Captain Planet, Horkheimer and Adorno

Horkheimer and Adorno make a lot of interesting comments throughout the article titled, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. The first is, “Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together” (41). This quote is saying that culture is inflecting us with ‘sameness.’ Like the concept of media convergence, where film, radio, and magazines are all interconnected. A character from a film is used as the subject in an advertisement that shows up in a magazine and is then announced on the radio. We get the same thing from all directions. I think that the second part of this quote is talking about the subcultures within our culture. Each subculture is unanimous, or undivided, within itself, and furthermore, every subculture in undivided from another. This sameness that we all see from the media creates this system within and between subcultures. Because all subcultures are undivided from each other, they follow the dominant culture. By seeing the same things in film, magazines, and radio, every subculture is exposed to the same media. The dominant hegemonic culture infiltrates into every division of our culture. This idea that no subculture is completely separate from the next relates to Lyotard’s idea of the avant-garde. In which, nothing new can be created. Even if a subculture starts a new trend it can never stay new, because of the ideology that works on our culture. The subculture is subjected to the dominant class and the ideologies that are constantly at work. The media is the outlet by which these ideologies reach our culture and influence subcultures.