On some transformations of the Culture Industry in Brazil

Abstract

In this article, I intend to analyse and interpret what I consider to be a transformation process in culture industry in Brazil, in sociological terms. The transformation process would have started in the mid of the 1990s and a greater visibility at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Thus, I intend to investigate a specific period (2000 to 2005) through a historical and theoretical perspective. In the following I propose a methodological frame of comparison between theoretical concepts and historical reality, and it takes some specific aspects about Brazilian film production and television in that same period as a priority analysis axis. My central hypothesis is that the culture industry in Brazil presents a new kind of relation between production and consumption in that historical period. It indicates transformations in the concept of culture industry itself, such as originally proposed by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. The central goal of this article is to contribute to the discussion about the concept of culture industry before substantive alterations in the capitalist mode of production, and it takes the Brazilian reality as an explanatory mark of such transformations.