Globalization and the Manufacture of Transient Events (Excerpt)

by: Bilal Khbeiz

I. The Body Manufactured with Letters

The practice of modern living is toilsome. It requires spending a substantial part of what is perhaps a short existence in preparation before commencing it. This living requires nothing short of long and 'unavoidably exhausting years in educating the mind and acquiring a variety of techniques for caring and hiding, whilst in contact with others, the persistent and cumbersome traces of the body. According to G. Canguilhem, a proper healthy and therefore viable body is a silent body. One which is absent, forgettable, showing no I signs of hunger, thirst, illness or symptoms of sexual excitement; a body which is maintained and schooled in the repetition of standard behaviors and kept at bay from all digressions.
Such demands are always appended with newer ones. No longer is it sufficient to hide the body and the signs of its basic needs. The effects of time are also considered ravages that must be fixed and bidden. Tired eyes are reviled. Sufficient sleep or its equivalent is stipulated to maintain the appearance of bloom and vigor. A similar attention is required for sustaining the bright whiteness of teeth so they seem always unused. Perhaps the only respite left for the body, to come forward and express itself, are those rare and intermittent moments of laughter where the body manages to slip away from control and ridicule itself. But those moments are necessarily brief. Modern living forcibly relegates such moments to the distant background, appearing only when the body slips inadvertently from underneath the weight of discipline. The crackling of a stomach is, in this sense, a momentous event. Although unintentional, if not due to it, it solicits one of two responses: either a blatant avoidance of the cause of that very recognizable sound or a short outbreak of laughter, openly ridiculing an undisciplined body. While the second option is often used, it is nevertheless crucial to recognize that laughter precipitates evaluative and classist discrimination. For we are only allowed to laugh at ourselves. Laughing at others, or even in the presence of others, requires permission and a pre-requisite agreement.

The Marginalization of the Senses
The preparation of the body for disappearance, for an obedient silence, requires considerable effort and skill. All that remains present and visible is that which appears seemingly intrinsic: namely, a constant suggestion of energy and strength, negating the traces of its use, peeling the accumulated crusts of time and powdering it with the signs of rebirth. Through the suggestion of energy, the body emigrates from the domain of smells and tastes and postpones, if not occults, the changes of illness and aging. The list of demands for making bodies disappear extends in accordance with time and place. And yet, what is constant and common in the relationship between moderns with their bodies is the marginalization of the senses and their prevention from acting as arbiter and director.
Sigmund Freud remarked that, ever since standing erect, humans have foregrounded the sense of sight and relegated the other senses to the shadows. Accordingly, this preferred sense of sight, maintained as an authority, has conferred upon all that is visible a complete sensorial tangibility. And yet, Paul Virilio, in his La Machine de Vision, traces how photography gradually cancels the mediation of the sensorial world through direct seeing and how in consequence the eye, unable to ascertain tangibility, loses its claims of owning the world.
The strenuous efforts required to prepare the body for meeting with the other, tends to make such a meeting a goal in itself. A similar effort is also expected of the other. Both are required to veil their bodies by neutralizing their senses and removing all traces of thirst, hunger, sleep and intimacy. And, by removing the sensorial from the domain of mutual influence, one is left with words. Words which intimate, as they conceal, the physicality of desires.

Designing the Quotidian
The work of sociologist Erving Goffman, on the preparations required for the presentation of the self in everyday life, constitute a notable contribution for understanding interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, David le Breton remarked on how modern bodies exist in a constant state of effacement, in order to maintain a necessary public mask similar to those frozen faces of allied prisoners during the Second World War. According to Le Breton, faces were fixed into masks in order to resist and deny any form of human - and humane - connection with their Nazi jailers. Between these masks, or what Le Breton terms as the "technique of the dead face" and the practice of chatting over the internet, lie certain - intriguing similarities.
Aside from those who loiter in Internet cafes, most chat practitioners tend to exercise an effacement of face and body while in dialogue with friends and partners. They are generally not concerned with their physical appearance and equally uninterested in meeting their interlocutors.
A chat-addict does not examine his body but rather, suggests its attributes through language. In other words, the body of the chat-addict becomes something akin to an enigma. According to the logic of chatting, the chatter does have a body which accords with a collective and consensual model. And yet, he or she carries, at all times the element of surprise. When written, the suggested body of the chatter shifts and is reformed according to whim and fancy, ever ready to communicate, or rather correspond, with the other’s fanciful requirements. But such a body is not a product of its own nature but is rather a composite of an ideal that is available and agreed upon by all.
This communion through the signs of a cornmon culture makes for the prevalence and dominance of movie stars, pop musicians and singers. These stars and models do not, therefore, only occupy the imagination of internet chat program-users as images, but also figure as references for other attributes such as strength, immortality and eternal youth. Accordingly, chatting over the Internet seems to absolve the personal body, allowing it to don the feats, attributes and vigor of movie stars. This transposition of the personal body into an imagined role makes for a body that is relatively surprising. That which occurs in real life is, comparatively, predictable, since it is often prefigured by cinema. A notable example is the poor replay in real life of the collapse of the World Trade Center, an event already and spectacularly staged in cinema. One remembers here the words of French director, Jean Renoir, demanding of his actors to constantly invent. As he often said, every event in cinema must be unpredictable.

The Channels of Desire
When speaking of the techniques of feminine seduction, indolence appears as a primary attribute. Understood, in this case, as the opposite of rectitude and attentiveness, indolence, as in the inadvertent caressing of a neck or the playful tweezing of a loose tress of hair, does not go unnoticed. They are, for the companion, arousing indications of a body withdrawn from activity and earnestness and given to a numbness that lulls the brain and limbs. Such a disposition may clarify the shift in the logic of seduction when transposed to the domain of internet chat. There, seduction requires a sharp attentiveness, making it a strenuous activity similar in its demands to pornographic performances. The demands of such an economy of seduction, of alert minds and absent bodies replaced by images, make, for instance, Isabel Allende weary, even fearful, of having to abandon the intimacy of her lived and embodied quotidian world.
The body, reconstituted on screens, is an abbreviated body. It is made succinct by reducing it to unequivocal desires solicited for an active connection with an interlocutor. It becomes a body that is well fed, athletic, healthy and capable of excessive exertions just to please. And although attributes for which living humans have often been praised return as specific and abstract qualities to the domain of internet chat, I do not think that globalization still requires the human body to persist in seeking them. What globalization requires on the other hand is a minimal knowledge of languages and a skill in those techniques, which allow a virtual contact with others. And, if the actual physical body lingers in the mind of Internet chatters, it does so as a pampered and cuddled body, an adolescent pet body, always in foreplay. Only as such is the body able to persist within a virtual exchange that, otherwise, has little use for it. In any case, even as it loiters, adolescent and postponed, this body - our bodies - is never allowed to grow into a loving and caring body. With the Internet, the body sits in front of screens, aging and slothful, framed by adolescent desires, which in actuality make of it a rather disappointing, frigid and forgettable weight.


II. The Deferral of Pleasures

The country of globalization is like that of sex, that is, if one is allowed to call sex a country. To it, we accede only for brief moments and then exit as soon as we tire. And, just like sex, this country of globalization receives us as individuals, divorced from family, clan and community. In its imagined land, we choose our parties, clubs, and friends and define our partialities. And, as in sex, we are also advised to approach it prepared and ready to maneuver across its many paths of seduction. Equally, this country of globalization is fearful, for in it there are no stops and no respite to shed the accumulated signs of fatigue. And, although that is an exorbitant price to pay, the country of globalization argues nevertheless that in it, all desires can be satisfied. That is, if we are still able to carry and entertain any desires at all.
In sex, a partner's body is deep and incommensurable. It cannot be delimited. It extends, galvanized, in two opposing directions: outwardly and inwardly. Sex is not mere contact. It is simultaneously a desire for entanglement and separation, for numbness and activity, for indolence and efficiency. In sex, desire is in a sense always twice: to surrender, lazy and solitary and to engage, d curious and investigative. And since the physical body is complex, the moment of sex is dense. So much so, that sex is followed by a sense of defeat, frustration even, as we fail to discover, convincingly, the precise functions of organs. Science is still debating the apparent biological uselessness of female orgasm. While some theories explain it in terms of the necessity for infidelity, others maintain it as a useless vestige similar to male nipples. While scientists await a definitive answer, it is nevertheless possible to assert that generosity, an endangered and dying attribute within society, still finds in the instance of embracing bodies what is perhaps its last manifestation.
Let us look a little closer at this attribute: gener0sity.A woman cares for her breasts and tends to their needs. She may not consider either childbearing or nursing. Such a project, or what Lester C. Thurow calls the owning of children, is in fact a luxury only the rich can afford. Without the costly chores of such a luxury, the career of breasts can be a long story of self-care and attention. They can be a part of a body that proves its desire through prodigality and 1avishness.A woman gives her breasts to a man in surplus as a gift. Yet it binds the man to her morally, as in the function of gifts according to the studies of Marcel Mauss. A man has little need for such a gift. And, although his lust is elsewhere, he accepts it and bows to its edicts whether in false modesty, praise, thrill or in borrowing a desire just for the occasion (I suppose that a woman sees in a man's erection sufficient signs of his generosity).
As we try to circumscribe sex, we should perhaps add to the notions of gift and prodigality, as in the example of the function of breasts, another notion, namely that of security. Turning the back to the companion and surrendering the body, disarmed, make for a challenge that, in principle, may be based on a sense of mutual security, but it is nevertheless fraught with the possibility of failure. Such is the irresistible magic of our other side: back and buttocks. And no matter how much we may engage the back, no matter how zealously we may try to define its function, it escapes us. It is always more ample than our caresses, more spacious than our grip and too solid for penetration. There is no biological function in sex for this other side of the machine of seduction. And I would venture to say that, like breasts, it is most probably connected with generosity and a sense of security.

