Tuesday, February 18, 2014

The Culture industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception


«Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together. (…) All mass culture under monopoly is identical, and the contours of its skeleton, the conceptual armature fabricated by monopoly, are beginning to stand out. (…) Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce».

(Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, first published in1944, pp. 94-95 SUP edition 2002)