In order to fully understand Adorno’s
opinions on the culture industry and mass culture, we must consider the context
in which he wrote them. The fact that Dialectic
of Enlightenment was published only two years post World War II (and Adorno
had been living in the United States for nearly a decade at this time) is
highly significant here. World War II heavily influenced American popular
culture in the 1940s with regard to propaganda and the anti-German and
anti-Japanese attitude that consumed most of the population and its culture.
Movies, music, news headlines, etc. were all focused around the war. In this
sense, the feelings of distaste that Adorno (a German man himself) expresses toward
the culture industry are better understood.
Adorno argues that “The most ambitious
defence of the culture industry today celebrates its spirit, which might be
safely called ideology, as an ordering factor. In a supposedly chaotic world it
provides human beings with something like standards for orientation…” (103). Do you all think this quote still applies today?
Would you consider us to be living in a so-called “chaotic world”? I would
say that we are, not in the same way that Adorno was, but possibly in a
different way. In an age of social media, technology, marketing, advertising
and politics, we are exposed to an entirely different culture industry that the
one Adorno was referring to.
Even though the content that the culture industry attempts to promote today may be different, fundamentally we still see this concept of ideology being an "ordering factor" in society. Though the culture industry may not be feeding us anti-Japanese propaganda as they were during Adorno's time, the processes and systems behind this content still affect us in the same way today. We cannot escape the ideologies of society, presented through media and "culture."
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