discord than the jazz arranger in suppressing any development which does not
conform to the jargon. When jazzing up Mozart he changes him not only when he is
too serious or too difficult but when he harmonizes the melody in a different way,
perhaps more simply, than is customary now. No medieval builder can have
scrutinized the subjects for church windows and sculptures more suspiciously than
the studio hierarchy scrutinizes a work by Balzac or Hugo before finally approving
it. No medieval theologian could have determined the degree of the torment to be
suffered by the damned in accordance with the ordo of divine love more
meticulously than the producers of shoddy epics calculate the torture to be
undergone by the hero or the exact point to which the leading lady’s hemline shall
be raised. The explicit and implicit, exoteric and esoteric catalogue of the forbidden
and tolerated is so extensive that it not only defines the area of freedom but is all-
powerful inside it. Everything down to the last detail is shaped accordingly. Like its
counterpart, avant-garde art, the entertainment industry determines its own
language, down to its very syntax and vocabulary, by the use of anathema. The
constant pressure to produce new effects (which must conform to the old pattern)
serves merely as another rule to increase the power of the conventions when any
single effect threatens to slip through the net. Every detail is so firmly stamped with
sameness that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth, or does not meet with
approval at first sight. And the star performers, whether they produce or reproduce,
use this jargon as freely and fluently and with as much gusto as if it were the very
language which it silenced long ago. Such is the ideal of what is natural in this field
of activity, and its influence becomes all the more powerful, the more technique is
perfected and diminishes the tension between the finished product and everyday
life. The paradox of this routine, which is essentially travesty, can be detected and
is often predominant in everything that the culture industry turns out. A jazz
musician who is playing a piece of serious music, one of Beethoven’s simplest
minuets, syncopates it involuntarily and will smile superciliously when asked to
follow the normal divisions of the beat. This is the ‘nature’ which, complicated by
the ever-present and extravagant demands of the specific medium, constitutes the
new style and is a ‘system of non-culture, to which one might even concede a certain
“unity of style” if it really made any sense to speak of stylized barbarity’. 
The universal imposition of this stylized mode can even go beyond what is
quasi-officially sanctioned or forbidden; today a hit song is more readily forgiven
for not observing the thirty-two beats or the compass of the ninth than for containing
even the most clandestine melodic or harmonic detail which does not conform to
the idiom. Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is
forgiven because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations
which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system. The
constraint of the technically conditioned idiom which stars and directors have to
produce as ‘nature’ so that the people can appropriate it, extends to such fine
nuances that they almost attain the subtlety of the devices of an avant-garde work
as against those of truth. The rare capacity minutely to fulfil the obligations of the
natural idiom in all branches of the culture industry becomes the criterion of
efficiency. What and how they say it must be measurable by everyday language, as
in logical positivism. The producers are experts. The idiom demands an astounding
productive power, which it absorbs and squanders. In a diabolical way it has