Culture industry adorno horkheimer pdf

The culture industry is the normalisation and the wrong isolation of items in our society, and the manner in which those items are measured. People have been normalised as companies tends to produce items which are seemingly what we crave for. In this case companies are responsible in the creation of our desires. This song have showed us very different representation of what it means to be our own person and what this world has come to.

He brought back a way that was effect knowing we would listen because it came in a form that was direct, but you would not understand if you did not listen so closely.

With what message we were giving are you really going to let matlertic items make you as a person or are you going to be yourself creating your own identity by standing outside. We all are just trying to find ourselves in the world, but we buy things thinking they will give us happiness. When that is not the case it just makes us feel emptier.

The society is brainwashed into thinking we need something when we really just want it. These are some of the topics which Sue Jozui voiced her opinion on, but was her opinion justified, or is it our responsibility as the consumers to keep ourselves from being ripped off?

Sue Jozui starts off buy saying that advertizing companies use celebrities in their commercials so that people will think that the celebrities prefer that. The Cconstitution seems to have seen every single detail covered and madke sure there was no possible way tyranny could be a problem. As their process was very intricate and thoroughthurow, in order to establish this. Their poor values have caused extensive damage to Donald, the plaintiff.

Finally the last key element in the process of ethical decision-making is How. The defendants needed to ask themselves why they did not let the public know the new chemical was not FDA approved. The three men and Novelty Now did not ask themselves what would happen if everybody followed their guidelines. If they had asked themselves these questions they would have realized they were making unethical decisions.

According to Adorno and Horkheimer these cultural products are not only meant for profit appealing to the lowest common denominator but also produce consumers that are adapted to the needs of the capitalist system. A simplified example which can help explain culture industry is TV lifestyles.

Ever noticed how characters on TV shows you watch usually have great homes and nice cloths except in the case in which the character is poor? The whole and the particularity [Einzelheit] bear the same features, without contrast or connection. Their harmony, guaranteed in advance, mocks those which were achieved by the great bourgeois works of art.

In Germany, even the most exuberant films of the democratic era were tinged with the sepulchral quiet of the dictatorship. The whole world is strained through the filter of the culture industry. The oft-noted experience of the filmgoer, who perceives the streets outside as the continuation of the screening [Lichtspiel] which they just left behind, because this latter wishes to reproduce the everyday world of perception, has become the guiding principle of production.

The more densely and seamlessly its empirical techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier does it succeed in casting the illusion that the world outside is merely the seamless extension of what one got to know during the screening [Lichtspiel]. Since the lightning-fast introduction of sound film, mechanical diversification has completely and totally served this plan. According to this tendency, everyday life is not supposed to be distinguishable anymore from the sound film.

Going far beyond the theater of illusion, it leaves no more dimension for the imagination of the audience, in that it indulges itself within the framework of the film-work and is nonetheless untrammeled by its exact conditionality [Gegebenheit] and can digress, without losing the thread, it schools those who it is aimed at to identify it immediately with reality. Today's withering of the power of conceptualization [Vorstellung] and the spontaneity of the cultural consumer need not be reduced to psychological mechanisms.

The products themselves, above all the most characteristic of them all, the sound film, cripple their capabilities through their objective constitution [Beschaffenheit].

They are so constructed that their adequate conception requires precisely the alacrity, perceptivity, and well-versedness prohibited to the thinking activity of observers, if they do not wish to miss the facts rushing on by.

The effort is indeed so ingrained that it need not even be actualized in the specific case and nonetheless suppresses the power of imagination. Those who are so absorbed by the cosmos of the film, by the gestures, images and words, that they are incapable of adducing just how it was turned into a cosmos, does not necessarily need to be preoccupied by the specific achievements of the machinery during the moment of the performance.

Above all, they have become so well acquainted with other films and other cultural fabrications that they carry out the required effort of attentiveness automatically. The power of industrial society impinges on human beings as one for all. The products of the culture industry can count on the fact that even in conditions of distraction, the consuming will happen alertly.

