To wait, to stand strolling the world with your mind,
Earth beneath you, pushing you to attend to something grand,
Touching the dust in your pocket, your fingers feel the only world that is,
The counting down till, is filled with those walks you take in your mind,
Coming closer to the time of encounter with the moment meet to come,
You imagine the world that will be in the next couple of minutes,
The anticipation kills you,
The expected image may disappoint and that makes your fingers sweat,
The dust now attached to your finger, your steps take your heart in circular shapes.
Awaiting the greeting time, you struggle with your own fear of saying bye,
Simplicity is all you praise but your approach so complicated all the time,
Correspondence of two minds, the authenticity you offer is too much,
Games are played and games are played thus,
You have to pick up a stick and swing a stick.
How should he communicate it to you that he dreams of the perfect greeting time,
When all you anticipate is the time of goodbye?
Its only been a minute in this valley we call life,
Its only been a drop in this pond set cause of a dam.
Coming together slowly, but answers and seeds fruit soon
and you by necessity will never be satisfied till that first perfect bite.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Exerpts from "The Culture Industry"
In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer display the modern man as a determined being, encapsulated in the cocoon that enlighten schematization has fabricated for it.
Summary of, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
120)
- Culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.
- Yet the city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary: the absolute power of capitalism.
- Living units crystallize into well organized complexes.
121)
- The false identity of the general and the particular
- Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce.
- Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms.
- Identical needs: identical goods
- Large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organization and planning by management.
- It is claimed the standards were based in the first place on consumers needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance.
- Circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger.
- Power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest.
- Technological rationale is the rationale of domination. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. It is due to standardization and mass production. It is due to the control of the individual consciousness.
122)
- All deemed to be the same and individuals are denied freedom to deviate.
- Any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is controlled and absorbed.
- The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favors the system of culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it.
- 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.
123)
- The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the whose sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven.
- 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 mass is catered for with 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.
- Products prove to be all alike.
124)
- Psychological formulas are secrets deciphered
- Media is 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.
- Triumph of invested capital
- 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. The industry does the schematizing for him.
125)
- The inescapable force is processed by commercial agencies so that they give an artificial impression of being in command.
- Nothing left for the consumer to classify.
- Everything derives from consciousness: for Malebranche and Berkley, from consciousness of God; in mass art, from the consciousness of the production team.
- As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end.
- 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.
- 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.
o Ex) modern music production
- 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.
126)
- Dialectic and progression in art 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.
- 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 that the sum of all those idiotic events.
- Dominant idea is to ensure order not coherence, for there is no antithesis, no connection and no dialectic harmony. Their prearranged harmony is a mockery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works of art.
- Intent upon reproducing the world of every day perceptions, 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.
- Mechanical reproduction of the empirical world has made real life indistinguishable from the movies.
- Films leave no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience. The audience 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.
127)
- Sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.
- 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 screening.
- They react automatically.
- The entertainment manufacturers know that their products will be consumed with alertness even when the customer is distraught, for each of them is a model of the huge economic machinery which has always sustained the masses, whether at work or at leisure- which is akin to work.
- The culture industry has molded man as a type.
- 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 pre-capitalist.
128)
- 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.
o Ex) like a child’s crib
- Everything is shaped accordingly. There is no room for chance and spontaneity.
- Contra avant-garde
- The constant pressure to produce new effects 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.
- The more technique is perfected and diminishes the tension between the furnished product and everyday life. The paradox of this routine is essentially a travesty.
129)
- Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is forgiven because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system.
- The producers are experts. The idiom demands an astounding productive power, which it absorbs and squanders.
- In a diabolic 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.
- Hence the style of the culture industry, which no longer has to test itself against any refractory material, is also the negation of style.
130)
- 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 great artists were never those who embodied a wholly flawless and perfect style, but those who used style as a way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth. The style of their works gave what was expressed that force without which life flows away unheard.
- The great artists have retained a mistrust of style, and at crucial points have subordinated it to the logic of the matter.
