Adorno and Horkheimer

Culture Industry

Adorno and Horkheimer were German theorists who had several theories on the culture industry. They adopted the term 'Culture Industry' to argue that they way in which cultural items were produced was analogues to how other industries manufactured vast quantities of consumer goods.


The pair argued that the culture industry exhibited on 'assembly line character' which could be observed in the synthetic planned method of turning out its products.

Adorno and Horkiemer linked the idea of the 'culture industry' to a model of 'mass culture' in which cultural production had become a routine, standardised repetitive operation that operation that produced undemanding cultural commodities which in turn resulted in a type of consumption that was also standardised, distracted and passive.