The Techniques of Mourning
With this equation of generosity and security, the body maintains an ability to resist a final, rational definition. It is successful where reason expects it to fail and fails where reason expects it to succeed. Notwithstanding and while most Arab societies remained reluctant, modernity persisted in fashioning a rational body and in segregating its various functions. It classified the body into specific domains and diligently sculpted it into the forms and shapes of ideals. So, we jog, diet, polish and apply all kinds of cosmetics seeking to embody ideals. The price is, of course, exorbitant. The elderly, the ill, the maimed and a wide array of incorrect bodies wither unnoticed on the sidelines. Meanwhile, in the mains of the social world, on televisions and other media, we witness the constant parade of a model and paradigmatic body, which is modernity's most efficacious apparatus for distinction and control.
Curiously enough, contemporary societies seem to have realized, as Arab societies have through the ages that bodies cannot be completely fixed. Today's globalization seems to, therefore, avoid - bodies altogether, keeping of them nothing but their surplus images, well chosen and scanned, images of bodies overflowing with health - and channeled with energy. Today, in regard to beauty, we try to suffice ourselves with images of international stars. As for vigor, we make do with language's ability to pretend unhindered by the limitations of actual living bodies. And so, we distance our bodies from all contact and companionship and avoid the embarrassment of trials. As such, the body ceases to be a land of enigmas and miscarriages and appears, instead, endlessly malleable to the whims of the imagination. This malleability precipitates the migration of the body from the province of magic to the domain of functionality, which is in itself a first and irreversible step towards mourning. The same mourning which marks an Arab body reiterating again and again the sovereignty of the discourse of the mind: An Arab actress does not act with her body but with her face, as she does not seduce in cinema with her breasts but with her voice.



Indolence Despised
Such are the conditions of globalization that can thus be defined in terms of the failure of the body to cope with the imagination. That is why the body is quickly expelled and replaced by another made of the imagined and the fantasized. Therefore, the first thing that virtual sex breaks is the equation of generosity and security. The concern is no longer to please the partner, for that, even if intended, is always dubious and difficult to ascertain. Virtual sex does away with the pleasures of indolence, of lying lazily in the embrace of a companion. What virtual sex does is demand of us to renounce fatigue and deny impotence. (In this perspective, it is relevant to recall that, throughout the Arabic erotic tradition, prime importance was given to the avoidance of intimacy and to male sexual potency while visiting the harem). In virtual sex, alertness postpones pleasure until after contact. Most probably, sex on the virtual web requires two specific attributes: greed and aggression. In it, chatters demand of one another an unfailing power, a lavish expanse of organs and ask of the partner to act out both roles. And, while some users concentrate on the sexual organs and others exchange roles, most practice both simultaneously.
Accordingly, chat practices on Arabic internet sites seem - focused on virtual sex activities. Many reasons can be noted for such popularity: a general societal repression of sexuality, the segregation between the sexes, not to mention the ample leisure time that Arab women seem to have due to the social reprimand on seeking a professional career. But what spurs on such an activity lies elsewhere. We must note that it is primarily a kind of sex practiced without costly calculations; not only because it allows women to avoid strict societal rules and traditional constraints, but also because it is a kind of sex that does not require the prodigality, generosity and comfort prepared and given to partners, gifts which are often misplaced and misused. The problems connected with marriages and divorces in Arab societies are often tied to women forced into being generous to the inappropriate man, and to women being slighted as their gifts are often reciprocated with betrayal and infidelity.Virtua1 sex is, of course, unable to replace the difficult realities of the life of an Arab woman often pre-occupied with the demands of fashion, skincare and youth. Such activities amount, in fact, to days spent in strenuous efforts beyond the worth of any man. Consequently, these activities must be justified by making them an end in themselves. That is why appearance is often manifested as self-sufficient. Curiously enough, an Arab woman thus accomplishes the subject of the image and the matter of seduction, in a way; fixing her femininity in as far as Jean Baudrillard defines seduction as a specialty of women.
With the internet, we are no longer bound by the demands of lavishness and prodigality in order to make contact with another. The other, virtual as he/she/it may be, must always be as prepared and readily seductive as a kept woman in a harem is supposed to be. This availability of contacts, and their relatively negligible costs, makes globalized and virtual sexual intercourse an attractive venue for Arab societies.

III. Kindness Shunned

It does not require the diatribes of ecologists and naturalists for us to realize the extent to which our senses are besieged in metropolices. Hearing is constantly drilled with waves of voices, sounds that cannot be organized and noises that must be shut out. Similarly, cities make our sense of smell a burden. As for our sense of touch, we are constantly reminded of the need to neutralize it, avoiding all signs of agitation and excitement, signs that may make one dangerously conspicuous. Not even our sense of seeing is spared. In cities, we are not allowed the pleasure of lingering or contemplating. Both are forms of inadvertence that may lead to accidents. Red in cities is a color of life and death, just as a honk may be the last sound one hears before dying. What remains, then, is the sense of taste which, in comparison with the other senses, is pampered and cuddled into the nuances of complex salads, different temperatures, the delicacies of prepared fish and game and the connoisseurship of wines and cheeses. But such efforts in preparing foods are seen by ecologists and naturalists as unnecessary and affected, even unnatural. According to them, the preparation of foods aims at distancing the pleasures of tasting from the general needs of eating and, as such, breaks with the natural constituents of foods. And yet, it is necessary, by way of a counter argument, to make the simple analogy between foods passed through the mill of fire, spices and mixings and the techniques of perfuming bodies that aim to shun those supposed natural odors from public spaces what is, in fact, being expelled in foods and bodies alike is precisely the natural. Furthermore, skin is also enveloped in safe houses and kept at bay from heat and cold, wind and rain. We walk over buffers made of high heels and synthetic soles. We obsessively clean clothes and iron ties placed around necks, even if threatened with the unfortunate effects of "natural" rain and heat. Briefly said, whether in eating, dwelling or seeming, we must always appear as if untouched by the natural. This passionate struggle to de-activate the effects of nature and remove them from the domain of the contemporary modern body is not only visible in the politics of health and hygiene, as in the studies of Michel Foucault, but clearly exceeds it into the realm of ethical values.
In an essay on friendship, Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze note the important role played by the act of mutual confiding in the construction of a friendship. A relationship is built on playing, by turns, the role of a confidant. Friendship in this sense is founded on discourse, which, in turn, then marginalizes all physical contacts. The demise of a friendship begins then with touching and so all physical signs of intimacy and longing are kept at bay. To me, that is not only difficult to maintain, but also risks the loss of friendship altogether. For kindness in friendships is essential and requires the "recklessness" of touching, which maintains the body present and relevant.
In her novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison describes Cholly' motives for raping his daughter Pecola, as an act enlivened by kindness:
Leaning over a fence staring at nothing in particular. The creamy toe of her bare foot scratching a velvet leg. It was such a small and simple gesture, but it filled him then with a wondering softness. Not the usual lust to part tight legs with his own, as is usual, but tenderness, protectiveness.
A desire to cover her foot with his hand and gently nibble away the itch from the calf with his teeth. He did it then ... The tenderness welled up in him, and he sank to his knees, his eyes on the foot of his daughter. Crawling on all four towards her, he raised his hand and caught the foot in an upward stroke." Having raped his daughter, this same kindness returns mixed with hatred to overwhelm Cholly: "She appeared to have fainted. Cholly stood up and could see only her grayish panties, so sad and limp around her ankles. Again the hatred mixed with tenderness. The hatred would not let him pick her up; the tenderness forced him to cover her.
Today’s cities allow no room for mystery and magic to influence and impress our bodies with visible traces. Every physical contact, even if only a passing touch demands practice and preparation as well as a mutual agreement over time and place. Such is the distance that the modern body has traveled from what is at least apparent in Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose, where a chill is sufficient reason for heretics and believers to embrace regardless of their sex, age, looks and smell. In a world where clothes were the body's only shield, intimacy denuded all.

