In their vehement social critique “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Horkheimer and Adorno observe that businesses perpetually reupholster their products to appear new, so the consumer masses will continue to buy the same rehashed products.  By buying the same content in a different package, consumers endorse the culture industry’s essential product, and fund the relatively inexpensive subsequent reissues.  The criticism of this modern assembly line culture has borne increasing relevance since its inception, especially regarding the perpetuation of the industrial ideology by advertisement and entertainment.  Whereas Horkheimer and Adorno complained about connoisseurs arbitrarily commending one cookie-cutter product over another and talkies of sustained kartharsis sans tragedy, we now endure product placement in films, unwelcome pop-ups online, and conspicuous brand names on an athlete’s clothing.  The culture industry has conflated entertainment and advertisement, forcing consumerist thoughts even into our leisure, our amusement.

The advertising machine abhors a vacuum: it sees everything as billboard, ad space, commercial.  To look is to look upon calculation.  Our eyes are guided to the logo, the trademark, the signature form.  The ubiquity of advertisement assures the consumer that the product will be wherever needed, so the repetition of the ad creates the need and then instantly gratifies it.

We have had our patience bred out of us by instant gratification–––the time to even make our rote decisions has been truncated by the saturation of our senses with rampant accessibility.  Our wills are being slowly eroded down to reflex.  The industry discovers what works and endlessly repeats it; Freud has become the father of manipulation.  Our teeming suggested needs compel us to consume as much as possible in the shortest amount of time: Fast food, satellite TV, strip malls, computers that download songs to iPods, DVD players in our minivans.  And of course the greatest triumph of instant gratification: the Internet.

With the apotheosis of the Internet, the technological Gesamtkunstwerk par excellence, the culture industry not only bombards the consumer with the hyper-produced word, image, and music of advertisements found on TV, but feeds off the input of the consumer.  It provides the illusion of submission to the consumer’s wishes.  What can I teach you?  What gift can I find for you?  What services do you need sent to your home?  The breadwinner consumer goes to the consumptive industry to gain sustenance (150).

Of course it advertises overtly and subliminally on every page: it is replete with blind links, unstoppable pop-ups, spam–––so much so that companies have designed software to stop these things (much like the mobster offering “protection” to the small business owner).

So leisure becomes entertainment becomes advertisement becomes consumption.  The question arises, though, of how the culture industry perpetuates the image of satisfaction through consumption when dissatisfaction grows persistently more evident the more one is driven to consume?  Children develop increasing impatience with toys as they grow older.  This is natural: it takes less time to grow tired of the repeated stimulus–––one must up the dose or frequency for the same high.  The culture industry has capitalized on this accumulating tolerance, so the natural response to stimuli integrates seamlessly into the ever-feeding, ever-moving culture machine.

Horkheimer and Adorno assert that the interchangeable, mass-produced commodities the industry offers the consumer have value only in their utility and/or the amount of money pumped into them.  In order to perpetuate consumption, the industry must make its product intensely superficially appealing, yet empty enough to be discarded for the next flashy package.  The industry markets superficial variety with homogeneous filler.  It expects consumers to model themselves on this schematic: change your appearance, your apparatus, your accessories, but the content remains the same.

The most logical escape from this cycle would be the aesthetic experience, as it transports the participant beyond the superficial and inspires individual thought and awareness, rather than encouraging mental passivity.  However, the culture industry has degraded art.  Horkheimer and Adorno contribute the devaluation of the work of art to the idea of a “sale” in a capitalist market.  The less one has to pay to acquire what was once valuable, the more people have it, and the less they concede that it retains value.  Just the opposite effort by the modern market keeps consumers interested in consumption–––by equating expensive products with the most pleasure.

