up misunderstandings, the culture industryassigns tragedy a fixed place in the routine. The well-knownexistence of the recipe is enough to allay any fear that there isno restraint on tragedy. The description of the dramatic formulaby the housewife as "getting into trouble and out again" embraces the whole of mass culture from the idiotic women's serialto the top production. Even the worst ending which began withgood intentions confirms the order of things and corrupts thetragic force, either because the woman whose love runs counterto the laws of the game plays with her death for a brief spell ofhappiness, or because the sad ending in the film all the morecleady stresses the indestructibility of actual life. The tragicfilm becomes an institution for moral improvement. The masses,demoralized by their life under the pressure of the system, andwho show signs of civilization only in modes of behavior whichhave been forced on them and through which fury and recalcitrance show everywhere, are to be kept in order by the sight ofan inexorable life and exemplary behavior. Culture has alwaysplayed its part in taming revolutionary and barbaric instincts.Industrial culture adds its contribution. It shows the conditionunder which this merciless life can be lived at all. The individual who is thoroughly weary must use his weariness as energy for his surrender to the collective power which wears him out. In films, those permanently desperate situations which crush the spectator in ordinary life somehow become a promise that one can go on living. One has only to become aware of one's own nothingness, only to recognize defeat and one is one with it all.Society is full of desperate people and therefore a prey to rackets.In some of the most significant German novels of the pre-Fascist era such as Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz and Fallada'sKleiner Mann, Was Nun, this trend was as obvious as in theaverage film and in the devices of jazz. What all these thingshave in common is the self-derision of man. The possibility ofbecoming a subject in the economy, an entrepreneur or a proprietor, has been completely liquidated. Right down to thehumblest shop, the independent enterprise, on the managementand inheritance of which the bourgeois family and the positionof its head had rested, became hopelessly dependent. Everybodybecame an employee; and in this civilization of employees thedignity of the father (questionable anyhow) vanishes. The attitude of the individual to the racket, business, profession orparty, before or after admission, the Fuhrer's gesticulations before the masses, or the suitor's before his sweetheart, assumespecifically masochistic traits. The attitude into which everybody is forced in order to give repeated proof of his moralsuitability for this society reminds one of the boys who, duringtribal initiation, go round in a circle with a stereotyped smile ontheir faces while the priest strikes them. Life in the late capitalist era is a constant initiation rite. Everyone must show that hewholly identifies himself with the power which is belaboringhim. This occurs in the principle of jazz syncopation, whichsimultaneously derides stumbling and makes it a rule. Theeunuch-like voice of the crooner on the radio, the heiress'ssmooth suitor, who falls into the swimming pool in his dinnerjacket, are models for those who must become whatever thesystem wants. Everyone can be like this omnipotent society;everyone can be happy, if only he will capitulate fully and sacrifice his claim to happiness. In his weakness society recognizesits strength, and gives him some of it. His defenselessness makeshim reliable. Hence tragedy is discarded. Once the oppositionof the individual to society was its substance. It glorified "thebravery and freedom of emotion before a powerful enemy, anexalted affliction, a dreadful problem."4 Today tragedy hasmelted away into the nothingness of that false identity of societyand individual, whose terror still shows for a moment in theempty semblance of the tragic. But the miracle of integration,the permanent act of grace by the authority who receives thedefenseless personÑonce he has swallowed his rebelliousnessÑsignifies Fascism. This can be seen in the humanitarianismwhich Doblin uses to let his Biberkopf find refuge, and again insocially-slanted films. The capacity to find refuge, to surviveone's own ruin, by which tragedy is defeated, is found in thenew generation; they can do any work because the work processdoes not let them become attached to any. This is reminiscentof the sad lack of conviction of the homecoming soldier with nointerest in the war, or of the casual laborer who ends up byjoining a paramilitary organization. This liquidation of tragedyconfirms the abolition of the individual.In the culture industry the individual is an illusion not merelybecause of the standardization of the means of production. Heis tolerated only so long as his complete identification with thegenerality is