On-line articles
The Immortalist
Yngve Nordgård <yngv...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:a8svo6$btn$1...@troll.powertech.no...
> I'm looking for on-line articles of Adorno. Does anybody have a link?
>
> Yours,
> Y. Nordgaard
> Oslo
>
http://www.mun.ca/hums/badorno.jpg
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Papers authored by Adorno:
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The Culture Industry
http://www.ddc.net/ygg/etext/adorno.htm
THEODOR ADORNO: Culture industry reconsidered
http://makeashorterlink.com/?N20D346A
THEODOR ADORNO AND MAX HORKHEIMER
THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q5EC346A
Chaplin Times Two - Theodor W. Adorno - Translated by John MacKay
http://makeashorterlink.com/?W1CC126A
LE PRIX DU PROGRESS
http://makeashorterlink.com/?E11D536A
Adorno: An Asian Extrapolation
http://makeashorterlink.com/?E16D426A
makeshorterlink refered by SirFredrick
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Papers about Adorno:
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Dialectics at a Standstill:
A Methodological Inquiry Into
the Philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno pt 1 & 2
http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/bron2.htm
http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/bron2a.htm
ADORNO and the NAME of GOD
http://webdelsol.com/FLASHPOINT/adorno.htm
Adorno's "Strategy of Hibernation"
http://makeashorterlink.com/?A34D216A
META-ADORNO
http://makeashorterlink.com/?R15D526A
Semi-Formation as Cultural Reconstruction of Society
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Soci/SociMaar.htm
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Various notes on Adorno:
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Theodor Adorno
Adorno (1903-69) argued that capitalism fed people with the products of a
'culture industry' - the opposite of 'true' art - to keep them passively
satisfied and politically apathetic.
Adorno saw that capitalism had not become more precarious or close to
collapse, as Marx had predicted. Instead, it had seemingly become more
entrenched. Where Marx had focussed on economics, Adorno placed emphasis on
the role of culture in securing the status quo.
Popular culture was identified as the reason for people's passive
satisfaction and lack of interest in overthrowing the capitalist system.
Adorno suggested that culture industries churn out a debased mass of
unsophisticated, sentimental products which have replaced the more
'difficult' and critical art forms which might lead people to actually
question social life.
False needs are cultivated in people by the culture industries. These are
needs which can be both created and satisfied by the capitalist system, and
which replace people's 'true' needs - freedom, full expression of human
potential and creativity, genuine creative happiness.
~k.i.s.s.~
Adorno was a member of the Frankfurt School in interwar Germany. He followed
a neoMarxian belief that modern art, media, etc. were controlled by the
ruling elites. Any dissenting views articulated in art would be co-opted by
the all-encompassing culture industry, which would always prevail.
I.
Adorno's specific beliefs:
1) All the forces of production are intertwined; a system.
2) Out of capitalism comes the concept of the culture industry, which itself
grew out of capitalism - a mass culture industry which is non-critical and
debasing.
3) Adorno (being negative) thought that the masses were systematically
manipulated and progressively unable to criticize their society effectively;
the culture industry is central.
4) To Adorno, the only people left who can still critique Enlightenment
ideas, capitalism and the culture industry are the avant-gardes.
5) Imminent Critique (Frankfurt School)
a) Contrasts the best concept of a thing (e.g., capitalism) with its
reality. b) This is a negative dialectic; future reality cannot be better
than its concept.
In the early 1940s, Adorno and Max Horkheimer elaborated on these principles
in Dialectic of Enlightenment.
II.
Adorno was more negative, yet more elitist, than Benjamin about the
implications of the culture industry and commodity fetishism. The
confrontation between Adorno and Horkheimer on the one hand, and Benjamin on
the other, "centered not on modernism as such, but the historical meanings
to be attached to avant-garde and commercialized "mass" art in capitalist
society." (Lunn, p. 150).
Adorno (and Horkheimer) on the culture industry:
1) Adorno argues the culture industry commodifies and standardizes all art
(music, fashion, etc.) then fools you into thinking it's "original"
("pseudo-individuality") in order to sell it.
2) This prompts a change in reception; in music he calls it "regressive
listening." This turns down the intellectual response to bourgeois art and
regresses the response to that of a child because the form of the
composition forces you to think this way.
3) This is a machine culture which mutates and dampens conciousness,
destroying critical thinking.
III.
