Culture Industry Today

Culture Industry Today
Culture Industry Today
Edited by
Fabio Akcelrud Duro

Culture Industry Today, Edited by Fabio Akcelrud Duro
This book first published 2010
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright 2010 by Fabio Akcelrud Duro and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-1955-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1955-8

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Fabio Akcelrud Duro
Chapter One................................................................................................. 5
The Exact Sense in which the Culture Industry No Longer Exists
Robert Hullot-Kentor
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23

What Barbarism Is?
Robert Hullot-Kentor
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 43

The Means of Intellectual Production and their Working Alliances:
Towards a Culture-Industry Analysis of The Media
Heinz Steinert
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 71

Is it Barbarous to Watch TV after Auschwitz?
Th. W. Adorno on the Television in the 1950s
Yoshikazu Takemine
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 93

The Culture Industry in Brazil
Rodrigo Duarte
Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 113

Adornos Minima Moralia: On Passion, Psychoanalysis
and the Postemotional Dilemma
Shierry Weber Nicholsen
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 133

Love as Resistance: A Miniature after Adorno
Gerhard Richter
vi Table of Contents
Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 141

Consumption and the Culture Industry in Light of Marxs Grundrisse
Jonathan Dettman
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 155

Fabio Akcelrud Duro in conversation with Robert Hullot-Kentor
About the Authors ................................................................................... 179

INTRODUCTION
FABIO AKCELRUD DURO
Strong concepts have a particular tendency to live double lives. In one

case, their potential for bringing intelligibility to the world makes them
circulate widely and in that process they acquire new signification,
meanings sedimented by the use they are put to, which then may easily
contradict their initial content. Society of the spectacle was coined by
Guy Debord in a Lukcsean vein as a new and most extreme degree of
reification only to be later on, through the most minimal displacements in
iteration, watered down and converted into its opposite, a well-nigh festive
term, as if life were a show. Culture industry had a somewhat different
fate, as Robert Hullot-Kentor shows in his first essay in this collection, for
the concepts double meanings were developed independently of one
another. The same letters refer to two utterly different, ultimately
incompatible, views of the same realm: on the one hand there is the critical
concept forged by Adorno and Horkheimer in the forties; on the other, the
purely descriptive expression of a business branch like any other. Not to
be able to view the abyss separating the two usages of the same words is
barbarous, as it is not to hear what the expression hides in itself. Indeed, as
one can conclude from Hullot-Kentors second piece in the book, the
source of todays barbarism may lie in a very specific kind of blindness
and deafness in relation to the presence of the primitive in the
contemporaneous. Without this absence on the horizon of our Zeitgeist the
acts of atrocity that pervade well-informed newspapers would make much
more sense and could be much more easily criticized. Hullot-Kentors
contribution concludes by pointing out how much art can contribute to
reinserting the primitive in ones scope of vision.
Something of enhanced perception is considered in Heinz Steinerts
essay too, which, following up on his well-known and celebrated Culture
Industry,1 starts by differentiating the concept from the idea of the media.
Steinert then proceeds to characterize the kinds of messages transmitted by
the media, its addressees and professionals working in it, as well as its
1
Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003.
2 Introduction
main genres. The result is an essay that is at the same time introductory
and demystifying, and which provides an incisive instance of what critical
theory of the media should look like.
Yoshikazu Takemine pursues this same tact by describing and
evaluating Adornos take on television. Not only does Takemine call
attention to the philosophers substantial engagement with this new
medium of mass communication of the time, but also well characterizes
Adornos dialectical approach to it. For if it is true that the rise of
television heralded an unprecedented psychic domination through images,
this does not mean that television could not be used against itself in order
to inoculate audiences with something close to an antidote. Indeed,
Takemine closes his essay with a reference to Alexander Kluges TV
program as a concrete instance of what an anti-television could appear to
be one is here miles away from the usual image of Adorno as the
pessimist mandarin, the secluded aesthetician averse to things popular.
Rodrigo Duarte chooses another direction of inquiry. He poses the
question of whether the notion of culture industry as it was elaborated by
Adorno and Horkheimer could be applied to an undeveloped country like
Brazil. Relying on four basic criteria, namely, the expropriation of
schematism (conceived in Kantian fashion), the consummation of a
style, the corruption of the tragic and, finally, the fetishism of cultural
goods, Duarte concludes that the concept is not only applicable to our
current situation and that this applicability has been even enhanced in
the globalized phase of monopolist capitalism, but also that its scope of
validity extends to Third World countries.
It is arguable that alongside images culture industry produces the
affects that are inherent to them. The manufacture of feelings leads to a
subjective dilemma, inasmuch as it is buttressed by the ideology of
spontaneity, the imperative to be oneself. Manipulation of sentiments
coupled with an ideal of transparent inwardness generate what Shierry
Weber Nicholsen terms postemotional society. Here Nicholsen
approximates Adornos description of damaged life in Minima Moralia to
recent research in psychoanalysis, showing a striking agreement between
what the German philosopher experienced more than sixty years ago and
what therapists today diagnose. The result is not only the possibility of
mutual improvement, furnishing Adorno with pointed concepts and
implicating psychoanalysts in the situation they describe, but of a
heightened sense of truth. By implication, Gerhard Richters essay
establishes an interesting dialogue with Nicholsens in his own reading of
Minima Moralia. If Nicholsen characterizes a contemporary, generalized
condition of affective deadlock, Richter investigates how love could be a
Culture Industry Today 3
defence against this. Of course, he does not have in mind the culture-
industrial idea, the degraded romanticism of a heterosexual and perfectly
harmonious couples unity. On the contrary, his characterization of love,
and of its twin notion, that of fidelity, takes into consideration its
participation in an all-encompassing system of domination; nor does
Richters text exclude the moment of truth in unfaithfulness and the
breaking away of desire from constrained patterns of conviviality. In the
tension of these opposing forces a faint glimpse of authenticity can be
contemplated in the world of manufactured affects.
One should not think, however, that Adornos conception of the culture
industry is beyond criticism. Jonathan Dettman bases himself on Moishe
Postones assessment to emphasize the concepts limitations. The kernel of
Dettmans critique lies in early critical theorys assessment of state control
under monopoly capitalism as effectively replacing competition in the
market, thus creating a system of static power relations that preserves
class antagonisms and inequality, yet does not itself contain contradictions
that propel an inner and potentially revolutionary dynamic. From this,
Dettman proceeds to examine Adornos notion of consumption as
completely administered, and while Dettman is at pains to shun the
assumption, so dear to much of cultural studies, that the sphere of
consumption harbours oppositional hopes, his essay does encourage the
reader to revaluate consumption as retaining the real social content that
even its subordination to capital cannot eliminate.
The book ends with an interview of Robert Hullot-Kentor by Fabio
Akcelrud Duro. After discussing the concept of intelligentsia and
education, the conversation moves in many directions, including the
United States incapacity to represent the common good to itself, to the
American system of representation, space and mimesis, and engaged art.
The careful reader will notice that there is a subtle coherence in the
conversational logic of this exchange. As in each of the contributions to
this volume, so in this one culture industry is perceived as not only
touching on every aspect of contemporary life, often where it could
hardly be imagined, but as virtually all that there is to touch.
CHAPTER ONE
THE EXACT SENSE IN WHICH THE CULTURE

INDUSTRY NO LONGER EXISTS1
ROBERT HULLOT-KENTOR
Anyone who has been studying Adornos philosophy over the past
number of decades, perhaps including years overlapping with the
philosophers own life, may have noticed that despite the many new
commentaries, despite the recently available publications of his
correspondence and lecture courses, Adornos writings are becoming
increasingly obscure. This is not because Adorno is now more difficult to
comprehend than he once was. On the contrary, the emerging obscurity of
his philosophy is reciprocal with a newfound self-evidence in the writings.
For this, the ready glosses and commentaries and years of growing
familiarity are at least partly responsible, and we can start summing things
up easily enough: Reification is the rigid web spun over the world,
isolating the universal from the particular; dialectics rends that web,
potentiating the conflict of the one and the many in which the primacy of
the object is manifest; relations of production are this; forces of production
that; the spell, the taboo, the fetish and barbarism, they are something else
again. But the motive force of these concepts, their noeud vital, is gone. If,
some decades ago, taking Negative Dialectics in hand, a reader was
astounded at that titles daunting purport, now, in spite of himself, that
same reader no longer distinctly sees how laying claim to the negative ever
appeared to risk everything and confront all. Concepts that once spoke
worlds for themselves, now stand mute in sight of the world. No doubt,
one can put ones shoulder to the historical weight that is heavily ballasted
in the flywheel of any one of them and, shoving, bring that concept around
once, but subjectivity, for instance, will not on its own bring itself
around again. Agency, not subjectivity, is now the self-revolving
1
An earlier version of this essay, In Exactly What Sense the Culture Industry No
Longer Exists, was published in Cultural Critique, Fall, 2008, vol.7.
6 Chapter One
topic. Plainly, it is not a matter of our individual volition which ideas are
bindingly thinkable and which are not. But if it is not for us to decide, as
an act of will or logical acuity, which concepts draw the world into
themselves as into a vortex and which suddenly eddy back out again,
slackly dispersing their phenomena, we can sometimes understand aspects
of the moment in which this reversal occurs. Comprehending something of
this event will figure in this discussion, but only by way of posing the
overarching question of how the central concepts of Adornos thinking
have lost their grip on the historical moment. And, while, as is to be seen,
it is possible to recover their noeud vital and state it, doing so will not
reanimate the philosophy. On the contrary, it will reveal an almost
intolerable point of dispute between the standpoint of thought today and
the content of Adornos philosophy, even while we recognize that this
philosophy itself is of increasingly urgent interest and importance.
Boom Town Revenant

The culture industry is one of Adornos concepts whose ghost for
certain is gone. But it is also the concept whose paradoxical existence,
when examined, provides unrivalled insight into the contemporary fate of
the whole of his work. The potentially illuminating paradox is this: While
the idea of the culture industry shares in the evident exhaustion of
Adornos central concepts; while there is no doubt that its ghost is gone;
this concept all the same lives a vigorous afterlife, fully indifferent to the
fact of its decease long ago. Unlike any other concept in the whole of
Adornos oeuvre, the term, the culture industry, is quoted omnipresently in
the full-throated convictions of our age. If, today, anyone who intends to
be alert, word by word, to the difference between what bears speaking
about and what does not, would hesitate to draw a fresh breath to launch
into a critique, for instance, of the depredations of reification, no one
hesitates to hold forth ad libitum on the culture industry. This could be
documented by presenting the statistical frequency of the terms citation in
scholarly journals and even in the newspapers of major cities. But the
ambitious tenacity of this concepts grip on existence is better
demonstrated in a single quotation. It is excerpted from a Chinese
government publication prepared in 2007 for the World Trade
Organization. In its very own words, the article concerns the state of the
culture industry in China: China has witnessed a booming development
of its culture industry since the 1990s. [] However, the culture industry
The Exact Sense in which the Culture Industry No Longer Exists 7
in China is still very laggard if compared with that in developed

countries.2
The article goes on to deplore the continuing backwardness of the
Chinese culture industry, then marshals graphs and statistics to assure the
waiting world of finance that this deficiency, this very laggard culture
industry, has long been in a process of considerable acceleration.
Homophony and Spontaneous Generation

Since the reason for quoting a Chinese publication on that nations
culture industry is to document the terms self-confident omnipresence,
there is no stopping here to delve into this Chinese concepts
hermeneutics. No one doubts what the culture industry means or what is
assembled under its apostrophe. The concept is a dependably interchangeable
worldwide Esperanto. By absolute contrast, however and now the
paradoxical existence of Adornos concept of the culture industry comes
into focus the word that is not in anyones head, the word that cannot
possibly be pronounced with the expectation of it being spontaneously
reciprocated with comprehension of what it once meant is Adorno and
Horkheimers homophonous trouvaille in the Dialectic of Enlightenment
more than fifty years ago. An accurately contemporary American
dictionary would mark their catchword, that culture industry, obsolete.
And although the dictionary entry would affirm that the terms are
historically enmeshed, that they share the embedded perceptions of a
single historical dynamic, a responsibly complete entry would take pains
to deny the easy presumption that the homophony of the German
philosophers term culture industry with our contemporary vernacular
vouches for a single historical development of one concept. For in spite of
the much-known fact that it was Adorno and Horkheimer who coined the
expression, the contemporary sound-alike term did not come into this
world as spawn of a German first that then adapted to current purposes
through etymological evolution. On the contrary, it owes its existence to
an entirely independent act of spontaneous generation. It is progeny of that
piling up and compression of commercial entities from under the mass of
which, one day, some decades ago, a great multitude of concepts began
scurrying out, fully mature. We now take a moment to acknowledge this
multitude, and not one by one, but sparsely instantiated in the likes of: the
hospitality industry, the education industry, the environmental industry,
2
China and the WTO, http://www.chinaculture.org/gb/en_focus/node_322.htm.
Emphasis added.
8 Chapter One
and the housing industry. These industrial appellations of which the

culture industry is just one frank derivative exist in mutually confirming
aggregate with other multitudes of such met phrases and dependably
pseudo organics as: the family tree of industries, a family of electronic
devices, corporate culture, the business community, and the banking
community.
Syllabic Ear Training I

This ideological weave of phrases is now so densely worked and
imperviously matted that it obstructs any remnant of what Adornos term,
the culture industry, once meant. But just in coming up against this
impasse for the first time, there is a chance to notice something of the fate
of the whole of Adornos thinking, for he would have been able to name
this heavy weave a net (Netz) or, alternately, a web of delusion
(Verblendungszusammenhang), whereas, obviously, we cannot. The
concepts of net and web in which Adorno sought to capture self-
consciously the totality of mediation, were instead themselves finally
captured by the fact of all-encompassing mediation in which their self-
reflection was effaced. In penalty for having touched directly on the truth,
critical thought was metamorphosed into what it struggled to oppose.
Repeatedly, understanding Adornos philosophy requires finding ways to
demonstrate how each concept has been compelled to echo functions of
socially necessary illusion. The alternative approach to his work, the
analytical explication of the concepts of his philosophy, by contrast, is
powerless against this process; in its obliviousness, as it waltzes off with
half-dead concepts to gesture authoritatively, it necessarily consolidates
this process. Only where ways can be fashioned to make visible how
Adorno concepts now serve to barricade themselves against their own
meaning, can it be understood why his work is today as urgently unalive as
it is urgently alive.
In the instance of the culture industry, our linguistic auscultation
requires pressing one step closer to the words themselves. But this
requisite step is beyond our power; we can only pretend at what must be
accomplished. For this purpose, we choose a linguistic conveyance, a
common mix of objective correlative and bombast to set into relief what
must once have been at stake in 1947, the publication date of the coinage
of the term, Kulturindustrie. With that agglutination in mind, half-speak
while reading: Shakespeares cold fire, Donnes miserable abundance,
Hugos dwarf giants, Quevedos fleeting permanence, Spencers pleasing
pain, Beethovens piano forte, Baudelaires soleil noir, Caravaggios
chiaroscuro room here for Nabokovs pale fire and then, again,
Adornos Kulturindustrie.
Syllabic Ear Training II

What is there to perceive in this incantation of days gone by? Only a
lizard-like fragment of a second to regard coolly the possible remembrance
of forgetting. Under the accumulated crosswise momentum of every just
cited soleil noir, our contemporary frictionless vernacular, the culture
industry an undergraduate topic available for three credits at any major
university was to snap in half, into culture and industry. And, then, in the
pronouncement of Adornos long-ago Kulturindustrie these splintered
parts were to be compelled to reassemble, but visibly marked by the
splinteredness that was theirs in the first place. Thus, the culture
industry might begin to divulge the first traces of its epigrammatical
pulse: for it is a coerced unity of the uncombinable, an abrasive sparking
of concept against concept their electrical charges spun around positive
to positive and jammed tight a mutually rebarbative grinding of culture
and industry, colliding while compressed at loggerheads.
This archaeological contrivance has provided a first perception of what
transpires in Adornos self-antagonistic concept of the culture industry.
Adorno himself, of course, never needed to trick out his concepts self-
antagonistic content, as we just have; he heard perfectly well what it was
about and could not possibly, not once, have heard it as we exclusively
hear it now. Neither, incidentally, would he have been subject to the
strangest aspect of the entire cohort of concepts in which the contemporary
culture industry travels. For even though the hospital industry, the music
industry, let alone the home office, are among the most caustic expressions
of the words of our tribe, they engage our perceptions exclusively as
neutral fact. Adorno, by absolute contrast, would have heard these acrid
phrases for what they are. It makes sense, then, that if we more exactly
perceived something of what Adorno sensed in his concept of the culture
industry; if we were thus prompted to acquire something akin to his
auditory discernment among concepts, our perceptual aphasia for their
content would be breeched. We would possess the rudiments of a
spontaneous, contemporary social physiognomy in which the whole of our
snap-together, commercial nomenclature would insist on the
distinctiveness of its voice being sensed in a way that Adorno himself
might have heard it.
10 Chapter One
The One Appetite of Commercial Reason

With this as an intention, it is possible to elucidate more closely the
antagonism in Adornos idea of the culture industry by considering the
agglutinated concepts individually, all the while alert that our concentration
will only tolerate summary and formulaic presentations. Fortunately, in the
instance of culture, there is in fact no alternative to being succinct. For,
according to Adorno, when culture is culture which is the exception by
far, since culture is overwhelmingly its own opposite there is hardly
anything to say about it that would not amount to something like: Lovely
sunset, or Beethovens 109th is my favourite, and thus pitch in with all
of culture that is not that. But it can at least be said of culture that it
potentially arises out of the capacity to suspend narrow purpose and
constitute the only aspect of the idea of freedom that is not an abstraction.
Culture may be trash as Adorno once wrote and nothing more than
the rationalization of inhibition, but as he also wrote it is no less the
idea of reconciliation. Industry, by contrast, the epitome of the modern
force of production, which could itself be a power of culture as the
capacity to assuage scarcity and suffering, is, in the imperative of its
seventeenth century concept of systematic labour, limited systematically to
the exclusion of all but narrow purpose. This rationality is the
intellectualization of self-preservation. It is structured so that in addition to
the manufacture of its cornucopia it must, to survive, simultaneously
produce scarcity in consistently equal or greater measure. The old saw of
the crisis of overproduction, the analysis of the tendency of prices to
decline and ultimately to jeopardize industrys cash flow, once sought to
make capitalisms cyclical, compulsory potlatches comprehensible. And
the old saw still holds true, though it has been amended by the acceleration
of the process of rationalization that it embodies. Computerized systems of
distribution have made corporations logistical devices for dominating
consumption; single companies have installed themselves as the social
appetites sole gatekeeper at every turn and in all regions. With this
tactical leverage, the logistically based corporation has been able to
disaggregate manufacture from its own internal structure and turn the
whole of its powers against what was once its own supplies of labour and
raw material, sources to which it no longer has any social responsibility
whatsoever. Dispossession is now the fiercest form of possession. This
development is a process of increasing corporate rationality. It is a
heightened capacity to use every element of the material within the range
of its system as efficiently as possible and to rid the system of all
redundancy in the extraction of wealth. Externally to the corporation, this
rationality disintegrates markets and societies worldwide. Internally to the

corporation, rationalization has eaten away and dissolved the corporations
own rationality. Holding sentinel guard over the appetites of the populous
mouth, on one side, and responding to the demand of shareholders for
maximized profits, on the other; having sloughed off the civilizing
commitments to labour and region; having dismissed their own internal
structure of middle management and product development, the dominant
corporations, which in the twentieth century became the sinew and
structure of the nation, have contracted to the blind devices of self-
preservation. The lead economic institutions have become compact gangs
and rackets for carving out profits. Planning has not only been reduced. It
is actively rejected as interfering with the ability to seek risk, those points
of perceived greatest vulnerability in an object in which the highest profits
are potentially located. According to the business critic, Barry C. Lynn,
the corporation as such has thus forfeited the capacity to think
comprehensively and is now unguided by any internal rational
authority.3 If the United States feels far out to sea, for sure no one is
steering; the country cannot locate its mind; it has excluded those
rudimentary centres of cognition that could wake it up to what it is.
At a time when the (corporate) system itself is far more complex than
ever before, and at a time when it faces threats unlike any it has ever
faced, it would seem that we have placed it all under the control of our
own stomach.4
The country is directed more and more by some sort of pure desire,
some sort of pure appetite.5 This is a desire and an appetite for survival as
if no other impulse could be sensed. Global however the word is
conjured up, and in whatever combination now means survival at the
price of nothing less than the whole. Here, being what is bigger is the only
conceivable, only acknowledgeable intention.
Exactly What It Is
In this study concerned with the exact sense in which the culture
industry no longer exists, it should be noticed that the question is not being
approached through movie land, web space or voiced concerns about TV
and industrial entertainment. Instead, the problem has been engaged by
3
Barry C. Lynn, End of the Line (New York: Doubleday, 2005), pp.129-260, esp.
p. 210.
4
Ibid., p. 236.
5
Ibid.
12 Chapter One
elucidating the elements of Adornos own concept. Archaeological means

have been required for this and the results are so far crude: if culture,
when it is culture, is what potentially goes beyond self-preservation; and if
industry, meaning considerably more than a device of manufacture, is
what reduces this potential to the task of survival, then the culture industry
as the production of culture by industry is the reduction of all that does
and could go beyond self-preservation to nothing more than life lived in
the violent struggle for survival. The manufacture of culture as the
production of barbarism is the culture industry. This is the internal
dynamic of the coerced unity of the uncombinable that Adorno objectified
in the self-antagonistic concept of the culture industry. Here the modern is
the cipher of the archaic insofar as culture, in its industrial transformation,
becomes a permeating force of social regression. And while the condition
of American English now makes it difficult to guess at a moment when
any noun could not casually be combined with industry, it took two world
wars to bring these words into combinatorial proximity. On its own first
day, the glitter of the word-formation, culture industry sparkled flat
against camouflage khakis. It was this, the locutions categorically
primitive quality as produced by the modern itself that must have startled
Adorno with the historical exactitude of his trouvaille. Every word he
wrote about the culture industry was drawn into the cognition of this
dynamic of primitivization interior to the concept.
Vestigial Physiognomy and Lapsed Imperative

Experiment now with an apparent non-entity of a phrase, selected from
a catalogue of higher education for the compact agility with which, in its
own split second, it promulgates its confident self-evidence: Florida State
University, Dedman School of Hospitality and Tourism, assures its
students of a career in Floridas number one industry.6 And if in reading
this phrase, the effort at discerning the internal dynamic of the culture
industry has begun to cause these collegiate words of the tribe even
slightly to stutter and speak off the page, half in their own voice,
motioning stiffly with inflexible lips, this is not ventriloquism. The
distinctiveness of the vocables is real; here, in abrupt quotation, concept
engulfs landscape human and seaside with unconscious ferocity. What
Adorno himself would have perceived in our otherwise numb-to-us
vernacular in that aggregate characterized, for instance, by the
6
General Bulletin, Dedman School of Hospitality, College of Business, 2006-
2007, Florida State University, p. 281.
hospitality industry has perhaps thus become evident to us as well: these

are stances of barbarization; actual powers of the primitivization of life by
the forces of progress itself; rationality as reasons own antagonist; in the
instance of the Dedman School, we perceive the university itself as an
established device of stupidification and catastrophe culture as what is
altogether its contrary.
A social physiognomy of culture industry lingo could begin at this
point to illuminate broad swaths of its phrasings under the constellation of
the key ideas of Adornos philosophy: the spell, the taboo, the ban, his
concept of natural history, regression, and magic each of which wants to
reveal the modern itself as the force of the primitive. This study would
begin to fulfil the categorical imperative of Adornos thinking as he stated
it in his Marginalia to Theory and Practice, where he writes that the
sole adequate praxis would be to put all energies toward working our way
out of barbarism.7 But exactly here, in considering Adornos maxim, we
call a halt. There is no sense deceiving ourselves. We are not about to
undertake any struggle to overcome barbarism, not in a social physiognomy
of culture industry lingo and not in any other way either. The categorical
imperative of Adornos thinking is not ours. On the contrary, the
invocation of his maxim presents an index of our disinterest in the critical
content of his work.
Velocity of Aversive Disinterest

The barbaric an appellation alternating in various contexts in
Adornos writings with the primitive and the archaic became a
matter of aversive disinterest to us not because its reality vanished from
world history, leaving its scattered vocables behind as an irritatingly
vacant shells. For even if we knew nothing about the contemporary
structure of the American economy, it is clear as Hobsbawm has written
that when the First World War came to an end, barbarism itself only
accelerated. To gauge its velocity by a series of markers, compare the
outrage at what for us would be the minor injustice of the Dreyfus case;
consider that Clauswitz assumed that in warfare armed forces fought to
disable the opposing forces and did not murder prisoners, devastate the
citizenry, or summarily demolish a nation; note the magnitudes of death
and sacrifice to which governments drove their enlisted men at Ypres and
7
Theodor W. Adorno, Marginalia to Theory and Practice, in Critical Models,
edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998), p. 268.
14 Chapter One
Verdun, for example, and notice as well the emergence of slogans such as
better dead than red that, as an end justifying any means, has
successfully helped prepare society as a whole for its annihilation. If there
was ever a movement to rid the world of catastrophic nuclear weaponry,
what evidence of that movement now remains? Both in the centre and at
the periphery of the developed world, Hobsbawm writes, unspeakable
things are done by people who no longer have social guides to action.8
And if in the United States which has yet to realize the degree to which it
is a morally devastated nation a fully discredited administration now
faces a majority opposition, there is still no saying whether this country,
which on its law books now grants margin to torture as well as to spying
on its citizenry, will somehow withdraw from its commitment to a
growing world unanimity in the conviction that barbarism is more
effective than civilization.9 How could it? it might be asked given the
international collapse of political order, the unravelling of the state
monopoly on violence, and the dissolution of coherent frameworks of
social relations. It must be, then, that our apparently spontaneous antipathy
to the censure of the barbaric is an aspect of the dissolution of these
frameworks of social relations. The process of barbarization itself has
consumed the capacity for its own differentiation and jettisoned the idea
when it was done with it.
I too am against everything

In this context, an essay that Adorno wrote in the nineteen fifties and
presented as a lecture The Concept of Philosophy is invaluable, for it
indicates a fundamental transformation in historical experience that reveals
deeper layers of what has essentially gone missing for us in Adornos
thinking. He presents this transformation as the seminal idea of Western
thought that infinitely expanded the horizon of knowledge. This insight, to
which he owed the sum total of the perceptions of his philosophy, was as
much waiting for him in the thinking of his own day as it is no longer
waiting for anyone now. And if this insight will at first be recognizable,
perhaps with some disappointment, as having already been touched on, it
involves an aspect and expanse of thinking that would be hard for us to
guess at:
8
Eric Hobsbawm, Barbarism: A Users Guide, in On History (New York: The
New Press, 1997), pp. 253-65, especially p. 264.
9
Ibid.
The horizon of knowledge has been infinitely expanded; layers have come
into our field of vision that were hidden. To understand the archaic in us
and in reality, this was the definitive step that Western thought made.10
Adorno did not in his essay go on to document the historical

preparation for what he considered this definitive step in Western thought
or to provide any detail of what was to be found on this new horizon it
was self-evident in the moment and context of his lecture, now a half
century past.11 But the contours of what Adorno then perceived as so
prodigious can be reconstructed from the first sentences of Aesthetic
Theory. There Adorno wrote of this same expanse as the sea of the
formerly inconceivable, on which around 1910 revolutionary art
movements set out. This sea was drawn to its vanishing point at every
degree of its encompassment exclusively on the horizon of the perception
of the primitive in us and in reality.12 This is what Adorno saw as the
fundamental occurrence, for instance, in Picassos Demoiselles and in his
African-inspired works of 1907-10; in the likes of Mary Wigmans Witch
Dance (1914); and in the stark glare of prehistory in every line of Kafka.
In their familiarity to us these works present the best occasion to observe
the mimetic spark of recognition that once shot across between what, on
one hand, was already abstract in tribal totemic masks and fetishes and, on
the other, the dynamic of abstraction that was transpiring in the societal
material itself. Here is the exact occasion of the gesture of that spark in
demonstratively slow motion as Picasso once glanced from the African
and Polynesian fetishes across to everything:
I kept looking at the fetishes. I understood: I too am against everything. I

too think that everything is unknown, is the enemy! Everything! Not just
the details women, children, animals, tobacco, playing but everything!13
10
Theodor W. Adorno, Der Begriff der Philosophie, in Frankfurter Adorno
Blaetter II, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main Text/Kritik, 1992), p. 52.
Emphases added.
11
See, for instance, the article Civilization in the much reputed 11th Edition of
The Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911), which importantly parallels Adornos
observation of the transformation of the idea of the primitive in its discussion of
the the most radical metamorphosis of mental view that has taken place in the
entire course of the historical period (www.1911encyclopedia.org/Civilization).
12
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor
(Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 3.
13
Pablo Picasso quoted by Andr Malraux in La Tete dobsidienne, now in Jack
Flam and Miriam Deutch (eds.), Primitivism and Twentieth Century Art,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 33.
16 Chapter One
Thus Picasso on an afternoon in 1907 at the Trocadero Museum of

Ethnography. He himself had no ethnographic interest or curiosity
whatsoever in the African sculptures he would come to collect.14 Art did
not become modern art in scholarship of the primitive but by appropriating
it as a power for the rejection of the sensuous in order to achieve a formal
capacity to direct the violence of life back against its own violence.15
Sedimented in this formal achievement was the decisive element in
modernism as the unfolding of an absolute depth of field in the profundity
of the historical consciousness of the West. This defined the course of
progress as modern progress. The desideratum of the utterly new, in a
degree and quality never before conceivable but in a way that office
buildings could spring fully imagined from Mondrians canvases,
originated in the awakening perception of the primitive not in the
establishment of a futuristic high-ground that threw the archaic into deep
perspective. And when Czanne said modestly of himself, I remain the
primitive of the way I discovered, that self-protective modesty concealed
the intention and resource of painting what had never been painted
before.16
For Adorno, then, the perception of the primitive in us was momentous
to the degree that it condensed in itself the entire critical consciousness of
the West. Adorno pursued this one insight in every sentence he wrote in
seeking to show that the domination of nature is the reproduction of the
primitive, that only in comprehending this could domination surrender its
violence and be reconciled with the primitive the act in which progress
would for once become progress. Adorno sought to render this insight
irresistibly perspicacious in the conviction that comprehending it would
make the difference between the survival and the self-destruction of
humanity and the habitable world altogether.
Sum Total of Insight Interdicted

If, however, out of interest in this thinking, in wanting somehow to
make good on it, we turned to regard this philosophy on the horizon
against which it was conceived, we will be brought up short. That
14
Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1986), pp. 41-2.
15
Wallace Stevens, The Nobel Rider and the Sound of Words, in Collected
Poems and Prose, edited by Frank Kermode (New York: The Library of America,
1984), p. 665.
16
Michael Doran, Conversations with Czanne (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001), p. 73. See also, for instance, p. 86.
infinitely expanded horizon of insight into the primitive in us and in reality

is not there to be seen. The self-reflection on the primitive has disappeared.
It is for this reason that when we initially looked to understand the
meaning of Adornos idea of the culture industry we understood nothing
even of its obsolescence without substantial historical bombast and
reconstruction. In becoming aware of the vanishing of the horizon against
which Adornos concept of the culture industry construed its meaning, we
now recognize the exact and only sense in which it can be said that the
culture industry no longer exists. The rubric of postmodernism delineates,
as a marker in time, however indistinctly drawn, the boundary across
which the perception of the primitive in us did not travel. The loss of this
perception was not of one moment among many, but has amounted to an
absolute diminution of historical perception that so depotentiated the
impulse of the modern that it contracted to a well-documented art-
historical period. The result is evident at every point in contemporary
thought, but most distinctly in the sum of insight, much of which had
become common knowledge to that earlier generation, that is now
blocked, and the degree to which binding insight itself is rigorously
interdicted. The way in which the central concepts of Adornos
philosophy, of the spell, the fetish, myth, and so on set up directly
alongside the famed collection of archaic statuary on Freuds desk
indicates that whatever the complex alliance and pointed antagonism
between Adornos philosophy and psychoanalysis, the formers dialectic
of enlightenment of progress as regression and the latters insight, for
instance, into a young patient who from time to time translated his wishes
from the totemic language into that of everyday life17 only have thinkable
meaning against that single horizon that once expanded in the recognition
of the primitive in ourselves. This horizons vanishment is the basis for the
spontaneously self-evident disrepute that now meets Freud. And this is a
disrepute that has implicitly already befallen Adornos philosophy without
account of this having yet been taken. What we cannot know of Adornos
philosophy while knowing it perfectly well on some other level is the
primitive in us, and the primitivization of our own circumstance.
17
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey (London:
Hogarth Press, 1995), vol. 13, p. 130.
18 Chapter One
Removing the Barbarians from our Minds

