realized, of any doubtful unity of form and content, within and without, of
individual and society; it is to be found in those features in which discrepancy
appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. Instead of
exposing itself to this failure in which the style of the great work of art has always
achieved self-negation, the inferior work has always relied on its similarity with
others – on a surrogate identity. 
In the culture industry this imitation finally becomes absolute. Having ceased
to be anything but style, it reveals the latter’s secret: obedience to the social
hierarchy. Today aesthetic barbarity completes what has threatened the creations of
the spirit since they were gathered together as culture and neutralized. To speak of
culture was always contrary to culture. Culture as a common denominator already
contains in embryo that schematization and process of cataloguing and
classification which bring culture within the sphere of administration. And it is
precisely the industrialized, the consequent, subsumption which entirely accords
with this notion of culture. By subordinating in the same way and to the same end
all areas of intellectual creation, by occupying men’s senses from the time they
leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning with
matter that bears the impress of the labour process they themselves have to sustain
throughout the day, this subsumption mockingly satisfies the concept of a unified
culture which the philosophers of personality contrasted with mass culture. 
The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually
promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on
pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle
consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be
reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. In front of the appetite
stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than
a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape. Of course
works of art were not sexual exhibitions either. However, by representing
deprivation as negative, they retracted, as it were, the prostitution of the impulse and
rescued by mediation what was denied. The secret of aesthetic sublimation is its
representation of fulfilment as a broken promise. The culture industry does not
sublimate; it represses. By repeatedly exposing the objects of desire, breasts in a
clinging sweater or the naked torso of the athletic hero, it only stimulates the
unsublimated forepleasure which habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a
masochistic semblance. There is no erotic situation which, while insinuating and
exciting, does not fail to indicate unmistakably that things can never go that far. The
Hays Office [the film censor of the time] merely confirms the ritual of Tantalus that
the culture industry has established anyway. Works of art are ascetic and
unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish. Love is downgraded
to romance. And, after the descent, much is permitted; even licence as a marketable
speciality has its quota bearing the trade description ‘daring’. The mass production
of the sexual automatically achieves its repression. Because of his ubiquity, the film
star with whom one is meant to fall in love is from the outset a copy of himself. Every
tenor voice comes to sound like a Caruso record, and the ‘natural’ faces of Texas
girls are like the successful models by whom Hollywood has typecast them. The
mechanical reproduction of beauty, which reactionary cultural fanaticism