Adorno on the music industry (part of the culture industry):
1) Authentic art (as defined by bourgeoisie) has difficulty surviving
against capitalism; avant gardes are chewed up by society and become
commodities themselves.
2) The bourgeoisie constructs a dichotomy of classical, "serious" music vs.
light, popular music. Thus, there develops a "flight from banality" (e.g.,
Schoenberg's atonal music vs. ever more standardized, imitative forms).
3) The "incomprehensibility of the serious form" (e.g., Joyce, Lawrence) is
in part a reaction by the avant-gardes to the "inescapability of fashion."
IV.
Criticisms of Adorno:
1) He concentrates on the educated elite.
2) He allows some elements of nostalgia to creep into his work.
3) He gets the relationship between high/mass culture wrong, because
pre-capitalist popular culture (e.g., the oral tradition of story-telling)
was also repetitive in nature.
4) He concentrates on cultivating particular emotions on the part of these
educated elites (e.g., does Beethoven fall in love "better" than the average
man on the street? Adorno seems to think so).
5) High culture does more than react against mass culture; it draws from it
more than Adorno admits.
6) He's pretty negative about our chances of breaking out of this hegemonic
culture industry. Besides, if hegemony is so all-encompassing, how can he
recognize it and stand outside of it.
Commodity fetishism (promoted by the marketing, advertising and media
industries) means that social relations and cultural experiences are
objectified in terms of money. We are delighted by something because of how
much it cost.
Popular media and music products are characterised by standardisation (they
are basically formulaic and similar) and pseudo-individualisation
(incidental differences make them seem distinctive, but they're not).
Products of the culture industry may be emotional or apparently moving, but
Adorno sees this as cathartic - we might seek some comfort in a sad film or
song, have a bit of a cry, and then feel restored again.
Boiled down to its most obvious modern-day application, the argument would
be that television leads people away from talking to each other or
questioning the oppression in their lives. Instead they get up and go to
work (if they are employed), come home and switch on TV, absorb TV's
nonsense until bedtime, and then the daily cycle starts again
Note: the following has been abstracted from the Fifty Key Contemporary
Thinkers by John Lechte, Routledge, 1994.
Theodor Adorno
Adorno was born Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno in 1903. According to Martin Jay
he may have dropped the Wiesengrund when he joined the Institute for Social
Research in New York in 1938 because of its sounding Jewish. Between 1918
and 1919, at the age of 15, Adorno studied under Siegfried Kracauer. After
completing his Gymnasium period, he attended the University of Frankfurt
where he studied philosophy, sociology, psychology, and music. He received a
doctorate in philosophy in 1924. In 1925, Adomo went to Vienna to study
composition under Alban Berg, and at the same time he began to publish
articles on music, especially on the work of Schönberg. After becoming
disillusioned with the 'irrationalism' of the Vienna circle, he returned to
Frankfurt in 1926 and began a Habilitationschrift on Kant and Freud,
entitled 'The concept of the unconscious in the transcendental theory of
mind'. This thesis was rejected, but in 1931, he completed another:
Kierkegaard: The Construction of the Aesthetic, which was published in 1933
on the day of Hitler's rise to power. Once his thesis was accepted, Adorno
joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research after Max Horkheimer
became director. To escape from Nazism, the Institute moved to Zürich in
1934, and Adorno moved to England.
In 1938, Adorno rejoined the Institute, which was now located in New York,
and worked on the Princeton Radio Research Project, headed by Paul
Larzarsfeld. While in America he worked on a number of different projects,
including one with Thomas Mann on Doktor Faustus. With Max Horkheimer,
Adorno sounded a pessimistic note about Enlightenment reason in the
Dialectic of Enlightenment which was first published in 1947. In 1953, at
the age of 50, Adorno left the United States and returned to Frankfurt to
take up a position with the Institute, and in 1959 he became its director
following the retirement of Horkheimer. By the end of the following decade
Adorno became embroiled in a conflict with the students who occupied the
Institute's offices. Adorno died in 1969 in Switzerland while writing what
many believe to be his most important work, Aesthetic Theory.
Current debate on Adorno's work has, in part, centred on the extent to which
he anticipates aspects of postmodern and post-structuralist thought.
Particular attention is often given here to Adorno's critique of
'identity-thinking' in his Negative Dialectics . While it is necessary to
understand what Adorno means here, we should also bear in mind a number of
points which clearly separate his project from those inspired by nominally
French thought.