The Tranquility of the Stripper
When an actress undresses in front of a camera and exposes her nude and awakened flesh to millions around the world, she neither fears nor worries about societal censorship. Nude and exhibited, absolved of shame and fear, the body is as tranquil as it is unreachable. It is a body fortified with a thousand trenches and Protected by a thousand shields. The contemporaneous nude body opens unto a space of dance, expansion and relaxation. Nobody intentionally and visibly undresses if shy of its own expansion. The nude body is a free and tranquil body, unlike veiled and covered and thus able to transform the walls, draperies and furniture that surround it into the stuff of its own personal expansion. In cities is not for touching. On the contrary, it is a nudity that accumulates its surroundings. Untouchable, the nude body paradoxically sheds its clothing to be at bay from touching. In any case, this nudity is certainly not the nudity of a starving Sudanese or that of the dead during ablution. Far from it, and forever young, at least in images, the nude body is what marks; for instance, the distance that separates the mortal Marilyn Monroe from her eternally sultry and seductive image. Marilyn's image is necessarily that of an intangible body. For touching inevitably spoils the marble perfection of the skin. If the body is an image, as Paul Virilio claims it is, it is then a body that cannot be owned, quite unlike the actual body of Marilyn Monroe experienced through pleasure, pain and death.

A Fear of Barbarity
Thinking back through the wars waged by the Americans in the late 90's of the last century and in the beginning of this century, on would venture to say that what precipitated the anti-Vietnam war movement were not the images of dead soldiers returning home black plastic body bags. Nor was it the good intentions of pacifists and activists who believed that war inevitably defeats all involve Rather, what really urged a cessation of combat and an end to the Vietnam War was seeing the specter of barbarity that lives every war. The Americans lost in Somalia because the world saw the images of the mutilated bodies of fallen American soldier. Equally, the distressing and moving images from the Vietnam were not those of the solemn funerals given to American soldiers or the countless rows of body bags. Rather, it was those images that showed wounded soldiers, in need of affection and care, seeking in their mates the kindness of a touch. Images of muddy faces, sweaty and blackened, confessing inhumane strain and effort. Those images of kindness where soldiers tended to their wounded fellows, gently patting their shoulders, were the pivotal point at which rose the idea of terror and fear of war. In comparison, one can think of other anti-war movements that never really happened, since American soldiers in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan remained invisible and unexposed to the disturbing gestures of kindness. And, just as Michelet saw in fidelity a virtue of the barbarians, so kindness today appears to be a virtue of the barbarians and, as such, is to be avoided at all costs.

IV. The Reproduction of Nature

The nature for which activists struggle, protect and preserve is no more than a palliated image of a wild and dangerous nature. It is a sheer image, in the sense of how an image carries a discrepant separation with the “real.” Precisely as in Rene Magritte’s painting on which the artist drew a pipe and wrote underneath it. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”. This image, which acquired a revolutionary tinge during the 1970’s, still seems today like an unadulterated prophecy. For the picture is no longer the shadow of the photographer but has donned flesh and bones of its own and so dominates the object itself. And so, the image continues to dominate the “real,” as in the summer of Tolstoy, a summer that provides protection t o flies and rodents and spawns a myriad of annoying sorts of flying and crawling insects, is replaced by the image of the Californian summer. A new summer bearing nothing but the brilliant sun and bodies, nude and svelte, with vitality so excessive that it all seems like a temple of youth. The Californian summer is the image of summer par excellence. And that is precisely what makes the sun every time it appears in California, the bearer of an extraordinary magic polished, beautiful and utterly vital. It is the complete opposite of the Oriental summer described by Orientalists; a summer swarming with flies, overtaken by beggars and exposing a life of idleness and stagnation.

The Preserves of Local Identities
On television, an incessant flow of images pervades the world and prods us viewers to adjust our understanding of the environment and adapt to new images of places and creatures traditionally viewed as dangerous and often as mysterious. Today, a documentary film can arguably defend the rights of rats to live in peace, just as it can extol the beauties of what Arabs have traditionally considered as man’s deadliest enemy, the snake. With the televised image, rats and snakes gain a right to beauty and a safe existence. Made intelligible and safely intangible by the mediation of images, all species begin to appear like air, water and other natural elements, churning and turning in natural reserves and far from the human habitat, maintaining only what is necessary for ecology's balance. Against the backdrop of natural reserves, cities stand as a distinct domain made wholly for the urban dweller and a few invented domestic animals. It is through natural reserves that civilization speaks most eloquently of its distance from a state of nature that is, in comparison, inherently violent and barbaric.
For a long time, Holland remained a notable example of man’s successful subjugation of nature. It was a model of how to succeed in transforming the flux of nature into an organized environment, able to sustain civilized human activities. The Dutch experience showed what human collaboration can achieve if given the right circumstances. Yet the success of the Dutch experiment cannot be fully assessed without reconsidering the notion of "right circumstances”, through what Regis Debray defines as “the damned feature”. For success in raising oneself out of a state of nature presupposes that one has had to survive the malediction of nature, a relative damnation that may prod a culture, as it may challenge an individual, to invent solutions. In other words, invention is necessarily wrested out of situations seemingly damned with difficulties, not graced with the ease of propitious conditions. In that sense, all great precedents carry this feature of damnation as inevitably as the healthy never worry about their health.
The success of the Dutch was unlikely considering the give natural conditions of the (nether) land. The Dutch were afflicted with endless marshlands unfit for human sustenance, in an epoch when the claiming of fertile land and the defining of natural boundaries, namely geography, was sufficient cause for conflict and an obvious excuse to wage wars across the continent. Land, owned and cultivated, was the gold for which humans contended. Besiege by their land, the Dutch had no choice but to turn their marsh into fields and their soil into the most precious and greenest the world. The Dutch experience carried the meanings of human advancement and set its standards. Accordingly, other societies were evaluated and praised. For to be a people blessed, by pure coincidence, with natural riches such as oil, gold or other precious metals, can be a cause for idleness. It is, then, no coincidence t the French economist, Alain Peyrefitte, ranked the Dutch high the list of those cultures most worthy of close study, in terms better recognizing the crucial role played by a culture’s ethos economic development.

Pruning Savage Claws
Today’s Holland is punctuated with natural preserves, which figure as the emblems of devoted ecologists. Yet to understand the mentality and technology of the Dutch experience is to wonder about the precise attributes of this nature which ecologists for. In Holland, nature is disconnected from its primal state a fashioned anew. Even animals, kept in preserves, are studied and carefully selected for their use and the variable roles that they can fulfill within the larger framework of human civilization. Therefore, it is most probable that the nature for which ecologists march and struggle, is a nature built to perfectly answer the needs of human society and to correspond with its intellectual and civilizational framework. Ecology’s activists’ fight in their belief that what humans may not understand today, will be appreciated tomorrow. And the tendency is to preserve the largest variety of species alive and available for future scientific study and use. Such is the logic Jean Baudillard noted when, in 1971, ethnologists in the Philippines were forced to reinstate the Tasaday tribe back into the depth of the jungle where they had lived in total seclusion for more than eight centuries. The move was prompted as members of the tribe began to fall ill and wither "like mummies" due to contact with civilization. When the ethnologists and the local authorities were finally convinced of the gravity of the situation, they decided to save the Tasaday by transforming their natural habitat into a natural preserve. And so, ethnology succeeded in avoiding its own demise by maintaining its subject of study alive and within reach, while donning the postures of humanitarianism. To have the privilege of survival, a species must fall within the strict control of science. The reactions of that species, its behavioral patterns and rates of proliferation must all be reasoned, handled and monitored. Speaking of his film Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg said that the actual cloning of dinosaurs, unlike in the film, is a dangerous endeavor, for it is a species of such intelligence and strength that it may escape human control. Accordingly, it is important to notice to what extent the preservation of nature is always circumscribed within the dual and foundational condition of control and domestication. In a sense no species is allowed to survive if it is potentially able to exceed the purview of human intelligence. Consequently, all that remains in nature, all that is allowed to multiply and live and all that is treated and tended, must fall within the strict censorship of two authorities: biomedicine and psychology.