However each one is a model of the gargantuan economic machinery which keeps everyone breathless from the get-go, at work and during the recuperation so similar to it. In every popular sound film, in every popular radio broadcast one can discern a kind of effect which cannot be ascribed to any individual, but to everyone together in society. Every individual manifestation of the culture industry irresistibly reproduces human beings as what the totality has made of them.

All of its agents, from the producer [producer: in English in original] to the women's associations, are on guard to prevent the process of the simple reproduction of the Spirit [Geist: spirit, mind] from leading to a more expanded one.

The complaints of the art historians and advocates of cultural concerning the extinction of style- generating energy in the West are horribly unfounded. The stereotypical translation of everything, even that which has not yet been thought up, into the schemata of mechanical reproducibility surpasses the stringency and validity of every actual style, whose concept the partisans of educational culture explained in terms of the precapitalist past. No Palestrina could have tracked down unforeseen and unresolved dissonances more puristically than the jazz orchestrators who do so with every phrase which does not fit exactly into the jargon.

When they jazz up Mozart, they do not merely transform the latter where it is too difficult or earnest, but also in the melody, even where this is harmonized more simply than is customary today. No church cloister could arrange the devilish faces and cries of the damned more carefully within the ordo [Latin: social order] of the love of the Almighty than the production director arranges the torture of the hero or the height of the hem of the leading lady [leading lady: in English in original] in the litany of the blockbuster film.

The expressive and implicit, exoteric and esoteric catalogue of what is forbidden and what is tolerated reaches so far, that it does not merely circumscribe the realm of what is free but administers it. Even the uttermost particularities are modeled after it. The culture industry positively establishes its own language, like its opponent, advanced art, through prohibitions, with syntax and vocabulary.

The permanent compulsion to adopt the latest effects, which nevertheless remain tied to old schematas, merely multiplies, like additional rules, the power of what has been already produced, which every single effect would like to escape.

Everything which appears [Erscheinende: that which appears] is so thoroughly stamped, that well-nigh nothing can occur which does not already bear the trace of jargon, which does not at first glance show itself to be approved. However the matadors, producing and reproducing, are those who speak the jargon so easily, freely and happily, that it is as if this latter were the language which it itself had long since silenced.

This is the ideal of what is natural in the sector. It asserts itself all the more magisterially, the more the perfected technics [Technik] diminishes the tension between what is produced [Gebilde] and everyday existence [Dasein]. The paradox of routine travestied as nature can be discerned in all expressions of the culture industry, and is glaringly obvious in many. A jazz musician who has to play a piece of serious music, even the simplest Beethoven minuet, involuntarily syncopates it and deigns to start on the beat only with a tongue-in-cheek grin.

All the transgressions committed by Orson Welles against the customs of the profession are pardoned, because as calculated wilding [Unarten: bad habits, vices] they strengthen the validity of the system all the more eagerly. The compulsion of the technically conditioned idiom which stars and directors must produce as nature, so that the nation can make it their own, relates to such fine nuances that they almost achieve the subtlety of the means of a work of the avant-garde, through which this latter serves, in contrast to the former, the truth.

What is said in everyday speech and how it is said, is supposed to be verifiable, as in logical positivism. The producers are experts. The idiom demands the most astonishing productive power, absorbs it and throws it away.

It has rendered the culturally conservative distinction between genuine and artificial styles satanically obsolete. To be sure, a style which is distinguished on the outside by impulses contrary to the form could still be called artificial. The bargain struck between artistic specialists and sponsors and censors, which ends up in all too unbelievable lies, does not testify so much to internal-aesthetic tension than to the divergence of interests. The reputation of specialists, which for the time being finds succor in a final bit of material [sachlicher] autonomy, clashes against the business policy of the church or of the company which produces cultural goods.

The matter however is, according to its own nature, already palpably reified before it even comes to an open conflict. Even before Zanuck hired her, the saintly Bernadette gleamed in the viewing-field of her scriptwriter as an advertisement for all interested consortiums. This is what has become of the impulses of the entirety [Gestalt: the whole as form].

That is why the style of the culture industry, which no longer needs to test itself against resisting material, is simultaneously the negation of style. The reconciliation of the general and the particular, in whose fulfillment alone style wins content, is void, because no tension exists between the antipodes: the opposites which are supposed to attract pass over into opaque identity, the general can replace the particular and vice versa. Nonetheless this distorted picture of style denotes something about the past genuine one.

