“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1944)
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

The Dialectic of Enlightenment

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“The Culture Industry” is a chapter from Horkheimer and Adorno’s book The Dialectic of Enlightenment. To properly understand the essay, we need to get a sense of the wider project of the book and to do this, we can start by historically situating its authors. Horkheimer and Adorno wrote The Dialectic of Enlightenment in exile. Both of them German Jews, they fled Nazi Germany and settled in the US. In many ways then, the book is a response to fascism as it seeks to explain how western civilization managed to produce the unparalleled horrors of the second world war.

 

As the title suggests, their focus is on enlightenment. Enlightenment refers to the revolution in thinking which underpins modernity. At the heart of enlightenment thought is the scientific method. This method, pioneered by thinkers like Francis Bacon (1561-1626), is based on empiricism which involves observation and measurement of the world as the primary means of gaining knowledge. This mode of thought has been dominant in the West for at least the past four hundred years.

 

What this means in practice is that when millions of people started dropping dead during the corona epidemic, the dominant response was not, as it once would have been, to consult astrologers, oracles or priests in order to find out what was going on. Instead scientists were tasked with making empirical observations to identify the cause of the deaths. So the epidemic was tackled with quarantine, masks and vaccinations instead of sacrifice, prayer and repentance.

 

It is reasonable to assume that this enlightened response to the virus saved many lives. Millions perhaps. So it is all the more shocking to read Horkheimer and Adorno (let’s call them H&A) write that “enlightenment is totalitarian.” In the light of Nazi totalitarianism, their claim is that enlightenment thinking is responsible for spreading fear around the world and for the deaths of millions of humans.

 

Let’s start with fear. The opening of The Dialectic of Enlightenment is arresting:

 

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.

 

The enlightenment was supposed to free humans from fear, and yet, as H&A glance at the world around them, they see disaster, death and fear. In their analysis, this is not coincidental. In fact, it is a direct result of the prime feature of enlightenment thought. We can see this feature in the quotation above. The enlightenment seeks to install humans as masters. Scientific thinking aims at mastering nature by dispelling superstition, mystery and enchantment. But in doing so, humans dominate nature. They seek to know nature on their terms, reducing it to a series of data points and measurable phenomena. 

 

H&A see echoes of this domination in totalitarianism. They write: “What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings.” In other words, domination of nature through science goes hand in hand with the domination of humans by those in control. This is what the enlightenment and totalitarianism have in common; they are both structured by relations of domination.

 

Enlightenment thinking dominates nature by making it calculable. Through standardized measurements and observation, science reduces the multiplicity of forms in nature to something that is essentially the same. By measuring everything according to the same set of standards, science implies that there is a fundamental sameness about everything out there in the world. As H&A write: “Formal logic was the high school of unification. It offered Enlightenment thinkers a schema for making the world calculable.” This process gives humans immense power over the natural world which H&A describe as God-like. But as we noted above, this power of domination sets the stage for totalitarianism since the domination of nature is also turned against humans themselves. If enlightenment thought is a tool for dominating nature, then it is also available as a tool for dominating humans.

 

The act of making nature calculable is not without irony. In making the world calculable, humans are also separated from it:

 

Human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them. Their “in-itself” becomes “for him.” In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination. This identity constitutes the unity of nature.

 

The sort of knowledge which enlightenment thinking produces is the knowledge of how to make things useful. Instead of understanding the world as something which exists for itself, scientific knowledge reduces the world to something which exists as a tool for human use. Just as a dictator sees people as a resource to be manipulated in order to gain more military strength or political power, so scientists see nature as a resource which can be harnessed to secure human ends. And just as dictators can never really know their citizens, scientists are estranged from nature. 

 

Ultimately, enlightenment thinking has failed. Instead of removing myth and shining a clear and objective light on the world in order to discover how things really are, enlightenment thinking has just installed a different set of myths. This set of myths understands the world as operating according to a precise set of rules with an underlying logic. By examining the world at a distance, enlightenment thinkers have lost the ability to see things on an individual level, close up. 

 

Thus, enlightenment thinking seeks to understand the world in a narrow and distorted manner. By making everything knowable through rationality and calculation, other sorts of ways of relating to the world are lost. Ultimately, the relation between science and the world is one of domination and so when these methods are used by politicians, the result is totalitarianism. In “The Culture Industry,” H&A examine how mass cultural products, especially film, are a part of this totalitarian society.

 

The Culture Industry

 

In this chapter, H&A paint a grim picture of mass culture under capitalism. In the grip of enlightenment rationality, culture has been reduced to a series of standardized products where spontaneity and choice have been eliminated. Consumers of culture experience no real pleasure since art has become merely an extension of work. Ultimately, H&A argue that culture under capitalism does little more than discipline people into being good consumers, teaching them to know their place in the economic system while destroying their individuality.