The Fangs of Intelligence
In his book La critique de la pensee politique, Regis Debray argues the simultaneous courses of two human histories. There is, according to the author, a history of the relationships between humans and another history of the relationships between humans and things. Notwithstanding the author’s careful enumeration and argumentation, in his attempt to define the difference between these two courses of history, his basic tenet in crucial and topical. For one argue by implication that humans, represented through their ideas are always contemporaneous and always interconnected. Thus, a Napoleon remains present in the mind of current generals as an interlocutor and as a competitor, while it is hard to claim that the world of things as defined by a Ptolemy stands still in the presence of an Einstein. The consequences of such a distinction clarify, with an almost suffocating irony, why it is no longer obvious to say, following a Socrates and a Darwin, that a creature standing erect and able to speak is necessarily human. The ongoing military campaign in Afghanistan is a notable example where the distinction between humans and things functions as a theoretical and practical framework. In the recent past, when the Afghans were dutifully fighting Soviet occupations, the United States saw them as a controllable agent, a thing, which although capable of expressing anger and zeal, lacked the kind of intelligence which would make it a dangerous and independent agent. In other words, the Afghans were allowed to be barbaric and savage as long as they were fully dependant on the constant care of a foreign custody. Thus, the Afghans, utilized and nourished, could also acquire the dubious privilege of a reversed racism, of being seen, according to some experts, as having the right to be left alone and maintain their own special social and cultural characteristics. Such a situation quickly shifted as soon as the Afghans became intelligent or, to put it more clearly, were able to threaten their custodians. Perhaps one ought to remember Milan Kundera's remark that what occupies civilization is not so much the avoidance of murder as the avoidance of the murderer. If a tiger escapes from a zoo and kills, while prowling, more people than a Carlos during his heyday, the tiger would certainly be handled with more understanding than the terrorist. That is equally true of the World Trade Center. The fact that it collapsed as the result of an act designed and perpetrated by intelligent creatures and not by a natural coincidence demanded a consorted effort to trace, extract and redeem the cause, namely intelligence, away from the creatures and things and back to its rightful human authority.
One of the most pressing consequences of such reasoning is the collapse of the theory that posits globalization as a domain in which local cultures may finally flourish after the ravages and repression of centuries of imperialism. Quite on the contrary, all that globalization seeks to preserve is the right to reproduce nature according to strict regulations. Within such a plan, a place is allotted to creatures and things; to servant cultures and natural reserves, all properly and rationally instrumentalized to procure an image of a nature untouched, and of a spectacular savagery unchecked. Without this right to control and police, globalization would lose its entrancing, logical hold in the same way that the logic of unclear armament would become mute and deadly if ever put to the test.
Natural reserves and zoos, as well as the peaceful ranges of the Tibet Mountains, are all living proofs traveling the world and made of a million images. And yet, there remains a chill in the Tibet Mountains and perhaps a few nasty odors emanating from animal cages. Flies and mosquitoes may still disturb eager vacationers in the Virgin Tropical Islands. Perhaps also, unannounced, a peaceful and tame Afghan may intimate a desire to speak with tourists. But his words will most probably remain as obscure as a hieroglyph, incapable of initiating a dialogue, not to mention nearness, empathy or a reciprocal kindness.
In a special issue of the journal Esprit entitled “Le nouvel age du sport” Michel Forr argues that daily physical exercises, such as walking and jogging, seems to be concentrated in those urban classes of sedentary professionals whose social ethos requires a physical fitness and a youthful appearance. These classes are also the ones most affected by mental fatigue and chronic depression and, according to Elaine Perrin, are required by the nature of their work to repress all signs of aggression and violence, having to sublimate them into logical argumentation, debate, discussions and conversations. This class of urban professionals carries the task of arresting any sign of social aggressiveness while having to contend and bear a high level of competition in their own work. This equation, which binds are repression of physical violence to the strenuous effort of physical fitness, tells of the social edict to inhibit all, and any, physical expression. For violence is, of course, a return to a barbarity while fitness is the fashioning of the body extends into the relation between humans and things as well as between humans themselves. In both cases, intelligibility and a logical understanding – even prediction – of the other conditions for a viable and quite coexistence.

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

by; Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944)

The sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialisation, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.

Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else. The huge gleaming towers that shoot up everywhere are outward signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, toward which the unleashed entrepreneurial system (whose monuments are a mass of gloomy houses and business premises in grimy, spiritless cities) was already hastening. Even now the older houses just outside the concrete city centres look like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy structures of world fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans.

Yet the city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary – the absolute power of capitalism. Because the inhabitants, as producers and as consumers, are drawn into the center in search of work and pleasure, all the living units crystallise into well-organised complexes. The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general and the particular. Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed.

Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organisation and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardisation and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.

This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in today’s economy. The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness. The step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are confined to the apocryphal field of the “amateur,” and also have to accept organisation from above.

But any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is controlled and absorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and official programs of every kind selected by professionals. Talented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in. The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favors the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it. If one branch of art follows the same formula as one with a very different medium and content; if the dramatic intrigue of broadcast soap operas becomes no more than useful material for showing how to master technical problems at both ends of the scale of musical experience – real jazz or a cheap imitation; or if a movement from a Beethoven symphony is crudely “adapted” for a film sound-track in the same way as a Tolstoy novel is garbled in a film script: then the claim that this is done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot air.

We are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena as inherent in the technical and personnel apparatus which, down to its last cog, itself forms part of the economic mechanism of selection. In addition there is the agreement – or at least the determination – of all executive authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves.

In our age the objective social tendency is incarnate in the hidden subjective purposes of company directors, the foremost among whom are in the most powerful sectors of industry – steel, petroleum, electricity, and chemicals. Culture monopolies are weak and dependent in comparison. They cannot afford to neglect their appeasement of the real holders of power if their sphere of activity in mass society (a sphere producing a specific type of commodity which anyhow is still too closely bound up with easy-going liberalism and Jewish intellectuals) is not to undergo a series of purges. The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven. All are in such close contact that the extreme concentration of mental forces allows demarcation lines between different firms and technical branches to be ignored.

The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will happen in politics. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing, and labeling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasized and extended. The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type. Consumers appear as statistics on research organization charts, and are divided by income groups into red, green, and blue areas; the technique is that used for any type of propaganda.

How formalized the procedure is can be seen when the mechanically differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end. That the difference between the Chrysler range and General Motors products is basically illusory strikes every child with a keen interest in varieties. What connoisseurs discuss as good or bad points serve only to perpetuate the semblance of competition and range of choice. The same applies to the Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer productions. But even the differences between the more expensive and cheaper models put out by the same firm steadily diminish: for automobiles, there are such differences as the number of cylinders, cubic capacity, details of patented gadgets; and for films there are the number of stars, the extravagant use of technology, labor, and equipment, and the introduction of the latest psychological formulas. The universal criterion of merit is the amount of “conspicuous production,” of blatant cash investment. The varying budgets in the culture industry do not bear the slightest relation to factual values, to the meaning of the products themselves.

Even the technical media are relentlessly forced into uniformity. Television aims at a synthesis of radio and film, and is held up only because the interested parties have not yet reached agreement, but its consequences will be quite enormous and promise to intensify the impoverishment of aesthetic matter so drastically, that by tomorrow the thinly veiled identity of all industrial culture products can come triumphantly out into the open, derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk – the fusion of all the arts in one work.

The alliance of word, image, and music is all the more perfect than in Tristan because the sensuous elements which all approvingly reflect the surface of social reality are in principle embodied in the same technical process, the unity of which becomes its distinctive content. This process integrates all the elements of the production, from the novel (shaped with an eye to the film) to the last sound effect. It is the triumph of invested capital, whose title as absolute master is etched deep into the hearts of the dispossessed in the employment line; it is the meaningful content of every film, whatever plot the production team may have selected.

The man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him. Kant’s formalism still expected a contribution from the individual, who was thought to relate the varied experiences of the senses to fundamental concepts; but industry robs the individual of his function. Its prime service to the customer is to do his schematizing for him.

Kant said that there was a secret mechanism in the soul, which prepared direct intuitions in such a way that they could be fitted into the system of pure reason. But today that secret has been deciphered. While the mechanism is to all appearances planned by those who serve up the data of experience, that is, by the culture industry, it is in fact forced upon the latter by the power of society, which remains irrational, however we may try to rationalise it; and this inescapable force is processed by commercial agencies so that they give an artificial impression of being in command.

There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him. Art for the masses has destroyed the dream but still conforms to the tenets of that dreaming idealism which critical idealism baulked at. Everything derives from consciousness: for Malebranche and Berkeley, from the consciousness of God; in mass art, from the consciousness of the production team. Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero’s momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter’s rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all the other details, ready-made clichés to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfill the purpose allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d’être is to confirm it by being its constituent parts. As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come. The average length of the short story has to be rigidly adhered to. Even gags, effects, and jokes are calculated like the setting in which they are placed. They are the responsibility of special experts and their narrow range makes it easy for them to be apportioned in the office.

The development of the culture industry has led to the predominance of the effect, the obvious touch, and the technical detail over the work itself – which once expressed an idea, but was liquidated together with the idea. When the detail won its freedom, it became rebellious and, in the period from Romanticism to Expressionism, asserted itself as free expression, as a vehicle of protest against the organisation. In music the single harmonic effect obliterated the awareness of form as a whole; in painting the individual colour was stressed at the expense of pictorial composition; and in the novel psychology became more important than structure. The totality of the culture industry has put an end to this.

Though concerned exclusively with effects, it crushes their insubordination and makes them subserve the formula, which replaces the work. The same fate is inflicted on whole and parts alike. The whole inevitably bears no relation to the details – just like the career of a successful man into which everything is made to fit as an illustration or a proof, whereas it is nothing more than the sum of all those idiotic events. The so-called dominant idea is like a file which ensures order but not coherence. The whole and the parts are alike; there is no antithesis and no connection. Their prearranged harmony is a mockery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works of art. In Germany the graveyard stillness of the dictatorship already hung over the gayest films of the democratic era.

