Daisy, Horkheimer and Adorno

The reading “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno was quite heavy and packed with information. Although among some of the packed sentences, I found many quotes that go along with the ideas we have been talking about along the way. The first quote had to do with the idea that the dominant class is the thinkers and producers and the rest of society is consumers. Horkheimer and Adorno said, “for the consumer there is nothing left to classify, since the classification has already been preempted by the schematism of production” (44). I think this relates back to Benjamin and his idea that the public has been conditioned to want to see something they already know, something they are familiar with. We have been taught to accept anything that is presented to us, but only if we have seen it before and it doesn’t deviate from what we already know. Although as a society we want everything that is “new,” it is debated whether the new is really new. Lyotard talked about the idea of bricolage and how everything new is just the old put together in some new way. The same ideologies are functioning within the new, but since it is marketed as “new,” and it is similar to what we already know, we buy into it.
Another common idea that I pulled out of the reading had to do with what we talked about last class, subcultures. Hebdige’s idea of the subcultures are that they go against the hegemonic ideals held by society, and the way society deals with the anti-hegemonic ideals are to incorporate them. Horkheimer and Adorno said, “anyone who resists can survive only to be incorporated” (48). Lyotard believes that you no longer can be avant-garde because, once you do, everyone will follow. But I also think, like Horkheimer and Adorno indicated in their article, society makes it impossible to survive unless you are creating something that fits within the dominant ideology and is accepted by the majority. The way ideology functions within society causes us to follow the dominant ideologies to survive because, “disconnected from the mainstream, he is easily convicted inadequate” (50). No one wants to be seen as inadequate, so is it possible to be different at all? Even the individuals who believe they are doing difference may in-fact be doing dominance.