Let us begin with science. While Julia Kristeva has said that
structuralist-inspired semiotics must take its cue from developments in
quantum physics, and while Jacques Derrida cites Gödel directly in
formulating his philosophical notion of 'undecidability' that is, while
semiotics and post-structuralism in France have forged bonds between the
natural and the human sciences - Adorno, like other members of the Frankfurt
School, saw modern science as inherently positivist. As Adorno aimed to
produce a dialectical thought which did not 'positivise' in any way, science
in general was treated with the greatest suspicion, if not contempt. Science
in Adorno's philosophy would even be the form of thought he most opposed
given that, like positivism in general, it is seen to be absolutely
dependent on the logic of identity. Philosophy has allowed itself to be
terrorised by science, Adorno claims. But philosophical truth does not equal
scientific truth, and philosophy should not shy away from this. In sum,
'Philosophy is neither a science nor the "cogitative poetry" to which
positivists would degrade it in a stupid oxymoron'.
Second, Adorno retains - albeit more in his works of cultural criticism than
his philosophy - the distinction between 'essence' and 'appearance' (a
distinction rejected by contemporary French thought of post-structuralist
inspiration) in order roundly to reject the superficial nature of appearance
in modern capitalist society. For Adorno, the world of appearance, as for
Plato before him, is a world of images and mere semblances, a world of
relativism and, most of all, of reification. On this reading, reification
and commodities in the capitalist world are almost identical; commodities
take on a life of their own independently of the conditions of their
production. Commodities hide the truth of their illusory nature. They serve
to titillate 'the reified consciousness' which is 'a moment in the totality
of the reified world'. Moreover, by contrast with recent French thought,
ideology still plays an important part in Adorno's analyses of social
conditions, even if, as he shows in Prisms, the analysis of ideology can no
longer rely on the 'transcendent' method, where the critic claims to be
detached from the milieu being analysed. The difference between 'essence'
and 'appearance' entails the ideological effect of reification. For behind
the reified appearances, lies the truth of the 'phantasmagoria' of commodity
production. This truth is that human beings, despite what they might think,
are unfree; they have restrictive forms of thought and action imposed upon
them by the existing social conditions of capitalist production; they live
in 'the open air prison which the world is becoming'.' People adapt to these
conditions rather than oppose them. Consequently, the freedom that Simmel
talks about in the same context is a myth. 'In a state of unfreedom', says
Adorno, 'no one, of course, has a liberated consciousness.'
Finally, Adorno places far more weight on the role of consciousness than is
the case with comparable French thinkers such as Lacan or Foucault. Although
he spent time developing ways of escaping a reductive view of the individual
as 'socialised', and although his position here is in other respects
complex, Adorno's view of the unconscious is extremely simple. First of all,
the unconscious (like Freud's work in general) receives little elaboration
in Adorno's philosophy. On one of the rare occasions in which he actually
refers explicitly to the unconscious in Negative Dialectics, he says:
'When the doctrine of the unconscious reduces the individual to a small
number of recurring constants and conflicts it does reveal a misanthropic
disinterest in the concretely unfolded ego; and yet it reminds the ego of
the shakiness of its definitions compared with those of the id, and thus of
its tenuous and ephemeral nature'.
Even if 'shakiness', 'tenuous', and 'ephemeral' suggest a movement away from
the primacy of consciousness, there is little evidence that the unconscious
poses a real obstacle to philosophy or to thought.
In other words, Adorno still seems to be far more beholden to a logic of
identity than some of his more recent readers suggest. On the other hand, it
is also true that his aspirations are in the direction of a thought that is
not wholly and solely indebted to the logic of identity. Thus when he begins
to rethink the nature of philosophy in Negative Dialectics, Adorno makes two
key points: first, that philosophy 'lives on' after the Marxist attempt to
discredit it for being too idealist had failed; and, second, that philosophy
needs a sense of its own impotence before the materiality of the world in
order that it might remain creative and open to the new. The materiality of
the world is philosophy's inexpressible side. The essential character of
philosophy thus consists in being only too well aware of the limitedness of
the concepts with which it works. 'Disenchantment of the concept is the
antidote of philosophy.' In effect, a truly creative philosophy - which, for
Adorno is philosophy - seeks out those things which are a challenge to
thought itself. These things can be generally designated by the terms
'heterogeneity', or more pointedly, by 'nonidentity'.