The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry. The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees the world outside as an extension of the film he has just left (because the latter is intent upon reproducing the world of everyday perceptions), is now the producer’s guideline. The more intensely and flawlessly his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen. This purpose has been furthered by mechanical reproduction since the lightning takeover by the sound film.

Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound film. They are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.

Even though the effort required for his response is semi-automatic, no scope is left for the imagination. Those who are so absorbed by the world of the movie – by its images, gestures, and words – that they are unable to supply what really makes it a world, do not have to dwell on particular points of its mechanics during a screening. All the other films and products of the entertainment industry which they have seen have taught them what to expect; they react automatically.

The might of industrial society is lodged in men’s minds. The entertainments manufacturers know that their products will be consumed with alertness even when the customer is distraught, for each of them is a model of the huge economic machinery which has always sustained the masses, whether at work or at leisure – which is akin to work. From every sound film and every broadcast program the social effect can be inferred which is exclusive to none but is shared by all alike. The culture industry as a whole has moulded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product. All the agents of this process, from the producer to the women’s clubs, take good care that the simple reproduction of this mental state is not nuanced or extended in any way.

The art historians and guardians of culture who complain of the extinction in the West of a basic style-determining power are wrong. The stereotyped appropriation of everything, even the inchoate, for the purposes of mechanical reproduction surpasses the rigour and general currency of any “real style,” in the sense in which cultural cognoscenti celebrate the organic pre-capitalist past. No Palestrina could be more of a purist in eliminating every unprepared and unresolved discord than the jazz arranger in suppressing any development which does not conform to the jargon. When jazzing up Mozart he changes him not only when he is too serious or too difficult but when he harmonises the melody in a different way, perhaps more simply, than is customary now. No medieval builder can have scrutinised the subjects for church windows and sculptures more suspiciously than the studio hierarchy scrutinises a work by Balzac or Hugo before finally approving it. No medieval theologian could have determined the degree of the torment to be suffered by the damned in accordance with the order of divine love more meticulously than the producers of shoddy epics calculate the torture to be undergone by the hero or the exact point to which the leading lady’s hemline shall be raised. The explicit and implicit, exoteric and esoteric catalogue of the forbidden and tolerated is so extensive that it not only defines the area of freedom but is all-powerful inside it. Everything down to the last detail is shaped accordingly.

Like its counterpart, avant-garde art, the entertainment industry determines its own language, down to its very syntax and vocabulary, by the use of anathema. The constant pressure to produce new effects (which must conform to the old pattern) serves merely as another rule to increase the power of the conventions when any single effect threatens to slip through the net. Every detail is so firmly stamped with sameness that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth, or does not meet with approval at first sight. And the star performers, whether they produce or reproduce, use this jargon as freely and fluently and with as much gusto as if it were the very language which it silenced long ago. Such is the ideal of what is natural in this field of activity, and its influence becomes all the more powerful, the more technique is perfected and diminishes the tension between the finished product and everyday life. The paradox of this routine, which is essentially travesty, can be detected and is often predominant in everything that the culture industry turns out. A jazz musician who is playing a piece of serious music, one of Beethoven’s simplest minuets, syncopates it involuntarily and will smile superciliously when asked to follow the normal divisions of the beat. This is the “nature” which, complicated by the ever-present and extravagant demands of the specific medium, constitutes the new style and is a “system of non-culture, to which one might even concede a certain ‘unity of style’ if it really made any sense to speak of stylised barbarity.” [Nietzsche]

The universal imposition of this stylised mode can even go beyond what is quasi-officially sanctioned or forbidden; today a hit song is more readily forgiven for not observing the 32 beats or the compass of the ninth than for containing even the most clandestine melodic or harmonic detail which does not conform to the idiom. Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is forgiven because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system. The constraint of the technically-conditioned idiom which stars and directors have to produce as “nature” so that the people can appropriate it, extends to such fine nuances that they almost attain the subtlety of the devices of an avant-garde work as against those of truth. The rare capacity minutely to fulfil the obligations of the natural idiom in all branches of the culture industry becomes the criterion of efficiency. What and how they say it must be measurable by everyday language, as in logical positivism.

The producers are experts. The idiom demands an astounding productive power, which it absorbs and squanders. In a diabolical way it has overreached the culturally conservative distinction between genuine and artificial style. A style might be called artificial which is imposed from without on the refractory impulses of a form. But in the culture industry every element of the subject matter has its origin in the same apparatus as that jargon whose stamp it bears. The quarrels in which the artistic experts become involved with sponsor and censor about a lie going beyond the bounds of credibility are evidence not so much of an inner aesthetic tension as of a divergence of interests. The reputation of the specialist, in which a last remnant of objective independence sometimes finds refuge, conflicts with the business politics of the Church, or the concern which is manufacturing the cultural commodity. But the thing itself has been essentially objectified and made viable before the established authorities began to argue about it. Even before Zanuck acquired her, Saint Bernadette was regarded by her latter-day hagiographer as brilliant propaganda for all interested parties. That is what became of the emotions of the character. Hence the style of the culture industry, which no longer has to test itself against any refractory material, is also the negation of style. The reconciliation of the general and particular, of the rule and the specific demands of the subject matter, the achievement of which alone gives essential, meaningful content to style, is futile because there has ceased to be the slightest tension between opposite poles: these concordant extremes are dismally identical; the general can replace the particular, and vice versa.

Nevertheless, this caricature of style does not amount to something beyond the genuine style of the past. In the culture industry the notion of genuine style is seen to be the aesthetic equivalent of domination. Style considered as mere aesthetic regularity is a romantic dream of the past. The unity of style not only of the Christian Middle Ages but of the Renaissance expresses in each case the different structure of social power, and not the obscure experience of the oppressed in which the general was enclosed. The great artists were never those who embodied a wholly flawless and perfect style, but those who used style as a way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth. The style of their works gave what was expressed that force without which life flows away unheard. Those very art forms which are known as classical, such as Mozart’s music, contain objective trends which represent something different to the style which they incarnate.

As late as Schönberg and Picasso, the great artists have retained a mistrust of style, and at crucial points have subordinated it to the logic of the matter. What Dadaists and Expressionists called the untruth of style as such triumphs today in the sung jargon of a crooner, in the carefully contrived elegance of a film star, and even in the admirable expertise of a photograph of a peasant’s squalid hut. Style represents a promise in every work of art. That which is expressed is subsumed through style into the dominant forms of generality, into the language of music, painting, or words, in the hope that it will be reconciled thus with the idea of true generality. This promise held out by the work of art that it will create truth by lending new shape to the conventional social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical. It unconditionally posits the real forms of life as it is by suggesting that fulfilment lies in their aesthetic derivatives. To this extent the claim of art is always ideology too.

However, only in this confrontation with tradition of which style is the record can art express suffering. That factor in a work of art which enables it to transcend reality certainly cannot be detached from style; but it does not consist of the harmony actually realised, of any doubtful unity of form and content, within and without, of individual and society; it is to be found in those features in which discrepancy appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure in which the style of the great work of art has always achieved self-negation, the inferior work has always relied on its similarity with others – on a surrogate identity.

In the culture industry this imitation finally becomes absolute. Having ceased to be anything but style, it reveals the latter’s secret: obedience to the social hierarchy. Today aesthetic barbarity completes what has threatened the creations of the spirit since they were gathered together as culture and neutralised. To speak of culture was always contrary to culture. Culture as a common denominator already contains in embryo that schematisation and process of cataloguing and classification which bring culture within the sphere of administration. And it is precisely the industrialised, the consequent, subsumption which entirely accords with this notion of culture. By subordinating in the same way and to the same end all areas of intellectual creation, by occupying men’s senses from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the labor process they themselves have to sustain throughout the day, this subsumption mockingly satisfies the concept of a unified culture which the philosophers of personality contrasted with mass culture.

And so the culture industry, the most rigid of all styles, proves to be the goal of liberalism, which is reproached for its lack of style. Not only do its categories and contents derive from liberalism – domesticated naturalism as well as operetta and revue – but the modern culture monopolies form the economic area in which, together with the corresponding entrepreneurial types, for the time being some part of its sphere of operation survives, despite the process of disintegration elsewhere.

It is still possible to make one’s way in entertainment, if one is not too obstinate about one’s own concerns, and proves appropriately pliable. Anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in. Once his particular brand of deviation from the norm has been noted by the industry, he belongs to it as does the land-reformer to capitalism. Realistic dissidence is the trademark of anyone who has a new idea in business. In the public voice of modern society accusations are seldom audible; if they are, the perceptive can already detect signs that the dissident will soon be reconciled. The more immeasurable the gap between chorus and leaders, the more certainly there is room at the top for everybody who demonstrates his superiority by well-planned originality. Hence, in the culture industry, too, the liberal tendency to give full scope to its able men survives.