- Style represents a promise in every work of art. This promise held out by the work of art that it will create truth by lending new shape to the conventional social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical
131)
- 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 appeals: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity.
- Having ceased to be anything but style, it reveals the latter’s secret: obedience to the social hierarchy.
- This is aesthetic barbarity.
- To speak of culture was always contrary to culture. Culture as a common denominator already contains embryo that schematization and process of cataloging and classification which bring culture within the sphere of administration. And it is precisely the industrialized, the consequent, subsumbtion which entirely accords with this notion of culture.
- By subordinating in the same way and to the same end all areas of intellectual creation, by occupying men’s senses from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again in the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the labor process they themselves have to sustain throughout the day, this subsumbtion mockingly satisfies the concept of a unified culture which the philosophers of personality contrasted with mass culture.
- So the culture industry, the most rigid of all styles, proves to be the goal of liberalism, which is reproached for its lack of style.
132)
- Anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in.
- The public voices of modern society accusations are seldom audible; if they are, the perspective can already detect signs that the dissident will soon be reconciled.
- The more immeasurable the gap between chorus and leaders, the more certainly there is room at the top for everybody who demonstrates his superiority by well-planned originality.
- Significantly, the system of the culture industry comes from the more liberal industrial nations, and its entire characteristics media, such as movies, radio and magazines.
- Its progress, to be sure, had its origin in the general laws of capital.
- It was pre-Fascist Europe which did not keep up with the trend toward the culture monopoly. But it was this very lag which left intellect and creativity some degree of independence and enabled its last representatives to exist.
133)
- Freedom from the forces of power which dominates the market, just as princes and feudal lords had done up to the nineteenth century. This strengthened art in this late phase against the verdict of supply and demand, and increased its resistance far beyond the actual degree of protection.
- What completely fettered the artist was the pressure and threats, always to fit into business life as an aesthetic expert.
- Tyranny leaves the body free and directs its attack at the soul. The ruler no longer says: you must think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a stranger among us.
- Not to conform means to be rendered powerless, economically and therefore spiritually.
- The consumers are the workers and employees, the farmers and lower middle class. Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them.
134)
- Immovably, the common people insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.
- By craftily sanctioning the demand for rubbish it inaugurates total harmony.
- Constant reproduction of the same thing: Standardized average of late liberal taste, dictates with threats from above.
- Tempo and dynamics serve this trend.
135)
- One might think that an omnipresent authority had sifted the material and drawn up an official catalog of cultural commodities to provide a smooth supply of available mass produced lines.
- Clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consumption.
- It enjoys a double victory: the truth it extinguishes without it can reproduce at will as a lie within.
- “Light” art is a distraction.
- Serious art has been withheld from those for whom the hardship and oppression of life make a mockery of seriousness, and who must be glad if they use time not spent at the production line just to keep going. Light art has been the shadow of autonomous art. It is the social bad conscience of serious art.
136)
- The culture industry did away with yesterday’s rubbish by its own perfection, and by forbidding and domesticating the amateurish.
- 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.
- Interest of innumerable consumers is directed to the technique, and not to the contents.
- The social power which the spectators worship shows itself more effectively in the omnipresence of the stereotype imposed by technical skill than in the stale ideologies for which the ephemeral contents stand in.
- The culture industry remains the entertainment business.
- Demand will ultimately be replaced by simple obedience.
- Captains of the industry control the sway of bourgeois art.
137)
- The power of the culture industry resides in its identification with a manufactured need, and not in simple contrast to it, even if this contrast were one of complete powerlessness.
- Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be to cope with it again.
- Mechanization has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after images of the work process itself.
- The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardized operations.
- What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time.
- All amusement suffers from this incurable malady. Pleasure hardens into boredom because if it is to remain pleasure, it must not demand any effort and therefore moves rigorously in the worn grooves of association.
- No independent thinking must be expected from the audience: the product prescribes every reaction: not by its natural structure, but by signals.
- Mental effort is painstakingly avoided.