Unlike Hegel's system in which the heterogeneous element would be reclaimed
dialectically through the principle of the ,negation of the negation',
Adorno announces the principle of 'negative dialectics', a principle which
refuses any kind of affirmation, or positivity, a principle of
thorough-going negativity. Thus negative dialectics is nonidentity. This key
element in Adorno's thought has a number of synonyms in addition to the ones
we have given above - for instance: 'contradiction', 'dissonance',
'freedom', 'the divergent', and 'the inexpressible'. Despite the importance
of nonidentity, Adorno also says that no thought can in fact express
nonidentity: for 'to think is to identify'. Identity thinking can only think
contradiction as pure, that is, as another identity. Where, and how, then,
does nonidentity thinking actually leave its mark on thought? In short, what
is the material basis of negative dialectics in thought?
To begin with, the material aspect is not philosophy as poetry, or as art.
For philosophy as art is equivalent of the erasure of philosophy. Nor is
philosophy permitted, according to Adorno, to give in to an aesthetic
impulse. This does not of course preclude experimenting in the presentation
of new concepts, a process which may lead to poetry, just as the most
avant-garde art might be an immanent conceptualisation. Nevertheless,
philosophy must 'void its aestheticism'. 'Its affinity to art does not
entitle it to borrow from art,' and here Adorno continues the point in a
tone for which he has become notorious '. . . least of all by virtue of the
intuitions which barbarians take for the prerogatives of art.' All that
philosophy can do in such circumstances is continue as philosophy. To give
up in light of the impossibility of expressing nonidentity would imply that
philosophy had misunderstood the heterogeneous, dissonant nature of
nonidentity; in other words, to give up in this sense is to misunderstand
that nonidentity is impure - not even a pure contradiction. 'Thoughts
intended to think the inexpressible by abandoning thought falsify the
inexpressible.' Nonidentity is possibly philosophy's hidden, negative telos.
It was thus Marx's mistake to think of the end of philosophy in precisely
these terms.
The other sense in which philosophy might come to an end is if it took the
form (as in Hegel) of Absolute knowledge. Then every problem confronting
philosophy - especially its relationship with the material world would be
resolved through the affirmative principle of the negation of the negation
which produces an affirmation.
By a surprising series of reversals, Adorno turns philosophy's potential
limitations into a philosophical gesture whose implications are perhaps now
only beginning to be appreciated. 'In principle', Adorno confirms,
'philosophy can always go astray, which is the sole reason why it can go
forward'. Philosophy, therefore, is a negative dialectics in the strongest
sense; it is itself the very nonidentity it seeks to conceptualise. In this,
the role of language becomes crucial because language is equivalent to the
presentation of philosophy's 'unfreedom' as equivalent to the impossibility
of conceptualising nonidentity. Were language to cease to be important in
philosophy, the latter would 'resemble science'.
Adorno's declarative statements in Negative Dialectics need to be read in
conjunction with his work in aesthetics and literary criticism. In this
regard, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, written during the
Second World War in an aphoristic style counters, like Kierkegaard (on whom
Adorno also wrote), Hegel's dialectical theory which 'abhorring anything
isolated, cannot admit aphorisms as such'. In his reflections on a diversity
of topics, Adorno seeks - practically, we may assume - to make a
philosophical statement, one that takes up the place of the heterogeneity of
human experience.
Similarly, Adorno's attraction to avant-garde music and art, particularly
the music of Schönberg, Webern, and Berg, was strongly motivated by a desire
to see avant-garde works defy the homogenising effects of the
commercialisation (read: reification) of art, where art objects would be
reduced to exchange-value. Subjectivity is reduced to the status of a 'mere
object' by exchange-value. There is thus a desire in Adorno to preserve the
sanctity, as it were, of subjectivity embodied in the art object, against
the onslaught of the market where value is equated with price. Through a
paratactic style (juxtaposition of statement with the link between them
being made explicit), and other devices, Adorno's presentation of his theory
of aesthetics in Aesthetic Theory participates in an effort to by-pass the
reduction of art and thought to the culture industry. Unlike his French
counterparts who tend to engage with exchange-value in order to subvert it
from the inside, Adorno lauds difficult art and philosophy; for, as he sees
it, only through a struggle to understand can value be given its true rights
here. Modernism, as the movement embodying the renewal of value, would thus
be essentially avant-garde where the work of art -'even the simplest'-
becomes a complex tour deforce. This avant-garde strategy is the point of
resistance to reappropriation by the market system.
