Theodor Adorno
The importance of the culture industry in the spiritual constitution of the masses is no dispensation for reflection on its objective legitimation, its essential being, least of all by a science which thinks itself pragmatic.
What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content. In that sense the character of the jargon would be quite formal: it sees to it that what it wants is on the whole felt and accepted through its mere delivery, without regard to the content of the words used.
The jargon makes it seem that ... the pure attention of the expression to the subject matter would be a fall into sin.
Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.
Words of the jargon sound as if they said something higher than what they mean.
In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon hearing the voice of a 'crooner'. Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized.
A thinking that approaches it objects openly, rigorously ... is also free toward its objects in the sense that it refuses to have rules prescribed to it by organized knowledge. It ... rends the veil with which society conceals them, and perceives them anew.
In a world that has been thoroughly permeated by the structures of the social order, a world that so overpowers every individual that scarcely any option remains but to accept it on its own terms, such naiveté reproduces itself incessantly and disastrously. What people have forced upon them by a boundless apparatus, which they themselves constitute and which they are locked into, virtually eliminates all natural elements and becomes “nature” to them.
We are really no longer ourselves a piece of nature at the moment when we notice, when we recognize, that we are a piece of nature.
Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.
If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought’s powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence.
Underlying the concept of positivity is the conviction that the positive is intrinsically positive in itself, without anyone pausing to ask what is to be regarded as positive. ...
It is significant and really quite interesting that the term 'positive' actually contains this ambivalence. On the one hand, 'positive' means what is given, is postulated, is there—as when we speak of positivism as the philosophy that sticks to the facts. But, equally, 'positive' also refers to the good, the approvable, in a certain sense, the ideal. And I imagine that this semantic constellation expresses with precision what countless people actually feel to be the case.
In psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.
What appears as the positive is essentially the negative, i.e. the thing that is to be criticized.
The thesis of the identity of concept and thing is in general the vital nerve of idealist thought, and indeed traditional thought in general. ... Negative dialectics as critique means above all criticism of precisely this claim to identity.
The concept of positivity in itself, in abstracto, has become part and parcel of the ideology today. ... Critique has started to become suspect, regardless of its content.
We cannot think any true thought unless we want the true. Thinking is itself an aspect of practice.
Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.
Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch
Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails.
The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.
Immer von Beckett ist eine technische Reduktion bis zum äußersten. ... Aber diese Reduktion ist ja wirklich das was die Welt aus uns macht ... das heißt die Welt aus uns gemacht diese Stümpfe von Menschen also diese Menschen die eigentlich ihr ich ihr verloren haben die sind wirklich die Produkte der Welt in der wir leben.
Always with Beckett there is a technical reduction to the extreme. ... But this reduction is really what the world makes out of us ...that is the world has made out of us these stumps of men ... these men who have actually lost their I, who are really the products of the world in which we live.
In organized groups such as the army or the Church there is either no mention of love whatsoever between the members, or it is expressed only in a sublimated and indirect way, through the mediation of some religious imagine in the love of whom the members unite and whose all-embracing love they are supposed to imitate in their attitude towards each other. ... It is one of the basic tenets of fascist leadership to keep primary libidinal energy on an unconscious level so as to divert its manifestations in a way suitable to political ends.
In America I was liberated from a certain naïve belief in culture and attained the capacity to see culture from the outside. To clarify the point: in spite of all social criticism and all consciousness of the primacy of economic factors, the fundamental importance of the mind—Geist—was quasi a dogma self-evident to me from the very beginning. The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed.
Music for entertainment ... seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility.
Impulse, subjectivity and profanation, the old adversaries of materialistic alienation, now succumb to it. ... The representatives of the opposition to the authoritarian schema become witnesses to the authority of commercial success. ... In the service of success they renounce that insubordinate character which was theirs.
To be sure, exchange-value exerts its power in a special way in the realm of cultural goods. For in the world of commodities this realm appears to be exempted from the power of exchange, to be in an immediate relationship with the goods, and it is this appearance in turn which alone gives cultural goods their exchange-value. But they nevertheless simultaneously fall completely into the world of commodities, are produced for the market, and are aimed at the market.
The dressing up and puffing up of the individual erases the lineaments of protest.
It suffices to remember how many sorrows he is spared who no longer thinks too many thoughts, how much more "in accordance with reality" a person behaves when he affirms that the real is the right, how much more capacity to use the machinery falls to the person who integrates himself with it uncomplainingly.
