"Cultural industry" (also Culture Industry) is a term originating in the work of ||Theodore Adorno|| and ||Max Horkheimer|| to characterize mass communications.

The standard view of mass culture is that it is another market in which the best, or most popular works succeed, and one that can be partitioned into submarkets as in the somewhat dated distinction between highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow culture.

Adorno, who was educated in Continental philosophy and much influenced by "dialectical" logics of Hegel and of Marx, where events are studied not in isolation but as part of change, theorized in works including ||Negative Dialectics|| and ||Dialectic of Enlightenment|| that the phenomenon of masscult has a political implication.

Considered as a static process, each release of a film or other product injects attitudes for better or worse into the audience, whether as crude propaganda or in various forms of nuanced consciousness such as irony, where the viewer adopts viewpoints and roles officially at variance with his "real" views.

For example, the George C. Scott film of the 1970s, Patton, about the American general was released at a time of considerable anti-war sentiment leading to anxieties on the part of its financiers. Thus Patton went "over the top", commencing with Scott in front of an enormous American flag which at the time had ambivalent associations for many viewers in the targeted audience.

The film enabled many viewers to slip into a role of "patriotism" without full committment and Scott "sold" the persona of Patton to the audience as part of what Adorno might call a dialectic, in which the backers hedged their bets, by anticipating a sincere and an ironic response. Likewise, white male viewers, enthusiastic perhaps at the revival of white, male values but afraid to be unfashionable, could hedge their response in irony.

Further application of the dialectical view would show that culture industry products, in a process misnamed self-referential, are in dialog with themselves in the way that the audience is prepared by previous films for effects in later films.

The naive view is that the "products" of the culture industry are each sui generis, and stand more or less on their own merits, without much affecting the world-views of the audience. Their use value is thought or made equivalent to their box office returns...their exchange value. The Hollywood phrase, "nobody knows anything" seems to equate product with a mystified genius/talent.

But the theory of a culture industry envisions a split between genuine artistic use value and exchange value, explained by the creation, over time and in a dialectical fashion, of an ironic false consciousness.

But if the success of any one film is explainable in a micro-historical consciousness, and if the products of culture industry are in a finely ordered sequence, then any one film's success depends upon its timing as a gesture in a dialogue with an evolving (or devolving audience). One gets the impression that genuinely first-rate films, including Hollywood product where resides some genuine "genius" could be released and be accessible at any time, whereas normally films are so referential that the timing of the release is critical.

One mistake in understanding culture industry is to equate this industry, as in a "conspiracy theory", with a non-dialectical engineering mechanism that replaces cogs and circuits with human beings...a common enough mistaken view, which takes Chaplin's metaphor in Modern Times too literally.

A machine isn't a dialectical process because of the absence of the human element. Therefore the participants in culture industry, reacting to stimuli in the form of box office returns, can't conspire to engineer the process in which they embed, only act out a script partly determined by the nature of a conversation dependent on the response of the audience.

Musings on the process of culture industry may have led ||Adorno|| to the concept of Negative Dialectics which is a third version of the original dialectic of ||Hegel||. Hegel's dialectic tended toward progress: Marx's material reversal, in which the Idea became emergent from history all the way down, also tended towards progress.

Adorno read in the phenomena of culture industry the potential of regress, perhaps to an apparently steady state of pointless social reproduction without the disruptive influence of high art, disdained because of its irrevelance to the struggle for existence, and (for the late Adorno of Aesthetic Theory) the way in which any given work of art criticises the world outside its boundaries: for the late Adorno of Aesthetic Theory, "high" cultural productions (such as, for the sake of example, the Ninth Symphony) are in themselves protests against the everyday rather than its celebration.

Some indications bear his predictions out. Increasingly, Fundamentalism is distributed by the cultural industry in various forms, and in some states of the Middle East, the Koran is read in a flat monotone to avoid a presumed insult to its hegemonic content: similar Iconoclastic phenomena have existed in Christianity since the American Puritans and are undergoing a (negative) Risiorgimento.

A striking phrase, due actually to Max Horkheimer, describes the culture industry as "psychoanalysis in reverse". Certainly a variety of empirical studies show how masscult products lower self-confidence and self-esteem; for example, the American "fitness and jogging" boom of the 1970s has been so appropriated by advertisers such as Calvin Klein that actual high school students in America have in some cases avoided jogging because of body shame caused by excessively toned models.

The dialectical irony, of course, is that the original "running craze" at the Boston Marathon and in California began, dialectically, as the thesis that one didn't have to be "rocky" in a sweaty gym to be physically fit and that bodily acceptance was key to effective aerobic training. The culture industry (completely unconsciously, of course, as a participant in the dialectic) responded to the thesis with a celebration of a popular movement that by the logic of dialectical growth flowered right back into the original scene of competition and mass humiliation. A similar "dialectic" in fact operated in Germany prior to WWI and after when heirs of the Romantic movement in Germany became seekers of "Strength through Joy" only to have their movement co-opted by a combination of German mass media and National Socialism.

