Dialectic of Enlightenment: The Culture Industry - Part II 

I used to just watch your videos for fun but now I get to go back and use them to understand the concepts for my academic papers. Thank you so much

Welp, looks like ima take a 17 minute bathroom break at work

And thus every remake was born. Awesome as usual!

I feel like I should be paying for this type of content. Very high quality indeed and very helpful. Thanks

I feel like I caught about half of that. But it was a pretty cool half.

Hey Lewis, great video as always! You do a fantastic job of breaking down difficult texts like DoE without letting your videos get too dry and lecture-y, which is no small feat for presenting these complex ideas. Reading DoE for myself, I find it interesting how Adorno and Horkheimer commented on the increasing sameness of culture. Pro-capitalist ideologues so often tout the merits of how the "free market" encourages diverse products and competition--but they conveniently leave out what happens when someone *wins* that competition: oligopoly, and in some cases, monopoly. A handful of US megacorps like Disney control so much of cultural production, and what we see is much as Adorno and Horkheimer observed in their own time: the homogenization of cultural products, easily digestible and unchallenging of the status quo. As Debord later observed, what is horrifying about the culture industry is that even critique, dissent, etc. can be mobilized as commodities ("dissatisfaction itself became a commodity as soon as economic abundance could extend production to the processing of such raw materials." SotS, 59). Our big movie villains are not infrequently overt images of the rich and powerful (such as the baddie in Transformers: Age of Extinction, as Lindsey Ellis observed), and we are given a superficial taste of rebellion as a palliative for our social/political/economic outrage. The tragedy of Debord's observation is that even his Situationist detournement has fallen victim to thesis 59: cynical/ironic disavowal or self-critique (a la Deadpool, vaporwave, self-aware advertising, etc.) is now just as much a part of pop culture as the "lowest common denominator" genre--as often repeated by Slavoj Zizek, viz "I know very well what I am doing, nevertheless I am doing it." As you point out, the culture industry has highly developed methods of marketing, dividing the pool of potential consumers into demographic categories and so on. This has reached a new and higher level of development in our era of algorithms and digital analytics, where all of our desires, likes, dislikes, our seemingly private thoughts are now just as vulnerable to colonization from the market as those old demographic signifiers were. Adorno and Horkheimer were prescient here to a degree which I think would disturb them deeply. I think it is also important to contextualize the Frankfurt school theorists historically in the development of Marxism both as a social-scientific theory and as a political movement: the bankruptcy of the SPD in its betrayal of anti-war proletarian internationalism in voting for war credits in WWI; the tragic fractiousness of the various Marxist tendencies during the German Revolution of 1918-1923; and so on. The pessimism (in general) of the Frankfurt school thinkers is evident of this overall trajectory. As a Marxist myself, I can praise the Frankfurt thinker's prescience in their analysis of cultural production, while at the same time I am critical of the gradual turn away from class and political economy (at least in Western Marxisms: Laclau and Mouffe, for example) which, in my opinion, the Frankfurt thinkers marked the beginning of. While perhaps an important analytical tool for contemporary Marxists, Marxism is at its heart not merely one academic method among many, but exists as a harmony of theory and praxis (as in Thesis XI). The point of analyzing culture through this lens then ought to be with an eye to creating (as Gramsci called it) counter-hegemonic cultural production; i.e. genuinely proletarian art, cinema, music and so on which foment class consciousness and point beyond the bourgeois mind-prison of atomization, instrumental rationality, etc. Thanks again for the great video, Melody

I really love this series. I take away a lot from it. Thank you

This book can easily be considered as the Bible of critique of bourgeois ideology, watching both parts of the video helps with understanding the text once you start reading the book. Amazing job with breaking it down and the book is a must-read.

The content is clear and insightful considering its density, plus the music works really well with the cinematography. Thanks again Lewis.

Man, the feeling of learning and identification with the video its just too much Not that we are the same from DoE, but it's a pretty solid critique of our society standarts thank you for breaking this hard book into comprehensible and powerful narration and imagenery

So poignant in the times we live today, yet again another brilliant video

I want this channel to both: be more recognized - because the channel deserves it; stay as recognized as it is - so I maintain superiority in knowledge 😳 But legit your videos are fucking amazing. You deserve a lot more recognition!