Even the most insensitive hit song enthusiast cannot always escape the feeling that the child with a sweet tooth comes to know in the candy store.
Regressive listeners behave like children. Again and again and with stubborn malice, they demand the one dish they have once been served.
Bourgeois sport [wants] to differentiate itself strictly from play. Its bestial seriousness consists in the fact that instead of remaining faithful to the dream of freedom by getting away from purposiveness, the treatment of play as a duty puts it among useful purposes and thereby wipes out the trace of freedom in it. This is particularly valid for contemporary mass music. It is only play as a repetition of prescribed models, and the playful release from responsibility which is thereby achieved does not reduce at all the time devoted to duty except by transferring the responsibility to the models, the following of which one makes in
Kunst ist Magie, befreit von der Lüge, Wahrheit zu sein.
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
Anpassung tritt kraft der Ideologie der Kulturindustrie anstelle von Bewußtsein: nie wird die Ordnung, die aus ihr herausspringt, dem konfrontiert, was sie zu sein beansprucht, oder den realen Interessen der Menschen. Ordnung aber ist nicht an sich ein Gutes. Sie wäre es einzig als richtige. Daß die Kulturindustrie darum nicht sich kümmert; daß sie Ordnung in abstracto anpreist, bezeugt nur die Ohnmacht und Unwahrheit der Botschaften, die sie übermittelt. Während sie beansprucht, Führer der Ratlosen zu sein, und ihnen Konflikte vorgaukelt, die sie mit ihren eigenen verwechseln sollen, löst sie die Konflikte nur zum Schein, so wie sie in ihrem eigenen Leben kaum gelöst werden könnten.
The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. The order that springs from it is never confronted with what it claims to be or with the real interests of human beings. Order, however, is not good in itself. It would be so only as a good order. The fact that the culture industry is oblivious to this and extols order in abstracto, bears witness to the impotence and untruth of the messages it conveys. While it claims to lead the perplexed, it deludes them with false conflicts which they are to exchange for their own. It solves conflicts for them only in appearance, in a way that they can hardly be solved in their real lives.
In the products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble only so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually by representa
In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.
By abstaining from all definite content, whether as formal logic and theory of science or as the legend of Being beyond all beings, philosophy declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete social goals.
Philosophy ... should not imagine that specialized work in epistemological theory, or whatever else prides itself on being research, is actually philosophy. Yet a philosophy forswearing all of that must in the end be irreconcilably at odds with the dominant consciousness. Nothing else raises it above the suspicion of apologetics. Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.
Traditional philosophy's claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics.
Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.
The more reified the world becomes, the thicker the veil cast upon nature, the more the thinking weaving that veil in its turn claims ideologically to be nature, primordial experience.
Falsch am Positivismus ist, daß er die nun einmal gegebene Arbeitsteilung, die der Wissenschaften von der gesellschaftlichen Praxis und die innerhalb der Wissenschaft, als Maß des Wahren supponiert und keine Theorie erlaubt, welche die Arbeitsteilung selbst als abgeleitet, vermittelt durchsichtig machen, ihrer falschen Autorität entkleiden könnte.
Die Berufung auf Wissenschaft, auf ihre Spielregeln, auf die Alleingültigkeit der Methoden, zu denen sie sich entwickelte, ist zur Kontrollinstanz geworden, die den freien, ungegängelten, nicht schon dressierten Gedanken ahndet und vom Geist nichts duldet als das methodologisch Approbierte. Wissenscahaft,das Medium von Autonomie, ist in einen Apparat der Heteronomie ausgeartet.
The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.
Sie möchte formal und material ebenjener Gestalt geistiger Freiheit helfen, die in den herrschenden philosophischen Richtungen keine Stel1e hat.
... to promote precisely that manner of intellectual freedom that has no place in the regnant philosophical movements
Denken, das offen, konsequent und auf dem Stand vorwärtsgetriebener Erkenntnis den Objekten sich zuwendet, ist diesen gegenüber frei auch derart, daß es sich nicht vom organisierten Wissen Regeln vorschreiben läßt. Es kehrt den Inbegriff der in ihm akkumulierten Erfahrung den Gegenständen zu, zerreißt das gesel1schaftliche Gespinst, das sie verbirgt, und gewahrt sie neu.
A thinking that approaches it objects o
The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.
The important thing is not the planning of an Index Verborum Prohibitorum of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their linguistic function.
