Adorno’s Years in California 285Adorno and Horkheimer wished to show that the mass culture of the
present has nothing in common with the spontaneous manifestations of
a popular culture, a culture of the people. Instead, it is manufactured
and organized from above. The concept refers to the entire network by
means of which culture is socially transmitted, in other words, it refers
to the cultural goods created by the producers, and distributed by agents,
the cultural market and the consumption of culture. The culture industry
includes the mass media, i.e., newspapers and newspaper concerns, the
publicly and privately owned radio and television organizations, music
and film businesses, and also the different organizations concerned with
cultivating culture, as well as the different sectors of the entertainment
business. All these institutions that make up the system of the culture
industry were analysed by Adorno and Horkheimer from the standpoint
of one central question: what is the influence of mass culture on the
formation of individual consciousness and the ways in which meanings
are socially transmitted? A chief function of the culture industry, they
maintained, was to produce conformism, i.e., a general approval of
the state of the world, through a plethora of consumer goods aimed at
different target groups. ‘Something is provided for all so that none may
escape.’^65 Despite the diversification of what is on offer, ‘the bread
which the culture industry offers man is the stone of the stereotype.’^66
The authors’ critical fire was drawn in particular to the way in
which phenomena of the culture industry were emotionalized and made
personal. They explained the social phenomenon of pseudo-education
from the way in which the stereotypes of mass culture functioned. This
pseudo-education is a result of ‘the constant reproduction of the same
thing’, which of course implies ‘the exclusion of the new’.^67 Adorno
and Horkheimer constantly stressed that the products of the culture
industry function like commodities determined by the market and to
that extent they are tailored to the needs of mass consumption. This
means that the culture industry does not react to pre-existing demand,
but that demand is created by the machinery of the culture industry,
which even influences the needs of the recipients. ‘The result is the
circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the
system grows ever stronger.’^68
The ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’ represents the attempt to analyse
the role of the Jews in the history of Western civilization.^69 Hatred of
the Jews is seen as the expression of the hidden self-contempt of the
national community. The blind rage of the social collective is directed
against minorities who stand out because of their defencelessness. In
the case of the Jews, an additional factor is that they form a group that
is excluded economically from production, being confined to the sphere
of distribution. Their weakness provokes all those who have never been
quite able to complete the painful process of repressing their instincts in
the interests of civilization, but who deny their anxieties and feel the
need to show their strength. The source of anti-Semitism is a collective