Adorno’s theory denies audiences relative autonomy of consciousness

Evidence

Because Adorno’s theory lacks these dimensions, it pictures the audience of the culture industry as the dupes of mass deception, denying thus the ‘relative autonomy of consciousness’. This can but lead to a ‘politics of resignation and despair and cannot account for struggles against advanced capitalism’. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 55

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: This is the standard critical objection the reader needs to hold in tension with Adorno’s own claims when running the analysis.

Related

• Mass media’s audience demands undermines their own ideological work (similarity 0.85)
• The culture industry does not fully determine what consumers think and feel. (similarity 0.83)
• Mass culture deception is self-consenting misconception, not top-down manipulation (similarity 0.82)
• Adorno’s elitist critique condemned mass-culture victims without addressing them empirically (similarity 0.81)
• Mass culture absorbs critique preemptively so that no ideology need be injected (similarity 0.81)
• Taking the culture industry seriously requires critical, not deferential, attention. (similarity 0.81)
• Disciplinary boundaries reflect reification, not the nature of their objects (similarity 0.81)
• The culture industry predetermines discourse so that truth itself becomes implausible. (similarity 0.81)
• Adorno saw Hitler as executor of a pre-existing deculturing tendency (similarity 0.80)
• Art’s autonomy internalizes the very social domination it claims to escape (similarity 0.80)
• Transcendent critique loses force as society grows more one-dimensional (similarity 0.80)
• Culture industry’s total effect is anti-enlightenment fettering consciousness (similarity 0.80)
• The high-low art split itself, not either pole, reveals truth about society (similarity 0.80)
• Adorno’s culture industry critique is structurally grounded in political economy, not mythical ruling elites (similarity 0.80)
• Audiences accept mass culture as a survival passport, not through stultification (similarity 0.80)