To do this for the efficient today is still the function of the market, which is otherwise proficiently controlled; as for the market’s freedom, in the high period of art as elsewhere, it was freedom for the stupid to starve. Significantly, the system of the culture industry comes from the more liberal industrial nations, and all its characteristic media, such as movies, radio, jazz, and magazines, flourish there. Its progress, to be sure, had its origin in the general laws of capital. Gaumont and Pathe, Ullstein and Hugenberg followed the international trend with some success; Europe’s economic dependence on the United States after war and inflation was a contributory factor. The belief that the barbarity of the culture industry is a result of “cultural lag,” of the fact that the American consciousness did not keep up with the growth of technology, is quite wrong. It was pre-Fascist Europe which did not keep up with the trend toward the culture monopoly.

But it was this very lag which left intellect and creativity some degree of independence and enabled its last representatives to exist – however dismally. In Germany the failure of democratic control to permeate life had led to a paradoxical situation. Many things were exempt from the market mechanism which had invaded the Western countries. The German educational system, universities, theatres with artistic standards, great orchestras, and museums enjoyed protection. The political powers, state and municipalities, which had inherited such institutions from absolutism, had left them with a measure of the freedom from the forces of power which dominates the market, just as princes and feudal lords had done up to the nineteenth century. This strengthened art in this late phase against the verdict of supply and demand, and increased its resistance far beyond the actual degree of protection. In the market itself the tribute of a quality for which no use had been found was turned into purchasing power; in this way, respectable literary and music publishers could help authors who yielded little more in the way of profit than the respect of the connoisseur.

But what completely fettered the artist was the pressure (and the accompanying drastic threats), always to fit into business life as an aesthetic expert. Formerly, like Kant and Hume, they signed their letters “Your most humble and obedient servant,” and undermined the foundations of throne and altar. Today they address heads of government by their first names, yet in every artistic activity they are subject to their illiterate masters.

The analysis Tocqueville offered a century ago has in the meantime proved wholly accurate. Under the private culture monopoly it is a fact that “tyranny leaves the body free and directs its attack at the soul. The ruler no longer says: You must think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a stranger among us.” Not to conform means to be rendered powerless, economically and therefore spiritually – to be “self-employed.” When the outsider is excluded from the concern, he can only too easily be accused of incompetence.

Whereas today in material production the mechanism of supply and demand is disintegrating, in the superstructure it still operates as a check in the rulers’ favour. The consumers are the workers and employees, the farmers and lower middle class. Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them. As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities. It is stronger even than the rigorism of the Hays Office, just as in certain great times in history it has inflamed greater forces that were turned against it, namely, the terror of the tribunals. It calls for Mickey Rooney in preference to the tragic Garbo, for Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop. The industry submits to the vote which it has itself inspired. What is a loss for the firm which cannot fully exploit a contract with a declining star is a legitimate expense for the system as a whole. By craftily sanctioning the demand for rubbish it inaugurates total harmony. The connoisseur and the expert are despised for their pretentious claim to know better than the others, even though culture is democratic and distributes its privileges to all. In view of the ideological truce, the conformism of the buyers and the effrontery of the producers who supply them prevail. The result is a constant reproduction of the same thing.

A constant sameness governs the relationship to the past as well. What is new about the phase of mass culture compared with the late liberal stage is the exclusion of the new. The machine rotates on the same spot. While determining consumption it excludes the untried as a risk. The movie-makers distrust any manuscript which is not reassuringly backed by a bestseller. Yet for this very reason there is never-ending talk of ideas, novelty, and surprise, of what is taken for granted but has never existed. Tempo and dynamics serve this trend. Nothing remains as of old; everything has to run incessantly, to keep moving. For only the universal triumph of the rhythm of mechanical production and reproduction promises that nothing changes, and nothing unsuitable will appear. Any additions to the well-proven culture inventory are too much of a speculation. The ossified forms – such as the sketch, short story, problem film, or hit song – are the standardised average of late liberal taste, dictated with threats from above. The people at the top in the culture agencies, who work in harmony as only one manager can with another, whether he comes from the rag trade or from college, have long since reorganised and rationalised the objective spirit. One might think that an omnipresent authority had sifted the material and drawn up an official catalogue of cultural commodities to provide a smooth supply of available mass-produced lines. The ideas are written in the cultural firmament where they had already been numbered by Plato – and were indeed numbers, incapable of increase and immutable.

Amusement and all the elements of the culture industry existed long before the latter came into existence. Now they are taken over from above and brought up to date. The culture industry can pride itself on having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consumption, on making this a principle, on divesting amusement of its obtrusive naïvetes and improving the type of commodities. The more absolute it became, the more ruthless it was in forcing every outsider either into bankruptcy or into a syndicate, and became more refined and elevated – until it ended up as a synthesis of Beethoven and the Casino de Paris. It enjoys a double victory: the truth it extinguishes without it can reproduce at will as a lie within. “Light” art as such, distraction, is not a decadent form. Anyone who complains that it is a betrayal of the ideal of pure expression is under an illusion about society. The purity of bourgeois art, which hypostasised itself as a world of freedom in contrast to what was happening in the material world, was from the beginning bought with the exclusion of the lower classes – with whose cause, the real universality, art keeps faith precisely by its freedom from the ends of the false universality. Serious art has been withheld from those for whom the hardship and oppression of life make a mockery of seriousness, and who must be glad if they can use time not spent at the production line just to keep going. Light art has been the shadow of autonomous art. It is the social bad conscience of serious art. The truth which the latter necessarily lacked because of its social premises gives the other the semblance of legitimacy. The division itself is the truth: it does at least express the negativity of the culture which the different spheres constitute. Least of all can the antithesis be reconciled by absorbing light into serious art, or vice versa. But that is what the culture industry attempts.

The eccentricity of the circus, peepshow, and brothel is as embarrassing to it as that of Schönberg and Karl Kraus. And so the jazz musician Benny Goodman appears with the Budapest string quartet, more pedantic rhythmically than any philharmonic clarinettist, while the style of the Budapest players is as uniform and sugary as that of Guy Lombardo. But what is significant is not vulgarity, stupidity, and lack of polish.

The culture industry did away with yesterday’s rubbish by its own perfection, and by forbidding and domesticating the amateurish, although it constantly allows gross blunders without which the standard of the exalted style cannot be perceived. But what is new is that the irreconcilable elements of culture, art and distraction, are subordinated to one end and subsumed under one false formula: the totality of the culture industry. It consists of repetition. That its characteristic innovations are never anything more than improvements of mass reproduction is not external to the system.It is with good reason that the interest of innumerable consumers is directed to the technique, and not to the contents – which are stubbornly repeated, outworn, and by now half-discredited. The social power which the spectators worship shows itself more effectively in the omnipresence of the stereotype imposed by technical skill than in the stale ideologies for which the ephemeral contents stand in.

Nevertheless the culture industry remains the entertainment business. Its influence over the consumers is established by entertainment; that will ultimately be broken not by an outright decree, but by the hostility inherent in the principle of entertainment to what is greater than itself. Since all the trends of the culture industry are profoundly embedded in the public by the whole social process, they are encouraged by the survival of the market in this area. Demand has not yet been replaced by simple obedience. As is well known, the major reorganisation of the film industry shortly before World War I, the material prerequisite of its expansion, was precisely its deliberate acceptance of the public’s needs as recorded at the box-office – a procedure which was hardly thought necessary in the pioneering days of the screen. The same opinion is held today by the captains of the film industry, who take as their criterion the more or less phenomenal song hits but wisely never have recourse to the judgment of truth, the opposite criterion. Business is their ideology. It is quite correct that the power of the culture industry resides in its identification with a manufactured need, and not in simple contrast to it, even if this contrast were one of complete power and complete powerlessness.

Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanised work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanisation has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardised operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time.

All amusement suffers from this incurable malady. Pleasure hardens into boredom because, if it is to remain pleasure, it must not demand any effort and therefore moves rigorously in the worn grooves of association. No independent thinking must be expected from the audience: the product prescribes every reaction: not by its natural structure (which collapses under reflection), but by signals. Any logical connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly avoided. As far as possible, developments must follow from the immediately preceding situation and never from the idea of the whole. For the attentive movie-goer any individual scene will give him the whole thing. Even the set pattern itself still seems dangerous, offering some meaning – wretched as it might be – where only meaninglessness is acceptable. Often the plot is maliciously deprived of the development demanded by characters and matter according to the old pattern. Instead, the next step is what the script writer takes to be the most striking effect in theparticular situation. Banal though elaborate surprise interrupts the story-line.

The tendency mischievously to fall back on pure nonsense, which was a legitimate part of popular art, farce and clowning, right up to Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, is most obvious in the unpretentious kinds. This tendency has completely asserted itself in the text of the novelty song, in the thriller movie, and in cartoons, although in films starring Greer Garson and Bette Davis the unity of the socio-psychological case study provides something approximating a claim to a consistent plot. The idea itself, together with the objects of comedy and terror, is massacred and fragmented. Novelty songs have always existed on a contempt for meaning which, as predecessors and successors of psychoanalysis, they reduce to the monotony of sexual symbolism. Today, detective and adventure films no longer give the audience the opportunity to experience the resolution. In the non-ironic varieties of the genre, it has also to rest content with the simple horror of situations which have almost ceased to be linked in any way.