Adorno has noted that whole epochs of historical reality have
disappeared from historical consciousness, the matriarchal age among
them. But contrary to the disputes surrounding the reality of the few
artefacts of that vastly remote age, the vanishing of the primitive the
archaic and the barbaric has occurred under our own eyes and well
within the plausible course of a single lifetime. E. H. Gombrich (1909-
2001) was of Adornos generation, though he outlived him by some thirty
years, and was only recently obliged to admit in The Preference for the
Primitive, his last major work, that his topic had just slipped out from
under his fingers: This book is about a movement of taste that came to its
climax during my lifetime and appears to have lost strength during the last
few years.18 Had Gombrich understood what was occurring he might have
wanted to entitle the book something more akin to Salvage the
Primitive, since the volumes over-arching intention is to show that the
loss of that taste for the primitive is inseparable from an emerging
incapacity for aesthetic differentiation, an idea that would be profoundly
deepened in related, central ideas of Adornos Aesthetic Theory.
The dynamic that eroded the cognition of the primitive is available to
observation because it has in many regards been carried out so self-
consciously; its traces are effectively a measure of consciousness itself.
The complexity of the event owes not least to the fact that the critique of
the concept has been so substantial an achievement. Over the course of
decades anti-colonial wars and rebellions successfully repudiated the
apostrophe of the primitive and with it suzeraintys paternalism.
Ethnography likewise succeeded, over the same decades, at the rejection
of an evolutionary approach that was from its inception a distorted
projection of Darwinism onto a scale of technological advance along
which stages of the recapitulation of phylogeny calibrated the relative
primitivism of all other peoples in comparison with the mind of the most
technologically advanced West.19 The distinguished historian Peter Brown
puts the entire critical transformation in a nutshell when he writes
productively and critically in The Rise of Western Christendom of the
figure of the barbarian that it is part of the purpose of this book to remove
18
E. H. Gombrich, The Preference for the Primitive: Episodes in the History of
Western Taste and Art (London: Phaidon, 2006), p. 7.
19
Primitivism in Modern Art, p. 177.
them [the barbarians] from our minds, and to substitute a more truthful and
complex image of what happened at this time.20
But if removing the barbarians from our minds has been an
accomplishment, what has made it possible is a dynamic that exists at a
considerable remove from its presumed moral and historiographical claim.
The spontaneity of the everyday What do you mean, primitive?;
What do you mean, barbaric? is too broadly available, it comes too
readily to peoples lips, to be motivated by any familiarity either with
medieval studies or the vicious history of the colonialists hatred of the
savage. On the contrary, the audible shock-quotes requisite to any mention
of the word themselves stand in the colonial tradition, but in a changed
form of economy and domination; they are only so eagerly mobilized
because they are an act of triumph over the object. The gesture draws on a
vernacular nominalism that amounts to a procedural dismissal of whatever
aspect of an object might lay claim to the universal as the objects own
autonomy; this is rejected as fraudulent and an injustice for presuming to
acknowledge anything that could come between the object and those uses
that might be made of it. The nominalist impulse is a societal
methodology, the act of a total social subject, however unconscious: it
prepares the content at hand for being broken down into those ever
smaller, simplest parts, which subjectivity demands for gaining ever
greater levels of control over it. The parts themselves are analysed
quantitatively, modelled on an exchange relationship in which all things,
words as well, are necessarily equal as integers of one, to which the
supposition of any inhering quality raises the threat that in its awareness
the coin of the realm would no longer circulate, sustenance would
disappear from the shelves and the businesses along main street would
board up their shutters and be gone.
Thus the spontaneity of those requisite shock-quotes is the spontaneous
blocking of a spontaneity: it is a power of manipulation and administration.
If it were otherwise, there would be no possible understanding of how the
struggle of once colonial nations to free themselves turned out to be
inextricable from a movement that has subjected them as markets to global
forces that now dominates them and tears them apart in no less unrelieved
a fashion than colonialism once did except that now it is next to
impossible to mobilize against these forces, to lay claim to being anything
in opposition to them, to understand the forces involved or who or what is
in charge of the event. The bureaucratic triage that commands that the
20
Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christiandom. 2nd. Edition (London:
Blackwell, 2003), p. 7.
20 Chapter One
word the primitive itself be shunned, as if nothing less than severing

light from dark will come to the aid of the injustice done to dark lands, is
the gesture that seeks to seal, once and for all, the primitive taboo on the
primitive. It betrays its commercial alliance most of all through the
injustice it does to the primitive, to the unformed and untamed in us
without the differentiated impulse of which there is no capacity to do the
next right thing, for person or nation to act on the moral impulse in that
spontaneity in which we might for a moment actually feel that we are
ourselves.21 If progress has to date been regression, actual progress
nevertheless requires regression; wilful decisiveness and thinking,
differentiating tenacity have no other resource and require nothing less
than what Adorno in Negative Dialectic calls the additional impulse [das
Hinzutretende], as primordial as any beast that refuses to take another
step.22 The Victorian stricture, its entranced How dare you!, marked a
considerable latitude of mind compared with the motto of the new Muse
du Quai Branly which, in recently inheriting the contents of the Trocadero,
would rather suppress what Picasso once saw in these holdings in favour
of a further spiritualization of exchange: Les cultures sont faites pour
dialoguer. Dialoguer word as trade is all that cultures can do if the
point is to insist, as that museum insists at every turn, on the equivalence
of all cultures, as if there is some basis in history to depend on all culture
being culture, as if all we have ever known is an achieved freedom.
Munera Pulveris
The acknowledgment of the loss of insight into the primitive in us may
be the only perspective from which we can understand not just the culture
industry but the urgency of Adornos philosophy that is, the possible
recognition we find in it of the primitivization of life and something of
how the content of this philosophy is now beyond our own reasoning. It is
the point at which, in studying his work our attention wavers, whatever the
desire to concentrate. And this brings us, for a concluding moment in a
discussion that has been preoccupied with the question of what we are and
are not able to think about with what we can and cannot concentrate on
to a comment that Walter Benjamin once made, when he wrote that the
power of concentration has itself declined along with the disintegration of
21
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton (New
York: Continuum, 1973), p. 222.
22
History and Freedom, translated by Rodney Livingstone (London: Polity Press,
2007), pp. 229-38.
the idea of eternity. Adorno would never have written this line, not as
such. But he would have agreed entirely with Benjamin that the capacity
to think, the power of concentration, itself depends on its object and on its
objects coherence. Both would have insisted on what is at stake when, in
an ancient and here unlikely text, the World-Honoured One, the Buddha,
concludes an oration in the Rose Sutra and enters into the place of
immeasurable meanings. Beholding this moment, all those in the great
assembly, both human and inhuman, the monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen,
heavenly beings, yakshas, mahagorgas, having gained what they had
never had before, were filled with joy and, pressing their palms together,
gazed at the Buddha with a single mind.23 It must be reality itself in
other words that demands of the mind its singleness, even its collective
singleness, its power of identity, its own strength as an ability of
concentration even in its illusions, a unitariness that the mind could hardly
fashion for itself anymore than our feet are able to produce the gravity
beneath them.
If so, then perhaps to complete the experiment in the philosophy of the
primacy of the object that, from its first word, this essay has been, read the
reports as they came in, in August 2002, from the unprecedented flooding
that damaged and destroyed museums and their holdings throughout
central Europe; use the spontaneous disinterest one might have for these
reports, for the distant places named, for their circumstances now some
years out of date, as a measure of an incapacity to sense a transformation
that has already occurred in what is closest at hand in days we are all
living that are no longer days out of any recognizable season, and thus: the
S.O.S. dispatched from the Museum of Central Bohemia a renown
museum of the Czech Republic that the buildings were completely
drowned in water [] permanent exhibitions completely destroyed; the
message from the Libechov Chateau, flooded up to the second floor level,
the whole complex including the park is totally devastated; the message
from the Invalides building in Prague, that the huge archive of
architecture and the archive of history of technology and industry, have
been completely flooded; the message from the Pinkas Synagogue, also
in Prague, that the recently renovated inscriptions on the walls,
commemorating victims of the Holocaust, were destroyed up to the height
of 2 meters.24 In recognition of the hundreds and sometimes thousands of
years over which major cities were located and established along rivers, at
23
The Rose Sutra, translated by Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993), pp. 5-6.
24
H-New Discussion Networks, First estimate of damage, 30 August 2002,
http://www.h-net.org/~museum/.
22 Chapter One
their junctions and along coast lines, in coastal breezes and in their
rhythms; and in trying to comprehend, as one now must, that in a
determinate future many of these places New Orleans and Bangkok
among them, and the many museums being the most and the least of it
will be partly and wholly gone, thinking becomes intolerable to itself. This
is not the loss of concentration in the vanishment of eternity, though it is
that as well, but in the loss of the possible continuity and coherence of
historical truth so that searching its contemporary physiognomy, it is
somehow not possible to find a single clue to what primitive might mean
or to comprehend why anyone would bother with a word that rubs so
closely on a wound. We have crossed a threshold, not of sleep, but of what
we will never again be able to wake up from. The question is not of
possibly avoiding a tipping-point eight or twenty years from now, but of
what might be saved in absolute emergency. In this moment, the
exasperation at the inscrutability of the primitive What does the word
mean? has become its constantly reiterated seal. These several decades
will mark the transformation in all human history after which every word
that has to date been written will bear an incomparably guilt-burdened
irreversibility. Adornos much contested denial of any possible writing of
poetry after Auschwitz did not conceive that the guilt of history would
engulf the possibility of its reading altogether. The perception of the loss
of historical depth, if we could grasp it in the absence of that horizon of
insight indicated in The Concept of Philosophy, would bring us to an
understanding of the exact sense in which the culture industry certainly
does continue to exist, though not as the industrial entertainment section of
the social division of labour but as society as a whole, as the power of
primitivization that has consumed the possibility of its historical
discernment. The content of Adornos philosophy is in the distinction
between identity as, on one hand, a tit for tat, an eye for an eye the
power to knock anything out of someone elses hands and grab it for
oneself and, on the other, of identity as the capacity to make reality
break in on the mind that has mastered it. To rescue the primitive from
itself and be reconciled with it requires the unswerving effort to conjoin
reasons critical consciousness of itself and the critical experience of
objects25 as a concentration capable of responding to the particular, as the
possibility, that is, of hearing wave doubling up on wave, doubling up on
wave, without being sickened.
25
This is the idea of a negative dialectic. Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three
Studies, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), pp.
9-10.
CHAPTER TWO
WHAT BARBARISM IS?
ROBERT HULLOT-KENTOR
An enormous nation happy in a style,

Everything as unreal as real can be.
Wallace Stevens
Prometheus stole fire to distract the

gods, not as our gift; what he bestowed
was reason, the ability to make
anything into a weaponeven this.
Anon.
What interests us in the thought and writings of T. W. Adorno cannot

interest us. Where it touches us most closely in the urgency of the
moment, it misses the mark entirely. When it cuts to the quick, nothing is
felt. This is easily demonstrated. For wherever we open Adornos writings,
whichever volume we turn to, the topic is the barbaric and barbarism. In
Aesthetic Theory, we read that the literal is the barbaric; we learn in the
section on Natural Beauty that it is barbaric to say of nature that one
thing is more beautiful than another. Adorno insists, again in Aesthetic
Theory, that he will not temper his most notorious claim that it is
barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. Concerns we barely recognize
are none the less barbaric: The New Objectivity is said to reverse into the
barbarically pre-aesthetic. Inwardness is barbaric. Even it is barbaric,
says Adorno, to name the artist a creator. I am positive that he would
have found this fragmented rendering of phrases from his work barbaric.
The relentless apostrophizing of the barbaric emerges as the single
apostrophe of his labour and circumscribes the entirety of what he
perceived. In Minima Moralia the whole itself is, indeed, said to be
barbarism. And, if so, if the whole itself really is barbarism then nothing
less than all things are barbaric. In the stream of assertion that threads
through his thousands of pages, Adorno never once admits a half-tone, not
24 Chapter Two
a single almost, semi, or formerly barbaric. In the Dialectic of

Enlightenment, the culture industry that the United States produced is
barbarism. This American barbarism is not the result of cultural lag,
as other European visitors to America speculated, he writes, but of
progress itself. And here, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, we arrive at
the statement that shifts like a magnet under the iron filings of what has so
far been a scattered catalogue of barbarisms membra disjecta and causes
them, as will be seen in a moment, to draw together, take their place,
become legible and shape the focal point of the whole of thinking. The
intention of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno writes, with
Horkheimer this is the sentence is to understand why humanity
founders in a new form of barbarism instead of entering a truly human
condition.1
A New Form of Barbarism

Here, Adorno has us. In the precision of the optic he crafted that
humanity now founders in a new form of barbarism in a second
barbarism, we stand in the glare of what has been forced into focus. More
than a half century after the publication of the Dialectic of Enlightenment,
we know ourselves the addressees of Adornos work in a way that we
could hardly have realized a decade ago. For the interregnum of the
postwar years is over. We are experiencing a return of the great fear, as if
it never ended and perhaps it never did.2 We are, without a doubt, the
occupants of the most catastrophic moment in the whole of human history,
in all of natural history, and we cannot get our wits about ourselves. What
is being decided right now for all surviving generations including our own,
is the exact sum total of the irreversible remainder, the unalterable How it
might have been. By every indication we are going ahead with the
irreparable calamity. Even if the treaties soon to be negotiated in
Copenhagen are ratified whole and nothing at all will be ratified the
proposals on the table are inadequate3; even if the legislation of the cap
and trade of carbon emissions is eventually made binding on American
industry, whatever limited good it may do, the scheme will become
1
T. W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann in 20 volumes
(Frankfurt am Main Suhrkamp), vols. 7, p. 114; vol. 7, p. 93; vol. 4, p. 174; vol. 7,
p. 89; vol. 4, p. 121; vol. 3, p. 11; vol. 8, p. 335; vol. 3, p. 581; vol. 6, p. 275.
2
Eric Hobsbawm, Globalization, Democracy and Terrorism (London: Abacus
Books, 2007), pp. 31-49.
3
This essay was originally presented as a talk at the University of Minnesota on
December 1st, 2009.
What Barbarism Is? 25
another futures market and power of delusion.4 In Adornos words,

already cited from Minima Moralia, nothing less than the whole is
barbaric, because nothing can possibly be excepted. Knowing this, if we
could be sane for a moment and sometimes we are and if we intended
to be sane for more than a moment, Adornos imperative stated in Critical
Models that the sole adequate praxis would be to put all energies toward
working our way out of barbarism, would read as the only adequate
statement of what there is to do. But the United States, a nation that has
succeeded at knowing and recognizing history exclusively as economic
cycles, that has jettisoned all other historical differentiation in the
articulation of its past, now finds itself stumped trying to name what it is
we are in the midst of. This is why Adornos work is no less urgent to us,
than, as we acknowledge it, we must dismiss it. We are those people who
are unable to know what we know.
Brief Account
To take some account of what has occurred, two moments will
establish historical reference and comparison. Senator Charles Sumner
deplored life in the South in 1860 as barbarous in origin, barbarous in
law, barbarous in all its pretensions, barbarous wherever it shows itself.5
Sumners words among the most declamatory of the age, but hardly
unprecedented in their views were so antagonizing that he was attacked
on the Senate floor by a cane-wielding Southern congressman and
knocked to the ground. The beating he sustained, from which he did not
recover for many years, directly contributed to the outbreak of the Civil
War. We could today in Congress pronounce similar words on climate,
war and economy in phrases that would, likely, be shorn of Sumners
stately periodic style. But our spoken words would undoubtedly be shorn
of any comparable self-evidence of moral provocation. Lets also consider
as a second moment of historical reference that in nineteenth century
America, elements of Adornos model of the dialectic of history were by
no means something that only foreigners might import to this continent. In
the second decade of that century, for instance, a journalist could observe
that what was happening to people in the unexampled rapidity of the
spread of population over the continent, was proceeding contrary to what
4
See Michael Pelias, Age of Financialism, forthcoming in Situations: Project of
the Radical Imagination.
5
Senator Charles Sumner, The Barbarism of Slavery, in the U. S. Senate, 36th
Congress, 1st Session, pp. 2590-2603 of the Congressional Globe.
26 Chapter Two
to date in history had otherwise been a movement from barbarism to

civilization. As this commentator wrote, Progress has [formerly] been
from ignorance to knowledge, from rudeness of savage life to the
refinements of polished society. But in the settlement of North America
the case is reversed. The tendency is from civilization to barbarism. To
some it seemed, as one historian has noted of the years following the
American Revolution, that the mind once enlightened could after all
become darker.6
Equal Secret
It is difficult to be brief in trying to understand what transpired that
made these nineteenth century thoughts aversively of another age to us. On
being queried, any one might spontaneously want to say, with a self-
edifying sense of progress achieved, that what provokes us in the judgment
of barbarism is the high-handed condescension of the light of civilization
to the dark lands that were pillaged in the presumption of that utter
distinction of high and low. That pillage occurred, and in those terms; its
criticism was an achievement. The terms of the accomplishment, however,
can be queried. There is no doubt that our aversion to the censure is in the
name of an equality that espies the epithet of barbarism, and senses that
the claim to equality has been transgressed. What we mean, however, by
equality may not be so different from that force of colonial pillage.
Equality, as such, our likeness without affinity, is another technique of the
same force of pillage in potentiated patterns of economic advancement,
and, effectively, a camouflage in which the muscled arm of that raised
higher hand of civilization was democratized as a universal potential to
coerce without remark. This is the open secret: whether in trying to
understand how the achievement of equality in the Obama administration
can be so entangled with Wall Street; whether in the drastic disproportion
of the look at me of so-called public art, always colossal in service to the
public interest. By the structure of law, we do not permit equality to be
pursued except as a fulcrum of inequality. Opportunity cannot mean
anything else to us. Thus the Supreme Court not long ago ruled that the
equal pursuit of happiness by no means extends to a guarantee of liveable
housing or nourishment. Instead, as we all in some sense know, houses are
6
Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage,
1991), p. 311.
in this moment being forcibly vacated by the tens of hundreds of

thousands, and half of all food in the nation is wasted.7
Another age commonly recognized this spurious form of equality as
the facade of inequality as bourgeois equality. That age could refer to it
without requiring any explanation whatsoever as what needed to be
overcome. This perception of bourgeois equality, however, even on the
political left, has vanished while occupying the visual panorama whole. It
is part of what we know without being able to know it. While it must be
discussed, it does not bear discussion; we have heard it all already, and
have yet to hear it. This clarifies something of what made the critique of
barbarism antipathetic to us. It must be that the dynamic of our form of
equality consumed both the insight into bourgeois equality and, with it,
any possible comprehension of barbarism as other than a culpable attack
on equality. The critique of the epithet of barbarism serves as its own
unapproachable mask. It is worn all the more securely because of the
element of truth, the genuine aspect of emancipation that it, like equality
itself, bears. Still, a slight nudge serves to dislodge the pretence and
reveals the half grin we all know it hides. After all, who has come home
from elementary school, head on chest, complaining that the teacher
called me a barbarian again today; I hate that!? And if that event had
somehow happened, it is not at all sure that it would have been such an
unpleasant memory. For confirmation, we only need to think of
Whitmans Song of Myself, to discover a soaring voice exalting in
directly familiar tones that I too am not a bit tamed I too am
untranslatable; / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
Untarnishable Truth
We do not need to disregard the humanity in Whitmans work to
realize how deeply his verse participates in a barbaric yawp that is the
characteristic assertion of a nation. American nationalism is felt directly in
opposition to the existence of the state; it presumes that equality means
that there should be no government; that, rightly, there can be none. We
are able to feel the motive national impulse without sensing anything
national about it. On the contrary, in the assertion of what we know as the
form of equality, we are confident that we are natures own allies in the
spontaneous expression of equality as the literal truth itself. To a degree,
this assumption is unavoidable. The literal truth, truth shorn of any
remainder, is the idea of equality. Still, to arrive at something closer to
7
www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/FoodReview/Jan1997/Jan97a.pdf.
28 Chapter Two
what truth may be, we would need to adjoin Adornos reflection that the
literal is the barbaric if we knew what that meant and meant it, which is
an aspect of what we are considering here. Part of the difficulty, however,
in following through on the need for this elucidation is that by its own
structure, equality is untarnishable by time, if only insofar as it cannot
experience time, and so remains the always youthful revolutionary impulse
of the nation, as the one untarnishable truth. Tocqueville more than
touched on this when he wrote, in what I count among the darkest several
sentences in that enormous volume a considerable source of Adornos
thinking that the gradual progress of equality is something fated [] it
is universal and permanent, and it is daily passing beyond human
control. Four hundred pages later, his study of the implications of the
structure of American equality causes us to recoil and dismiss its most
central conclusion, but only because Tocqueville leaves no doubt which of
two peoples he means us to recognize ourselves in We should not console
ourselves he writes by thinking that the barbarians are still a long way
off. Some peoples may let the torch be snatched from their hands, but
others stamp it out themselves.8
Esthtique du Mal
Tocquevilles statement of the danger of an unstoppable, fated equality
that is escaping what is human, directly catches us going the other
direction, and not only in our spontaneous distress at the epithet of
barbarism. For what Tocqueville names the danger of equality is what we
know as the rightly unstoppable impulse of the American Revolution. This
is why we have no choice but suspect that the comment of Monsieur de
Tocqueville is an unreformed aristocratic attempt at foreign usurpation.
Either his comment amounts to that, or, we would need to fear that if the
remark were crumbled up and sprinkled around, it would reveal youth as
an archaic and incalculably wrinkled old age, with a pitch fork in its hand.
It would. If, as Tocqueville claimed, equality daily passes beyond human
control, equality originated in what was not in our control in the first
place. Equality must be, therefore, on one hand, the power of human
emancipation something Tocqueville never doubted any more than
Adorno ever did but it is no less a force of second nature. It is as much a
capacity of wakeful consciousness, as it is a power of civilization for
inflicting on its consciousness the aspect that first nature bears, of having
8
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by George Lawrence
(New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 12; p. 465.
as yet to open its eyes. Equality is a means to an end as a technique of

fairness; but split off from the primacy of the object, it transforms all ends
into a means.9 But if, as such, equality is furtively the power of inequality
and if it is true that the only way out is through then this is also the
potential for equality to exceed itself. Tocqueville conceived this in words
that could just as easily be found in many passages of Adorno: Men
cannot be absolutely equal without being entirely free, and consequently
equality, in its most extreme form, must merge with freedom.10 It is in
understanding what equality in its extreme form would be that Adorno
has something to add to Tocqueville. For Adorno, equality potentially
exceeds itself when an unrestricted equality becomes the capacity for the
perception that the object is yet to be itself.
This would be more comprehensible to us if we momentarily succeeded
at extracting ourselves from an unconscious preoccupation with flag. Then
Tocquevilles remarks for instance concerning the inhumanity of
equality, would make us think not of foreign usurpation, but of financial
forces of exchange, themselves devices of that same power of equality,
and realize that they have, as Tocqueville feared, become primordially
destructive powers. The characteristic mark of these powers of second
nature is that they assert themselves literally, as in page after page of
available statistics, without a remainder, in the sense of drawing in their
wake no bindingly audible sound of what actually transpires. What is
happening to people now by the statistical millions in hunger, lost
productive life, homelessness and ruined education; and what we are far
into preparing to do to ourselves by the statistical billions, is what, even
while stating it, we sense as the inability to get our own bearings. We
know it, without our being able to know it. We could, for instance, read in
Wallace Stevens Esthtique du Mal that Except for us/ Vesuvius might
consume/ In solid fire the utmost earth and know/ No pain, and need to
consider that we are now substantially the closer kin to Vesuvius than to
the except for us of the verse, which, in spite of what it wishes for,
evidently pertains only to the poem.11 Its self-likeness salvages mimesis
for equality by potentiating self-identity as a capacity for non-identity and
thus shapes just what it is that Vesuvius cannot know.
9
J. R. Pole, The Pursuit of Equality in American History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978), p. 355.
10
Democracy in America, p. 504.
11
Wallace Stevens, Esthtique du Mal, in Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank
Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York: The Library of America, 1984), p. 277.
30 Chapter Two
Censure of Censure
We are considering a number of things at once, and it is worth making
sure that we have the main thread. We are following up on an interest
and a decisive disinterest in Adornos work that revolves around the
question of what barbarism is. I have said that our spontaneous censure of
that censure somehow involves our not knowing what we know. If Adorno
is always thinking about barbarism, it is in these terms that he thinks about
it. In a lecture series, for instance, he memorably questioned how it could
be that internal to society tremendous advances are constantly made in all
areas, but society itself, as such, never advances a single step. Why is it, he
keeps asking, that the portals of historical possibility objectively await a
single push and may even in this moment ride wide on rusty hinges, but to
us, in every direction, they appear barred and sealed with lead? Adorno by
no means supposes that there are not forces to contend with on the other
side of those portals, but that these forces cannot even be engaged in the
name of objective possibility, that even the hopes of the past continually
become less distinct to us, is the recurrent puzzle his philosophy presents.
We thus find ourselves back at Adornos question in the Dialectic of
Enlightenment with which we started: why does humanity founder in a
new form of barbarism instead of entering a truly human condition, while
we probably remain no less bothered that he was obliged to include that
awkward remark on barbarism?
Adorno sought to answer this question of the vanishment of possibility
in the midst of its proliferation with a mobile group of interpretative
concepts, rather than with any general theory of society. Adorno had no
general theory of society. He did not intend to have one. It would not be
difficult to extract such a general theory from any number of his
comments, but only on the condition of making his thinking as a whole
meaningless. That is, the absence of this general theory was reciprocal
with the answers that Adorno could conceive to the dead end we have
manufactured for ourselves: his thinking is recognized as a critique of
systematic reason; in alliance with nominalism, it is the critique of a
subordinating theory of reality. But he develops this by means of the
impulse of systematic reason itself. His thinking is not a post-modern
everything is in fragments, and here is more of the same. Adorno
intended nothing less than to save reason from reason, as the mastery of a
false mastery that, in fright, remains restricted to domination. If Adorno
was to find a way to make reality break in on the mind that masters it and
discern any possibility at all in what it has achieved, then it was reasons
own spell, its socially necessary illusions, its bedazzling veils
whether the money veil or the technological veil whether the spurious
necessity of logical construction, or of the exchange relation, or in the
aporia of aesthetic form, that reason would have to master, not least of all
in the ability to understand that barbarism is what befalls us when we have
lost any capacity to gain what he sometimes called the world of
objects.12 By contrast, in his philosophy, the achievement of the world of
objects would occur in acts of insight, not in grasping the totality of
society, of a totalizing society, in one fell swoop with however many
chapters. To make sense of this, one must understand that Adorno thought
not only that pleasure, but possibility itself only exists in reality, only in
the objects themselves. For where we are, however and he knew this
most of all as what he termed the delusion of constitutive subjectivity
this idea of possibility in the object itself could hardly be more remote.
Wallace Stevens could put this idea concisely in one of his adagia, by
saying that reality is the only genius.13
The Lid on the Garbage Can

We perceive Adornos concept of barbarism as being of another day
and age. It is. His concept of barbarism is an emphatically modern
concept; it epitomizes the insight of radical modernism; it is that insight.
As has been discussed in more detail in the previous chapter, the thought
that first made radical modernism radical its sine qua non on its every
level of thought and art was the recognition of the primitive in ourselves
and in the world itself. In 1911, a year in which radical modernism was
still discovering its self-confidence, the reputed 11th edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica authoritatively noted that this new idea of the
primitive marked the most radical metamorphosis of mental view that has
taken place in the entire course of the historical period in
anthropological terms, that is, since the emergence of the written word.
Radical modernism is the recognition that the primitive is not what we
were at an earliest moment, but what we remain. Adorno himself
acknowledged in his Concept of Philosophy this understanding of the
primitive in ourselves and in the world as the definitive step of Western
thought.14 When Adorno apostrophizes barbarism, then, he is not as we
suppose castigating the remnants of an original state of rudeness in nasty
12
See also H. D. Lewis, On Poetic Truth, Journal of Philosophy XXI (1946), pp.
147-66, for the same formulation of barbarism.
13
Collected Poetry and Prose, p. 914.
14
See Robert Hullot-Kentor, A New Type of Human Being and Who We Really
Are, The Brooklyn Rail (November, 2008), p. 34.
32 Chapter Two
people who failed to mature, and are as yet unfamiliar with European
formalities. What he intends is not any centurys cruel reproof of the
uncivilized, which is what we suspect in the oblivious loss of radical
modern insight. On the contrary, as Adorno developed the concept of
barbarism, he is criticizing the form of maturation itself, that is, the
struggle to dominate nature as a primitiveness that destroys the primitive
rather than becoming reconciled with it in its emancipation. It is only in
these terms that we could ever fit together Adornos epithet with, for
instance, his remark in Negative Dialectics that culture is the lid on the
garbage can; it is trash itself. If there were time here to review it, we
would see that this complex insight into the barbarism of culture is what
fundamentally distinguishes Adornos epithet from the instances of
nineteenth century American censure Sumners outraged voice included
cited earlier, and brings Adornos thinking, in its alliance with the
primitive, into important relation with yet unconsidered aspects of
Whitmans barbaric yawp.
Formerly Primitive
We can document the exhaustion of modernisms radical insight and
of the modern itself either by thinking again of our spontaneous failure
to understand what Adorno means by barbarism, or, indexically, if need
be, in the obituary early in November this year which marked the death of
Claude Levi-Strauss at the age of 100 with a notice that blindly shares in
what is actually a pre-modern prejudice against the primitive. The
obituary, adding insult to injury, acknowledges Levi-Strauss as the French
anthropologist who conducted research into what was once called
primitive man.15 Levi-Strauss, of course, like his contemporary Adorno,
and in alliance with an entire generation including the likes of Freud and
Benjamin wanted to understand the entwinement of reason in myth. This
is what Levi-Strauss perceived in primordial mythology. It is no less what
he saw in front of himself when he debarked in New York City harbour,
expecting to find a sleekly vertical ultra-modern metropolis. Instead he
discovered a horizontal disorder of ancient and recent layers of historical
magma tossed up by the building of the skyscrapers. The magma he
wrote covered the horizon as witnesses to different eras that followed
one another at an accelerated rhythm with, at intervals, the still visible
remnants of all those upheavals: vacant lots, incongruous cottages, hovels,
15
Edward Rothstein, Claude Levi-Strauss, 100, Dies, New York Times, Nov 4,
2009, p. A28.
red-brick buildings the latter already empty shells slated for

demolition.16 This is a natural-historical cityscape. The forgotten, the
archaic, and the detritus of history are forcibly extruded from below as the
skyscrapers jut through the earths crust in an accelerating intertwinement
of progress and barbarism.
But return now from what Levi-Strauss saw in New York City, and
consider again his obituary, in the phrase quoted, which in the voice of the
journalist presents a disillusioned superiority to the ancient myth of the
primitive, now capably dismissed. The comment amounts to the actual
sacking and repression of the primitive, and of the capacity of insight into
what the modern is. That obituary notice it exactly is what Adorno
meant by barbarism. Yet to our mind it amounts to the most contemporary
freedom from bias. We are the modern that has consumed its earlier
radical insight in the force of the asserted equality of all things. It could
not be more obvious, but in a situation in which we cannot know what we
know, it needs to be said that the critique of the injustice of the epithet of
the primitive is not in its rejection, but in the recognition of the primitive
in ourselves. Barbarism, as second nature, is the denial of that insight.
Lapsed Insight/Each Word

To elucidate Adornos concept of barbarism in this way, however, by
no means supposes that the critical impulse of the concept can be restored.
Insight that has lapsed, is just that lapsed. This is not to insist that the
concept is better forgotten; on the contrary, the research is meaningful, and
there is still more to say here about Adornos concept of barbarism. But its
moment is gone, and that impulse cannot be recovered by systematic
labours. In seeking to carve into the moment, Adornos concept of
barbarism is no less futile than is the idea of reification, which no effort of
clarification and expansion will revive, not any more than the stale
academic banquets on five continents devoted to the culture-industry,
dialectics or historical materialism will resurrect those now decisively
vestigial ideas. They are defunct. One must, on one hand, regret the fragile
loss of insight. But, on the other hand, our problem is not what we have
lost, but what we have failed to find.17 In this recognition one is allied
with what was once most alive in those concepts by acknowledging that
16
Claude Levi-Strauss, New York, 1941, in The View from Afar, translated by
Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992), p. 258.
17
On Poetic Truth, in Collected Poetry and Prose, p. 177.
34 Chapter Two
they now verge on an irreversible vacancy. They remain actual exclusively

as memorials to the effort to differentiate the vanishment of differentiation
the actual loss of reality which is the pre-eminent sense of our own
moment. Citing them is legitimate only when doing so resonates with their
imminent disuse.
In the awareness of their disintegration, as of the possibilities that they

once housed, our attention moves to where, in counter-ballast to them, the
affect of social self-evidence now pools up where we indisputably feel it.
It is located, for instance, in the confidence with which the enunciated
surge continues long after the event. Bush may be gone, but the surge
mounts. In every next article, reading the newspapers broadly, we continue
to see that Republicans predict a 2010 surge; Lay offs surge; Chinas
power surge ends, for now; in New York City, involuntarily comic, even
Bed bugs surge; there is a surge in financial products, and, as it turns
out, as if we still need to be told what we know but have decided to do
anyway the surge might not work in Afghanistan. The Wall Street
Journal headline today December 1, 2009 reads, U.S. Decides for
Limited Surge in Afghanistan. At variable distances, the one syllable
surge sits in ever reiterated range with the other watchwords of the day,
the muscularly eager robust; the aspiration to a timeless legacy straight out
of a box; the obliterating trump; the same push coming to shove in the
self-identify as in they self-identify as home-owners that dismisses
the life labour of identity with the punctual obligation to omit reflection on
himself, herself, or themselves; the rethink whatever climate policy,
perhaps that treats every concern as handily as any other direct object, as
in to kick a soccer ball; each rethink, at the cost of strictly limiting thought
to what anyone can recognize as a guaranteed rehash, disposes of the
cumbersome prepositions that efforts to think about something require in
achieving a relation to an object. These contemporary self-certitudes have
in common, in each repetition, a differentiation that has vanished and been
sacrificed to a greater fright and power. The reading eye, aware of the
collapse now of all critical concepts halts at each and every rethink,
reimagine, rediscover, rewrite, reinscribe, trump, legacy, and surge,
seeking the differentia specifica of regression by refusing as if that
refusal might be all that is left to possibility to read another word before
figuring out how it might otherwise have been said before what fell on our
heads tumbled.
Plain People in Plain Towns

