Adorno on Mass Culture

By Audio Pervert - 9/16/2013

According to Adorno, the spread of technology served the culture industry in U.S. and eventually to the rest of the world, just as it helped tighten the control of authoritarian governments in Europe. The result was a sweeping transformation in the conditions of the production and distribution of culture. This transformation spelled the erosion of the free circulation of cultural works in the bourgeois era and their monopolistic control by the culture industry. Adorno believed that this decline in the conditions of circulation and production permitted the wholesale standardization was apparent in the culture industry's promulgation of hit songs, creation of singing and movie stars, and reliance on a series of invariant types, slogans, and repetitive formulas "... " 

Today, almost 60 years to that prediction, do we witness all cultural success as an eventual and iconic system of autocratic power  ? Or it is just a calculated and automated industry made for the sole purpose of achieving maximum profitability.

http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC20folder/AdornoMassCult.html

"… hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own beating ..."  Theodor Adorno : Institut Frankfurt 1964.



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