The uninterrupted reign of the culture industry over our world^[1]—the roots of which extend back to the enlightenment—means that contemporary sensibility is completely moulded by that influence. Any chance for its upheaval through an emancipation by cyberspace was denied in part by this fact, but a furtive and confused awareness of the culture industry’s character still grew in some digital niches as conspiracy theories. Also, this pseudo-awareness blooms as a common theme in certain genres of folk art, reflecting on the vice of mass culture. Both an attempt at solution (conspiracy) and meditation (art) are only wishes for sedation; today’s darlings only toil in the shadow of what is now wholly ingrained.

(There is so much which is broken in this world. Art, no matter how violent or confrontational, can only ever be a sedative to the deep sadness which colors this merciless reality we have built for ourselves; I hope this little pamphlet can at least convince the reader of the possibility of such a claim. In spite of the cynicism, what we have is precious.)

In “The Schema of Mass Culture,” Adorno constructs his schema of mass culture (the naming of which was later changed to ‘culture industry’ in order to make clear the distinction between it and any sort of culture that may spontaneously arise from the masses—essentially, the two terms describe the same phenomenon). He begins with a story, a genealogy of children’s literature beginning in enlightenment period Germany. He describes the demythologization of reality, its reduction to “the prosaic and even the banausic” through this poetry (p.61). The equating of the ‘ideal’ with fantasy, fulfillment with colonial expansion; Adorno gives a history of the enlightenment as it was effected on an unknowing youth through art.

Children had no armour against these ways of conceiving—or at least, they were never presented alternatives which could be understood as appropriate for ‘real’ life—and as they grew up they propagated those ideas which they were taught; the good people always do the right thing. This is, Adorno claims, the same mechanism which has tended to the growth of the culture industry: “[t]oday total mass culture has replaced the ‘Neue Universum’ (‘New World’)” (p.63). The ‘New World’ as paragon was the focus of enlightenment (the metaphor which means goodness being conflated with material and empirically measurable progress), the culture industry’s ideal^[2] was itself the culture industry. How odd, for mass culture to be a constant allusion to itself—but this oddness is its own special glitter.

Mass culture exists as its products (which, again, always refer back to mass culture—the culture industry exists both as its referent and as the reference). The films, the writing, the music, the “most stylish photographs of aeroplanes soaring above the clouds,” these are those products; popular art (p.63). This ‘art’ is all dolled up just for us, the ‘masses’, “pre-digested,” always only a hidden affirmation woven from repetition (p.67). Every piece is only ever an investment in time without any return,^[3] where the ending is always known from the beginning (for the ending will only ever be a near identical return to what already was). And the infinity of retellings—this exact process’ extratemporal sheen, its being ingrained as an archetype, an archetype so familiar because it is of the same cloth as the audience—this is the loop of “adaptation” Adorno writes of (p.67).

The work of art now never goes beyond that familiar resolution, the emotional depth of which bottoms out at a ‘beautiful’ dominant one to four (I7 to IV) or a ‘heart-wrenching’ minor four to one (iv to I);^[4] the limits of artistic expression are therein delimited. To hear any chord which goes beyond this becomes noise almost immediately, and so the culture industry restricts itself from further invention. To create a song becomes a project of ‘adapting’ those handful of chords which are allowed, and to listen to a song (properly) is to be moved by those same chords which were already recycled in the last piece.

“It is solely the power which stands behind this everyday poetry today and impresses us with its colourfast and lavish presentation that can still deceive adult human beings about the extended childhood that is only prepared for them so that they might function in all the more ‘adult’ a fashion” (p.63). This ‘culture’ is only an embrace, a familiar blanket. Like enlightenment thinking, it is an instruction. Mass culture instructs on the ‘proper’ domestic lifestyle where conflict is never truly present. The episodic structure of media never interrupts the protagonist’s world for longer than twenty minutes, or simply; the status quo always upheld. Unlike enlightenment thinking’s spread through the masses however, it does not merely inform the youth the proper way to behave. It is a perpetual sustenance, a trick vitamin (which, by the way, cannot be chewed like a candy—it is so very adult-like!) that claims to cure the symptoms it itself is inciting. Mass culture is only ever a map leading back again to mass culture; it grabs hold of its audience and becomes an addiction. But the incessant referencing back to itself, the denial of anything more than ‘pre-digested’, starves the audience. Hungry, they return.^[5]

The self referencing character of commercial art leads to the collapsing of a distinction “between culture and empirical reality” (p.61). In shedding “aesthetic semblance”—what made art purposeless, or at least, separated it—this ‘commodity’ becomes a mirror that shows its own sort of reality where it is “always the fairest in all the land” (p.61, p.67). That photographed ‘aeroplane’ which was mentioned is not only a visual still; it is an ‘advertisement’ for success. The work produced by the culture industry represents the promise of happiness that the subscription to that ‘culture’ will bring about. It is a pseudo world that, without the earlier distinguishing line, becomes the instruction that feeds itself into culture and becomes the new reality.