Barbarism, then, as a critical concept of which it is evident that its
thinking epithet no longer strikes flint on stone; that has willingly
surrendered any intention to be stated with crescendo or even decrescendo;
can still be understood for what it is. As second nature, barbarism is
disillusion as the last that is, an all-encompassing illusion.18 As Adorno
put it as might be remembered from the beginning of this discussion
the literal is the barbaric. Still, Wallace Stevens, whose poetry is affiliated
with Adornos aesthetics in the intention to salvage semblance, speaks
more recognizably to us in An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, with
some emphasis on ordinary, where he writes that the plainness of plain
things is savagery. This savagery, he says, is the condition of plain
people in plain towns. In following Adorno to Stevens, we intend to
understand more about Adornos work, but the intention remains broader
than that in wanting to pursue the now vestigial concept of barbarism as a
capacity to perceive a loss of differentiation. This loss needs to be made
perceptible in the language of the tribe, and not just in the shibboleths of
the moment, in the surge, the robust, and so on. We must hear the
plainness of plain people, even if the plainness itself urges us to dismiss
Stevens and Adorno in what must be their exaggeration that it is savagery.
The perception of this plainness is in fact immediately there for our
own ears in every you every English you we speak. This is
unavoidably striking if one has needed to listen to this you while working
ones way into English, coming from another European language. Then
one constantly makes the discovery that English provides no alternative to
you. For unlike any other European language, English expulsed its familiar
pronouns, the thee and thou, and did so in deference to the Puritan
distress at the presumption of that familiaritys intrusion on the inwardness
of spirit. The Puritan effort, however, in its own literalistic intention to
defend the boundary of the inward at all costs, contributed to the
effacement of the sanctum that they sought. For the prohibition on the
intimate pronouns dissolved the boundary between the familiar and the
formal, leaving in its wake a remaindered you that turned out to be both
singular and plural. In our plain language, that is, you darling is, in the
same breath, inescapably you thousands and millions and, frankly, darling,
you everyone. The you we speak, and have no choice but to be, is as icy in
its intimacy as it is insinuating in public. In the centuries following the
Puritan repudiation of uninvited intimacy, commerce would seize on this
18
Wallace Stevens, op. cit., An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, p. 399.
36 Chapter Two
anonymously intimate and intimately anonymous you as an economy of

scale. Thus, the you of Melvilles 1850s Confidence Man, who goes about
the ferry deck importuning every next inadvertently available you with the
skeweringly invasive, Do you have confidence, sir? Implicit in the
hucksters you was already the supreme court ruling that commercial
speech would enjoy every First Amendment protection; you fore-spoke
the emails from colleagues and socially net-working friends linking
directly to their websites, unable to distinguish the importuning from the
intimate. We think of Hopper, of course, as having painted that you at the
All Night Diner, as our own melancholy, Ok, you, your turn honey;
whatll you have? along with every next honey who takes a seat down
the row of barstools for the displaced, each feeling equally alone at the
ragged mercy of an unparryable economy. American literature has not had
anything like its own Flaubert, but we can still perceive, if in a learned
way, that language bears its own criterion, and that it is a criterion of
reality. And by the criterion of our you, we can start to hear in our own
voices the voice of plain people in plain towns, those persons fully
distorted by their isolation whom Sherwood Anderson still had the sense
of scale and courage to describe as the grotesques of Winesburg, Ohio.
The you we speak is the literal measure of the literal each and all.
This is, of course, not to say that the fact of the familiar pronouns
enduring in the other European languages, the du Lieber Kind, or the cest
toi cherie, protected their people from barbarism. We know it did not.
Adorno knew this. But the residual existence of this differentiation of the
familiar and the formal in the other European languages is one aspect of
historical boundaries internal to those societies and the self that has
something to do with the continuingly possible comprehension in them of
the meaning of the barbaric and why it is that, in Europe, in the wake of
being overcome by its own barbarism in the twentieth century, acts of
barbarism are indictable, whereas, by contrast, our law has available to
itself only the term of art, incivility, or, hate crimes. The latter
constitutes a distinct category from acts of barbarism in that they
specifically concern a crime against equality, as a culpable bias, not as a
crime against humanity as an acknowledgeable transgression.
In his writings, Adorno, of course, never once addresses us as du he
did not address Walter Benjamin as du. It is, however, the place of the
unvoiced du in his thinking that provokes us in what we perceive as the
arbitrarily Alexandrian formality of his writing. It is part of what is
inimical to us in his apostrophizing of the barbaric, and in claims such as
that writing poetry after Auschwitz is itself barbaric. But it is no less the
implicit du on every page that causes a style determined never once to slip,
to crack with pained tenderness even where it is conceptually hardened to

a glassy impenetrability. For us, the du is a more resilient puzzle than any
of the intricacies of Heideggers being of beings. Even those of us who,
for historical reasons, find it difficult to travel in Germany and may avoid
speaking the language, however well we may know it, may also be aware
that there is not any way in English to sign a letter to the friends in
Germany of many years, Seid beide fr heute herzlichst gegrt, the plural
familiar, or, the other side of it, to provide a formal salutation that
concludes with anything like, Je vous assure, Mesdames et Messieurs, de
mes sentiments les plus distingus. What may feel comic and archaic to us
in these expressions, whether as an excess of sincerity or of formality, is
how plain people, in plain towns, sense the commercial force of a nation
that Claude Levi-Strauss described in his New York City 1941 when
Adorno was also a refugee there, sharing with him as well the perception
of the mythical barbarism of the modern as the force of a machine
capable of both going in reverse as well as advancing in time that has
pushed us back into the one remaining dimension: one will probe it in vain
for secret loopholes.19
Interrupted Gesture
The two most important statements in Adornos Aesthetic Theory are
located in Walter Benjamins study of the baroque play of lamentation, the
Trauerspiel book. The first is this: The object of philosophical criticism
is to show that the function of artistic form [] is to make historical
content [] into a philosophical truth. Aesthetic form, that is, translates
history into truth. In Adornos Aesthetic Theory, this becomes the thought
that art as form is the unconscious transcription of the history of human
suffering. Aesthetic criticism, then, must find a way in concepts to present
this content. The second essential statement for Aesthetic Theory from the
Trauerspiel study is in no way as deceptively limpid as the first. The
statement occurs on the next page of Benjamins study, and it explains
exactly how aesthetic form functions to make historical content truth: It
may not accord with the authority of nature; but the voluptuousness with
which significance rules, like a stern sultan in the harem of objects, is
without equal in giving expression to nature. It is indeed characteristic of
the sadist that he humiliates his object and then or thereby satisfies
19
The View from Afar, p. 263.
38 Chapter Two
it.20 Benjamins pictograph of the sadist who gives nature expression in

the stern rule of significance, which in this image specifically touches on
what Benjamin frequently refers to as the barbaric techniques of the play
of lamentation, elucidates his comprehension of Baroque form as it
translates history into truth. In Adornos Aesthetic Theory this is the idea
that in the dialectic of mimesis and construction, expression is achieved as
an interrupted gesture. Nature, that is, does not find expression in tossing
the proverbial shoe against the wall with a shout. On the contrary, nature
gains expression only in the shaping of how it is historically impeded. In
the dialectic of mimesis and construction, this expression occurs as a
movement at a standstill as if the arm were moving, but the shoe not; or,
the shoe, and not the arm. This is how art, unlike any other object we can
make, becomes a surface that refuses to let its content remain hidden. That
is no less why the unconscious transcription of human suffering is the
human, as the more than human, in the achieved voice of nature itself in
what it undergoes.
We could follow this philosophical discussion art-historically if we
considered several Palaeolithic rock paintings, which are exclusively
mimetic participation in a magical object, and compared them with what
happens in the sudden appearance of the conflict of mimesis and
construction in Neolithic geometrical artefacts. These Neolithic geometrical
pots mark the beginning of settled, agricultural society and with it, not
only the separation of image from object in life as organized labour, but no
less the appearance of the conflict of mimesis and construction. In the
absence of an emancipated concept of form, however, which would not
occur for tens of thousands of years before the Greeks, the Neolithic
conflict of mimesis and construction remained limited to an almost
absolute absence of expression. Obviously, this is not the moment to
follow that history from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic. It is only
mentioned here in order to help flesh out a little what is happening in
Aesthetic Theory, because neither does Adorno proceed in any way art-
historically. In Aesthetic Theory he omits most all close history of art from
his discussion, and hardly approaches a single art work in the volume. This
makes it difficult to recognize what he is talking about, especially in the
important discussions of the dialectic of construction and mimesis.
Aesthetic Theory is organized in this fashion because Adorno, in a
philosophy devoted to the emancipation of nature that is conceived as
much in alliance with the barbarically primitive as in opposition to it,
20
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, translated by John
Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977) p. 182, 183.
wanted to make the experience of natural beauty central to his aesthetics.

His aesthetics thus runs self-consciously contrary to the telos of the
modern development of aesthetics, which participates in the ban on the
mimetic relationship in the marginalization of natural beauty from
aesthetic reflection. Structurally considered, Aesthetic Theory is organized
concentrically around the section on Natural Beauty, which may also be
this almost intolerably interesting works most interesting section. This
section itself turns most of all on the study of the experience of a
movement at a standstill. Adorno memorably describes this movement as
what most of us know from childhood as those cloud dramas in which
under our gaze the cumulus rhino in motionless motion becomes the
elongated cirrus giraffe. Here the experience of natural beauty provides the
model of the longing, needful, voice of nature, which elsewhere in his
aesthetics Adorno shows takes shape in the form of art beauty in the
dialectic of mimesis and construction as memory of what historical nature
undergoes.
Adornos aesthetics, then, directs our attention not so much to the
observation of nature, but to beauty in art as it is primordially oriented to
natures beauty, though not in any way in the sense of copying the yachts
at bay down at the harbour club. In instance, we might think, rather, of
Richard Serras work. He employs a German steel mill that once rolled out
materials for battle ship hulls for the manufacture of torqued panels that
never before existed. Self-alert that a humanizing touch now adds nothing
in art to the human, other than the pretence that the human immediately
exists, the unsurfaced, oxidized steel panels of his sculptures are as
rebarbative to the touch as any compacted encompassment of cinder block.
Serras accomplishment depends on the possibility of a mastery of
mastery, as the mastery of the domination of nature. Its constructive
powers must be at the level of what remains stranded in pragmatic labour
as barbaric forces of production, and match them with no less capacity
than Titian once handled a paintbrush. In art, only what impedes can
emancipate, because what impedes is what waits to become a power of
emancipation. A work of art that fails to become its own-most enemy
remains the imitation of the muteness of history. Art, as Wallace Stevens
wrote in The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words, must be a violence
against the violence; but if this violence is to be something more than
more violence, what history presents art with must be returned to it
pacified in form as memory.
40 Chapter Two
How-it-is
Serras legerdemain has been in figuring out how to organize his
torqued panels to transform the mobile sensorium, including the splayed
hips and sprung ribs of his otherwise desk bound visitors, into elements of
the performing arena of the work.21 The perceived dynamic, walking
through Serras raw spirals, originates in the recognition that you could
confidently throw yourself with a heave against those massive walls. But
given the pitched angle of the severe, unfinished tonnage no one dares lay
on a finger tip. The ingenuity in the sudden, built transitions between these
two states is prodigious. So much weight, so tentatively poised draws on
an ancient tradition in architecture of those buildings where the most
intense feelings of helplessness have historically lodged. In those precincts
the devout, shielded eye is trained on domed arches and high pitched
windows whose majesty is in all that reaches up to support them, as if
thought alone either sustains dome and glass with belief or brings them
down in deserved punishment. Serra does without dome, window,
devotion or doctrine and without architectural replication of any kind. But
the knee does bend. For the work captures the primordial impulse of self-
preservation where it wells up in those walls remnant of the sacred Dont
touch me. Under the shifting weight of vectored forces of avoidance and
enclosure, in the perceptually counterintuitive sweep of Serras steep,
triggered caverns, a focal hollow of amazed sensorial concentration is
compressed into existence and you begin to count your footsteps, though
not to number them: If there were anything on top of this one thinks
no one would come in here. Whichever interior vector you follow in
response to the inner turning spirals massed Egyptian come hither, to its
final centre its utter be like me you discover that each step acquires
precisely the time it takes. Time clocked becomes porous to a movement
at a standstill in which you you anyone, no art history needed or
permitted in the spirals anonymously intimate confine, become acutely
awake to what reaches under your ribs, to what takes hold of the left
shoulder blade, and, as invisibly, of the right, and of the knees, but so that
vision diverges from kinesis as it peers into the labyrinthine curve to find
its way between the corridors interior and exterior spherical surfaces,
turning at opposed velocities and angles. Every constancy of proprioception
is impinged as one senses a loss of footing largo on solid ground. There is
no step that is not a restriction, none that does not carry forward and none
that does not transform geometrical space into memory of nature in the
21
See images on p.42 below.
subject. The seriousness in the faces passing is probably your own and
might make you think of Maya Lins memorial where there is not a dry
eye in the look of anyone seen coming away from either side of that
marble trough of names, because no one comes away from it. It is only as
if that it can occur in fact. In Serras heaved walls we discover ourselves as
close to public participation in news of the mortal coil stung by the weight
of How-it-is as what is otherwise hardly elsewhere to be sensed in this
land of body bags and distant bombardments.
42 Chapter Two
Betwixt Torus and the Sphere (2001). Wheatherproof steel. Three Torus
sections and three spherical sections, overall: 1110399267
(3.611.58.1 m), plates: 2 (5.1 cm) thick. Private Collection.
Photographed by Dirk Reinartz. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian
Gallery.
CHAPTER THREE
THE MEANS OF INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION

AND THEIR WORKING ALLIANCES:
TOWARDS A CULTURE-INDUSTRY ANALYSIS
OF THE MEDIA
HEINZ STEINERT
Culture industry is not the media

In contrast to a common misunderstanding, culture industry is not
the media and their products. Culture industry, as first formulated in
the chapter of this name in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adornos
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/47), but dating back to much earlier
work by both authors individually, is a theory of the form of capitalist
domination that developed during the first half of the 20th century with the
mode of production that we today describe under the name of Fordism.
It is a form of domination that reaches deep into what people know about
society and the world. It is domination not by fear and repression in the
first place, but by subtly determining what and how we know about the
world. Its centre is the cult of the factual, the fetish of a reality that is
actually created by and in the service of domination. Its principle is the
commodity form.1
Culture industry is a theory of intellectual production under the
imperatives of commodified knowledge, or more generally: of
1
The commodity form implies bureaucratic domination: Horkheimer and Adorno
were acutely aware that a) markets need to be organized by non-market means of
domination, and that b) in the Fordist formation, which they experienced (without
having the word Fordist or, for that matter, a proper concept of what that mode
of production means beyond monopolization), markets had long lost their
independence and were being turned into outlets for monopoly products. I will
come back to this complex of insights.
44 Chapter Three
commodification of the intellectual aspect of labour. Given that all work

has manual and intellectual aspects, we have long accepted that the
manual/body part of it has been taylorized, taken over by a machine that
reduces the worker to a feeder: He or she has to provide material or
additional manual interventions that the machine needs and demands. And
they have to do so fast and reliably or the machine will stutter and lose its
rhythm. Even more importantly: The knowledge, experience, and
intellectual parts of production have, in this process, been incorporated
into the machinery, the conveyor belt that organizes and co-ordinates the
elements of work that are left to living workers. What happens today
and in the electronification of work is the extension of that process:
intellectual production is being taylorized. In the early stages of the
process, during the first decades of the 20th century, manual work became
dis-qualified and dis-owned the same is presently done to intellectual
production in what sociologists and politicians euphemistically call the
information society and its knowledge industry.
Even if a good part of the culture industry chapter in Dialectic of
Enlightenment deals with entertainment, the very first example
Horkheimer and Adorno use to illustrate culture industry is architecture,
the design of buildings and cities:
The decorative administrative and exhibition buildings of industry differ
little between authoritarian and other countries. The bright monumental
structures shooting up on all sides show off the systematic ingenuity of the
state-spanning combines, toward which the unfettered entrepreneurial
system, whose monuments are the dismal residential and commercial
blocks in the surrounding areas of desolate cities, was already swiftly
advancing. The older buildings around the concrete centres already look
like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts, like the flimsy
structures at international trade fairs, sing the praises of technical progress
while inviting their users to throw them away after short use like tin cans.
But the town-planning projects, which are supposed to perpetuate
individuals as autonomous units in hygienic small apartments, subjugate
them only more completely to their adversary, the total power of capital.2
Ideology is not just the lies told to us in propaganda speeches and in the
news or the dream worlds of advertising and of Hollywood movies (today
sit-coms and telenovelas); ideology can be built in stone. Domination is in
the design of car doors that cannot be closed softly but have to be slammed
(an example Adorno uses in his Minima Moralia). Domination lies in a
2
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002),
translated by Edmund Jephcott, p. 94.
The Means of Intellectual Production and their Working Alliances 45
concept like audience demand which takes it for granted that the proof
of a work of art, a piece of musical composition, for instance, is in the
radio coverage and the concert sales figures it can command. Culture
industry is a mode of understanding the world in terms of commodities
and instrumentality that can be incorporated in material conditions (from
the layout of a city to the design of kitchen utensils) and abstract concepts
(from the common sense of popular proverbs to academic philosophy).
Culture industry, then, is a much more general, abstract and
comprehensive concept than the media. It denotes the commodity form
of domination. This, in turn, poses a different question: What is the
position of the media in this form of domination? The media can and
have to be analysed under a culture-industry perspective. A critical theory
of the media is a special and limited part and an application of the theory
of culture industry. It has an interesting position in the overall theory of
culture industry in that the media are the means of intellectual
production: from the Homeric singers and narrators in an oral tradition
through different forms of scriptures right up (or down) to the complex
apparatus of TV production; from ornaments tattooed into the skin through
devotional paintings to the museum and the exhibition hall; from the
marketplace Cynics of antiquity and the aristocratic Platonic symposia
through public lectures to scholarly journals and internet publications. All
human production has intellectual aspects but there is a specifically
intellectual production which uses the media as its means of production.
From communication to being part of the action

There is a recently invented new verb in American English: to swift-
boat (someone), which is completely incomprehensible unless you
remember the 2004 presidential campaign in the USA. The Democrat
candidate John Kerry, a Vietnam War hero and highly decorated swift-
boat commander, was accused in a book and in a concomitant campaign
by a group of Swift-Boat Veterans to have been a coward on at least one
occasion and a bad officer to his men. It is today known (and soon after
the book came out) that there is no factual basis for the accusations, but
observers also agree that they probably caused Kerry to lose the
presidency. To swift-boat (someone), therefore, means to smear a person
with freely fabricated defamations in the hope that something will stick.
The media for making something stick are, of course, the internet
where everyone can, freely and in an uncontrolled way, publish any
rumour, the US speciality of hate radio stations, run by fanatic preachers
46 Chapter Three
of mostly right-wing and evangelical persuasion,3 and the mainstream TV

formats of the news show and the talk show: they need interesting
controversies, not factual truth. Any opinion that is appealing and
sensational, for which there is a large enough group that wants to believe
it, or at least likes (seriously or jokingly) to talk about it, has a good
chance of wide distribution.
One of the authors of the book on the Swiftboat Veterans, one
Jerome R. Corsi, Harvard PhD in political science, has devoted another
volume to the 2008 presidential campaign, full of fabrications again The
Obama Nation. Its publisher is the highly reputed house of Simon and
Schuster. In August 2008 it headed the NY Times bestseller list for three
weeks.4 Again commentators expected severe damage for the Democratic
candidate. Corsi has, between 2004 and 2008, published a number of
books in which he uncovers a conspiracy to unite Canada, the US and
Mexico into a new super-state; reveals that oil is continually produced
below the earths surface and therefore is not a limited resource; accuses
Democratic politicians to help Iran get the bomb. Confabulations of this
kind did not prevent a (formerly) reputable publisher from printing one
more collection of lies, as long as it promised high sales. Nor does it keep
the other media mentioned above from trying to make something stick.
A second example, this time from Germany: one of the big industrial
organizations, Gesamtmetall, in 2000 set up a small PR office. They
started two main activities: they set up a homepage and organized a club
of prominent friends (called ambassadors) of their cause, the Soziale
Marktwirtschaft (social market economy). The homepage offers
political information in an environment of games and polls. The friends
and ambassadors are offered support for their public appearances, in
particular information on political and economic questions they might
have to debate or speak on in public. Their professed aim is to create a
climate of reform in Germany, to further private initiative, achievement
and competition, neo-liberalism in the best sense of the word. They do
some advertising under the name of Initiative Neue Soziale
Marktwirtschaft, but mostly they try to influence public opinion through
their ambassadors who speak as experts or just prominent members of
the chattering class and certainly not as the multiplicators they are
3
Adorno analysed an early example in his 1943 The Psychological Technique of
Martin Luther Thomas Radio Addresses, Gesammelte Schriften vol. 9.1, pp. 7-
141.
4
Hendrik Hertzberg knows that this no. 1 position was achieved through bulk
purchases, he does not say by whom. (New Yorker Sept 1, 2008: 53) Even the New
Yorker does not always document its sources.
turned into. The activity is lobbying not for a specific interest but for the
belief in a market economy. And this is done by undercover agents of
public opinion, who may not even be aware of the job they do.
The point of these and similar examples is that the traditional
journalistic distinction between factual information and opinion has
become obsolete. Rather, the guiding principle is: Does it sell? Does it
draw a public? Furthermore, this public is not meant to be taken in by the
content, by the information or opinion presented; rather, it is meant to take
part, to gloat over someones failure and misery, to take part in their
alleged luxury, to repeat and spread the story, to enjoy listening to some
figure of authority (or mostly just prominence) tell what we want to
believe anyway. There is no need to assume that these talking heads
mean what they say, that they are authentic or simply just do not lie. We
may know or assume that we are being lied to it does not matter as long
as we are entertained or morally uplifted by what we see and hear, and
stay tuned in. The aim is arousal and excitement.5 We are not in the
first place told a story but rather made to take part. Audience
participation is the main principle, from the well-instructed studio
audience that is a major part of every TV show to the internet forum
attached to every article in a paper or journal. In postmodernism we even
got architecture for entertainment and tourist participation (instead of
citizen involvement).
We now live in what we can call extended culture industry, where
the limits between genres are blurred, where we are not to be persuaded
but made to participate. It is the form that dominates: organization of an
event in which we have to play our assigned role. We are not treated to
any message that we would have to decode. There is, in culture industry,
no communication that recognizes and accepts our being rational and
independent human minds susceptible to arguments. We live through a
transition from (fake) communication to being made part of the action as
the dominant form of culture industry.
5
In German journalist-speak stories are sometimes presented as der neueste
Aufreger the latest exciter, a neologism that has replaced sensation and,
significantly, shifts attention from properties of the story to the effect it is meant to
have on the recipient.
48 Chapter Three
Media theories three basic models: transport,

communication, domination
Concepts and theories meant to capture societies and social relations
are not gifts from above, nor the chance inspiration of some (major or
minor) genius. They use mostly traditional models of thought and are the
result of earlier or recent experience in a specific social position. They
depend on social relations and on socially structured events of which we
try to make sense by conceptual and theoretical efforts. The history of
ideas can, therefore, be used to reconstruct the experience and from this
the social structure that determined it. Ideas refer to society and its
workings in an indirect and complicated way.6 Social changes like the
succession of different modes of production are particularly prone to result
in novel experiences in different fields of society, which will then find
their way into artistic and scholarly as well as scientific production.
Conceptual and theoretical changes can therefore be used to look for the
social changes to which they respond. This is, by the way, the only useful
comparison between theories: not which of them corresponds to the
truth, a match of elimination, but rather what is the social formation to
which each of them refers, what are the different structures on which their
differences depend.7 Changing and dominant as well as deviant concepts
are articulations of different social experiences and interests.
It is in this sense that the history of a concept like medium/media can
be interesting. According to Raymond Williams Keywords, the concept,
in todays understanding, came into use in the 18th century together with
journals and magazines. That they came to be addressed as media of
communication is a product of the 20th century only. Earlier, media were
needed to transport ideas in contrast to material objects.
Communication, therefore, has two distinct meanings: it can be
interpersonal exchange in the sense of communicative action best
described by Habermas, i.e. oriented towards mutual understanding, in the
absence of force, relying on the better argument only. Or it can be the
simple transport of ideas, stored on a medium, through time and space.
Interpersonal communication makes a number of demanding assumptions:
6
There was a time when this reconstruction used to be called critique of
ideology and there was frequently an illusion that this could be carried out in an
easy and schematic way. Tough and thorough thinkers like Adorno always knew
that it is not a simple task but it is one that can and must to be done.
7
There is just one measure for the superior or limited quality of a piece of social
theory: its reflexivity. Does it include an account of how it relates to a given social
experience and in which social position or is it blind to this dependence?
mutuality and reciprocity of understanding, rationality in the sense of

being able and willing to be impressed by an argument and to honour its
quality and persuasiveness, or in its most general implication: mutual
recognition as rational human beings with equal rights and capacities.
Communication as transport does nothing of the kind. In this case there is
no presumption of rationality or recognition. It is only in this stripped-
down version that a word like mass communication can be used at all.
But it is a major part of mass medias self-descriptions that they
transmit and communicate. This way they make what they do personal
and neutral at the same time. They do not produce what they transmit
and they deliver it to each person individually. The confusion is enhanced
by the existence of technical media of interpersonal communication like
the letter or the telephone or recently e-mail. But books, journals, TV or
the Internet do not communicate, they just transport intellectual contents
(in a very broad sense of intellectual). It is ironical that they claim to be
communication right in the 20th century, which otherwise openly, if not
proudly, offered its media to be dominated by propaganda, commercials
and the editorial surroundings for them. This claim is not just a lie. It is
at the same time a moment of resistance against the purely instrumental
use of mass media. If they are supposed to be communication and not
just sale the contents must live up to a minimum of sincerity, if not
factual information. On the other hand, the easy talk of communication
came exactly at the time when speeches of the Fhrer and hate
propaganda turned the mass media into purely instrumental means of
unreason and disregard for humanity. They were used for manipulation
and as an occasion for people to self-manipulate themselves into a
Volksgemeinschaft by shared hatred and fanaticism the embodiment of
instrumental reason.
Up to the middle of the 20th century, media theories (Lazarsfelds, for
instance) used a transport and propaganda model of sender medium
recipient in some more or less complicated variant like two-stop-flow-
of-information or the more or less independent, creative, even subversive
recipient. Starting in the 1970s communication took over, and not just in
media theories but in high theory as well: in Luhmanns systems theory
and in Habermas theory of communicative action. Their concepts of
communication are different, however. For Habermas, instrumental and
communicative action are ideal types used to analyse real-life deviations
from them. For systems theory communication it is the intake and
exchange of information which is the basic activity for systems to stabilize
and reproduce. Media are of prime importance, since they are the
general bearers of meaning from the sand that keeps the footprint to
50 Chapter Three
generalized media like power, money, love, art and truth that represent
structured social relations. Media are not thematic; they disappear
behind the meaning, the contents they keep and bear.
The high plausibility of communication at the time (the 1970s,
Fordism at its peak) obviously derived from and corresponded to political
institutions like deliberative democracy and in particular the European
(and especially Austro-German) social partnership (Sozialpartnerschaft,
a compromise to replace class struggle by negotiations between the
organizations of capital and of labour). Politically, it seemed imperative
and possible to base domination on communication between different,
even opposing interest positions.8 Culturally, Fordism and the 60s and 70s
in particular were the age of psychology, social work and therapy, of
talking cures of all kinds, on which individuals set their hopes for a
solution or at least mitigation of interpersonal and social problems. At the
time it was quite logical that communication should be the basis,
centre or universal means of social life.
Both of the theoretical understandings of communication mentioned
above are far too general and abstract for a Critical Theory of media. We
get more of a basis by generalising the everyday understanding of
media: they are the material carriers of intellectual products, which
implies that they are the means of production of intellectual work. This
can be a book, a pulpit, a stage, a concert podium, an art gallery, public
places in a city or the internet; papers, journals, radio and television are
special cases.
Critical Theory in its original form, which culminated in the Dialectic
of Enlightenment, used neither the transport nor the communication
model of the media, but a third one that does not accord much
independence to the media and to the public sphere: producers as well as
recipients are subject to the same relations of domination that pervade all
of society and all kinds of (intellectual) production and products.
Resistance that takes the form of reflexivity is possible on both sides, from
producers and recipients, but is not very likely. We are not so much
manipulated by the contents of what we are told in the media, but rather by
the dominant form of knowledge that is deprived of a base in sensual
experience and by the general self-manipulation of adapting to domination
8
This connection is more easily apparent in Habermas normative theory of
democracy based on communicative action, which in fact gives a special place
of referee, mediator or court of appeal to moral philosophy, for it has the task to
state the rules of rational deliberation and point out illegitimate infringements of
power and domination on the ideal democratic, rational and coercion-free public
discourse.
that characterizes capitalist society. Instrumental reason has formed the

basic institution of work in society and peoples adaptation to this
domination to a degree that makes the additional influence of what radio
and TV may tell us, the possible impact of media contents, ephemeral. For
Critical Theory it is the commodity and bureaucratic form of knowledge
that determines capitalist work and what the media represent, and how
they do it. The media are not an independent actor but are determined by
the same relations of domination that characterize social life in other fields
as well.
Culture industry is a basic concept in Horkheimer and Adornos
Critical Theory because it connects the most abstract form of domination
to everyday social phenomena and allows us to analyse their aspect of
domination. But culture industry is also and this distinguishes the level
of reflexivity Critical Theory demands and masters from other theoretical
approaches the means of intellectual production, the means of
production of planners and designers, and also of artists, scholars and
scientists. Social theory and research follow the very same determinants of
domination that are their principal object. Culture industry studies are
research on the same form of domination that determines culture industry
and the ways of describing it.
Intellectual production is certainly not exempt from social domination
in the first place because the division of manual and intellectual work is
its fundamental dimension. To be able to do specialized intellectual labour
is a privilege granted to and by the dominant class. But this privilege
comes at the price of being secluded from the sensual experience that goes
with work, as Hegel demonstrated in his dialectic of liberation in the
master-servant section of his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Intellectual
production includes a struggle over the availability of and access to the
means of this production: the media. They are in the hands of the dominant
class, in capitalism through private ownership and state organization, and
there are, on the other hand, some popular media, available to all, like
streets and market places or private gatherings, gossip, rumour and
irreverent language or popular songs and narratives (which can be
restricted or enabled, suppressed and regulated from above). The state of
this struggle between producers and media owners is a major determinant
of intellectual production. Some producers describe this determination as
overwhelming and use it as an excuse for having sold out, but to deny it is
a sign of naivet and lack of reflexivity, if not megalomania on the part of
intellectuals. In scientific work, the first group are the technocrats,
consultants and salespeople who put science management above actual
research and theory. The second group are the value-free and sometimes
52 Chapter Three
academic-esoteric devotees of pure science, who disregard material and

organizational restrictions and determinants. We can identify the two poles
in media research as well.
It is the third model we can call it the domination model of the
media, in contrast to the transport and the communication models
that transcends its origin in the propaganda and advertising experience of
mid-20th century conditions and which can still be applied today. In
particular, the transition from the presentation of contents to active
involvement of the audience mentioned above can be interpreted in terms
of modes of domination, but not in the other two models. They have a
historically specific meaning only, which is difficult to bring up to date.
Structures of the public sphere

Means of production of intellectual commodities
Depending on the genre, the means of intellectual production can be
more or less demanding: A haiku can be written down on a paper napkin
during breakfast in my favourite caf, while the production of a movie or
an opera needs work, machinery and organization in the order of a middle-
sized factory. For a football world championship, a worldwide apparatus
of production, including several ten thousands of directly (and even more
of indirectly) participating workers and a web of top-level electronic
devices, reaching into space, is set in co-ordinated motion. The immediate
producers have different degrees of control over their means of
production. (But who are they in the case of a football championship? the
players who are mercenaries and a high-price commodity? the
functionaries who do a specialized administration job? the journalists
and other sales personnel? the radio and TV stations? the mechanics,
electronics specialists, stadium builders and transport workers? the police,
catering and other service personnel? the FIFA and their sub-organizations
who make a profit mainly through licensing fees?) The means of
production may be the infrastructure available to all in some cases; in
others, there is a more or less monopolized private ownership or public
control that grants highly restricted access only. For the most part,
intellectual work is as deprived of control over the means of production as
is manual labour in material production. It follows the logic of private
ownership and/or bureaucracy. But some art, music, literature and theory
have the charm and appeal that they can seemingly be produced in self-
employed and home production, in job-shop manufacturing and as a craft
with tools and other equipment that most people can afford to own, much
of it not even with the aim of making a living from. There is a deep
hierarchy of cultural production from youthful attempts, mostly given up
after a limited time, to the grown-up hobby, today called creative
activity, to the small professional peak of the iceberg.
Publication secrecy
Understood as means of intellectual production, publication or an
audience is not a necessary aspect of the media, even less an anonymous
and paying audience. A major part of intellectual production is secret,
i.e., done exclusively for a specific customer or employer under a
provision of non-proliferation at least for a time. The media of such secret
knowledge extend from the inner (esoteric) circle of a cult or religion
that keeps it and passes it on often without any written record after a
highly selective initiation only, through the formula of a chemical process
and its industrial organization that is kept secret from competitors, to the
exclusive expertise of a think-tank for a specific politician or his party.
The institutions of copyright and patent make knowledge and information
public, but restrict their economic exploitation.
In pre-bourgeois times, arts like literature, theatre, painting and
sculpture had a very restricted public only: they belonged to the noble
who had commissioned them and were open to those he invited and no-
one else. Audiences were to be impressed by the work of the court artist
and thus by the prince whose court he adorned. More than anything, they
were the princes competitors, who were to be outdone, and those higher
up who were to be flattered by a display of glory and extravagance. On
occasion, that would include the common people who needed to be bribed
into submission and admiration. Religion, when and insofar as it was not
exclusive to the dominant class, could open such display to a general
public in the service of proselytising or even on the improbable
assumption that all human beings have a soul and are Gods children.
The people could also be entertained by spectacles of punishment and
torture, religiously by the burning of witches and heretics, secularly by
public executions of criminals, i.e., those who had infringed on the
majesty of the powers that be.
Other knowledge was even pressed on the people: obligatory schooling
did not come as a blessing and privilege to many of them. The public
display of the architecture of domination or art in public spaces forces
information about domination (and its historical legitimation) not only on
spectators but also on anyone who walks by. Its impact cannot be avoided.
54 Chapter Three
Selective publication
Most intellectual products are neither aimed at nor received by every-
one. Usually they have a selective audience. Media, therefore, select the
public they serve. Illiteracy is the easiest determinant of a restricted access
to written culture. Specific places for certain types of cultural products
select their public, formally (through gate-keeping) or informally (often by
self-restriction of where not to go). Culture is as stratified as societies
are. Religion and its knowledge have a way of cutting across classes in
some respects in order to reinforce acquiescence to class boundaries in
others.
The producers of culture are either artisans or scholars producing
culture based on experience or on scripture, on handling material or on
interpreting (often holy) books. Musicians, painters, sculptors, actors,
clowns, rope-dancers, jugglers and magicians work with their hands and
their bodies and use a knowledge embodied in their skilled movements
and their expert handling of tools. Often they cannot tell how they do it. If
they want to teach their art they must do so by showing and by coaching
active attempts by the apprentice. Composers, authors, directors and
engineers tend to be more on the scholarly side, using rules, (if possible
mathematical) formulas, explanations, programmes and practical theories
for their production. Historically, Western intellectual production has seen
a gradual shift from experience- to theory-based culture, from tradition by
apprenticeship to tradition by schooling, from artisan to scientific
knowledge. The institution of school and mass instruction may have
been the main motor for this development, not least because teaching
created an opportunity for second-order intellectual work, an enormous
field of activity (and income), the meaning of which is well captured in the
popular saying: He who can, does, he who cannot, teaches.
Artisan culture has been superseded by scholarly culture generating a
series of oppositions: musicians music (like jazz and other improvisations)
vs. composers music (some of it nearly un-playable and structured in
abstract ways that cannot be heard but only read); theatre and film
dominated by actors (like the Commedia delArte) vs. by authors (the
domination of the director is somewhere between the poles); abstract
expressionism vs. concept art; builders vs. architects; inventors (as
mechanics with an idea, tinkers) vs. engineers, planners, designers;
observers vs. methodologists. Accordingly, the relevant media turned
instructional: educational museums, theatre as a moral institution,
journals in the service of political education (for teachers in particular),
special (often bowdlerized) literature for the young, censorship or at
least rating of movies, an educational mission of public TV.
Today, in Western democracies, overt censorship is not the main

problem: if it is art or science nearly everything is permissible that some
group would like to brand as blasphemy or pornography. Rather, self-
or internal censorship and beyond such negative determinants the
positive rules of what an intellectual product has to look like follow
the dictates of the viewing rate and sales records of all kinds. The scandal
around the threat of censorship may even be part of the sales pitch. For
popular genres and the media the imperative of education has also been
removed. With the rise of mass media and especially in the course of the
20th century cultural populism9 came to rule practically all of cultural
production. Education of the masses has been replaced by wooing them
in the service of getting hold of their money or their vote. The old 19th
century division between high and popular culture has been shifted
towards a universal boulevard and allegedly lower class entertainment
in which what used to be high art has become a special niche pandering
to a select audience that can pay an extra high price. Advertising and
propaganda, which pay for it all, are their common denominator.
Public spheres
Media as the means of intellectual production are, on a most
elementary level, shared by those who cooperate in a specific kind
production. All thought has a social character: it uses shared knowledge
acquired through socialization and shared skills and instruments. But even
beyond this, intellectual production usually has not just one author, but
is carried out by a production team. The media in which an intellectual
product materializes constitute a public sphere of production. The
finished product may well be appropriated by one spokesperson of that
team and in capitalism by the media owners. There are interesting
historical shifts in who the spokesperson for the product is: in music, the
musician or the composer; in film the writer, the cinematographer, the star
actor(s) or an ensemble, the director, the producer, even the studio; in
literature the author may be just the instrument of divine inspiration or a
genius or a compiler and collector of traditional material. The role of the
publisher and the editor has also changed historically; even in science the
individual genius has been replaced by teams, in which technicians and
9
The concept has been introduced by Jim McGuigan in his Cultural Populism
(London: Routledge, 1992). Here he offers a specific critique of Cultural Studies
and its over-optimistic view of the defiant and subversive audience, but it can
and should be applied more widely to media orientations towards (c)rude and
unrefined taste in general.
56 Chapter Three
data specialists may be more important than any scientist. Today public
relations specialists may be the most decisive participants of any
intellectual production.
Starting from this public sphere of production we can distinguish
further, increasingly wider and more anonymous kinds of public:
* Usually there is a professional public of producers, a category or
genre who can judge the quality of a product and who are at the same
time competitors. Producers who use the same medium want to learn from
each other; they want to set up and develop standards of good work;
they have to regulate their competition; they teach the next generation. Not
infrequently there are solidarity groups (schools, cliques, circles), so that
competition is not just individual but has multiple layers.
* There is also a professional public of media owners who have to
observe what each of them does and is planning to do, and who may have
to regulate their competition even more than the immediate producers do.
They may, as for instance book publishers against the electronic media,
have shared interests against other categories of media or they may do
business amongst themselves, own and form useful coalitions between
different media.
* When the contents refer to persons or institutions in the world
outside the media there is a public of those immediately involved in what is
made public. The first public of journalism is the subculture of
professional politics and the celebrity subculture. The first and most
relevant readers of the political section of daily papers are members of the
administration and their opposition, the persons on whom media may (or
may not) report. They want to control their self-presentation and the
information that circulates about them and, if that is important enough,
they have a professional staff of PR managers who see to it that the proper
information is given out or held back. Their public is not a general
audience in the first place, but rather the inner circle of the respective
subcultures. Information management is part of the power-play and
intrigues in this circle.
* The general, anonymous audience is often the least relevant and only
indirectly important, unless big numbers who pay or vote are the explicit
aim which is not always and not even frequently the case. This general
public is layered in itself:
** There is an important inner circle of opinion leaders, the so-called
multiplicators in German, who can influence how and how far a certain
product is received and distributed. They are people who are especially
interested and have access to others of their kind and have credibility
among them. They are potential critics at the same time. They may be
professionally involved in distributing culture, like teachers of all kinds

and levels, or culture-management specialists.
** Each medium and genre has a specialist public that is particularly
interested and knowledgeable (mostly in what the market has to offer): the
fans. Market research identifies them in demographic categories of age,
sex, education, and income and organizes special offers to them.
** It is in special situations only that an undifferentiated general public
is to be addressed election campaigns and general sales drives are the
best-known cases. Even then, todays marketing methods would break this
universe down into target groups that can be specifically addressed. The
populist situation of a national state of emergency or a declaration of
war is the prototype. Nationalist and racist, sometimes religious, categories
have been and are still used with some success to override differences
and even opposition of interest positions in the population. Such appeals
use the widest possible inclusion by defining (and sharply excluding) an
external enemy category.
Communication and its mediation