Some (e.g., Lyotard) have come to see Adorno's approach as a last-ditch
attempt to maintain a boundary between high art and popular culture just at
a time when the logic and social basis of such a boundary is becoming
untenable in the name of the very political values (e.g., opposition to
conventional Marxism) to which Adorno himself subscribed. Furthermore, in
light of Bataille's work, it is clear that exchange-value can be subverted
as much by the very 'low' elements (obscenity) in social life, as by the
highest and most spiritually charged products of the avant-garde. Both can
entail the distancing necessary to counter the ephemeral immediacy of
consumer pleasure. Perhaps the 'low' even more than the 'high'; for
ultimately 'high' art depends on the judgement of criticism as to its nature
and quality; it is thereby incorporated into the play of concepts. In other
words, avant-garde art and philosophy become interdependent and all the more
so - if an analogy with Negative Dialectics holds - to the extent that the
art object becomes inseparable from its materiality (nonidentity). Grasping
the force and significance of avant-garde art requires the use of concepts
which can never do a work justice; for the materiality of the work
constitutes its uniqueness, and this defies conceptualisation. As Peter
Osborne has remarked, 'It is out of this critique of identity-thinking that
Adorno's basic conception of aesthetic experience, as the experience of the
"non-identical", arises.'
Overall, Adorno's Aesthetic Theory struggles to reach an accommodation
between avant-garde art that risks being 'normalised' and reified in
capitalist society, and the essentially radical autonomy of art objects
which qua art objects are singularly out of harmony with the social
conditions (including criticism) which enable them to speak at all. There is
another aspect to the question, however, one that perhaps Adorno forgets. It
is that the conceptualising facility itself could become impoverished
through a continual rejection of its worth and efficacity. While the detail
of art which defies the system because it defies conceptualisation is no
doubt fundamental, conceptualisation might well be also. In other words,
what Adorno does not readily acknowledge is that a certain degree of
identity philosophy is as essential as material nonidentity.
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Theodor W. Adorno
The following quotes are taken from Theodor W. Adorno (1974), Minima
moralia. Reflections from damaged life. (First published in German in 1951.)
London (NLB)
The gods look in pleasure on penitent sinners. 174
No emancipation without that of society. 173
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the
dominated. 182
The man for whom time stretches out painfully is one waiting in vain,
disappointed at not finding tomorrow already continuing yesterday. 175
He who has loved and who betrays love does harm not only to the image of the
past, but to the past itself. 166
Time flies. 166
Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is
supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for
this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love
transcends bourgeois society. But in erecting truth directly amid the
general untruth, it perverts the former into the latter. 172
But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain. 167
They are down to earth like their zoological forbears, before they got up on
their hind-legs. 184
To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults. 190
Life has become the ideology of its own absence. 190
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves. 192
Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar. 191
All morality has been modelled on immorality and to this day has reinstated
it at every level. The slave morality is indeed bad: it is still the master
morality. 187
The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his
autonomous being is modelled on material power. 185
People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of
subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more
distinguished cut of an evening dress. 188-189
The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich
by their own. 187-188
In his state of complete powerlessness the individual perceives the time he
has left to live as a brief reprieve. 165
Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by
its own means. 150
The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of
exploitation, however mediated. 148
The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes
human at all by imitating other human beings. 154
Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in
the most literal sense. 154
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention. 141
In the fanatical love of cars the feeling of physical homelessness plays a
part. It is at the bottom of what the bourgeois were wont to call,
mistakenly, the flight from oneself, from the inner void. Anyone who wants
to move with the times is not allowed to be different. Psychological
emptiness is itself only the result of the wrong kind of social absorption.
