Adorno's "Culture Industry" Theory and its Relation to Contemporary Iranian Music

Undoubtedly, the root of Adorno's thinking can be traced to his belief in the destruction of those philosophical ideas which seek to create immutable universals in the form of frozen and sound philosophical systems. The starting point for him, therefore, is not in the same idea, but in the contradiction or otherwise, which is only in one aspect of this oneness and not in its complete drowning. That is why the non-like is highlighted in order to breathe the breeze of freedom from falling into the vicious circle of absoluteness. In this regard, he defines the purpose of each work of art in a kind of irreconcilability with the whole. According to Adorno, this totality in the field of culture and art, in a pragmatic way, appears more in a phenomenon called the culture industry; because works of art are caught up in the mechanism of bureaucratization and assimilation by the commodity-production economic system, in which the individual subject is diminished. Such a danger is felt more and more in the cultural products of today's Iranian society (especially in the field of music), which can be examined in terms of Adorno's critical theories and the structure of Iranian classical music.