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moments. But of course it cannot happen. Pure amusement in its consequence, relaxed self-surrender to all kinds of
associations and happy nonsense, is cut short by the amusement on the market: instead, it is interrupted by a surrogate
overall meaning which the culture industry insists on giving to its products, and yet misuses as a mere pretext for bringing in
the stars. Biographies and other simple stories patch the fragments of nonsense into an idiotic plot. We do not have the cap
and bells of the jester but the bunch of keys of capitalist reason, which even screens the pleasure of achieving success.
Every kiss in the revue film has to contribute to the career of the boxer, or some hit song expert or other whose rise to fame
is being glorified. The deception is not that the culture industry supplies amusement but that it ruins the fun by allowing
business considerations to involve it in the ideological cliches of a culture in the process of self-liquidation. Ethics and taste
cut short unrestrained amusement as "naive" naivete is thought to be as bad as intellectualism and even restrict technical
possibilities. The culture industry is corrupt; not because it is a sinful Babylon but because it is a cathedral dedicated to
elevated pleasure. On all levels, from Hemingway to Emil Ludwig, from Mrs. Miniver to the Lone Ranger, from Toscanini to
Guy Lombardo, there is untruth in the intellectual content taken ready-made from art and science. The culture industry does
retain a trace of something better in those features which bring it close to the circus, in the self-justifying and nonsensical
skill of riders, acrobats and clowns, in the "defense and justification of physical as against intellectual art."3 But the refuges
of a mindless artistry which represents what is human as opposed to the social mechanism are being relentlessly hunted
down by a schematic reason which compels everything to prove its significance and effect. The consequence is that the
nonsensical at the bottom disappears as utterly as the sense in works of art at the top.
The fusion of culture and entertainment that is taking place today leads not only to a depravation of culture, but inevitably to
an intellectualization of amusement. This is evident from the fact that only the copy appears: in the movie theater, the
photograph; on the radio, the recording. In the age of liberal expansion, amusement lived on the unshaken belief in the
future: things would remain as they were and even improve. Today this belief is once more intellectualized; it becomes so
faint that it loses sight of any goal and is little more than a magic-lantern show for those with their backs to reality. It consists
of the meaningful emphases which, parallel to life itself, the screen play puts on the smart fellow, the engineer, the capable
girl, ruthlessness disguised as character, interest in sport, and finally automobiles and cigarettes, even where the
entertainment is not put down to the advertising account of the immediate producers but to that of the system as a whole.
Amusement itself becomes an ideal, taking the place of the higher things of which it completely deprives the masses by
repeating them in a manner even more stereotyped than the slogans paid for by advertising interests. Inwardness, the
subjectively restricted form of truth, was always more at the mercy of the outwardly powerful than they imagined. The culture
industry turns it into an open lie. It has now become mere twaddle which is acceptable in religious bestsellers,
psychological films, and women's serials as an embarrassingly agreeable garnish, so that genuine personal emotion in real
life can be all the more reliably controlled. In this sense amusement carries out that purgation of the emotions which
Aristotle once attributed to tragedy and Mortimer Adler now allows to movies. The culture industry reveals the truth about
catharsis as it did about style.
The stronger the positions of the culture industry become, the more summarily it can deal with consumers' needs, producing
them, controlling them, disciplining them, and even withdrawing amusement: no limits are set to cultural progress of this
kind. But the tendency is immanent in the principle of amusement itself, which is enlightened in a bourgeois sense. If the
need for amusement was in large measure the creation of industry, which used the subject as a means of recommending
the work to the masses the oleograph [imitation oil painting] by the dainty morsel it depicted, or the cake mix by a picture of
a cake amusement always reveals the influence of business, the sales talk, the quack's spiel. But the original affinity of
business and amusement is shown in the latter's specific significance: to defend society. To be pleased means to say Yes. It
is possible only by insulation from the totality of the social process, by desensitization and, from the first, by senselessly
sacrificing the inescapable claim of every work, however inane, within its limits to reflect the whole. Pleasure always means
not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is
asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance. The liberation which amusement
promises is freedom from thought and from negation. The effrontery of the rhetorical question, "What do people want?" lies
in the fact that it is addressed as if to reflective individuals to those very people who are deliberately to be deprived of this
individuality. Even when the public does exceptionally rebel against the pleasure industry, all it can muster is that feeble
resistance which that very industry has inculcated in it. Nevertheless, it has become increasingly difflcult to keep people in
this condition.
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