Conduct a critique of McDonald or Adorno & Horkheimer
In your first written assignment, you will conduct a critique of McDonald or Adorno & Horkheimer. Unlike what we see on social media, in academic writing, you will rarely see a complete takedown or blazing criticism of an academic piece. Most critiques are subtle and targeted; they show respect for their subject, but offer reasoned disagreement. Accordingly, most critiques are brief and focused. They take issue with one aspect of an argument, and approach it very carefully, showing that the author made an improper assumption, overlooked an important perspective or fact, or misinterpreted something. Even when a writer does take on the entirety of an argument, they typically do so in a piecemeal way, breaking it down into parts, and analyzing each separately and then, subsequently, as a whole. In short, you have to earn your critical perspective by proving your point–brazen critique is rarely impressive.
Choose one quote or short passage that represents an idea that you find problematic; it does not have to be central to the whole text.
In a 750 word short essay, introduce the reading or chapter, and then clearly and concisely summarize the idea you’ve chosen. You SHOULD use a quote to do this, but select carefully and be sure to set it up well. Then transition from that summary/idea to your critique. Your critique should rely on something in the present day. In what ways did the author(s) get it wrong? What incorrect assumptions underlie their argument? What have they misinterpreted? Elaborate on this. Conclude your essay with a take-away message. (*IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU TAKE AN IDEA FROM HORKHEIRMER AND CRITIQE IT, EXPLAIN WHAT THE AUTHOR GOT WRONG OR MISINTERPRETED OR WHAT FAULTY ASSUMPTIONS UNDERLIE THEIR IDEAS!!!!! THIS IS THE PROMPT)!!!
our essay should be formatted using an APA title and your full name at the top of the page, centered above the text of your essay (no separate title page is required). It should be typed, double spaced, in a clear and legible font, with 1-inch margins. You are not required to have a running head. Please use APA style in-text citations and for your reference list.
Your critique should focus on one issue/problem. You’ll need to explain the author’s perspective as best you can, relying on both direct quotes and paraphrasing. And then analyze it, explaining what the author is saying and why they get it wrong.
You should include in-text citations with page numbers to show your engagement with the text; you may reference course lectures and videos shown in class as well with proper citation. You should also include a reference list. Outside sources are ok but absolutely not required. You should be relying on your own analytic skills and writing abilities. This assignment, therefore, is Chat GPT prohibited in terms of written content. If you use Chat GPT as a research tool, you must fact check the output the tool provides and cite it the way you would another website or article. Again, you need to rely on your own reading and synthesis of this material–not the tool’s.*
*IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU TAKE AN IDEA FROM HORKHEIRMER AND CRITIQE IT, EXPLAIN WHAT THE AUTHOR GOT WRONG OR MISINTERPRETED OR WHAT FAULTY ASSUMPTIONS UNDERLIE THEIR IDEAS!!!!! THIS IS THE PROMPT
Requirements:
The Culture Industry414The Culture Industry:Enlightenmentas Mass DeceptionMax Horkheimer and Theodor W. AdornoThe sociological view that the loss of support from objective religion and the dis-integration of the last precapitalist residues, in conjunction with technical and socialdifferentiation and specialization, have given rise to cultural chaos is refuted by dailyexperience. Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, andmagazines form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and allare unanimous together. Even the aesthetic manifestations of political oppositesproclaim the same inßexible rhythm. The decorative administrative and exhibitionbuildings of industry differ little between authoritarian and other countries. Thebrightmonumental structures shooting up on all sides show off the systematic ingenuity ofthe state-spanning combines, toward which the unfettered entrepreneurial system,whose monuments are the dismal residential and commercial blocks in the sur-rounding areas of desolate cities, was already swiftly advancing. The older buildingsaround the concrete centers already look like slums, and the new bungalows on theoutskirts, like the ßimsy structures at international trade fairs, sing the praises oftechnical progress while inviting their users to throw them away after short use liketin cans. But the town-planning projects, which are supposed to perpetuate indi-viduals as autonomous units in hygienic small apartments, subjugate them onlymorecompletely to their adversary, the total power of capital. Just as the occupants of citycenters are uniformly summoned there for purposes of work and leisure, asproducersand consumers, so the living cells crystallize into homogenous, well-organized com-plexes. The conspicuous unity of macrocosm and microcosm confronts humanbeingsFrom Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, ÒThe culture industry: Enlightenment as massdeception.Ó In Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (ed.), Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments,pp. 94Ð136. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.Original German version © 1944 by Social Studies Association, NY; new edition © 1969 byS. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main. English translation © 2002 by Board of Trustees ofLeland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Used with the permission of Stanford UniversityPress, www.sup.org.
42Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adornowith a model of their culture: the false identity of universal and particular. All massculture under monopoly is identical, and the contours of its skeleton, the conceptualarmature fabricated by monopoly, are beginning to stand out. Those in charge nolonger take much trouble to conceal the structure, the power of which increases themore bluntly its existence is admitted. Films and radio no longer need to presentthemselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideologyto legitimize the trash they intentionally produce. They call themselves industries,and the published Þgures for their directorsÕ incomes quell any doubts about thesocial necessity of their Þnished products.Interested parties like to explain the culture industry in technological terms. Itsmillions of participants, they argue, demand reproduction processes which inevitablylead to the use of standard products to meet the same needs at countless locations.The technical antithesis between few production centers and widely dispersedreceptionnecessitates organization and planning by those in control. The standardized forms,it is claimed, were originally derived from the needs of the consumers: that is whythey are accepted with so little resistance. In reality, a cycle of manipulation andretroactive need is unifying the system ever more tightly. What is not mentioned isthat the basis on which technology is gaining power over society is the power ofthose whose economic position in society is strongest. Technical rationality today isthe rationality of domination. It is the compulsive character of a society alienatedfrom itself. Automobiles, bombs, and Þlms hold the totality together until theirleveling element demonstrates its power against the very system of injustice it served.For the present the technology of the culture industry conÞnes itself to standardiza-tion and mass production and sacriÞces what once distinguished the logic of thework from that of society. These adverse effects, however, should not be attributedto the internal laws of technology itself but to its function within the economytoday. Any need which might escape the central control is repressed by that ofindividual consciousness. The step from telephone to radio has clearly distinguishedthe roles. The former liberally permitted the participant to play the role of subject.The latter democratically makes everyone equally into listeners, in order to exposethem in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put out by different stations. Nomechanism of reply has been developed, and private transmissions are condemned tounfreedom. They conÞne themselves to the apocryphal sphere of Òamateurs,Ó who,in any case, are organized from above. Any trace of spontaneity in the audience ofthe ofÞcial radio is steered and absorbed into a selection of specializations by talent-spotters, performance competitions, and sponsored events of every kind. The talentsbelong to the operation long before they are put on show; otherwise they would notconform so eagerly. The mentality of the public, which allegedly and actually favorsthe system of the culture industry, is a part of the system, not an excuse for it. If abranch of art follows the same recipe as one far removed from it in terms of itsmedium and subject matter; if the dramatic denouement in radio Òsoap operasÓ1 isused as an instructive example of how to solve technical difÞculties Ð which aremastered no less in Òjam sessionsÓ than at the highest levels of jazz Ð or if amovement from Beethoven is loosely ÒadaptedÓ in the same way as a Tolstoy novelis adapted for Þlm, the pretext of meeting the publicÕs spontaneous wishes is mere
The Culture Industry43hot air. An explanation in terms of the speciÞc interests of the technical apparatusand its personnel would be closer to the truth, provided that apparatus were under-stood in all its details as a part of the economic mechanism of selection. Added tothis is the agreement, or at least the common determination, of the executivepowers to produce or let pass nothing which does not conform to their tables, totheir concept of the consumer, or, above all, to themselves.If the objective social tendency of this age is incarnated in the obscure subjectiveintentions of board chairmen, this is primarily the case in the most powerful sectorsof industry: steel, petroleum, electricity, chemicals. Compared to them the culturemonopolies are weak and dependent. They have to keep in with the true wielders ofpower, to ensure that their sphere of mass society, the speciÞc product of which stillhas too much of cozy liberalism and Jewish intellectualism about it, is not subjectedto a series of purges. The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting companyon the electrical industry, or of Þlm on the banks, characterizes the whole sphere,the individual sectors of which are themselves