Kulturindustrie by Roger Behrens is an expository work, volume 15 in the “Library of Dialectical Basic Concepts” series. Published in 2004, it offers an introductory philosophical analysis of the concept of the “culture industry,” primarily drawing on the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and examining its historical development and contemporary relevance.
“Die Bibliothek dialektischer Grundbegriffe ist eine Einführungs- reihe in verschiedene Ansätze dialektischen Philosophierens.”
The Enduring Critique of the Culture Industry
The “Library of Dialectical Basic Concepts” and Behrens’ “Kulturindustrie”
The “Bibliothek dialektischer Grundbegriffe” (Library of Dialectical Basic Concepts) introduces readers to various approaches within dialectical philosophy. This series, edited by Andreas Hüllinghorst and published by Edition panta rei | sávra dei, includes works on diverse topics such as “Mittel,” “Naturwissenschaft,” “arm und reich,” and “Leben (bio-ethisch).” Roger Behrens’s “Kulturindustrie” (Culture Industry) is presented as Volume 15 in this collection, with several other volumes listed as either previously published or in preparation. The series aims to provide foundational texts for dialectical thought, offering further information and direct engagement opportunities with authors and the editor through its dedicated website. Bibliographic details confirm the book’s publication in 2004 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, under a Creative Commons license, ensuring its accessibility and outlining its printing specifications.
The book’s table of contents offers a glimpse into its central arguments through a series of provocative quotes. These phrases, such as “Kulturindustrie bietet als Paradies denselben Alltag wieder an” (Culture industry offers the same everyday life again as paradise) and “Die ganze Welt wird durch das Filter der Kulturindustrie geleitet” (The whole world is guided through the filter of the culture industry), foreshadow a critique of how modern society is shaped by cultural production. Other entries highlight themes of conformity, the commodification of art, and the pervasive influence of ideology. The final entry, “Weiterführende Literatur,” suggests a deeper engagement with the subject matter beyond the immediate text.
What is the Culture Industry?
The opening section, “Was ist Kulturindustrie?”, immediately confronts the reader with the idea that the “old ghosts of bourgeois society” have transformed into pervasive spectacles. In the neoliberal era, wealth manifests as an “immense collection of commodities,” echoing Marx’s observations, and this commodification extends to the aestheticization of daily life. The author illustrates this with common experiences: eagerly anticipating TV series, renting blockbusters, watching war coverage, engaging in sports, or illegally downloading music. Even fashion choices, like camouflage or national flags, and youth subcultures, which often become retro phenomena, are presented as examples of this aestheticized, commodified existence. The profit motive, the text argues, has co-opted revolutionary slogans, turning “¡Hasta la victoria siempre!” into the late capitalist mantra “Nichts ist unmöglich!” (Nothing is impossible!). A footnote clarifies that the section headings are drawn from Adorno and Horkheimer’s seminal work, “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” and provides references to Adorno’s “Gesammelte Schriften” and Marx’s economic critiques.
Consumer Capitalism and Conceptual Confusion
The subsequent section, “Konsumentenkapitalismus,” argues that consumption now entirely obscures production, with every commodity presented as a cultural good in a market of endless possibilities. Everything, the text asserts, is “culture” or “pop culture.” The term “Kulturindustrie,” coined by Adorno and Horkheimer over fifty years prior, appears paradoxical in this context. On one hand, their observations about the entertainment industry in the 1930s and 1940s seem fully realized today, influencing lives more profoundly than anticipated. On the other hand, the culture industry is often perceived not as mass deception but as a pluralistic arena for self-determination and empowerment, fostering mature subjects in a democratic leisure society.
This leads to “Begriffsverwirrung” (Conceptual Confusion), where the perception of cultural commodities shifts like an optical illusion. What proponents of consumer culture celebrate as diversity and subversion, critical theory identifies as standardization and cliché, precisely what Adorno and Horkheimer critiqued. The idea of culture as a commodity, once a core problem, has become a slogan for cultural possibilities, even a synonym for democracy. The availability of diverse television programs, from educational content to entertainment, is often cited as evidence against Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis of enlightenment as mass deception. The term “Kulturindustrie” itself has even become a positive label for production companies. Critical theory, in this view, is reduced to mere cultural criticism, lamenting commerce and triviality. This perspective often leads to a simplistic understanding of the culture industry as a “factory” run by “mean bigwigs” producing “commercial culture,” against which “honest, homemade, and original folk culture” is defended—a schema that can harbor anti-American, racist, and anti-Semitic sentiments. This also aligns with the notion of subculture as an opposition, either co-opted by the culture industry or finding niches within it. The text notes that this view also reflects an older interpretation where Adorno and Horkheimer were seen as defending high culture against the culture industry, thus legitimizing the educated bourgeoisie’s occasional engagement with mass entertainment.
