Adorno Theodor W. - The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture

Adorno expounds what may be called a new philosophy of consciousness. His philosophy lives, dangerously but also fruitfully, in proximity to an ascetic puritanical moral rage, an attachment to some items in the structure and vocabulary of Marxism, and a feeling that human suffering is the only important thing and makes nonsense of everything else.... Adorno is a political thinker who wishes to bring about radical change. He is also a philosopher, with a zest for metaphysics, who is at home in the western philosophical tradition.'

Iris Murdoch

This collection of Adorno's provocative and disturbing essays on The Culture Industry will introduce his thinking to a wide readership. The introduction by J. M. Bernstein shows that Adorno's voice is potentially the greatest challenge to the debate over postmodernity, exposing its social and political collusions.'

Gillian Rose, author of Loves Work

Theodor W. Adorno

The Culture Industry - Selected essays on mass culture

Edited and with an introduction by J. M. Bernstein

London and New York

First published 1991 by Routledge

First published in Routledge Classics 2001 by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005.

Introduction J. M. Bernstein 1991

The copyright for the Adorno papers is as follows: from Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedmann, Volumes 8 & 10 Surhkamp Verlag 1972, 1976; Volume 3 Surhkamp Verlag 1981

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ISBN 0-203-99606-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-25534-1 (hbk)

ISBN 0-415-25380-2 (pbk)

The editor and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce the essays in this book: Chapter 1, On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening, in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds) The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1982); Chapter 2, Das Schema der Massenkultur, in Adornos Gesammelte Schriften III. Dialektik der Aufklrung (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981), pp. 299-335; Chapter 3, Culture Industry Reconsidered, translated by Anson G. Rabinbach, New German Critique 6, Fall 1975, pp. 12-19; Chapter 4, Culture and Administration, translated by Wes Blomster, Telos 37, Fall 1978, pp. 93111; Chapter 5, Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda, in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds) The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1982); Chapter 6, How to Look at Television, The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television 8 (3), 1954, pp. 213-35, reprinted by permission of the Regents of the University of California; Chapter 7, Transparencies on Film, translated by Thomas Y. Levin in New German Critique 24-5, Fall-Winter 1981-2, pp. 199-205; Chapter 8, Freizeit, Gesammelte Schriften 10/2, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), pp. 645-55; Chapter 9, Resignation, translated by Wes Blomster in Telos 35, Spring 1978, pp. 165-8.

I would also like to thank the following: Mr Gordon Finlayson and Mr Nicholas Walker for the translation of Chapter 8, Free Time; Mr Nicholas Walker for the translation of Chapter 2, The Schema of Mass Culture; Peter Dews for his careful reading of Chapter 2 and his many helpful suggestions and Gillian Rose for her comments on the Introduction.

The contentious arguments surrounding the idea of an affirmative postmodernist culture have brought with them a persistent theoretical depreciation of the claims of high modernist art as well as a positive reevaluation of the character and potentialities of popular (mass) culture. Both of these critical re-evaluations often take the form of a sustained criticism of the cultural theory of T. W. Adorno. Adornos apparently uncompromising defence of modernist art and his apparently uncompromising critique of mass culture as a product of a culture industry has served the proponents of postmodernism as a negative image against which their claims for a democratic transformation of culture may be secured. In their view Adorno is an elitist defending esoteric artistic modernism against a culture available to all. Equally, by calling for a continuation of the project of artistic modernism and perceiving only manipulation and reification in the products of the culture industry, Adornos critical theory appears to proscribe the transformation of culture in an emancipatory direction.

While it is certainly true that the cultural landscape has altered substantially in the twenty years since Adornos death, and perhaps in ways he had not anticipated, our current situation may be a great deal less sanguine than its proponents suppose. Even if some of the historical and sociological details of Adornos analyses were composed to address a specific context, it does not follow that his critical diagnosis of the predicament of culture is not applicable to the present. In collecting together a broad selection of Adornos writings on the culture industry the aim is to allow a wider appreciation of his achievement in this area, as well as, and more importantly, a more informed confrontation between Adornos critical theory and the claims of postmodernist cultural theory. Since the essays collected in this volume represent only one side of Adornos critical theory, his analysis of the culture industry, and since these essays are to a large extent self-explanatory, this Introduction will focus on setting these analyses in the wider theoretical context in which they belong, and on suggesting avenues of analysis through which the understanding of Adornos critical theory may lead to a more nuanced evaluation of the claims of postmodernism.

No one statement of Adornos concerning the great divide between artistic modernism and the culture industry is either more famous or better encapsulates his view than the one found in his letter to Walter Benjamin of 3 March 1936. There he states that both high art as well as industrially produced consumer art bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change (but never, of course, the middle term between Schoenberg and the American film). Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.

In reading Adorno, especially his writings on the culture industry, it is important to keep firmly in mind the thought that he is not attempting an objective, sociological analysis of the phenomena in question. Rather, the question of the culture industry is raised from the perspective of its relation to the possibilities for social transformation. The culture industry is to be understood from the perspective of its potentialities for promoting or blocking integral freedom. These positive or negative potentialities, however, are not naively or immediately available; and this because the terms through which we might gauge potentialities for change are themselves not naively or immediately available. According to Adorno the division of labour between disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, history and psychology is not contained in or dictated by their material, but has been forced on them from the outside. There is no discrete or unique object, for example, the mind or psyche, whose objective characteristics entail or directly correspond to the concepts and categories of psychology or psychoanalysis; nor is there a discrete object whose objective characteristics entail or correspond to the concepts and categories of sociology, history or philosophy. Rather, the same forces of fragmentation and reification which have produced the great divide between high art and the culture industry produced the division of labour among the various disciplines.