PARTISAN REVIEW
513
What has occurred since is something else again. When a phase of
culture comes to an end or to a kind of end, it does not simply vanish
and leave not a wrack behind. What it usually does is to go into a state
of decomposition.
It
is that state that we are passing through now. We
are, I believe, in the midst of the beginning of the decomposition of
bourgeois culture, or of high culture, or whatever it is that we want
to
call that phase of culture that accompanied the development of
capitalism-industrial and then advanced capitalism-in the West
until 1950, or thereabouts. Regarded in this context, certain other
recent developments begin to make slightly more sense, or at least
seem slightly more coherent.
It
may still be that our perception of
these changes surpasses the means at our disposal to express them or
deal with them analytically. This kind of discrepancy has occurred
often enough in the past for us to be aware of it as a constraint
imposed not by means of our personal inadequacies alone; it is a
constraint imposed by the situation as well.
As the modernist phase of culture began to decompose, one of
the effects first visible was the rapid diffusion of the decomposed
elements of modernism throughout the larger culture and society.
This diffusion was made possible by the technologies of mass produc–
tion and mass consumption characteristic of advanced industrial soci–
ety. The mass market for this quasi-new culture brought the culture
industry into even greater prominence than it had occupied before.
The "Culture Industry" is a term coined by Horkheimer and Adorno
of the Frankfurt School, and
it
refers quite simply to those large
institutions in modern society which are devoted to the industrial
production of culture for mass consumption. (In the 19th century it
was often urged that religion had
to
be a "marketable commodity"; in
this sense Arnold was right, and culture in the 20th century is at this
level of analysis the structural equivalent of religion in the 19th.)
According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the culture industry tends in
the images it creates and sends out to reproduce the surface of every–
day life.
It
is essentially uncritical and. tends to integrate its audience
or clients into the social world as it is and to consolidate the present
structure of domination.
There is clearly much to be said in qualification of this argument
and diagnosis. For example, there can
be
no doubt that the diffusion
of certain elements of modernism throughout parts of the larger
