Mass culture pre-forms experience rather than outlining it.

Evidence

The ‘schema’ of the title does not refer to Adorno’s outline of the culture industry but rather to the culture industry’s own schematizing (a Kantian term), patterning or pre-forming of experience. Hence, the essay opens with what I shall suggest later is the controlling movement of postmodernism: the collapse of the difference between culture and practical life, which here is the same as the false aestheticization of the empirical world, an aestheticization of empirical life that does not transform it in accordance with the ideals of sensuous happiness and freedom, but rather secures the illusion that empirical life realizes those ends to the degree to which such is possible. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 29

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines ‘schematization’ as the culture industry’s Kantian pre-forming of experience — the analytical unit for applying Adorno.
• XREF: Frames the collapse of culture/life distinction as the root of postmodernism — a bridge claim useful across critical-theory work.

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