unquestioned. Pseudo individuality is rife: from thestandardized jazz improvization to the exceptional film starwhose hair curls over her eye to demonstrate her originality.What is individual is no more than the generality's power tostamp the accidental detail so firmly that it is accepted as such.The defiant reserve or elegant appearance of the individual onshow is mass-produced like Yale locks, whose only differencecan be measured in fractions of millimeters. The peculiarity ofthe self is a monopoly commodity determined by society; it isfalsely represented as natural. It is no more than the moustache,the French accent, the deep voice of the woman of the world,the Lubitsch touch: finger prints on identity cards which areotherwise exactly the same, and into which the lives and faces ofevery single person are transformed by the power of the generality. Pseudo individuality is the prerequisite for comprehendingtragedy and removing its poison: only because individuals haveceased to be themselves and are now merely centers where thegeneral tendencies meet, is it possible to receive them again,whole and entire, into the generality. In this way mass culturediscloses the fictitious character of the "individual" in the bourgeois era, and is merely unjust in boasting on account of thisdreary harmony of general and particular. The principle of individuality was always full of contradiction. Individuation hasnever really been achieved. Self-preservation in the shape ofclass has kept everyone at the stage of a mere species being.Every bourgeois characteristic, in spite of its deviation and indeed because of it, expressed the same thing: the harshness ofthe competitive society. The individual who supported societybore its disfiguring mark; seemingly free, he was actually theproduct of its economic and social apparatus. Power based itself on the prevailing conditions of power when it sought theapproval of persons affected by it. As it progressed, bourgeoissociety did also develop the individual. Against the will of itsleaders, technology has changed human beings from childreninto persons. However, every advance in individuation of thisktnd took place at the el~pense of the individuality in whosename it occurred, so that nothing was left but the resolve topursue one's own particular purpose. The bourgeois whose existence is split into a business and a private life, whose private life is split into keeping up his public image and intimacy, whose intimacy is split into the surly partnership of marriage and the bitter comfort of being quite alone, at odds with himself and everybody else, is already virtually a Nazi, replete bothwith enthusiasm and abuse; or a modern city-dweller who cannow only imagine friendship as a "social contact": that is, asbeing in social contact with others with whom he has no inwardcontact. The only reason why the culture industry can deal sosuccessfully with individuality is that the latter has always reproduced the fragility of society. On the faces of private individuals and movie heroes put together according to the patterns on magazine covers vanishes a pretense in which no one now believes; the popularity of the hero models comes partly from a secret satisfaction that the effort to achieve individuation has atlast been replaced by the effort to imitate, which is admittedly more breathless. It is idle to hope that this self-contradictory,disintegrating "person" will not last for generations, that thesystem must collapse because of such a psychological split, orthat the deceitful substitution of the stereotype for the individual will of itself become unbearable for mankind. SinceShakespeare's Hamlet, the unity of the personality has beenseen through as a pretense. Synthetically produced physiognomies show that the people of today have already forgotten thatthere was ever a notion of what human life was. For centuriessociety has been preparing for Victor Mature and MickeyRooney. By destroying they come to fulfill.The idolization of the cheap involves making the average theheroic. The highest-paid stars resemble pictures advertising unspecified proprietary articles. Not without good purpose arethey often selected from the host of commercial models. Theprevailing taste takes its ideal from advertising, the beauty inconsumption. Hence the Socratic saying that the beautiful is theuseful has now been fulfilledÑironically. The cinema makespropaganda for the culture combine as a whole; on radio, goodsfor whose sake the cultural commodity exists are also recommended individually. For a few coins one can see the film whichcost millions, for even less one can buy the chewing gum whosemanufacture involved immense richesÑa hoard increased stillfurther by sales. In absentia, but by universal suffrage, thetreasure of armies is revealed, but prostitution is not allowedinside the country. The best orchestras in the worldÑclearlynot soÑare brought into your living room free of charge. It isall a parody of the never-never land, just