Culture industry’s total effect is anti-enlightenment fettering consciousness

Evidence

The total effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment, in which, as Horkheimer and I have noted, enlightenment, that is the progressive technical domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves. These, however, would be the precondition for a democratic society which needs adults who have come of age in order to sustain itself and develop. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 147

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: This is the dialectic of enlightenment thesis applied at its most compressed — connects to the Horkheimer/Adorno collaboration that spawned the whole culture industry concept.

Related

• The culture industry offers evidence of destinations rather than genuine escape (similarity 0.83)
• Even modernist art becomes infected by the schema of mass culture. (similarity 0.81)
• The culture industry does not fully determine what consumers think and feel. (similarity 0.81)
• Culture industry efficacy operates by exploiting consumers’ ego-weakness. (similarity 0.80)
• The culture industry is defined by repetition under a false formula of totality (similarity 0.80)
• Adorno’s theory denies audiences relative autonomy of consciousness (similarity 0.80)
• Consumer conformity in culture industry is exploitation dressed as humanitarianism (similarity 0.80)
• The culture industry converts bare existence into a substitute for meaning and right (similarity 0.80)
• Disciplinary boundaries reflect reification, not the nature of their objects (similarity 0.79)
• Modernism’s decline removes the chief obstacle to culture industry dominance. (similarity 0.79)
• Individuals can still alter institutions through critical, conscious use of them. (similarity 0.79)
• Culture consumed as consumer goods manipulates people rather than liberating them. (similarity 0.79)
• The culture industry’s false harmony is more sinister than open contradiction (similarity 0.79)
• Culture’s promise of happiness is equivocal because it exists only where freedom does not (similarity 0.79)
• The culture industry does the consumer’s cognitive schematizing for him (similarity 0.79)