Cartoons were once exponents of fantasy as opposed to rationalism. They ensured that justice was done to the creatures and objects they electrified, by giving the maimed specimens a second life. All they do today is to confirm the victory of technological reason over truth. A few years ago they had a consistent plot which only broke up in the final moments in a crazy chase, and thus resembled the old slapstick comedy. Now, however, time relations have shifted. In the very first sequence a motive is stated so that in the course of the action destruction can get to work on it: with the audience in pursuit, the protagonist becomes the worthless object of general violence. The quantity of organised amusement changes into the quality of organised cruelty. The self-elected censors of the film industry (with whom it enjoys a close relationship) watch over the unfolding of the crime, which is as drawn-out as a hunt. Fun replaces the pleasure which the sight of an embrace would allegedly afford, and postpones satisfaction till the day of the pogrom. Insofar as cartoons do any more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment.

The enjoyment of the violence suffered by the movie character turns into violence against the spectator, and distraction into exertion. Nothing that the experts have devised as a stimulant must escape the weary eye; no stupidity is allowed in the face of all the trickery; one has to follow everything and even display the smart responses shown and recommended in the film. This raises the question whether the culture industry fulfils the function of diverting minds which it boasts about so loudly. If most of the radio stations and movie theatres were closed down, the consumers would probably not lose so very much. To walk from the street into the movie theatre is no longer to enter a world of dream; as soon as the very existence of these institutions no longer made it obligatory to use them, there would be no great urge to do so. Such closures would not be reactionary machine wrecking. The disappointment would be felt not so much by the enthusiasts as by the slow-witted, who are the ones who suffer for everything anyhow. In spite of the films which are intended to complete her integration, the housewife finds in the darkness of the movie theatre a place of refuge where she can sit for a few hours with nobody watching, just as she used to look out of the window when there were still homes and rest in the evening. The unemployed in the great cities find coolness in summer and warmth in winter in these temperature-controlled locations. Otherwise, despite its size, this bloated pleasure apparatus adds no dignity to man’s lives. The idea of “fully exploiting” available technical resources and the facilities for aesthetic mass consumption is part of the economic system which refuses to exploit resources to abolish hunger.

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. In front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape. Of course works of art were not sexual exhibitions either. However, by representing deprivation as negative, they retracted, as it were, the prostitution of the impulse and rescued by mediation what was denied.

The secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representation of fulfilment as a broken promise. The culture industry does not sublimate; it represses. By repeatedly exposing the objects of desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the athletic hero, it only stimulates the unsublimated forepleasure which habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a masochistic semblance. There is no erotic situation which, while insinuating and exciting, does not fail to indicate unmistakably that things can never go that far. The Hays Office merely confirms the ritual of Tantalus that the culture industry has established anyway. Works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish. Love is downgraded to romance. And, after the descent, much is permitted; even license as a marketable speciality has its quota bearing the trade description “daring.” The mass production of the sexual automatically achieves its repression. Because of his ubiquity, the film star with whom one is meant to fall in love is from the outset a copy of himself. Every tenor voice comes to sound like a Caruso record, and the “natural” faces of Texas girls are like the successful models by whom Hollywood has typecast them. The mechanical reproduction of beauty, which reactionary cultural fanaticism wholeheartedly serves in its methodical idolisation of individuality, leaves no room for that unconscious idolatry which was once essential to beauty.

The triumph over beauty is celebrated by humour – the Schadenfreude that every successful deprivation calls forth. There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at. Laughter, whether conciliatory or terrible, always occurs when some fear passes. It indicates liberation either from physical danger or from the grip of logic. Conciliatory laughter is heard as the echo of an escape from power; the wrong kind overcomes fear by capitulating to the forces which are to be feared. It is the echo of power as something inescapable. Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud practised on happiness. Moments of happiness are without laughter; only operettas and films portray sex to the accompaniment of resounding laughter. But Baudelaire is as devoid of humour as Hölderlin. In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is drawing it into its worthless totality. To laugh at something is always to deride it, and the life which, according to Bergson, in laughter breaks through the barrier, is actually an invading barbaric life, self-assertion prepared to parade its liberation from any scruple when the social occasion arises. Such a laughing audience is a parody of humanity. Its members are monads, all dedicated to the pleasure of being ready for anything at the expense of everyone else. Their harmony is a caricature of solidarity. What is fiendish about this false laughter is that it is a compelling parody of the best, which is conciliatory. Delight is austere: res severa verum gaudium. The monastic theory that not asceticism but the sexual act denotes the renunciation of attainable bliss receives negative confirmation in the gravity of the lover who with foreboding commits his life to the fleeting moment. In the culture industry, jovial denial takes the place of the pain found in ecstasy and in asceticism. The supreme law is that they shall not satisfy their desires at any price; they must laugh and be content with laughter. In every product of the culture industry, the permanent denial imposed by civilisation is once again unmistakably demonstrated and inflicted on its victims. To offer and to deprive them of something is one and the same. This is what happens in erotic films. Precisely because it must never take place, everything centres upon copulation. In films it is more strictly forbidden for an illegitimate relationship to be admitted without the parties being punished than for a millionaire’sfuture son-in-law to be active in the labour movement. In contrast to the liberal era, industrialised as well as popular culture may wax indignant at capitalism, but it cannot renounce the threat of castration. This is fundamental. It outlasts the organised acceptance of the uniformed seen in the films which are produced to that end, and in reality. What is decisive today is no longer puritanism, although it still asserts itself in the form of women’s organisations, but the necessity inherent in the system not to leave the customer alone, not for a moment to allow him any suspicion that resistance is possible.

The principle dictates that he should be shown all his needs as capable of-fulfilment, but that those needs should be so predetermined that he feels himself to be the eternal consumer, the object of the culture industry. Not only does it make him believe that the deception it practices is satisfaction, but it goes further and implies that, whatever the state of affairs, he must put up with what is offered. The escape from everyday drudgery which the whole culture industry promises may be compared to the daughter’s abduction in the cartoon: the father is holding the ladder in the dark. The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought to help to forget.

Even today the culture industry dresses works of art like political slogans and forces them upon a resistant public at reduced prices; they are as accessible for public enjoyment as a park. But the disappearance of their genuine commodity character does not mean that they have been abolished in the life of a free society, but that the last defence against their reduction to culture goods has fallen. The abolition of educational privilege by the device of clearance sales does not open for the masses the spheres from which they were formerly excluded, but, given existing social conditions, contributes directly to the decay of education and the progress of barbaric meaninglessness. Those who spent their money in the nineteenth or the early twentieth century to see a play or to go to a concert respected the performance as much as the money they spent. The bourgeois who wanted to get something out of it tried occasionally to establish some rapport with the work. Evidence for this is to be found in the literary “introductions” to works, or in the commentaries on Faust. These were the first steps toward the biographical coating and other practices to which a work of art is subjected today.

Even in the early, prosperous days of business, exchange-value did carry use value as a mere appendix but had developed it as a prerequisite for its own existence; this was socially helpful for works of art. Art exercised some restraint on the bourgeois as long as it cost money. That is now a thing of the past. Now that it has lost every restraint and there is no need to pay any money, the proximity of art to those who are exposed to it completes the alienation and assimilates one to the other under the banner of triumphant objectivity. Criticism and respect disappear in the culture industry; the former becomes a mechanical expertise, the latter is succeeded by a shallow cult of leading personalities. Consumers now find nothing expensive. Nevertheless, they suspect that the less anything costs, the less it is being given them. The double mistrust of traditional culture as ideology is combined with mistrust of industrialised culture as a swindle. When thrown in free, the now debased works of art, together with the rubbish to which the medium assimilates them, are secretly rejected by the fortunate recipients, who are supposed to be satisfied by the mere fact that there is so much to be seen and heard. Everything can be obtained. The screenos and vaudevilles in the movie theatre, the competitions for guessing music, the free books, rewards and gifts offered on certain radio programs, are not mere accidents but a continuation of the practice obtaining with culture products. The symphony becomes a reward for listening to the radio, and – if technology had its way - the film would be delivered to people’s homes as happens with the radio. It is moving toward the commercial system. Television points the way to a development which might easily enough force the Warner Brothers into what would certainly be the unwelcome position of serious musicians and cultural conservatives. But the gift system has already taken hold among consumers. As culture is represented as a bonus with undoubted private and social advantages, they have to seize the chance. They rush in lest they miss something. Exactly what, is not clear, but in any case the only ones with a chance are the participants. Fascism, however, hopes to use the training the culture industry has given these recipients of gifts, in order to organise them into its own forced battalions.

Culture is a paradoxical commodity. So completely is it subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used. Therefore it amalgamates with advertising. The more meaningless the latter seems to be under a monopoly, the more omnipotent it becomes. The motives are markedly economic.

