The culture industry has to be understood as an expanded form of ideology.

Interviewee: Roger Behrens

This means, furthermore, that the culture industry has to be understood as an expanded form of ideology, and that hence the critique of the culture industry must be actualised as a critique of ideology: “enlightenment as mass deception” – the subtitle of the culture industry section in the Dialectic of Enlightenment – refers to the subject being defrauded of the happiness of collective, unregimented experience. This experience is concealed by the false promise of happiness held out by what Marx called the fetish character of the commodity. At first, the culture industry transforms culture into commodities, and then – and this is the decisive moment – “culture” is industrially produced as a commodity. My short formula for defining the culture industry thus runs: “culture becomes commodity”.