economically intertwined. Everythingis so tightly clustered that the concentration of intellect reaches a level where itoverßows the demarcations between company names and technical sectors. Therelentless unity of the culture industry bears witness to the emergent unity ofpolitics.Sharp distinctions like those between A and B Þlms, or between short storiespublishedin magazines in different price segments, do not so much reßect real differences asassist in the classiÞcation, organization, and identiÞcation of consumers. Somethingis provided for everyone so that no one can escape; differences are hammered homeand propagated. The hierarchy of serial qualities purveyed to the public serves onlyto quantify it more completely. Everyone is supposed to behave spontaneouslyaccording to a ÒlevelÓ determined by indices and to select the category of massproduct manufactured for their type. On the charts of research organizations, indistin-guishable from those of political propaganda, consumers are divided up as statisticalmaterial into red, green, and blue areas according to income group.The schematic nature of this procedure is evident from the fact that the mechan-ically differentiated products are ultimately all the same. That the difference betweenthe models of Chrysler and General Motors is fundamentally illusory is known byany child, who is fascinated by that very difference. The advantages and disadvant-ages debated by enthusiasts serve only to perpetuate the appearance of competitionand choice. It is no different with the offerings of Warner Brothers and MetroGoldwyn Mayer. But the differences, even between the more expensive and cheaperproducts from the same Þrm, are shrinking Ð in cars to the different number ofcylinders, engine capacity, and details of the gadgets, and in Þlms to the differentnumber of stars, the expense lavished on technology, labor and costumes, or theuse of the latest psychological formulae. The uniÞed standard of value consists inthe level of conspicuous production, the amount of investment put on show. Thebudgeted differences of value in the culture industry have nothing to do with actualdifferences, with the meaning of the product itself. The technical media, too, arebeingengulfed by an insatiable uniformity. Television aims at a synthesis of radio and Þlm,delayed only for as long as the interested parties cannot agree. Such a synthesis, withits unlimited possibilities, promises to intensify the impoverishment of the aesthetic
44Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adornomaterial so radically that the identity of all industrial cultural products, still scantilydisguised today, will triumph openly tomorrow in a mocking fulÞllment of WagnerÕsdream of the total art work. The accord between word, image, and music is achievedso much more perfectly than in Tristan because the sensuous elements, whichcompliantly document only the surface of social reality, are produced in principlewithin the same technical work process, the unity of which they express as theirtrue content. This work process integrates all the elements of production, from theoriginal concept of the novel, shaped by its side-long glance at Þlm, to the lastsound effect. It is the triumph of invested capital. To impress the omnipotence ofcapital on the hearts of expropriated job candidates as the power of their true masteris the purpose of all Þlms, regardless of the plot selected by the production directors.Even during their leisure time, consumers must orient themselves according tothe unity of production. The active contribution which Kantian schematism stillexpected of subjects Ð that they should, from the Þrst, relate sensuous multiplicity tofundamental concepts Ð is denied to the subject by industry. It purveys schematismas its Þrst service to the customer. According to Kantian schematism, a secret mechan-ism within the psyche preformed immediate data to Þt them into the system ofpure reason. That secret has now been unraveled. Although the operations of themechanism appear to be planned by those who supply the data, the culture industry,the planning is in fact imposed on the industry by the inertia of a society irrationaldespite all its rationalization, and this calamitous tendency, in passing through theagencies of business, takes on the shrewd intentionality peculiar to them. For theconsumer there is nothing left to classify, since the classiÞcation has already beenpreempted by the schematism of production. This dreamless art for the people fulÞlsthe dreamy idealism which went too far for idealism in its critical form. Everythingcomes from consciousness Ð from that of God for Malebranche and Berkeley, andfrom earthly production management for mass art. Not only do hit songs, stars, andsoap operas conform to types recurring cyclically as rigid invariants, but the speciÞccontent of productions, the seemingly variable element, is itself derived from