“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” A Passage From the Dialectic of Enlightenment

Please enjoy this excerpt from Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer's "Dialectic of Enlightenment" as it delves into the radical politics and critical theories regarding desire, 

consumerism, capitalism and culture-creation

“The culture industry endlessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises. The promissory notes of pleasure issued by the plot and packaging is indefinitely prolonged: the promise, which actually comprises the entire show, disdainfully intimates that there is nothing more to come, that the diner must be satisfied with reading the menu. The desire inflamed by the glossy names and images is served up finally with a celebration of the daily round it sought to escape. Of course, genuine works of art were not sexual exhibitions either. But by presenting denial as negative, they reversed, as it were, the debasement of the drive and rescued by mediation what had been denied. That is the secret of ascetic sublimation: the present fulfillment in its brokenness. The culture industry does not sublimate: it suppresses. By constantly exhibiting the object of desire, the breasts beneath the sweater, the naked torso of the sporting hero, it merely goads the unsublimated anticipation of pleasure, which through the habit of denial has long since been mutilated as masochism. There is no erotic situation in which innuendo and incitement are not accompanied by the clear notification that things will never go so far. The Hays Office merely confirms the ritual which the culture industry has staged in any case: that of Tantalus. Works or art are ascetic and shameless; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish. It reduces love to romance. And, once reduced, much is permitted, even libertinage as marketable specialty, purveyed by quota with the trade description “daring.” The mass production of sexuality automatically brings about its repression. Because of his ubiquity, the film star with whom everyone is supposed to fall in love is, from the start, a copy of himself. Every tenor now sounds like a Caruso record, and the natural faces of Texas girls already resemble those of the established models by which they would be typecast in Hollywood. The mechanical reproduction of beauty - which, admittedly is made only more inescapable by the reactionary cultural zealots with their methodical idolization of individuality - no longer leaves any room for the unconscious idolatry with which the experience of beauty has always been linked.” 

—Adorno and Horkheimer: “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (From the Dialectic of Enlightenment)

Notes:

1. image found here