The Actuality and Possible End of the Culture Industry Thesis
The “Begriffsverwirrung” directly raises the question of the “Aktualität der Kulturindustriethese” (Actuality of the Culture Industry Thesis), developed by Adorno and Horkheimer in “Dialectic of Enlightenment.” Its relevance, the text argues, is tied to the actuality of critical theory itself. Reducing the thesis to Adorno’s perceived dismissal of all mass culture, particularly jazz, misses the fundamental point. The absurdity lies in believing that disproving Adorno’s critique of the culture industry, perhaps by finding “good jazz,” would somehow make the world better. This very idea, the author contends, is part of the culture industry’s ideology. The critique targets a structural transformation in capitalist society, not merely specific cultural products. Dismissing the critique as outdated due to its historical context is illogical, as Adorno and Horkheimer described a dynamic crisis in late capitalism, not a static system. Thus, the culture industry thesis remains relevant as long as critical social theory does, challenging not just “bad culture” but the “bad society” it conceals.
Adorno and Horkheimer already envisioned a “Mögliches Ende der Kulturindustrie” (Possible End of the Culture Industry), seeing its culmination in advertising and society’s reproduction through it—a “society of the spectacle,” as Guy Debord later described. Debord’s analysis of the commodity’s total occupation of social life and culture’s complete commodification aligns with Adorno and Horkheimer’s diagnosis. Adorno, in his 1963 “Resume über Kulturindustrie,” summarized that the culture industry’s “substitute gratification” deceives people of true happiness by creating the illusion that the world is as it should be, ultimately functioning as an “anti-enlightenment.”
Critical Theory, Dialectics of Culture, and the Fetish Character of Commodities
The critical theory of society and the dialectics of culture reveal that societal domination extends beyond mere exploitation, manifesting as oppression within the consciousness of modern individuals, thereby challenging the very notion of the bourgeois subject. Building on Kant’s analysis of consciousness, Hegel’s historical unfolding of spirit, and Marx’s materialist turn, critical theory asserts that “being determines consciousness.” Marx’s insight that human essence is the “ensemble of social relations” highlights the dialectical relationship between being and consciousness, where capitalist society distorts reality, presenting commodity production, money, and exchange value as natural conditions for happiness. This “necessarily false consciousness” stems from the “fetish character of the commodity.” Critical theory, by integrating Marxist ideology critique with Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, uncovers the unconscious dynamics within this ideology, demonstrating how societal contradictions permeate and constitute the bourgeois individual.
Bourgeois ideology, the text explains, reifies human history as cultural history, reducing humanity and its conflicts to cultural peculiarities. However, “culture” is not an invariant, nor is it merely abstract spiritual values or art. It embodies both the concrete achievements of humanism and the result of sublimated pleasure and necessary instinctual renunciation. The freedom of culture exists only in contradiction to the societal unfreedom that produced it. Critical theory insists that this dialectic cannot be resolved by merely engaging with culture, but only through a critical analysis of the contradictory totality of social being. Max Horkheimer, in “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), established the Institute for Social Research’s program, recognizing that while individuals and society are distinct, the individual’s world is shaped by social practice. Critical theory asserts that “it does not have to be this way, people can change being, the circumstances are now present,” questioning why people maintain repressive orders despite possibilities for a better society.
The Dual Character of Culture and Ideology
“Culture” carries a dual meaning: it encompasses the entirety of social life, including both ideal and material reproduction, as a historical unit. Simultaneously, it refers to “affirmative culture,” which emerged from the division of labor and the separation of work and leisure. This affirmative culture elevates the spiritual realm as an independent sphere of values, promising a universally binding, eternally better world that individuals can realize “from within,” distinct from daily struggles. While culture means “shaping real life,” it remains powerless against “blindly moving conditions” and also functions as “adaptation” or the “taming of animalistic humans” in a psychoanalytic sense. This duality arises from unresolved social antagonisms that culture attempts to heal but cannot, as mere culture.
The historical dimension of culture’s dual character reveals it as both the reification of regressive ideology and a source for changing the social order. This duality is inherent in the concept of culture itself. To label culture as a field for consumer goods, rather than a sphere to be challenged, falsifies its essence. All culture, the text argues, has always been a protest against the integration of human life into the production mechanism—against the rationalization, organization, and standardization of practical life. Cultural critique, therefore, must be social critique; otherwise, it succumbs to the very ideology it seeks to expose. The fight against mass culture involves revealing its connection to oppressive domination.
The critical theory of the culture industry rejects a positive view of culture as inherently superior, distancing itself from cultural pessimism and conservatism often attributed to Adorno and Horkheimer. The focus is not on culture as a value, but on enlightenment reflecting on itself to prevent human betrayal. Under current conditions, happiness becomes unhappiness, and progress turns into regression. Film and radio embody society; the culture industry, including “Volkswagen and Sportpalast,” becomes an “ideological curtain behind which real disaster gathers.” Merely “talking about culture was always against culture.” Cultural critique, by isolating culture from the social whole, inadvertently reproduces the “universal context of delusion” it aims to shatter. “Dialectic of Enlightenment” emphasizes realizing past hope, not preserving the past. Its critique of the culture industry is not that it gives people too much, but that it ensures they get too little and too bad, perpetuating misery and injustice, and maintaining a world prone to catastrophe and elite conspiracies. Leo Löwenthal similarly noted critical theory’s interest in mass culture: to expose how objective elements of a social whole are produced and reproduced in mass media, rejecting “mass taste” as a primary category. Instead, it highlights how consumers are taught a specific taste, a product of technical, political, and economic conditions controlled by those who own the means of production. “Taste” thus becomes an ideological filter, binding consumers to society without critical distance, composed of mere opinions about the world and themselves, an “ideology of immediacy.”