thosetypes. The details become interchangeable. The brief interval sequence which hasproved catchy in a hit song, the heroÕs temporary disgrace which he accepts as aÒgood sport,Ó the wholesome slaps the heroine receives from the strong hand of themale star, his plain-speaking abruptness toward the pampered heiress, are, like all thedetails, ready-made clichŽs, to be used here and there as desired and always com-pletely deÞned by the purpose they serve within the schema. To conÞrm the schemaby acting as its constituents is their sole raison dÕtre. In a Þlm, the outcome caninvariably be predicted at the start Ð who will be rewarded, punished, forgotten Ðand in light music the prepared ear can always guess the continuation after the Þrstbars of a hit song and is gratiÞed when it actually occurs. The average choice ofwords in a short story must not be tampered with. The gags and effects are no lesscalculated than their framework. They are managed by special experts, and their slimvariety is speciÞcally tailored to the ofÞce pigeonhole. The culture industry hasdeveloped in conjunction with the predominance of the effect, the tangible perform-ance, the technical detail, over the work, which once carried the idea and was
The Culture Industry45liquidated with it. By emancipating itself, the detail had become refractory; fromRomanticism to Expressionism it had rebelled as unbridled expression, as the agentof opposition, against organization. In music, the individual harmonic effect hadobliterated awareness of the form as a whole; in painting the particular detail hadobscured the overall composition; in the novel psychological penetration had blurredthe architecture. Through totality, the culture industry is putting an end to all that.Although operating only with effects, it subdues their unruliness and subordinatesthem to the formula which supplants the work. It crushes equally the whole and theparts. The whole confronts the details in implacable detachment: somewhat like thecareer of a successful man, in which everything serves to illustrate and demonstratea success which, in fact, it is no more than the sum of those idiotic events. Theso-called leading idea is a Þling compartment which creates order, not connections.Lacking both contrast and relatedness, the whole and the detail look alike. Theirharmony, guaranteed in advance, mocks the painfully achieved harmony of the greatbourgeois works of art. In Germany even the most carefree Þlms of democracy wereoverhung already by the graveyard stillness of dictatorship.The whole world is passed through the Þlter of the culture industry. The familiarexperience of the moviegoer, who perceives the street outside as a continuation ofthe Þlm he has just left, because the Þlm seeks strictly to reproduce the world ofeveryday perception, has become the guideline of production. The more densely andcompletely its techniques duplicate empirical objects, the more easily it creates theillusion that the world outside is a seamless extension of the one which has beenrevealed in the cinema. Since the abrupt introduction of the sound Þlm, mechanicalduplication has become entirely subservient to this objective. According to thistendency, life is to be made indistinguishable from the sound Þlm. Far more stronglythan the theatre of illusion, Þlm denies its audience any dimension in which theymight roam freely in imagination Ð contained by the ÞlmÕs framework but unsuper-vised by its precise actualities Ð without losing the thread; thus it trains thoseexposedto it to identify Þlm directly with reality. The withering of imagination and spon-taneity in the consumer of culture today need not be traced back to psychologicalmechanisms. The products themselves, especially the most characteristic, the soundÞlm, cripple those faculties through their objective makeup. They are so constructedthat their adequate comprehension requires a quick, observant, knowledgeable castof mind but positively debars the spectator from thinking, if he is not to miss theßeeting facts. This kind of alertness is so ingrained that it does not even need to beactivated in particular cases, while still repressing the powers of imagination. Anyonewho is so absorbed by the world of the Þlm, by gesture, image, and word, that he orshe is unable to supply that which would have made it a world in the Þrst place, doesnot need to be entirely transÞxed by the special operations of the machinery at themoment of the performance. The required qualities of attention have become sofamiliar from other Þlms and other culture products already known to him or herthat they appear automatically. The power of industrial society is imprinted onpeople once and for all. The products of the culture industry are such that they canbe alertly consumed even in a state of distraction. But each one is a model of thegigantic economic machinery, which, from the Þrst, keeps everyone on their toes,
46Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adornoboth at work and in the leisure time which resembles it. In any sound Þlm or anyradio broadcast something is discernible which cannot be attributed as a social effectto any one of them, but to all together. Each single manifestation of the cultureindustry inescapably reproduces human beings as what the whole has made them.And all its agents, from the producer to the womenÕs organizations, are on the alertto ensure that the simple reproduction of mind does not lead on to the expansionof mind.The complaints of art historians and cultural attorneys over the exhaustion ofthe energy which created artistic style in the West are frighteningly unfounded. Theroutine translation of everything, even of what has not yet been thought, into theschema of mechanical reproducibility goes beyond the rigor and scope of any truestyle Ð the concept with which culture lovers idealize the precapitalist past as anorganic era. No Palestrina could have eliminated the unprepared or unresolveddissonance more puristically than the jazz arranger excludes any phrase which doesnot exactly Þt the jargon. If he jazzes up Mozart, he changes the music not onlywhere it is too difÞcult or serious but also where the melody is merely harmonizeddifferently, indeed, more simply, than is usual today. No medieval patron of archi-tecture can have scrutinized the subjects of church windows and sculptures moresuspiciously than the studio hierarchies examine a plot by Balzac or Victor Hugobeforeit receives the imprimatur of feasibility. No cathedral chapter could have assignedthe grimaces and torments of the damned to their proper places in the order ofdivine love more scrupulously than production managers decide the position ofthe torture of the hero or the raised hem of the leading ladyÕs dress within the litanyof the big Þlm. The explicit and implicit, exoteric and esoteric catalog of what isforbidden and what is tolerated is so extensive that it not only deÞnes the area leftfree but wholly controls it. Even the most minor details are modeled according tothis lexicon. Like its adversary, avant-garde art, the culture industry deÞnes its ownlanguage positively, by means of prohibitions applied to its syntax and vocabulary.The permanent compulsion to produce new effects which yet remain bound to theold schema, becoming additional rules, merely increases the power of the tradi-tion which the individual effect seeks to escape. Every phenomenon is by now sothoroughly imprinted by the schema that nothing can occur that does not bear inadvance the trace of the jargon, that is not seen at Þrst glance to be approved. Butthe true masters, as both producers and reproducers, are those who speak the jargonwith the same free-and-easy relish as if it were the language it has long sincesilenced. Such is the industryÕs ideal of naturalness. It asserts itself more imperiouslythe more the perfected technology reduces the tension between the culture productand everyday existence. The paradox of routine travestied as nature is detectable inevery utterance of the culture industry, and in many is quite blatant. A jazz musicianwho has to play a piece of serious music, BeethovenÕs simplest minuet, involuntarilysyncopates and condescends to start on the beat only with a superior smile. SuchÒnaturalness,Ó complicated by the ever more pervasive and exorbitant claims of thespeciÞc medium, constitutes the new style, Òa system of nonculture to which onemight even concede a certain Ôunity of styleÕ if it made any sense to speak of astylized barbarism.Ó2
The Culture Industry47The general inßuence of this stylization may already be more binding than theofÞcial rules and prohibitions; a hit song is treated more leniently today if it does notrespect the thirty-two bars or the compass of the ninth than if it includes even themost elusive melodic or harmonic detail which falls outside the idiom. Orson Wellesis forgiven all his offences against the usages of the craft because, as calculatedrudeness, they conÞrm the validity of the system all the more zealously. The com-pulsion of the technically conditioned idiom which the stars and directors mustproduce as second nature, so that the nation may make it theirs, relates to nuancesso Þne as to be almost as subtle as the devices used in a work of the avant-garde,where, unlike those of the hit song, they serve truth. The rare ability to conformpunctiliously to the obligations of the idiom of naturalness in all branches of theculture industry becomes the measure of expertise. As in logical positivism, what issaid and how it is said must be veriÞable against everyday speech. The producersare experts. The idiom demands the most prodigious productive powers, which itabsorbs and squanders. Satanically, it has rendered cultural conservatismÕs distinc-tion between genuine and artiÞcial style obsolete. A style might possibly be calledartiÞcial if