The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

Culture is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together. All mass culture under monopoly is identical, and the contours of its skeleton, the conceptual armature fabricated by monopoly. The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry. For the present the technology of the culture industry confines itself to standardization and mass production and sacrifices what once distinguished the logic of the work from that of society. The relentless unity of the culture industry bears witness to the emergent unity of politics. The concept of a genuine style becomes transparent in the culture industry as the aesthetic equivalent of power. The culture industry, the most inflexible style of all, proves to be the goal of the very liberalism which is criticized for its lack of style.