'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception' by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

'Enlightenment As Mass Deception' 

'Enlightenment As Mass Deception' is a phrase used by Adorno and Horkheimer to illustrate the idea of film, radio, magazine, and the mass media as being representations of false consciousness and false identity amongst cultures, used as a tool of political and capitalist control witnessed 'as a mode of engaging with the world, it builds by playing first to the proximate over the distant, the personally salient over a range of varied degrees of relevance, the discretely detailed over the broadly scoped (Neiger, Meyers, and Zandberg [2011:27]).

The false notion of a greater knowledge of culture and sub-culture, as having individual identities, reflects on the idea that these cultures have left their mark on everything in the media and in politics, and results in society as producers and consumers of most content. Also, these impressions of multi-culture are consistently being homogenised through the social utility of film and radio, which have become nothing more than business industries due to their commodifying of a macrocosm and uniform society or structure: 'This process is evident in the reemergence of avant-garde strategies of representation in art, in aesthetics and sociology through the search for alternative modernities, and in politics through the return of absolutist discourses of power' (Smith, Enwezor, and Condee [2008:165]).

The article also considers the loss of influences that had once derived from established religions, literature, and art in the control of the normative structure of society, and invokes the appeal of capitalism, and social differences that is touched upon in Marshall McLuhan's article "The Medium Is The Message". Although, particularly in McLuhan's article, the idea of technological development and specialisation in cultures that can afford it, is stated as being used as a form of homogenisation and control over many other global microcosms and communities, which are inadvertantly being pulled into the artificial model, and are slowly but surely being made identical.

Also, the concept of technology as simply a means of standardisation and a means of establishing the normative, and model figure is represented as a means of unifying the mass, or a different approach to globalisation. Also, the idea of technological prestige is challenged as being interwoven with most medium, and in reference to the film industries, such as Pixar, Paramount Pictures, and Warner Bros, it is stated that the need for connoisseur's discussion and avid competition is almost entirely non-relevant, as the key amplifications and projections of technology and film remain alike and have no relation between factual values and the meaning of those products.

In reference to film and television, the article goes onto the subject of rationalism and irrationalism as being contrasted to the real world through the anthropometric, mimetic cartoon animation in which the viewers will naturally associate to, and experience an almost vicarious sense of irrationalism and escapism. Also, through the cartoon character, the viewer may almost sense both a defiance and compliance to the Formalist's notion that industry provides the data and structure of human experience, and how we understand or translate leisure and work. The concept of natural reason in the influence of the industry and the model structure is portrayed as illusory, and that the constant involvement of ubiquitous visuals in modern culture is a ways of occupying the minds of the consumers as to not allow them any notion that they can reject those visuals in thoughts that 'this is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in today's economy. The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness' (Rivkin and Ryan [2004:1242]).

This video denotes the construction of the 20th century through industrialisation, consumerism, technological advancements, automated technology, fragmentation, abstract art, political coerce, false identity, war, pre-capitalism, communism, western democracy, false consciousness, media propaganda, elitism, and economic union:

 

Reference List:

Neiger, M. Meyers, O. and Zandberg, E. eds., 2011. On Media Memory, Collective Memory in a New Media Age. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rivkin, J., and Ryan, M. eds., 2004. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.  

Smith, T. Enwezor, O. Condee, C. eds., 2008. Antinomies Of Art And Culture, Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. London: Duke University Press.