Mass consumers are calculated objects, not the subjects, of culture production

Evidence

The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan. The individual branches are similar in structure or at least fit into each other, ordering themselves into a system almost without a gap. This is made possible by contemporary technical capabilities as well as by economic and administrative concentration. The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years. The seriousness of high art is destroyed in speculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it as long as social control was not yet total. Thus, although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 138

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the diamond trade’s extralegal systems and reputation economics — the culture industry as another arena where the customer’s alleged sovereignty masks industrial calculation. — connects to: Audience taste is manufactured by the industry, not the reverse. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 94; Product differentiation in mass culture functions as consumer classification, not real variety. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 95; Mass production really means producing the masses, not producing massively — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 227 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Establishes the core definition of ‘culture industry’ that the whole essay hinges on, distinguishing it from ‘mass culture’.

Related

• The culture industry is production from above, not culture arising from the masses (similarity 0.88)
• The culture industry rules by manufacturing the needs it satisfies (similarity 0.86)
• Mass culture creates the very needs it then claims to satisfy (similarity 0.84)
• Mass culture’s technical rationality masks class domination as consumer demand. (similarity 0.84)
• Mass production really means producing the masses, not producing massively (similarity 0.83)
• Mass culture replaces genuine art experience with identification and evaluation (similarity 0.83)
• Product differentiation in mass culture functions as consumer classification, not real variety. (similarity 0.83)
• The culture industry does the consumer’s cognitive schematizing for him (similarity 0.82)
• Predetermined needs reduce the consumer to the eternal object of the industry (similarity 0.82)
• The culture industry offers evidence of destinations rather than genuine escape (similarity 0.81)
• The culture industry’s catalog of prohibitions governs the entire space of permitted expression (similarity 0.81)
• Mass culture perfects its technical presentation while the content remains fatuous and standardized (similarity 0.81)
• Mass culture functions as baby-food that manufactures the very needs it satisfies (similarity 0.81)
• Audience taste is manufactured by the industry, not the reverse. (similarity 0.81)
• Even modernist art becomes infected by the schema of mass culture. (similarity 0.80)