despite the cultural industry being a primordial factor in the formation of collective consciousness in mass societies, its products are far from artistic. This is because these products no longer represent a type of class (superior or inferior, dominant and dominated), but are exclusively dependent on the market.
This vision allows us to understand how the Cultural Industry. Offering products that promote a compensatory and ephemeral satisfaction that pleases individuals, it imposes itself on these, subjecting them to their monopoly and making them uncritical (since their products are acquired consensually).
Camouflaging the forces of classes, the cultural industry it presents itself as the only power to dominate and spread a culture of subservience. She becomes the guide that guides individuals in a chaotic world and therefore deactivates, dismantles, any revolt against her system. This means that the pseudo happiness or satisfaction promoted by cultural industry it ends up demobilizing or preventing any critical mobilization that, in some way, had been the main role of art (as in the Renaissance, for example). It turns individuals into its object and does not allow for the formation of conscious autonomy.
Encompassing society as a whole, with a small number of dropouts, it is almost impossible to break with such a productive system. Those who submit to this industry model do nothing but say the same thing differently. However, a certain criticism can still be seen in those who promote a type of art that produces aesthetic effects outside the standardization offered by the industry. Even so, it is an attempt that is left out of the system because it does not appeal to those consciences used to a standardized model.
Adorno himself, as one of the members of the Frankfurt School, where Critical Theory was developed, constructed a type of music calculated along the lines of classical and classical music, but with an apparently horrifying melody to ears accustomed to the chords of traditional classical music (read bourgeois). His intention is precisely to unaccustom the perception of that traditional notion of order and harmony (since his music only seems disharmonious, but in fact it is totally ordered and arranged – dodecaphonic) prevailing in the bourgeois culture prevailing at the time.
For Adorno and Horkheimer, cultural industry distinguished from mass culture. This comes from the people, their regionalizations, customs and without the pretense of being commercialized, while that one has patterns that are always repeated in order to form a common aesthetic or perception focused on the consumerism. And although classical, erudite art could also be distinguished from popular and commercial art, its origin does not have a first intention of being commercialized and does not appear spontaneously, but it is technically worked and has an unusual originality - then it can be standardized, reproduced and marketed according to the interests gives Cultural Industry.
Thus, in the view of these authors, it is practically impossible to escape from this model, but we should look for alternative sources of art and cultural production, which, even if used by the industry, would promote a minimum of awareness possible.
By João Francisco P. Cabral
Brazil School Collaborator
Graduated in Philosophy from the Federal University of Uberlândia - UFU
Master's student in Philosophy at the State University of Campinas - UNICAMP
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/cultura/industria-cultural.htm