What is put out in (a given circle of) the public sphere is not
communication, not in the demanding Habermasian sense of the word, i.e.,
of partners who interact verbally and with rational arguments in an
orientation towards understanding what is being said, recognizing each
other as rational human beings. Such a concept makes sense in face-to-
face situations and can be transferred to media situations only
metaphorically. At least under capitalist conditions, the media will strive
to sell their contents and their forms of entertainment, advertising and
propaganda. In a useful theory we need to clearly distinguish such media
of culture presentation, as we could name them, from media of
communication. For the second case we could instead use technical
means of communication.
Mass communication is a categorical mistake, a shift of the meaning
of the word to transport. This categorical mistake is openly propagated
by media like radio or TV, when their anonymous audience is personally
addressed. In contrast to the patent absurdity of the personal address in a
public gathering, the fake character of the personal address is not that
obvious for radio and TV, which are received in each persons sitting
room while the other components of the audience remain invisible. It is
not rare that people answer back to the anchorpersons friendly good
evening or good bye. TV celebrities, especially those seen every
58 Chapter Three
evening, are turned into imaginary members of the household. What they
say acquires the nature of a personal communication.
The second false element of what radio and TV do is their claim that
they transmit some event from where it happens to peoples sitting
rooms. The camera, even if a static one, does not transmit; it stages what it
picks up by selecting, if not otherwise transforming, pictures and sounds.
Sports is a familiar example: nowhere in the reality outside the TV set,
in the stadium or standing next to the racing track, can we see a football
match or a ski downhill race the way we get it presented on the screen in
detailed and overview shots, even with slow-motion replays. Sports
spectators as we know them today have been in fact produced by TV, not
transmitted. But the claim that they just transmit an outside reality
dovetails with the personal-address game they play: TV (and before it
radio) was and is made to appear to be communication. This production
of reality has long been a standard feature of the theory and practice of
documentary filmmaking: in order to look documentary-like, meticulous
staging of reality, reality signals like a shaky hand-held camera and
interviewer voice-over are needed. We had an example of the counter-
intuitive reality of TV images when on September 11, 2001, the burning
World Trade Centre towers, before they collapsed, looked surreal,
unbelievable and seen before in the movies to TV spectators and even
to the people who gathered in Washington Square Park. It took a time and
additional evidence, not least from what was reported on TV, before their
reality sedimented and could and had to be accepted.
The categorical mistake is supported by the fact that there actually exists
technically mediated personal communication mediated and at the same
time abstracted by the letter or the telephone, where the actual presence of
interaction is abstracted into words written on a piece of paper, including
the complete literary bag of tricks at the one extreme and reduced to just a
few signal words leaving out all the niceties at the other extreme of the
telegram. In these cases the technical mediation acts as an imperfect
substitute for face-to-face interaction of partners communicating.
Technical innovations were and are sought to improve on what is seen as
distortions of full communication, such as background noise, a metallic
or otherwise unnatural sound of the voices, the lack of visual information
etc.
The situation is complicated by the possibility that the limitations of
this imperfect substitute for communication can be exploited for
deceptions: lying about the location of a telephone call used to be a
frequent ploy in detective novels. Letter writing developed into a literary
genre of its own that can go beyond being a substitute for the desired
actual presence of partners, thus constituting a reality of its own, possibly

better than the complicated and disappointing reality of living in each
others actual company would be. This is also a function of the frequency
of exchange: the letter that arrives once a week and has to last the recipient
for days, being re-read and interpreted word by word eagerly is different
from the e-mail message or SMS with their immediate transmission.
Accordingly, the latter have given rise to abbreviations and a whole
language of their own, a disregard for what used to be the rules of polite
address, not to mention of grammar and spelling. The secrecy of the letter
(protected by the rules of polite respect and even by law) has given way to
a wild willingness to share messages and to a near complete disregard of
their private character. The rules of this type of communication are still
in flux.
There is, in the case of the letter, an area of overlap and gradual shift
between mediated communication (that is an imperfect substitute for the
real thing), and the letter as a genre of presentation of culture in its own
right.
The new Internet genres, on the other hand, are genres and games of
their own and certainly not a substitute for the real thing. Chats are not
communication but anonymous games of wit and aggression. Friendship
nets in cyberspace partly complement actual acquaintances, and partly
represent metaphorical games on the idea of friendship and of being
popular. These programs are media of self-presentation. Some are used for
initiating real-life contact the same way informal or commercial contact
ads were used in the papers earlier. But mostly they are an end in
themselves and not meant to spill over into real life. The process is made
explicit in games such as Second Life, where people are represented by
more or less fantastic avatars, whereas in MySpace or StudiVZ the
presumption is that the avatars are real persons who present themselves.
These games actively blur the line between fiction and reality in the same
way radio and TV do, but they are not communication.
The mobile phone, an instrument of technical mediation of
communication, is an interesting case: by making contact to a group of
friends and family permanently available, it cancels separation from them
and makes being by oneself impossible, but on the other hand it also
distances the person from the actual surroundings in which s/he moves.
The separation of work and private life becomes as obsolete as the
separation of different spheres and circles of private contacts. On the other
hand, anonymous public spaces like the city are increasingly peopled by
persons who are not there: with the machine on the ear they are
elsewhere and in the company of other people who are not there. The
60 Chapter Three
effect is that they cannot pay attention to who moves where and bump into
people who are there. The effect is that they do not care who listens and
has to listen to what they exchange with the person who is not there. The
reality of material bodies moving in a shared social space becomes less
real than the imaginary presence of persons to whom they are
electronically connected.
As we can see from an analysis of different examples, there are
interesting mixtures between technically mediated communication and
media of culture presentation in the same technical gadget or program.
This makes it all the more imperative to be clear about this distinction.
Genres and working alliances

To be taken in
The sale and distribution of cultural commodities to a wider or
restricted public is not a matter of contents in the first place. Before
individuals can be reached at all they have to enter into some relation to
the medium; they have to form a working alliance with it. How attractive a
medium is depends on this working alliance, in which contents get a place.
The most general media working alliance is to let yourself be taken in to
some degree, to be willing to engage with it, to start feeling at home
there.10 In popular interpretations of how and why we get interested in
some media presentation, this experience of allowing oneself to be taken
in is discussed in terms of identification (mostly with the hero or with
the theme of the story).
The first thing a medium delivers is its working alliance; contents
stand in the second place only. Contents fall into a limited number of types
and are repeated endlessly. The well-socialized recipient knows them and
directs his or her attention to the small variants and variations. Take
news as an example: there is a fixed sequence of categories about which
we get a report, starting with natural and other catastrophes (including
wars) and their body counts, recently released government announcements,
meetings of the high and mighty and the rich and beautiful, society and
culture gossip, sports results, the weather, lotto winning numbers, updated
stock indices as an addition to the game-of-luck section. Research has
shown again and again that people hardly remember what they just heard
(but they could probably, if asked, recite the sequence of categories). This
10
Marshall McLuhans famous The medium is the message (or, as in the title of
a book, even the massage) captured exactly this basic premise.
is not a failing of the news or of the listeners and viewers: they need to
forget the contents so they are free and even curious to hear the next
instalment. What counts is the working alliance, the framework of what
constitutes news or any other genre.
The working alliance, in technical terms, is the framework of rules and
knowledge that is taken for granted in a specific situation and must be
entered into for the specific event to make sense and to take place at all. It
is not thematic (only when something goes wrong) but taken for granted.
The well-socialized spectator enters into it automatically, when the
proper cues are given, and chooses it actively when he or she decides to
take part in some media presentation. It is this working alliance that gets
filled with variants of genres and that we enjoy (or hate) in the first place.
Propaganda
The extreme and paradigmatic case of propaganda is the declaration of
war and the concomitant enticement of war enthusiasm in the whole
population. To be taken in by war propaganda a master-race working
alliance is used: We are the master race and we are being threatened in a
deadly way by an enemy who is at the same time detestable and terrible.
The stress is on the We: propaganda constitutes an imaginary
community of us against them to which every single one of us wants
to and has to belong. There are no exceptions, only traitors. Propaganda
always uses an element of fear. But the imaginary community will
overcome it and be eventually victorious. This is because it is innately
higher than the enemy, a master race by nature and right. The imagined
community is pictured in the metaphor of a (one big) family (from the
corporate family that stretches from the worker to the director to the
state constituted by its cells, the families), or a sworn covenant and
confederation, united in a common destiny in the past, present and
future.
Lately, we have repeatedly seen the extreme cases of a pure
propaganda of fear: the working alliance is we are threatened by an
utterly serious problem, so every single one of us has to contribute his or
her share for the common good. There is not much enthusiasm in this
situation, but a grave and solemn mood of gloom and doom. The main
point is the willingness to sacrifice some income or state support in the
easier case, ones life in the case of the soldier and even more of the
kamikaze, or todays suicide bomber. The political form of structural
populism, the political form of the present neo-liberal mode of
production, depends heavily on propaganda of fear: it produces a climate
62 Chapter Three
of defensive reform, not reforms to make life better, but reforms

necessary to just keep the worst from happening. This is a one-sided
variant of what propaganda usually does: to offer an appealing mix of fear
together with the promise of the master race.
Advertising
Obviously, this is the paradigm11 of being taken in: the working
alliance of advertising can be paraphrased as the management has spared
neither pains nor expense to make you happy. The more refined
contemporary version, though, is to make customers want to be part of the
community: we are the greatest, the coolest, most successful and most
exclusive and you can buy in and be part of this. This working alliance
originated with brand marketing. Its most recent addition is making
customers advertisers, turning them into walking billboards: they proudly
display an expensive metal DG belt buckle, one of two possible logos on
their jogging shoes or DKNY on the back of a silk blouse, Kenzo at
least on the inside pocket of a blazer and the Mercedes star on the car. We
are not supposed to buy some useful item but to join in a cool, exclusive
(or, in defiance of good taste, tough and rude) lifestyle. Interestingly
enough, this is not just indicated by what the item looks like, but rather by
a company logo. (The lucrative business of brand piracy became possible
through this advertising strategy.)
The working alliance of the bargain purchase has in recent years
become prevalent. Originally, there was a variant of advertising that said:
Through our special effort we can provide this item at a price lower than
any of our competitors. A next step was the special sale: to clear our
stocks, clearing sale due to bankruptcy a recent such offer I saw in
Vienna was sale due to death of owner. This working alliance plays on
the competition between buyers: How much did you pay for this? Oh,
but I know a source where you could have acquired it for half the price.
The model situation for this competition is the department store ground
floor bargain bin surrounded by buyers who try to grab the best items first.
The well-known caricature is the housewife who unpacks her goods, none
of which she needs or wanted to spend money on but they all were such
sensational bargains.
11
In German there is just one word for courting someone and for inducing her
to buy: umwerben.
Entertainment
To be entertained is something for which we cannot just wait
passively; we have to desire it, prepare for it; we have to be determined to
be entertained. This is why people who coldly join an ongoing
entertainment, often cannot see whats so funny or exciting about it. In
order to be entertained, one needs to take part in a working alliance of we
are all in a mood for laughter and feeling high. Outside of this, what is
meant to be entertainment often looks ridiculous, undignified and tasteless.
Since we often laugh at someones expense, entertainment may appear as
classist, sexist, nationalist and racist. Participation in the proper working
alliance is decisive for being entertained.
The public, i.e. the customers of entertainment, may have to be more or
less active or passive. On one end we have the audience sitting in rows
quietly, allowed to clap at certain points in the performance only; on the
other end the provider sells or hires out the equipment or the requisites or
even just the backdrop for (self-entertaining) activities by customers as
in a bowling alley or a fitness studio, a hiking trail well-provided with
markers and rest stations, the permanent exhibition of a museum, the
buildings and monuments of the city of Vienna sold by travel business.
Providing for bodily sensations is a special case of entertainment. The
roller coaster type provides the experience of going to ones limit of
being tossed around, falling from some height or being made dizzy
experiences we would not choose to have in other but these allegedly
controlled situations. Some forms of sports (if we would include them in
this category) like parachuting, hang-gliding or car racing also provide
such extreme sensations, only now connected with an element of active
mastery of a dangerous activity that includes them, not just being able to
stand them. Active body sensations of skill, audacity, strength and
endurance are in the foreground here. Other possibilities are elegance and
grace, the coordination between participants or shared tactical manoeuvres
in a game. Usually there is a strong element of competition, achievement
and success.
Mastery also dominates a lot of solitary entertainments: mastery of
some device, tool or machine or a specific situation with its own rules
(called a game), as in recent computer programs designed to be difficult
to beat. Games of chance provide a special situation that cannot be
mastered but gives at least an illusion that we can get better through long
experience. Often it is clear that we cannot win, not in the long run, but we
can at least develop a stoic attitude towards the inevitable loss, a cool
nonchalance that is hard to acquire. The game is challenging ones luck
and also getting into trouble and out again, the soap-opera theme as
64 Chapter Three
identified by Adorno in the Culture Industry chapter. A more general

formulation of what we experience in such games is you have to dare
your fate and you have to bear it and there are turns of fate much worse
than what youve just experienced. The working alliance that connects all
these is: Keep your nerve, never give up, life goes on.
Media and their actors

The audience
There are different ways in which audiences are taken in traditionally
they were presented a performance increasingly they are activated and
made to take part. They are to be members of the media world and know,
if possible like or even love, their prominent protagonists. Audiences are
treated to one-sided intimacy (they allegedly know every private detail
about media figures), and false privilege (every one is made to believe
the figure speaks to him or her exclusively) and are, this way, turned into
followers. In reality, audiences are allowed the occasional peak over the
barrier that shields the subculture of lesser and major celebrities against
them and they are fed fantasy stories about how this subculture lives. In
reality, the audiences function is to pay and be counted. Often the latter is
the more important of the two. A high viewing rate is a criterion for
substance and reputability the audience is understood to have voted
with their feet. It is also an opportunity to sell this big audience to
advertisers (the bigger the more expensive). We are happy to have you
here in such great numbers today is an expression of all these motives in
one absurd sentence.
Recent forms of entertainment take in the audience by mirroring it: the
studio audience represents the spectators and shows them what an
adequate degree of enthusiasm and its proper expression would be. The
laughter from the tape in TV comedy shows has a similar function. In the
extreme case audiences are entertained by just seeing themselves on the
big screen, a spectacle that is often presented in the warm-up phases
before an open-air viewing of a football match or pop performance. The
old-fashioned MC had to do this by asking single representatives of the
audience up on the stage and have them make a fool of themselves there.
The huge TV screens used in all big events today replace this by the
camera scan across the audience, which is used by people to wave into the
camera or even present some pre-arranged spectacle or a banner. Perhaps
more importantly, the camera overview can show the mass performing
for instance the wave (la ola), a self-organized movement produced by
people standing up and sitting down in the proper sequence for the camera
effect. The mass ornament in which Siegfried Kracauer saw the threat of
fascism rising in the 1930s, has today become a spontaneous entertainment
activity in which people present themselves, or rather: their well-
disciplined self-subjection, to the camera.
Producers and sales persons

In a mode of production that is characterized by the commodity form
(and, connected to it, the bureaucracy form), the most apt metaphor for
media is point of sale: the department store and the mail order
catalogue are the paradigmatic media. Official announcements, mostly less
colourful than commercial offers, are a further example. Products (and
they all have an intellectual aspect) need to be presented and advertised for
sale. Thats what media are for.
Other products that are not sold but widely distributed all the same and
by other means are state and religion. Historically, their media have been
buildings (and their architecture of domination) and public events (parades
and processions), including public speeches and sermons. Representation
of the rules of conduct that are propagated by state and religion has
historically used murals and statues in public places and public
performances of a theatrical kind, including torture and execution of
enemies of these rules. Popular culture has also known public rituals of
resistance like fools parades, carnivals or charivaris in which a world
turned upside down could be imagined. Except for the rare occasions
when they got out of bounds, such performances functioned as the safety
valves of domination and could even be instrumentalized by factions of
the ruling class. But they did keep the idea of a society with a different or
even less domination alive. What we know as art today used to be an
aspect of such celebration and questioning of domination, which has
developed out of it as a spin-off, by taking on a life of its own.
The Enlightenment propagated the idea of universal education (where
earlier regimes had seen to it to keep their subjects ignorant). The main
effect was the creation of a broad stratum of teachers and other non-
religious educators, an educated class that uses (and is paid by) the
widespread net and multi-layered hierarchy of the medium school. It is,
at the same time, the prime audience for high culture as produced by
artists, scholars and scientists. This new hierarchy of education12 has
12
The centrepiece of the educated class are teachers of all levels, from
kindergarten to the university. Above them we have a small elite of those who
66 Chapter Three
changed culture radically: now the elite is not shut off from the rest of
society but teaches its knowledge, even if in a popularized, simplified,
pedagogical versions first, to all and makes them all aspire to the higher
rungs of knowledge and research. This also implies a society that is open
to (upward) mobility, not closed by status groups into which people are
born. The promise is liberation.
Next to teaching, the media of journalism form an important aspect of
enlightenment. Originally, there was a broad overlap between the
practitioners of literature and journalism. In its development, journalism
created a varied field of political reasoning, social life and social and
cultural criticism channelled into small talk, but also a field of adventures
and excitements for people who would not be politicians, artists, sports
heroes and other celebrities, conquerors, soldiers, policemen or social
workers, but would rather report on their activities. Their genres were
and are daily-paper reports, photographs, radio and TV features, clips,
documentaries and popular non-fiction books. As a profession, journalism
has been discredited by its participation in propaganda of all sorts,
including the political propaganda for 20th century dictatorships, and it has
further been devalued by the general blurring of the boundaries between
reporting and PR or advertising. Even if rationalized with the help of
computer technology, what used to be journalism and is now a special
branch of advertising and propaganda is still an important activity of the
educated class.
Public relations has become an activity that uses the media of
journalism, but has developed into an industry of its own. Its origin is the
need to control information that can be distributed by journalists. And the
best way to do this is to not just by trying to prevent undesirable
information from being leaked, but to produce desirable information and
offer it for distribution. In connection with the competition and election
campaigns of political parties, this activity is today at least as
industrialized as marketing of (other) commodities has been for a long
time. Social science products like polling and identification of target
groups are a major part of this industry.
Some of the media of entertainment derive from art, education and
journalism, but much of popular entertainment champions spectator
sports (in a wide sense of the concept), i.e. bodily exertions, risks and
freaky features and abilities that may be fun to watch. Much of education
actually produce the knowledge that, in canonical form, is handed down to and
by teachers. The broad audience of those who do not become teachers are meant to
at least stay followers, to be aware that there is a lot they do not, but should,
know. This way they stay potential customers and consumers of what is on offer.
and journalism has been captured and superseded by entertainment. Even

public discussions have to be entertaining and are judged by how skilfully
the protagonists attacked and how courageously they hid their weaknesses,
and not by the contents of what they had to contribute with to solutions for
a serious public issue.
Traditional and critical media research

Market research
An important part of media research always has been, and still is,
market research. Each time competition tightens, and especially with the
appearance of a new genre or a new way of financing production, research
intensifies. Media research started and has been developed into an industry
as market research. There is no urgent demand and little incentive for
research on the media. Producers of intellectual goods who seek access to
publishing media may be those most interested in information on how they
actually function but practical experience is a more relevant source of
such knowledge (which, since it is relevant for ones place in the
competition, is not made public). Parts of the public who feel they are mis-
or under-represented by the media or neglected in their programming, may
also be interested. But here too the question is practical influence on the
media and certainly not critical, reflexive insight.
The latest speciality in media professions, cultural management, may
be interesting in an oblique way, for there seems to be an enormous over-
production of graduates, and the proliferation of cultural management
studies has resulted in overcapacities on this level too. This production of
graduates and degrees in highly instrumental approaches to culture cannot
continue as it did in its initial phase: competition has to turn to product
differentiation. A possible variety could be courses and studies that go
beyond an ever more refined commodification of culture towards
increasing the fit between the object/contents to be presented and the form
of display. Such considerations, which lead back to the use value of
cultural commodities, might open a chance for critical media research.
Critical media research

Critical theory sees its objects (material objects, events, knowledge)
under a perspective of the domination that constitutes and forms them. The
success of research is attested in the reflexivity it achieves. Critical media
research needs to address questions and use forms of analysis that may
68 Chapter Three
induce patient contemplation and reflection on how we are involved in

domination as participants as well as outside observers of the field.
Reflexivity starts with the insight that research itself is part and parcel
of culture industry. The production of scientific knowledge follows the
imperatives of its specific markets and the publication of its results reaches
right into the centre of culture industry and its relations of domination.
Insight into what the information society does to information and
knowledge and the production of both, therefore, is the overarching and
background theme of critical media research: how does it influence our
means of production? The general answer is that intellectual production is
being rationalized in this mode of production (of neo-liberalism) in the
same way that material production was rationalized by Fordism in the
20th century. In contrast to what enthusiasts tell us about new possibilities,
the main effect is that processes of intellectual work are being
expropriated by computers and their programmes, thus reducing
production to mastery of (complicated) instructions manuals. The products
have to conform to market imperatives and to instrumental rationality to
unprecedented degrees.
A program of critical media research not only performs the obvious
critique of the administrative research, commissioned and financed by
media in a (mostly survey but occasionally even experimental) research
industry that is an essential part of how the media function. Perhaps even
more important is an awareness of how university research is included in
this system not only by funds from the same sources, but even in
independent research that is fettered by the project-with-peer-review
format (with its pressure towards normal science and the average) and
whose credibility has to compete with the common sense of the research
industry mentioned above. Critical research will also include the forms of
publication that dominate today such as: 1. popular science that is in fact
public-relations work for (and of) universities and certain disciplines,
traditional or brand new like e.g. the neurosciences; 2. the popular non-
fiction format that has been taken over by journalists, so that professional
scientific publications are not considered to be suited for general
consideration and discussion any longer; or 3. the huge field of science
for entertainment from science magazines for boys (and grown-up kids),
from the most popular animal life TV features, to the new genre of
climate catastrophe movies (which has replaced the traditional mad
scientist genre). Public knowledge of scientific matters is determined
by these formats and there is even feedback into professional work (and
its funding).
These developments can also be analysed in the context of a sociology

of occupations. Examples are printers, layouters and typesetters and what
their disappearance means for the work of editors, reporters and other
journalists; the reduction of journalists who are employed by the
newspaper or TV/radio station in favour of writers who are paid per
printed line; the virtual disappearance of editors in publishing firms in
favour of free-lancing literary agents; new occupations (new at least in
Europe) like cultural managers who are specialists in the
commodification of art, music, literature and the presentation of culture
organized in terms of the largest possible audience. This approach can
include the field of politics and its contemporary form of structural
populism with its PR consultants, campaign managers and trouble-
shooters and the industry of political polling behind them all of them
staffed by political science and psychology graduates and a product of
applied social science. Some reflection on instrumental social science may
be well recommended here.
Obviously the development from a presentation of narratives and other
contents to taking in the audience by making them actively do something
will be researched by analysing internet formats, where enthusiasts see a
democratization of culture, whereas a detached perspective can only make
out games, pornography and gossip all produced by participants
presenting themselves. The most advanced technology is being used for a
reestablishment of social forms predominant in small-town and village
social life in the programmes that offer (and simulate) acquaintance and
even friendship nets. The relation of presentation of self and commercial
as well as state control is beginning to be discussed in this context. The
general development towards audience activity is represented in a number
of TV formats as well: talk shows, quiz shows, the many variants of
Robinson Island shows, studio audiences, sports events etc. Examples of
other audience take-ins by activating them can be found in sales formats
that make customers write reviews, give recommendations or (the
Tupperware recipe) become sales agents themselves.
Critical media research will place its agenda in the more general
framework of an analysis of how the information society and its
knowledge industries have affected the production, presentation and
actual use of culture. In order to do this, we have to translate what
sociologists call the information society into the capitalist mode of
production of neo-liberalism and its regime of domination of culture
industry. It will analyse the most encompassing rationalization and
commodification of intellectual work which is part of this regime and the
role the media, the means of intellectual production, have in it.
70 Chapter Three
Contradiction
There is one redeeming quality of culture industry: it is so indifferent
to contents that it will, on occasion, even let the truth pass.
CHAPTER FOUR
IS IT BARBAROUS TO WATCH TV
AFTER AUSCHWITZ?
TH. W. ADORNO ON THE TELEVISION
1
IN THE 1950S
YOSHIKAZU TAKEMINE
1. Television: Visual-Medium after Auschwitz

Adorno returned to Frankfurt after a fifteen-year exile in the United
States in order to collaborate with Horkheimer and Pollock on rebuilding
the Institute for Social Research. In the fall of 1949, several months before
his return, Adorno wrote an essay entitled Cultural Criticism and
Society, which expressed an idea that led to a polemic that still motivates
the exchange of various viewpoints: that is, to write poetry after
Auschwitz is barbaric.2 The original context in which this statement was
made apparently refers to the complicated relationship between culture
and barbarism in a reified society, which forms the main thesis of
Dialectic of Enlightenment (1939-44). At the same time, it also implicitly
presents the motive behind the Bilderverbot (image prohibition) as one of
the features of Adornos philosophical thought, which denounces the utter
naivety of the absence of suspicion about the possibility of representation
in general after the genocide of the Jews in Auschwitz, which, as an
unprecedented event, surpasses all limits of representation. However, the
taboo of prohibiting people from projecting God or utopia through positive
images has been broken, even outside artistic domains such as poetry.
1
An early Japanese version of this essay first appeared in the Hyosho: Journal of
the Association for Studies of Culture and Representation 1 (2007), and in the
authors Adorno, His View on Technical Reproduction (Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2007).
2
Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms: Cultural Criticism and Society, translated by
Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), p. 34.
72 Chapter Four
Rather, it goes without saying that in our highly modernized society of

mass consumption, all territories of daily life are completely inundated
with visual images (Bilder). Today, one can hardly imagine a world
without any form of visual media such as pictures, printed matter,
photographs, films, television, video, DVDs, or the Internet. By constantly
transforming themselves in accordance with the development of virtual
technology, they never cease to reduce everything to a spectacle of
images. Moreover, the fact that even the Holocaust itself cannot evade
manipulation by the media is easily verifiable in many popular movies
dealing with Auschwitz.
Adorno was seriously concerned about the ongoing development of
technology in the media, through which everything is compulsorily
transformed into visual images. This was especially evident in the critical
analysis of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where he
and Horkheimer focus on the problem of Bilder/images produced and
spread by the media, demonstrating how they bombard the minds of the
masses with a variety of ideological messages in order to distract peoples
attention from the illusorily concealed discrepancies of commercialistic
capitalism. Their vehement critique, particularly against American films,
was launched at a time when the film industry in Hollywood was at the
peak of its prosperity, as evidenced by record-breaking box-office returns
year after year. In contrast, the American TV industry, which had already
made its inaugural broadcast in 1939, did not win audiences in the mid-
1940s, due to the mobilization plans of World War II. In this regard,
Dialectic of Enlightenment said prophetically that television aims at a
synthesis of radio and film and that it promises to intensify the
impoverishment of the aesthetic material.3 In addition, it reasoned that
television points the way to a development which easily enough could
push the Warner brothers into the doubtless unwelcome position of little
theatre performers and cultural conservatives.4 However, Adorno and
Horkheimer did not venture into an in-depth discussion of this new
medium, even though around 1949, when Horkheimer and Adorno
returned to Germany, the unrivalled position of cinema as a mass-
entertainment medium began to waver and decline, vindicating
Horkheimer and Adornos prediction about the destiny of the film
industry. At that time, television viewing began to spread among families
in the United States at an astonishing pace, buoyed by rapid economic
growth in the postwar period. On the other hand, American motion
3
Adorno/Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by Edmund
Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 97.
4
Ibid., p. 130f.
Is it Barbarous to Watch TV after Auschwitz? 73
pictures found smaller audiences and their box-office returns declined in

inverse proportion to the sales volume of television sets.5 It is astonishing
how quickly Adorno reacted to this change in the medium of
entertainment. When Adorno, in the Fall of 1952, returned to Southern
California for a ten-month stint as a visiting researcher at the Hacker
Foundation, he devoted his time to the analysis of American television and
its audience, and to studying the Los Angeles Times astrology column.6
Later, in step with the partial resumption of the broadcasting of television
programs in West Germany at the end of 1952, Adorno successively
published three analytical essays on television: Prologue to Television
(1953), How to Look at Television (1953), and Television as Ideology
(1954).7 These writings can surely be considered pioneering in the field of
television studies since they were produced much earlier than those of
McLuhan and other media researchers.
Adornos chief objective in writing these essays was to analyse the role
of television and confirm that the central concept of the culture industry in
the early 1940s could be applied to American postwar society. However,
he was not satisfied with merely using his old theory; he attempted to
adopt a different, holistic approach to the new audiovisual media. What
was especially noteworthy was a theoretical perspective on television that
Adorno had explicitly introduced, but which had not been entirely put
forward until then; this perspective concerned psychoanalysis. Adorno
claimed that it was apparently the time to investigate systematically
socio-psychological stimuli typical of televised material both on a
5
See Garth Jowett, The Decline of an Institution, in Thomas Schatz (ed.),
Hollywood. Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (London/ New York:
Routledge, 2004), vol. I, pp. 197226.
6
Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, edited by
Rolf Tiedemann, 20 volumes (Frankfurt am Main Suhrkamp, 197086) (=AGS),
vol. 9, pp. 7-120. Also see its German altered version: Adorno, Aberglaube aus
zweiter Hand, in AGS 8, pp. 147-76.
7
Adorno, Prologue to Television, in Critical Models. Interventions and
Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2005), pp. 49-58; Television as Ideology, in Critical Models, pp. 59-70;
How to Look at Television, as Television and the Patterns of Mass Culture, in
Bernard Rosenberg/ David Manning White (ed.), Mass Culture. The Popular Arts
in America (Glencoe: The Free Press & Falcons Wing Press, 1957), pp. 474-88.
The original version of How to Look at Television was read on April 13, 1953,
at the Hacker Foundation. It was co-authored by Bernice T. Ediuson, a
psychologist working at the foundation. Television as Ideology was written in
German along the lines of How to Look at Television and there is some content
that is common to both these essays.
74 Chapter Four
descriptive and psychodynamic level by means of an attempt [], with

