overreached the culturally conservative distinction between genuine and artificial
style. A style might be called artificial which is imposed from without on the
refractory impulses of a form. But in the culture industry every element of the
subject matter has its origin in the same apparatus as that jargon whose stamp it
bears. The quarrels in which the artistic experts become involved with sponsor and
censor about a lie going beyond the bounds of credibility are evidence not so much
of an inner aesthetic tension as of a divergence of interests. The reputation of the
specialist, in which a last remnant of objective independence sometimes finds
refuge, conflicts with the business politics of the church, or the concern which is
manufacturing the cultural commodity. But the thing itself has been essentially
objectified and made viable before the established authorities began to argue about
it. Even before Zanuck acquired her, St Bernadette was regarded by her latter-day
hagiographer as brilliant propaganda for all interested parties. That is what became
of the emotions of the character. Hence the style of the culture industry, which no
longer has to test itself against any refractory material, is also the negation of style.
The reconciliation of the general and particular, of the rule and the specific demands
of the subject matter, the achievement of which alone gives essential, meaningful
content to style, is futile because there has ceased to be the slightest tension between
opposite poles: these concordant extremes are dismally identical; the general can
replace the particular, and vice versa. 
Nevertheless, this caricature of style does not amount to something beyond the
genuine style of the past. In the culture industry the notion of genuine style is seen
to be the aesthetic equivalent of domination. Style considered as mere aesthetic
regularity is a romantic dream of the past. The unity of style not only of the Christian
Middle Ages but of the Renaissance expresses in each case the different structure of
social power, and not the obscure experience of the oppressed in which the general
was enclosed. The great artists were never those who embodied a wholly flawless
and perfect style, but those who used style as a way of hardening themselves against
the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth. The style of their works gave
what was expressed that force without which life flows away unheard. Those very
art forms which are known as classical, such as Mozart’s music, contain objective
trends which represent something different to the style which they incarnate. As late
as Schoenberg and Picasso, the great artists have retained a mistrust of style, and at
crucial points have subordinated it to the logic of the matter. What Dadaists and
Expressionists called the untruth of style as such triumphs today in the sung jargon
of a crooner, in the carefully contrived elegance of a film star, and even in the
admirable expertise of a photograph of a peasant’s squalid hut. Style represents a
promise in every work of art. That which is expressed is subsumed through style into
the dominant forms of generality, into the language of music, painting, or words, in
the hope that it will be reconciled thus with the idea of true generality. This promise
held out by the work of art that it will create truth by lending new shape to the
conventional social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical. It unconditionally
posits the real forms of life as it is by suggesting that fulfilment lies in their aesthetic
derivatives. To this extent the claim of art is always ideology too. However, only in
this confrontation with tradition of which style is the record can art express
suffering. That factor in a work of art which enables it to transcend reality certainly
cannot be detached from style; but it does not consist of the harmony actually