it had been imposed from outside against the resistance of the intrinsictendencies of form. But in the culture industry the subject matter itself, down to itssmallest elements, springs from the same apparatus as the jargon into which it isabsorbed. The deals struck between the art specialists and the sponsor and censorover some all-too-unbelievable lie tell us less about internal, aesthetic tensions thanabout a divergence of interests. The reputation of the specialist, in which a lastresidue of actual autonomy still occasionally Þnds refuge, collides with the businesspolicy of the church or the industrial combine producing the culture commodity.By its own nature, however, the matter has already been reiÞed as negotiable evenbefore the various agencies come into conßict. Even before Zanuck3 acquired her,Saint Bernadette gleamed in the eye of her writer as an advert aimed at all therelevant consortia. To this the impulses of form have been reduced. As a result, thestyle of the culture industry, which has no resistant material to overcome, is atthe same time the negation of style. The reconciliation of general and particular, ofrules and the speciÞc demands of the subject, through which alone style takes onsubstance, is nulliÞed by the absence of tension between the poles: Òthe extremeswhich touchÓ have become a murky identity in which the general can replace theparticular and vice versa.Nevertheless, this caricature of style reveals something about the genuine style ofthe past. The concept of a genuine style becomes transparent in the culture industryas the aesthetic equivalent of power. The notion of style as a merely aestheticregularity is a retrospective fantasy of Romanticism. The unity of style not only ofthe Christian Middle Ages but of the Renaissance expresses the different structuresof social coercion in those periods, not the obscure experience of the subjects, inwhich the universal was locked away. The great artists were never those whose worksembodied style in its least fractured, most perfect form but those who adopted styleas a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth. In thestyle of these works expression took on the strength without which existence isdissipated unheard. Even works which are called classical, like the music of Mozart,
48Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adornocontain objective tendencies which resist the style they incarnate. Up to Schšnbergand Picasso, great artists have been mistrustful of style, which at decisive points hasguided them less than the logic of the subject matter. What the Expressionists andDadaists attacked in their polemics, the untruth of style as such, triumphs today inthe vocal jargon of the crooner, in the adept grace of the Þlm star, and even in themastery of the photographic shot of a farm laborerÕs hovel. In every work of art,style is a promise. In being absorbed through style into the dominant form ofuniversality; into the current musical, pictorial, or verbal idiom, what is expressedseeks to be reconciled with the idea of the true universal. This promise of the workof art to create truth by impressing its unique contours on the socially transmittedforms is as necessary as it is hypocritical. By claiming to anticipate fulÞllment throughtheir aesthetic derivatives, it posits the real forms of the existing order as absolute.To this extent the claims of art are always also ideology. Yet it is only in its strugglewith tradition, a struggle precipitated in style, that art can Þnd expression for suffer-ing. The moment of the work of art by which it transcends reality cannot, indeed,be severed from style; that moment, however, does not consist in achieved harmony,in the questionable unity of form and content, inner and outer, individual andsociety, but in those traits in which the discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failureof the passionate striving for identity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure, inwhich the style of the great work of art has always negated itself, the inferior workhas relied on its similarity to others, the surrogate of identity. The culture industryhas Þnally posited this imitation as absolute. Being nothing other than style, itdivulges styleÕs secret: obedience to the social hierarchy. Aesthetic barbarism today isaccomplishing what has threatened intellectual formations since they were broughttogether as culture and neutralized. To speak about culture always went againstthe grain of culture. The general designation ÒcultureÓ already contains, virtually,the process of identifying, cataloging, and classifying which imports culture into therealm of administration. Only what has been industrialized, rigorously subsumed, isfully adequate to this concept of culture. Only by subordinating all branches ofintellectual production equally to the single purpose of impos
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