What is Culture Industry?
This term appeared during the Frankful School. Theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Max Hockheimer first mentioned the “Culture Industry” in their work The Dialectic of Enlightenment where they gave a specific critique of culture, talking about how it affects capitalism and transforms the individual from a thinker into a passive consumer.
Philosophy of capitalism
Now a question for you. What will you do after a hard day at work? How would you prefer to relax?
Most likely, most of us will prefer to watch some TV shows or sitcom when we feel tired. And this means that for most people leisure time is basically reduced to consuming, not creating. Thus there are 2 realms of life the active producer and the passive customer, where they complement each other perfectly.
Precisely according to the FrankfuL School, capitalism is not just economics, but a whole psychology
Moreover, pop culture and mass media were not created for the purpose of artistic or intellectual merit but for making more money.
Adork’s reasoning about culture was such that In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorc attempted to explore why the inequality of capitalism did not stimulate revolution in America. Capitalist society finds ways to create various forms of entertainment that belong to the cultural industry, and at the same time they stimulate people’s desire and make money from it. It is not associated with the creation of intellectual or revolutionary art. And more impotanly, art used to matter to some people. Walter Benjamin, Adorno’s mentor, formulated this idea in The World of Art in the Age of the Mechanical Revolution and said that the mechanical, factory, reproduction of art objects reduces their perceived aesthetic affinity with the artists, it is the “aura” that does him special.
For the most part, today culture is manipulated by companies like Disney, Comcast, AT&T, FOX, Viacomcbs. It also became a meta-topic, this is when an ordinary film became available only in cinemas but also in real time through social networks and their posts. Thus, social networks, namely the Internet, produce various manipulations. But what further develops the cultural industry is freedom. It penetrates more widely into mass society. One example is that the popular company Google created a gaming platform where it then looked for good engineers to work with.