as the national societyis a parody of the human society. You name it, we supply it. Aman up from the country remarked at the old Berlin Metropoltheater that it was astonishing what they could do for themoney; his comment has long since been adopted by the cultureindustry and made the very substance of production. This isalways coupled with the triumph that it is possible; but this, inlarge measure, is the very triumph. Putting on a show meansshowing everybody what there is, and what can be achieved.Even today it is still a fair, but incurably sick with culture. Justas the people who had been attracted by the fairground barkersovercame their disappointment in the booths with a brave smile,because they really knew in advance what would happen, so themovie-goer sticks knowingly to the institution. With the cheapness of mass-produce luxury goods and its complement, theuniversal swindle, a change in the character of the art commodity itself is coming about. What is new is not that it is acommodity, but that today it deliberately admits it is one; thatart renounces its own autonomy and proudly takes its placeamong consumption goods constitutes the charm of novelty. Artas a separate sphere was always possible only in a bourgeoissociety. Even as a negation of that social purposiveness which isspreading through the market, its freedom remains essentiallybound up with the premise of a commodity economy. Pureworks of art which deny the commodity society by the veryfact that they obey their own law were always wares all thesame. In so far as, until the eighteenth century, the buyer's patronage shielded the artist from the market, they were dependenton the buyer and his objectives. The purposelessness of thegreat modern work of art depends on the anonymity of themarket. Its demands pass through so many intermediaries thatthe artist is exempt from any definite requirementsÑthoughadmittedly only to a certain degree, for throughout the wholehistory of the bourgeoisie his autonomy was only tolerated, andthus contained an element of untruth which ultimately led tothe social liquidation of art. When mortally sick, Beethovenhurled away a novel by Sir Walter Scott with the cry: "Why,the fellow writes for money," and yet proved a most experi-enced and stubborn businessman in disposing of the last quar-tets, which were a most extreme renunciation of the market; heis the most outstanding example of the unity of those opposites,market and independence, in bourgeois art. Those who succumb to the ideology are precisely those who cover up the contradiction instead of taking it into the consciousness of their own production as Beethoven did: he went on to express in music his anger at losing a few pence, and derived the metaphysical Es Muss Sein (which attempts an aesthetic banishmentof the pressure of the world by taking it into itself) from thehousekeeper's demand for her monthly wages. The principle of idealistic aestheticsÑpurposefulness without a purposeÑreverses the scheme of things to which bourgeois art conforms socially: purposelessness for the purposes declared by the market. At last, in the demand for entertainment and relaxation, purpose has absorbed the realm of purposelessness. But as the insistence that art should be disposable in terms of money becomes absolute, a shift in the internal structure of culturalcommodities begins to show itself. The use which men in thisantagonistic society promise themselves from the work of art isitself, to a great extent, that very existence of the useless whichis abolished by complete inclusion under use. The work of art,by completely assimilating itself to need, deceitfully deprivesmen of precisely that liberation from the principle of utility which it should inaugurate. What might be called use value in the reception of cultural commodities is replaced by exchange value; in place of enjoyment there are gallery-visiting and factual knowledge: the prestige seeker replaces the connoisseur. The consumer becomes the ideology of the pleasure industry, whose institutions he cannot escape. One simply "has to" have seen Mrs. Miniver, just as one "has to" subscribe to Life andTime. Everything is looked at from only one aspect: that it canbe used for something else, however vague the notion of this usemay be. No object has an inherent value; it is valuable only tothe extent that it can be exchanged. The use value of art, itsmode of being, is treated as a fetish; and the fetish, the work'ssocial rating (misinterpreted as its artistic status) becomes itsuse valueÑthe only quality which is enjoyed. The commodityfunction of art disappears only to be wholly realized when artbecomes a species of commodity instead, marketable and inter-changeable like an industrial product. But art as a type ofproduct which existed to be sold and yet to be unsaleable iswholly and hypocritically converted into "unsaleability" as soonas the transaction ceases to be the mere intention and becomesits sole principle. No tickets could