Pleasure goes best with entertainment, and so the culture industry remains in the entertainment business.   Amusement is sought as escape from mechanized work, to recuperate to do more work; however, amusement requires no thought––to sustain pleasure, there must be no effort (137).  But we are not merely shown the token well-to-do man or woman relaxing in their luxury vehicle or lounging beside their state-of-the-art electronic equipment; these universal symbols lack much relatability.  The advertiser employs the movie star or musician from humble beginnings to hawk its wares to the same lower class from which the star emerged.  So deeply has this practice penetrated the lower classes, rising music stars mimic their inspiration.  They not only willfully promote the same brand names they were taught to desire (and could not afford at the time they recorded the song extolling the appeal of Rolex or Versace)–––not only that, they even promote it in their music, as an aspiration for the same youth they once were, back when they could barely eat, let alone purchase designer leather jackets.

To exacerbate this abuse, the illusion of the sale has replaced the sale.  Now when these high-priced “desirables” are marked as “reduced priced,” the consumer believes he is getting a deal, and buys what he cannot afford (courtesy of the credit card companies).  The credit card companies emerged when the culture industry desired even more money than the solvent income of the masses.  With credit, the industry not only takes the money you have, but the money you will have, someday, or rather will use to pay off credit card bills.  With the help of credit, the ostensibly unattainable comes nearly within reach, such that the conspicuously produced becomes conspicuously consumed.

In Our Kind, cultural anthropologist Marvin Harris posits that the cycle of conspicuous production–––where “quality” is determined by how much cash is dumped into a project–––and the rise of conspicuous consumption brought about the birth of the Yuppie (Harris, 370).  The mantra, the single-minded goal, of the young urban profession is to consume the most valuables, then discard them when they lose their appeal and acquire more valuables; as Horkheimer and Adorno warn, nothing is actually permanently “of worth” (150), and the next obscure expensive commodity becomes valuable.  There is nothing inherently superior, aesthetically, in a Versace dress over a Dolce & Gabbana, or for that matter a J C Penney’s dress.  The Yuppie’s desire to consume en masse comes from above: you may only be admitted to the upper class if you buy preciosities, which the upper class conveniently own.  Consumers make the rich richer by trying to be like them, and make themselves poorer.  They are taught to resent their poverty–––how can anyone be poor in the land of plenty?  And especially how can I be poor when I work so hard?  I need to show that I work hard by frittering away my money on excesses, thus showing how much disposable income I have.  People try to look as “comfortable” as their seemingly better-off neighbors, who are themselves trying to out-consume to someone else.

With this level of internal regulation, the culture industry has grown certain of it unrivaled power–––so certain of its monopoly, so satisfied with its unassailability, that it permits attacks against itself, as it knows the consumer is helpless.  Entertainment invites the mockery of its transparency, only to revel in our continued financial support after the revelation.  By showing the consumer its abuses, it pretends to take him into its confidence.  “Here’s what I’m really up to…but you’re so smart you saw that already, didn’t you?  Ok, well, here’s something much more authentic for your discriminating eye…”  Even the potentially perceptive consumer therefore becomes duped through his or her own intellectual vanity.  The American culture has given in so fully to the industry, has become so dependent on consuming, that it cannot sustain its needs on its own, and requires the industry to maintain function.  Who could bear to subsist after being so acculturated?

Any reversion, on a significant scale, back to self-sufficiency and self-awareness, requires an almost clinical reformatting of lower brain functions at the degree of brainwashing.  We live in an age where movies incorporate advertisements in the film proper.  Even the performance, the entertainment, the space of imagination has been invaded by product placement, so that any emotions roused by drama become intimately linked with the products consumed to evoke those emotions observed on screen.  We need to learn to feel again, feel our emotions, and forget the histrionics of fake culture.  While it seems impossible to counter the considerable arsenal of advertisement and entertainment, consider simply the presence of Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique, and the liberation of at least a few minds evidenced by that work’s production.  It can be done, that much we see, but what matters most is that it must be done, if any relic of humanity should exist in the progressively more technology-framed future.

Work Cited

Harris, Marvin.  Our Kind.  New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1990.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno.  “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.”  Dialectic of Enlightenment.  John Cumming, trans.  New York: Continuum Publishing Corporation, 1972.