The concept of genuine style becomes transparent in the culture industry as the aesthetic equivalent of domination. In the unity of style, not only that of the Christian middle ages but also that of the Renaissance, what was expressed was the various structures of social authority [Gewalt], not the opaque experience of those who were ruled, in which the universal was hidden.

The great artists were never those who embodied style the most seamlessly and completely, but those who perceived style in their work as a harshness against the chaotic expression of suffering, as negative truth. In the style of the work, the expression won the energy without which everyday existence [Dasein] melted away unheard. Those specifically which are called classics, like Mozart's music, contain objective tendencies which have intentions which differ from the style in which they are incarnated.

What the Expressionists and the Dadaists meant polemically, the untruth of style as such, triumphs today in the song-jargon of the crooner, in the high-bred grace of the film star, indeed even in the mastery of the photographic shot of the miserable shacks of farmworkers. In every work of art, its style is a promise. By dissolving through style into the dominating form of the generality, into which the musical, visual, and verbal language dissolves, what is expressed is supposed to be reconciled with the idea of the just generality.

This promise of the work of art, to establish the truth through the shaping of the entirety [Gestalt] into socially traduced forms, is as necessary as it is dissembling. It sets forth the real forms of what exists [Bestehenden] as absolute, by purporting to anticipate in advance fulfillment in its aesthetic derivatives.

To that extent the claim of art is always ideology. Art finds expression for suffering in no other manner however than in its dispute with the tradition in which it expresses its style. The moment in a work of art when it goes beyond reality, is in fact not to be separated from style; indeed it consists not in the achieved harmony, in the dubious unity of form and content, the inner and the outer, the individuated [Individuum: individuated, individual] and society, but in those features which show discrepancies, in the necessary failure of the passionate exertion for identity.

Instead of exposing themselves to this failure, in which the style of the great works of art has since time immemorial negated itself, the lesser ones have always constrained themselves through similarity to others, through the surrogacy of identity. The culture industry has finally positioned imitation as an absolute. Aesthetic barbarism today is completing what has threatened intellectual [geistigen: spiritual, intellectual] constructs [Gebilde], ever since they were brought together as culture and neutralized.

To even speak of culture was always contrary to culture. The general denominator of culture already virtually contains the constitution, cataloguing, and classification, by which culture is taken into the realm of administration. Solely what has been industrialized and consequently subsumed wholly accords to this concept of culture.

By subordinating all branches of intellectual [geistigen] production for a single purpose in the same manner, by keeping the senses of human beings from their departure from the factory in the evening to their arrival by the alarm bell the next morning preoccupied with the seal of that mode of labor, which they must perform over the course of the day, the concept of a unitary culture which the philosophers of personality wielded against massification is mockingly fulfilled.

The culture industry, the most uncompromising style of them all, thus proves itself to be the logical terminus of precisely that liberalism which is reproached for its lack of style. It is not merely that its categories and contents were generated by the liberal sphere, in domesticated naturalism as well as in the operetta and the revue: modern cultural firms are economic locations wherein a chunk of a circulation-sphere otherwise in steep decline can, just like their corresponding entrepreneurial types, still survive.

There you can ultimately achieve a measure of happiness, insofar as you don't look too closely at the matter, but allow yourself to go along with things. Those who resist, can survive only by being incorporated. Once your differences with the culture industry are registered, they already belong to it, just like land-reformers to capitalism. Reality-based outrage is the trademark of those who wish to offer a new idea to the company.

The public sphere of contemporary society does not permit any other perceptible complaint to appear, than those whose tone does not already whisper to the sharp-eared about the prominent figures, under whose signum the outraged ones are reconciled. The more immeasurable the gap between the chorus and the leader, the more certainly a place is reserved amongst the latter for those who through well-organized conspicuousness proclaim their superiority.

What thereby survives in the culture industry is the tendency of liberalism to guarantee free rein to the most proficient. It is not for nothing that the system of the culture industry originated in the liberal industrial nations, just as indeed all of their characteristic media, including cinema, radio jazz and magazines, triumph there. Their progress however arises from the universal law of capital.

