The Consciousness Industry
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"However, with a single great exception, that of Walter Benjamin (and in his footsteps, Brecht), [[Marxists have not understood the consciousness industry and have been aware only of its bourgeois capitalist dark side and not of its socialist possibilities. An author such as Georg Lukacs is a perfect example of this theoretical and practical backwardness."--"Constituents of a Theory of Media" (1970) by Hans Magnus Enzensberger "If you should think this is Utopian, then I would ask you to consider why it is Utopian."--"Theory of Radio" by Brecht, epigraph "Constituents of a Theory of Media" (1970) by Hans Magnus Enzensberger |
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The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics, and the Media is a compilation of essays written by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, translated and published in an English version in 1974.
Chapter contents
- The Industrialization of the Mind (1962)
- The Aporias of the Avant Garde (1962)
- The World Language of Modern Poetry (1960/62)
- Poetry and Politics (1962)
- Commonplaces on the Newest Literature (1968)
- Constituents of a Theory of Media (1970)
- Tourists of the Revolution (1973)
In "The Industrialization of the Mind," Enzensberger characterizes mentality as a product of society and elaborates on the phenomena of the mind-making industry as a product of the last 100 years. The industrialization of the mind is achieved through means of induction and reproduction, and although it can be industrially reproduced, it cannot be industrially produced. As a social product, the consciousness industry cannot be understood in terms of machinery, nor in terms of a buyers and sellers market, or production cost. Its main business is not to sell a product, but rather, to sell the existing order, and "to perpetuate the prevailing pattern of man's domination by man, no matter who runs the society, and by what means."
In a modern society, Enzensberger identifies "immaterial exploitation" as a necessary corollary to "material exploitation," whereby material exploitation is no longer sufficient to guarantee the continuity of the system; in order to exploit people's intellectual, moral, and political faculties, they must be developed. The roles of education and mass media then become critical in immaterial exploitation, in fact, Enzensberger identifies education as the most powerful mass media of all. The full realization of the mind industry, however, has hardly begun to be realized. A fully industrialized education system will be characterized by an increasingly centralized curriculum. The growth of the mind industry is faster than that of any other industry.
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