This dual character of culture also signifies the dual character of ideology in advanced society: ideology is both the necessarily “false” consciousness that existing conditions are “correct,” and the “correct” consciousness of “false” conditions. The capitalist world appears optimal, yet its capitalist structure remains unacknowledged. This relationship between social consciousness and being is manifested and reproduced by the culture industry. Social being and consciousness, estranged in modern society, now merge indistinguishably. Ideology, in this sense, means the culture industry suggests its commodities offer immediate experience of life’s meaning, while simultaneously abstracting from the reality of capitalist commodity production.
The Fetishistic Logic of the Culture Industry and Uneven Development
Such an “ideology of immediacy” cannot be analyzed directly. The culture industry’s dual character is its self-contradiction, embodying the contradiction of capitalist commodity production in a dialectically pure form. It is immediate because it is mediated with itself, requiring a mediate analysis through critical intervention into the dialectical structure of its relations. These relations are characterized by a fetishistic structural logic: capitalism, as immense commodity production, asserts itself abstractly through its “uncanny logic of valorization,” operating “behind people’s backs.” Capital, as the progressive self-valorization of value, becomes an “automatic subject,” as Marx described. Walter Benjamin spoke of an “expressive context,” emphasizing “not the economic origin of culture, but the expression of the economy in its culture.” He likened this to an overfull stomach expressing itself in a dream, not as a direct cause. The collective expresses its living conditions, finding expression in dreams and interpretation upon waking. Tearing society from its ideologically distorted, restless sleep is a core task of critical theory. Benjamin’s “dialectics at a standstill” encapsulates this method. The title “Dialectic of Enlightenment” thus refers both to the contradictory historical movement of enlightenment turning into mythology and vice versa, and to the critical method for explicating this movement within its expressive context.
The materialist theory of society’s dialectic posits that cultural conditions are rooted in material living conditions, specifically “bourgeois society,” rather than being understood in isolation or from the general development of the human spirit. Marx argued that the “anatomy of bourgeois society” lies in political economy, the economic base, which he contrasted with a superstructure encompassing “ideological forms” like law, politics, religion, art, and philosophy. Marx also noted the uneven development between the economic base and superstructure in 19th-century capitalism, where the superstructure could change at a different pace. Max Raphael, a Marxist art theorist, illustrated how the superstructure could be more developed than the economic base, citing Gothic architecture as an example of overwhelming progress compared to backward production conditions. Conversely, Benjamin traced a slower transformation of the superstructure relative to industrial capitalism through modern mass culture’s provisional forms, such as the flipbook and panorama anticipating film, and surrealism anticipating it aesthetically. Ernst Bloch, who introduced the concept of unevenness, also noted its presence in class and mass consciousness—unevenness of ideology, regressive remnants, and reactionary desires that disguise themselves in new forms of society and culture. Popular mass culture, he observed, bases its modernity on warmed-up myths. Siegfried Kracauer similarly observed this unevenness in employee culture of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in cinema’s function. Kracauer wrote in 1927 that “films are the mirror of existing society,” financed by corporations to meet public taste for profit. He added that “idiotic and unreal film fantasies are the daydreams of society, in which its true reality emerges, its otherwise suppressed desires take shape. […] The epitome of film motifs is also the sum of social ideologies.” A crucial function of these ideologies is to obscure simultaneous social contradictions, shifting them into private and individual fate. Unevenness thus becomes an ideological strategy to replace history with fashion and stage culture as a timeless present. As cultural production is organized according to capitalist production relations, the economic base and superstructure merge into a ubiquitous cultural sphere, though their distinction is ideologically maintained, for example, in the separation of work and leisure, workday and evening.
Avant-Garde, Kitsch, and the Aestheticization of Politics
The divergence of cultural fields reveals an asynchronous simultaneity of progress and regression within culture, a phenomenon Clement Greenberg concisely described in 1939 as “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Greenberg noted that the same civilization produces both a T.S. Eliot poem and a Tin-Pan-Alley hit, or a Braque painting and a Saturday Evening Post cover, all belonging to culture yet appearing vastly different. He explained that alongside the avant-garde, “Kitsch” emerged in the industrialized West, encompassing popular, commercial art and literature like magazine covers, pulp novels, comics, and Hollywood films. Kitsch, he argued, is mechanical, formulaic, and offers second-hand experience and feigned emotion. While it adapts to current styles, its essence remains the same, embodying everything inauthentic in contemporary life, demanding nothing from its audience but their money.