the aid of depth-psychological categories and previous knowledge of mass
media, to crystallize a number of theoretical concepts by which the
potential effect of television [] could be studied.8 The dialectical fusion
of Freuds psychoanalysis and Marxs social theory was the main feature
of the Frankfurt School, at least since Erich Fromm started to participate in
the Institute for Social Research in 1930.9 Moreover, the decade from the
late 1940s to the end of 1950s was, in particular, the period when Adorno,
now one of the Institutes official representatives, actively embarked on
applying the psychological schemata of analysis of culture and the ego
developed by Freud to empirical social research, conceived to be the
core of the new critical sociology.10 He apparently lacked any partisan
intention to countervail the neo-Freudian revisionists like Fromm, who
had already defected from the Institute in 1938. It can be said that
Adornos television studies during his return to the United States were
clear evidence of the new phase of his acceptance of the Freudian concepts
that would characterize his postwar social-critical works.
The psychological bent brought out in Adornos works has frequently
drawn intense accusations that question his fundamental understanding or
speculative interpretations of Freudian theory.11 One critic even claims
that all of Adornos texts on mass media, even though they proposed new
approaches, were nothing more than a crude version of a theory of
manipulation, in which his theory of the culture industry finally
concludes.12 However, the underlying factor for the reason Adorno
engaged in analysing the potential effect of television from the depth-
psychological perspective in the early 1950s should not be overlooked,
namely, the ever-increasing fear of the resurgence of fascism in postwar
8
How to Look at Television, p. 474.
9
For a comprehensive overview of the Reception of Freud by the Frankfurt
School, see Wolfgang Bon, Psychoanalyse als Wissenschaft und Kritik. Zur
Freudrezeption der Kritischen Theorie, in W. Bon/Alex Honneth (ed.),
Sozialforschung als Kritik (Frankfurt am Main Suhrkamp, 1982), pp. 367-425.
10
See Adorno, Zur gegenwrtigen Stellung der empirischen Sozialforschung in
Deutschland (1952), in AGS 8, pp. 478-493; Zum Verhltnis von Soziologie und
Psychologie (1955), in AGS 8, pp. 42-85.
11
For example, see Simon Jarvis, Adorno. A Critical Introduction (New York:
Routledge, 1998), p. 86: His social psychology [] is the weakest aspect of his
work. This is partly the result of the absence of any fully elaborated account of sex
and gender [...].
12
Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power. Reflective Stages in a Critical Social
Theory, translated by Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p.
79.
democratic societies. At that time, the United States was enjoying

economic prosperity, symbolized by the popularization of television.
However, the golden 50s were also the period when the atmosphere of
the entire American society was rapidly moving toward conformism and
populism due to the increasing tension of the Cold War, as made evident
by McCarthyism (1950-54), the outbreak of the Korean War (1950), the
beginning of Eisenhowers presidency (1952) and the promotion of
anticommunist policies on the initiative of the Republican Party. In that
period, the media, which contributed in no small measure to such
disquieting tendencies, showed ingenuity with its tele-politics during the
campaigns of the presidential candidate Eisenhower and vice-presidential
candidate Nixon, in 1952. Such historical contexts attested to and
strengthened the vigorous spread of television in the advanced nations in
those days. In contrast, in the early 1950s, while West Germany marched
rapidly toward economic reconstruction, later labelled Wirtschaftwunder,
under the Adenauer government, nationwide TV broadcasts had not yet
been launched.13 There existed a dominant reactionary atmosphere which
preferred to forget or repress painful memories related to the genocide of
the Jews or the wars of aggression. In such a climate, the rehabilitation of
former members of the Nazi Party or ex-militarists went on smoothly.
There were still many German citizens who denied their own associations
with the Third Reich and sought to take refuge in petty bourgeois
reactionism or commercial activities, while others persisted in justifying
the ideas and policies of the Nazis with various unconvincing reasons or
still harboured anti-Semitic views.
In the face of such a reactionary backdrop in postwar Germany, the
members of the Institute of Social Research, who had just resumed their
activities in the summer of 1950 and had celebrated the anniversary of
reopening of the Institute in November 1951, did not stand by fecklessly.
They wanted to contribute, through empirical social research, to coming
to terms with the past and establishing democracy. In order to deal with
the great challenges faced by West Germany at that time, the Institute
conducted the Gruppenexperiment (Group Experiment) in 1950-51, which
aimed to survey postwar Germanys consciousness regarding Nazi state
crimes and the Germans perceptions of foreign countries.14 This
13
The first nationwide television broadcast in West Germany began in 1954.
14
For details on the Gruppenexperiment, see Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt
School. Its History, Theories and Political Significance, translated by Michael
Robertson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), pp. 431-42; Alex Demirovi, Der
nonkonformistische Intellektuelle. Die Entwicklung der Kritischen Theorie zur
Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt am Main Suhrkamp, 1999), pp. 353-72; Stefan
76 Chapter Four
experiment was a large-scale project in which almost 1800 subjects,

categorized under occupation, region, gender, age, etc., were persuaded to
discuss certain topics like democracy, guilty conscience for past atrocities,
Jews, Western and Eastern nations, and rearmament plans. Each statement
was recorded and analyzed, with Adorno figuring as one of the foremost
conductors of this experiment. However, the results that came up from the
enormous amounts of data obtained were extremely shocking for the
Jewish ex-migrs, who had just returned home. Research estimates
revealed that only 10% of the subjects supported democracy, 22% rejected
it, 60% disclaimed responsibility for Nazis crimes; and 77% showed an
anti-Semitic attitude in some measure.15 These survey results must have
deepened Adornos suspicion that the mindset that had manifested itself in
the form of unmitigated barbarism in Auschwitz had not changed.16 There
is no doubt that this concern would have also been a factor for Adornos
choice to survey television and astrology instead of other areas, when he
revisited the United States. Being aware of the rapidity with which
American commercialism was entering West Germany at a rapid pace
during postwar reconstruction, Adorno, with renewed vigour, formulated
the core insight of Dialectic of Enlightenment or Studies in the
Authoritarian Personality (1944-49). The main concern of these two
studies was the potential for the organized, fascistic administration of
society; they were undertaken by analysing the media and television from
a socio-psychological perspective. In Adornos words, the objective of his
investigation was to analyse the inner structure of such movements on a
small test-tube scale, as it were, and at a time when they do not yet
manifest themselves so directly and threateningly that there is no time left
Mller-Doohm, Adorno. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt am Main Suhrkamp, 2003),

pp. 576-83. It is worth pointing out the fact that the experiment of the institute was
financed by the Office of the U. S. High Commissioner for Germany [=HICOG];
therefore, the experiment was conducted as part of the policy of democratization of
postwar Germany, which was pursued by the U. S. government.
15
See Friedrich Pollock (ed.), Gruppenexperiment. Ein Studienbericht. Frankfurter
Beitrge zur Soziologie. vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main, 1955), pp. 134-272;
Demirovi, Der nonkonformistische Intellektuelle, p. 362.
16
Based on the results of this survey, Adorno wrote a text entitled Schuld und
Abwehr (Guilt and Defensiveness) as the third part of the final report of
Gruppenexperiment. It was published in 1955 as the second volume of the series of
Frankfurter Beitrge zur Soziologie (Frankfurt Contributions to Sociology). This
empirical-sociological study written in German attempts to carry out a
psychological analysis of typical discourses of German postwar self-justification of
the past, grounded in the Freudian concept of defence mechanism.
for objective and detached research.17 In his TV studies, as will be

mentioned later in this chapter, Adorno explained the mechanisms of mass
deception implemented by television with the help of the newest
technology in media and culture industry. These methods altered the
consciousness of audiences to a state of regression by means of ingenious
psychological manipulations, which aimed at impregnating their minds
with a totalitarian mentality, with the aid of psychoanalytical terms like
drive or psychic energy. In contrast to the common image of Adornos
theory of mass culture, he did not indulge merely in pessimistic
speculation, but tried to provide in his TV studies concrete and practical
antidotes against mass control by fascism and the culture industry.
Although in texts like Prologue to Television Adorno levels unrelenting
criticism at the current status of American television, he also presents a set
of suggestions with regard not only to the question of how to establish a
foundation for resistance by TV audiences against ideologies disseminated
by the culture industry; he also indicates the means by which various
potentialities hidden in this audiovisual media could be uncovered in the
circumstances surrounding television broadcasting at that time.
In the following sections, we will reconsider Adornos theses on the
function of the televisual media nach Auschwitz, with special focus on
the socio-psychological motives in his three analytical essays on
television. Adorno used the concept of psychoanalysis in reverse for the
analysis both of television and of fascism: he equated TV audiences with
masses under a fascist regime, which as a repressed group were bound by
libido alone. In my argument, however, I would like to demonstrate that
Adornos view of television was ambivalent. While television functions as
a visual medium that manipulates the ideology of its audience, it also
allows for the possibility of mass enlightenment via the reformation of the
production system and the re-education of both TV audiences and
broadcasters.
2. The Little Men and Women on the Television Screen

Adornos television analyses begin with Prologue to Television,
which contains theoretical speculation about the nature of the medium. It
is followed by two other essays that include a content analysis of 34
scripts of several TV drama series that were broadcasted on the American
TV network: these essays are written from a socio-psychological
viewpoint and aim to concretely validate the insights presented in the
17
The Stars Down to Earth, p. 15.
78 Chapter Four
Prologue. The critique of the culture industry in the Prologue can be

seen as a proof of the fact that these essays are an extension of the
argument in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. First of all, Adorno states that
[t]he medium itself, however, as a combination of film and radio, falls
within the comprehensive schema of the culture industry and furthers its
tendency to transform and capture the consciousness of the public from all
sides,18 by defining the ultimate end of television as possessing the
entire sensible world once again in a copy satisfying every sensory organ
by means of filling up the gap between private existence and the culture
industry, which had remained.19 This means that the main function of
television, the latest instrument for mass deception by the culture industry,
is to permeate the living space of consumers with copies of reality and to
manipulate the viewers consciousness ideologically. As a result, even the
family room and leisure time have become stages for the exercise of
psychological control by the administrated world, instead of remaining
private sanctuaries that are protected from any direct control by the
system. In addition, Adorno develops the well-known argument that the
culture industry, through the media of cinema and television, intends ad
extremum to plug conventional mentality, but not try to progress beyond
its present stages in its forms of consciousness the status quo but on
the contrary to reinforce it relentlessly and reestablish it wherever it may
appear threatened.20 Nonetheless, Adorno also points out a decisive
difference between the two audiovisual media of television and film. On
the screen of a television set in peoples living room [t]he visual images
are much smaller than those in the cinema.21 Therefore, audiences have a
feeling of superiority over virtual figures appearing on the screen.
Earlier, the miniature format of human beings on the television screen was
supposed to hinder habitual identification and heroization. Those on the
screen speaking with human voices are dwarfs. They are hardly taken
seriously in the same way that characters in the film are. [] The little
men and women who are delivered into ones home become playthings for
unconscious perception. [] [T]hey are, as it were, his property, at his
disposal, and he feels superior to them.22
18
Prologue to Television, p. 49.
19
Ibid., pp. 49-50.
20
Ibid., p. 50. See also Television as Ideology, p. 61; How to Look at
Television, p. 478.
21
Adorno, Prologue to Television, p. 50.
22
Ibid., p. 51.
However, in the chapter on the culture industry in the Dialectic of

Enlightenment, the emphasis is on consumers heroization and imitation of
standardized pseudo-individuality embodied by Hollywood movie
stars23; Adorno argues that the little men and women on the television
screen no longer provoke any illusion or adoration. Rather, they are
nothing more than miniature toys or property with which audiences
unconsciously and deridingly play as they please, without taking seriously
whatever such dwarfs say. Adorno goes on to consider the day-to-day
characteristics of television viewing at home:
[Television images] are supposed to lend lustre to his dreary quotidian life
and nevertheless essentially resemble it: in this way they are futile from
the start. [] The world, threateningly devoid of warmth, comes to him
like something familiar, as if specially made just for him: the contempt he
feels for it is the contempt he feels for himself. The lack of distance, the
parody of fraternity and solidarity has surely contributed to the
extraordinary popularity of the new medium. Commercial television
avoids everything that might recall, no matter how vaguely, the cultic
origins of the work of art, its celebration of particular occasions. []
[T]he viewing environment should derivate as little as possible from the
23
Adorno/Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 124-6. However, Adorno
and Horkheimer also indicate that the time when audiences had deliriously
identified with heroes and heroines on the cinema screen was gone, and in the age
of statistics the masses are too astute to identify with the millionaire on the
screen. (Ibid., p. 116) According to their arguments, the female spectator who
gazes at a new actress discovered by the talent scouts is attracted not only to the
possibility that she, too, might appear on the screen, but also with a cynical
consciousness of the difference between reality and film to rejoice in the good
fortune of someone else, who might just as well be oneself but never is. This is
because, where the culture industry still invites nave identification, it
immediately denies it. (Ibid.) What is at the root of audience psychology is, as
they continue to argue, a certain kind of defeatism, which supposes that every
person is just a replaceable sample whose destiny is completely subjected to
irrational moments of contingency, not at all capable of effort or talent.
Concomitant with the spread of such an attitude of resignation, any faces which
do not confirm for example, those which, like Garbos, do not look as if they
would welcome the greeting Hello, sister is gradually excluded (Ibid., p. 117).
The appearance of the little men and women on television is already presignified
by Garbos come down in Hollywood cinema of the 40s, with which Adorno was
familiar through Salka Viertel, the former scriptwriter who exclusively worked for
Garbo.
80 Chapter Four
normal situation. [] The border between reality and the work becomes
blurred for consciousness.24
The images presented by television are as dreary as the daily life of the
audiences, so that they seem to be something familiar and thus evoke a
parody of fraternity and solidarity. Therefore, peoples awareness of the
difference between reality and illusion is reduced. The medium of
television functions like a parasite to replace our empirical world with
technologically mediated, simulacrum-like images. Thus, in the television
screen that has mingled with everyday living, the entire aura surrounding
artworks or movie stars vanish in smoke. The poor TV viewers continue to
gaze tenaciously at the little men and women with faces similar to their
own, laden with a slight feeling of self-disdain for the vacuity in their own
lives. Adorno attributes the reason television images attract audiences,
despite their emptiness and coldness, to the intimacy projected by this
medium, so that people can enjoy the semblance of solidarity that serves
as a substitute for a social immediacy, which is entirely lost in modern
society.
That awkward intimacy of television, which allegedly engenders a
community through the effect of the television set around which family
members and friends sit idiotically who supposedly would otherwise have
nothing to say, [] obscures the real alienation between people and
between people and things. It becomes a substitute for a social immediacy
that is being denied to people. They confuse what is mediated through and
through the life deceptively programmed for them with the solidarity
they are so acutely deprived of. This reinforces the regression: the viewing
situation itself stultifies, even when what is being viewed is no more
stupid than the usual fodder fed to compulsive consumers. The fact that
they probably indulge themselves more in television, it being convenient
and inexpensive, than in cinema and more than radio [] contributes
further to the regression. Addiction is immediately regression.25
A vague feeling of togetherness embraced by TV audiences evokes in their

mind the illusion that television might be, although thoroughly mediated
by technology, something unmediated because of the intimacy inherent in
the medium. This is, as it were, a sense of belonging to the media
community that has been imaginatively created by its function as a
deceitful means of covering up the alienated situation of the masses.
Further, those who casually turn on the television during their leisure
hours and abandon themselves to the illusion of mediated solidarity will
24
25
Ibid., p. 53.
turn into addicts who cannot do without television and eventually regress
to the infantile state of only unconscious reactions. While the act of
watching TV pushes audiences toward regression, the culture industry
secretly transmits the accepted behavioural norms in the form of image-
writing to the people psychologically regressed by television.
By awaking and representing in the form of images what slumbers
preconceptually in people, it also shows them how they should behave.
Whereas the images of film and television strive to evoke those that lie
buried in the viewer and indeed resemble them, they also, by flashing up
and slipping away, approach the effect of writing. They are grasped, but
not contemplated. The eye is carried along by the film as it is by the line of
a text, and in the gentle jolt of a sense change a page is turned. As image,
the image-writing is a medium of regression in which producer and
consumer meet; as writing, it makes the archaic images available to
modernity. Disenchanted enchantment, [] they are models of behaviour
that correspond to the gravitation of the total system as well as to the will
of the controllers.26
This passage is taken from the definition of mass culture as hieroglyphic

writing in Schema of Mass Culture (1942),27 from which he quotes
almost a whole sentence. The main summary of the first draft of the
chapter Culture Industry is also entirely repeated here; this summary
states that images shown to audiences in a movie theatre are equivalent to
writing, which cryptically indicates the ideology of capitalistic society.
The culture industry represents and projects the preconceived notions of
audiences on the television screen, and as a result, it inculcates or drives
people to the desirable behaviour in the existing social structure as if
writing into their unconscious. The detailed contents of these necessary
messages are shown in How to Look at Television and Television as
Ideology with several concrete examples. A serialized farce in which a
young female teacher working at low pay makes comical mistakes one
after another, but always cheerfully, teaches a tacit lesson that when you
have humour, when youre good-natured, quick on the ball, and charming,
then you dont need to get so worked up about your starvation wages.28
Further, a mystery show featuring a ruthless con woman who, after being
sentenced to a long prison term, is immediately pardoned and marries her
26
Ibid., pp. 54-5.
27
Ibid., p. 54. For further details on Adornos interpretation of mass culture as
writing, see Miriam B. Hansen, Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing. Adorno,
Derrida, Kracauer, in New German Critique 56 (Spring/Summer 1992), pp. 43-73.
28
Television as Ideology, p. 61.
82 Chapter Four
victim provides an environment that helps to reinforce the social

acceptance of parasitic behaviour, by putting a premium on what
psychoanalysis calls orality, the combination of dependency and
aggressivity.29
3. Psychoanalysis in Reverse: Television and Fascism

At a first glance, the underlying argument of Adornos analyses of
television reminds us of typical television bashing symbolized by a term
such as the plug-in drug. However, the reason that Adorno sees the
televisual medium as a problem in particular is, as mentioned above, the
fact that the regressed psychological state of TV viewers has striking
similarities with that of fascist followers under totalitarian regimes.
Adorno states that the majority of television shows today aim at
producing or at least reproducing, the very smugness, intellectual
passivity, and gullibility that seem to fit in with totalitarian creeds even if
the explicit surface message of the shows may be anti-totalitarian.30
Psychological tendencies cultivated by television in the subconscious of
the masses conventionalism, internalization of social disciplines, mental
regression, sadism, etc. coincide basically with the syndromes found
among high scorers of the F-scale described in Studies in the
Authoritarian Personality31; this is developed in How to Look at
Television and Television as Ideology. In short, for Adorno, the
television is nothing more or less than an apparatus that ferments an
authoritarian mentality at an underlying level.
Adorno had authored a series of studies on fascist propaganda in
English to complement the studies on authoritarianism in the late 40s and
early 50s: Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda (1946), Democratic
Leadership and Mass Manipulation (1949), and Freudian Theory and the
Pattern of Fascist Propaganda (1951).32 On comparing Adornos analyses
of TV audiences with his studies on authoritarianism, we discover that the
relation between television and fascism reaches the structural dimension of
a socio-psychological mechanism that controls the unconscious desires of
the masses. In Prologue to Television, Adorno proffers the following
29
Ibid., p. 63-4.
30
How to Look at Television, p. 479. Emphasis mine.
31
See Adorno et al., Studies in the Authoritarian Personality, in AGS 91, pp. 454-
91.
32
Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda, in AGS 8, pp. 397-407; Democratic
Leadership and Mass Manipulation, in AGS 20.1, pp. 267-86; Freudian Theory
and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda, in AGS 8, pp. 408-33.
argument in reference to Freuds Civilization and Its Discontents (1930):

the innermost desires of individuals in modern society can never be
sufficiently satisfied, so that they consistently erupt as superfluous libido,
and the culture industry regulates and utilizes such torrents of
subconscious energy for mass manipulation.33 TV audiences naively
suppose that they can amuse themselves innocently through the stimuli
presented in a variety of TV programs. However, what actually happens is
that unsatisfied drives accumulate in their subconscious and find
gratification in desexualized images such as violence shown in television
dramas by the deceitful manipulation by the culture industry.34 In this
process of deceptive sublimation of erotic drives, Adorno argues,
censorship and the inculcation of conformist behaviour, which are
conveyed by even the most anodyne gestures of any television program
are carried out and internalized as second nature,35 and as a result, the
consciousness and behaviour of the audiences are cast automatically into
reactionary patterns that are most advantageous to the dominant system.
Adorno calls this mechanism of regression of TV audiences psychoanalysis
in reverse, a term borrowed from Leo Lowenthal.36 This means that the
culture industry, in contrast with the psychoanalytical practice aiming to
cure psychic illness of society by bringing the unconscious of a subject
back to the conscious mind, deprives the masses of all the critical
awareness by the medium of television. In doing so, it intends to reduce
them to the unconscious state and intentionally develop pathological
symptoms.37 As mentioned above, the culture industry makes use of the
33
See Prologue to Television, p. 50: Freud taught that the regression of the
instinctual drives never succeeds entirely or for long and that for this reason the
unconscious psychic energy of the individual is ceaselessly squandered in retaining
within the unconscious everything that should not enter into consciousness. This
Sisyphean labour of every individuals psychic economy of drives appears to be
socialized today, brought into direct control by the institutions of the culture
industry []. Television, such as it is, makes its own contribution to this.
34
Prologue to Television, p. 54: This source consists primarily of the repressed,
or simply unsatisfied, instinctual impulses of the masses, which are either directly
or indirectly accommodated by cultural commodities mainly indirectly. []
[S]exuality is replaced by the representation of desexualized brutality and acts of
violence.
35
36
Television as Ideology, p. 67; How to Look at Television, p. 480.
37
Prologue to Television, p. 55. Instead of paying tribute to the unconscious by
elevating it to consciousness so as to fulfil its urge and simultaneously pacify its
destructive force, the culture industry, with television at the vanguard, reduces
people to unconscious modes of behaviour [].
84 Chapter Four
intimate effect of television to engender a community as a kind of lure,

which, to put it in Freudian terms, could be explained as the effect that
creates a libido group bound by narcissistic ties. The addicts who cannot
abstain from watching TV, despite recognizing its trashiness are pouring
narcissistic libido into stereotypical images displayed on the screen,
engaging in cathexis to channel libido into these objects. This is exactly
the moment which combines TV audiences together into a regressive
pseudo-group.38 It is particularly worth noting that this mechanism of
engendering a community through the effect of the television is virtually
identified with that of a mass-psychology which, as clearly shown in
Adornos analysis of fascist propaganda, fascist leaders used to rely on,
especially as instigations of the masses into an ideological unity. In
Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda, written in 1951,
Adorno states, this time drawing on Freuds Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego (1922), that the core of the Fhrer ideology is
formed by the partial transfer of the narcissistic libido to the object.39
This means that the fascistic mass organization is nothing but a group of
individuals who identify their own weak egos with the ego ideal or
externalized super-ego known as Fhrer, and channel their narcissistic
libido into it. By dissolving oneself into narcissistic solidarity with a
leader or with other followers, people in a fascist group enter into a
regressive state of mind that is deprived of all subjective control, finally
accepting irrational ideologies or demagogies as directed. Furthermore,
members of such a regressive group often release the collective energy of
their pent-up drives by means of naked hatred or merciless violence
against others who do not belong to the group/community.40 It is obvious
that this schema of fascist drive and manipulation comes close to the process
of psychoanalysis in reverse that is presented to mass audiences by the
medium of television. However, as Adorno repeatedly emphasized, this
does not mean that a fascist spirit is cultivated primarily through mass
agitation and then carried on into a commodity-driven capitalist society.
On the contrary, fascist propaganda serves as the true children of todays
standardized mass culture, largely robbed of autonomy and spontaneity
38
The inclination of the culture industry to intentionally induce collective
narcissism is frequently documented in social-critical texts written by Adorno in
the 1950s, such as The Stars Down to Earth. For a detailed examination of the
role of narcissism in Adornos theory of the culture industry, see Deborah Cook,
The Culture Industry Revisited. Theodor W. Adorno on Mass Culture (Boston:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), pp. 53-65.
39
Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda, p. 419.
40
Ibid., p. 422-8.
[]. Fascist propaganda has only to reproduce the existent mentality for
its own purposes.41 After all, the fascism that once rampaged across
Europe derived from exactly the same mentality that the culture industry
has tended to engender in the minds of consumers. The fascist methods of
ideological propaganda were also directly borrowed from the advertising
techniques the culture industry uses to address mass consumers.
However, the objects toward which TV viewers direct their libido are
often just little men and women on the screen whose familiar behaviour
lets viewers feel a vague intimacy, when not contempt and ridicule. On the
contrary, in the case of fascism, the Fhrer, with whom the masses
identify themselves, demands unconditional respect and obedience as the
ego ideal possessing overwhelming authority and allurement. Although
Adorno lays stress on Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist
Propaganda, the point is that the image conceived of a fascist leader is
projected onto the ambivalent image of the great little man.42 The
masses, identifying themselves emotionally with their leader as the ego
ideal, implicitly indulge in cathexis; meanwhile, narcissistic libido is also
invested into weaknesses or defects the leader has as a human being, by
his/her consideration as an extension of the self. Therefore, the
psychological attitude of the masses toward the fascist leader includes not
only a feeling of affirmative awe, but also a sense of distance from the
phoniness of their own master at the same time.43 Just as promoters of
anti-Semitism are not completely confident that all the Jews are actually
devilish, but only act as if they were, people enthusiastic about their fascist
leader also do not really identify themselves with him but act this
identification, perform their own enthusiasm. They already know it is
false, but despite this falseness, they overact as if it were true44 It is
41
Ibid., p. 429. Emphasis by Adorno.
42
Adorno, Freudian Theory, p. 421. The concept of great little man was
derived from The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas Radio
Addresses (1943-44); see AGS 9.1, pp. 28-33.
43
Freudian Theory, p. 432.
44
See also Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda, p. 403; Democratic
Leadership and Mass Manipulation, p. 267. Slavoj iek appreciates Adornos
analytical consideration of fascist psychology for shedding light on the moment of
a theatrical simulation that reveals how fascism feigns, stages, the
performative power of political discourse, transposing it into the modality of as-if.
However, iek criticizes the reductionist tendency of Adornos social theory in
general as his error, especially in perceiving this simulation as an effect of
external coercion and/or pursuit of material gain. Slavoj iek, The Metastases of
Enjoyment. Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London/New York: Verso,
1994), p. 21.
86 Chapter Four
probably the suspicion of this fictitiousness of their own group

psychology which makes fascist crowds so merciless and
unapproachable.45 We can recognize a further similarity between fascism
and television in this function to promote cynical identification with the
phony object. For example, in a passage in Television as Ideology,
Adorno labels the content television offers to its audiences as in a word,
phony, for which there is utterly no equivalent in German,46 thus calling
the readers attention to the fact that the ideology of the culture industry
contains an awareness of its own falsehood as a component.
For the culture industry is not at all disturbed by the idea that none of its
creations are serious, that everything is simply merchandise and
entertainment. Long ago it made this a part of its own ideology. Among the
scripts analysed, several consciously play at being kitsch, and they give the
less nave viewer a knowing wink as though saying that they do not take
themselves seriously, they are not that stupid [].47
We know from psychoanalysis that the reasoning, But we know all this!
is often a defence. This defence is made in order to dismiss insights as
irrelevant [].48
Television often deliberately divulges that what it shows is only phony,

and its audiences understand quite clearly the stupidity and insubstantiality
of the programs. However, despite this, such a cynical self-consciousness
does not arouse any resistance against ideologies, because even the
consumers cool reaction to kitsch products is, after all, artificially
provoked through deliberate calculations of the culture industry. Hence, it
is nothing more than a symptom of the defence mechanism to look away
from the abhorrent truth that they the viewers are only slaves of the
system. TV audiences, although fully aware of their phony farcicality,
cannot stop gazing eagerly into scenes where virtual dwarfs indulge in
making whoopee sounds with friendly faces on the box set. This brings
about a narcissistic identification with the objects they are supposed to
view with a critical distance, just as the fanatical German masses who
hailed the great little man Hitler did. In doing so, they secretly satisfy their
unconscious drives and their longing for an unmediated bond. If I may
borrow a line from the thesis on the fascist ticket in the last paragraph of
the chapter Elements of Anti-Semitism in Dialectic of Enlightenment,
45
Ibid.
46
Television as Ideology, p. 65.
47
Ibid., p. 68.
48
the horror of television is that of the blatant but insistent lie.49 Thus, by
repeatedly implying the continuous connection between fascism and the
culture industry, Adorno demonstrates his sombre resignation that
regressive libido groups based on narcissism and cynicism have been
automatically reproduced as ever through the technologically advanced
media, including television, even in postwar democratic societies. Such
developments have occurred even after totalitarian regimes like Nazism
were pushed from the political centre stage. This is the reason why
Adorno, in his last years as well, never let go of his suspicion that
enlightenment would revert into mythology and that the tragedy of
Auschwitz would be repeated. In this regard, he says that the fact that one
is so barely conscious of this demand [that Auschwitz will not happen
again] and the questions it raises shows that monstrosity has not penetrated
peoples minds deeply, itself a symptom of the continuing potential for its
recurrence as far as peoples conscious and unconscious is concerned. []
[B]arbarism continues as long as the fundamental conditions that help
relapse continue largely unchanged.50
4. Inoculation of TV audiences
One should not jump to the conclusion that Adorno had only immersed
himself in finding similarities between television and fascist propaganda,
without presenting any hope or foresight. Prologue to Television
concludes with the following statement: In order for television to keep
the promise still resonating within the word, it must emancipate itself from
everything with which it reckless wish-fulfilment refutes its own
principle and betrays the idea of Good Fortune for the smaller fortunes of
the department store.51 In this fashion, Adorno finally appeals to the need
to liberate television from the ideological pressures that lead to the
renunciation of the idea of Good Fortune. This idea promises to realize
what is still resonating within the word [television/Fernsehen], namely,
to look into the distance [tele-vision/fern-sehen], by adopting a phrase
the department store for Small Fortune that appears in Christian
Morgensterns poem The Department Store (1910). So, how should we
emancipate television? In Composition for the Films (1943-44), which
Adorno completed with Hanns Eisler in South California ten years before
he conducted his studies on television, he made an argument that a
49
Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 172.
50
Education after Auschwitz (1966), in Critical Models, p. 191.
51
88 Chapter Four
filmmaker should change the function of accompanying music through the

dialectical intersection of image and sound in order to emancipate the
critical potentialities of film as a reproductive medium from the
ideological fetters of the powerful culture industry. According to Adorno
and Eisler, by introducing advanced film music, the discrepancies
between visual and acoustic technologies inherent in a talking picture
should be strategically exposed, thus enabling movie audiences to reflect
on the meaning of the images projected on the screen, instead of merely
identifying with them. From this viewpoint, it does not seem impossible to
apply such a program to television, since it too is an audiovisual medium.
In fact, Adorno admits that the phenomenon of disjunction between image
and sound can be perceived in television just as in sound films: the
discrepancy in television between the more or less naturally rendered
voices and the miniaturized figures cannot be ignored. Such discrepancies
permeate all the products of the culture industry and recall the deceit of the
doubled life. It has on occasion been remarked that even sound film is
silent, that a contradiction reigns between the two-dimensional images and
the very true-to-life speech. However, Adorno immediately adds the
following reservations:
On the surface the public is hardly disturbed by this. But it surely
recognizes it unconsciously. The suspicion grows that the reality being
served up is not what it pretends to be. But the first reaction is not
resistance; on the contrary, what is inevitable and what one loathes in
ones heart of hearts is loved, with clenched teeth, all the more
fanatically.52
The gap between the two-dimensional images and the very true-to-life
speech underlying every audiovisual medium becomes ever more
apparent in the shift of the entertainment medium from film to television,
in the course of which the daily life of the masses is entirely subsumed by
the culture industry. People, meanwhile, recognize such a contradiction
only unconsciously. However, the first reaction is not resistance, but
fanatic affection for the televisual images which are only imitations of the
real society. Behind such a perverse reaction of TV viewers, we can easily
discern the narcissistic psychology of fascist followers who are
enthusiastic about their leader because/despite his phoniness. We can also
find a similar mentality toward the ambivalence of the listeners of popular
music or to a sadomasochistic jazz fan who derives enjoyment from the
52
Ibid.
subordination he overtly detests.53 Nevertheless, it is at least obvious that

