The Culture Industry (Theodor Adorno)

“The term culture industry was perhaps used for the first time in the book Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and I published in Amsterdam in 1947. In our drafts we spoke of ‘mass culture’. We replaced that expression with ‘culture industry’ in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme. The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by masses
and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan. The individual branches are similar in structure or at least fit into each other, ordering themselves into a system almost without a gap…” -Theodor Adorno

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Bourdieu on Television (Imre Szeman)

“When it appeared in France in 1996, Pierre Bourdieu’s On Television ignited a media controversy that raged for months and propelled the book to the top of the best-seller lists. Bourdieu could not have hoped for a better reception for this short text. Certainly, the controversy surrounding the book boosted Bourdieu’s already considerable cultural capital as one of the most prominent figures of the French academy. More significantly, however, the reaction of the print and electronic media to his pointed criticisms served as a confirmation of his conclusions regarding the severe limits of contemporary journalism. The transformation of Bourdieu’s book into one of the seemingly endless string of “current events” and “social issues” that grips the media for a moment, only to fade forever into obscurity within a week or so (call this the “Time syndrome”), exemplified all of the media’s gravest problems in their very attempt to dispute Bourdieu’s assessment of their failings.” -Imre Szeman

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