The boredom that people are running away from merely mirrors the process of
running away, that started long before. 139
What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest
part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the
world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the
omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of
machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness. 146-147
Quality is decided by the depth at which the work incorporates the
alternatives within itself, and so masters them. 142
Genuine things are those to which commodities and other means of exchange
can be reduced, particularly gold. But like gold, genuineness, abstracted as
the proportion of fine metal, becomes a fetish. 155
Insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the
rhythm of total destruction. 163
Running in the street conveys an impression of terror. The victim's fall is
already mimed in his attempt to escape it. The position of the head, trying
to hold itself up, is that of a drowning man, and the straining face
grimaces as if under torture. He has to look ahead, can hardly glance back
without stumbling, as if treading the shadow of a foe whose features freeze
the limbs. Once people ran from dangers that were too desperate to turn and
face, and someone running after a bus unwittingly bears witness to past
terror. Traffic regulations no longer need allow for wild animals, but they
have not pacified running. It estranges us from bourgeois walking. The truth
becomes visible that something is amiss with security, that the unleashed
powers of life, be they mere vehicles, have to be escaped. The body's
habituation to walking as normal stems from the good old days. It was the
bourgeois form of locomotion: physical demythologization, free of the spell
of hieratic pacing, roofless wandering, breathless flight. Human dignity
insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by
command or terror. The walk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time,
the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century. 162
In the clock's over-loud ticking we hear the mockery of light-years for the
span of our existence. 165
Horror is beyond the reach of psychology. 164
Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom,
leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion
to the conquest of strange stars. 156
It is not man's lapse into luxurious indolence that is to be feared, but the
savage spread of the social under the mask of universal nature, the
collective as a blind fury of activity. 156
He who matures early lives in anticipation. 161
None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of
eternal peace. 156
The ideology of cultural conservatism which sees enlightenment and art as
simple antitheses is false, among other reasons, in overlooking the moment
of enlightenment in the genesis of beauty. Enlightenment does not merely
dissolve all the qualities that beauty adheres to, but posits the quality of
beauty in the first place. 224
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth. 222
If the integration of society, particularly in totalitarian states,
designates subjects more and more exclusively as partial moments in the
network of material production, then the 'alteration of the technical
composition of capital' is prolonged within those encompassed, and indeed
constituted, by the technological demands of the production process. The
organic composition of man is growing. That which determines subjects as
means of production and not as living purposes, increases with the
proportion of machines to variable capital. 229
Taste is the ability to keep in balance the contradiction in art between the
made and the apparent not-having-become; true works of art, however, never
at one with taste, are those which push this contradiction to the extreme,
and realize themselves in their resultant downfall. 227
Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category. 218
Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic. 217
The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. 222
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it. 219
The organic composition of man reers by no means only to his specialized
technical faculties, but - and this the usual cultural criticism will not at
any price admit - equally to their opposite, the moments of naturalness
which once themselves sprung from the social dialectic and are now
succumbing to it. Even what differs from technology in man is now being
incorporated into it as a kind of lubrication. 229-230
He who integrates is lost. 240
Newness only becomes mere evil in its totalitarian format, where all the
tension between individual and society, that once gave rise to the category
of the new, is dissipated. Today the appeal to newness, of no matter what
kind, provided only that it is archaic enough, has become universal, the
omnipresent medium of false mimesis. The decomposition of the subject is
consummated in his self-abandonment to an ever-changing sameness. 238
The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is
the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from
the standpoint of redemption. 247
Mind arose out of existence, as an organ for keeping alive. In reflecting
existence, however, it becomes at the same time something else. The existent
negates itself as thought upon itself. Such negation is mind's element. 243
Metaphysical categories are not merely an ideology concealing the social
system; at the same time they express its nature, the truth about, and in
their changes are precipitated those in its most central experiences. 231
The ego consciously takes the whole man into its service as a piece of
apparatus. In this re-organization the ego as business-manager delegates so
much of itself to the ego as business-mechanism, that it becomes quite
abstract, a mere reference-point: self-preservation forfeits its self.
Character traits, from genuine kindness to the hysterical fit of rage,
become capable of manipulation, until they coincide exactly with the demands
of a given situation. With their mobilization they change. All that is left
are the light, rigid, empty husks of emotions, matter transportable at will,
devoid of anything personal. They are no longer the subject; rather, the
subject responds to them as to his internal object. 230
Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that
has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people. 233
So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of
functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not
wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen
as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death
has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the
natural organism in face of the social absolute. 232
There is no love that is not an echo. 217
Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one
can indeed think. 197
Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned
problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem. 196
The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as
it counterfeits them. 200
Intelligence is a moral category. 197
The quantification of technical progress, however, their dissection into
minute operations largely independent of education and experience, makes the
expertise of these new-style managers to a large degree illusory, a pretence
concealing the privilege of being appointed. That technical development has
reached a state which makes every function really open to all - this
immanently socialist element in progress has been travestied under late
industrialism. Membership of the elite seems attainable to everyone. One
only waits to be co-opted. Suitability consists in affinity, from the
libidinal garnishing of all goings-on, by way of the healthy technocratic
outlook, to hearty realpolitik. Such men are expert only at control. 194
Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking
strength. 192
If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the
goods. 196
Up to our days a man's membership of the upper or lower classes has been
crudely determined by whether or not he accepted money. At times false pride
became conscious criticism. 195
The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted
openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished
rediscovers himself. 200
He who has laughter on his side has no need of proof. 210
The intellectuals themselves are already so heavily committed to what is
endorsed in their isolated sphere, that they no longer desire anything that
does not carry the highbrow tag. 207
... legitimate works of art are today without exception socially undesired.