Elements of empirical language are manipulated in their rigidity, as if they were elements of a true and revealed language. The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
Was Jargon sei und was nicht, darüber entscheidet, ob das Wort in dem Tonfall geschrieben ist, in dem es sich als transzendent gegenüber der eigenen Bedeutung setzt; ob die einzelnen Worte aufgeladen werden auf Kosten von Satz, Urteil, Gedachtem. Demnach wäre der Charakter des Jargons überaus formal: er sorgt dafür, daß, was er möchte, in weitem Maß ohne Rücksicht auf den Inhalt der Worte gespürt und akzeptiert wird durch ihren Vortrag.
Der des Jargons Kundige braucht nicht zu sagen, was er denkt, nicht einmal recht es zu denken: das nimmt der Jargon ihm ab und entwertet den Gedanken.
Negative Dialektik ... handelt sich um den Entwurf einer Philosophie, die nicht den Begriff der Identität von Sein und Denken voraussetzt und auch nicht in ihm terminiert, sondern die gerade das Gegenteil, also das Auseinanderweisen von Begriff und Sache, von Subjekt und Objekt, und ihre Unversöhntheit, artikulieren will.
Negative dialectics ... does not presuppose the identity of being and thought, nor does it culminate in that identity. Instead it will attempt to articulate the very opposite, namely the divergence of concept and thing, subject and object.
When I speak of 'negative dialectics' not the least important reason for doing so is my desire to dissociate myself from this fetishization of the positive.
The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.
When intellectual formulations are treated simply by relegating them to the past and permitting the simple passage of time to substitute for development, the suspicion is justified that such formulations have not really been mastered, but rather they are being suppressed.
Indifference to style ... is almost always symptomatic of the dogmatic sclerosis of content.
In pursuing yonder what they have lost, they encounter only the nothing they have. In order not to lose touch with the everyday dreariness in which, as irremediable realists, they are at home, they adapt the meaning they revel in to the meaninglessness they flee. The worthless magic is nothing other than the worthless existence it lights up.
What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.
Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.
The bourgeois … is tolerant. His love for people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be.
The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.
The conflicts that tear society apart resemble the distinction between the concept and the particular facts subordinated to it. ...
Whatever refuses to abide by the unity imposed by the principle of dominion manifests itself not as something indifferent to that principle, but as an infringement of logic: as a contradiction.
The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority.
Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.
About Alban Berg
If one is to take Lulu's twelve-tone chord as the integral totality of complementary harmony, then Berg's allegorical genius proves itself within a historical perspective which makes the brain reel: just as Lulu in the world of total illusion longs for nothing but her murderer and finally finds him in that sound, so does all harmony of unrequited happiness long for its fatal chord as the cipher of fulfillment — twelve-tone music is not to be separated from dissonance. Fatal: because all dynamics come to a standstill within it without finding release. The law of complementary harmony already implies the end of the musical experience of time, as this was heralded in the dissociation of time according to Expressionistic extremes.
About art
The coming extinction of art is prefigured in the increasing impossibility of representing historical events.
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
About Auschwitz-Birkenau
To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
About Daniel Levinson
Fear and Destruction|destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, Eros|eros belongs mainly to democracy.
From Dialectic of Enlightenment
Furchtbares hat die Menschheit sich antun müssen, bis das Selbst, der identische, zweckgerichtete, männliche Charakter des Menschen geschaffen war, und etwas davon wird noch in jeder Kindheit wiederholt.
About Edmund Husserl
Whoever wishes to define the conceptual invariants of natural beauty would make himself as ridiculous as Husserl did when he reports that while ambulating he perceived the green freshness of the lawn. Whoever declaims on natural beauty verges on poetastery. Only the pedant presumes to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly in nature, but without such distinction the concept of natural beauty would be empty.
About Ego
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
About Else Frenkel-Brunswik
Fear and Destruction|destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, Eros|eros belongs mainly to democracy.
About Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Hegel ... destroyed the illusion of the subject's being-in-itself and showed that the subject is itself an aspect of social objectivity. ... However, ... we must ask this question: is this objectivity which we have shown to be a necessary condition and which subsumes abstract subjectivity in fact the higher factor? Does it not rather remain precisely what Hegel reproached it with being in his youth, namely pure externality, the coercive collective? Does not the retreat to this supposedly higher authority signify the regression of the subject, which had earlier won its freedom only with the greatest efforts, with infinite pains?
