cal connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly avoided. As far as possible, developments must follow from the immediately preceding situation and never from the idea of the whole.For the attentive movie-goer any individual scene will give him the whole thing. Even the set pattern itself still seems dangerous, offering some meaning – wretched as it might be – where only meaninglessness is acceptable. Often the plot is maliciously deprived of the devel
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
the culture industry resides in its identification with a manufactured need, and not in simple contrast to it, even if this contrast were one of complete power and complete powerlessness. Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanised work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanisation has such power over a ma
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
o business life as an aesthetic expert. Formerly, like Kant and Hume, they signed their letters “Your most humble and obedient servant,” and undermined the foundations of throne and altar. Today they address heads of government by their first names, yet in every artistic activity they are subject to their illiterate masters. The analysis Tocqueville offered a century ago has in the meantime proved wholly accurate. Under the private culture monopoly it is a fact that “tyranny leaves the body free and directs its atta
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
l industrial nations, and all its characteristic media, such as movies, radio, jazz, and magazines, flourish there. Its progress, to be sure, had its origin in the general laws of capital. Gaumont and Pathe, Ullstein and Hugenberg followed the international trend with some success;Europe’s economic dependence on the United States after war and inflation was a contributory factor. The belief that the barbarity of the culture industry is a result of “cultural lag,” of the fac
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
val builder can have scrutinised the subjects for church windows and sculptures more suspiciously than the studio hierarchy scrutinises a work by Balzac or Hugo before finally approving it. No medieval theologian could have determined the degree of the torment to be suffered by the damned in accordance with the order of divine love more meticulously than the producers of shoddy epics calculate the torture to be undergone by the hero or the exact point to which the leading lady’s hemline shall be raised. The explicit and implicit, exoteric and esoteric catalogue of the forbidden and tolerated is so extensive that it not only defines the area of freedom but is all-powerful inside it. Everything d
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
the social effect can be inferred which is exclusive to none but is shared by all alike. The culture industry as a whole has moulded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product. All the agents of this process, from the producer to the women’s clubs, take good care that the simple reproduction of this mental state is not nuanced or extended in any way. The art historians and guardians of culture who complain of the extinction in the West of a basic style-determining power are wrong. The stereotyped appropriation of everything, even the inchoat
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are confined to the apocryphal field of the “amateur,” and also have to accept organisation from above.
But any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is con
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
But any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is con
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
umers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger.No mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together until t
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Frankfurt School: The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
7 years
...signing up to use the tool, giving Genius fewer big channels with which to promote its use for current events. And other news organizations are building similar features of their own. NPR has created an annotator that places notes in the body of the text — and the LA Times has considered using that tool as well, a spokeswoman said. The nonprofit organization OpenNews has built an open-source tool of its own for newsrooms to use.
Brain drain - The Verge
7 years
