For Adorno, popular culture on film and radio did not bother to present itself as art. They were instead a business, and this in turn became an ideology to legitimize the trash
they intentionally produce
(Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 95). This business was based on what Adorno referred to as “Fordist capitalism,” in which mass production based on the techniques
used by Henry Ford were implemented in the cultural sphere, insofar as these tendencies were based on centralization and hierarchy (Hohendahl, 1995, p. 142). Examples of this—not specified by
Adorno—were the Hollywood production system, or the CBS radio network that had been associated with the Princeton Radio Research Project. Movies and hit songs were based on formulas, and
the formula supplants the work
(Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 99). Mechanical reproduction ensured that there would not be any real change to the system, and that nothing
truly adversarial to the system would emerge (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 106-7). Paradoxically, any innovation would only reaffirm the system, and Adorno cited Orson Welles as an example
of someone who was allowed to break the rules. The elasticity in the system would allow it to assume the stance of any opposition and make it its own, ultimately rendering it ineffectual
(Friedman, 1981, p. 165). Like religion and other institutions, the culture industry was an instrument of social control (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 120), but freedom to choose in a system
of economic coercion ultimately meant the freedom to be the same
(Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 136).
Since Adorno had been, in his essays on music and radio, an apparent defender of high art, “The Culture Industry” has been criticized as being a defense of high art, as opposed to popular culture. Adorno specifically defines avant-garde art as the adversary of the culture industry (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 101). It was not high art that Adorno was presenting as an alternative to the culture industry, but modernism. Although he provides the idea of an opposing force to the culture industry, Adorno provides no overt Marxist analysis. Instead, he notes in passing that the dominant system utilized capacities for mass consumption for entertainment or amusement, but refused to do so when it was a question of abolishing hunger (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 111).
Dialectic of Enlightenment was issued in mimeograph form in 1944, in German, and thus would have limited impact outside of the expatriate community. In the meantime Adorno began working, along with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, on an empirical investigation into prejudice titled The Authoritarian Personality. He wrote Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life in 1945, and this work, upon its publication in Germany in 1951, would mark the beginning of his impact in Germany (Jäger, 2004, p. 167). Adorno would also co-author Composing for the Films with Hans Eisler, and in this text Adorno made it clear that the culture industry is not identical with high or low art (Hohendahl, 1995, p. 134). This is perhaps the first of several of Adorno’s attempts at redefining the culture industry to an audience that in all probability had no exposure to the concept as it was detailed in the original essay.
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