Mass culture must pose as realistic while steadily lowering its intellectual demands

Evidence

The overt ‘naiveté’ of older popular culture is avoided. Mass culture, if not sophisticated, must at least be up to date - that is to say, ‘realistic’, or posing as realistic - in order to meet the expectations of a supposedly disillusioned, alert, and hard-boiled audience. Middle-class requirements bound up with internalization - such as concentration, intellectual effort, and erudition - have to be continuously lowered. This does not hold only for the United States, where historical memories are scarcer than in Europe, but it is universal, applying to England and Continental Europe as well. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 218

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘posing as realistic’ imperative maps directly onto the pseudo-individuation idea — realism as a product feature rather than documentation, applicable to the reader’s stated goal of running Adorno on new objects. — connects to: Mass cultural manipulation depends on genuine Utopian longings — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 6911; Higher art must approach the masses by assimilating kitsch — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 874