be bought when Toscaniniconducted over the radio; he was heard without charge, andevery sound of the symphony was accompanied, as it were, bythe sublime puff that the symphony was not interrupted by anyadvertising: "This concert is brought to you as a public service." The illusion was made possible by the profits of the united automobile and soap manufacturers, whose payments keep the radio stations goingÑand, of course, by the increased sales of the electrical industry, which manufactures the radio sets. Radio, the progressive latecomer of mass culture, draws all the consequences at present denied the film by its pseudomarket. The technical structure of the commercial radio systemmakes it immune from liberal deviations such as those themovie industrialists can still permit themselves in their ownsphere. It is a private enterprise which really does represent thesovereign whole and is therefore some distance ahead of theother individual combines. Chesterfield is merely the nation'scigarette, but the radio is the voice of the nation. In bringingcultural products wholly into the sphere of commodities, radiodoes not try to dispose of its culture goods themselves as commodities straight to the consumer. In America it collects no fees from the public, and so has acquired the illusory form of disinterested, unbiased authority which suits Fascism admirably. The radio becomes the universal mouthpiece of the Fuhrer; his voice rises from street loud-speakers to resemble the howling of sirens announcing panicÑfrom which modern propaganda can scarcely be distinguished anyway. The National Socialists knewthat the wireless gave shape to their cause just as the printingpress did to the Reformation. The metaphysical charisma of theFuhrer invented by the sociology of religion has finally turnedout to be no more than the omnipresence of his speeches on theradio, which are a demoniacal parody of the omnipresence ofthe divine spirit. The gigantic fact that the speech penetrateseverywhere replaces its content, just as the benefaction of theToscanini broadcast takes the place of the symphony. No lis-tener can grasp its true meaning any longer, while the Fuehrer'sspeech is lies anyway. The inherent tendency of radio is tomake the speaker's word, the false commandment, absolute. Arecommendation becomes an order. The recommendation of thesame commodities under different proprietary names, the scientifically based praise of the laxative in the announcer's smoothvoice between the overture from La Traviata and that fromRienzi is the only thing that no longer works, because of itssilliness. One day the edict of production, the actual advertisement (whose actuality is at present concealed by the pretense of a choice) can turn into the open command of the Fuehrer. In a society of huge Fascist rackets which agree among themselves what part of the social product should be allotted to the nation's needs, it would eventually seem anachronistic to recommend the use of a particular soap powder. The Fuehrer is more up-to-date in unceremoniously giving direct orders for both the holocaust and the supply of rubbish.Even today the culture industry dresses works of art like political slogans and forces them upon a resistant public at reduced prices; they are as accessible for public enjoyment as a park. But the disappearance of their genuine commodity character does not mean that they have been abolished in the life of a free society, but that the last defense against their reduction to culture goods has fallen. The abolition of educational privilege by the device of clearance sales does not open for the masses the spheres from which they were formerly excluded, but, givenexisting social conditions, contributes directly to the decay ofeducation and the progress of barbaric meaninglessness. Thosewho spent their money in the nineteenth or the early twentiethcentury to see a play or to go to a concert respected the performance as much as the money they spent. The bourgeois who wanted to get something out of it tried occasionally to establish some rapport with the work. Evidence for this is to be found in the literary "introductions" to works, or in the commentaries on Faust. These were the first steps toward the biographical coating and other practices to which a work of art is subjected today. Even in the early, prosperous days of business, exchange- value did carry use value as a mere appendix but had developedit as a prerequisite for its own existence; this was socially helpful for works of art. Art exercised some restraint on the bourgeois as long as it cost money. That is now a thing of the past. Now that it has lost every restraint and there is no need to pay any money, the proximity of art to those who are exposed to it completes the alienation and assimilates one to the other under the banner of triumphant objectivity. Criticism and respect disappear in the culture industry; the former becomes a mechanical expertise, the latter is succeeded by a shallow cult