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Week Four: Contemporary Feminist Debates - The Culture Industry

Adorno,T. & Horkheimer, M. (2002). ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ [excerpts], in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. pp. 41-48

"the town-planning projects, which are supposed to perpetuate individuals as autonomous units in hygienic small apartments, subjugate them only more completely to their adversary, the total power of capital." p.41

"Just as the occupants of city centers are uniformly summoned there for purposes of work and leisure, as producers and consumers, so the living cells crystallize into homogenous, well-organized complexes." p.41

"Film and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce." p.42

"a cycle of manipulation and retroactive need is unifying the system ever more tightly." p.42

Presently, "the technology of the culture industry confines itself to standardardization and mass production and sacrifices what once distinguished the logic of the work from that of society." p.42

"The talents belong to the operation long before they are put on show; otherwise they would not conform so eagerly." p.42

"The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of film on the banks, characterizes the whole sphere, the individual sectors of which are themselves economically intertwined." p.43

"The relentless unity of the culture industry bears witness to the emergent unity of politics." p.43

"Something is provided for everyone so that no one can escape; differences are hammered home and propagated." p.43

"On the charts of research organizations, indistinguishable from those of political propaganda, consumers are divided up as statistical material into red, green, and blue areas according to income group." p.43

"Even during their leisure time, consumers must orient themselves according to the unity of production." p.44

Kantian schematism: "a secret mechanism within the psyche preformed immediate data to fit them into the system of pure reason." p.44

"This dreamless art for the people fulfils the dreamy idealism which went too far for idealism in its critical form." p.44

"The culture industry has developed in conjunction with the predominance of the effect, the tangible performance, the technical detail, over the work, which once carried the idea and was liquidated with it." p.44

"The familiar experience of the moviegoer, who perceives the street outside as a continuation of the film he has just left, because the film seeks strictly to reproduce the world of everyday perception, has become the guideline of production." p.45

Film has become so close a replica of reality that the spectator is excused from using their imagination p.45

"The products of the culture industry are such that they can be alertly consumed even in a state of distraction." p.45

"Each single manifestation of the culture industry inescapably reproduces human beings as what the whole has made them. And all its agents, from the producer to the women's organizations, are on the alert to ensure that the simple reproduction of mind does not lead on to the expansion of mind." p.46

Logical positivism - "what is said and how it is said must be verifiable against everyday speech." p.46

"in the culture industry the subject matter itself, down to its smallest elements, springs from the same apparatus as the jargon into which it is absorbed." p.46

"the style of the culture industry, which has no resistant material to overcome, is at the same time the negation of style." p.46

"The concept of a genuine style becomes transparent in the culture industry as the aesthetic equivalent of power." p.47

"What the Expressionists and Dadaists attacked in their polemics, the untruth of style as such, triumphs today in the vocal jargon of the crooner, in the adept grace of the film star, and even in the mastery of the photographic shot of a farm laborer's hovel." p.48

"it is only in its struggle with tradition, a struggle precipitated in style, that art can find expression for suffering." p.48

"Aesthetic barbarism today is accomplishing what has threatened intellectual formations since they were brought together as culture and neturalized." p.48

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