Great video. If possible, it would be interesting to see a video by you on Zizek’s reading of Hegel in relation to the ontological incompleteness of reality itself as an effect of the late Lacanian notion of the Real as the impossible. Best regards.

This explains why Marilyn Monroe and Kurt Cobain were such tragic figures...I think. Cobain's lyrics and music and whole self representation seems to express an artist who felt an overwhelming pressure to a be a consumer object while acknowledging he was also a consumer and an artist...

Wonderful and insightful like always

This video is so so good, thank you so much for creating this kind of content.

Thank you so much. I have used some quotes in your videos (from the Horkheimer/ Adorno book) in my own essays (I give you full credit) and this is just golden. I hope my redirections to your channel favour your own suscriptions, I do my best to recommend your material. I would love to collaborate with you someday and perhaps bring more people to your channel. You're better than me, frankly.

Lots of truth here regarding the imprint of uniformity upon culture via mass production and advertising. At the same time, however, no one is holding a gun to the consumer's head. So the lament ought to be placed more toward why the consumer is so cheaply bought. This is a spiritual matter, not an economic system matter.

This 2 part series was so good.

A very lovely exquisit dissertation

I enjoyed this video. I wonder, as a good Frankfurt School boy, if my enjoyment is an indictment on me.

As much as I appreciate the amount of academic work that has gone into this, I can't shake the feeling that this is just the intellectual way of saying: "What's with kid's music these days? It all sounds the same, with their bleepy-dee-bleep-bleep noises!"

Thank you

I should be sleeping but well it can wait...

Quality content as ever. Shared etc.

yo, this was great??? ive watched so many things abt the culture industry but this one struck home. im gonna have to research this further and really think abt how i can take on these ideas as an artist

Got a link to Part 1? I couldn't find it - there are too many videos to be able to search easily, which isn't a criticism, just, could do with the link in the description.

What's missing in this analysis is that the principle "something is produced for everyone, so that no one may escape" applies just as well to avant-garde art, which is easily incorporated into the capitalist dialectic, despite apparent opposition. After all, the formula is very simple: the virtues of the avant-garde are all in negation, and therefore parasitic upon the "mainstream" they condemn. It's good because it offends official morality. It's good because there's no happy ending. It's good because there's no melody, rhythm, or rhyme. It's good because it doesn't depict anything or isn't "about" anything. Et cetera. Ultimately this path is a total dead end which exhausts its possibilities: there's only so many conventional elements you can subtract before arriving at nothing, thus Seinfeld's joke about itself as a show about nothing: "Everybody's doing something; we'll do nothing!" If you think this threatens capitalism in any way, you haven't checked in on the art world lately.

As an artist working in the realm of the abstract I got a lot out of this video. Parts reminded me of Hannah Arendt' essay CRISIS IN

YT hates it when i listen to haydn every day.........does not compute

Ma man you’re doing good things

I love your videos, but sometimes I could not hear you because of the high background music volume. I hope you lower it next time so that we hear you very clearly. Thank you very much for your hard work, keep it up!

Brilliant video. An antidote to the conformity.

Hi. Can you enable auto-generated subtitles/closed captions for this video and for the rest of your older videos that were never subtitled by a human? They are helpful for those of us who speak a different language, or those who have hearing problems. In my experience, subtitles/close captions are 99% accurate and can understand accents nowadays, so you shouldn't worry about being misrepresented by them

15:59 *culture industry illness* “Now personality means hardly more than dazzling white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions-that is the triumph of advertising in the culture industry. The compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which at the same time they recognize as false.”

Where is part 1? Can u please put them in a playlist?

