This current research deepens the concept of cultural industry, coined by Horkheimer and Adorno (1985), so that its overlapping with unconscious fantasies, especially destructive one, may be understood. When subjects internalize the symbolic violence of cultural industry, they transfer the identification models required by consumption society and universalize the object logic among all. The perversion in the subjectivities’ constitution processes leads towards the standardization of models which Adorno identifies as pseudo-individual symbiotically linked to one another. A similarity exists between these concepts by Adorno and Freud’s “unconscious feeling of guilt” in which the latter identifies processes of subjective self-punishment when subjects are impaired to react due to “social repression”. Sadomasochism sustains the subjects’ complicity with such an oppressing status quo, orchestrated by the mistake of ideologies diffused by the cultural industry. Is it possible that these subjects appropriate their critical possibilities to become culture-builders?
Cultural industry; Consumer objects; Identification models; Symbolic violence; Sadomasochism