One could certainly live without the culture industry, therefore it necessarily creates too much satiation and apathy. In itself, it has few resources itself to correct this. Advertising is its elixir of life. But as its product never fails to reduce to a mere promise the enjoyment which it promises as a commodity, it eventually coincides with publicity, which it needs because it cannot be enjoyed. In a competitive society, advertising performed the social service of informing the buyer about the market; it made choice easier and helped the unknown but more efficient supplier to dispose of his goods. Far from costing time, it saved it.

Today, when the free market is coming to an end, those who control the system are entrenching themselves in it. It strengthens the firm bond between the consumers and the big combines. Only those who can pay the exorbitant rates charged by the advertising agencies, chief of which are the radio networks themselves; that is, only those who are already in a position to do so, or are co-opted by the decision of the banks and industrial capital, can enter the pseudo-market as sellers. The costs of advertising, which finally flow back into the pockets of the combines, make it unnecessaryto defeat unwelcome outsiders by laborious competition. They guarantee that power will remain in the same hands – not unlike those economic decisions by which the establishment and running of undertakings is controlled in a totalitarian state. Advertising today is a negative principle, a blocking device: everything that does not bear its stamp is economically suspect. Universal publicity is in no way necessary for people to get to know the kinds of goods – whose supply is restricted anyway. It helps sales only indirectly. For a particular firm, to phase out a current advertising practice constitutes a loss of prestige, and a breach of the discipline imposed by the influential clique on its members. In wartime, goods which are unobtainable are still advertised, merely to keep industrial power in view. Subsidising ideological media is more important than the repetition of the name. Because the system obliges every product to use advertising, it has permeated the idiom – the “style” – of the culture industry. Its victory is so complete that it is no longer evident in the key positions: the huge buildings of the top men, floodlit stone advertisements, are free of advertising; at most they exhibit on the rooftops, in monumental brilliance and without any self-glorification, the firm’s initials. But, in contrast, the nineteenth-century houses, whose architecture still shamefully indicates that they can be used as a consumption commodity and are intended to be lived in, are covered with posters and inscriptions from the ground right up to and beyond the roof: until they become no more than backgrounds for bills and sign-boards. Advertising becomes art and nothing else, just as Goebbels – with foresight – combines them: l’art pour l’art, advertising for its own sake, a pure representation of social power. In the most influential American magazines, Life and Fortune, a quick glance can now scarcely distinguish advertising from editorial picture and text. The latter features an enthusiastic and gratuitous account of the great man (with illustrations of his life and grooming habits) which will bring him new fans, while the advertisement pages use so many factual photographs and details that they represent the ideal of information which the editorial part has only begun to try to achieve.

The assembly-line character of the culture industry, the synthetic, planned method of turning out its products (factory-like not only in the studio but, more or less, in the compilation of cheap biographies, pseudo-documentary novels, and hit songs) is very suited to advertising: the important individual points, by becoming detachable, interchangeable, and even technically alienated from any connected meaning, lend themselves to ends external to the work. The effect, the trick, the isolated repeatable device, have always been used to exhibit goods for advertising purposes, and today every monster close-up of a star is an advertisement for her name, and every hit song a plug for its tune. Advertising and the culture industry merge technically as well as economically. In both cases the same thing can be seen in innumerable places, and the mechanical repetition of the same culture product has come to be the same as that of the propaganda slogan. In both cases the insistent demand for effectiveness makes technology into psycho-technology, into a procedure for manipulating men. In both cases the standards are the striking yet familiar, the easy yet catchy, the skilful yet simple; the object is to overpower the customer, who is conceived as absent-minded or resistant.

By the language he speaks, he makes his own contribution to culture as publicity. The more completely language is lost in the announcement, the more words are debased as substantial vehicles of meaning and become signs devoid of quality; the more purely and transparently words communicate what is intended, the more impenetrable they become.

The demythologisation of language, taken as an element of the whole process of enlightenment, is a relapse into magic. Word and essential content were distinct yet inseparable from one another. Concepts like melancholy and history, even life, were recognised in the word, which separated them out and preserved them. Its form simultaneously constituted and reflected them. The absolute separation, which makes the moving accidental and its relation to the object arbitrary, puts an end to the superstitious fusion of word and thing.

Anything in a determined literal sequence which goes beyond the correlation to the event is rejected as unclear and as verbal metaphysics. But the result is that the word, which can now be only a sign without any meaning, becomes so fixed to the thing that it is just a petrified formula. This affects language and object alike. Instead of making the object experiential, the purified word treats it as an abstract instance, and everything else (now excluded by the demand for ruthless clarity from expression – itself now banished) fades away in reality. A left-half at football, a black-shirt, a member of the Hitler Youth, and so on, are no more than names. If before its rationalisation the word had given rise to lies as well as to longing, now, after its rationalisation, it is a straitjacket for longing more even than for lies.

The blindness and dumbness of the data to which positivism reduces the world pass over into language itself, which restricts itself to recording those data. Terms themselves become impenetrable; they obtain a striking force, a power of adhesion and repulsion which makes them like their extreme opposite, incantations. They come to be a kind of trick, because the name of the prima donna is cooked up in the studio on a statistical basis, or because a welfare state is anathematised by using taboo terms such as “bureaucrats” or “intellectuals,” or because base practice uses the name of the country as a charm.

In general, the name – to which magic most easily attaches – is undergoing a chemical change: a metamorphosis into capricious, manipulable designations, whose effect is admittedly now calculable, but which for that very reason is just as despotic as that of the archaic name. First names, those archaic remnants, have been brought up to date either by stylisation as advertising trade-marks (film stars’ surnames have become first names), or by collective standardisation.

In comparison, the bourgeois family name which, instead of being a trade-mark, once individualised its bearer by relating him to his own past history, seems antiquated. It arouses a strange embarrassment in Americans. In order to hide the awkward distance between individuals, they call one another “Bob” and “Harry,” as interchangeable team members. This practice reduces relations between human beings to the good fellowship of the sporting community and is a defence against the true kind of relationship.

Signification, which is the only function of a word admitted by semantics, reaches perfection in the sign. Whether folk-songs were rightly or wrongly called upper-class culture in decay, their elements have only acquired their popular form through a long process of repeated transmission. The spread of popular songs, on the other hand, takes place at lightning speed. The American expression “fad,” used for fashions which appear like epidemics – that is, inflamed by highly-concentrated economic forces – designated this phenomenon long before totalitarian advertising bosses enforced the general lines of culture. When the German Fascists decide one day to launch a word – say, “intolerable” – over the loudspeakers the next day the whole nation is saying “intolerable.” By the same pattern, the nations against whom the weight of the German blitzkrieg was thrown took the word into their own jargon. The general repetition of names for measures to be taken by the authorities makes them, so to speak, familiar, just as the brand name on everybody’s lips increased sales in the era of the free market. The blind and rapidly spreading repetition of words with special designations links advertising with the totalitarian watchword. The layer of experience which created the words for their speakers has been removed; in this swift appropriation language acquires the coldness which until now it had only on billboards and in the advertisement columns of newspapers. Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes; in this sense, words are trade-marks which are finally all the more firmly linked to the things they denote, the less their linguistic sense is grasped. The minister for mass education talks incomprehendingly of “dynamic forces,” and the hit songs unceasingly celebrate “reverie” and “rhapsody,” yet base their popularity precisely on the magic of the unintelligible as creating the thrill of a more exalted life. Other stereotypes, such as memory, are still partly comprehended, but escape from the experience which might allow them content. They appear like enclaves in the spoken language. On the radio of Flesch and Hitler they may be recognised from the affected pronunciation of the announcer when he says to the nation, “Good night, everybody!” or “This is the Hitler Youth,” and even intones “the Fuehrer” in a way imitated by millions. In such cliches the last bond between sedimentary experience and language is severed which still had a reconciling effect in dialect in the nineteenth century. But in the prose of the journalist whose adaptable attitude led to his appointment as an all-German editor, the German words become petrified, alien terms. Every word shows how far it has been debased by the Fascist pseudo-folk community.

By now, of course, this kind of language is already universal, totalitarian. All the violence done to words is so vile that one can hardly bear to hear them any longer. The announcer does not need to speak pompously; he would indeed be impossible if his inflection were different from that of his particular audience. But, as against that, the language and gestures of the audience and spectators are coloured more strongly than ever before by the culture industry, even in fine nuances which cannot yet be explained experimentally.

Today the culture industry has taken over the civilising inheritance of the entrepreneurial and frontier democracy – whose appreciation of intellectual deviations was never very finely attuned. All are free to dance and enjoy themselves, just as they have been free, since the historical neutralisation of religion, to join any of the innumerable sects. But freedom to choose an ideology – since ideology always reflects economic coercion – everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same. The way in which a girl accepts and keeps the obligatory date, the inflection on the telephone or in the most intimate situation, the choice of words in conversation, and the whole inner life as classified by the now somewhat devalued depth psychology, bear witness to man’s attempt to make himself a proficient apparatus, similar (even in emotions) to the model served up by the culture industry.

The most intimate reactions of human beings have been so thoroughly reified that the idea of anything specific to themselves now persists only as an utterly abstract notion: personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odour and emotions. The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.