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as "cultural life" and who consequently have resigned themselves to
bear the unfortunate name of cultural critics. In other words, they are
certified as harmless; they are supposed to think in terms of
Kultur
and not in terms of power.
Yet the vague and insufficient name
cultural industry
serves to re–
mind us of a paradox inherent in all media work. Consciousness, how–
ever false, can
be
induced and reproduced by industrial means, but it
cannot be industrially produced. It is a "social product" made up by
people: its origin is the dialogue. No industrial process can replace the
persons who generate it. And it is precisely this truism of which the
archaic term "culture" tries, however vainly, to remind us. The mind
industry is monstrous and difficult to understand because it does not,
strictly speaking, produce anything. It is an intermediary, engaged only
in production's secondary and tertiary derivatives, in transmission and
infiltration, in the fungible aspect of what it multiplies and delivers to
the customer.
The mind industry can take on anything, digest it, reproduce it and
pour it out. Whatever our minds can conceive of is grist to its mill;
nothing will leave it unadulterated: it is capable of turning any idea
into a slogan and any work of the imagination into a hit. This is its
overwhelming power, yet it is also its most vulnerable spot: it thrives
on a stuff which it cannot manufacture by itself. It depends on the
very substance it must fear most, and must suppress what it feeds on:
the creative productivity of people. Hence the ambiguity of the term
cultural industry, which takes at face value the claims of culture, in the
ancient sense of the word, and the claims of an industrial process
which has all but eaten it up. To insist on these claims would be naive;
to criticize the industry from the vantage point of a "liberal education"
and to raise comfortable outcries against its vulgarity will neither change
it nor revive the dead souls of culture: it will merely help to fortify
the ghettoes of educational programs and to fill the backward, high–
brow section of the Sunday papers. At the same time, the indictment
of the mind industry on purely aesthetic grounds will tend to obscure
its larger social and political meaning.
On the other extreme we find the ideological critics of the mind
industry. Their attention is usually limited to its role as an instrument
of straightforward or hidden political propaganda, and from the mes–
sages reproduced by it they try to distill the political content. More
often than not, the underlying understanding of politics is extremely
narrow, as if it were just a matter of taking sides in everyday contests
of power. Just as in the case of the "cultural critic," this attitude can
