Culture today is infecting everything with sameness (416).
Technical rationality today is the rationality of domination. It is the compulsive character of a society alienated from itself (416-17).
Automobiles, bombs, and films (417).
Sharp distinctions . . . do no smooch reflect real differences as assist in the classification, organization, and identification of consumers (417).
Something is provided for everyone so that no one can escape (417).
Everyone is supposed to behave spontaneously according to a “level” determined by indices and to select the category of mass product manufactured for their type (418).
To impress the omnipotence of capital on the hearts of expropriated job candidates as the power of their true master is purpose of all films (418).
The culture industry has developed in conjunction with the predominance of the effect, the tangible performance, the technical detail, over the work, which once carried the idea and was liquidated with it (419).
The products of the culture industry are such that they can be alertly consumed even in a state of distraction (420).
The explicit and implicit, exoteric and esoteric catalog of what is forbidden and what is tolerated is so extensive that it not only defines the area left free but wholly controls it (420).
The rare ability to conform punctiliously to the obligations of the idiom of naturalness in all branches of the culture industry becomes the measure of expertise (421).
In every work of art, style is a promise (422).
To this extent the claims of art are always also ideology (422).
Only by subordinating all branches of intellectual production equally to the single purpose of imposing on the senses of human beings, from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock on in the morning, the imprint of the work routine which they must sustain throughout the day, does this culture mockingly fulfill the notion of a unified culture which the philosophers of the individual personality held out against mass culture (422).
In former times they signed their letters, like Kant and Hume, “Your most obedient servant,” while undermining the foundations of throne and altar. Today they call heads of government by their first names and are subject, in every artistic impulse, to the judgment of their illiterate principals (423).
Anyone who does not conform is condemned to an economic impotence which is prolonged in the intellectual powerlessness of the eccentric loner (424).
the defrauded masses today cling to the myth of success still more ardently than the successful. They, too, have their aspirations. They insist unwaveringly on the ideology by which they are enslaved. The pernicious love of the common people for the harm done to them outstrips even the cunning of the authorities (424).
The industry bows to the vote it has itself rigged (424).
By artfully sanctioning the demand for trash, the system inaugurates total harmony (424).
Connoisseurship and expertise are proscribed as the arrogance of those who think themselves superior, whereas culture distributes its privileges democratically to all (424).
only the universal victory of the rhythm of mechanical production and reproduction promises that nothing will change, that nothing unsuitable will emerge (424).
The more all embracing the culture industry has become, the more pitilessly it has forced the outsider into either bankruptcy or a syndicate (425).
Demand has not yet been replaced by simple obedience (426).
the power of the culture industry lies in its unity with fabricated need (426).
Entertainment is the prolongation of work under later capitalism (426).
[Entertainment] is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again (426).
the off-duty worker can experience nothing but after-images of the work process itself (426).
The only escape from the work process in factory and office is through adaptation to it in leisure time (426).
Amusement congeals into boredom, since, to be amusement, it must cost no effort and therefore moves strictly along the well-worn grooves of association (426).
Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators can accustom themselves to theirs (427).
distraction becomes extortion (427).
The culture industry does not sublimate: it surpasses (427),
By constantly exhibiting the object of desire . . . it merely goads the unsublimated anticipation of pleasure, which through the habit of denial has long since been mutilated as masochism (428).
In wrong society laughter is a sickness infecting happiness and drawing it into society’s worthless totality (428).
Entertainment fosters the resignation which seeks to forget itself in entertainment (429).
The deception is not that the culture industry serves up amusement but that it spoils the fun by its business-minded attachment to the ideological clichés if the culture which is liquidating itself (429).
Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering,even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness (430).
Ideology hides itself in probability calculations (431).
Fundamentally, everyone recognizes chance . . . as the other side of planning (431).
Industry is interested in human beings only as its customers and employees (432).
Words which are not a means seem meaningless, the others seem to be fiction, untruth (432).
Value judgments are perceived either as advertisements or as mere chatter (432).
Beauty is whatever the camera reproduces (433).
the bread on which the culture industry feeds humanity, remains the stone of stereotype (433).
Individuals are tolerated only as far as their wholehearted identity with the universal is beyond question (433).
pseudoindividuality reigns (434).
The peculiarity of the self is a socially conditioned monopoly commodity misrepresented as natural (434).
Pseudo individuality is a precondition for apprehending and detoxifying tragedy (434).
Mass culture thereby reveals the fictitious quality which has characterized the individual throughout the bourgeois era (434).
the advance of bourgeois society has promoted the development of the individual (434).
all such progress of individuation has been at the expense of the individuality in whose name it took place, leaving behind nothing except individuals’ determination to pursue their own purposes alone (434).
The unity of the personality has been recognized as illusory since Shakespeare’s Hamlet (434).
The heroizing of the average forms part of the cult of cheapness (435).
The dominant taste derives its ideal from the advertisement, from commodified beauty (435).
To put on a show means to show everyone what one has and can do (435).
use value in the reception of cultural assets is being replaced by exchange value; enjoyment is giving way to being there and being in the know, connoisseurship by enhanced prestige. The consumer becomes the ideology of the amusement industry, whose institutions he or she cannot escape (436).
Culture is a paradoxical commodity. It is so completely subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly equated with use that it can no longer be used (438).
advertising for advertising’s sake, the pure representation of social power (439).
The demythologizing of language, as an element of the total process of enlightenment, reverts to magic (439).
the word, which henceforth is allowed only to designate something and not to mean it, becomes so fixated on the object that is hardens to a formula (440).
vileness exonerates itself by invoking the name of a homeland (440).
freedom to choose an ideology, which always reflects economic coercion, everywhere proves to be freedom to be the same (441).
That is the triumph of advertising in the culture industry: the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false (441).