 

We’ll start by thinking about choice. Choice is crucial to Western democratic capitalist societies. On a political level, it is impossible to imagine freedom without choice and the choice of consumers to select between competing products is an indispensable mechanism of capitalism. Indeed, consumer choice creates a sense of political freedom and could even be argued to stand in for it.

 

One of H&A’s most striking arguments is that while western societies provide consumers with an abundance of choice, in the cultural sphere, these choices are between things which are essentially the same. In other words, choice is an illusion. Enlightenment rationalism has standardized cultural products so that one action movie is interchangeable with any other, each pop song sounds like the last and film stars all conform to a certain type.

 

Culture is all the same, H&A argue, since it has been standardized under capitalism where it is produced in an industrial manner – hence the culture industry. The culture industry has no interest in spontaneity, beauty or depth since it only has only one measure of cultural products – profit. A good piece of art is a profitable one and profitable art is good art. To put this in more Marxist terms, this is an example of commodity fetishism; the exchange value is all-important and the use value is diminished. Like any other industry, the drive for profit shapes the product and in this case, cultural products are made in a formulaic manner according to predetermined standards.

 

Mainstream films, for example, cannot be experimental, unfamiliar or challenging. Instead, they are produced according to strict rules concerning genre, casting, editing and marketing. A romantic comedy will be the same as all other romantic comedies since the studios know what sells. The movie industry will always strive to make movies like previously successful films rather than taking risks on something new.

 

But H&A’s criticism extends beyond the complaint that culture is boring or conservative. Culture is totalitarian. As they write: “Something is provided for everyone so that no one can escape.” Parallel to the division and categorization of cultural products is the division and categorization of consumers. Marketers divide society into groups so that they can be specifically targeted with a cultural product which has been created with them in mind. H&A therefore describe a total system which creates and enforces social groups and aims at nothing more than making profits for the small number of industry owners.

 

Under these conditions of production, culture becomes stale, formulaic and miserable. Movie audiences can predict the end of the film based on the beginning. TV shows resemble adverts. All of the parts of a film, song, TV show are subordinate to a predetermined harmonious totality. Under these conditions, imagination shrivels, the attention-span shortens and the mind contracts. Even enjoyment is removed; formulaic cultural products can elicit no real pleasure in the consumer.

 

Ultimately, under capitalism, the distinction between work and leisure is removed. H&A write that “entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism.” In a simple sense, this is because entertainment is in the service of the workplace. It is the space for workers to recharge their batteries in preparation for the next day of work. On a deeper level, entertainment shows workers reconfigured images of their work processes. The series of standardized processes that workers perform is precisely what is fed to them by the culture industry. Ideologically speaking, people consuming mass culture are still in the workplace since the same logic of standardization applies to both spaces.

 

And it is the ideological power of culture which is really what H&A are getting at. Culture has been taken over by and placed in the service of capitalism. That cultural products generate profits is one thing, but more significantly, they turn people seeking entertainment into good capitalists on an ideological level. Mass culture does your thinking for you. Films pre-program viewers’ responses both emotionally and intellectually. They train viewers not to think and thus close off the possibility of independent thought. As H&A observe, “to be entertained means to be in agreement.” Cultural products sweep the consumer along, offering shallow pleasures on the condition that viewers abandon their critical faculties. At the root of entertainment, therefore, is powerlessness. 

 

Although the essay describes the culture industry of 1944, it still resonates today. We would expect this, since the root cause of the state of mass culture according to H&A is capitalism – a system which persists today. Contemporary interactions with the culture industry involve many of the features which H&A discuss. Someone returning home from a hard day at the office is likely to unwind in front of a show on Netflix. The choice on Netflix is almost overwhelming, but the selection process is guided by familiarity. The platform’s algorithms are designed to serve up more of the same and shows are commissioned, written and screen-tested on the basis of previously popular shows. In the end, in the service of profit, novelty will always lose. As for the viewer, they can forget about work as they sink into the viewing experience. Maybe, they will stop thinking altogether as they experience a string of shallow but meaningless and ultimately dissatisfying pleasures.

 

H&A believe that culture should foster thinking, that it should challenge and surprise us. It should be spontaneous and genuinely pleasurable. They also believe that culture should be an exchange; something that people participate in rather than just consume; something which allows individuals to develop themselves in meaningful ways. Unfortunately, under capitalism, H&A see mass culture as a powerful means of social control, enforcing capitalist ideology while suppressing individuality, pleasure and thought.