and emancipation risk becoming illusory, they consider that there is still no other
course that can be taken: however inadequate Enlightenment may be, it remains the
only possible road to freedom.
Dialectic of Enlightenmentis open to being read as a thoroughly pessimistic
book that leaves no room for any justifiable hope of progress and emancipation.^58 Ac-
cording to Horkheimer and Adorno, modernity actually tends to become monolithic
in character: Enlightenment has violent and totalitarian traits, and these have inun-
dated almost every area of reality. The authors substantiate this diagnosis on the ba-
sis of developments such as the proliferation of positivism in science and philosophy,
the degradation of the individual to the level of being a mere supplier of labor or a con-
sumer, and the media’s continuous belittling of the public.
The most notorious chapter of their book, “The Culture Industry: Enlighten-
ment as Mass Deception,” is devoted to this last theme. The producers of popular
entertainment, state Horkheimer and Adorno, pervert culture by turning it into a ma-
nipulated, uniform, and utterly predictable commodity. The technological rationality
of the mechanisms of reproduction, and the commercial logic of consumption, hold
such a sway over the culture industry that there is no longer any room for anything
that does not obey the norm, for anything critical. The laws of the cliché prevail to
such an extent in this industry that everything that does not conform to it is auto-
matically twisted into being an exception that confirms the rule.
The culture industry, they argue, is occasionally characterized by a subtlety
that reminds one of an avant-garde artwork. The difference lies in the fact that the
works of the avant-garde serve truth, while the culture industry is dominated by com-
modification. This can be seen in the continual reproduction of the same thing: de-
spite appearances to the contrary, the genuinely new, the unpredictable, and the
unashamed are excluded in a highly calculated manner.
The culture industry implies a short-circuiting between the categories of light
and serious art, and it is precisely here that the fraudulence lies. For the separation
between these two forms of art is in fact the correlative of defective relations in the
social domain:
Serious art has been withheld from those for whom the hardship and
oppression of life make a mockery of seriousness, and who must be
glad if they can use time not spent at the production line just to keep go-
ing. Light art has been the shadow of autonomous art. It is the social
bad conscience of serious art.... The division itself is the truth: it does
at least express the negativity of the culture which the different spheres
constitute. Least of all can the antithesis be reconciled by absorbing
light into serious art, or vice versa. But that is what the culture industry
attempts.^594
Architecture as Critique of Modernity