of leading personalities. Consumers now find nothing expensive. Nevertheless, they suspect that the less anything costs, the less it isbeing given them. The double mistrust of traditional culture asideology is combined with mistrust of industrialized culture as aswindle. When thrown in free, the now debased works of art,together with the rubbish to which the medium assimilatesthem, are secretly rejected by the fortunate recipients, who aresupposed to be satisfied by the mere fact that there is so muchto be seen and heard. Everything can be obtained. The screenosand vaudevilles in the movie theater, the competitions for guessing music, the free books, rewards and gifts offered on certainradio programs, are not mere accidents but a continuation ofthe practice obtaining with culture products. The symphony becomes a reward for listening to the radio, andÑif technologyhad its wayÑthe film would be delivered to people's homes ashappens with the radio. It is moving toward the commercialsystem. Television points the way to a development which mighteasily enough force the Warner Brothers into what would certainly be the unwelcome position of serious musicians and cultural conservatives. But the gift system has already taken hold among consumers. As culture is represented as a bonus with undoubted private and social advantages, they have to seize the chance. They rush in lest they miss something. Exactlywhat, is not clear, but in any case the only ones with a chanceare the participants. Fascism, however, hopes to use the training the culture industry has given these recipients of gifts, inorder to organize them into its own forced battalions.Culture is a paradoxical commodity. So completely is it subjectto the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is soblindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used. Therefore it amalgamates with advertising. The more meaningless the latter seems to be under a monopoly, the more omnipotent it becomes. The motives are markedly economic. One could certainly live without the culture industry, therefore it necessarily creates too much satiation and apathy. In itself, it has few resources itself to correct this. Advertising is its elixir of life. But as its product never fails to reduce to a mere promise the enjoyment which it promises as a commodity, it eventually coincides with publicity, which it needs because it cannot be enjoyed.In a competitive society, advertising performed the social service of informing the buyer about the market; it made choiceeasier and helped the unknown but more efficient supplier todispose of his goods. Far from costing time, it saved it. Today,when the free market is coming to an end, those who controlthe system are entrenching themselves in it. It strengthens thefirm bond between the consumers and the big combines. Onlythose who can pay the exorbitant rates charged by the advertising agencies, chief of which are the radio networks themselves; that is, only those who are already in a position to doso, or are co-opted by the decision of the banks and industrialcapital, can enter the pseudo-market as sellers. The costs of advertising, which finally flow back into the pockets of the combines, make it unnecessary to defeat unwelcome outsidersby laborious competition. They guarantee that power will remain in the same handsÑnot unlike those economic decisionsby which the establishment and running of undertakings is controlled in a totalitarian state. Advertising today is a negativeprinciple, a blocking device: everything that does not bear itsstamp is economically suspect. Universal publicity is in no way necessary for people to get to know the kinds of goods whose supply is restricted anyway. It helps sales only indirectly. For aparticular firm, to phase out a current advertising practice constitutes a loss of prestige, and a breach of the discipline imposed by the influential clique on its members. In wartime, goods which are unobtainable are still advertised, merely to keep industrial power in view. Subsidizing ideological media ismore important than the repetition of the name. Because thesystem obliges every product to use advertising, it has permeatedthe idiomÑthe "style" of the culture industry. Its victory isso complete that it is no longer evident in the key positions:the huge buildings of the top men, floodlit stone advertisements,are free of advertising; at most they exhibit on the rooftops, inmonumental brilliance and without any self-glorification, thefirm's initials. But, in contrast, the nineteenth-century houses,whose architecture still shamefully indicates that they can beused as a consumption commodity and are intended to be livedin, are covered with posters and inscriptions from the groundright up to and beyond the roof: until they become no morethan backgrounds for bills and sign-boards. Advertising becomes art and nothing else, just as Goebbels with foresight combines them: l'art pour l'art, advertising for its own sake, apure