Everyday and the Culture Industry

After reading Marx and Althusser, Adorno's assessment of culture seems relatively less prescient. However, he does raise a number of points still relevant to today's culture, albeit with some adaptation.

Throughout the text Adorno drops in scathing criticisms of how culture has become a commodified, industrial system, presumably juxtaposed against the organic creation and artistic expression of "high art". He repeatedly describes culture as imposing an ideology of conformity among consumers, and decries it as stifling the pure, untapped creative genius of mankind's collective consciousness. He also mentions how the products of culture have the ability to take a specific uniqueness of a subject and turn it into something homogenized and bland.

All of these points can be seen in modern culture - we still see plenty of cultural creations blindly following the tropes that enabled the success of their predecessors, with little artistic input to distinguish themselves and establish their own identities. More often than before, these do not succeed commercially, and the remainder of the fruit on the vine is brought to wither (His Dark Materials may never be fully adapted because of this). Culture and media are also responsible for generating persistent stereotypes via means of a single work or event, and this is as reviled today as it had been by Adorno in the 1940s.

Through no fault of his own, Adorno failed to predict the evolution of the process of cultural creation, and this should be given some serious consideration. As humanity developed more varied means of communication, the culture industry began integrating elements from numerous other cultures into single works; eventually, consumers were able to create as well as recreate popular culture. Nowadays, satire, parody, and homage may be considered legitimate forms of artistic creation, and memes can go from non-existent to pervading the collective consciousness of the Internet in a single night. One might argue that this only reinforces dominant ideology the same way the cultural industry does, but the power to create has by and large been taken away from the industry and returned to the hands of the people, and with this ability it has become much more difficult for the ideological mandate of the powerful to assert its dominance over humanity's collective voices by simply drowning them out. Even so, those voices often represent poles rather than spectra; humanity has escaped its cell only to find itself on an island, while the ocean of potential ideologies surrounds them still.