Culture and/or deception the dialectic of enlightenment

Abstract

This text deals with Adornos dialectic critic of culture, within which it tries to clarify the relationship between earlier bourgeois culture, on the one hand, and contemporary forms of mass culture, on the other. Adornos understanding of culture enables us to comprehend many specific social forms in their dialectic relationship and their mutual determination. The text itself, first of all, examines the changes that contemporary industrial society brought in regard to critic potential of culture, namely the way in which it achieves to convert, once useless-provocative, culture into useful-impotent culture. Here is analyzed the influence of manufactural industry of high and mass culture on individual consciousness - namely upon mass consciousness - as well as the way in which individuals are being fooled for the things that are said to be offered by the culture. It is asserted that the triumph of manufacturing in cultural industry fooles men for the offer it seemingly gives, and therefore, that it has today become almost impossible to practice individuation, and therewith to hold a critical distance toward ruling forms of material and spiritual manufacturing.