Culture industry

Why 'culture industry' instead of 'mass culture'?

While writing Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer replaced their original term 'mass culture' (Massenkultur) with 'culture industry'. Both words still appear in the book, but afterwards they avoided 'mass culture'. That phrase suggests a culture the masses produce themselves, whereas the film, radio and magazines they had in mind came not from the masses but were produced industrially 'from above'. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy likewise explains that the term was chosen to stress that mass culture is manufactured with the same standardised, profit-oriented methods as any industrial product.

'Industry' is meant literally: cultural goods, like factory goods, are made in quantity, to set patterns, in order to sell.

In Korean today 'munhwa saneop' (culture industry) is also an administrative term grouping the film, music, games and broadcasting businesses. This entry deals with Adorno and Horkheimer's critical concept, not with that classification of industries.

What did the theory claim?

Its main claims can be put in five points.

First, culture becomes a commodity through and through. Marx distinguished use value, a thing's usefulness, from exchange value, what it fetches in exchange. In the culture industry a work is judged less by its content or quality than by how well it sells, that is, by exchange value. The authors wrote that the products of the culture industry are 'no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through'.

Second, standardisation. Mass-produced culture follows the same patterns and varies only in details: a film's ending is clear from the start, a hit song repeats a familiar formula. The authors put it this way:

Culture today stamps everything with sameness.

Third, amusement prolongs work. Culture is consumed in free time, and free time is for recovering the strength to work the next day, so the culture industry sells pleasures that cost as little effort as possible. 'Late capitalism' refers to twentieth-century capitalism marked by monopoly and state intervention.

Amusement is the prolongation of work under late capitalism.

Fourth, it promises and cheats. Advertising and film promise happiness, but the promise is always deferred.

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises.

Fifth, it integrates. The authors held that the culture industry reduces people to consumers, takes away the chance to develop critical thought and tames them to the existing order, offering substitute gratifications while drilling the same patterns of behaviour. Dialectic of Enlightenment says that 'the whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry'.

One point needs care. The authors did not see a conspiring elite behind the culture industry. Those who control culture are not plotters deliberately making people stupid but actors in a capitalism whose structure drives it to turn everything into a commodity. The authors even left vague who profits, pointing only to 'the most powerful interests'.

The authors repeatedly set Nazi Germany beside the American film industry: in both, mass-produced culture made by a few institutions was consumed by a passive, homogenised audience. Adorno argued in particular that radio, addressing listeners directly in their private space, increased the power of an 'authoritarian voice'.

How did Benjamin's 'Work of Art' essay differ?

Walter Benjamin, close to the same institute, drew another conclusion. He wrote 'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility' in Paris exile in 1935; it appeared in 1936, abridged and in French, in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Benjamin called it 'the first materialist theory of art worthy of the name'.

By 'aura' Benjamin meant the singular presence and authority that come from an original existing once, here and now. Media that can be reproduced technically, such as photography and film, break down this aura. The work of art loses its 'cult value', its place in ritual, and gains 'exhibition value', being shown to many. Benjamin saw a chance of liberation here: collective perception and participation could democratise culture. At the same time he warned that fascism 'aestheticises politics' through marches, speeches and newsreels, and answered with a call to politicise art.

Adorno objected in a letter to Benjamin of 18 March 1936:

You underestimate the technicality of autonomous art and overestimate that of dependent art.

Adorno placed his hope not in mass culture but in autonomous art that refuses easy reconciliation with reality. The German philosopher Albrecht Wellmer summed up the difference: Benjamin saw in technologised mass culture an antidote to the psychic destruction of society, Adorno above all a medium of conformism and psychic manipulation.

How did the Birmingham school answer?

In 1964 Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham; the current it produced is called the Birmingham school, and Hall directed the centre from 1971 to 1979. Like Critical Theory, it aimed to criticise domination and further emancipation, but unlike Critical Theory it looked for potential resistance in subcultures.

Its theoretical basis was Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony: a ruling group rules not only by force but by winning consent, and since consent is always negotiated and contested, popular culture becomes a field of struggle rather than something handed down from above.

In 'Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse' (1973) Hall argued that even when broadcasters 'encode' a meaning, viewers 'decode' it differently according to their situation.

Hall's colleague David Morley tested the model in the late 1970s by studying groups of viewers of the BBC current-affairs programme Nationwide, and Janice Radway studied women who read romance novels. In 'Notes on Deconstructing "the Popular"' (1981) Hall wrote that 'ordinary people are not cultural dopes'. Media hegemony, he stressed, 'is not a conscious plot or conspiracy, it's not overtly coercive, and its effects are not total'.

Who else defended popular culture?

• John Fiske, in Television Culture (1987) and Understanding Popular Culture (1989), distinguished popular culture from mass culture and spoke of a 'semiotic democracy' in which audiences make their own meanings from texts.
• Herbert Gans, in Popular Culture and High Culture (1974), rejected the assumption that the aesthetic standards of high culture are universal and argued that tastes reflect education and other aspects of class.
• Michel de Certeau refused to picture consumers as passive: every system of control, however tight, leaves gaps, and people appropriate given structures in their own ways in everyday life.
• John Storey, following Gramsci, saw popular culture as a site of struggle between the 'resistance' of subordinate groups and the 'incorporation' pursued by dominant groups.

The jazz dispute is often cited. Adorno treated jazz as a product of the culture industry; critics say he missed its role in the African American movement. In 1953 Joachim-Ernst Berendt replied to Adorno's critique of jazz in the German journal Merkur but did not convince him. The sociologist Heinz Steinert thought this was because Berendt accepted Adorno's pair of 'culture industry' and 'autonomous artwork' in the first place, and in 1992 argued that the scheme did not fit jazz at all.

Did Adorno himself change his view?

In Dialectic of Enlightenment the authors wrote that under pressure people are reduced to 'the reaction patterns of amphibians'. In one of his last radio talks, 'Free Time', Adorno stepped back:

The real interests of individuals are still strong enough to resist, within limits, total capture.

He saw in this 'a chance of maturity'. Later studies of popular culture also tended to conclude that the culture industry cannot build a seamless system of control.

How do the positions compare?

By what criteria can we judge?

The debate has not ended with one side simply right. The claims can be weighed by these criteria.

1. Production or reception? The culture-industry thesis is strong on structures of production: concentration of ownership, standardisation, advertising. Cultural studies is strong on what people actually read and how. They look at different links in the chain, so evidence for one does not straightforwardly refute the other.
2. Is there empirical evidence? Ask whether a claim rests on studies of real viewers and readers, like Morley's or Radway's, or stays with theoretical inference. Dialectic of Enlightenment is often judged closer to speculative history than to empirical research.
3. Does decoding change outcomes? If viewers read against the grain, do ownership or political results change? Fiske's critics doubted 'semiotic democracy' on exactly this point.
4. Does it assume a hierarchy of taste? Measuring popular culture by high art risks mistaking a class taste for a universal standard (Gans). Treating all tastes as equal, on the other hand, weakens the grounds for criticising commercial standardisation.
5. Does it distinguish periods? The culture-industry thesis came out of the Hollywood studio system and broadcasting of the 1940s. Applying it to other media environments means checking separately what still holds and what has changed.

Seeing popular culture, as John Storey does, as a field where 'resistance' and 'incorporation' contend is one way of holding both views together.