Prefascist Europe had lagged behind the tendency towards cultural monopolies. Yet it was precisely to such retrogression that the Spirit [Geist: spirit, mind, intellect] owed a remnant of independence, and its most recent upholders their very existence, however straitened.

In Germany, the insufficient penetration of life with democratic checks had paradoxical effects. A great deal remained outside of that market mechanism, which had been unleashed in the western countries.

The political powers, states and townships which inherited such institutions as a legacy from absolutism, also endowed them with a bit of that independence from overt relationships of domination of the market, which the princes and feudal lords had granted until the 19 th century. This strengthened the backbone of more recent art against the verdict of supply and demand and increased its resistance far beyond the actual protection.

On the market itself, the tribute to unvalorizable and not yet accepted quality was transmuted into purchasing power: that is why upstanding literary and musical publishers could cultivate authors, who did not bring in much more than the attention of experts [Kenners].

It was only the relentless compulsion, under the most drastic threat, to incorporate themselves as aesthetic experts into business affairs that ultimately curbed artists. Today they call leading politicians by their first names and their every aesthetic impulse submits to the judgement of their illiterate sponsors.

The analysis written by Tocqueville a hundred years ago has in the meantime fully materialized. The master no longer says, you will think like me or die.

He says: you're free to think differently from me, your life, your belongings, you can keep everything, but from this day on you are a stranger among us. Excluded from business, they are easily convicted of inadequacy. While today the mechanism of supply and demand is crumbling in material production, it acts in the superstructure as a check in favor of the rulers. Capitalist production has so enclosed their body and soul, that they unresistingly fall prey to what they are offered.

However just as those who are ruled over always took the morality which came to them from the rulers more seriously than the rulers themselves, today the deluded masses fall prey to the mythos of success even more than these success stories themselves.

They have their dreams. They stubbornly insist on the ideology, through which they are enslaved. The unholy love of the people for what was done to them, outdoes even the cleverness of the authorities. It surpasses the rigor of the Hays Office [informal censorship body of Hollywood], just as in heroic times it fueled the larger authorities directed against it, the Terror of the tribunals. The industry follows the vote it itself conjured up.

The faux frais [French: incidental costs] due to a contract with a fading star, which companies cannot fully exploit, are legitimate costs for the entire system. Through the arrant sanctioning of the demand for junk, it inaugurates total harmony. In the view of this ideological truce, the conformism of the customers, like the shamelessness of the productions which the former keep going, maintains its good conscience. Both are contented with the reproduction of what is always the same [Immergleichen].

That which is always the same [Immergleichheit] governs the relationship to what is past, too. What is new about the mass-cultural period in comparison to the late-liberal one is the exclusion of the new.

The machine rotates around the same position. Film people look with mistrust at any manuscript which is not already an assured bestseller. Thus the constant talk of idea, novelty and surprise [idea, novelty, surprise: in English in original], of what is simultaneously all too familiar and what has never existed. Tempo and dynamics pace it. Nothing may remain what it was, everything must operate ceaselessly, must be in motion. For only the universal victory of the rhythm of mechanical production and reproduction augurs that nothing changes, nothing comes out which does not fit in.

Additions to the time-tested cultural inventory are too speculative. The frozen formal types such as the sketch, the short story, the social reform film, and the blockbuster are the normatively conscious, threateningly imposed average of late-liberal taste. The power- brokers of the cultural agencies, who are in accord as only managers are with others, no matter whether they came from the rag trade or college, have long since sanitized and rationalized the objective spirit [Geist: spirit, mind, intellect].

It is as if an omnipresent authority had scrutinized the material and issued the authoritative catalog of cultural goods, succinctly listing the models for delivery.

Ideas are written into the heavens of culture, where Plato had already counted them, indeed were determined to be numbers themselves, immutable and unchanging. Amusement [amusement: in English in original], all the elements of the culture industry, existed long before this latter. Now they are set in motion from above and brought up to date. The culture industry can brag about how energetically it carried out the frequently clumsy transposition of art into the consumption-sphere, raised this to a principle, divesting amusement of its importunate naivete and improving the make of commodities.