About Great Commandment
Liebe ... ist ein Unmittelbares und widerspricht wesentlich vermittelten Beziehungen. Der Zuspruch zur Liebe — womöglich in der imperativischen Form, daß man es soll — ist selber Bestandstück der Ideologie, welche die Kälte verewigt. Ihm eignet das Zwangshafte, Unterdrückende, das der Liebesfähigkeit entgegenwirkt. Das erste wäre darum, der Kälte zum Bewußtsein ihrer selbst zu verhelfen, der Gründe, warum sie wurde.
Love is something immediate and in essence contradicts mediated relationships. The exhortation to love—even in its imperative form, that one should do it—is itself part of the ideology coldness perpetuates. It bears the compulsive, oppressive quality that counteracts the ability to love. The first thing therefore is to bring coldness to the consciousness of itself, of the reasons why it arose.
About Heteronomy
If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought’s powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence. …
It is incumbent upon philosophy … to provide a refuge for freedom. Not that there is any hope that it could break the political tendencies that are throttling freedom throughout the world both from within and without and whose violence permeates the very fabric of philosophical argumentation.
About History
The coming extinction of art is prefigured in the increasing impossibility of representing historical events.
About Impotence
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
About Jazz
Jazz is the false liquidation of art—instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.
About logic
The logical figure of the absurd, which presents as stringent the contradictory opposite of stringency, negates all the meaningfulness logic seems to provide in order to convict logic of its own absurdity: to convict it of using subject, predicate, and copula to lay out the nonidentical as though it were identical, as though it could be accommodated with forms.
** Theodor Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz? (2003), p.
About Marcel Proust
The son of well-to-do parents who … engages in a so-called intellectual profession, as an artist or a scholar, will have a particularly difficult time with those bearing the distasteful title of colleagues. It is not merely that his independence is envied, the seriousness of his intentions mistrusted, that he is suspected of being a secret envoy of the established powers. … The real resistance lies elsewhere.
The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become “practical,” a business with strict division of labor, departments and restricted entry. The man of independent means who chooses it out of repugnance for the ignominy of earning money will not be disposed to acknowledge the fact. For this he is punished. He … is ranked in the competitive hierarchy as a dilettante no matter how well he knows his subject, and must, if he wants to make a career, show himself even more resolutely blinkered than the most inveterate specialist. The urge to suspend the division of labor which, within certain limits, his economic situation enables him to satisfy, is thought particularly disreputable: it betrays a disinclination to sanction the operations imposed by society, and domineering competence permits no such idiosyncrasies. The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract. It performs this task all the more reliably since anyone who repudiates this division of labor—if only by taking pleasure in his work—makes himself vulnerable by its standards, in ways inseparable from elements of his superiority. Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game.
The son of well-to-do parents who, regardless of whether from talent or weakness, takes up a so-called intellectual profession, as an artist or scholar, has it particularly hard among those who bear the distasteful name of colleague.
Not only is his independence envied, the seriousness of his intention mistrusted, and in him a secret emissary of the established powers suspected. Such mistrust testifies indeed to ressentiment, but would mostly find its confirmation. However, the real resistances lie elsewhere.
The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become “practical,” a business with strict division of labor, with branches and numerus clausus.
The materially independent person, who chooses it out of repugnance against the shame of earning money, will not be inclined to acknowledge that. For that he is punished. He is no “professional,” ranks in the hierarchy of competitors as a dilettante, regardless of how much he understands substantively, and must, if he wants to make a career, outdo the most stubborn specialist in resolute narrow-mindedness.
The suspension of the division of labor, which drives him and which his economic situation enables him to realize within certain limits, is considered particularly disreputable: it betrays the reluctance to sanction the business recommended by society, and the swaggering competence allows no such idiosyncrasies.
The departmentalization of the mind is a means of abolishing it where it is not operated ex officio, on commission. It does its job all the more reliably, as always the one who denounces the division of labor—even if only by taking pleasure in his work—exposes himself according to its own measure, in ways inseparable from moments of his superiority.
Thus order is ensured: some have to join in because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could otherwise live are kept out because they do not want to join in. It is as if the class from which the independent intellectuals have deserted revenges itself by compulsively enforcing its demands where the deserter seeks refuge.
About Martin Heidegger
In both positivism and Heidegger—at least in his later work—speculation is the target of attack. In both cases the thought that autonomously raises itself above the facts through interpreting them and that cannot be reclaimed by them without leaving a surplus is condemned for being empty and vain concept-mongering.
