Explain the following passage taken from Adorno’s Culture Industry Reconsidered: “The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. The order that springs from it is never confronted with what it claims to be or with the real interests of human beings.”

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Adorno discusses how the culture industry has furthered the collapse of reason. Equating culture with the “high arts,” Adorno describes culture as a form of protest “against the petrified relations” (1991:100) under which individuals live. The purpose of culture is to render the impossible possible, to offer alternatives to existing social conditions. To the extent that culture (art) is free from the profit-motive, it is able to develop according to its own internal logic and thus voice essential social critiques. In advanced societies, however, culture has become synonymous with industry and hence subject to the rule of efficient production and standardization that is its hallmark. The relationship between mass culture and the individual is one akin to that of seller and buyer. Individuals, themselves objects of production, are left to consume mass-produced, prepackaged ideas that instill an uncritical consensus that strengthens established authority. Because culture is now a product of the machine and not the imagination, it is incapable of negating the oppressive conformity by the culture industry. Culture no longer prods—it pacifies: The categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. While the culture industry claims to be a producer of choice, freedom, and individual identity, it instead provides its customers with a totalitarian, conformist social landscape.