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Theodor Adorno and the culture industry 71
distance, in either content or the consumer’s reception, are destined
to failure because the outputs of the culture industry innately lack
the dialectical complexity of autonomous art and can only be
understood in relation to the media systems within which they
circulate. These systems, in turn, need to be understood in terms of
their relations to the other organs of capitalist society. In other
words, since the culture industry’s ‘work’ is structural, only a
structural critique of the culture industry will suffice. In a certain
post-ideological sense, ideology is no longer to be located in any
particular message or content; the entire system is an objectified
ideological system – reflected in the increasing licence granted to
the content of individual forms which are no longer required to
promote particular perspectives or uphold prescribed doctrines. The
culture industry promotes the values of tolerance, balance and
democratic access to representation, because in this way it ensures
any alternative remains strictly unthinkable – its ideological coup
resides in the fact that it claims that as a structure it is outside
ideology, when this very structure itself is nothing less than the
triumph of its ideology.

The ideology of entertainment

In analysing the structural function of the culture industry, Adorno
focuses on the value ascribed to entertainment. The involvement of
entertainment as ‘value’ and part of an ‘industry’ reveals the
complicity of culture with capitalism. In providing amusement,
distraction, relief, and so on, the culture industry ameliorates the
violence that capitalism performs. This occurs on numerous levels:
within the products it produces; the immediate responses they
provoke in their audience; and at wider structural level where the
culture industry plays an important regulatory function – the
harmonizing of various elements within the capitalist system. Of
particular importance is the lack of a role for tension or conflict in
the output of the culture industry. As previously alluded to, for
Adorno the most authentic expression of autonomous or high art
involved an immanent and irresolvable tension that existed between
its form and content (for example, the confinement of the classical
music form and the ingenuity to be found in individual composi-
tions), which made its progress and outcome irresolvable in advance.
As a result, such art was often difficult and disturbing for its
audience, since it involved a confrontation with contradiction – in
the form of challenging works that refused to cater to received
notions of closure, harmony and form. Whereas, within the culture
industry’ ‘every individual product is levelled down in itself … There
are no longer any real conflicts to be seen. They are replaced by the

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