ABSTRACT
The commercial character of culture causes the difference between culture and practical life to disappear. Today total mass culture has replaced the ‘Neue Universum’ (‘New World’). The most stylish photographs of aeroplanes soaring above the clouds, the brilliant play of light on moving machinery, the furrowed brows of well-chosen representatives of the ‘common folk’ emulate that perfidious innocence of ‘The Golden Book of Technology’ that lies resplendent among the Christmas gifts of the modern liberal child. The mass culture which is so true to the facts absorbs the truth content and expends itself in the material but all it has left as material is itself. All mass culture is fundamentally adaptation. However, this adaptive character, the monopolistic filter which protects it from any external rays of influence which have not already been safely accommodated within its reified schema, represents an adjustment to the consumers as well.
