Language in the culture industry calculates and incites but no longer expresses.

Evidence

Today language calculates, describes, betrays, incites to murder; but it expresses nothing. The culture industry, like science, seeks a standard to work to outside itself … in facts. Film stars are experts; their performances are protocols of natural behavior, a guide to approved responses. Producers and scriptwriters produce models for proficiently adjusted conduct. The precision work of the culture industry rules out distortion as mere error, chance, the unwholesomeness of the subjective and natural. Deviation is permitted only on practical grounds that bring it within the realm of reason. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 258

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the culture industry’s relation to language: expression is replaced by instrumental calculation with reference to ‘facts’ outside itself.
• ADDENDUM: Grounds the ‘complaints about immodesty’ piece indirectly: the suppression of ‘the unwholesomeness of the subjective and natural’ in conduct models parallels the taming of dress and body.
• XREF: connects to: The culture industry is defined by repetition under a false formula of totality; The culture industry converts bare existence into a substitute for meaning and right — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 114; Ordinary language is already purged of expressive means by society — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 651 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Ordinary language is already purged of expressive means by society #corroborates (0.85) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 651
• Language works by exchange rules mirroring economic exchange, not by free expression. #expands (0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1000
• Language itself has become a site where reified theory falsifies lived experience #complicates (0.75) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1100