The more total it becomes, the more mercilessly it compels every outsider [outsider: in English in original] into bankruptcy or into syndication, the more subtle and sophisticated it simultaneously becomes, until it finally culminates in the synthesis of Beethoven and the Casino de Paris [classic music-hall of Paris].

Its victory is twofold: the truth it extinguished outside, can be internally reproduced at will as a lie. Those who accuse it of betrayal of the ideal of pure expression, harbor illusions about society.

The purity of bourgeois [i. Serious art has always withheld itself from those to whom the necessity and pressure of everyday existence [Dasein] made a mockery of seriousness, and who were happy enough to use the time they did not have to spend standing on the assembly-line in just drifting along. Light art accompanied the autonomous kind as its shadow. It is the social bad conscience of the serious kind. The truth this latter had to omit on the grounds of its social prerequisites, gives the former the appearance [Schein] of objective justice [sachlichen Rechts].

This split is itself the truth: at the very least, it expresses the negativity of the culture, to which these spheres add up. The antithesis is least of all to be reconciled by absorbing the light kind into the serious, or vice versa. This however is what the culture industry strives for. That is why jazz directors like Benny Goodman must appear with the Budapest string quartet, rhythmically more pedantic than any philharmonic clarinetist, while the quartet for its part plays as flatly vertical and cloyingly as Guy Lombardo [bandleader and violinist].

What is noteworthy is not the crude lack of education, stupidity and inelegance. However what is new is that the unreconciled elements of culture, art and distraction are transformed through their subordination under the goal of a single false formula: the totality of the culture industry. It consists of repetition. The fact that its characteristic innovations consist entirely of mere improvements of mass reproduction, is not extrinsic to the system.

The interest of countless consumers is fixated on technics [Technik], and not on the rigidly repeated, hollowed-out and half-abandoned content, for good reason.

The social power adored by the audience is attested to more effectively by the omnipresence of the stereotypes compulsorily produced by technics [Technik], than by the stale ideologies which the ephemeral content has to vouchsafe. Nevertheless the culture industry remains the business of amusement.

Its leverage over consumers is mediated through amusement [Amusement: in English in original]; this is not be dissolved through sheer diktat, but through the deep-seated hostility of the principle of amusement against that which would be more than itself.

Yet since the incarnation of all tendencies of the culture industry in the flesh and blood of the audience comes about through the entire social process, the survival of the market in the industry still supports the former tendencies. Demand has not yet been replaced with simple obedience. The large-scale reorganization of film shortly before WW I, the material prerequisite of its expansion, was indeed the conscious alignment towards the needs of the audience as registered by the box office proceeds, which noone during the pioneering days of the silver screen had to take into account.

To the captains of the cinema, who set store solely on the basis of the more or less phenomenal hit, and wisely never on the counter-example, the truth, this is how things appear even today.

Their ideology is business. What is true about this is that the power of the culture industry lies in its unity with the produced need, not in simple opposition to such, even if it were that of omnipotence versus powerlessness.

It is sought by those who wish to escape the mechanized labor-process, so that they can once again deal with this latter. Simultaneously, however, mechanization has such power over those with free time and their happiness, it determines so thoroughly the fabrication of entertainment- commodities, that the latter cannot experience anything other than after-images of the labor- process.

The presumed content is mere faded foreground; what leaves an impression is the automated succession of standardized performances. The labor-process of the factory and office can be evaded only by alignment towards it in idleness. This is what hopelessly ails all amusement.

Entertainment freezes into boredom, because in order to remain entertainment, it should cost no effort and thus move strictly within extended tracks of association.

The audience doesn't need to think for themselves: the product anticipates every reaction, not through its objective [sachlichen] framework this disintegrates, as soon as one begins to think , but through signals. Every logical connection which presupposes an intellectual breathing-space is meticulously avoided. Developments are preferably to unfold directly from the immediately preceding situation, but not from the idea of the whole. There is no storyline [Handlung: action, plot, storyline] which could resist the keenness of the production crew to extract whatever can be gotten from each individual scene.

Ultimately, even the overall schemata seems dangerous, insofar as it had established a framework of meaning, be it ever so paltry, where only meaninglessness can be accepted.

