Page 78 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Theodor Adorno and the culture industry 63
re-establishing itself in the USA. This experience proved crucial in
the evolution of Adorno’s media theory. In Hitler’s Germany he had
witnessed the powerful role that mass media could play in shaping
the opinions and behaviour of populations, and arriving in America
he confronted a society in which the mass media’s influence was
ubiquitous but apparently benign. The veneer of democracy and
simple diversion that characterized American media did not con-
vince Adorno. He believed that a common logic underlay both the
propaganda of the Reich and the mass entertainment of the USA:
both were manifestations of the capitalism’s infiltration of everyday
life, and thus any adequate theory of capitalism must factor in the
role played by mass media, or what he and his colleague Hork-
heimer had come to call the culture industry.
Walter Benjamin’s account of the new media had been produced
under the auspices of the Institute, and Adorno had played the role
of critical interlocutor in the development of Benjamin’s thesis (see
Jameson 1980). As previously discussed in Chapter 1, Benjamin had
argued that the various technologies of mechanical reproduction
held the promise of new forms of cultural expression – the
possibility of a mass culture made by and for the masses. In many
ways Adorno and Horkheimer’s media theory is a refutation of
Benjamin’s Essay. It argues that rather than releasing the masses
from the hypnotic spell of aura, the media of reproduction ensnared
them in a sophisticated, technologically facilitated version of Marx’s
false consciousness. While Benjamin singled out reproduction as the
process that emancipated culture, Adorno and Horkheimer saw
reproduction as the ingression of the capitalism into the very fabric
of culture and life itself. Culture had become a term in a monstrous,
panoptic system, a new integral industry in the pervasive (but largely
unacknowledged as such) ideology of industrial capitalism which we
shall explore later in terms of Banality TV.

The Dialectic of Enlightenment
Adorno’s vision of the culture industry receives its fullest expression
in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997 [first
1
published in 1944]) . Here he and Horkheimer placed mass culture
in the context of what they termed ‘late’ capitalism. They offered an
analysis of cultural production that established its role and function
within the capitalism of their time and gave it a historical context by
providing an account of the emergence of capitalism itself and
culture’s increasingly influential role within it. The Enlightenment to
which Adorno and Horkheimer refer is that of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries: the intellectual movement inaugurated by
figures such as Descartes, Galileo and Bacon, which championed the

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