With wide eyes: the ideology of industrial society according to Adorno

Authors

  • Leonardo Masaro

Keywords:

Ideology. Adorno. Managed society. Mass culture.

Abstract

In one of its last writings, Theodor Adorno identifies a transformation in the phenomenon of ideology, brought by the advent of totally managed society, and therefore pointing to the obsolescence of the classical Marxist concept of ideology and, indirectly, to Lukacs. According to Adorno, ideology no longer presents itself as a veil covering reality, hiding social domination under falsely universal justifications, but as reality itself, frozen in a fixed image – domination becomes transparent and naturalized as “the way things are”. The aim of this article is to explain how Adorno builds this new understanding of ideology, strongly based on his studies of fascist propaganda and on the system of cultural industry. Both are seen as the main organizing schemes of mass culture, creating a new kind of consciousness reification, in which what matters mostly is the libidinal satisfaction brought by the specific form of relationship between subjects and the ideological material consumed by then, instead of the specific content of this material.

Author Biography

Leonardo Masaro

Graduado em filosofia pela USP (2006), mestre em sociologia pela UNICAMP (2010) e doutor em filosofia pela USP (2016).

References

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Published

2018-04-30

Issue

No. 19

Section

Varia

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