Just stumpled upon this channel, rly good stuff! Do you have any interrest in philosophy of technology? I am myself studying Science, Technology and Society (STS)(i think the akronym stand for something else in America) Any motivation for doin videoes in this field? I know Critical theory is big in european sts

Entertaining.

about that sameness... there's a guy who basically brought this idea into popular culture through industrial design (about that lil later) (since the video is on the subject & concludes what it concludes on the example of american pop culture... let me elaborate...) - it's human nature for people to look for similar things over which they can relate to each-other / bond... - I guess you could look for the roots of it in good ole tribalism - where members of a certain group need to build an identity (based on believes as much as on "stylistics" of the objects they use, clothing they wear... ) that keeps that group together - & because certain values & believes are not necessarily universal - especially it's diffuclt to establish common ground whn you don't speak the same language... it was a huge challenge for all sorts of groups bigger than 150 people (dunbar number...) for millenia to form alliances until the introduction of big religions that has created a universal identity - as suddenly if we believe in the same thing/same values we can successfully cooperate amongst different groups/tribes as part of one civilization. With the free market & success of american consumerism after the 2nd world war there was a as marx noticed already a century before a surplus of goods - problem was - for producers trying to satisfy growing needs of fast growing middle class... that consumers were simply not liking things that were too different from the ones that already existed that say their neighbor or a person you passed on the streets already had they seemed sometimes too novel & with it made you stand out & standing out is maybe a value for a stage artist like lady gaga but not for your neighbor Bob who just wants to shine a lil at a coctail party but not too much as that may give him a label of some eccentric dude with weird fetish for flamboyant hats & shirts... And here enters a Frenchman, Raymond Loewy, artist turned industrial designer who landed in New York & landed a job as an illustrator in some popular magazine- just like a lot of advertisers that were having trouble promoting all the new wonderful innovative products but not understanding why people wouldn't buy them he started thinking what is it that makes people like 1 item & despise another - regardless of it's functionality... he coined the term MAYA (most advanced yet acceptable) - which simply states that people by nature are as much neophillic as they are neophobic (we like & also dislike new things/novelties) (it must have it's roots in evolutionary psychology - if you found some new berry say & took a chance & ate it & it turned out to be belladona or some other poisonous fruit than you took a huge risk that did not pay off (risk reward ratio)... so it's better to stick to things we know - you can see that with tourists - going to a new country & instead of trying some local food they be settling to eat in macdonalds or kfc... that's why they are so successful globally...) so the key is to introduce smthn new but not completely new & not completely different from smthn that was already on the market as for a consumer it's percieved as a huge risk - an itteration of the old thing / an improved version ... -that's why we trust good old established brands & all the sequels of avenger movie series & spiderman movies & whatever that was already a success brings investors/producers a secure return on their investment... it's not just about market providing mindless entertainment - it's a social thing - you find no connection with people if you saw some weird movie that nobody else have seen & you mention that at a coctail party & have to explain the plot & recommend it - you're being a marketer in some way rather than a networker... there is a lot of indie stuff out there... but it's not as successful because you know - human nature... & not capitalism ...

What’s the song at 5:55?

What about great artists who embody the universal through rigorous classical forms? E.g. Bach, Mozart, Renaissance painters, etc.?

Thank you so much! Just saved my life help pls- what's the word you say at 5:43 ? i've played it 12 times still don't get it..

What is the video at 11.45?

I would see the rise of fascism during this same time as with the rise of culture industry from a hysterical perspective, in that people like Hitler, Mussolini, etc, merely utilized the rising industrial culture industry, but they were not directly bred from it as a consequence of it. That was Communism. In my opinion, fascism arose from an extremely complex combination between socio-economic and political-economic situations, which includes as a direct consequence from Culture Industry. You said it yourself in your video on how Van Gogh's painting was revolutionary at that time when other 'contemporary' art was hanged that expression typical beauty, religion, etc. i think fascism arose as a direct consequence from this, in much the same way as Communism arose. Both Fascism and Communism, more or less, has the same fear of what was happening. The difference lied on how they both handled it. Fascism simply utilized this vast industrial culture base for its own use, in essence, keeping things relatively the same way, while Communism, at least it tried, to overthrow it completely and replace it with something else. Either way, I always enjoy your videos!! Keep up the great work!

