Mass culture’s commercial self-justification is a subterfuge that evades responsibility for falsity

Evidence

Habermas argues that the triple response to modernity outlined above originates in the collapse of Hegel’s system. For it was Hegel who ‘inaugurated the discourse of modernity’, whose theme is ‘the self-critical reassurance of modernity’. Hegel grasped the distinctive problem of modernity, its need for self-justification, given the collapse of traditional norms and models consequent on the seventeenthcentury revolution (see section 2.1 above). — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 264 (#expands, via linked claim)

Adorno’s critique concerns not only standardised production, but the very needs it ostensibly fulfils: ‘these needs – which are not really needs at all – are bad insofar as they are directed towards a fulfilment that cheats us out of this very fulfilment. The social mediation of need – as mediated by capitalist society – has reached a point where need comes into contradiction with itself’. Adorno identifies this situation as one of ‘mass deception’ and ‘total social delusion’. The deception in question here is less of a case of directed manipulation than of the eager promotion of the misconception that mass culture is the culture of the masses. The concept of mass culture Adorno uses in ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’ is ultimately dropped in Dialectic of Enlightenment ‘in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From the latter, the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme’. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 845 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Mass culture deception is self-consenting misconception, not top-down manipulation — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 845; Modernity’s need for self-justification arises from the collapse of traditional norms — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 264; Mass media openly admit being business to justify their production (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Mass culture deception is self-consenting misconception, not top-down manipulation #expands (0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 845
• Modernity’s need for self-justification arises from the collapse of traditional norms #expands (0.80) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 264