Adorno agrees that the program sketched in Composition for the Films is
not always efficacious in emancipating television. In contrast, what he
suggests, in the last paragraph of Television as Ideology, as a concrete
means of transforming the televisual medium is surprisingly realistic.
It is far more important, first of all, to raise consciousness about
phenomena such as the ideological character of television, and that not
only among those on the production side but also in the public. Precisely
in Germany, where economic interests do not directly control the
programming, there is some hope in trying to raise awareness. If the
ideology, which avails itself of a truly modest number of endlessly
repeated ideas and tricks, were taken down a peg or two, then perhaps the
public could develop an aversion to being led around by the nose []. It
would then be possible to imagine a kind of inoculation of the public
against the ideology propagated by television and its related media.54
We can say that promoting awareness about the ideology of the culture
industry among not only TV producers but also public viewers represents
a step towards mass enlightenment. This is aimed as a kind of
inoculation to protect people from propaganda disseminated by
television. In Adornos view, this was all the more realizable in a West
Germany that still had only a single, state-run broadcasting network and,
therefore, was free from economic interests. To be sure, the method
proposed here to arouse an aversion among the public by gibing about
the ideology in television is something akin to counter-propaganda.
Additionally, what Adorno wants to emphasize is the necessity of
conducting another, more extensive socio-psychological survey of the
ideological effects of television as the presupposition for the inoculation of
the producers and audiences. Such a scientific work of research assumes a
moral nature in actively opposing the mass-deceptive system of the culture
industry.
Of course, this idea would require far more extensive investigations, which
would have to separate out and isolate social-psychological norms in
television production. Instead of tracking down vulgar words and
indecency like most organs of self-censorship, the producers would need to
be vigilant and remove those provocations and stereotypes that, according
the judgment of a committee of responsible and independent sociologists,
psychologists, and educators, result in ideological disorientation of the
public. [] If a science that [] takes up the research of ideology itself
53
Perennial Fashion Jazz, in Prisms, p. 122.
54
Television as Ideology, p. 69
90 Chapter Four
would give its support to those artists kept in check, then they would stand
a better chance against their bosses and the censors.55
The effort here required is of a moral nature itself: knowingly to face

psychological mechanisms operating on various levels in order not to
become blind and passive victims. We can change this medium of far-
reaching potentialities only if we look at it in the same spirit which we
hope will one day be expressed by its imagery.56
Thus, one has to manage two tasks simultaneously: to shed light on the
psychological mechanisms of the multilayered ideological effects the
culture industry achieves in people through television, and to depict a
vision of a television to come in the same spirit which we hope will one
day be expressed by its imagery, which should emancipate far-reaching
potentialities dwelling in this medium. In an essay, Adorno states that
the total effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment.57
However, in these quotations, he expresses the opinion that we should not
succumb to ideological pressures of anti-enlightenment from the culture
industry in a blind and passive way. He wanted the public rather to
counteract them by adopting critical reforms of television production
under the guidance of an expert committee and thus by conducting a kind
of re-enlightenment of the masses through the media. The most effectual
apparatus, therefore, is sociology as a science embarking on the research
of ideology. Such a stance might have reflected the responsibility for the
moral mission with which Adorno was entrusted as an intellectual and
educator who had chosen to restart in war-ravaged Germany. However,
what is more important is that here Adorno does not exclude
enlightenment or media representation a priori, but rather strives to
actively divert the media towards an educational praxis that will cultivate
critical consciousness and autonomous thought among individuals,
enabling them to conquer the ideologies of the culture industry. As Adorno
remarked at the end of the chapter Elements of Anti-Semitism in
Dialectic of Enlightenment, enlightenment itself, having mastered itself
and assumed its own power, could break through the limits of
enlightenment.58 Even if it is enlightenments unavoidable destiny to
revert to barbarism, we should attempt to work toward the slim potential
for enlightenment to surmount its limits and for visual media to critically
55
Ibid., pp. 69-70.
56
57
Adorno, Culture Industry Reconsidered, in J. M. Bernstein (ed.), The Culture
Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 106.
58
overcome the discipline of Bilderverbot, in order to prevent an awful

recurrence of the disaster at Auschwitz.
Incidentally, in his last years, Adorno looked forward to every
Saturday because it was the day of the week when his favourite television
series Daktari was broadcast.59 In fact, the old philosopher enjoyed
watching the popular show made in the USA, which depicts with a human
touch how Dr. Tracy, a veterinarian working at the Study Centre of
Animal Behaviour in East Africa, his daughter Paula, and his assistant
Jack communicate with wild animals. Such a seemingly mirthful subject
makes us if we consider that Adorno at that time was seriously plagued
by radical student movements feel somewhat sorrowful. Although one
should neither conclude that, after having finished his television studies in
the mid-1950s, Adorno found nothing but a way to lend lustre to his
dreary quotidian life, nor infer that his educational program to re-
enlighten the postwar Germans through television would have turned out
to be futile. That is because he had a firm belief that [a]ll political
instruction finally should be centred upon the idea that Auschwitz should
never happen again.60 Adorno often claimed the effectiveness of mass
enlightenment through TV broadcasting or the need to change the
production system related to Education after Auschwitz even in the
1960s.61 It is in connection to this that one should consider the
independent TV production company DCTP (Development Company for
TV Program), which was founded in 1987 on the initiative of Alexander
Kluge, a film director, writer, and media philosopher who once was a
faithful pupil of Adorno. Since 1988, without regard for viewer rating or
sponsors, Kluge has been continuously broadcasting several late-night
cultural and educational programs with very different styles and contents
on various commercial channels.62 This can surely be considered as an
59
See Reinhard Pabst (ed.), Theodor W. Adorno. Kindheit in Amorbach (Frankfurt
a.M./Leipzig: Insel, 2003), p. 82.
60
Education after Auschwitz, p. 203.
61
See ibid, p. 196: One should be I am improvising here that television
programs be planned with consideration of the nerve centres of this particular state
of consciousness [for the debarbarization of the countryside]. See also Adorno,
Kann das Publikum wollen? (1963), in AGS 20.1, pp. 346-7.
62
DCPT was founded on February 12, 1987, at Dsseldorf, together with Kluge,
the Japanese advertising company Dentsu, and, a year later, Spiegel-Verlag. Since
May 1988, it has been broadcasting the cultural program 10 vor 11 (RTL), which
is still on the air. The most widely viewed programs produced by DCTP are
Prime Time Sptausgabe (RTL), News and Stories (SAT 1), and
Mitternachtsmagazin (VOX). For the details on Kluges TV production activities,
see Matthias Uecker, Anti-Fernsehen? Alexander Kluges Fernsehproduktion
92 Chapter Four
attempt to implement the ideas and practical suggestions Adorno proposed

in Television as Ideology and How to Look at Television, and to make
them thrive. It goes without saying that such localized practical activities
will not realize drastic reforms of the televisual medium overnight.
However, even today, after more than a half century has passed since
Adornos television studies, the need for resistance against the ideologies
diffused by television is still the order of the day; the fulfilment of this
need will help raise the consciousness of the viewers through both
scientific research and program production in order to change this
medium of far-reaching potentialities. The moral task that Adorno
demands from us is to doggedly persevere, without losing the spirit
which we hope will one day be expressed by its imagery, which might be
able to forestall a second coming of Auschwitz.
(Marburg: Schren, 2000); Peter C. Lutze, Alexander Kluges Cultural Window

in Private Television, in New German Critique 80 (Spring-Summer 2000), pp.
171-90; Christian Schulte/Winfried Siebers (eds.), Kluges Fernsehen. Alexander
Kluges Kulturmagazine (Frankfurt am Main Suhrkamp, 2002).
CHAPTER FIVE
THE CULTURE INDUSTRY IN BRAZIL
RODRIGO DUARTE
Despite the breadth of the subject, I intend to show in this article that,
while being on the capitalist periphery and having had a spatially and
temporally unequal industrial development, Brazil has had, since the
1930s, a system of mass media whose ideological aims were at least in
terms of form the same as those of its counterparts in the most
industrialized countries. Another purpose of the paper is to show that,
taking into account some peculiarities, the analysis and theoretical
understanding of the Brazilian model of mass culture can be accomplished
through the same categories Horkheimer and Adorno developed in their
approach to the mainstream culture industry in North America.
What is the Culture Industry?

The concept of culture industry was proposed by Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno in the late 1930s and early 1940s to describe the
industrial and commercial complex of production and distribution of
cultural goods existing in Europe and the USA since the first decade of the
20th century, and involving then-recent inventions like cinema and radio.
Neither of these early technological developments, nor later ones like
television, VCRs and digital means of storage and diffusion of audiovisual
messages (DVDs and now the Internet), can be seen as the culture industry
itself. This notion presupposes the appropriation of the technical means by
monopoly capitalism, whose beginnings coincide precisely with the first
successes in capturing moving images and displaying them on a large, flat
surface, and in registering sounds mechanically, with the possibility of
broadcasting them through radio waves.
Beyond the good business opportunity offered by these recently
invented media, their appropriation by monopoly capitalism required the
establishment of behavioural patterns in mass society, in which the
94 Chapter Five
increased productivity associated with the concentration of people was

constantly threatened by the possibility of a political organization
endeavouring nothing less than to overthrow capitalism itself.
In regard to this peculiarity of the concept of the culture industry, it is
clear that one of Horkheimer and Adornos most important contributions
was to show that it did not mean simply mass culture. From the
beginning it was a system, i.e., a well-articulated ensemble of media
whose main purpose would be to influence the behaviour of the masses
according to interests of industry, not only to guide the demand for
commodities but also to introduce a degree of predictability into their
social and political attitudes.
Even after the early leading media of the culture industry cinema and
radio were no longer its most important vehicles, sharing space with
other devices such as television and VCRs, its systemic character was
preserved, since its function of manipulating public opinion was required
by the powers that be in every period of contemporary history. At the
beginning of the 20th century, the need for a culture industry was
determined by the rise of the labour movement against capitalist
exploitation, which prompted an increasing empowerment of the
communist and socialist parties in European countries, culminating in the
Russian Revolution. During World War II, all media in the culture
industry played a very important role in stimulating and sustaining the
morale of the populations (especially the troops) on both sides, as shown
clearly in North American and German movies of the period. Later, with
the onset of the Cold War, the relevance of the culture industry increased
in particular from the perspective of the dominant classes.
From this point of view, it is remarkable that the end of the Cold War
following the fall of the Berlin Wall coincided with the development of
both digital media production and digital distribution of sound, images and
texts and that both events coincided decisively with the beginning of so-
called globalization. This meant nothing less than the extension of the
economic, political and cultural influence of the USA to regions of the
globe until then dominated by the USSR and thus inaccessible to North
American expansionist politics. Even after 9/11, when the US removed the
mask of generosity it wore during the first ten years of globalization, the
role of the culture industry, with its new digital media, became perhaps
even more important, because the communication media now had to try to
justify the bellicose interventions of the US in the Middle East and other
parts of the world.
Taking into account that each of the above-mentioned periods of
contemporary history has its peculiarities, a question arises about the
The Culture Industry in Brazil 95
applicability of the concept of culture industry to situations as different as

early-20th-century monopoly capitalism and its current, globalized form.
This question becomes more relevant if one remembers that, for the
Critical Theory of Society, which grounded Adornos and Horkheimers
research on mass culture, a concept is always something historical. This
paper aims to show that the features of the classic model of culture
industry are not only still applicable to our current situation, but that they
have become even more relevant in the globalized phase of monopoly
capitalism.
But what are the characteristics of this classic model of culture
industry? It is very difficult to summarize all of its features, but I will
select four main characteristics in order to investigate to what extent it is
possible to speak of the existence of a culture industry in Brazil since the
beginning of the 20th century. These characteristics are: 1) the
expropriation of schematism, 2) the consummation of a style, 3) the
corruption of the tragic and 4) the fetishism of cultural goods.
The expropriation of schematism is exposed in the initial pages of the
chapter dedicated to mass culture in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, and it
represents the very heart of the critical theory of culture industry. It refers
to the obscure Kantian doctrine of schematism, according to which, since
the cognitive material coming from the senses (intuitions) and the intellect
(the pure concepts of understanding or categories) have nothing in
common with each other the former being partly made of empirical
material, the latter containing nothing empirical the existence of a kind
of mediation between the two heterogeneous elements which form our
knowledge of external objects is indispensable.1 In Kants words,
there must be some third thing, which is homogeneous on the one hand
with the category, and on the other hand with the appearance, and which
thus makes the application of the former to the latter possible. This
mediating representation must be pure, that is, void of all empirical
content, and yet at the same time, while it must in one respect be
intellectual, it must in another be sensible. Such a representation is the
transcendental schema. (Critique of Pure Reason, B 181)
1
Explanations about the expropriation of schematism can be found in Rodrigo
Duarte, Schema und Form. Wahrnemung und sthetische Betrachtung bei T.W.
Adorno in Zeitschrift fr kritische Theorie, Heft 20/21, Jg. 2005, pp. 74-95. See
also Rodrigo Duarte, Das Design und der Schematismus der Produktion, in
Thomas Friedrich (ed.), Wirklichkeit als Design-Problem. Zum Verhltnis von
sthetik, konomik und Ethik (Wrzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2008).
96 Chapter Five
It is remarkable in the original Kantian conception of schematism that its

functioning requires the activity of a strong (gnosiologic) subjectivity,
which has as its anthropological (and even moral) counterpart the subject
of enlightenment. This subject is capable of rendering an account of
herself or himself, not only with regard to her or his moral positions, but
also to the intellectually mediated perceptions which ground them. The
expropriation of schematism referred to by Horkheimer and Adorno
means that this powerful subjective element which is, according to the
classic Kantian conception, required for knowledge to sustain a personal
position, is replaced by an activity not quite proper, but suggested as a
matter of fact, almost imposed by the agencies of the culture industry, as
a kind of key to decode its messages. In the words of Horkheimer and
Adorno:
The active contribution which Kantian schematism still expected of
subjects that they should, from the first, relate sensuous multiplicity to
fundamental concepts is denied to the subject by industry. It purveys
schematism as its first service to the customer. According to Kantian
schematism, a secret mechanism within the psyche preformed immediate
data to fit them into the system of pure reason. That secret has now been
unravelled. [] For the consumer there is nothing left to classify, since the
classification has already been pre-empted by the schematism of
production.2
The second trait of Adorno and Horkheimers critique, the

consummation of style, is referred to in the Dialectic of Enlightenment
as the role of stylistic demands throughout the history of arts. They argue
that, at least in what concerns the most significant artists and artworks,
there has always been a dialectic interaction between the personal
requirements of artistic creation itself and the social expectations related to
the form of the aesthetic object, so that there is an opening for individual
expression in spite of potential formal rigidity in artistic constructs.
Horkheimer and Adorno further note that something quite different
happens in the realm of commercial culture: that is, the social expectations
of the liberal era, which could be circumvented by the cleverest artists, in
the age of the culture industry now exercise such a strong coercion in the
creation of the aesthetic object that the possibility of personal
manifestation no longer exists. One of the most salient consequences of
this process is the near complete standardization of culture. As explained
by Horkheimer and Adorno:
2
Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment, translated
by E. Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 98.
The complaints of art historians and cultural attorneys over the exhaustion
of the energy which created artistic style in the West are frighteningly
unfounded. The routine translation of everything, even of what has not yet
been thought, into the schema of mechanical reproducibility goes beyond
the rigour and scope of any true style the concept with which culture
lovers idealize the precapitalist past as an organic era.3
The third trait of the critique of mass culture, the corruption of the
tragic, is the most fully developed in that chapter, and consists of a
comparison between the role the tragic situation has played in the arts
since its origins in Ancient Greece until now, its revival in modern times,
and at the beginning of the contemporary age. According to Adorno and
Horkheimer, the main characteristic of ancient tragedy is the position of its
heroines and heroes against the forces that could annihilate them: even
though, curiously, in the ancient world there was nothing like the modern
concept of the subject, which is more related to individuality than to
collectivity. Rather, in this conception of the tragic there was a notion of
the possibility of interaction between particularity and universality. Even
while taking the historical transformations of this conception into account,
the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment consider that the complete
destruction of the tragic occurs only in the realm of culture industry. Their
explanation for this is based on the fact that, in spite of the exacerbated
individualism of the ideology of current times, it is possible to see in it a
decline of subjectivity in a substantial sense; this subjectivity inhered
seminally in the ancient tragedies and would also be indispensable to a
modern notion of the tragic. As Horkheimer and Adorno put it:
Tragedy, included in societys calculations and affirmed as a moment of
the world, becomes a blessing. It deflects the charge that truth is glossed
over, whereas in fact it is appropriated with cynical regret. It imparts an
element of interest to the insipidity of censored happiness and makes that
interest manageable. To the consumer who has seen culturally better days
if offers the surrogate of long-abolished depth, and to regular moviegoers
the veneer of culture they need for purposes of prestige. To all it grants the
solace that human fate in its strength and authenticity is possible even now
and its unflinching depiction inescapable. The unbroken surface of
existence, in the duplication of which ideology consists solely today,
appears all the more splendid, glorious, and imposing the more it is
imbued with necessary suffering. It takes on the aspect of fate. Tragedy is
levelled down to the threat to destroy anyone who does not conform,
3
Ibid., p. 100.
98 Chapter Five
whereas its paradoxical meaning once lay in hopeless resistance to

mythical threat.4
Thus, what was traditionally known as a tragic situation is downgraded

to the formula of getting into trouble and out again,5 meaning a prosaic
affair in which the hero is involved, which flows from a situation of
tension into a happy ending. Furthermore, the downgrading of tragedy to
the menace of the outsiders destruction is a very good description of its
corruption, mentioned above, while the idea of acquiring prestige through
the consumption of certain cultural products, which appears in the passage
above, is linked to the fourth characteristic of the critical theory of culture
industry, namely, the fetishism of cultural goods. This concept is closely
related to the Marxian notion according to which commodities in general
are things that hide social relations within them. In Dialectic of
Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer investigate whether there is
something unique about the fetishism of cultural commodities, concluding
that, compared to its counterpart in Marxs political economy, the main
difference lies in the fact that the use value of a commodity is almost
totally absorbed by its exchange value. This means that it is immediately
far more important for the consumer (as a reflection of what is expected
from her) to go or to be seen as going to the theatre, in order to appear
to be well informed, in short to buy the product (and be seen in the act
of buying it), than to use it, in other words, to have any kind of
experience of the thing as an aesthetic object, however problematic that
might be.
It is interesting to note that, just as the expropriation of schematism
depended on a topic of Kants Critique of Pure Reason (the doctrine of
schematism of the pure concepts of understanding in the Analytic of
principles), the fetishism of cultural commodities refers to a passage of
the Critique of Judgment in which Kant defines the purposefulness of the
object of taste judgment as merely formal, meaning that no purpose can be
unequivocally apprehended in the contact with its harmonious whole. This
feature of the object of taste judgment is the objective counterpart of the
disinterested pleasure it gives to its observer. Although Adorno and
Horkheimer view positively against the predominance of capitalist
universal utilitarianism the absence of immediately given purposes in
genuine aesthetic objects and the disinterestedness of its typical correlate,
judgment, what they call the fetishism of cultural commodities is the result
of the ideological distortion of the aforementioned purposefulness without
4
Ibid., p. 122.
5
Ibid., p. 123.
purpose of Kantian aesthetics, made possible by the fact that the

appearance of purposelessness allows the consummation of its potential
(and, in fact, frequently problematic) use value for the sake of its always
palpable exchange value:
The principle of idealist aesthetics, purposefulness without purpose,
reverses the schema socially adopted by bourgeois art: purposelessness for
purposes dictated by the market. In the demand for entertainment and
relaxation, purpose has finally consumed the realm of the purposeless. But
as the demand for the marketability of art becomes total, a shift in the
inner economic composition of cultural commodities is becoming
apparent.6
Having briefly described Adorno and Horkheimers critique of mass

culture, I can now proceed to an analysis of the peculiarities of the culture
industry in Brazil, beginning with reflections on the existence of such a
thing in a country on the periphery of industrialized capitalism at the
beginning of the 20th century.
Culture Industry in a Peripheral Country?

As stated above, the industrialization of culture per se began in the
USA in the first decades of the 20th century, although many European
countries had already experienced the commodification of cultural goods.
But since such experiences outside the United States took place only in the
key countries of western capitalism, what would have been the role of a
peripheral country like Brazil, which at that time had an economy based
mainly on the export of agricultural products like cotton or coffee? The
truth is that it was exactly this kind of export that fostered the
industrialization process in the beginning of the 20th century, and which
resulted in considerable urbanization, thus creating a strong demand for
products of mass culture as had occurred before in Europe and the
United States. Not only did the Brazilian masses consume the films
produced in Hollywood in the 1920s, but also a system of commercial
radio had emerged in the 1930s, reaching the most populated parts of the
country. At the same time, a native film industry managed to keep itself
alive by copying the Hollywood model, first in Rio de Janeiro and later in
So Paulo. In the 1940s, actress Carmen Miranda, who had begun her
career in Brazil some years before, went to Hollywood and, after a five-
year contract with 20th Century Fox, became world-famous through films
6
Ibid., pp. 127-8.
100 Chapter Five
like Down Argentine Way (1940), That Night in Rio (1941), Weekend in
Havana (1941), The Gangs All Here (1943) and Four Jills in a Jeep
(1945).
Even without taking into account the experimental movies of Cinema
Novo, which, in spite of their international critical acclaim, were never
blockbusters, there have always been films produced in Brazil by
Brazilian directors, featuring Brazilian actresses and actors that enjoyed
success abroad. Examples of this international success in the last ten years
include, among others, Walter Salles Central Station (1998) and
Fernando Meireles City of God (2003).
Furthermore, it must be noted that the era of television began very
early in Brazil. The first transmissions took place at the beginning of the
50s in So Paulo and, in the 60s and 70s, long-distance satellite
broadcasting made possible the establishment of countrywide networks
like Globo, Bandeirantes, SBT and Manchete. The first three networks are
still active, with Globo being the most prominent in terms of international
influence, exporting its soap operas worldwide and beaming many of its
productions to every continent and to over fifty countries.
Since the newest media are always linked to computer networks, it is
opportune to remember that in Brazil, despite social exclusion limiting
Internet access to a considerable portion of its 190 million inhabitants,
there were, according to the Fundao Getlio Vargas, approximately 50
million personal computers operating countrywide in April of 2008. A
realistic projection points to the possibility of there being one computer for
every two Brazilians by 2011. Even now, some twelve million users
already access the Internet, making this country one of the most important
collective users of this technology in the world. The typical Internet use of
a Brazilian for June 2008 (22 hours and 26 minutes) surpassed countries
like France (19 hours and 34 minutes), US (19 hours and 5 minutes),
Australia and Japan (both with 17 hours and 55 minutes).
As for the question of the applicability of the critical categories devised
by Horkheimer and Adorno in the 40s to todays much more complex
scenario of the culture industry discussed above, the same could be asked
about the explanatory power of such theoretical concepts to a social,
economic and cultural context so significantly different from its European
and North American counterparts. Taking this into consideration, I will
examine below some of the most important characteristics of mass culture
in Brazil, in order to address the question of whether Horkheimer and
Adornos critical model is applicable to that particular reality.
Radio, Movies and the Vargas Dictatorship 1937-45

Since Adorno and Horkheimers analysis deals specifically with radio
and cinema the predominant vehicles of mass communication of the
North American culture industry in the 1940s I will begin with a short
discussion of the conditions from which both media emerged in Brazil,
stressing their relationship to the most politically and economically
powerful sectors in society.
The beginning of radio sends us back to 1922, when, during the
centenary celebrations of Brazils independence from Portugal, with the
technical support of Westinghouse International Company and Western
Electric Company, the first broadcast in the country took place, with
commemorative speeches and concerts to and from different points in Rio
de Janeiro and So Paulo. Regular broadcasting began in 1923 with the
foundation of the Radio Sociedade do Rio de Janeiro and the Radio Club
of Pernambuco, in the Brazilian Northeast, which were not yet commercial
broadcasters, but were maintained by members contributions and whose
purpose was the diffusion of cultural contents to a very elite public which
could also afford the for that time very high prices of a radio receiver.7
The democratization of radio coincided with its becoming a
commercial venture, which only happened in 1930 with the foundation of
Radio Philips, created by the Dutch electronics concern of the same name,
in order to increase sales of its receivers. From 1932 to 1937 sixty-three
radio stations were created, located in almost every Brazilian state.8 But
the spirit of commercial radio began to be established in Brazil in 1932 by
a producer named Ademar Cas, himself a short-wave radio listener
(mainly of North American and British stations), who wanted to bring to
his country broadcasting practices that were already current in
industrialized countries. His show, named Programa Cas, had a large
audience and was responsible for the introduction of commercial practices
such as the use of jingles,9 and the featuring of guests who had a regular
performance time in the show. Among these guests was Noel Rosa, who
wrote short songs to advertise commodities and also comment on social
7
See Rafael Cas, Programa Cas: o rdio comeou aqui (Rio de Janeiro: Mauad,
1995), p.29.
8
See Fbio Martins, Senhoras e senhores, no ar - A cidade e o rdio (Belo
Horizonte: C/Arte, 1999), p. 58.
9
The first Brazilian jingle was composed by a popular musician named Nssara to
advertise a bakery owned by a Portuguese, which explains why this short song was
like a fado (a typical Portuguese popular music). See Programa Cas, pp. 49-50.
102 Chapter Five
and political issues. Later, Noel Rosa would become one of Brazils most
famous songwriters of all time.
In September of 1936 a private group founded Rdio Nacional in Rio
de Janeiro, which became the most influential means of communication in
Brazil until the rise of television in the early 1950s. In the following year,
Getlio Vargas, who had been the head of a provisional government since
the so-called Revolution of 1930,10 established a dictatorship through a
putsch-like shift to the right. This regime is known in Brazilian history as
the Estado Novo; it aimed at a conservative modernization of the country,
including the development of modern media such as radio and cinema.11
The nationalization of Rdio Nacional in 1941 gave birth to a very
powerful communications medium with a countrywide broadcasting
capacity and facilities as good as those of the best broadcasters in the
world. For almost a decade, having hired the best producers, musicians
(for a while Rdio Nacional had four orchestras), actresses/actors, directors,
writers etc, this station drew the attention of the whole nation. Also, in
1941, the first Brazilian radio soap opera, entitled Em busca da felicidade
(In Search of Happiness), was produced in the studios of Rdio
Nacional, beginning a history that still continues today with the Brazilian
television soaps, which enjoy a worldwide audience.
It is remarkable that the beginning of the film industry in Brazil,
following a pattern similar to that of commercial radio, also coincided with
the 1930 Revolution.12 Although in the 20s there had been many semi-
amateur attempts to produce fiction and documentary silent films,13 it was
only in 1929 that the first Brazilian feature film, Barro humano (Human
Clay), produced by Ademar Gonzaga, was launched in Rio de Janeiro.
Encouraged by its relative success, Gonzaga started in 1930 the
construction of Cindia Brazils first industrial film studio with state of
the art equipment imported from the USA. This studio produced in the
same year its first sound-feature film, entitled Lbios sem beijos (Kissless
Lips). Cindia, which is still active14 after overcoming some extremely
10
Regarding Getlio Vargas and the Estado Novo, see Robert M. Levine, Father
of the Poor? Vargas and his Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
especially p. 50ff.
11
See Othon Jambreiro (ed.), Tempos de Vargas: o rdio e o controle da
informao (Salvador: Edufba, 2004).
12
Father of the Poor? p. 18ff.
13
See for instance, Paulo Augusto Gomes, Pioneiros do cinema em Minas Gerais
(Belo Horizonte: Crislida, 2008).
14
More information about Cindias history and current activities can be obtained
at www.cinedia.com.br (Accessed in December 30th, 2008).
difficult phases, was long one of the few Brazilian film producers
comparable to big Hollywood studios like Warner, Universal, MGM,
Columbia, 20th Century Fox and Paramount. In almost eighty years of
operation, Cindia produced over sixty feature films, including co-
productions with other Brazilian studios. Among them were the first
movies featuring Carmen Miranda, Al, Al, Brasil! (1935) and Al, Al,
Carnaval (1936), in addition to some hundreds of weekly-news short
films. It is also worth noting that Orson Welles unfinished Its all True
(1942) had all its studio parts filmed in Cindias facilities.15
Having provided some basic information concerning the rise of radio
and cinema in Brazil, I would like to test the applicability of Horkheimer
and Adornos critical concepts for researching the existence of a culture
industry in the country. Taking the concept of culture industry as a
system, it would, nevertheless, be interesting to first consider a very
specific characteristic of the Brazilian model, which includes not only an
obvious dominance of radio over cinema but also a synergy between both
media in Brazils broader cultural scene in the 30s and 40s.
As seen above, Vargas dictatorship invested directly in radio
broadcasting, apparently because the ideological effects of this medium
were more immediate and had a much wider range, since the content
produced in Rio de Janeiro (Brazils Federal Capital at that time) reached
the whole of the Brazilian territory on shortwave. Although in the 30s and
40s the DIP (Brazilian department of censorship and propaganda)
inspected both dominant media in Brazils mass culture, government direct
investments were drawn almost only to Rdio Nacional. The Brazilian
film industry, which was almost entirely private, fought against many
obstacles, ranging from the difficulty of showing its productions theatres
nationwide were under strong pressure from North American film
distributors to the lack of film negative for shooting, in particular during
World War II.
That historical context generated a peculiarity in the Brazilian culture
industry: in contrast with its North American counterpart, in which movies
were by far the most important medium, in Brazil a reverse situation was
observed, since radio reached many more people in all states of the
country more quickly than the movies. As a matter of fact, the survival of
the Brazilian film industry depended greatly on a strategy of hiring almost
all the stars and starlets launched in radio to act in films, so that the
attention of a larger audience could be in some measure guaranteed.
15
See Alice Gonzaga, 50 Anos de Cindia (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1987).
104 Chapter Five
This public interest in Brazilian movies existed, indeed, mainly

because a very devoted and large radio audience across the country had for
many years before the television era only imagined how its idols really
looked. The production and subsequent nationwide distribution of sound
feature films (beginning with the previously mentioned Cindias
Kissless Lips) made it possible for the exclusively acoustic information
of radio to be supplemented by corresponding images (which, coming
from sound feature films, also had their own sounds).
For this reason, the system characteristic of the Brazilian culture
industry in its first phase is perhaps more concrete and tangible than it was
elsewhere, and this enables us to test the aforementioned criteria
considering both radio and cinema together and also in relation to each
other, in spite of the predominance of radio.
It is important to remember that the expropriation of schematism works
at the same time in two different modes, which may be called universal
and particular. This difference means that the expropriation of
schematism not only provides the masses with a general key to
understanding their reality, keeping in mind the instances given by cultural
commodities and according to an external point of view, often harmful
to their own purposes , but also offers ad hoc standpoints that depend on
the immediate technical use and capabilities of the devices involved in
each specific production. With regard to the particular sense of the
expropriation of schematism, it is difficult to say anything beyond
generalities, since it depends on the analysis of particular objects. It is
nevertheless remarkable that, even considered in their synergy, the relative
lack of realism of both leading media radio and cinema in the 1930s
and 1940s hindered a full exploitation of this ideological strategy.
Concerning the application of the universal sense of expropriation of
schematism to the Brazilian case, it is obvious that it was crucial for
Vargas conservative modernization project that the discourses, songs and
even soccer games disseminated by Rdio Nacional taught the masses how
to perceive things in general. This worked as a kind of filter through which
reality should be seen and, considering the nationalistic background of the
Estado Novo, this method of perceiving reality was closely linked to the
idea of the privilege of having been born in Brazil: ordinary people (the
large majority) could be poor, underfed and illiterate, but they were
nonetheless blessed by God for being Brazilian. Not only some
characters of popular comedy shows such as Rdio Nacionals PRK 30,16
16
This was the most popular comedy show of Rdio Nacional in the 1930s and
1940s.
but also almost all heroines and heroes in feature films and radio soap
operas, displayed the trait of having limitations linked to their personal
condition, that is, being poor or ignorant, or coming from a very small
town, or subject to discrimination for their ethnic origins, or all of them
together. However, these characters managed to overcome all obstacles
using a typically Brazilian way of solving their problems. All this
strengthens that specific mode of the expropriation of schematism
operated by the culture industry in Brazil.
As in Horkheimer and Adornos model, the expropriation of
schematism is also in the first phase of Brazilian mass culture closely
related to the culture industrys second criterion, i.e., the consummation of
style. It is possible to say that style is the objective counterpart of
expropriated schematism, understood as an intervention in the subjects
faculty of perception. As a matter of fact, style in consonance with the
peculiarity of being Brazilian means in this case also an artistic
construction that expresses itself mainly in popular music (as in samba and
other Afro-Brazilian rhythms).
On this topic it is helpful to take into account the fact that Ademar
Gonzaga as we saw, the pioneer of the Brazilian film industry and the
founder of Cindia intended to make movies that would be Brazilian in
their content, and North American in form,17 that is, exhibiting high
technical standards and very professional production. In view of this, it is
possible to recognize in many Brazilian films of the 30s and 40s an exact
imitation of Hollywoods technical procedures, while it could be surmised
from their content a very clear intention to immediately reflect the
peculiarities of the Brazilian way of life. Another very strong feature of
those productions is that some typical formal elements come to the fore,
proceeding mainly from the language of radio (as stated above, the leading
mass medium in Brazil) and from the vaudevilles (teatros de revista).
The most remarkable fact of this genre is that many feature films of this
period were conceived as radio shows, in which comic sketches or
relatively independent scenes alternated with musical numbers, relegating
the films general plot to the background.
Concerning the third criterion of the culture industry, the corruption of
the tragic, it could be said that there is not an important difference between
North American and Brazilian cultural commodities: they have the same
formula, described by Horkheimer and Adorno for Hollywood, of getting
into trouble and out again, which is applied ad nauseam not only to
17
Garcia, Tnia da costa, O It Verde e Amarelo de Carmen Miranda (1930-
1946) (So Paulo: Annablume/FAPESP, 2004), p. 69.
106 Chapter Five
feature films but also to radio soap operas. What distinguishes the
Brazilian style in this case is that the trouble from which the hero or
heroine must escape is tightly linked to the aforementioned peculiarities of
the Brazilianity model imposed by the correlated workings of the
expropriation of schematism and consummation of style.
The last criterion of the culture industry, the fetishism of cultural
goods, appears clearly in the formation of a wider public, which, as in the
North American model, mostly did not have an opportunity to develop
itself with culture in a superlative sense, since it had already severed its
connections to a popular culture strictly speaking, i.e. one related to the
rural origins of most city-inhabitants of that time.18 From this point of
view, the Brazilian case resembles more the North American than the
European process of culture industrys consolidation, since the first
European audience was partly impregnated by a more sublimated
concept of culture, still grounded in the realm of the idea of erudition
which characterized the culture of the liberal era. A further peculiarity of
the Brazilian model is that the strong influence of the North American
culture industry created something like two levels of fetishism: a
background one, generated mainly by Hollywood productions, and
another, perhaps less important level, generated by Brazilian films and
radio shows.
Television and the Military Dictatorship 1964-85

The beginning of the 50s witnessed the fall of radio and the rise of
television as Brazilian mass cultures leading medium. One of the reasons
for this shift is probably the fact that, unlike the previous situation, in
which radio and cinema, while complementary, formed a temporally and
spatially dissociated system, which was therefore somewhat schizophrenic,
in television the audience could immediately see what they heard, which
represented an incredible economy of means.
On September 10th 1950 the first television transmission in Brazil took
place at the studios of TV Tupi in So Paulo, which belonged to Assis
Chateaubriands Dirios Associados, a communications group that owned
many newspapers and radio stations throughout the country. In the
following years, other channels began to operate: TV Tupi and TV Rio, in
18
An analysis of this historical process can be found in Clement Greenbergs
Avant-garde and Kitsch, in The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 1:
Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1988).
Rio de Janeiro; TV Record and TV Paulista, in So Paulo, and TV