"Psychoanalysis in reverse" means that not all dialectical processes are "good" but applying a Marxist logic to the culture industry indicates that it is a dialectic in which declining profit margins and increasing costs even for midrange films makes investors anxious for "sure things": responses to brutalized tastes where the ground was prepared by previous mega-success.

One difficulty the theory of culture industry presents is its normative character. People engaged in a struggle for existence naturally look for value-free solutions, and are appalled to encounter criticism which seems to assume an elitist mentality.

But it may be impossible to "do" aesthetics without meditating on its nexus with ethics, a question posed by Adorno as regards "poetry after Auschwitz". The aesthetic sense may be strictly ordered after ethical response in such a way that if we deny, as against Kant, that we have an ethical sense beyond personal gratification, it becomes difficult to sit still for the Ninth symphony, which becomes (once the ethical denial is complete) mere "pretty noise" tending towards rhodomontade.

Many observers, more or less innocent of "critical theory", have nonetheless observed in America and elsewhere a convergence between politics and entertainment. The theory of the culture industry provides a way for pondering how culture can have political effects without theorizing culture as simple propaganda because it views our actions, in watching the latest Steven Spielberg mega-hit, as continuous with our actions outside the theater...doing us the genuine courtesy of admitting that we have a memory and a search for personal growth that can be thrown into reverse.

However, as introductions to Adorno's thought on culture industry, both Negative Dialectics and Dialectic of Enlightenment are forced marches. The best place to start may be Adorno's short book, The Stars Down To Earth, on a small part of culture industry, the astrological columns of the daily papers around 1951.

This book shows how the "elitist" Adorno nonetheless gave his subjects credit for full humanity. He did accuse them of false consciousness, for he portrays how astrological columns encourage the low-level, male or female, clerical or office worker to identify with rungs above them.

However, "false" consciousness is by definition multiple consciousness and ambivalence itself and while polls tend to reduce consciousness to one note, narrative and "theory" allow it to follow its own (dialectical) laws in which the astrological reader, like the filmgoer, engages in a (quite respectable) suspension of disbelief (another would be the psychology of the lottery ticket buyer, who probably knows how slim the chances are).

The ethical orientation, which begins with admission of suffering, means that the descriptive and theoretical activity can never, for the sake of a bogus neutrality, decouple from the admission and the judgement that "another world is possible"...in which people wouldn't, half ironically, peruse the "stars" for clues, buy lottery tickets, or troop to monster films.

The problem is the largeness of theme. If one is only concerned with manipulating, in the manner of a military general, a specific historical event to advantage, then the thought must be instrumental and "value free"; one of the reasons in masscult for "war" pictures is precisely the false totalization of a specific victory achieved by means of eliminating the ethical sense.

Indeed, as Adorno's friend the film critic Siegfried Kracauer seems to have realized, the overall structure of film as experience in Adorno's time, in which one had to go to an air-conditioned theater and leave when the picture ended, may tend towards the totalizing illusion that we can "step outside" history, or let politicians do this, to provide "solutions".

Many post-Adorno thinkers have asked whether "new media" changes the rules so as to render Adorno's concerns moot. Certainly, the experience of renting all seven volumes of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah on several visits to the public library is a far better way of understanding how an event can have no happy endings than, say, watching Schindler's List and the multimegaplex.

But Adorno would point out that "new media" don't dampen commodity relations in which (as opposed to being ancient festivals in honor of Dionysius, or mediaeval "mystery" plays for holidays) all media, as a condition of production, must confront all other media commodities, meaning that, just like the original film of the 1930s, they, like time, "must have a stop".

[In this connection, we note that very possibly the LAST time the image of Karl Marx appeared in a Hollywood film was fleetingly, and in a placard carried in a political demonstration in the Garbo film, Ninotchka: Trotsky appeared recently in Frida but this itself was striking, because in the David Lean film, Trotsky was necessarily fictionalized as Strelnikov, to pacify not only Hollywood, but Boris Pasternak's censors. To present the unreconciled and unpunished is to forestall an ending, happy, or otherwise].

The "critical theorist" is like the man trapped in the sinking Untersee Boot without clear knowledge of a way out, who is himself engaged (as was Adorno in his practical affairs) in a dialectic with other would-be survivors with no known resolution. The "bottom line" is that we don't know long term the result of mass culture because we are, at best, deeply embedded journalists.

The absence of an exogenous, God-like perspective is why the ethics of the view are organic to the view; there seems to be no CONSERVATIVE cultural theory of mass culture, although at times, Catholic priests, engaged in enthusiastically condemning products like The Blue Angel, actually wrote some interesting observations that were in league with a Marxist critique of the commodification of Lola/Marlene Dietrich's legs.