"The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry".
(Horkheimer and Adorno)
Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote a critique of the culture industry within capitalist society in a chapter called “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). In this work, they compare the production of culture through such media as film, radio, and magazines to that of a factory in which consumers are manipulated into a state of docile passivity.
This densely written treatise reviles the easy pleasures of popular culture that perpetuate desire and create insatiable psychological needs that cycle into the capitalist structures of consumer demand.