The text asserts that economic conditions and production relations are inseparable from “culture” (the superstructure). The full establishment of the capitalist economy, particularly commodity production, dictates cultural production, leading to cultural commodities. This signifies a merging of base and superstructure, where social production relations can no longer be separated from reproduction. This is precisely what “Kulturindustrie” denotes. The contradiction between kitsch and avant-garde finds expression in advanced bourgeois society, which structurally conceals its economic contradictions and inherent crisis dynamics. Ideologically, the opposition between avant-garde and kitsch is maintained in mass culture, only to be annulled, no less ideologically, in the culture industry. This suggests that insoluble social structural contradictions are masked by cultural contradictions that appear solvable in the medium term, with the staging of cultural conflicts overlaying economic antagonisms. Individual social life is shaped as everyday life, oriented towards a leveled employee culture that, at least in leisure organization, no longer recognizes class conflict or interest. Benjamin described this formation of mass culture under specific commodity production conditions as the “aestheticization of politics.” Economic classes are definitively transformed into a cultural mass, an audience, consumers. Benjamin, discussing mass culture in National Socialism, stated that “the masses have a right to change property relations; fascism seeks to give them an expression in their conservation. It logically leads to an aestheticization of political life.”
Marcuse, in his studies on Nazi German society, similarly concluded that art and culture undergo a general transformation. He observed that “beautiful factories make workers more compliant, patient, persistent.” This policy, however, has a deeper meaning: people perceive art as a homogeneous part of their environment, losing their sense of alienation and becoming familiar with it. But art, adapted to a world hostile to its promises, changes its content and function, becoming a means of repression that adapts people to the powers dominating social and political life. Ultimately, the arts lead individuals to love and maintain a world that needs them only as a means of oppression.
Culture and art now exclusively serve to affirm existing society, accompanied by a reorganization of everyday life where work and leisure no longer appear as separate spheres. The technological alignment of individuals at work is mirrored by the standardization of individuals in leisure. Two primary factors drive this standardization: first, pleasure has become standardized consumer goods produced and distributed by entertainment industry monopolies (e.g., restaurant chains, film corporations, radio stations, media syndicates), which supply unified entertainment that educates the public to unified reactions. Second, monotonous work routines lead to similarly monotonous post-work recreation. This diagnosis of a fundamental structural change in capitalist society and its culture, occurring as a modernization process in mass democracies and fascism from the 1920s to the 1940s, remains central to a critical theory of the culture industry.
The Culture Industry and the Standardization of Everyday Life
The statement “Culture today strikes everything with similarity” underscores how the critical theory of the culture industry must be understood against the backdrop of changes in everyday life. This can be traced through various investigations into leisure behavior published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the theoretical organ of the “Institut für Sozialforschung” from 1932 to 1941. Adorno’s “Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik” (On the Social Situation of Music) in the first issue already contained the core thesis of the culture industry concept: the connection between culture and commodity, based on Marx’s theory of the fetish character of the commodity. Similarly, Löwenthal, in the same year, examined the “Gesellschaftliche Lage der Literatur” (Social Situation of Literature) concerning the success of popular works in a literary market. Andries Sternheim’s “Zum Problem der Freizeitgestaltung” (On the Problem of Leisure Activities) outlined the overarching scope of the still-developing concept, addressing mass leisure activities like sports, cinema, radio, and allotment gardening, as well as education, reading, and various club and family activities. Sternheim further explored the “Family and Everyday Life” problem in a collective review, and the Institute published “Studien über Autorität und Familie” (Studies on Authority and Family) in the mid-1930s.
The fifth volume in 1936 became central to the discussion, featuring Benjamin’s famous essay “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) and Adorno’s notorious contribution “Über Jazz” (On Jazz) under the pseudonym Hektor Rottweiler. The sixth volume in 1937 included Horkheimer’s and Marcuse’s fundamental contributions to critical theory, as well as Marcuse’s essay “Über den affirmativen Charakter der Kultur” (On the Affirmative Character of Culture). In the seventh volume, Adorno wrote “Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens” (On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening), discussing the changed reception behavior of a mass audience. Here, Adorno elaborated on the connection between identification, advertising, and musical reception, attributing its cause—as he later did for the culture industry as a whole—to the commodity form of culture. He stated that “the fetish character of music produces its own concealment through the identification of listeners with the fetishes.” Ernst Křenek similarly argued in the same volume in his “Bemerkungen zur Rundfunkmusik” (Remarks on Radio Music) that “radio accelerates the trivialization and thus the incapacitation of tonal musical language for the purposes of music and thereby certainly performs a progressive work.” He ironized that radio does not disseminate new music in the same way, but rather causes a “planless inflation, an immeasurable underscoring of all humanity with music.” This music is immediately perceived by listeners as it was intended: “as acoustic applied art for the embellishment of everyday life.”
Adorno further discussed the consequences of the fetish character of cultural commodities in his “Fragmenten über Wagner” (Fragments on Wagner) in the eighth volume. This volume also published Benjamin’s essay “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” (On Some Motifs in Baudelaire), which also deals with specific aspects of cultural expression in capitalism, understood by Benjamin and Adorno as “Phantasmagorien” (phantasmagorias) in Marx’s terms. In the final, ninth volume, Adorno’s essay “On Popular Music” appeared, where he spoke of the “communication industry” and identified the “fundamental characteristic” of popular music as “Standardization.” He noted that “the whole structure of popular music is standardized, even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardization,” citing the rule that the chorus consists of thirty-two bars and the range is limited to one octave and one note. The ninth volume also included Horkheimer’s essay “Art and Mass Culture” and various contributions on American mass culture, particularly Hollywood film production. William Dieterle analyzed “Hollywood and the European Crisis.” Herta Herzog wrote “On Borrowed Experience. An Analysis of Listening to Daytime Sketches.” Harold D. Laswell analyzed “Radio as an Instrument of Reducing Personal Insecurity.” Paul F. Lazarsfeld published “Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communication Research.” Charles A. Siepmann examined the relationship between “Radio and Education.”
