ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the increasingly close relationship between the loss of symbolic meaning from the social relationships of industrial societies and the emergence of culture industries as the narrative form in which the individual orientates himself or herself within the social totality. In particular, I will look at the evolution of analogue technologies (film, radio, television, etc.), and how these are related to the formation of a techno-aesthetics whose purpose is the mass coordination of attention, desire, and mass consumption. I will also look at the way this process was coordinated with an ideology of radical individualism, in which the power of the nation state and the vitality of the economy were conceived purely as outcomes of individual self-determination and entrepreneurial spirit. In particular, I will examine the historical relationship between the abstract principles of freedom articulated by Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Karl Popper (the co-founders of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947), the commodification of human work and desire, and the dismantling of the liberal state as an instrument of social welfare in Europe and the United States.