138)
- Slapstick comedy and cartoons
- Accustom the sense to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society.
139)
- Distraction into exertion: Nothing that the experts have devised as a stimulant must escape the weary eye; no stupidity is allowed in the face of all the trickery; one has to follow everything and even display the smart responses shown and recommended in the film.
- To walk from the street into the movie theatre is no longer to enter a world of dream.
- The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises.
- Metaphor The diner must be satisfied with the menu. In front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape.
140)
- The culture industry does not sublimate, it represses.
- Works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish.
- Mechanical reproduction of beauty, which reactionary cultural fanaticism wholeheartedly serves in its methodical idolization of individuality, leaves no room for that unconscious idolatry which once essential to beauty.
- Laughter, whether conciliatory or terrible, always occurs when some fear passes. It indicates liberation either from physical danger or from the grip of logic.
- 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 practiced on happiness.
141)
- 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 scruple when the social occasion arises. Such a laughing audience is a parody of humanity. Its 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 v. laughter.
- In the culture industry, jovial denial takes the place of the pain found in ecstasy and in asceticism. The supreme law is that they shall not satisfy their desires at any price; they must laugh and be content with laughter.
- What is decisive today is no longer Puritanism, although it still assets 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.
142)
- 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.
- Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought to help to forget.
- Amusement, if released from every restraint, would not only be the antithesis of art but its extreme role.
- 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, and yet misuses as a mere pretext for bringing in the stars.
- 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 clichés of a culture in the process of self-liquidation.
143)
- The culture industry is corrupt; not because it I a sinful Babylon but because it is a cathedral dedicated to elevated pleasure.
- The fusion of culture and entertainment that is taking place today leads not only to deprivation of culture, but inevitably to and intellectualization of amusement.
- Amusement itself becomes an ideal, taking the place of the higher things which it completely deprives the masses by repeating them in a manner even more stereotyped than the slogans paid for by advertising interests.
144)
- Genuine personal emotion in real life can be all the more reliably controlled.
- 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.
- But the original affinity of business and amusement is shown in the latter’s specific signification: to defend society. To be pleased means to say yes.
- Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. It is helplessness.
- The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation.
145)
- Those discovered by talent scouts and then publicized on a vast scale by the studio are ideal types of the new dependent average.
- The girls in the audience not only feel that they 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 the same 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 somehow never is.
- The lucky actors on the screen are copies of the same category as ever member of the public, but such quality only demonstrates the insurmountable separation of the human elements.
- The perfect similarity is the absolute difference. The identity of the category forbids that of the individual cases.
- Ironically, man as a member of a species has been made a reality by the culture industry.
- Now any person signifies only those attributes by which he can replace everybody else: he is interchangeable, a copy. As an individual he is completely expendable and utterly insignificant.
146)
- Increasing emphasis is laid not on the path of hardship and success but on winning a prize.
147)
- 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.
- As employees, men are reminded of the rational organization and urged to fit in like sensible people.
- As customers, the freedom of choice, the charm of novelty is demonstrated to them on the screen or in the press by means of the human and personal anecdote.
- Language based entirely on truth simply arouses impatience to get on with the business deal it is probably advancing.
- Value judgments are taken either as advertising or as empty talk.
- It’s very vagueness; it’s 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 status quo; the embodiment of authoritative pronouncements and thus the irrefutable prophet of the prevailing order.
- It skillfully steers a winding course between the cliffs of demonstrable misinformation and manifest truth, faithfully reproducing the phenomenon whose opaqueness blocks any insight and installs the ubiquitous and intact phenomenon as ideal.
- Ideology is split into photograph of stubborn life and the naked lie about its meaning.
148)
- The only choice is either to join in or to be left behind: those provincials who have recourse to eternal beauty and the amateur stage in preference to the cinema and the radio are already at the point to which mass culture drives its supporters.
- 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.
- Whatever the camera produces is beautiful.
- Continuing and continuing to join in are given as justification for the blind persistence of the system and even for its immutability.