With the imperialist and Fordist era, bourgeois society became fully permeated by economic law. Regarding the organization of everyday life and leisure, critical theory assumes that capitalist valorization logic has extended into culture, and the production of social life has intertwined with its reproduction. In this sense, critical theory diagnoses a “totally administered world,” a “universal context of delusion.” The ideological mechanisms of advanced society culminate in the culture industry, where the dialectic of enlightenment manifests. The section “Kulturindustrie” indicates the regression of enlightenment in ideology, finding its decisive expression in film and radio. The culture industry marks the dialectic of culture, its development under capitalist conditions, and simultaneously the end of bourgeois ideas associated with culture, by reifying ideology into a material relationship. Critical theory is not concerned with reconstructing cultural history but with how “culture” itself emerges as ideology and a material force field in the capitalist modernization process, dialectically intertwined with socio-economic conditions, as presented later in the Dialectic of Enlightenment with the concept of the culture industry.
Art as Commodity and the End of Aesthetic Distinction
The culture industry’s triumph lies in its ability to transform art into a consumable commodity. This pervasive commodification of culture is so complete that its presence is no longer overtly recognized, making it all the more potent. The traditional distinction between form and content, often invoked by critics, becomes meaningless in this context. For instance, it is impossible to separate a fascist message from the music in a Nazi punk band, just as one cannot admire a moderator’s style or expertise while ignoring their contempt for others. Similarly, attempting to find artistic merit in an advertisement because it contains subtle references to a renowned filmmaker, or interpreting technically sophisticated special effects through postmodern theories without acknowledging the underlying production relations, misses the point entirely. As aesthetics become a mere surface layer, critical theory must abandon aesthetic interpretation and instead focus on the social implications. As Kracauer observed, the social meaning of mass culture products grows in importance precisely because their content becomes increasingly devoid of genuine aesthetic value.
When art fully embraces its role as a commodity, its aesthetic facade merely reinforces its fetishistic connection to the market, rendering aesthetic critique insufficient to challenge its social function. A clear-eyed perspective is essential, especially when everything has become a commodity. This means recognizing that art within the culture industry is fundamentally a product. Film, for example, operates within the capitalist economy as any other commodity, produced primarily for profit rather than artistic expression or public enlightenment, with only a few exceptions. Adorno similarly noted in 1932 that music’s social role had become exclusively that of a commodity, its value determined solely by the market. It no longer served immediate needs or uses but conformed to the imperative of exchange for abstract units, subordinating its use-value to the demands of the market. While art in the bourgeois era always existed within this system, its autonomy from church and state also meant its freedom as a commodity. Under the culture industry, however, its function is entirely absorbed into the realm of cultural goods. The novelty lies not in art’s commodification itself, but in its open acknowledgment and its proud renunciation of autonomy, aligning itself directly with other consumer products.
The Liquidation of Art and the Rise of Kitsch
Hegel’s declaration two centuries ago about the “end of art” — a pronouncement made just as the modern cultural apparatus of mass events, museums, and autonomous artworks was establishing itself in bourgeois society — finds its full realization in the culture industry a century later. The arts and their cultural domain are not separate but are fully integrated into this industry, along with the bourgeois educational ideology still clinging to the art system, despite the long-eroded boundaries between high art, mass culture, and popular forms. Adorno termed this phenomenon the “liquidation of art,” the “de-artification of art,” or the “fraying of the arts,” describing it as a false end. This updated thesis, like Hegel’s, does not imply art’s disappearance, but rather an expansion of what is considered “art,” leading to an aestheticization of everyday and political life. This fundamentally alters art’s structure. The truly new development is the way “the irreconcilable elements of culture, art, and entertainment are brought under a single false formula by their subordination to purpose: the totality of the culture industry. It consists in repetition.” Through this relentless repetition, art’s truth content perishes; it ceases to foster aesthetic experiences that challenge the existing order or offer a glimpse of a utopian alternative. Its cognitive character, which once exposed social untruths, is lost. Instead, the aesthetic appearance of instrumentalized art repeatedly confirms the existing order. The idealistic aesthetic principle of “purposiveness without purpose” is inverted: bourgeois art now serves a “purposelessness for purposes declared by the market.” Consequently, art structurally transforms into kitsch, even in spheres where the bourgeoisie attempts to preserve sophisticated art for prestige. The economic boom in fine art during the 1990s exemplifies this broader trend of high culture merging with the culture industry. Academic fields like social sciences were rebranded as media and cultural studies, and today, media or cultural management is a prominent focus, making the combination of business administration and free art obligatory. The artist, in this environment, becomes an independent entrepreneur, having already learned to function as an entertainer.