Contact points here with Schmactenberger's thoughts on the Big $ Machine as a paper clip maximizer. YET, it's just not quite right with regards to THAT WHICH it is - or seems to be - in service to... To something else other than the good, the true, and the beautiful. Of asymmetrical power dynamics. Speaking 🗣️ of THIS, I would very much like to see 🙈👀/hear 🙉👂 some of your thoughts on THAT, my good fellow and dear professor. Cheers 🍻 Luck 🍀 Peace 🕊️ Gaia ✨♾️🌌🚀☯️⭐

PLEASE, add substitles or captions please

Hi. I don't think that the 'cultural industry' excludes difference. The difference is there but its manifestation is usually in the form of a new product or a 2.0 of something. The capitalist system relies heavily on difference/innovation. However, there is a duality to this; difference and sameness merge when protection is needed from your competition.

it would be better if you added subtitle for different language speakers

Can I help by adding subtitles in English and Portuguese PT-BR?

how to inject sameness: *add a synthesizer*

Picasso's cubism doesn't a boot of Van Gogh.

6:20

I don't know if this make any sense anymore. Let's take one of the most recent "pop culture" films: Joker. It has a pretty complex storyline, a pretty deep psychological analysis of his characters and it is not a light escapist film, as in it there are many reflections on mental illness, economic inequality and other topics that are relevant today. And this apply to many successful "pop art" products of our time, they are not as shallow as the critical theory says. Also "niche" products are not that irrelevant today. Videos of Jordan Peterson, Slavoj Zizek and other intellectuals often gain hundreds of thousand if not millions of views, and you can agree with them or not but you must admit they say complex stuff and they receive attention. So I think the criticism of the critical theorists makes no sense anymore and just give to pseudointellectuals the delusion that they are better than "the mass".

Algo

The epitome of culture is religion

A reactionary brasilian philosopher named Olavo de Carvalho Said that adorno wrote some songs for the Beatles... CuLtUrAl MaRxIsM

Anyone from RUC?

"A mass fortress of" futilitarianism. All mugs are the same: we're the mugs.

love it when some of these right wingers claim how exploiting working class people is a basic right -- they don't seem to get it, that capitalism only reifies itself as long as you are rich, the rest of us can only watch movies about rich people and 'wish' we could be part of that wonderful city on the hill!! so in the meantime, we all bite the bullet and conform and become the same, Junior "Dont rock the BOAT!"

Is this video a part of the culture industry? It is certainly style-conscious and somewhat hip, with its visual imagery and use of music. It's also part of the Critical Theory Industry, with its many hipster automaton followers. What I get from "critical theory" is an endless supply of gross and snobby generalisations about the society and culture in which these Marxists lived. They seem to turn their noses up at everything and everything outside their leftwing tribe. Take the Marxist notion of "false consciousness"; which inhabits all this. It's the most arrogant and smug notion ever to come out of theory or philosophy. That is, anyone who lives or thinks differently to the critical theorist or Marxist is - by definition - a victim of false consciousness. Cultural theorists saw and see themselves as a priest-class which enunciates gross poetic generalisations, all of which fall to pieces once analysed for more than a millisecond. In the video itself we have a long list of poetic generalisations which sound sexy on first hearing (good for first-year-student t-shirts), but soon show themselves to be the pretentious and oracular fantasies of an elitist. Yes, a Marxist elitist - usually someone of the upper-middle-class who's spent his entire adult life in academia.... Adorno, for example, was just an obvious and unadulterated snob. What do these theorists have to offer us in the place of the "culture industry"? Just dreary agitprop? A dull, pious and politically righteous existence of pure theory-intoxication in which the world is made in the image of Adorno, Hockenheimer, etc? Even all the great artists that these theorists patronised, experimental and conventional, existed in total ignorance of their theorising. . Cultural theorists outside of academia are like fish out of water.

Just ludicrous

" Music, Songs, tunes and melodies will get shorter, faster, simpler hence stupider and duller and eventually be vanquished to oblivion (NOISE) " Theodore Adorno's nightmare came true... 60 odd years later, We have Pop Music and HipHop and all such instant gratification > trash < Which rules the world...

Wowww that's fucked up

If they thought culture was bad back then, what the f**k would they say about "reality" tv and the Kardashians.

These 'enlightened' atheists rejected true enlightenment when their spiritual ancestors rejected and killed the savior of ALL humanity. The spirit of antichrist and revolution is in their genetics. 'Let his blood be upon us us and our children' they cried at the condemnation of an innocent man.

So this is why Star Wars sucks now.

A pretty shallow video all things considered.