Being, in whose name Heidegger’s philosophy increasingly concentrates itself, is for him—as a pure self-presentation to passive consciousness—just as immediate, just as independent of the mediations of the subject as the facts and the sensory data are for the positivists. In both philosophical movements thinking becomes a necessary evil and is broadly discredited. Thinking loses its element of independence. The autonomy of reason vanishes: the part of reason that exceeds the subordinate reflection upon and adjustment to pre-given data. With it, however, goes the conception of freedom and, potentially, the self-determination of human society.
About mind
The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract.
From Minima Moralia
Marriage as a community of interests unfailingly means the degradation of the interested parties, and it is the perfidy of the world's arrangements that no one, even if aware of it, can escape such degradation. The idea might therefore be entertained that marriage without ignominy is a possibility reserved for those spared the pursuit of interests, for the rich. But the possibility is purely formal, for the privileged are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second-nature—they would not otherwise uphold privilege.
The son of well-to-do parents who, regardless of whether from talent or weakness, takes up a so-called intellectual profession, as an artist or scholar, has it particularly hard among those who bear the distasteful name of colleague.
Not only is his independence envied, the seriousness of his intention mistrusted, and in him a secret emissary of the established powers suspected. Such mistrust testifies indeed to ressentiment, but would mostly find its confirmation. However, the real resistances lie elsewhere.
The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become “practical,” a business with strict division of labor, with branches and numerus clausus.
The materially independent person, who chooses it out of repugnance against the shame of earning money, will not be inclined to acknowledge that. For that he is punished. He is no “professional,” ranks in the hierarchy of competitors as a dilettante, regardless of how much he understands substantively, and must, if he wants to make a career, outdo the most stubborn specialist in resolute narrow-mindedness.
The suspension of the division of labor, which drives him and which his economic situation enables him to realize within certain limits, is considered particularly disreputable: it betrays the reluctance to sanction the business recommended by society, and the swaggering competence allows no such idiosyncrasies.
The departmentalization of the mind is a means of abolishing it where it is not operated ex officio, on commission. It does its job all the more reliably, as always the one who denounces the division of labor—even if only by taking pleasure in his work—exposes himself according to its own measure, in ways inseparable from moments of his superiority.
Thus order is ensured: some have to join in because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could otherwise live are kept out because they do not want to join in. It is as if the class from which the independent intellectuals have deserted revenges itself by compulsively enforcing its demands where the deserter seeks refuge.
In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than the glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.
The center of intellectual self-discipline as such is in the process of decomposition.
The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.
What is true of the instinctual life is no less of the intellectual: the painter or composer forbidding himself as trite this or that combination of colors or chords, the writer wincing at banal or pedantic verbal configurations, reacts so violently because layers of himself are drawn to them.
Repudiation of the present cultural morass presupposes sufficient involvement in it to feel it itching in one's finger-tips, so to speak, but at the same time the strength, drawn from this involvement, to dismiss it.
This strength, though manifesting itself as individual resistance, is by no means of a merely individual nature. In the intellectual conscience possessed of it, the social movement is no less present than the moral super-ego.
Such conscience grows out of a conception of the good society and its citizens. If this conception dims—and who could still trust blindly in it—the downward urge of the intellect loses its inhibitions and all the detritus dumped in the individual by barbarous culture—half-learning, slackness, heavy familiarity, coarseness—comes to light.
Usually it is rationalized as humanity, desire to be understood by others, worldly-wise responsibility. But the sacrifice of intellectual self-discipline comes much too easily to him who makes it for us to believe his assurance that it is one.
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
Tenderness between people is nothing other than awareness of the possibility of relations without purpose.
The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.
The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.
Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case.
Rigorous formulation demands unequivocal comprehension, conceptual effort, to which people are deliberately disencouraged, and imposes on them in advance of any content a suspension of all received opinions, and thus an isolation, that they violently resist.
Only what they do not need first to understand, they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches them as familiar.
All the world's not a stage.
Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of the free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, ... but only for the dead God?
About Nazi Germany
I remember well a junior seminar I gave with Paul Tillich shortly before the outbreak of the Third Reich. A participant spoke out against the idea of the meaning of existence. She said life did not seem very meaningful to her and she didn't know whether it had a meaning. The very voluble Nazi contingent became very excited by this and scraped the floor noisily with their feet. Now, I do not wish to maintain that this Nazi foot-shuffling proves or refutes anything in particular, but I do find it highly significant. I would say it is a touchstone for the relation of thinking to freedom. It raises the question whether thought can bear the idea that a given reality is meaningless and that mind is unable to orientate itself; or whether the intellect has become so enfeebled that it finds itself paralysed by the idea that all is not well with the world.