Art After Auschwitz: The Silence of Horror
A common misconception portrays art as a passive mirror of society, merely reflecting existing realities. In contrast, Leon Trotsky argued that art is not a mirror but a hammer, capable of shattering the ideological mirror. However, when art becomes a commodity, it reverts to being a mere mirror. This would be unproblematic if the world shaped by the culture industry were largely peaceful and humane. Yet, the 20th century was defined by unimaginable horror, demanding more from art than a simple reflection of this terror. Adorno even questioned the very possibility of advanced art to offer an aesthetically critical response to the history that produced Auschwitz. Auschwitz, a name that silences, representing a crime that stripped people of their identities, also silences art itself. Adorno’s struggle with the question of what art remains possible after Auschwitz extends beyond art directly addressing mass murder to encompass art and the culture industry fundamentally. He provocatively declared, “All culture after Auschwitz, including urgent criticism of it, is garbage.” The sheer terror of reality had surpassed the capacity of art to provoke.
The Culture Industry and the Logic of Decay
The relentless uniformity of the culture industry mirrors an emerging unity in politics. “Dialektik der Aufklärung” (Dialectic of Enlightenment) explored the regression of the civilized world, a theme Adorno later revisited in “Negative Dialektik” as a “logic of decay.” While this thesis is elaborated through the lens of mass democracy solidified into the culture industry, Adorno and Horkheimer did not equate “barbarism” with democratic America, which had offered them refuge. Instead, they referred to Europe under the shadow of Nazi German terror. The culture industry is not fascist, but it shares structural functions, behaviors, and predispositions in the general consciousness with fascist society. As critical theory’s studies on authority demonstrated, racist resentments, for example, are not inherently logical but stem from an authoritarian or conformist character, whose prejudices can easily escalate from harmless projections to pogroms. The “Elements of Antisemitism” section in “Dialektik der Aufklärung,” which follows the culture industry discussion, illustrates this through the increasing reification of consciousness and social relations. German fascism’s völkisch system perfected the aestheticization of life, and the systematic mass murder of Jews was an integral part of this advanced modernization process, not merely a negative byproduct. Antisemitism represented the culmination of the logic of value’s self-valorization, as encapsulated in phrases like “To each his own” or “Work makes you free.” A chilling joke from Hitler’s Germany — “No one should starve or freeze; whoever does, goes to a concentration camp” — could serve as a maxim for all portals of the culture industry. Those not cared for outside belong in concentration camps, or at least in the hell of the lowest labor and slums. The culture industry, however, presents both positive and negative care for the administered as the immediate solidarity of capable individuals.
Can the culture industry still be understood in these terms half a century after liberation from fascism? A comparison between reality show “Big Brother” containers and concentration camp barracks does not relativize Auschwitz, but the German extermination camps certainly relativize the pleasure derived from the humiliations depicted in reality shows. The difference is one of totality, yet simultaneously, there is no difference: the wretchedness of culture industry employees confined to containers and the torment of those persecuted and murdered by German fascism are not the same, yet both phenomena are structurally rooted in the principle of selection, the reduction of humans to specimens, the humiliation of the weak, and malicious discrimination. Similar containers are used not only for housing low-wage workers from Eastern Europe but also as deportation prisons for unwanted migrants, in front of which neo-fascist mobs gather to set fires. Here, the dialectic of enlightenment continues ominously. While it is incorrect to label the culture industry as fascist, it is equally crucial to reflect on the logic of fascist society: National Socialism itself functioned as a culture industry, by no means lagging behind modern mass culture. This is likely what Adorno’s suspicion targets: that “the afterlife of National Socialism in democracy is to be considered potentially more threatening than the afterlife of fascist tendencies against democracy.”
The Aestheticization of Politics and the Obscured Dialectic
This critical perspective directly contradicts the image the culture industry cultivates for itself. For example, against state-mandated anti-fascism in the German Democratic Republic, democratic structures of mass culture are invoked, supposedly guaranteeing freedom and tolerance. The perpetual aestheticization of the present serves as a bulwark for the culture industry against the Nazi past. After decades of suppressing the fact that the state of emergency in fascist society was rooted in everyday normality, German history is now presented in spectacularly staged docu-dramas as a suffering history of Germans, who were merely seduced by the Führer and cheated out of the true Volksgemeinschaft. Culture before 1945 is reduced to Hitler’s favorite artists, while post-1945 culture becomes a brightly embellished “experience society”: the economic miracle, student protests, Spreewald pickles, and punk rock are indiscriminately presented in “Germany shows” as a grand democratic cultural movement culminating in the “uprising of the decent.” This doubly obscures the dialectic of enlightenment: it ignores the cultural logic that led to Auschwitz, and it ignores the cultural logic that persists after Auschwitz. If a right-wing to neo-fascist mainstream emerges today, encompassing general resentments and open antisemitism, it is still treated as a fleeting fashion phenomenon that “actually has nothing to do with culture.” Regardless of what happens, the entertainment program must continue. This perpetuates an order where the social spheres of economy, sport, politics, and culture merge into a single, undifferentiated block. The “political” nature of the culture industry means not only that it transforms political topics into information commodities, but also that the political itself dissolves into a cultural behavior.
