The+Culture+Industry+as+Deception

essay -- you have to keep in mind that this essay was written to “reassess and renew Enlightenment values” and as a response to how Hitler used culture as a tool for Nazi propaganda (325).
 * =Title= || The Culture Industry as Deception ||
 * =Author= || Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1944) ||
 * =Source= || Lemert, 4th Edition, 2010 ||
 * =Summary By= || Namalie ||
 * =Summar= || Critical skepticism about mass culture, i.e. mass culture is ruining us all. I found it helpful to read the intro to this

Culture has merged with the advertisement – the more meaningless advertisements become, the more omnipotent culture becomes.

Products need advertisements because products just promise pleasure that they cannot actually offer. Advertising has become “a procedure for manipulating human beings” (327).

Horkheimer and Adorno liken mass culture to a totalitarian state run by totalitarian advertising bosses. Everywhere something is telling us what to think, what to buy, what to do (Hitler!) – and now it has reached a point where we do not even understand what we are doing – “countless people use words and expressions which they either have ceased to understand at all or use only according to their behavioral functions” (328).

According to Horkheimer and Adorno, we are all trying to “conform to the model presented by the culture industry” (329)

The sphere of advertising is tightly controlled. A select group of producers has control over the advertising industry and has effectively created barriers to entry in its high advertising costs. Therefore, new competitors cannot enter and the producers are able to hold on to their influence.

Language is becoming communication, devoid of meaning and demythologized. As a result, the word, which henceforth is allowed only to designate something and not to mean it, becomes so fixated on the object that it hardens to a formula (327)

Their happy conclusion: “the triumph of advertising is the imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false” (329). ||
 * =Discussion points= || This essay was written with the destruction and atrocities from World War II still very fresh in everyone's minds. Now in 2011, do you think that Horkhemier and Adorno’s take on mass culture to still be relevant?

What do you think Horkheimer and Adorno mean by this quote: “the more meaningless advertisements become, the more omnipotent culture becomes”?

Why do Horkheimer and Adorno distinguish between language and communication? Do you agree with them? || = =

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