Dialectic of Enlightenment, Part 3: The Culture Industry

To complete our series on Dialectic of Enlightenment, we take an extended look at the famous chapter on the culture industry. The function of the culture industry, or the sphere of production concerned with creating entertainment and art is to inure and train consumers to acquiesce to the dominant ideology expressed through its culture products. The tendency of this process, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is to reproduce sameness, conformity, and eliminate the thought of rebellion against the status quo. The culture industry is a totalizing system that continuously creates desires by the management of consumer preference, while foreclosing the means of actually fulfilling these desires. Some have argued that this analysis is no longer applicable to a digital age characterized by a fragmentation of mass media and infinite streams of information. In this episode, we ask to what extent does the internet age continue to stifle authentic creativity and individuality and reproduce formulaic entertainment? Finally, we pose the question of whether rebellion is still possible within a system that anticipates and absorbs the gesture of rebellion.