Modern society exhibits three distinct stages of the aestheticization of politics, corresponding to mass culture, the culture industry, and pop culture. For pre-fascist mass culture, Benjamin observed a “crisis of the conditions of exhibition of political man,” where the politician becomes a performer. This necessitates a new selection process, a selection before the apparatus, from which the champion, the star, and the dictator emerge as victors. Against this aestheticization of politics by the culture industry, Benjamin called for the politicization of art. However, what actually occurs is the democratic reversal of totalitarian political beautification: the politicization of aesthetics. This is precisely what happens in pop culture, which Debord aptly termed the “society of the spectacle”: an “aestheticized” attitude becomes politics, and conversely, politics becomes a matter of taste, where the aesthetic order of everyday life transforms into advertising for a “being political” lifestyle.
The new ideology takes the world itself as its object. If 19th-century bourgeois society found its expression in mass culture, 20th-century Fordist and late-capitalist society formed as the culture industry. Today, the culture industry has dialectically dissolved into pop culture: everything is pop. Sociologist Jeremy Rifkin speaks of a “culture society” characterized by the reversal of the relationship between an object and its symbol: the product no longer represents the image, but the product is the image. Adorno and Horkheimer concluded their section on the culture industry by diagnosing this very phenomenon.
What the “Culture Industry” Means
Behrens begins by asking “What is Culture Industry?” and immediately grounds the concept in the transformation of bourgeois society’s “old ghosts” into pervasive spectacles. He illustrates this with examples from contemporary life: the enthusiastic consumption of television series, blockbuster films, war coverage, and the widespread availability of music through illegal downloads. He notes the resurgence of national symbols and retro youth cultures, all under the relentless drive of profit. The term “Kulturindustrie” itself, coined by Adorno and Horkheimer in the 1930s and 40s, initially seems paradoxical in a consumer capitalism that presents itself as a vibrant market of possibilities. Yet, Behrens argues, much of what they observed has become even more fully realized today, shaping lives with a ruthlessness they anticipated.
The book delves into the “Conceptual Confusion” surrounding the term. While proponents of consumer culture see diversity and subversion in cultural commodities, critical theory identifies standardization and clichés. The idea that culture is a commodity, once a core critique, has become a slogan for democratic choice and self-determination. Production companies even use “Kulturindustrie” as a self-promotional label. This confusion often reduces critical theory to mere cultural criticism, leading to a simplistic view of a “factory” of “mean bigwigs” producing “commercial culture,” against which “honest, homemade, and original folk culture” is defended—a schema that can harbor anti-American, racist, and anti-Semitic sentiments. Behrens clarifies that the point is not to dismiss mass culture as inherently bad, but to critique a fundamental structural change in capitalist society. The culture industry thesis remains relevant as long as critical theory itself remains current, challenging not just “bad culture” but the “bad society” it conceals.
The Dialectical Nature of Culture and Ideology
Central to Behrens’s analysis is the critical theory of society, which posits that societal domination extends beyond economic exploitation to oppress individual consciousness. Drawing on Kant, Hegel, and Marx, he explains how consciousness, historically shaped by material conditions, becomes distorted in capitalist society. The “fetish character of the commodity” makes society appear as a natural condition for happiness, creating a “necessarily false consciousness.” Behrens integrates Freud’s psychoanalytic theory to show how these contradictions permeate the individual, constituting the bourgeois subject.
Culture, in this framework, is not a static concept of spiritual values or art. It is both the embodiment of human achievements and the result of sublimated desires and necessary renunciation. Its freedom exists in contradiction to the societal unfreedom that produced it. Critical theory argues that this “dialectic of culture” can only be resolved through an analysis of the contradictory totality of social being, not merely through cultural critique. Behrens highlights Horkheimer’s “Traditional and Critical Theory,” which established the research program for the Institute for Social Research, emphasizing that individuals can change their circumstances. The question, then, is why people maintain repressive orders despite the possibility of a better society.
Behrens explores the dual meaning of “culture”: encompassing all social life (ideal and material reproduction) and also referring to “affirmative culture.” This affirmative culture elevates the spiritual world as an independent realm of values, distinct from daily struggles, which individuals can realize “from within.” Culture means “shaping real life” but remains powerless against “blindly moving conditions”; it also functions as “adaptation” or “taming of animalistic humans.” This dual character stems from unresolved social antagonisms that culture attempts to heal but cannot. The historical dimension of this duality shows culture as both regressive ideology and a means to change the social order. Critiquing mass culture, therefore, means exposing its connection to “bad domination.”
The critical theory of the culture industry rejects a positive view of culture as inherently superior. Adorno and Horkheimer, Behrens notes, were not cultural pessimists but sought to prevent people from being utterly betrayed by a system where goods of happiness become unhappiness and progress turns into regression. Cultural critique, by isolating culture from the social whole, risks reproducing the “universal context of delusion” it aims to shatter. The true interest of critical theory in the culture industry is to understand how objective elements of the social whole are produced and reproduced in mass media, shaping consumer taste as an ideological filter that binds individuals to society without critical distance.