213
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total
decay has absorbed the forces of satire. 211
... everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected
domination. 204
The dreams have no dream. Just as the technicolour heroes do not allow us to
forget for a second that they are normal people, type-cast public faces and
investments, so under the thin tinsel of schematically produced fantasy
emerges in unmistakable outline the skeleton of cinema-ontology, the whole
obligatory hierarchy of values, th canon of the undesirable or the
exemplary. There is nothing more practical than escape, nothing more
fervently espoused to big business: we are abducted into the distance only
to have the laws of empiricist living hammered from afar, unhampered by
empirical possibilities of evasion, into our own consciousness. The escape
is full of message. And message, the opposite, looks what it is: the wish to
flee from flight. It reifies the resistance to reification. 202
Society is integral even before it undergoes totalitarian ule. Its
organization also embraces those at war with it by co-ordinating their
consciousness to its own. 206
The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into
social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any
conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of
warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting
nothing, is one with total social delusion. 206
Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted
from leisure ... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this
resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain.
138-139
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass. 50
In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I' . 50
The whole is the false. 50
The first and only principle of sexual ethics: the accuser is always in the
wrong. 50
In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations. 49
In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome
was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it
was already a dream. 49
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego
as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
50
The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes. 49
One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly. 52
The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be
taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful
decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. Underlying the
prevalent health is death. All the movements of health resemble the
reflex-movements of beings whose hearts have stopped beating. 59
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own
powerlessness, stupefy us. 57
Psychology repeats in the case of properties what was done to property. It
expropriates the individual by allocating him its happiness. 64
And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not
necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the
latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous
pattern. 60
Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with
empty, paralysed intervals. 54
There is some reason to fear that the involvement of non-Western peoples in
the conflicts of industrial society, long overdue in itself, will be less to
the benefit of the liberated peoples than to that of rationally improved
production and communications, and a modestly raised standard of living. 53
Normality is death. 56
The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that
culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not
already its negation - is idiotic. 55
In the end the tough guys are the truely effeminate ones, who need the
weaklings as their victims in order not to admit that they are like them. 46
Lies are told only to convey to someone that one has no need either of him
or his good opinion. 30
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than
glorification of the splendid system that makes them so. 28
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious
deviations. 37
The only decent marriage would be one allowing each partner to lead an
independent life, in which, instead of a fusion derived from an enforced
community of economic interest, both freely accepted mutual responsibility.
31
In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility
vanishes. 25
Today it is seen as arrogant, alien and improper to engage in private
activity without any evident ulterior motive. Not to be 'after' something is
almost suspect. 23-24
We shudder at the brutalization of life, but lacking any objectively binding
morality we are forced at every step into actions and words, into
calculations that are by humane standards barbaric, and even by the dubious
values of good society, tactless. 27
He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others
and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private
interest. 26
The hardest hit, as everywhere, are those who have no choice. 39
The decay of giving is morrored in the distressing invention of
gift-article, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give
because one really does not want to. 42
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between
people. 41
The enraged man always appears as the gang-leader of his own self, giving
his unconscious the order to pull no punches, his eyes shining with the
satisfaction of speaking for the many that he himself is. The more someone
has espoused the cause of his own aggression, the more perfectly he
represents the repressive principle of society. In this sense more than in
any other, perhaps, the proposition is true that the most individual is the
most general. 45
Every undistorted relationship, perhaps indeed the conciliation that is part
of organic life itself, is a gift. He who through consequential logic
becomes incapable of it, makes himself a thing and freezes. 43
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. 40
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly. 39
If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one's own, and such
parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.
41
The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what
he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in
his most secret innervations. 40
The scientific industry has its exact counterpart in the kind of minds it
harnesses: they no longer need to do themselves any violence in becoming
their own voluntary and zealous overseers. Even if they show themselves,
outside their official capacity, to be quite human and sensible being, they
are paralysed by pathic stupidity the moment they begin to think
professionally.
