Farewell to mass communication? The unfinished project of the culture industry

This dissertation attempts to critically survey Adorno's analysis of the culture industry, which involves his reflections on both culture and communication in capitalist society. I read Adorno's conceptualization of the culture industry as an open and contradictory text and claim that Adorno's arguments about the culture industry are based upon his dual and contradictory views of society, culture, subject and communication in human life. In doing so, I also demonstrate that the culture industry is never an isolated notion, but an ongoing project which has continued in three different approaches to mass communication: Habermas's conceptualization of intersubjective legitimacy; Hall's ideological analysis of objective representation; and critical audience studies of subjective interpretation. These approaches usually emphasize their discontinuities with Adorno's arguments about the culture industry; I show their continuities with Adorno in terms of production, text and consumption in mass mediated communication.; Although this ongoing project of the culture industry is a sustained theoretical effort to deal with the problematic of culture and communication between human life and social production, from its very inception, it denies any possibility of mass communication. I will argue that this project instead aims to preserve individuality and individual communication through the never-ending contradictions between symbolic consumption and material production, as well as between human subjects and inhuman objective relations. As Adorno's successors, contemporary critical communication scholars continue his life-long effort to rescue fragments of human agency from the wreckage of capitalism.; This project, in my view, is unfinished, since it only dwells only on individual communication rather than communication among the masses, on personal freedom instead of collective solidarity. Therefore, this project is not a Marxist critique, but a bourgeois one. The question of how mass communication of individuals is transformed into a public community of individuals is the incomplete task that lies ahead for critical mass communication studies. This project of the culture industry can only be completed by creating a new social collectivity through mass communication, without damaging individual particularity.