- The bread which the culture industry offers man is the stone of the stereotype.
149)
- Nature is viewed by the mechanism of social domination as a healthy contrast to society, and is therefore denatured.
- 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.
- The enemy who is already defeated, the thinking individual, is the enemy fought.
- 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.
150)
- 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.
- It is part of the irrational planning of this society that it reproduces to a certain degree only the lives of its faithful members.
- Anyone who goes cold and hungry, even if his prospects were once good, is branded.
- The most mortal of sins is to be an outsider.
- The individual’s position becomes precarious.
- Human solidarity of men in a world of the efficient.
Summary of, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
120)
- Culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.
- Yet the city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary: the absolute power of capitalism.
- Living units crystallize into well organized complexes.
121)
- The false identity of the general and the particular
- Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce.
- Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms.
- Identical needs: identical goods
- Large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organization and planning by management.
- It is claimed the standards were based in the first place on consumers needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance.
- Circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger.
- Power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest.
- Technological rationale is the rationale of domination. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. It is due to standardization and mass production. It is due to the control of the individual consciousness.
122)
- All deemed to be the same and individuals are denied freedom to deviate.
- Any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is controlled and absorbed.
- The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favors the system of culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it.
- 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.
123)
- The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the whose sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven.
- 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 mass is catered for with 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.
- Products prove to be all alike.
124)
- Psychological formulas are secrets deciphered
- Media is 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.
- Triumph of invested capital
- 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. The industry does the schematizing for him.
125)
- The inescapable force is processed by commercial agencies so that they give an artificial impression of being in command.
- Nothing left for the consumer to classify.
- Everything derives from consciousness: for Malebranche and Berkley, from consciousness of God; in mass art, from the consciousness of the production team.
- As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end.
- 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.
- 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.
o Ex) modern music production
- 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.
126)
- Dialectic and progression in art 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.
- 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 that the sum of all those idiotic events.
- Dominant idea is to ensure order not coherence, for there is no antithesis, no connection and no dialectic harmony. Their prearranged harmony is a mockery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works of art.
- Intent upon reproducing the world of every day perceptions, 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.
- Mechanical reproduction of the empirical world has made real life indistinguishable from the movies.
- Films leave no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience. The audience 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.
127)
- Sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.
- 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 screening.
- They react automatically.
- The entertainment manufacturers know that their products will be consumed with alertness even when the customer is distraught, for each of them is a model of the huge economic machinery which has always sustained the masses, whether at work or at leisure- which is akin to work.
- The culture industry has molded man as a type.
- 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 pre-capitalist.
128)
- 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.
o Ex) like a child’s crib
- Everything is shaped accordingly. There is no room for chance and spontaneity.
- Contra avant-garde
- The constant pressure to produce new effects 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.
- The more technique is perfected and diminishes the tension between the furnished product and everyday life. The paradox of this routine is essentially a travesty.
129)
- Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is forgiven because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system.
- The producers are experts. The idiom demands an astounding productive power, which it absorbs and squanders.
- In a diabolic 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.
- Hence the style of the culture industry, which no longer has to test itself against any refractory material, is also the negation of style.
130)
- 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 great artists were never those who embodied a wholly flawless and perfect style, but those who used style as a way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth. The style of their works gave what was expressed that force without which life flows away unheard.
- The great artists have retained a mistrust of style, and at crucial points have subordinated it to the logic of the matter.
- Style represents a promise in every work of art. This promise held out by the work of art that it will create truth by lending new shape to the conventional social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical
131)
- 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 appeals: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity.
- Having ceased to be anything but style, it reveals the latter’s secret: obedience to the social hierarchy.
- This is aesthetic barbarity.
- To speak of culture was always contrary to culture. Culture as a common denominator already contains embryo that schematization and process of cataloging and classification which bring culture within the sphere of administration. And it is precisely the industrialized, the consequent, subsumbtion which entirely accords with this notion of culture.
