Elmo, Horkheimer & Adorno

The reading, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, seemed to bring what we’ve been discussing for the past few classes together nicely. After reading the essay, a few main quotes stood out to me as some of the main ideas.

The first quote is, “culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazine form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together” (41). This is a very important idea to understand. Over the past few classes we have been talking a lot about ideology and how it essentially runs our lives; it creates a standard for how people should live. This ideology ultimately creates, as Horkheimer and Adorno say, sameness. Everywhere we turn in the media, TV or magazine, the Internet or radio, they all seem to be displaying the same images or ideas about how things “should” be. They are telling us the way we are “supposed” to act and live our lives. Since the ruling class runs the media, their ideas are forced upon everyone and since we are such absent-minded observers, according to Lyotard, we just follow along, thus creating sameness.

Another quote that goes along with this concept of the absent-minded observer is, “the power of industrial society is imprinted on people once and for all. The products of the culture industry are such that they can be alertly consumed even in a state of distraction” (45). It is almost sad to me how susceptible we are to the media. Like this quote states, we are observing culture and playing into its so-called norms without even knowing it; we are oblivious to the fact that nearly everyone around us is the same. This has come to be just the way things are and no one seems to question it or have concern about it.

Lastly, Horkheimer and Adorno point out that, “freedom to choose an ideology, which always reflects economic coercion, everywhere proves to be freedom to be the same. The way in which the young girl accepts and performs the obligatory date, the tone of voice used on the telephone and in the most intimate situations, the choice of words in conversation, indeed, the whole inner life compartmentalized according to the categories of vulgarized depth psychology, bears witness to the attempt to turn oneself into an apparatus meeting the requirements of success, and apparatus which, even in its unconscious impulses, conforms to the model presented by the culture industry” (71). While this quote is very long and wordy, I find that it carries great importance with what we have been discussing. While we all have the freedom to choose to go against the norm and the ideologies set forth to us, we never do. We always play into the ideologies because it’s something that is already there and it’s easy. We are always conforming and I just wonder when, if ever, this will change.