Summary: Culture Industry: Enlightenment as

Mass Deception by Adorno and Horkheimer

"Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" is a chapter in Theodor Adorno
and Max Horkheimer's book "Dialectic of Enlightenment" which discusses their famous
notion of the "culture industry". In this chapter Adorno and Horkheimer view capitalist
society's culture industry as an aspect of the enlightenment has betrayed itself by
allowing instrumental logic to take over human social life (a notion developed
throughout "Dialectic of Enlightenment").

According to Adorno and Horkheimer culture industry is a main phenomenon of late

capitalism, one which encompasses all products and form of light entertainment – from
Hollywood films to elevator music. All these forms of popular culture are designed to
satisfy the growing needs of mass capitalistic consumers for entertainment. Adorno
specifically notes that the term "culture industry" was chosen over "mass culture" in
order to make sure that it is not understood as something which spontaneously stems
from the masses themselves.

Products of the culture economy take the appearance of artwork but are in fact
dependant on industry and economy, meaning they are subjected to the interests of
money and power. All products of the culture industry are designed for profit. According
to Adorno and Horkheimer this means that every work of art is turned into a consumer
product and is shaped by the logic of capitalist rationality (i.e. whatever sells best). Art is
no longer autonomous, but is rather a commodified product of the economic relations of
production.
The main argument of "Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" is that the
commodification of culture is the commodification of human conciseness. Adorno and
Horkheimer assert that culture industry eradicates autonomous thinking and criticism,
serving to preserve the reigning order. It provides easy entertainment which distracts
massed from the wrongs and sickness of the ruling order. They argue that culture
industry has taken over reality as the prism through which people experience reality,
thus completely shaping and conditioning their experience of life. In addition culture
industry serves to keep workers busy, as expressed by the famous quote from "Dialectic
of Enlightenment": "Amusement has become an extension of labor under late
capitalism". Popular culture appears to be offering a refuge and distraction for work, but
in fact it causes the worker to further dwell into a world of products and consumerism.
The only freedom culture industry has to really offer a freedom from thinking.

Adorno and Horkheimer claim that culture industry positions the masses ad objects of
manipulation (instead of just satisfying their wants and needs). This turns people into
passive and subordinated subjects, unable to fully take critical responsibility for their
own action, a thing which is crucial for a functioning democracy. People therefore gladly
give in a help maintain the system by taking part in it.

in "Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" Adorno and Horkheimer stress

the fact that culture industry uses a production-line mentality in producing cultural
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products. Seemingly all films and TV shows we watch are different, but in fact they
follow the same recycled formulas as in other types of consumer goods. Like
consumers goods, it feels like "there is something for everyone" here but in fact it's all
variations of the same thing. This is a main feature of the culture industry, for the fact
that all products are produced under the same scheme allows them to be "readable"
and effortlessly digested. This is how culture industry imposes conformity – with things
that only seem to be different but are in fact all (slight) variations of the same thing. The
final argument posed by Adorno and Horkheimer is that people under capitalism suffer
the same fate of art under the culture industry – they are reduced to the exchange value
with no intrinsic or unique traits as the Enlightenment dreamed.

Summary: The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction

February 28, 2008 by ginal

In his essay, “The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin

discusses a shift in perception and its affects in the wake of the advent of film and photography

in the twentieth century. He writes of the sense changes within humanity’s entire mode of

existence; the way we look and see the visual work of art has is different now and its

consequences remain to be determined. How does human sense perception related to history? Is

it a universal perspective that is being critiqued here? Can there be a universal perspective in the

first place?

Benjamin here attempts to mark something specific about the modern age; of the effects of

modernity on the work of art in particular. Film and photography point to this movement.

Benjamin writes of the loss of the aura through the mechanical reproduction of art itself. The

aura for Benjamin represents the originality and authenticity of a work of art that has not been

reproduced. A painting as an aura while a photograph does not; the photograph is an image of

an image while the painting remains utterly original.

The sense of the aura is lost on film and the reproducible image itself demonstrates a historical

shift that we have to take account of even if when we don’t necessarily notice it. What does it

mean when the aura is lost? How does it function and how does it come about? Benjamin writes

of the loss of the aura as a loss of a singular authority within the work of art itself. But what

comes through in this new space left by the death to the aura? How does the mechanically

reproduced work of art manage to make up for this void?

As Benjamin continues, a tension between new modes of perception and the aura arise. The

removal of authority within the original work of art infers a loss of authority, however, in regards

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to mass consumption, this liberation is not necessarily contingent. The cameraman, for example,

intervenes with what we see in a way which a painting can never do. It directs the eye towards a

specific place and a specific story; at the same time it is radical and revolutionary it is also

totalitarian. It guides us to a particular side of a story and leaves other parts out. It dulls our

perception towards the work of art and introduces distraction as a mode of reception. The

location of anything we might call the aura has to be moved into a mythological space; into the

cult of genius. This cult of genius relates back to the cultish characteristic of the aura itself; in its

absence there is a grabbling for a replacement. What does it mean to place an aura on

“someone” or “something”? Is it even necessary to reclaim the aura in the first place? The

mystical cult of the original in broken with the loss of the aura, and now every one can go to a

gallery, a museum, the theater or the cinema. A whole new appreciation of art is introduced

while at the same time, a whole new mode of deception and distraction also enters.

For Benjamin, the aura is dead and it exists in an improbable and mystical space. But in the

making of our own myths therein lies an aesthetic interpretation of these reproducible images;

there is a temporal world that is there for you, where you do not truly participate. The object

consumes man at the same time man consumes it. Mass consumption revels in this consequence

of the loss of the aura. For Benjamin, a distance from the aura is a good thing. The loss of the

aura has the potential to open up the politicization of art, whether or not that opening is

detrimental or beneficial is yet to be determined. However, it allows for us to raise political

questions in regards to the reproducible image which can be used in one way or another.

Yet Benjamin makes it clear that in this new age of mechanical reproduction the contemplation

of a screen and the nature of the film itself has changed in such a way that the individual no

longer contemplates the film per say; the film contemplates them. A constantly moving image in

the disjunction of the physical arrest of watching a moving image move, changes the structure of

perception itself. Within the reproducibility of images there is an increase of submission towards

the film itself. In and of itself this marks a symptom and not a cause of something terrible that is

happening. How can we think of subjectivity in the age of mechanical reproduction? What does it

mean to reflect back onto ourselves after being absorbed by these inauthentic and politicized

images? What does the aestheticization of the work of art mean now when the aura is lost?

Key passages:

“During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s

entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the

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medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical

circumstances as well” (Benjamin, 222).

“The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician. The magician heals a stick person

by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient’s body. The magician maintains the

natural distance between the patient and himself; though he reduces it very slightly by the

laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly

the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating

into the patient’s body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves

among the organs. In short, in contrast to the magician—who is still hidden in the medical

practitioner—the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man;

rather , it is through the operation that he penetrates into him” (Benjamin, 233).

“The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really

goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the

camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations,

its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to

unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses”(Benjamin, 237).

“Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting

invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his

associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene

than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested….The spectator’s process of association in the

view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the

shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of

mind. By means of its technical structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the

wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral shock effect” (Benjamin,

238).

“The distracted person too, can form habits. More, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of

distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction is provided by art

presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception.

Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult

and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in film.

Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is

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symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of

exercise”(Benjamin, 240).

“Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, is now

one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own

destruction as aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism

is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art”(Benjamin, 242).