Dmariel, Horkheimer and Adorno

When reading about the culture industry today, I felt like I was awakening from a naive dream. Horkheimer and Adorno definitely put the American culture industry into a critical perspective. As I was reading, I was immediately reminded of Althusser’s concept of ideology when I read that “something is provided for everyone so that no one can escape; differences are hammered home and propagated..everyone is supposed to behave spontaneously according to a ‘level’ determined by indices and to select the category of mass product manufactured for their type”. Althusser generalizes this idea through ideology when he states “those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology”. Through the act of counter-hegemony, one may believe that existing in a social group makes you different than all the others, when in reality you are just like everyone else. In relation to Horkheimer and Adorno, they claim that no one can escape! Everyone follows a certain ideology that is mass produced for their type. Therefore, “for the consumer there is nothing left to classify, since the classification has already been pre-empted by the schematism of production”. We are the producers and consumers of ideologies, all existing together under a higher power: the culture industry.
Horkheimer and Adorna state that “the routine translation of everything, even of what has not yet been thought, into the schema of mechanical reproducibility goes beyond the rigor and scope of any true style-the concept with which culture lovers idealize the pre-capitalist past as an organic era”. Benjamin believed that in our culture today we are producing things that we don’t even know that we want. We are taking away from ‘true style’ and unique existence through mass reproduction. We are no longer driven by tradition in the postmodern world, we are driven by production. Subsequently, there is a “withering of imagination and spontaneity” in todays culture. The term ‘new’ has lost it’s meaning, we rely on improving what is already made and act within our obedience to the social hierarchy.