Itacolomi in Belo Horizonte the latter also belonging to the
Chateaubriand group. In 1956, this same group opened nine new stations
in important cities like Curitiba, Porto Alegre, Salvador, Recife, Fortaleza,
Campina Grande, So Lus, Belm and Goinia, becoming the countrys
leading television company.
As in the 50s, Brazil lacked specific legislation that would define
responsibilities of public and private sectors, and which would force
television broadcasters themselves to pay for building and maintaining
their transmitting towers and other essential equipment. Probably due to
pressures from TV station owners, the Brazilian Telecommunications
Code (CBT) was promulgated in 1962, inspired by the strong liberal North
American FCC (Federal Communications Commission) rules. According
to this code, it would be the states responsibility to provide the whole
material infrastructure for telecommunications, presupposing competition
among the several TV stations, and therefore providing regulatory
mechanisms in order prevent the formation of cartels.19 Indeed, in the
1950s many television channels competed against each other until
following a right-wing coup through which military forces ruled Brazil for
two decades TV Globo began to operate in 1965.
This TV station, founded in Rio by the Marinho family, which owned
newspapers and radio stations, had in a few years spread branches to So
Paulo, Recife, Belo Horizonte and Braslia. After also associating with
independent stations in many states, Globo was the first Brazilian channel
to broadcast as a countrywide network. The Globo network took
advantage of the telecommunications infrastructure provided by the
military regime, which was then very interested in ideological justifications
for its reactionary project, based as it was on a technological
modernization process that was supported by the United States in their
anti-communist campaigns at the peak of the Cold War. As a matter of
fact, TV Globo was, from the beginning, more strongly identified with the
military government than the other TV stations, even those owned by the
19
On the economic and legal aspects of televisions rise in Brazil, see Cassiano
Ferreira Simes and Fernando Mattos, Elementos histrico-regulatrios da
televiso brasileira, in Valrio Cruz Brittos and Csar Ricardo Bolao (eds.),
Rede Globo 40 anos de poder e hegemonia (So Paulo: Paulus, 2005), p. 35-54.
See also Eugnio Bucci (editor), A TV aos 50. Criticando a televiso brasileira no
seu cinquentenrio (So Paulo: Editora Fundao Perseu Abramo, 2003).
108 Chapter Five
Chateaubriand group, whose communications empire by then had started

to decay.20
TV Globo, which in its first years had the Time-Life Group as a
shareholder, brought many technological and methodological innovations
to Brazilian television, basing its own program grid mainly on journalism
and soap operas (telenovelas). Globos newscasts, besides pioneering
network broadcasting all over the country, introduced portable cameras
and mobile transmission units, which enabled a much more dynamic
approach to the events to be covered, according to the ideological and
market-driven needs of that moment.21
As for the soap operas, TV Globo managed to receive and adapt a
tradition of radio productions, dating from the thirties, to the language of
television. Globos innovation was again the introduction of highly
professional, market-oriented methods, which resulted in an authentic
industrial production of content and, consequently, in a considerable
increase of advertising income. Globos soap operas were the first to
widely explore the technique of merchandising (i.e., advertising integrated
in the plot), which amounted to another source of profit not yet fully
exploited by its competitors.
From the point of view of content, although some soap operas with
historical themes, such as Escrava Isaura, were successful worldwide,
Globo managed to televise stories concerning Brazilian modern urban life
(more adequate to the use of merchandising), displaying, without any
deeper discussion, issues such as homoerotics, social and racial prejudice
etc. According to Silvia Borelli, this very trait was related to the popular
roots of soap operas in general, and the visible improvements in its
productive processes ensured the Brazilian telenovelas acceptance in
Brazil and abroad.22
20
The supremacy of Globo over all its competitors in Brazil is confirmed by
following passage: In 1987 the estimated annual income of Globo TV was about
500 million dollars and its patrimonial value reached one billion dollars. With
12.000 employees, it was the fourth largest private network in the world, just
behind the North American CBS, NBC and ABC. It absorbed two thirds of the
advertising values designated to television and had an audience of 80 million
people in 98% of the national territory. Marialva Barbosa and Ana Paula Goulart
Ribeiro Telejornalismo na Globo: vestgios, narrativa e temporalidade in Rede
Globo 40 anos de poder e hegemonia, p. 218.
21
On the formation of Globos concept of journalism, see, Telejornalismo, pp.
205-22.
22
See Silvia H. S. Borelli, Telenovelas: padro de produo e matrizes
populares, in Rede Globo 40 anos de poder e hegemonia, p. 200. See also
Borelli observes also that Globo helped to consolidate in Brazil the

concept of a prime time, consisting of a relatively long newscast (the
Jornal Nacional) placed between two soap operas (the first one around 7
and the second around 9 p.m.).23 This arrangement could be fruitfully
theorized, for the alleged report about facts in the newscast represented a
bond with reality, while the soaps before and after the newscast meant an
incursion into fiction. However, with some exceptions, it would be
possible to perceive a tendency of both shows to approach one another.
While the soap operas managed to tackle realistic themes and discussions,
the newscast adopted narrative strategies which according to the
ideological project to which TV Globo belongs brought it nearer to
drama.
I conclude my analysis by testing the four aforementioned criteria of
the culture industry in relation to the features pointed out. Concerning the
first criterion, it is remarkable that television the dominant medium in
the Brazilian mass culture over the last fifty years seems to be in general
much more capable of expropriation of schematism than the previous
system composed of two leading media (radio and movies), for, as
Horkheimer and Adorno predicted in the early 40s, television aims at a
synthesis of radio and film.24 Furthermore, the television system can
overcome the relative lack of realism characteristic of radio and cinema,
enabling a complete exploitation of this ideological strategy. Both aspects
of the expropriation of schematism universality and particularity can
be clearly perceived through an analysis of the two main products of
Brazilian television (especially by TV Globo): journalism and soap operas.
As for the more general aspect of expropriation of schematism, the
surreptitiously imposed point of view reinforces the suggestion for
ordinary viewers, mentioned above, that there is some compensatory
peculiarity in being a Brazilian. At the same time, this point of view
introduces a totally new element, namely, the possibility of these viewers
self-perception as partakers of a modern and progressive society. The
visible, pendulum-like movement of showing both in newscasts and in
soap operas archaic and future-oriented aspects in Brazil seems to
confirm my hypothesis.
Regarding the particular aspect of the expropriation of schematism, it
is undeniable that the technical quality of colourful images and stereophonic
sound associated with the naturalistic atmosphere produced by the very
Renato Ortiz et alii, Telenovela. Histria e produo (So Paulo: Editora

Brasiliense, 1991).
23
Ibid., p. 188.
24
110 Chapter Five
conception of these cultural commodities suggest a kind of emulation to

external reality itself. This allows people who already have escapist
tendencies due to certain psychological features to live in a very peculiar
world, obviously not constructed for their own sake, but according to the
needs of todays monopoly capitalism.
As for the second criterion of the culture industry, the consummation
of style, it can be said that the association mentioned above, through the
powerful technical capacity of the television system, of the supposed
privilege of being Brazilian with the economic and social modernity
produced in Brazil creates a very typically naturalistic audiovisual
language. This also resulted in the fact that many of the people acting in
soap operas are not until their hiring by the television station
professional actors or actresses, but young adults whose appearance fits in
with the ideological and commercial aims of show business (many people
acting in the soaps are former models).
The corruption of the tragic the fourth criterion of the culture
industry is also very evident in Brazilian television productions. As
mentioned above, one of its pillars is the soap opera, whose main
characteristic is a strong but superficial intensity of feelings, which
Horkheimer and Adorno saw as the culture industry revealing the truth
about catharsis.25 The same formula they identified as getting into
trouble and out again applies largely to Brazilian soap operas, with the
peculiarity that the out again can be very much postponed: the length of
a soap opera is 150 to 200 episodes. An alternative instance of the
corruption of the tragic can be found taking into account the
aforementioned relationship between TV journalism and dramaturgy in
Brazil in the newscasts themselves, since, whenever it is possible, the
above-mentioned formula getting into trouble and out again is applied to
real-life stories.
In what concerns the fetishism of cultural goods, it is evident that, in
the same terms defined above in relation to radio and cinema in Brazil, the
bipod newscast/soap-opera on television has created a particular realm that
has acquired such a fanatical following that it is no longer possible to
distinguish exchange value from use value. This means that
Horkheimer and Adornos definition of this phenomenon as an absorption
of the latter by the former simultaneously applies and does not apply, since
the identity of exchange- and use-value can be also thought of as a result
of a complete absorption. The culturally fetishist feature can be clearly
perceived in the fact that those who ignore the most watched soap opera of
25
Ibid., p. 144.
the moment run the risk of being considered arrogant or simply

extraterrestrials.
I believe to have shown even if schematically that the four criteria
of the culture industry in Horkheimer and Adornos analysis in Dialectic
of Enlightenment apply not only to the first decades of last century but also
to the more recent phases of mass culture in Brazil, at least in relation to
its most outstanding phenomena, i.e., at first radio and cinema and later on
television. To conclude, it is important to remember that, considering the
complex and multifarious nature of my theme, it would be impossible to
give a complete and seamless account of it; but I think its purpose is fully
achieved if this paper managed to draw the readers attention to the
richness and relevance of the matter.
CHAPTER SIX
ADORNOS MINIMA MORALIA:

ON PASSION, PSYCHOANALYSIS
AND THE POSTEMOTIONAL DILEMMA
SHIERRY WEBER NICHOLSEN
Introduction
As Adorno and Horkheimer conceived it, the culture industry shapes
all facets of life in society, reaching into the very fabric of the individuals
subjective experience. As Adorno wrote in his preface to Minima Moralia,
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.1 Nor has this shaping force of the culture industry on subjective
experience diminished in the years since Adorno and Horkheimer first
described it. Contemporary thinkers continue to attempt to describe the
phenomena to which it gives rise. In the 1990s, for instance, sociologist
Stjepan Mestrovic coined the term postemotional for a society in which
emotional experience has been preformed. But Minima Moralia, written
during Adornos American exile in the 1940s and subtitled fragments
from damaged life, remains one of the most poignant elucidations of the
fate of subjective experience in a society dominated by the culture
industry. Perhaps the most personal of Adornos works, it is written from
the point of view of the individual whose capacity for emotional
experience is withering even as he attempts to articulate it. In the precision
with which Adorno takes this point of view, Minima Moralia offers
something further. For while the culture industry preforms subjective
experience, it also fails to deliver on its promises, and individual
awareness retains a sense of the tension between the whole and the
1
London: Verso, 1974. p.15.
114 Chapter Six
particular. As Adorno writes in The Culture Industry Reconsidered, it

may be supposed that the consciousness of the consumers themselves is
split between the prescribed fun which is supplied to them by the culture
industry and a not particularly well-hidden doubt about its blessings.2
This particular twist given to subjective experience places the still thinking
individual in what I will call the postemotional dilemma. One of my
goals here is to present Adornos articulation of this dilemma.
A particular focus of this essay is the role of psychoanalysis in this
dilemma of subjectivity. One would expect that psychoanalysis, in which
the individuals emotional life is of primary concern, would have much to
offer to an understanding of this withering of emotional experience. In
Minima Moralia, however, Adorno illuminates the role of the North
American psychoanalysis of his time in legitimizing the kind of preformed
subjective experience produced by the culture industry. Since then, some
contemporary psychoanalysts have addressed the postemotional
phenomenon. But just as Minima Moralia anticipates Mestrovics depiction
of a postemotional condition, so it anticipates psychoanalytic descriptions
of a damaged capacity for subjective experience. It goes beyond them as
well, both in depicting the individuals unavoidable complicity with social
domination and its deformation of subjective experience, and in showing
the links between individual experience and larger social forces. At the
same time, some trends in psychoanalytic thought attempt to define
emotional experience in a way that escapes what I will call the dilemma of
postemotionality. I offer passion as a term for that form of emotional
experience, and will attempt to demonstrate its presence in the form of
Adornos dialectical thought and writing.
The Postemotional
I will be appropriating the term postemotional from Mestrovics
book Postemotional Society.3 I will not be concerned here with the details
of Mestrovics argument but will simply use his characterization of the
postemotional as a starting point for my argument. Mestrovics thesis is
that while emotions more than ideas or behaviour would seem to be the
inviolable heart of individual subjective experience, in postemotional
society as exemplified by contemporary America, emotions are
prefabricated, simulated, manipulated externally through the mass media,
2
Culture Industry Reconsidered, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on
Mass Culture, edited by J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 89.
3
London and Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997.
Adornos Minima Moralia 115
and triggered by images. They lose their genuineness and become quasi-
emotions. The emotional spectrum becomes limited and individual
emotions blurred. In Mestrovics words,
contemporary emotions are dead in the analogous sense that one speaks
of a dead current versus a live wire, or a dead nerve in a limb or tooth.
The current is still on, the nerve is still present anatomically, but neither is
functioning as it was supposed to. The result is that all of the primal
passions discussed from Aristotle to Hume to the present become shadows
of their former selves. Anger becomes indignation. Envy [] becomes an
objectless craving for something better. Heartfelt joy is now the bland
happiness represented by the happy meal. Sorrow, as the manifestation
of affliction, anguish, grief, pain, remorse, trials, tribulations, and sadness, is
magically transformed by the TV journalists question How do you feel?
(after a death of a loved one to a sniper, or a tornado, or other calamity)
into the typical but vague answer Im very upset.4
The complement to the prefabricated, quasi-nature of emotions, Mestrovic

says, is a cult of sincerity, genuineness, and quasi-therapeutic self-
examination. This cult facilitates the use of emotions for purposes of social
manipulation, in that individuals find themselves pressed to regard their
preformed emotions as their very own, genuine and sincere expressions of
self.
This combination of prefabricated emotions and a cult of genuineness
places the individual who retains a modicum of capacity to reflect in what
I have called the postemotional dilemma. How do I evaluate what would
seem to be my genuine subjective experience? Are my emotions real?
How and where can truly genuine emotional experience survive? And on
what basis can I make these assertions of external manipulation?
Mestrovic does not speak directly to this dilemma, but Adorno does.
Minima Moralia and Postemotional Society

Mestrovic conceives postemotional society as a malignant development
out of the other-directed society that sociologist David Riesman
described in 1950 in his book The Lonely Crowd. Mestrovics work thus
figures in the tradition of cultural criticism through description of
American society, a tradition that extends back to de Toqueville and
Veblen. Minima Moralia too belongs in this tradition, though with a
dialectical twist. It is as though Hegels Phenomenology had been forced
to take the culture industry into account and became Minima Moralia.
4
Ibid. pp. 62-3.
116 Chapter Six
Written, as I said above, during Adornos American exile in the 1940s

but first published in German in 1951, Minima Moralia is a collection of
what might be described as aphoristic essays. It is composed of over two
hundred such pieces, organized into three parts, dated 1944, 1945, and
1946-47 thus written during the Second World War and continued in its
immediate aftermath. The full title, Minima Moralia, Reflections from
Damaged Life, refers in antithesis to Aristotles Magna Moralia and his
concern with the nature of the good life. For Adorno, the phenomena
Mestrovic described were already in full swing in the 1940s, and Minima
Moralia explores the thinking individuals struggle to retain the capacity
to think and experience in the midst of a constellation of power, individual
and society that reduces the very idea of the good life to a mere glimmer.
The fragment from Minima Moralia entitled How Nice of You,
Doctor, citing Goethes Faust, exemplifies the way Adorno articulates
the quality of damaged life. (My quotations from Minima Moralia are
from E.F.N. Jephcotts 1974 translation, with occasional slight alterations;
page numbers will be given in the text.)
There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life
that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an
element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve
their diametrical opposite. (p.25)
As we see here, Adorno takes it for granted that the structure of

contemporary society is one of domination, and that the domination has
reached into the very fabric of daily life. Even the smallest pleasures of
life serve to legitimize a society based on domination and thus to
legitimize the suffering beneath the surface. And in fact, the injustice
served by apparently light-hearted and casual actions imbues them with a
coarse and ugly quality. Hence the distinction between the serious and the
trivial or carefree, between larger social issues and personal life, is invalid
and misleading. One cannot afford to be thoughtless, to enjoy the
relaxation that seems promised:
Mistrust is called for in the face of all spontaneity, impetuosity, all letting
oneself go, for it implies pliancy towards the superior might of the
existent. The malignant deeper meaning of ease, once confined to toasts of
conviviality, has long since spread to more appealing impulses. (p.25)
The individual needs to be constantly vigilant, yet it is impossible to avoid

complicity with this pervasive structure of domination. Complicity seems
to follow from participation of any kind. Conversation itself, the medium
of social life, entangles one in complicity:
The chance conversation in the train, when, to avoid dispute, one consents
to a few statements that one knows ultimately to implicate murder, is
already a betrayal; no thought is immune against communication, and to
utter it in the wrong place and with the false appearance of agreement is
enough to undermine its truth. [] Sociability itself connives at injustice
by pretending that in this chill world we can still talk to each other, and the
casual, amiable remark contributes to perpetuating silence, in that the
concessions made to the interlocutor debase him. (p.25-6)
Adorno names this malignant sociability affability one of the essential

quasi-emotional expressions of postemotional society. If affability is
malignant in the sense of being destructive of respect for human beings,
then participating in it does not serve the cause of humanity. But to
withhold oneself from affability means isolation:
The evil principle that was always latent in affability unfurls its full
bestiality in the egalitarian spirit. Condescension and thinking oneself no
better are the same. To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm
in it the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness,
insensitivity, and violence needed to exert domination. For the intellectual,
inviolable isolation is now the only way of showing some measure of
solidarity. (p. 26)
Adorno refers here to thought and truth, and to the intellectual. But
of course he is not concerned with matters of the mind and intellect as
opposed to matters of emotion, feeling, and human relationship. For
Adorno, the postemotional dilemma implicates the individuals life as a
whole, in every aspect. He gives us a poignant example of this destruction
of the spontaneity and delicacy of human relationships in a piece on gifts
and giving, called Articles May Not Be Exchanged:
We are forgetting how to give presents []. Real giving had its joy in
imagining the joy of the receiver. It means choosing, expending time,
going out of ones way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of
distraction. Just this hardly anyone is now able to do. At best they give
what they would have liked themselves, only a few degrees worse. The
decay of giving is mirrored in the distressing invention of gift-articles,
based on the assumption that one does not know what to give because one
really does not want to. (p.42-3)
The dilemma reaches down into the subtlest of expressive physical

actions. The very design of the built environment entraps the individual in
actions which have implications for human relations. The culture industry,
one might say, shapes not only products which might be considered to fall
into the standards categories of culture or art but as design shapes
118 Chapter Six
the whole of the material fabric of daily life. Adorno demonstrates this in a
piece about the contemporary construction of doors called Do Not
Knock:
Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them, human
beings. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It
subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects.
Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discreetly,
yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have
the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the
bad manners of not looking behind them, not shielding the interior of the
house which receives them. (p.40)
The Last Bourgeois and the Last Enemy of the Bourgeois

These pieces from Minima Moralia engender a complicated response
in this reader. On the one hand, I sense the truth of their portrayal of
damaged experience, and it is a relief to hear someone describe it so
directly and so emphatically. On the other hand, they seem almost
unbearably pessimistic and painful, for they leave no way out. As Adorno
describes it, the untruth of ordinary life is so pervasive, and complicity
with domination thus so unavoidable, that we are condemned to solitary
suffering. All we can do is hold fast to an awareness of pain, and try to
remember that something better might have been, might conceivably still
be possible:
Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the
shadow of terror; even the innocent how lovely! becomes an excuse for
an existence outrageously unlovely, and there is no longer beauty or
consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in
unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of
what is better. (How nice of you, Doctor, p. 25)
This is a disturbing thesis, and I think one of the ways we respond to the
suffering Adorno seems to be proposing that we endure is to attack
Adorno as elitist. But when we think of someone as elitist, we generally
attribute to that person a contempt and disdain for the other. Adorno,
however, writes from intimate knowledge of his own complicity and his
own frailty. He is no more exempt from the dilemma than anyone else.
And despite his assertive and exaggerated formulations, Adorno claims no
definitive solution to the postemotional dilemma. His dialectical thought
and essayistic form work against that. Every proposition has its dialectical
antithesis. The piece that follows How Nice of You, Doctor, for
instance, is called Antithesis. It begins this way:
The person 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. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true
existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a
substitute for true life. [] The detached observer is as much entangled as
the active participant; the only advantage of the former is insight into his
entanglement, and the infinitesimal freedom that lies in knowledge as
such. (p.26)
When Adorno here emphasizes the frailty and weakness of his own
capacities and conjoins the truth of powerlessness to the frail possibility of
thought, I am reminded of the weak Messianic power evoked by
Adornos friend and colleague Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the
Philosophy of History. But what is the source of this weak power? How is
insight into entanglement possible? In addition to being called an elitist,
Adorno is often criticized as merely a bourgeois individual yearning for a
lost past of high culture. But Adornos relationship to his bourgeois
origins helps us to understand the infinitesimal degree of freedom that the
individual in the postemotional dilemma retains. For Adorno, in the past
bourgeois culture served both to mediate social power and at the same
time to provide some kind of buffer between an individual or a family,
or a group of friends or intellectuals and the larger social structure. With
the advance of the postemotional condition, this is increasingly less so. For
Adorno, the defining characteristic of a society dominated by the culture
industry is an increasingly direct shaping of the individual psyche by
social forces. The whole is the false, he writes, and the individual is
where we see the whole reflected most perfectly. At this point in history,
he says, the thinking individual is both the last enemy of the bourgeois and
the last bourgeois. (Antithesis, 27)
Adorno identifies himself with both these terms. As a bourgeois
Adorno is a product of upper-bourgeois European culture in the days of its
transition into fascism he is enabled to see the more naked version of
oppression in fascism and the more affable and phony version of it in
America by contrast with the more nuanced version he grew up within. As
the last bourgeois, and thus the product of something that is disappearing,
what was positive in the nuances remains only as glimmers and memories.
As the last enemy of the bourgeois, Adorno, like Benjamin, is mindful that
the ugly movement of history is not in fact air tight, and thought needs
to address itself to the remnants of the defeated, the waste products and
blind spots that have escaped. (Bequest, Minima Moralia, p. 151)
120 Chapter Six
Historically, Adorno is not our contemporary. But insofar as the last

bourgeois and the last enemy of the bourgeois is an image for the
remaining capacity for individual awareness and reflection, it points to the
dilemma we are all enmeshed in under the attack of the unmediated whole
in postemotional society. If Adornos formulations strike us as exaggerated,
dogmatic, opinionated, and repetitive; if we are irritated by the paradoxes,
the negations, and the antitheses, those qualities reflect and convey to us
emotionally the desperate struggle to simultaneously reflect on complicity
and hold fast to the capacity for awareness and the memory and hope of
something different under conditions where thinking itself is under attack,
and to make that struggle visible to others similarly under attack.
Adorno and Psychoanalysis

As an endeavour that looks into the workings of the human psyche,
psychoanalysis could certainly be expected to help shed light on what
happens to the individual psyche under the impact of the culture industry.
Indeed, Adornos comments on psychoanalysis occupy a conspicuous
place in Minima Moralia. Adornos picture of psychoanalysis is complex.
For him it is a key but crucially ambivalent enterprise, combining
progressive potential on the one hand embodied primarily in Freuds
work and complicity with the ideology of social domination on the other
embodied primarily, in his view, in American adaptations of
psychoanalysis. In Minima Moralia Adorno portrays the American
psychoanalysis of his time as facilitating the withering of experience, but
he also anticipates the ways in which later analysts will try to understand
that phenomenon.
A piece from Minima Moralia shows how Adorno uses Freudian
concepts in the service of his social critique. We have seen Adornos
portrayal of affability as a mask of tolerance and egalitarianism that hides
impersonal social violence. Its postemotional complement is an
indignation that threatens violence. In Adornos analysis, the rage the
indignant person indulges in represents the coercive thuggery of larger
social forces, and he portrays it in psychoanalytic terms:
If society, as a contemporary theory teaches, is really one of rackets, then
its most faithful model is the precise opposite of the collective, namely the
individual as monad. By tracing the absolutely particular interests of each
individual, the nature of the collective in a false society can be most
accurately studied, and it is by no means far-fetched to consider the
organization of divergent drives under the primacy of an ego answering
the reality principle as, from the first, an internalized robber band with
leader, followers, ceremonies, oaths of allegiance, betrayals, conflicts of

interest, intrigues and all its other appurtenances. One need only observe
outbursts in which the individual asserts himself energetically against his
environment, for instance rage. 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. (Plurale tantum, p.45)
In Freuds thought, the reality principle is the capacity to recognize and

accommodate to social reality, as opposed to the pleasure principle, which
bows to reality only under coercion. Adorno here portrays the reality
principle as the unifying forces of society acting within the individual and
following ruthless gangland principles in which individuals are reduced to
mere objects. His extrapolation exemplifies what he would consider the
positive potential of Freuds thought, its capacity to illuminate the
relationship between the individual psyche and structures of social
domination. American psychoanalysis, on the other hand, Adorno says,
serves what he calls the bottomless fraud of mere inwardness,
promulgating false happiness, false pleasure and the denial of suffering.
The mechanization and conventionalization of pleasure, happiness, and
sexuality as the hallmarks of mental health excise, in effect, the
individuals capacity for truth.
I will not be concerned here with the accuracy of Adornos picture of
psychoanalysis in the United States in the 1940s. My guess is that
practicing analysts of the time would see it as a caricature with some grain
of truth, a caricature that has gone into the formation of the popular image
of psychoanalysis. What is important here is Adornos portrayal of how
psychoanalysis has failed its potential:
Psychoanalysis prides itself on restoring the capacity for pleasure, which is
impaired by neurotic illness. [] As if a happiness gained through
speculation on happiness were not the opposite, a further encroachment of
institutionally planned behaviour-patterns on the ever diminishing sphere
of experience. (Invitation to the Dance, p. 62)
Part of the mechanism of domination, Adorno says, is to forbid

recognition of the suffering it produces (Invitation to the Dance, 63).
Neurotic suffering at least preserves some awareness of domination.
Psychoanalysis should help to increase awareness of emotional pain and to
decrease the experience of illusory, that is, postemotionally generated
pleasure:
122 Chapter Six
[A] cathartic method with a standard other than successful adaptation and
economic success would have to aim at bringing people to a consciousness
of unhappiness both general and inseparable from it personal, and at
depriving them of the illusory gratifications by which the abominable
order keeps a second hold on life inside them, as if it did not already have
them firmly enough in its power from outside. (Invitation to the Dance,
p. 62)
Normotic Illness
How could psychoanalysis realize its potential rather than failing it?
Notions like normality and psychological health, Adorno says, serve
both to mutilate the individuals capacity for experience and finding truth
and to disguise the mutilation. Psychoanalysis could and should expose
this. Adorno lays out his program for a psychoanalytic analysis of
postemotional culture in a piece called The Health unto Death:
If such a thing as a psychoanalysis of todays prototypical culture were
possible; if the absolute predominance of the economy did not beggar all
attempts at explaining conditions by the psychic life of their victims; and if
the psychoanalysts had not long since sworn allegiance to those conditions
such an investigation would needs show the sickness proper to the time
to consist precisely in normality. The libidinal achievements demanded of
an individual behaving as healthy in body and mind, are such as can be
performed only at the cost of the profoundest mutilation []. The regular
guy, the popular girl, have to repress not only their desires and insights,
but even the symptoms that in bourgeois times resulted from repression.
(The Health unto Death, p. 58)
In recent decades, psychoanalysis has begun on Adornos program.

Drawing on developments in both British and French psychoanalysis,
some psychoanalytic writers have described what they call a new kind of
patient a kind of patient not anticipated by Freud, but seen more and
more frequently in analysts offices. Writing on Normotic Illness in his
1987 book The Shadow of the Object, Christopher Bollas portrays a kind
of patient who has succeeded in obliterating his subjective experience and
the mental functions that make it up. The normotic is to Bollas the
psychoanalyst what the postemotional is to Mestrovic the sociologist.
The normotic, he writes, flees from dream life, subjective states of
mind, imaginative living and aggressive differentiated play with the other.
[] We could say that if the psychotic has gone off at the deep end, the
normotic has gone off at the shallow end.5
For the normotic, what takes the place of mental life and subjective
experience is things attachment to them, interest in them, identification
with them. The normotic person strives to be a commodity object in the
world of human production.6 His sense of isolation, Bollas suggests,
is mitigated by virtue of his ability to mingle with objects and to feel
identified with the commodity object world. For instance, driving a car
that one is proud of may be an unconscious act of marriage. In this way,
products become part of ones family, and the normotics family of objects
extends itself throughout the material object world.7
The normotic is more an object than a subject. Such a person, Bollas

comments, echoing Adornos concern with the attack on thinking,
suggests that mind itself, in particular the unconscious, is an archaism, a
thing to be abandoned in the interests of human progress.8
Bollas is not the only analyst to address this phenomenon. Joyce
McDougall, a contemporary analyst working in Paris, writes on the anti-
analysand in her 1978 book Plea for a Measure of Abnormality. Bollas
talks in terms of the patient experiencing himself as a commodity object;
McDougall focuses on mental flatness and the lack of human relationship.
He describes the anti-analysand as eager for analysis and apparently having
quite appropriate reasons to want analysis. Once in analysis, the anti-
analysand is a faithful patient, observing all the rules, cooperating and so
on. But nothing ever seems to happen. The analysis is in effect dead.
McDougall speaks of the death of curiosity the patient has no interest
in his or her self. It is the things that are missing that define the anti-
analysand. The patient talks of people, and of things, but rarely of
relationships between people or things. Nor does there seem to be that
intermingling of conscious and less conscious layers of meaning in the
patients communication. Links between past and present, links between
associations, affective links between people, or indeed with the analyst or
the analytic work, are absent. These patients seem to speak a robot
language impregnated with clichs. [] In spite of better than average
intelligence, McDougall says, the patient is capable of displaying a
5
Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1987), p.146.
6
Ibid. p.13.
7
Ibid. p.155-6.
8
Ibid. p.156.
124 Chapter Six
banality of thought akin to mental retardation.9 The language is dead, and

the mind is dead stupefied as well.
How might such a condition arise? McDougall speculates that these
patients, unaware of their own suffering, may have experienced something
like the hospitalized infants Rene Spitz wrote of, physically cared for but
emotionally so neglected that they do not develop. She compares them to
patients suffering from an inability to feel physical pain, who must
construct a set of automatized behavioural habits to protect themselves
from disasters they cannot consciously experience as threatening. Survival
for these patients thus means precisely making sure that no affective links
are formed. But the force that cuts emotional links is an anti-life force. In
fact, McDougall chose the term anti-analysand over the term robot
analysand with its implications of passivity, she tells us, in order to convey
the impression of force as implied in the concept of anti-matter, a
massive strength that is only revealed through its negative effect, its
opposition to the functions of cohesion and liaison.10 Bollas too
understands the genesis of normotic illness in terms of deadly forces:
I think it is highly likely that the children who give in to the normotic
element perceive in the parents way of being a form of hate that we might
conceptualize as a death instinct. Such a hate does not focus on the
personality of the child, so it would be untrue to say that the child feels
hated by the parent. It may be more accurate to say that the child
experiences the parents attack on life itself, and that such a parent is
trying to squeeze the life out of existence. [] Parent and child organize a
foreclosure of the human mentality. They find a certain intimacy in
shutting down life together, and in mastering existence with the
unconscious skill of a military operation. Because the normotic person
fails to symbolize in language his subjective states of mind, it is difficult to
point to the violence in this persons being, yet it is there, not in his
utterances, but in his way of shutting life out.11
In such thinking, Bollas and McDougall are drawing on the theory of

Melanie Klein, who worked with very young children and who elaborated
Freuds notion of the death instinct, and on post-Kleinian notions of an
attack on the linking capacities of the mind.12 To my knowledge, Adorno
was unfamiliar with the work of Klein and her followers, but his
9
Joyce McDougall, Plea for a Measure of Abnormality (New York: Brunner/Mazel,
1978), p. 215; p. 225.
10
Ibid. p. 215
11
The Shadow of the Object, p. 143.
12
See, for instance, Wilfred Bion, Attacks on Linking, in Second Thoughts:
Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1967).
comments follow precisely this course. In The Health Unto Death, he

draws an unforgettable picture of the deadness implicit in normotic health:
The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily
be taken for prepared corpses, from which 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. (p.59)
Like the Kleinians, Adorno, while using Freudian terminology, infers that
the psychic damage that gives rise to such a condition must have occurred
very early on, prior to the Freudian Oedipal phase:
No science has yet explored the inferno in which were forged the
deformations that later emerge to daylight as cheerfulness, openness,
sociability, successful adaptation to the inevitable, an equable, practical
frame of mind. There is reason to suppose that these characteristics are
laid down at even earlier phases of childhood development than are
neuroses: if the latter result from a conflict in which instinct is defeated,
the former condition, as normal as the damaged society it resembles, stems
from what might be called a prehistoric surgical intervention, which
incapacitates the opposing forces before they have come to grips with each
other. (p.59)
Adorno then draws a further connection, to larger social dynamics in

which in fact the authority of social dynamics replaces the authority of the
family and programs the individual directly. This prehistoric surgical
intervention, he continues, has the result that the subsequent absence of
conflicts reflects a predetermined outcome, the a priori triumph of
collective authority, not a cure effected by knowledge (p.59).
I find this work by Bollas and McDougall interesting and valuable.
And yet, if we compare it with Adornos comments, we see that it is
limited in two ways. First, perhaps understandably, as clinicians they do
not make the links to the larger social level that Adorno does. And second,
and more surprisingly, Adorno puts himself even more squarely within the
postemotional dilemma than the clinicians do. While both Bollas and
McDougall do of course make use of their own countertransference
reactions the way the patient has affected them in their attempts to
understand normotic illness, they do not seem to feel personally threatened
by the normotic. They do not raise the question of how the same forces
that produced normotic illness might have affected them and their own
ability to recognize what they are dealing with. Adorno, as we have seen,
126 Chapter Six
is much clearer that he is subjected to the same social forces that stupefy
us.
These two limitations in the work of Bollas and McDougall are
interrelated, and they make up the crux of Adornos critique of
psychoanalysis: that the magnitude of the death-dealing forces we see
cannot be understood unless we see them in relation to the larger social
order and in their impact on ourselves; but their nature is such that it is
extremely difficult as individuals to reach this understanding. The
diagnosis of Adolf Hitler in terms of psychopathology is perhaps the
paradigm case of the limits of conventional psychoanalytic understanding:
The relation of knowledge to power is one not only of servility but of
truth. Much knowledge, if out of proportion to the disposition of forces, is
invalid, however formally correct it may be. If an migr doctor says: for
me, Adolf Hitler is a pathological case, his pronouncement may
ultimately be confirmed by clinical findings, but its incongruity with the
objective calamity visited on the world in the name of that paranoiac
renders the diagnosis ridiculous. [] The vanity and poverty of many of
the declarations directed against Fascism by migrs is connected with
this. People thinking in the forms of free, detached, disinterested appraisal
were unable to accommodate within those forms the experience of
violence which in reality annuls such thinking. The almost insoluble task
is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy
us. (Johnny-Head-in-Air, p. 56-7)
Adorno on War and the Postemotional