About Nevitt Sanford
Fear and Destruction|destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, Eros|eros belongs mainly to democracy.
About Occultism
Occultism is the metaphysics of dunces.
About Paul Tillich
I remember well a junior seminar I gave with Paul Tillich shortly before the outbreak of the Third Reich. A participant spoke out against the idea of the meaning of existence. She said life did not seem very meaningful to her and she didn't know whether it had a meaning. The very voluble Nazi contingent became very excited by this and scraped the floor noisily with their feet. Now, I do not wish to maintain that this Nazi foot-shuffling proves or refutes anything in particular, but I do find it highly significant. I would say it is a touchstone for the relation of thinking to freedom. It raises the question whether thought can bear the idea that a given reality is meaningless and that mind is unable to orientate itself; or whether the intellect has become so enfeebled that it finds itself paralysed by the idea that all is not well with the world.
About Self-consciousness
Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.
From The Authoritarian Personality
Fear and Destruction|destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, Eros|eros belongs mainly to democracy.
About Truth
Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
By Andrew Bowie
Ideology is a highly controversial term, precisely because it challenges the extent to which people are self-determining with respect to the ideas to which they adhere. This seems to put the critic of ideology in a transcendent position, of the kind which theories like Adorno's should be concerned to question. However, saying, as Rorty does, for example, that ideology therefore should just mean 'bad idea' is likely to obscure the fact that the production and adoption of 'bad ideas' involve accumulated systemic social and economic pressures. These need to be analysed in terms of how individuals are subject to forces beyond their control and yet do not see how they may be led to deceive themselves by such forces.
By Christopher Wood
It is easy to see that the mimetic image is inscribed in art. Every painting, every sculpture, every photograph wants to be a second body And it is easy to see that the apparitional, instantaneous image is also inscribed in the work of art. Modern works of art, according to Theodor Adorno, are "ashamed" of their apparitional quality but are unable to shed it. "If the deities of antiquity," Adorno wrote, "were said to appear fleetingly at their cult sites .. . this act of appearing became the law of the permanence of artworks, but at the price of the living incarnation of what appears." It is harder to see that the work of art is already inscribed in every image, even in the supposedly pre-aesthetic artifact like the effigy and the mask. Emile Durkheim recognized this fact when he observed that "art is not merely an external ornament with which the [religious] cult has adorned itself in order to dissimulate certain of its features which may be too austere and too rude; but rather, in itself, the cult is something aesthetic."' The image is thus best understood not as the origin but as the destination of art.
By Fredric Jameson
Adorno retains the concept of the system and even makes it, as target and object of critique, the very center of his own anti-systematic thinking. ... His most powerful philosophical and aesthetic interventions are all implacable monitory reminders—sometimes in well-nigh Weberian or Foucauldian tones—of our imprisonment within system, the forgetfulness or repression of which binds us all the more strongly to it.
Habermas is wrong to conclude that Adorno's implacable critique of reason (Verstand rather than Vernunft) paints him into the corner of irrationalism and leaves him no implicit recourse but the now familiar poststructural one of l'acéphale, cutting off the intolerable, hyperintellectual head of the formerly rational being. He thinks so only because he cannot himself allow for the possibility or the reality of some new, genuinely dialectical thinking.
By Paul Gottfried
Christopher Lasch explains the process by which the therapeutic segment of the managerial elite win moral acceptance. Despite the fact that its claims to be providing “mental health” were always self-serving and highly subjective, the therapeutic class offered ethical leadership in the absence of shared principles. By defining emotional well-being as both a social good and the overcoming of what is individually and collectively dangerous, the behavioral scientists have been able to impose their absolutes upon the culturally fluid society.
In The True and Only Heaven Lasch explores the implications for postwar politics of the “Authoritarian Personality.” A chief contributor to this anthology, Theodor Adorno, abandoned his earlier work as a cultural critic to become a proponent of governmentally imposed social therapy.
According to Lasch, Adorno condemns undesirable political attitudes as “prejudice” and “by defining prejudice as a ‘social disease’ substituted a medical for a political idiom. In the end, Adorno and his colleagues “relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic – to scientific study as opposed to philosophical and political debate.