The Critique of the Culture Industry

The second chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," coined the term "Kulturindustrie" (culture industry) in deliberate substitution for the more neutral "mass culture," a phrase Adorno and Horkheimer rejected because it wrongly suggested a culture spontaneously arising from the masses themselves, when in fact, they argued, film, radio, magazines, and popular music were produced top-down by a small number of commercially and technologically integrated corporations for passive consumption. Drawing on firsthand observation of the Hollywood studio system and American radio and advertising during their Californian exile, Adorno and Horkheimer describe an industry whose products are formally standardized — interchangeable genre plots, hit-song formulas, magazine photo layouts — while being marketed under a false promise of individuality and novelty, so that consumers experience only "pseudo-individualization," the superficial variation of minor details atop a rigidly repetitive underlying structure.