representation of social power. In the most influential American magazines, Life and Fortune, a quick glance can now scarcely distinguish advertising from editorial picture and text.The latter features an enthusiastic and gratuitous account of the great man (with illustrations of his life and grooming habits) which will bring him new fans, while the advertisement pages use so many factual photographs and details that they represent the ideal of information which the editorial part has only begunto try to achieve. The assembly-line character of the culture industry, the synthetic, planned method of turning out its products (factory-like not only in the studio but, more or less, in the compilation of cheap biographies, pseudodocumentary novels, and hit songs) is very suited to advertising: the important individual points, by becoming detachable, interchangeable, and even technically alienated from any connected meaning, lend themselves to ends external to the work. The effect, the trick,the isolated repeatable device, have always been used to exhibitgoods for advertising purposes, and today every monsterclose-up of a star is an advertisement for her name, and everyhit song a plug for its tune. Advertising and the culture industrymerge technically as well as economically. In both cases thesame thing can be seen in innumerable places, and the mechanical repetition of the same culture product has come to be thesame as that of the propaganda slogan. In both cases the insistent demand for effectiveness makes technology into psycho-technology, into a procedure for manipulating men. In bothcases the standards are the striking yet familiar, the easy yetcatchy, the skillful yet simple; the object is to overpower thecustomer, who is conceived as absent-minded or resistant.By the language he speaks, he makes his own contribution toculture as publicity. The more completely language is lost inthe announcement, the more words are debased as substantialvehicles of meaning and become signs devoid of quality; themore purely and transparently words communicate what is intended, the more impenetrable they become. The demytholo-gization of language, taken as an element of the whole processof enlightenment, is a relapse into magic. Word and essentialcontent were distinct yet inseparable from one another. Concepts like melancholy and history, even life, were recognized inthe word, which separated them out and preserved them. Itsform simultaneously constituted and reflected them. The absolute separation, which makes the moving accidental and itsrelation to the object arbitrary, puts an end to the superstitiousfusion of word and thing. Anything in a determined literal sequence which goes beyond the correlation to the event is rejected as unclear and as verbal metaphysics. But the result isthat the word, which can now be only a sign without any meaning, becomes so fixed to the thing that it is just a petrified formula. This affects language and object alike. Instead of makingthe object experiential, the purified word treats it as an abstractinstance, and everything else (now excluded by the demand forruthless clarity from expression itself now banished) fades away in reality. A left-half at football, a black-shirt, a memberof the Hitler Youth, and so on, are no more than names. If be-fore its rationalization the word had given rise to lies as well asto longing, now, after its rationalization, it is a straitjacket forlonging more even than for lies. The blindness and dumbnessof the data to which positivism reduces the world pass over intolanguage itself, which restricts itself to recording those data.Terms themselves become impenetrable; they obtain a strikingforce, a power of adhesion and repulsion which makes themlike their extreme opposite, incantations. They come to be akind of trick, because the name of the prima donna is cookedup in the studio on a statistical basis, or because a welfare stateis anathematized by using taboo terms such as "bureaucrats"or "intellectuals," or because base practice uses the name of thecountry as a charm. In general, the name to which magic most easily attaches is undergoing a chemical change: a metamorphosis into capricious, manipulable designations, whose effectis admittedly now calculable, but which for that very reason isjust as despotic as that of the archaic name. First names, thosearchaic remnants, have been brought up to date either by stylization as advertising trade-marks (film stars' surnames havebecome first names), or by collective standardization. In comparison, the bourgeois family name which, instead of being atrade-mark, once individualized its bearer by relating him to hisown past history, seems antiquated. It arouses a strange embarrassment in Americans. In order to hide the awkward distance between individuals, they call one another "Bob" and "Harry,"as interchangeable team members. This practice reduces relations between human beings to the good fellowship of the sporting community and is a