[ The Culture Industry Revisited ]

What I have Learnt 

This book describes Adorno's theories in a comprehensible and informative manner. It has turned out to be the most important book for this research project and has taught the researcher a great deal about culture and consumerism. Some interesting arguments on value are placed by Cook and Adorno's theories are well triangulated. Social behaviour Being Cooks specialism has lead the researcher into new perspectives of the music industry.

On page 28 to 30 she discusses the commodity form of culture's products and explains to readers that many critics of Adorno find his work to be superficial and vague she later goes on to elaborate that Adorno's views are very pessimistic. She also explains the corporate greed or 'venerable profit motives' of the industry through adorno's writing. She also goes onto explain why Adorno feels that consumers of culture care more from the money placed into a ticket for a concert than the concert itself. 

She then goes onto tell readers that a common mistake in interpreting Adorno's thesis' is that many believe him to be talking about capitalism and production. This is not the case for Adorno as he realised that companies in this industry were oligopolized, however these where his last thoughts on the matter. His major concern, in cook's words

 'is actually imitation - not mass production techniques - which partially accounts for the fact that cultural goods have become standardized' (Cook, 1996, p40).

She then goes on to talk about autonomy and cultural production and explains Adorno's ideas on pseudo individualism. Which is the driving force of deception that keeps customers in line by doing their thinking for them.  Cooks analyses has been extremely helpful in this research project and the researcher has new found information that has lead to a more critical train of thought in the artforms of the actual music and the Graphic Design on the cover as imitation occurs here too. 

Full reference: 

Cook, D. (1996) The culture industry revisited: Adorno on mass culture. United States: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.