delusion and passivity, passivity with commodity culture. And this line of
equivalences is contrasted with another, consisting of the modern, the light,
the demystiWed, the debunking critical theorist. Here Marx highlights for us
the central role played by the technique of demystiWcation or ‘‘ideology
critique’’—what Weber called a rationalization process—within the narrative
of modernity. For Marx, modernity is ideology; it is a narrative that main-
tains the existing structure of power by obscuring or defending as legitimate
its inherent inequalities and injustices. The just response to modernity qua
ideology is modernity qua critique; that is, the clear-eyed unmasking of
inequities that reveals them to be products of social choices that could be
otherwise.
3 Ideology Critique
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An exemplary instance of ideology-critique is Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno’s 1944 essay on ‘‘The Culture Industry’’ (see Horkheimer and Adorno
1972 ). This elaboration of Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism aims to
awaken man’s critical faculties, which have been blunted by a postwar world
saturated with commercialism. Horkheimer and Adorno echo the calls of
Friedrich Nietzsche ( 1844 – 1900 ), Ralph Waldo Emerson ( 1803 – 82 ), Henry
Thoreau ( 1817 – 62 ), and others for a life liveddeliberatelyand in opposition
to the voices of conformity, normality, and respectability. Unlike Nietzsche
and the American Transcendentalists (and the Adorno ofAesthetic Theory
and Negative Dialectics), however, Horkheimer and Adorno are skeptical
about the role that aesthetic experience might play in this project of wake-
fulness. They argue that even the senses have been colonized, rendered
incapable of posing an eVective challenge to the ‘‘iron system’’ of capital.
‘‘The culture industry can pride itself on having energetically executed the
previously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consumption’’
(Horkheimer and Adorno 1972 , 137 ). Despite its constant invocation of
novelty, the culture industry serves up only formulaic amusements designed
to produce a passive, consumeristic audience.
In the version of the story told by Horkheimer and Adorno, modernity is
on the brink of no return. It has solidiWed into a system where commercial
modernity and its critics 219