Brooke Bumgarner Horkheimer and Adorno

When beginning this reading I was a bit nervous about what to expect. Horkheimer and Adorno's theory is filled with complexities, however, one of the initial statements is quite simple; "Culture today is infecting everything with sameness".

The theory goes on to explain how media, political oppositions, buildings and more are always claiming to be so different, yet they are founded on the basis of others that have come before them. They are not in essence authentically different and original.

So one must wonder, if everything is infected by sameness and American culture and life is structured through everything before it, is there such a thing as authentic and original? Further, if everything is perpetuated by this theory of sameness, are we really living in a unitized, and totalizing culture? Horkheimer and Adorno write, "the conspicuous unity of macrocosm and microcosm confronts human beings with a model of their culture: they false identity of universal and particular. All mass culture under monopoly is identical, and the contours of its skeleton, the conceptual armature fabricated by monopoly, are beginning to stand out" (Horkheimer and Adorno, 53).

This made me think of the matrix, about the agents and how they are essentially all identical.


Regarding industry, we can think of the sameness in the terms of technology, where "its millions of participants, they argue, demand reproduction processes which inevitably lead to the use of standard products to meet the same needs at countless locations"(Horkheimer and Adorno, 54). When reading this, my best understanding is this: In order for mass production to be effective, standard, or at points substandard reproduction sets the tone for the most in the desire to unify everything. We start to see how this plays into production costs and how product differences, despite different pricing tiers, are becoming more and more the same.

Now you see, this idea of unity or totality, isn't just happening within production and industry. The ideas of totality are affecting us in areas of art, politics, and culture as a whole. In a society that pushes for totality, style and authenticity is seen as power, and due to the structure of American economics, politics and social norms, power is something that must be regulated and reserved. So, as I understand it, if totality cannot be reached, and style is furthered in various outlets, power cannot be truly held in one mighty facet, but instead others seek to gain power and this would create an unequal power structure, where some could come to power in ways and through ideas that the standards American culture is based off of now, would not like.