Theodor W. Adorno, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Enlightenment is self-undermining. The program of demythologization through instrumental reason becomes its own myth: instrumental reason is continuous with the mythic mastery it claimed to overcome; the disenchantment of the world produces the administered world as second nature. The culture industry is the structural form taken by cultural production under the commodity-form.
Standardization disguised as pseudo-individuation; the regression of listening from the structural-formal grasp that classical music demanded to the atomized consumption of the hit-tune fragment; the production-side commodity determination that the consumer's subjective state cannot offset. The thesis is structural — about how cultural commodities are produced and what shapes the conditions of their reception — not psychological about what individual consumers subjectively experience.
The structural-thesis form is what survives the historical revisions: the 1940s Hollywood-radio analysis was period-situated; the structural diagnosis applies to digital streaming and platform-mediated culture as well, the production form having generalized rather than receded.12
For the use which is made of the work of art in antagonistic society is largely that of confirming the very existence of the useless, which art's total subsumption under usefulness has abolished. In adapting itself entirely to need, the work of art defrauds human beings in advance of the liberation from the principle of utility which it is supposed to bring about.Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 116–117
The second excursus is concerned with Kant, Sade, and Nietzsche, whose works represent the implacable consummation of enlightenment. This section shows how the subjugation of everything natural to the sovereign subject culminates in the domination of what is blindly objective and natural. This tendency levels all the antitheses of bourgeois thought, especially that between moral rigor and absolute amorality.Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 15–16
The most-misread sociological thesis in the Anglo-American reception. The Birmingham cultural studies tradition (Hall, Fiske, Jenkins) reads it as a totalizing claim about consumer passivity that the empirical evidence of audience reception refutes. The Habermasian critical-theory tradition reads it as the totalizing-critique-without-normative-ground problem. Jameson's Late Marxism defends the structural form against both lines, reading the culture industry thesis as a sustained analysis of late-capitalist cultural production whose target is the commodity-form, not the empirical receiver. The debate runs alongside the broader contemporary debate about platform capitalism, attention economies, and the digital extension of the culture industry's structural form.