defense against the true kind of relationship. Signification, which is the only function of a word admitted by semantics, reaches perfection in the sign. Whether folksongs were rightly or wrongly called upper-class culture in decay, their elements have only acquired their popular form through a long process of repeated transmission. The spread of popular songs, on the other hand, takes place at lightningspeed. The American expression "fad," used for fashions which appear like epidemics that is, inflamed by highly-concentrated economic forces, designated this phenomenon long before totalitarian advertising bosses enforced the general lines of culture. When the German Fascists decide one day to launch a word, say, "intolerable", over the loudspeakers the next day the whole nation is saying "intolerable." By the same pattern, the nations against whom the weight of the German "blitzkrieg" was thrown took the word into their own jargon. The generalrepetition of names for measures to be taken by the authoritiesmakes them, so to speak, familiar, just as the brand name oneverybody's lips increased sales in the era of the free market.The blind and rapidly spreading repetition of words with special designations links advertising with the totalitarian watchword. The layer of experience which created the words fortheir speakers has been removed; in this swift appropriationlanguage acquires the coldness which until now it had only onbillboards and in the advertisement columns of newspapers. Innumerable people use words and expressions which they haveeither ceased to understand or employ only because they triggeroff conditioned reflexes; in this sense, words are trade-markswhich are finally all the more firmly linked to the things theydenote, the less their linguistic sense is grasped. The minister formass education talks incomprehendingly of "dynamic forces,"and the hit songs unceasingly celebrate "reverie" and "rhapsody,"yet base their popularity precisely on the rnagic of the unintel-ligible as creating the thrill of a more exalted life. Other stereo-types, such as memory, are still partly comprehended, butescape from the experience which might allow them content.They appear like enclaves in the spoken language. On the radioof Flesch and Hitler they may be recognized from the affectedpronunciation of the announcer when he says to the nation,"Good night, everybody!" or "This is the Hitler Youth," andeven intones "the Fuehrer" in a way imitated by millions. In suchcliches the last bond between sedimentary experience and language is severed which still had a reconciling effect in dialect inthe nineteenth century. But in the prose of the journalist whoseadaptable attitude led to his appointment as an all-German editor, the German words become petrified, alien terms. Everyword shows how far it has been debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community. By now, of course, this kind of language isalready universal, totalitarian. All the violence done to words isso vile that one can hardly bear to hear them any longer. Theannouncer does not need to speak pompously; he would indeedbe impossible if his inflection were different from that of hisparticular audience. But, as against that, the language and gestures of the audience and spectators are colored more stronglythan ever before by the culture industry, even in fine nuanceswhich cannot yet be explained experimentally. Today the culture industry has taken over the civilizing inheritance of the entrepreneurial and frontier democracy whose appreciation of intellectual deviations was never very finely attuned. All are free to dance and enjoy themselves, just as they have been free,since the historical neutralization of religion, to join any of the innumerable sects. But freedom to choose an ideology since ideology always reflects economic coercion everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same. The way in which a girl accepts and keeps the obligatory date, the inflection on the telephone or in the most intimate situation, the choice of words in conversation, and the whole inner life as classified by the now somewhat devalued depth psychology, bear witness to man's attempt to make himself a proficient apparatus, similar (even in emotions) to the model served up by the culture industry. The most intimate reactions of human beings have been so thoroughly reified that the idea of anything specific to themselves now persists only as an utterly abstract notion: personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions. The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
1. Nietzsche, Unzeitgemaesse Betrachtungen, Werke, Vol. I (Leipzig,1917), p. 187.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Democracie en Amerique, Vol. II(Paris, 1864), p. 151.
3. Frank Wedekind, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. IX (Munich, 1921), p.426.
4. Nietzsche, Gotzenddmmerung, Werke, Vol. VIII, p. 136.
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