Often the storyline [Handlung] spitefully rejects the continuation demanded by the characters and concerns of the previous schemata. Mindlessly-hatched, too-clever-by-far surprises implode the storyline [Handlung]. The tendency of the product to fall back malevolently on pure nonsense, the nonsense which popular art has had its legitimate share of, down to the antics and clowning of Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, appears most conspicuously in the less developed genres.

Miniver , Davis starred in the Welsh coal village drama The Corn is Green ] derive their reasonably solid storyline [Handlung] from something like the unity of the social- psychological case study, the former tendency has pushed itself through completely in the text of the novelty song [novelty song: in English in original], in the crime film and in cartoons.

Thought itself is massacred and chopped into pieces, like the objects of comedy and of horror. Novelty songs have always lived on the scorn for meaning, which they reduce, as the forerunners and successors of psychoanalysis they indeed are, to the monotony of sexual symbolism. Even in nonironic productions of the genre, they must put up with the fright of situations which are hardly ever connected in any necessary way.

Animated films were once exponents of the imagination against rationalism. They granted the animals and things electrified via their technics [Technik] a measure of justice, by allowing those who have been mutilated a second life. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google.

Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Kelly Maeshiro. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. Notes on the Culture Industry Kelly Maeshiro 28 April Capitalism is an historical mode of production predicated on the extraction of surplus value from the worker, who in order to survive must sell his or her own labor power to the owner of money because he or she owns no commodity except his or her own labor power.

Marx famously or infamously, depending on one s point of view criticized this system, showed through a systematic examination of the law of value, how utterly alienating, degrading, and dehumanizing this mode of production is.

For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over-against himself, the poorer he himself — his inner world — becomes, the less belongs to him as his own … The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. It turns the richest capacity of the human creature into a form of degradation: So much does labor s realization appear as loss of realization that the worker loses realization to the point of starving to death.

So much does objectification appear as loss of the object that the worker is robbed of the objects most necessary not only for his life but for his work … So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less he can possess and the more he falls under the sway of his product, capital.

But the basic content of these ideas, while clarified and elaborated in greater detail, do not substantially alter. Dirk J. Struik, trans. Machinery, gifted with the Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it; The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want; The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character.

At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance.

Robert C. Tucker New York: Norton, , pp. And generations of thinkers, Marxists and others, have contributed to the original line of reasoning first systematically explored by Marx, built on what is surely one of the most significant contributions to the history of human thought. And yet for all that Marx accomplished in proving, it was to a large extent limited to the material conditions of human beings under conditions defined by capitalist relations of production.

It is in this context that Adorno s and Horkheimer s work can be most readily and most fully appreciated. The Culture Industry is in my view not only one of the finest essays of Marxist theory, but also one of the most powerful critiques of modern existence ever written, Marxist or otherwise.

Friedrich Engels, trans. As Lukacs suggested the problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem in economics, but as the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. On these grounds, Lukacs argued that the commodity structure … penetrate[s] society in all its aspects and … remould[s] it in its own image.

Like Lukacs, Adorno and Horkheimer extend the logic of the commodity to the whole sphere of life in capitalist society, especially to culture. Their analysis proceeds on the assumption that in capitalist societies, culture itself becomes something like a commodity, and they examine the specific implications this commodification has on both the definite form and content of culture, as well as the effects this in turn produces within and upon human subjects.

Culture is a paradoxical commodity, they write. So completely is it subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used.

On the assumption that in capitalist societies, culture itself becomes a commodity to be bought and sold on the market like cars and bombs and Pepsi Cola, they analyze the implications of commodification for the definite form and content of culture in capitalist societies. Their method of analysis is not unlike that of a formalist literary critic. They read culture like a literary critic reads a text, only their object is not a novel by Jane Austen nor a poem by Milton, but the very substance of culture itself, whose formal structure is laid bare in its relation to its commodity form.

As the substance of human life, the very medium in which it moves, culture is usually too much part of the grain and texture of ordinary life to even notice. For instance: Whenever [people] start talking about capitalism, you can be sure the system is in trouble. You name it we supply it. But it is in the specific suggestions put forth about the particular effects of this commodification that The Culture Industry finds its most powerful expression.

Of these, a few deserve special attention.