The culture industry continues its reign over modern sensibility today. Always properly tended for, mass culture is practically all enveloping. Reality seems almost devoid of meaning; it has become so reduced and flattened to the empirical, the causal. Contemporary media, with its ‘sheen’, seems almost like a salvation; it has become the true reality which must be emulated in order to live ‘properly’. Reality is but a mere reflection. Sitcoms taught how to behave with their perfect rhythm of family life, every individual molded to one of the possible archetypes. Photographs instructed the planning of life’s important celebrations; vacations, graduations, birthdays, marriage, etc. Music showed the limits of letting loose, each new hit delineating what could be considered appropriate fun. Poetry became a written testimony of what is to be deemed beautiful and cherished. Narrative; the blueprint for dreams.

Because of that ingenious invention, the internet, one might believe in a possibility for autonomy today.^[6] In a sense, contemporary mass commercial culture is only one of many many worlds that are lived in since the integration of a secondary reality (realities)—billboards, celebrities, etc.; the lineage of that same culture industry Adorno constructed. Simultaneously, however, the culture industry has bred itself into the whole; after at least a century of its spell, sensibility is obedient. The emancipation of media meant that the masses could create their own entertainment, disseminating those same ideas which they were taught: the good people always do the right thing, and what a joy to see another who is so good—there is no doubt that this is everlasting reality.^[7] Popular online communities are always congregations which worship either the ‘product’, waxing it until it shimmers; holy (innumerable reproductions, ‘memes’, or reinterpretations, ‘fanart’, for example)—or which worship the culture industry’s teachings (proofs of ‘correct’ behaviour, ‘vlogs’, or proofs of ‘correct’ sensibility, ‘podcasts’, etc.). Adorno’s old qualm of the naming of the culture industry is a worry of a bygone era; mass culture, in the previously erroneous autonomous sense, becomes the culture industry’s workhorse.

The shattering of the world into channels meant that, almost inevitably, communities would form whose interest would be rebellion; the culture industry, as always, forces them to “remain outside the pale,” only fitting into mass culture as wrongdoers, spiteful beings who oppose freedom (p.91). The breadth of these outsider communities accounts for the many different reactions one might take to the reduction of life/reality to the merely ontic while simultaneously becoming somehow detached from the stream of instructions supplied by mass culture. The drama of cinema’s “half a death” is replaced with filmed gore (p.72). Or the purpose of life—the amassing of capital—is replaced with uncovering society's ‘dark secrets’. The genesis of those latter kinds of groups was something like a glimpse of the culture industry’s hidden sparkle. Unfortunately, their resulting theories were often built on a mountain of lies, constructing narratives in order to explain the wrongs of the world, completely misunderstanding the nature of the underlying schema, that which became invisible in its assimilation with the ‘natural’ culture.

Behold a Pale Horse, 1991, Milton William Cooper’s ‘magnum opus’, is a defining work for those online communities^[8] who share the author’s belief “that something is terribly wrong,” (where that ‘something’ is terribly ill-defined, an invisible beast) those communities which rally around a sort of empirical mysticism (Behold a Pale Horse, ii). Though Cooper concedes that “[i]t is possible that one or more conclusions may be wrong,” all his explanations for that ‘something’ are constructed using the deus ex machina Illuminati, among other anxious and untenable, or at least unfalsifiable pieces of evidence—pieces of evidence which can discount the man as lunatic by the ‘mentally sane’^[9] (Behold, ii). Behind those explanations, however, Cooper seems to have constructed his worldview around impression of that phenomenon Adorno called the culture industry: it is disclosed not as theory, however, but as the empirically provable document which is supposedly circulated throughout the ‘powers that be’ entitled “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars.”

From the ‘document’: “The solution of today's problems requires an approach which is ruthlessly candid, with no agonizing over religious, moral or cultural values” (Behold, p.37). The ‘document’ also references “social engineering” and “the automation of society, [...] i.e. the engineering of social automation systems,” the likes of which are sensational language versions of Adorno’s ideas (Behold, p.36). The ‘silent weapon’ is art, the ‘quiet war’ is the preservation of the status quo, the culture industry. It becomes clear, when understood as an attempt at understanding that ‘something’, that Cooper’s work is only a kind of Western esotericism, born out of the contemporary mind, deprived of myth. The book reads like a fever dream constructed from all those elements that define modern action cinema: everything has its purpose, all sense is arrested almost instantly, and to read any line out of context from the hundreds of pages makes no difference to the meaning conferred from the words. It is all nonsense.

The radical and misguided attempt at resisting that which never impeded in any real sense was doomed to fail from the outset. From “From a Theory of the Criminal,” Adorno and Horkheimer write: “the strength to stand out as an individual against one’s environment and, at the same time, to make contact with it through the approved forms of intercourse and thereby to assert oneself within it—in the criminals this strength was eroded” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, p.189). Cooper died in front of his home in Eager, Arizona on November 5th, 2001 exchanging gunfire with law enforcers after a warrant was put out for his arrest for tax evasion.

