Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Culture industries is a term which performs both a descriptive and conceptual function. It also has a history. Since the term was coined by Horkheimer and Adorno in their 1947 essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” both what the term designates and its theoretical implications have undergone a number of shifts. In its original Frankfurt School usage the term was a polemical intervention into the mass society/mass culture debate and a development of the Marxist theory of Ideology. On the one hand, the term culture referred to the superstructure – the social realm of meaning construction and circulation where symbolic forms of all types were produced and distributed – and to the German Idealist tradition of culture (or art) as a realm of freedom from material constraint and interests. Its linkage to the term industry (in the singular), on the other hand, was intended polemically to indicate the destruction of the relative autonomy of the superstructure and of the emancipatory possibilities of art by the economic dynamics of the base. The culture industry thus primarily referred to the industrialization and commodification of the process of symbolic production and circulation in toto . For Horkheimer and Adorno, the ideological domination of capitalism, and thus the suppression of revolutionary possibilities, was effected not by the overt content of cultural ... log in or subscribe to read full text