Dialectic of Enlightenment: The Culture Industry – Part II

24 thoughts on “Dialectic of Enlightenment: The Culture Industry – Part II”

1. 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.”

2. how to inject sameness:
   add a synthesizer

3. 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.

4. A very lovely exquisit dissertation

5. 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.

6. 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…

7. 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.

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

9. Everyone is praising this video saying that it is great, but for me…it's terrifying (both parts). This endless cycle of enlightenment thinking, is there even an out?

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

11. In other words, to be an individual, rebel against the dominant "sameness," which suppresses your creativity? What's new about this message? every child that grows up in a family in one way or other rebels. An adult is a child that learns how to negotiate with authority to become an authority without having to go to war over the matter. This is why we have the US constitution of law, It is not to be overthrown simply because we do not like the culture we think it might produce. Are they advocating the "robotic sameness" enforced by those who believe in the tenets of Marxist – kabbalistic theosophy?

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

13. Although I guess maybe we cant really say that it was their fault. Maybe they were just born to be pricks.

14. Neither Theodore or Max ever worked an honest day in their entire fucking lives Im sure. This idleness gave rise to their ideas of their own mental superiority Im sure. While everyone else was providing them with their sustenance, they were busy with their own self adulation. Fuckin pricks. I wish they had stayed in Germany.

15. 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.

16. "Repetition is Death!"

    This is my new slogan 🙂 Great Video thank you.

17. Ok. Then what about communism? Maoist China and Soviet-Russia screamed nothing else but 'sameness'

18. 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!

19. Quality content as ever. Shared etc.

20. Just ludicrous

21. What’s the song at 5:55?

22. 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

23. I really enjoy your videos. Nice, quiet, but also quietly rigorous. Keep it up.

24. Wait..weren't dem cultural marxists undermining our culture through gender politics and destruction of core institutions with mass media? Weren't they the ones trying to impose the norm and universality of SJW set values?

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