Sep 28 2008
Today’s Reading
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944)
The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
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Source: most of one chapter from Dialectic of Enlightenment;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden 1998;
proofed and corrected Feb. 2005.
Just finished reading that article … required for class tomorrow…I’m thinking there might be another article as well; shall check that shortly …
Anyway … it was, if nothing else, very interesting reading: a Marxist approach to the culture industry - and one which - at least to me, reading in 2008, seems just a ~tad~ negative.
The authors suggest that “culture now impresses the same stamp on everything” …and everything mass media is all basically pointless on its own: it is all part of one system, one whole.
We are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena as inherent in the technical and personnel apparatus which, down to its last cog, itself forms part of the economic mechanism of selection. In addition there is the agreement – or at least the determination – of all executive authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves.
I wonder what they would have thought of the Internet!