- By subordinating in the same way and to the same end all areas of intellectual creation, by occupying men’s senses from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again in the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the labor process they themselves have to sustain throughout the day, this subsumbtion mockingly satisfies the concept of a unified culture which the philosophers of personality contrasted with mass culture.
- So the culture industry, the most rigid of all styles, proves to be the goal of liberalism, which is reproached for its lack of style.
132)
- Anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in.
- The public voices of modern society accusations are seldom audible; if they are, the perspective can already detect signs that the dissident will soon be reconciled.
- The more immeasurable the gap between chorus and leaders, the more certainly there is room at the top for everybody who demonstrates his superiority by well-planned originality.
- Significantly, the system of the culture industry comes from the more liberal industrial nations, and its entire characteristics media, such as movies, radio and magazines.
- Its progress, to be sure, had its origin in the general laws of capital.
- It was pre-Fascist Europe which did not keep up with the trend toward the culture monopoly. But it was this very lag which left intellect and creativity some degree of independence and enabled its last representatives to exist.
133)
- Freedom from the forces of power which dominates the market, just as princes and feudal lords had done up to the nineteenth century. This strengthened art in this late phase against the verdict of supply and demand, and increased its resistance far beyond the actual degree of protection.
- What completely fettered the artist was the pressure and threats, always to fit into business life as an aesthetic expert.
- Tyranny leaves the body free and directs its attack at the soul. The ruler no longer says: you must think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a stranger among us.
- Not to conform means to be rendered powerless, economically and therefore spiritually.
- The consumers are the workers and employees, the farmers and lower middle class. Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them.
134)
- Immovably, the common people insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.
- By craftily sanctioning the demand for rubbish it inaugurates total harmony.
- Constant reproduction of the same thing: Standardized average of late liberal taste, dictates with threats from above.
- Tempo and dynamics serve this trend.
135)
- One might think that an omnipresent authority had sifted the material and drawn up an official catalog of cultural commodities to provide a smooth supply of available mass produced lines.
- Clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consumption.
- It enjoys a double victory: the truth it extinguishes without it can reproduce at will as a lie within.
- “Light” art is a distraction.
- Serious art has been withheld from those for whom the hardship and oppression of life make a mockery of seriousness, and who must be glad if they use time not spent at the production line just to keep going. Light art has been the shadow of autonomous art. It is the social bad conscience of serious art.
136)
- The culture industry did away with yesterday’s rubbish by its own perfection, and by forbidding and domesticating the amateurish.
- 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.
- Interest of innumerable consumers is directed to the technique, and not to the contents.
- The social power which the spectators worship shows itself more effectively in the omnipresence of the stereotype imposed by technical skill than in the stale ideologies for which the ephemeral contents stand in.
- The culture industry remains the entertainment business.
- Demand will ultimately be replaced by simple obedience.
- Captains of the industry control the sway of bourgeois art.
137)
- The power of the culture industry resides in its identification with a manufactured need, and not in simple contrast to it, even if this contrast were one of complete powerlessness.
- Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be to cope with it again.
- Mechanization has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after images of the work process itself.
- The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardized operations.
- What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time.
- All amusement suffers from this incurable malady. Pleasure hardens into boredom because if it is to remain pleasure, it must not demand any effort and therefore moves rigorously in the worn grooves of association.
- No independent thinking must be expected from the audience: the product prescribes every reaction: not by its natural structure, but by signals.
- Mental effort is painstakingly avoided.
138)
- Slapstick comedy and cartoons
- Accustom the sense to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society.
139)
- Distraction into exertion: Nothing that the experts have devised as a stimulant must escape the weary eye; no stupidity is allowed in the face of all the trickery; one has to follow everything and even display the smart responses shown and recommended in the film.
- To walk from the street into the movie theatre is no longer to enter a world of dream.
- The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises.
- Metaphor The diner must be satisfied with the menu. In front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape.
140)
- The culture industry does not sublimate, it represses.
- Works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish.
