The paper reconstructs an intellectual genealogy of Adorno’s concept of culture industry with reference to interrelationships between social production, ideological text, and audience consumption in the communicative aspects of human lives. Adorno’s repressed classic is continued and discontinued by three distinctive yet interrelated descendants in critical media studies:(1) Habermas’s intersubjective legitimacy in his discussion of public sphere and communicative interaction;(2)Hall’s objective representation in his articulation theory of ideology;and (3)critical audience studies’ notion of subjective interpretation in the theorization of power and identity. This genealogy begins with the problematic of questioning the impossibility of authentic communication in anti-enlightenment culture industry, and ends with the celebration of the liberating subjectivity in the dialectic of isolation and communication.