Cindy Lee, a contemporary Canadian rock & roll musician, despite blatantly broadcasting those musical dead ends Adorno vilified,^[10] also grapples with that ‘something’, although with a more thorough understanding of its unsolvable nature and without outwardly aggressive action. Their art is more a meditation on the immense sadness and exhaustion a realization of the constant self-flagellation brought out in the culture industry incites. The individual who yearns for those (non)objects which aren’t commodities is shunned, who attempts to escape the prison of the sitcom archetype is outcast. From the liner notes to their record Cat O’ Nine Tails, 2020; “our rejection of the divine is a response to the co-optation of spirituality to meet the needs of imperialist regimes, the needs of snakes and jackals and liars. We are damned if we do and damned if we do not. [...] Ambivalence a luxury coming at the highest price. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” There is no ‘winning’, no escaping the prison that is the culture industry.

Both individuals, and the groups they represent, yearn for salvation. Revelation 6:1-8, the verses in which Cooper’s books namesake are found, are also included in the liner notes to Cat O’ Nine Tails.^[11] Cooper was a Christian (through and through) and Cindy Lee (at least as a character; at least for the sake of the art’s meanings; certainly not an atheist) stands in relation to that religion. The desire for magic, for a reality which isn’t merely a means to consumption, grips those who do not find comfort in the ‘sheen’ of the commodity. A particularly keen reading of the verses in Revelations by Edward Bishop Elliot which accounts for the verse’s relationship to the Roman Empire might name that third horse as representing imperial oppression. Cindy Lee, mourning this life, awaits salvation, awaits those gates. Cooper believed “that God put [him] in places [...] so that [he] would be able to deliver ‘this’ warning to His people” (Behold p.3).

Contemporary mass culture is the sum of its parts, the total conscience of its population. Those individuals who (pseudo)knowingly suffer within it—of which there are many many others besides those inspected here—regardless of their dispositions, are damned to suffer without solace except in self-deception, rotting in their makeshift prisons. In this way, however, the reader might think nothing has changed since the concept of the culture industry was originally penned; prisons, Adorno and Horkheimer write, “are the image of the bourgeois working world thought through to the end” (Dialectic p.188). And therein the reader would be right, and none the happier for it.

Adorno, T. W. (1991). The culture industry : Selected essays on mass culture. Routledge. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com

Cooper, M. W. (2005). Behold a Pale Horse: Exposing the New World Order. Light Technology Publishing, LLC.

Elliott, E. B. (1851). Horae apocalypticae. Church of England Quarterly Review, 30, 241. Retrieved from http://myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/docview/1416180453?accountid=14771

Flegel, P. (2020) [Liner notes]. In Cat O’ Nine Tails [digital]. Realistik Studios.

Flegel, P. (2020). The Limit. On What’s Tonight to Eternity [digital]. Realistik Studios. Retrieved from cindylee.bandcamp.com/track/the-limit

Horkheimer, M., Adorno, T. W., In Schmid, N. G., & Jephcott, E. F. N. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments. Stanford University Press.

[4] These chordal examples are, though not immediately clear to those unfamiliar with their sounds and ‘emotional’ associations, are as commonplace in ‘modern’ music as a bird is in the sky. They easily conjure a specific emotion in the listener, and are even more easily produced from the clever musician’s instrument. (And though the clever musician may feel inclined to argue about these chords’ essences or the ingenious tricks which can hide the nature of that flattened six (b6) in the four minor (vi) or whatever, these cliches or at least some relevant variation upon them are present in nearly all popular harmonic recordings of the modern canon.) The chords themselves and their particular uses have been employed frequently throughout Western music’s recorded history, but in this they are only examples of Adorno’s idea of the culture industry’s “time lag;” though old, they are played on the new electric guitars in the new rock & roll style (p.79). By Adorno’s own conception, then, the purposiveness of a certain ‘rhythm & blues’ ballad finds its concretion in these established and enduring sounds. Cindy Lee, who will be discussed later as one of those contemporary artists who struggle with the contemporary manifestation of the culture industry, a piece which utilizes the four chords discussed in turn; just just on the first minute, a quiet synth eschew in the dominant one (I7). The following three chords are those discussed in order, announced with blaring shrill synths: cindylee.bandcamp.com/track/the-limit.

[5] Those audience members in search of high art, the intellectuals, are the one who can recite those little known facts which were read about in the paper, the ontic happenings which surround the film; the pre-digested piece cannot be the object of purely aesthetic considerations.

[6] John Battelle, Wired's 28-year old managing editor, said of those burgeoning days; "I think that a lot of what some of the original Net god-utopians were thinking is that there was just going to be this sort of huge anarchist, utopian, bliss medium, where there are no rules and everything is just sort of open. That's a great thought, but it's not going to work. And when the Time Warners get on the Net in a hard fashion it's going to be the people who first create the commerce and the environment, like Wired, that will be the market leaders."

[8] Although finding a source for such a claim isn’t really possible—there have yet to be exhaustive anthropologies of internet subcultures—I had an interest in this sort of contemporary mysticism in secondary school. The book is certainly a groundwork for those relevant subcultures.

[11] And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.

And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see.

And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.

And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. (Revelations 6:1-8)