Jumping off a cliff, Adorno & Horkheimer in hand....

Adorno and Horkheimer talk about technology, the culture industry’s greatest achievement, as simply being an assembly line of standardized products. These products are so well designed and mechanized that there is nothing that escapes appropriation by the culture industry. Style of products becomes no style at all when they are all mass produced to masquerade as unique, and natural. Thus, the culture industry creates a veil of ideology in which individuals buy into their falsely needing the industry’s standardized products. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry is selling the dominant ideology’s dream, and we are lapping it up like the good Pavlovian mutts we are.

What I don’t understand is, if all the culture industry’s products are predictably the same, and nothing ever changes, then there is a sense in which what it means to be human, in a technological environment, never really changes either. Adorno and Horkheimer mention that there is no escape from appropriation by the culture industry, and that “anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in”. To be clear, then, within a Marxist paradigm, the economic base determines the culture industry, which determines the superstructure, which feeds back to the capitalist that determines the economic base. Therefore, what it means to be … is essentially to fulfill this economic circle of life. For anyone not in the capitalist class, there is no freedom to choose, no historical situation or social context that can alter your inevitable obedience to the culture industry. How do Adorno and Horkheimer explain the history of human existence before or without the culture industry? And would that defense prove without a doubt their prescribed nature of human being in the future? Or does the future even matter?