But far from finding anything inimical in the prohibitions on thinking, the
candidates - and all scientists are candidates for posts - feel relieved.
Because thinking burdens them with a subjective responsibility which their
objective position in the productive process does not allow them to meet,
they renounce it, shiver a bit, and run to join their opponents. Dislike of
thinking rapidly becomes incapacity for it: people who can effortlessly
discover the most sophisticated statistical objections when it is a question
of sabotaging a piece of knowledge, are unable to make ex cathedra the
simplest predictions. They hit out at speculation and in it kill common
sense. The more intelligent of them suspect the sickness of their
intellectual powers, since it first appears not universally but in the
organs whose services they sell. Many wait in fear and shame for their
defect to be discovered. But they all find it publicly acclaimed as a moral
achievment, and see themselves recognized for a scientific asceticism which
to them is none, but the secret contour of their weakness. Their rancour is
socially rationalized with the argument: thinking is unscientific. At the
same time, their mental power has, in a number of dimensions, been
prodigiously increased by control mechanisms. The collective stupidity of
research technicians is not simply an absence or regression of intellectual
faculties, but a proliferation of the thinking faculty itself, which
consumes thought with its own strength. 123-124
Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of
thought but absolute tautology. 123
The overbearing matter-of-factness which sacrifices the subject to the
ascertainment of the truth, rejects at once truth and objectivity. 126
The division of the world into important and unimportant matters, which has
always served to neutralize the key phenomena of social injustice as mere
exceptions, should be followed up to the point where it is convicted of its
own untruth. The division which makes everything objects must itself become
an object of thought, instead of guiding it. 125
The world is systematized horror, but therefore it is to do the world too
much honour to think of it entirely as a system; for its unifying principle
is division, and it reconciles by asserting unimpaired the irreconcilability
of the general and the particular. 113
He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He
alone keeps faith who says: I was happy. The only relation of consciousness
to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity. 112
Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the
unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come. 121-122
Rampant technolgy eliminates luxury, but not by declaring privilege a human
right; rather, it does so by both raising the general standard of living and
cutting off the possibility of fulfilment. 119
Advice to intellectuals: let no-one represent you. 128
Whatever the intellectual does, is wrong. He experiences drastically and
vitally the ignominious choice that late capitalism secretly presents to all
its dependants: to become one more grown-up, or to remain a child. 133
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such
prescribed choices. 132
No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.
138
Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every
mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation. 136
In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality
must be raised anew. 129
The most powerful person is he who is able to do least himself and burden
others most with the things for which he lends his name and pockets the
credit. 128
Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of
repressive self-discipline. 130
A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of
assistants. 129
To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in
it. 112
Rather, knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions,
innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short
through the dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent
medium of experience. 80
The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality. 79
Without hope, the idea of truth would be scarcely even thinkable, and it is
the cardinal untruth, having recognized existence to be bad, to present it
as truth simply because it has been recognized. 98
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. 87
The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness,
nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason. 73
The notions of subjective and objective have been completely reversed.
Objective means the non-controversial aspect of things, their unquestioned
impression, the façade made up of classified data, that is, the subjective;
and they call subjective anything which breaches that façade, engages the
specific experience of a matter, casts off all ready-made judgements and
substitutes relatedness to the object for the majority consensus of those
who do not even look at it, let alone think abou it - that is, the
objective. 69-70
To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image
of undistorted life ... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely
planet. 78
Exuberant health is always, as such, sickness also. 77
Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill
their bellies. 102
A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself. 110
Lies have long legs: they are ahead of their time. The conversion of all
questions of truth into questions of power, a process that truth itself
cannot escape if it is not to be annihilated by power, not only suppresses
truth as in earlier despotic orders, but has attacked the very heart of the
distinction between true and false, which the hirelings of logic were in any
case diligently working to abolish. So Hitler, of whom no-one can say
whether he died or escaped, survives. 109
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. 111
Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews. 110
An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but
the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences. 103
That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It
considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not
enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its
machinery, not quite determined by its totality. 102-103
Fascism is itself less 'ideological', in so far as it openly proclaims the
principle of domination that is elsewhere concealed. 108
When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid
quality. 107
If you could perchance learn how I searched fer dis stuff yea get good
grades all the time. 101
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