ighlight highlight-21" rel="21">In the most influential American magazines, Life and Fortune, a quick glance can now scarcely distinguish advertising from editorial picture and text. The latter features an enthusiastic and gratuitous account of the great man (with illustrations of his life and grooming habits) which will bring him new fans, while the advertisement pages use so many factual photographs and details that they represent the ideal of information which the editorial part has only begun to try to achieve. The assembly-line character of the culture industry, the synthetic, planned method of turning out its products (factory-like not only in the studio but, more or less, in the compilation of cheap
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
Advertising becomes art and nothing else, just as Goebbels – with foresight – combines them: l’art pour l’art, advertising for its own sake, a pure representation of social power. In the most influential American magazines, Life and Fortune, a quick glance can now scarcely distinguish advertising from editorial picture and text. The latter features an enthusiastic and gratuitous account of the great man (with illustrations of his life and grooming habits) which will bring him new fans, while the advertisement pages use s
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
They guarantee that power will remain in the same hands – not unlike those economic decisions by which the establishment and running of undertakings is controlled in a totalitarian state. Advertising today is a negative principle, a blocking device: everything that does not bear its stamp is economically suspect. Universal publicity is in no way necessary for people to get to know the kinds of goods – whose supply is restricted anyway. It helps sales only indirectly. For a particular firm, to phase out
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
asses the spheres from which they were formerly excluded, but, given existing social conditions, contributes directly to the decay of education and the progress of barbaric meaninglessness. Those who spent their money in the nineteenth or the early twentieth century to see a play or to go to a concert respected the performance as much as the money they spent. The bourgeois who wanted to get something out of it tried occasionally to establish some rapport with the work. Evidence for this is to be found in the literary “introductions” to works, or in th
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
the gravity of the lover who with foreboding commits his life to the fleeting moment. In the culture industry, jovial denial takes the place of the pain found in ecstasy and in asceticism. The supreme law is that they shall not satisfy their desires at any price; they must laugh and be content with laughter. In every product of the culture industry, the permanent denial imposed by civilisation is once again unmistakably demonstrated and inflicted on its victims. To offer and to deprive them of someth
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
laughter is heard as the echo of an escape from power; the wrong kind overcomes fear by capitulating to the forces which are to be feared. It is the echo of power as something inescapable. Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it.It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud practised on happiness. Moments of happiness are without laughter; only operettas and films portray sex to the accompaniment of resounding laughter.
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
yhow. In spite of the films which are intended to complete her integration, the housewife finds in the darkness of the movie theatre a place of refuge where she can sit for a few hours with nobody watching, just as she used to look out of the window when there were still homes and rest in the evening. The unemployed in the great cities find coolness in summer and warmth in winter in these temperatu
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
cities find coolness in summer and warmth in winter in these temperature-controlled locations. Otherwise, despite its size, this bloated pleasure apparatus adds no dignity to man’s lives. The idea of “fully exploiting” available technical resources and the facilities for aesthetic mass consumption is part of the economic system which refuses to exploit resources to abolish hunger. The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the pro
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
display the smart responses shown and recommended in the film. This raises the question whether the culture industry fulfils the function of diverting minds which it boasts about so loudly.If most of the radio stations and movie theatres were closed down, the consumers would probably not lose so very much. To walk from the street into the movie theatre is no longer to enter a world of dream; as soon as the very existence of these institutions no longer made it obligatory to use them, there would be
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
ance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment. The enjoyment of the violence suffered by the movie character turns into violence against the spectator, and distraction into exertion. Nothing that the experts have devised as a stimulant must escape the weary eye; no stupidity is allowed in the face of all the trickery; one has to follow everything and even display the smart r
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years