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The term culture industry (German: Kulturindustrie) was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", [1] of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), wherein they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing ...
According to Adorno we inhabit a media culture driven society which has product consumption as one of its main characteristics. Mass media is employed to deliver messages about products and services to consumers in order to convince these individuals to purchase the commodity they are advertising.
Adorno says that the masses are secondary and are "an appendage of the machinery" in the cultural industry. He argues that the culture industry claims to bring order in the chaotic world. It provides human beings with something like a standard and an orientation, yet the thing that it is claiming to preserve is actually being destroyed.
Adorno's work has had a large impact on cultural criticism, particularly through Adorno's analysis of popular culture and the culture industry. [10] Adorno's account of dialectics has influenced Joel Kovel, [11] the sociologist and philosopher John Holloway, the anarcho-primitivist philosopher John Zerzan, [12] the sociologist Boike Rehbein, [13] and the Austrian musicologist Sebastian Wedler.
Adorno and Horkheimer argue that antisemitism is a deeply rooted, irrational phenomenon that stems from the failure of the Enlightenment project and the inherent contradictions of bourgeois society. They argue that Jews serve as a universal scapegoat onto which individuals and societies project their deepest fears, anxieties, and neuroses.
The book consists of 153 aphorisms and short essays that reflect on the nature of modern life and the impact of Capitalism, Fascism, and mass culture on the individual. Adorno critiques the alienation, conformity, and loss of individuality in modern society, arguing that the conditions of late capitalism have made it impossible to lead a ...
Adorno retraces the historical evolution of art [2] into its paradoxical state of "semi-autonomy" within capitalist modernity, considering the socio-political implications of this progression. Some critics have described the work as Adorno's magnum opus and ranked it among the most important pieces on aesthetics published in the 20th century.
[9]: 711–2 Max Horkheimer, from the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, and Adorno, conducted the research for these studies. [9] Starting in 1944, the exiled Institute was hired by the JLC to conduct a study led by Leo Löwenthal and others, with assistance from Adorno. Their 1500-page report based on empirical data on "Antisemitism ...