Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The study of the culture industries has become increasingly more complex in the field of communications in light of the ways in which expanding research into their organization, activities, and logics connects with questions and arguments concerning culture, commercialism, and social control. Largely originating in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), the term “culture industry” was initially utilized to critique the proliferation of commercial mass culture and what the authors perceived as the increasingly routinized techniques employed in the processes of cultural production (→  Critical Theory ). In trying to explain why the working class revolution predicted by Karl Marx failed to materialize, Adorno and Horkheimer posited that a new, more subtle form of social domination had emerged which operated through the mass appeal and production of standardized leisure commodities and amusement culture which served to keep the population docile and distracted from recognizing the real conditions of their labor and exploitation under capitalism. Calling this process “enlightenment as mass deception,” the authors suggested that administrative techniques within advanced capitalism played upon societal myths regarding scientific enlightenment, essentially curtailing the development of any revolutionary impulses toward systemic change from below. ... log in or subscribe to read full text