This dual character of culture also reflects the dual character of ideology itself: it is the “necessarily false” consciousness that existing conditions are “correct,” and simultaneously the “correct” consciousness of “false” conditions. The capitalist world appears as the best possible, yet its capitalist structure remains obscured. The culture industry both suggests immediate experience of life’s meaning and abstracts from the reality of capitalist commodity production. This “ideology of immediacy” can only be analyzed through critical intervention into its dialectical structure, characterized by a fetishistic logic where capital becomes an “automatic subject.” Behrens cites Walter Benjamin’s idea of an “expressive context,” where the economy expresses itself in culture, not as a causal reflection, but as a dream expresses an overfull stomach. The task of critical theory is to awaken society from this ideologically distorted sleep.
Odysseus, Art, and the Administered World
Behrens uses the figure of Odysseus as a “prototypical citizen” and “archetype of the bourgeois individual,” whose cunning in navigating the Sirens’ song serves as a “prescient allegory of the Dialectic of Enlightenment.” Odysseus’s self-mastery and self-renunciation, achieved by having himself tied to the mast while his oarsmen’s ears are plugged, mirrors the advanced division of labor: the alienated proletariat in joyless labor and the reified bourgeoisie in unfulfilled enjoyment. This episode anticipates the cultural operations of the administered world, where pleasure is postponed and replaced by passive enjoyment.
The condition of art in the culture-industrial age arises from this dynamic. All music, from orchestras to pop bands, functions with a division of labor, offering enjoyment that is merely a derivative of culture’s promise of happiness. In the culture industry, the separation of work and enjoyment is ostensibly reversed, democratically leveled, by making enjoyment itself into work. “Amusement is the prolongation of work under late capitalism,” and “being amused means agreeing.” The culture industry dictates reactions through signals, avoiding any logical connection that demands thought. Products are calculated in advance, and while they may differ externally, their content as commodities is uniform in not questioning their primary nature as commodities. Even concessions to minorities, such as giving Black people roles as Black people or gay men roles that copy heterosexual clichés, serve to integrate racist stereotypes and homophobic standards more easily.
This standardization of cultural goods leads to a standardization of needs, contrary to the ideal of free self-development. Any disruption of the familiar is avoided, and substitute gratifications are provided to prevent any void or resistance. “Pleasure always means: not having to think about it, forgetting suffering.” The culture industry not only persuades consumers that its deception is satisfaction but also implies they must resign themselves to what is offered. Behrens refutes the criticism that Adorno and Horkheimer considered people too foolish, arguing that critical theory never prescribed happiness but defended individuals’ right to decide for themselves. The culture industry, not the theorists, declares the masses stupid by demanding nothing of them. “Stupidity is not caused by the oppressed, but oppression makes stupid.”
The “success of the culture industry lies in the ‘transposition of art into the sphere of consumption’.” When art becomes a commodity, its aesthetic appearance doubles the fetishistic connection, making aesthetic criticism insufficient. Behrens argues that art in the culture industry must be recognized as a commodity, produced for profit, not enlightenment. Its autonomy, once a freedom on the economic market, is now fully assimilated to cultural goods. This “liquidation of art” or “de-artification” does not mean art disappears, but that more social spheres are declared art, leading to an aestheticization of everyday and political life. The “irreconcilable elements of culture, art, and entertainment are brought under a single false formula by their subordination to purpose: the totality of the culture industry. It consists in repetition.” In this repetition, art loses its truth content and its premonition of a utopian truth. The principle of purposelessness for market purposes transforms art into kitsch, even high art.
The Political Implications of Cultural Standardization
The “ruthless unity of the culture industry testifies to the emerging unity of politics.” Behrens connects the culture industry to the “regression of the civilized world” and the “logic of decay” that Adorno later described. While the thesis was explicated using mass democracy, Adorno and Horkheimer did not equate “barbarism” with democratic America, but with Nazi German terror. The culture industry is not fascist, but it shares structural functions and predispositions of general consciousness with fascist society. Studies on authority showed how racist resentments, for example, presuppose an authoritarian character. The aestheticization of life, perfected by German fascism, and the systematic mass murder of Jews, are seen as part of an advanced modernization process. Behrens provocatively compares Big Brother containers to camp barracks, arguing that while the suffering is not the same, both phenomena are structurally based on selection, reduction of humans to specimens, and humiliation of the weak.
The “afterlife of National Socialism in democracy” is potentially more threatening than overt fascist tendencies. The culture industry maintains an image of freedom and tolerance, obscuring the cultural logic that led to Auschwitz and the cultural logic after it. Today’s right-wing to neo-fascist mainstream is often dismissed as a fleeting fashion, but Behrens argues that the entertainment program must continue, maintaining an order where economy, sport, politics, and culture merge into a single block. The culture industry is “political” not just by turning political topics into commodities, but by dissolving the political into cultural behavior.
Behrens distinguishes three stages of the aestheticization of politics: mass culture, culture industry, and pop culture. Benjamin noted a “crisis of the conditions of exhibition of political man” in pre-fascist mass culture, where the politician becomes a performer. Against this aestheticization, Benjamin demanded the politicization of art. However, what happens in pop culture, which Debord calls the society of the spectacle, is the “politicization of aesthetics”: an “aestheticized” attitude becomes politics, and politics becomes a matter of taste, an aesthetic order of everyday life advertising a lifestyle of “being political.” The new ideology has the world itself as its object.