- Mechanical reproduction of beauty, which reactionary cultural fanaticism wholeheartedly serves in its methodical idolization of individuality, leaves no room for that unconscious idolatry which once essential to beauty.
- Laughter, whether conciliatory or terrible, always occurs when some fear passes. It indicates liberation either from physical danger or from the grip of logic.
- 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 practiced on happiness.
141)
- 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 scruple when the social occasion arises. Such a laughing audience is a parody of humanity. Its 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 v. laughter.
- In the culture industry, jovial denial takes the place of the pain found in ecstasy and in asceticism. The supreme law is that they shall not satisfy their desires at any price; they must laugh and be content with laughter.
- What is decisive today is no longer Puritanism, although it still assets 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.
142)
- 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.
- Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought to help to forget.
- Amusement, if released from every restraint, would not only be the antithesis of art but its extreme role.
- 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, and yet misuses as a mere pretext for bringing in the stars.
- 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 clichés of a culture in the process of self-liquidation.
143)
- The culture industry is corrupt; not because it I a sinful Babylon but because it is a cathedral dedicated to elevated pleasure.
- The fusion of culture and entertainment that is taking place today leads not only to deprivation of culture, but inevitably to and intellectualization of amusement.
- Amusement itself becomes an ideal, taking the place of the higher things which it completely deprives the masses by repeating them in a manner even more stereotyped than the slogans paid for by advertising interests.
144)
- Genuine personal emotion in real life can be all the more reliably controlled.
- 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.
- But the original affinity of business and amusement is shown in the latter’s specific signification: to defend society. To be pleased means to say yes.
- Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. It is helplessness.
- The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation.
145)
- Those discovered by talent scouts and then publicized on a vast scale by the studio are ideal types of the new dependent average.
- The girls in the audience not only feel that they 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 the same 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 somehow never is.
- The lucky actors on the screen are copies of the same category as ever member of the public, but such quality only demonstrates the insurmountable separation of the human elements.
- The perfect similarity is the absolute difference. The identity of the category forbids that of the individual cases.
- Ironically, man as a member of a species has been made a reality by the culture industry.
- Now any person signifies only those attributes by which he can replace everybody else: he is interchangeable, a copy. As an individual he is completely expendable and utterly insignificant.
146)
- Increasing emphasis is laid not on the path of hardship and success but on winning a prize.
147)
- 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.
- As employees, men are reminded of the rational organization and urged to fit in like sensible people.
- As customers, the freedom of choice, the charm of novelty is demonstrated to them on the screen or in the press by means of the human and personal anecdote.
- Language based entirely on truth simply arouses impatience to get on with the business deal it is probably advancing.
- Value judgments are taken either as advertising or as empty talk.
- It’s very vagueness; it’s 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 status quo; the embodiment of authoritative pronouncements and thus the irrefutable prophet of the prevailing order.
- It skillfully steers a winding course between the cliffs of demonstrable misinformation and manifest truth, faithfully reproducing the phenomenon whose opaqueness blocks any insight and installs the ubiquitous and intact phenomenon as ideal.
- Ideology is split into photograph of stubborn life and the naked lie about its meaning.
148)
- The only choice is either to join in or to be left behind: those provincials who have recourse to eternal beauty and the amateur stage in preference to the cinema and the radio are already at the point to which mass culture drives its supporters.
- 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.
- Whatever the camera produces is beautiful.
- Continuing and continuing to join in are given as justification for the blind persistence of the system and even for its immutability.
- The bread which the culture industry offers man is the stone of the stereotype.
149)
- Nature is viewed by the mechanism of social domination as a healthy contrast to society, and is therefore denatured.
- 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.
- The enemy who is already defeated, the thinking individual, is the enemy fought.
- 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.
150)
- 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.
- It is part of the irrational planning of this society that it reproduces to a certain degree only the lives of its faithful members.
- Anyone who goes cold and hungry, even if his prospects were once good, is branded.
- The most mortal of sins is to be an outsider.
- The individual’s position becomes precarious.
- Human solidarity of men in a world of the efficient.
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