Adorno & Horkheimer: Enlightenment, Domination, and the Culture Industry

For this session, we’ll be reading Adorno and Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” This text critiques modern mass culture as a continuation of the Enlightenment project under the conditions of advanced capitalism.

In this essay, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the Enlightenment’s promise of emancipation through reason has inverted into its opposite: rationalization now produces conformity and domination. The “culture industry”—film, radio, popular music, mass entertainment—standardizes cultural products, erases individuality, and manufactures consent. Pleasure is pre-packaged, differences are superficial, and audiences are trained to consume rather than think critically.

The logic of the culture industry is one of pseudo-individualization and standardization: the consumer believes they exercise choice, but every option follows the same formula. Culture becomes an extension of capitalist production, with artworks treated as commodities that discipline consciousness. Far from liberating, enlightenment reason functions as an instrument of control, producing passive subjects.

This critique frames mass culture not as trivial entertainment but as a key site where power, ideology, and subjectivity are reproduced. It raises questions about autonomy, authenticity, and resistance in a society where even leisure is colonized by production.

The reading can be found here