For Adorno, normotic illness and postemotionality cannot be
understood separately from war. Death-dealing violence and social
domination are the agents of the destruction of experience, and thus
inextricably linked to the phoniness and propaganda quality of life
subjected to the culture industry. For Adorno, that is, the development of
fascism and the development of the culture industry and the other aspects
of damaged life so evident in America are part and parcel of the same
thing. War is central to Adornos picture of the postemotional society
not the war of the Good Americans vs. the Bad Germans, but rather the
inextricable presence of killing and war making in a society of domination.
Adorno does not write much about the Second World War in Minima
Moralia, but one piece he devotes to it, Out of the Firing Line, from the
summer of 1944, demonstrates his awareness of that link with a precocity
that is painful to see. He speaks directly to issues which most of us have
recognized more slowly, with Vietnam and post-traumatic stress
syndrome, with Paul Fussell13 on the role of public relations and

propaganda in the Second World War, with Robert Jay Lifton14 and the
notion of psychic numbing, with the cycles of revenge and the media
management of war we are now seeing in the Middle East and between the
United States and other nations. Here, for instance, is Adorno on the
intertwining of business and armaments as brand-name commodities:
Reports of air-attacks are seldom without the names of the firms which
produced the planes: Focke-Wulff, Heinkel, Lancaster feature where once
the talk was of cuirassiers, lancers and hussars. The mechanism for
reproducing life, for dominating and for destroying it, is exactly the same,
and accordingly industry, state, and advertising are amalgamated. The old
exaggeration of sceptical Liberals, that war was a business, has come true:
state power has shed even the appearance of independence from particular
interests in profit; always in their service really, it now also places itself
there ideologically. Every laudatory mention of the chief contractor in the
destruction of cities helps to earn it the good name that will secure it the
best commissions in their rebuilding. (Out of the Firing Line, p. 53-54)
And here is Adorno on the incommensurability of bodily, sensory

experience and the mechanical and discontinuous violence of war,
anticipating the obliteration of the psyches ability to grasp and work
through experience that we now call post-traumatic stress:
[T]he Second War is as totally divorced from experience as is the
functioning of a machine from the movements of the body, which only
begins to resemble it in pathological states. [] Everywhere, with each
explosion, it has breached the barrier against stimuli beneath which
experience, the lag between healing oblivion and healing recollection,
forms. Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced
with empty, paralyzed intervals. But nothing, perhaps, is more ominous for
the future than the fact that, quite literally, these things will soon be past
thinking on, for each trauma of the returning combatants, each shock not
inwardly absorbed, is a ferment of future destruction. (p.54)
Adorno also speaks to the pre-eminence of media representation of war

over the war itself, with consequent withering of experience:
The total obliteration of the war by information, propaganda, commentaries,
with camera-men in the first ranks and war reporters dying heroic deaths,
the mishmash of enlightened manipulation of public opinion and oblivious
13
Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989).
14
Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967).
128 Chapter Six
activity; all this is another expression for the withering of experience, the
vacuum between men and their fate, in which their real fate lies. It is as if
the reified, hardened plaster-cast of events takes the place of events
themselves. (p. 55)
And he speaks to the fusion of war and administration, such as can be seen
in some of the technology of Israeli military administration of Palestinian
towns:
Cinema newsreel: The impression is not of battles, but of civil engineering
and blasting operations undertaken with immeasurably intensified
vehemence, also of fumigation, insect-extermination on a terrestrial
scale. Works are put in hand, until no grass grows. The enemy acts as
patient and corpse. Like the Jews under Fascism, he features now as
merely the object of technical and administrative measures. (p. 56)
And here, finally, is Adorno on the terrible quandary of revenge, and his
vision of its endless large-scale perpetuation:
The idea that after this war life will continue normally or even that
culture might be rebuilt [] is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been
murdered, and this is to be seen as an interlude and not the catastrophe
itself. What more is this culture waiting for? And even if countless people
still have time to wait, is it conceivable that what happened in Europe will
have no consequences, that the quantity of victims will not be transformed
into a new quality of society at large, barbarism? As long as blow is
followed by counter-blow, catastrophe is perpetuated. [] If, however, the
dead are not avenged and mercy is exercised, Fascism will despite
everything get away with its victory scot-free, and having once been
shown so easy, will be continued elsewhere. The logic of history is as
destructive as the people that it brings to prominence: wherever its
momentum carries it, it reproduces equivalents of past calamity. Normality
is death. (p.55-56)
Adorno, Bion, and Binocular Vision

The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our
own powerlessness, stupefy us, says Adorno. How can we think in such a
way as to be adequate to forms of violence that transcend our previous
knowledge? Adornos effort to answer this question yielded the text that is
Minima Moralia. But to further conceptualize it I want to turn again to the
evolution of psychoanalytic thought, and in particular to another post-
Kleinian analyst, arguably the most original and far-reaching in his
thinking, Wilfred Bion. Bion shares with Adorno a focus on attacks on the
mind and a deep awareness of social violence, gained in part through

experience, in Bions case, not only in the Second but also the First World
War. During the period in which Adorno was writing Minima Moralia,
Bion was serving as a military psychiatrist in the British army and
working with psychologically disabled officers in a military hospital. His
work then and immediately after the end of the war was oriented to linking
individual psychological phenomena to social/collective situations and to
developing a theory of emotional life in groups. Bion was concerned with
the human beings capacity to ignore reality through received knowledge
and falsehood. Psychoanalytic jargon, he acknowledged, was quite capable
of being used in this way. In his postwar work as a psychoanalyst,15 he
formulated the idea that destructive forces in the mind attacked linking,
as he put it, including the links between thought and feeling and emotional
bonds with other people, thus preventing recognition of reality.
McDougalls description of the anti-analysand draws on Bions notion of
attacks on linking.
In his work with groups,16 Bion formulated the notion of binocular
vision. He described the irrational group fantasies that circulate within a
group, such as the fantasy of an omniscient and omnipotent leader on
whom group members are absolutely dependent for guidance and
instruction. In his view, every individual in the group who is in any
meaningful sense a member of the group is infected by the groups
irrationality and participates in these group fantasies. By binocular
vision, Bion means this: as an individual within the group, I am able to
perceive the fantasy-based (i.e. delusional) forces in the group because I
am part of them. I feel them at work in me. At the same time, as an
individual within the group, I am capable, though with great difficulty, of
articulating and speaking to these irrational forces, despite the risk I take
that the group will turn on me. And as a socially responsible working
member of the group (in Bions case, as psychotherapist to the group), that
is in fact my function.
Bions term binocular vision speaks to the terribly difficult and
nearly impossible challenge of retaining a hold on thought while feeling
the effect of those irrational collective forces in oneself. It formulates at
the group level the dilemma of entanglement and complicity that Adorno
formulates for ordinary social life in postemotional society. It is through
the terribly difficult, in fact nearly impossible, exercise of binocular vision
that Adorno is capable of writing Minima Moralia.
15
Attacks on Linking, in Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis
(Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1967).
16
Experiences in Groups (London: Tavistock, 1961).
130 Chapter Six
Adorno and Passion

There is an intrinsic link between Bions notion of binocular vision and
his idea of attacks on linking. For the forces of group fantasy work to
destroy the kinds of emotional and mental links that would allow one to
see the complex truth of what is happening. And with this I arrive at the
third of my triad of passion, psychoanalysis, and the postemotional
dilemma namely, the subject of passion.
I take passion to be incompatible with postemotionality. For Mestrovic,
postemotionality may very well mean the end of passion, as he puts it. If
emotions are only quasi-emotions, and are pre-formed, then they are too
dead and artificial to fit the nature of passion. But if we think of passion as
a single intense, overpowering emotion, as Mestrovic no doubt does, we
cannot say that Adornos critique of postemotionality is based on an
advocacy of passion. Adorno is much more concerned with tact and
nuance, the faint glimmer of possible human happiness, and with the frail
capacity for critical thought. But Bion, followed by contemporary
psychoanalyst Donald Meltzer,17 has advanced what to me is a far more
interesting theory of passion. For Bion and Meltzer, passion is a form of
turbulent emotional experience, a clash of competing emotional ties
among themselves and with the forces that oppose and kill emotional ties.
Passion provides the kind of emotional experience that genuine thought
can think about. Understood this way, passion provides the fuel for
personality development in the sense of the individuals expanding
capacity for truth and relationship.
Passion in these terms is intrinsic both to Adornos mode of thought
and to the form of his writings. It is at work in Adornos form of binocular
vision, in his struggle with the opposing sides of phenomena, and in his
struggle with the deadly forces of terror and domination that would kill
thought. The very act of creating links, in the face of the forces that attack
linking, as Bion formulated it, is work on the side of life against death. But
the linking must include the negative: recognition of the power of
irrational collective forces, recognition of falsehood and oppression. The
suffering inherent in damaged life is part of the fuel of Minima Moralia.
The passion in Adornos thought is also reflected in what one might
call the weakly aesthetic form of Adornos writing, a form he refers to
elsewhere as constellational or configurational.18 For Adorno, the aesthetic
17
What is an Emotional Experience and On Turbulence, in Studies in
Extended Metapsychology (Strathclyde, Perthshire: Clunie Press, 1986).
18
See my Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adornos Aesthetics (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1997).
dimension, as beauty and aesthetic form, is the locus of that Utopian

glimmer, that faint and fleeting promise of happiness, the positive
emotional link:
What beauty still flourishes under terror is a mockery and ugliness to
itself. Yet its fleeting shape attests to the avoidability of terror. Something
of this paradox is fundamental to all art; today it appears in the fact that art
still exists at all. The captive idea of beauty strives at once to reject
happiness and to assert it. (Auction, p. 121)
This aesthetic dimension can be seen in the way in which each piece in
Minima Moralia pulls together disparate levels of experience and analysis,
and the way the hundreds of small essays, ranging over a wide variety of
aspects of daily life, form a coherent configuration. As a piece of writing,
Minima Moralia is a tour de force of linking, a product of intense passion
in Bions sense. I will end with a small illustration of that idea.
The piece in Minima Moralia called Gala Dinner is about the
suffocation of genuine need by the forces of production; the productive
capacity dictates a crushing weight of consumption in which one must
hurry to keep up with the new, so that for instance each bestseller must be
read through from beginning to end. Gala Dinner begins like this:
How far progress and regression are intertwined today can be seen in the
notion of technical possibilities. Mechanical processes of reproduction
have developed independently of what they reproduce, and become
autonomous. (p. 118)
And ends like this:

The abundance of commodities indiscriminately consumed is becoming
calamitous. It makes it impossible to find ones way, and just as in a
gigantic department store one looks out for a guide, the population wedged
between wares await their leader. (p. 119)
The initial formulation, characteristic of Adornos dialectical thought,

points to both progressive and regressive elements in a historical
phenomenon. It links technological progress with a detail of the way the
productive forces are organized, the autonomy of the machines and the
need for them to be kept functioning regardless of what might be the
objective need for what is produced. The final formulation evokes the
emotional state and the subjective experience to which Adorno has access
through binocular vision calamitous; impossible to find ones way.
It couples this evocation of emotion with a double-sided analogy that links
the experience of consumption to the collective political sphere and the
132 Chapter Six
ominous advent of terror: Just as in a gigantic department store one looks

for a guide, so the population wedged between wares await their leader.
This is dialectical logic that incorporates subjective experience and
imagination. The emotional impact, to which the final image is crucial, is
what enables the dialectical analysis to hit home and be grasped. It is this
passionate dimension of Adornos thought that makes his contribution
unique among social and cultural critics and gives it its particular
effectiveness.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LOVE AS RESISTANCE:
A MINIATURE AFTER ADORNO
GERHARD RICHTER
Anyone who doubts that the core elements of what Theodor W. Adorno
liked to call the administered world (verwaltete Welt) are more
forcefully at work than ever six decades after he first cast them into
exacting relief may wish to consider what a senior adviser to George W.
Bush candidly revealed to New York Times journalist Ron Suskind in the
summer of 2002. According to Suskinds account,
[t]he aide said that guys like me were in what we call the reality-based
community, which he defined as people who believe that solutions
emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. I nodded and
murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He
cut me off. Thats not the way the world really works anymore, he
continued. Were an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
reality. And while youre studying that reality judiciously, as you will
well act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and
thats how things will sort out. Were historys actors [] and you, all of
you, will be left to just study what we do.1
The narrowly self-interested manufacture of global hegemony that Bushs

advisor so cynically portrays can be understood as one of many instantiations
of the autopoietic reality within an administered world that, since
Adornos death, has become an ever more sophisticated, technically
mediated empire. The ideological features of this administered world
belong to what Adorno calls a Verblendungszusammenhang, or far-
reaching delusional context, which sponsors a remainderless commodification
of human emotions and which leaves little room for the demands of
1
Ron Suskind, Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush, New
York Times Magazine, 17 October 2004.
134 Chapter Seven
noninstrumental reason and the possibility of non-predigested experience.

Given the reach, force, and resources of todays techno-capitalism, the
category of love, which in its modern form often is regarded as a
problematically bourgeois invention, would seem to be a rather odd
candidate for the role of resistance fighter. To be sure, there are those who
prefer to render love as a transhistorical phenomenon associated not
primarily with genealogical, political, and ideological formations, but
rather with certain aspects and functions of the brain. Love, as a matter of
so-called limbic regulation and of neocortical activity, is here firmly
situated in the realm of the natural.2 But such attempts at understanding
this powerful emotion in the largely depoliticized terms of neuroscience
are in the minority. Even Niklas Luhmann, whose systems theory can
hardly be accused of excessive political fervour, conceptualizes the
phenomenon of love as a symbolic code to be deciphered by those wishing
to participate in certain self-observing social systems, rather than as a
natural, spontaneous given.3 And, indeed, in the thought-image Constanze
from Minima Moralia, composed in American exile between 1946 and
1947, Adorno at first seems to wish to expose love as just one more
instantiation of the bourgeois idealization and streamlining of experience:
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.4 Adorno extends his observation by noting
that in erecting truth directly amid the general untruth, it perverts the
former into the latter. The dialectical perversion of which he speaks is the
illusion that something akin to a true feeling is possible under conditions
of financial and political domination that masquerade as natural and self-
evident. By propagating a widespread belief in the possibility of
spontaneous romantic love, the highly mediated violence of an economically
driven system of relations puts on a happier face. Ought the concept of
love, under the conditions of finance capitalism, therefore not be included
in the realm of concepts that Marx calls upon us to interrogate until all that
is solid melts into air? Does love, in its artificial evocation of a peaceful
2
See for instance Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, A General
Theory of Love (New York: Vintage, 2001).
3
Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, translated by
Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
4
Theodor W. Adorno, Constanze, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged
Life, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), p. 110. All quotations of
Constanze are from this page. On occasion, I have altered translations to enhance
their fidelity to the original German.
Love as Resistance: A Miniature after Adorno 135
enclave, not ultimately reinforce rather than subvert what Adorno calls
the omnipresent weight of mediation and economics?
At first glance, the answers seem to be affirmative. The central theses
of the Frankfurt Schools most significant manifesto, Dialectic of
Enlightenment, which Adorno co-wrote with Max Horkheimer, would
seem to substantiate this conclusion. But in Constanze, which was
composed at the same time, Adorno gives the dialectical screw one more
turn: To love means being capable of not letting immediacy wither under
the omnipresent weight of mediation and economics, and in such fidelity
[Treue] it becomes mediated within itself, as a stubborn counter pressure.
This is why, for him, love is possible only insofar as it refuses the self-
reflexivity and even ipseity of being inscribed into an economy in which it
can be measured and therefore ultimately bought and sold in terms of
standards that are alien to its inner logic. Such a love could be said to be
free not in the hippie sense in which the singularity and idiomaticity of
experience always already appear tinged with the transcendental
aspirations of universalism but rather in the sense of having freed itself
from the calculatable regulative according to which its market-ideological
value could be measured in the first place. If free love is a love of freedom
and non-regulated affect, is it ultimately not closer to what Jacques
Derrida once referred to as an economy without reserve?
The question of fidelity in an economy of love without economy plays
an important role in Adornos thinking. His diligent biographers have
brought to light that Adornos empirical experience in romantic matters
did not conform to conventional incarnations of fidelity: he, together with
other members of the Frankfurt School, made regular visits to brothels; he
had steamy affairs with married women, female students, and even a
Baroness; and his sexual repertoire at times was inflected by extramarital
S&M practices. His beloved wife, Gretel Karplus Adorno, is known to
have suffered as a result of Adornos infidelities, in spite of having
exercised the freedom to create her own orbit of extramarital liaisons. Yet
infidelity is neither morally denounced nor celebrated as a form of
liberation in the logic of his writings. After all, neither denouncement nor
celebration really touches the core of Adornos dialectical concept of
fidelity. The love, he suggests, which in the guise of unreflecting
spontaneity and proud of its alleged integrity, surrenders itself exclusively
to what it takes to be the voice of the heart ends up precisely the tool of
society. Adorno continues: In betraying the loved one, love betrays
itself. The command to be faithful [Der Befehl zur Treue] issued by
society is a means of unfreedom, but only through fidelity can freedom
achieve insubordination to societys command.
136 Chapter Seven
Love, according to this model, places us in a personal and political

aporia of impossible demands. On the one hand, fidelity in love becomes
an instrument of oppression through which the administered world
regulates not only the behaviour between partners but also, by extension,
each partners relation to the ideological mechanisms that control the
replication of the system in which they are embedded. This sort of
replication of the political through the personal follows the logic that
Horkheimer and Adorno interrogate in their analysis of Walt Disneys
cultural production, an assessment which was rather more sinister than that
offered by their colleague Walter Benjamin, who at times ascribed a
certain utopian potential to Mickey Mouse. According to Horkheimer and
Adornos analysis, Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate
victims in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators can
accustom themselves to theirs.5 Fidelity, when seen from this Donald
Duck perspective, could be regarded as belonging to what the German
writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger as early as 1962 aptly called our
contemporary consciousness industry, a kind of manufactured
compliance that extends from the apparently personal to the overtly
political.6 Yet neither the naive celebration of fidelity nor its categorical
rejection as an instrument for the legitimization and perpetuation of the
status quo can interrupt this chain of ideological inscriptions and
translations. Rather, according to Adornos model, it is only through
fidelity that a universal adherence to the ideological demands can, if only
momentarily, be disrupted, placed out of joint through a kind of non-
compliance that would seem to register as a form of radical compliance.
Refusing to betray fidelity by betraying the aporetic demands and
responsibilities of betrayal itself, that is, by remaining faithful to betrayal
and by betraying in order to affirm fidelity, an experience of freedom
emerges for which no empire, not even our current global market
radicalism, has yet found an appropriate mechanism of control and
containment. The unfreedom propagated by empire in the guise of the
superficial freedom to choose among dozens of differently flavoured tooth
pastes (but, at least in the U.S., between only two viable political parties,
whose leaderships may, in fact, answer to the same corporate paymasters)
is a mode of experience that cannot afford to exhibit much fidelity. As
workers are casually let go, fidelity to, or even love of, their vocations and
5
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford
6
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Bewutseins-Industrie, in Einzelheiten (Frankfurt
am Main Suhrkamp, 1962), pp. 7-15.
their companies can only be regarded as a burden; as national and

international laws are bent or even ignored to accommodate business
interests, fidelity to established rules and procedures is seen as
anachronistic; and as even the last remnants of human relations are struck
with sameness and commodification, too much fidelity to ones 500
closest friends on ones favourite social network website only becomes a
liability. In order to exhibit the brand of so-called flexibility demanded by
the neoliberal market, one must be prepared to press the delete button at a
moments notice. But the love of fidelity, and the dialectical fidelity that
Adornos model of love imagines, is one in which fidelity itself, if and
when it loves love as love rather than as an internalized form of exchange
value, is a love of resistance, and it loves the resistance that is love. From
this perspective, radically and aporetically faithful love, far from being an
antiquated tool of bourgeois self-delusion and of market expansion, is
resistance itself.
At this point, the question could be raised as to whether Adornos
theory of love does not come rather close in certain respects to the old
biblical commandment of neighbourly love, the radical love of the
stranger-other that also appears to be a love without condition. Indeed,
such questions are fashionable today, now that, following a new religious
turn in literary and cultural studies, academics, even those outside of
religion departments, have become infatuated with religious discourse
once again. (Though, it must be said that such discourse today often
remains affirmative, without ever approaching the political sophistication
of Ernst Blochs famous statement that Jesus was the first socialist).
Unlike the biblical injunction to love ones neighbour as oneself and,
through this mediated network of libidinal relays, ultimately express ones
love of God Adornos love as a political proposition is not the mediated
expression of fidelity to a transcendental signified. It is not for another,
but for itself, to employ the old Hegelian distinction, in a radical gesture of
nonself-identity and self-differentiation. Likewise, Adorno is too much of
a Freudian to have missed the psychoanalytic challenge to neighbourly
love. As the mature Freud writes:
Though shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. [This demand] is known
throughout the world and is undoubtedly older than Christianity, which
puts it forward as its proudest claim. Yet it is certainly not very old; even
in historical times it was still strange to mankind. [...] Why should we do
it? How can it be possible? My love is something valuable to me which I
ought not to throw away without reflection. It imposes duties on me for
whose fulfilment I must be ready to make sacrifices. If I love someone, he
must deserve it in some way [...] He deserves it if he is so like me in
important ways that I can love myself in him [...] But if he, too, is an
138 Chapter Seven
inhabitant of this earth, like an insect, an earth-worm or a grass snake, then

I fear that only a small modicum of my love will fall to his share [...] Not
merely is this stranger in general unworthy of my love; I must honestly
confess that he has more claims to my hostility and even my hatred. He
seems not to have the slightest trace of love for me and shows me not the
slightest consideration [...] Indeed, if this grandiose commandment had run
Love thy neighbour as thy neighbour loves thee, I should not take
exception to it. And there is a second commandment, which seems to me
even more incomprehensible [...] It is Love thy enemies. If I think it
over, however, I see that I am wrong in treating it as a greater imposition.
At bottom it is the same thing.7
Unlike the canonical Christian version of neighbourly love or the Pauline

love of ones enemy, the love that Adorno portrays does not run counter to
the logic of proportionality and reciprocity as outlined by Freud, although
it cannot be reduced to an indirect version of the kind of calculative
thinking and instrumental reasoning that Adorno elsewhere so memorably
destabilizes. (This radically dialectical perspective on neighbourly love
also is confirmed in Adornos essay Kierkegaards Doctrine of Love,
originally published in 1939/1940, which exposes the contingencies of
neighbourly love in an administered world in which there are no more
neighbours.8) The radical love that Adorno theorizes in Constanze
refuses itself to an economy of exchange (tit for tat) or silent mediation (to
love my strange neighbour is to love God) by returning incessantly to the
fidelity of fidelity itself, an interruption in the exchange economy in the
confines of which it nevertheless must be articulated as the expression of
a disfiguration, as it were, as an epistemo-political scar. After all, as Simon
Jarvis reminds us concerning Adornos well-known reversal, in Minima
Moralia, of Hegels dictum from the Phenomenology of Spirit that the
true is the whole, into the whole is the untrue, for Adorno, the whole
may be false, but it is nonetheless real.9 Even the reality of an apparent
defect must not be allowed to disappear behind the veil of its radical
critique.
The love that Adorno wishes to think exhibits fidelity to the idea that
love is a form of fidelity to rigorous thought, that is, to thinking itself. If
7
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by James Strachey
(New York: Norton, 1961), pp. 65-7.
8
Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe, Gesammelte Schriften,
edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main; Suhrkamp, 1997), vol. 2, pp. 217-
36, here p. 225.
9
Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998), p.
172.
the West invented philo-sophia as the love of wisdom, philosophy is

called upon to return, again and again, to the idea that, as Jean-Luc Nancy
writes in Shattered Love, thinking is love and that it is love that
receives and deploys the experience of thinking.10 As if echoing
Adornos fidelity to loves nonself-identity, Nancy suggests that love
does not imply cut across, it cuts itself across itself, it arrives and arrives at
itself as that by which nothing arrives, except that there is arriving,
arrival and departure: of the other, always of the other, so much other that
it is never made, or done (one makes love, because it is never made).11
Fidelity to such a concept and experience of love is therefore always also
exposed to the ways in which its movement of arrival can never be
predicted or instrumentalized in advance but, on the contrary, remains the
wild card of thinking, even as it provides the conditions of possibility of,
and an affective attachment to, what is to be thought and shared under the
heading of love, and its making, in the first place.
A few years after writing Constanze, Adorno, who had since
returned to Germany, takes up the trope of fidelity once more. In the final
lines of On the Question: What is German? he speaks of his unyielding
fidelity to the idea [Treue zur Idee] that the current state of affairs ought
not to be the last.12 His thought wishes to remain faithful to the idea that
the last word has not yet been spoken, that the definitive reading has not
yet been given, that there will be an other that is yet to arrive, both in
terms of a transformation of the political and as a matter of a more
reflective, less deracinated personal experience of what Husserlian
phenomenology calls our life-world. The love of fidelity and the fidelity of
love, as treacherous chiastic poles, cannot but inflect the idea of this
transformation, a transformation that always also is a form of resistance to
the allegedly given world that appears to be the case.
Ultimately, the chiastic forces of this double love for Adorno are
negotiated most powerfully not in this or that conceptual disputation alone
but rather in the realm of the aesthetic, especially music. It is no accident
that, at the moment of his sudden death in the midst of the political
upheavals of the late 1960s, he was working not on a further socio-
political study but rather on a book on aesthetic theory. In an essay on the
10
Jean-Luc Nancy, Shattered Love, in The Inoperative Community, edited by
Peter Connor, translated by Lisa Garbus and Simona Sawhney, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 82-109, here p. 85.
11
Ibid., p. 102.
12
Theodor W. Adorno, On the Question: What is German?, Critical Models:
Interventions and Catchwords, translated by Henry W. Pickford (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 205-14, here 214.
140 Chapter Seven
composer Arnold Schnberg, Adorno explains this conjunction of music

and the transformative potential of love as a form of radical negation that
appears as the experience of an affirmation:
Music which lets itself be driven by pure, unadulterated expression
becomes highly allergic to everything representing a potential encroachment
on this purity, to every tendency to ingratiate itself with the listener as well
as the latters efforts to ingratiate himself with it, to all identification and
empathy. The logical consequence of the principle of expression includes
the moment of its own negation as that negative force of truth which
transforms love into the power of unremitting protest.13
Taking up the trope of love and its expression as resistance and protest,
Adorno locates in loves potential for radical self-negation the anticipatory
illumination of a force of rigorous negativity that views the worlds truth-
content as a form of renunciation. Love, when understood in the light of
the force of self-reflexive negation with which Schnbergs music
saturates it, becomes one of the names of Adornos negative dialectics.
Could it not be on account of this musically mediated resistance that
Adorno also loved Mozart? And would this love of resistance not provide
the reason why Adorno, without further explanation, chose to entitle his
text on love and fidelity simply Constanze, thereby alluding
simultaneously to the name of the composers beloved wife and to the
figure of the faithful heroine in his opera Die Entfhrung aus dem
Serail?14 Constanzes fidelity, we might say, is matched only by another
womans, Leonora, who, in the disguise of Fidelio, or the faithful one,
rescues her husband from certain death in Beethovens opera. If there is
hope in Adornos sombre dialectical orbit and the jury is still out on this
point surely it only can be thought in relation to the kind of fidelity that
the love that is resistance both enables and renders impossible.
13
Theodor W. Adorno, Arnold Schnberg 1874-1951, in Prisms, translated by
Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 147-172, here p.
158f. Emphasis added.
14
This connection between the proper name Constanze and Mozart is also pointed
out by Adornos English translator.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CONSUMPTION AND THE CULTURE INDUSTRY

IN LIGHT OF MARXS GRUNDRISSE
JONATHAN DETTMAN
Even the commodity fetishist who has succumbed to conspicuous

consumption to the point of obsession participates in the truth content of
happiness.1 Theodor Adorno penned this statement in an essay written
against Thorstein Veblens theory of consumption. Adorno expressed
disagreement with the latters characterization of luxury consumption as
an unequivocal manifestation of bad faith, because the consumer does, in
fact, derive real satisfaction from the object consumed. [T]he happiness
that man actually finds cannot be separated from conspicuous consumption.2
Adornos negative judgement of Veblen has, at its core, the insight that
Veblens critique of conspicuous consumption is, at best, one-sided,
understanding it only as consumption of a product that benefits the needs
of the system, but not of people. According to Adorno, luxury
consumption must also be seen as the use of parts of the social product
which serve not the reproduction of expended labour, directly or
indirectly, but of man in so far as he is not entirely under the sway of the
utility principle.3 The extent to which Adornos Kulturkritik itself
maintains this double vision vis--vis the sphere of consumption, particularly
in regard to cultural or aesthetic consumption, is not immediately clear,
especially when one considers that Adornos theory of the Culture
Industry is a relentless attempt to show that the utility principle has, in
fact, extended its influence into the domain of the useless. The Culture
Industry is the expression of the incongruous notion that Culture, although
it emerged in opposition, not to Nature, but to its mundane, quotidian
1
Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1983), p. 87.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid., p. 86.
142 Chapter Eight
appropriation, has now become an analogue of Industry, or of the capitalist

mode of appropriation of nature.
The problematic character of this view has been noted by many, but the
most adequate critique of the Frankfurt School in general with important
implications for Adornos critical philosophy comes via the re-
interpretation of Marx undertaken by intellectual historian Moishe Postone,
whose assessment of the Frankfurt School I will now attempt to summarize.
Critical Theory proper, that is, the philosophical and sociological work of
theorists associated with Frankfurt am Mains Institute for Social Research
and its Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung, was an attempt to account for the
systemic transformations in capitalism that were taking place during the
1930s. These theorists, most notably Friedrich Pollock and Max
Horkheimer, viewed the transition from liberal capitalism to more
bureaucratic and centralized forms of state capitalism as a negative
development. In postliberal capitalism, the state displaces the market as
the central determinant of social life. A command hierarchy operating on
the basis of a one-sided technical rationality replaces market relations and
the rule of law.4 Postone explains that, for Pollock in particular, economic
laws, as well as categories such as the commodity and value, emerge
solely from the market. Pollock, in other words, understood the economic
sphere and, implicitly, Marxian categories of the relations of production in
terms of the mode of distribution alone.5 Likewise, says Postone, the
fundamental contradiction of capitalism was understood by Pollock as the
opposition between industrial production and the bourgeois mode of
distribution.6 Pollock, whose views became generally accepted by his
fellow Critical Theorists, saw state control of the sphere of distribution as
the effective supersession of this contradiction. [A]n understanding of the
contradiction between the forces and relations of production in terms of
the growing inadequacy of the market and private property to conditions
of developed industrial production implies that a mode of distribution
based on planning and the effective abolition of private property is
adequate to those conditions.7 This results in the effective cancellation of
the emancipatory drive supposedly embodied in the proletariat, whose
4
Moishe Postone, Critique, State, Economy, in Fred Rush, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
pp. 165-93.
5
Ibid., p. 175.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid., p. 176.
Consumption and the Culture Industry in Light of Marxs Grundrisse 143
claims to universality in traditional Marxism8 are based fundamentally on

the argument that the irrational market is the root cause of inequality
because it prevents conscious control of distribution, which goes on
behind the backs of the producers.
In his major work, Time, Labour, and Social Domination, Postone
notes the Frankfurt Schools critical pessimism, which he explains as
having arisen precisely from Pollocks supposition that bureaucratic forms
of state capitalism had succeeded in eliminating capitalisms fundamental
contradiction. Pollocks view leads, ultimately, to a theory of state
capitalism as a system of static power relations that preserves class
antagonisms and inequality, yet does not itself contain contradictions that
propel an inner and potentially revolutionary dynamic. Postone, likewise,
calls attention to the primacy of the political in Pollocks thought, in
which the economic spheres of production and circulation are subordinated
to rationalized, bureaucratic planning in a totally administered society.
This pessimistic turn by Pollock and the Frankfurt School grasps
capitalisms transformation from a liberal to a more centralized phase and,
at the same time, intuits the concomitant reduction of the proletariats
revolutionary potential, but does so in a way that precludes the existence,
in society, of an immanent and potentially emancipatory dynamic and,
ultimately [...] does not move beyond the horizons of the traditional
Marxist critique of capitalism.9
Although Postone underlines the Frankfurt Schools pessimistic turn as
a necessary response to political and historical developments and to the
underlying fallacy of transhistorical labour as a social ontology, in light
of subsequent developments in world capital (e.g. the demise of Fordism
and its supersession by a newer, seemingly more liberal form of
capitalism, and the apparent ongoing demise of the latter), the idea of a
monolithic, non-contradictory form of capitalism must be judged a
theoretical impoverishment and, even from the standpoint of traditional
Marxism, to be undialectical. As Neil Larsen explains, this is why
Adornian formulations like the whole is the untrue must be judged fatal
8
Traditional Marxism is defined broadly by Postone as any approach that views
the basic contradiction of capitalism as the tension between the forces of
production and what are assumed to be capitalisms fundamental social relations:
value, commodity, capital, etc. qua market categories. Labour, understood
as a transhistorical condition of human society, remains an external standpoint
whence to critique these relations.
9
Moishe Postone, Time, Labour, and Social Domination (Cambridge: Cambridge
144 Chapter Eight
to any aspiration to dialectical thought.10 I contend that Adorno, despite

his philosophical acumen and deep understanding of Hegel, allowed this
undialectical assumption to pervade his thinking. Larsen and Wertkritik
theorist Norbert Trenkle have described how, despite being, in many
respects, a critique of traditional Marxism, Adornian philosophy and
aesthetic theory remain attached to the assumption that labour must be
the revolutionary agent of emancipation.11 I will attempt to build on this
approach to Adorno in order to show that the Culture Industry, as defined
by Adorno, rests on both his adoption of the traditional Marxian notion of
labour signalled by Trenkle and Larsen and an understanding of
consumption (aesthetic or otherwise) that differs from that of Marx. I will
begin by explicating Marxs theory of consumption as outlined in the
Grundrisse, an important text whose reading has furnished both Postone
and the German Wertkritik theorists with many fundamental insights
regarding the centrality of value to Marxs critique of capital.
In the Grundrisse, Marx takes pains to establish that the relationship
between production and consumption is not simply a unity of opposites, a
direct identity of production and consumption which he says economists
call productive consumption,12 but one in which they mediate one
another reciprocally. Each is immediately its opposite. But at the same
time a mediating movement takes place between the two.13 Consumption
realizes, or finishes the product as such, just as production not only
supplies a material for the need, but [...] also supplies a need for the
material.14 Production produces the object, manner, and motive of
consumption; conversely, consumption produces the producers own
inclination to fulfil a need via his or her production.15 Marx differentiates
between a certain kind of consumption, productive consumption stricto
sensu, which can be thought of as part of the production process because it
feeds back directly into this process as either the means of reproduction of
the worker or as the means of production (e.g. consumption of raw
materials, wear of fixed capital, etc.) and consumption proper, the
10
Neil Larsen, The Idiom of Crisis, Krisis: Beitrge zur Kritik der
Warengesellschaft (2006), Retrieved 4 January 2010 from http://www.krisis.org/.
11
See Larsens Idiom and Trenkles Gebrochene Negativitt: Anmerkungen zu
Adornos und Horkheimers Aufklrungskritik, Krisis: Beitrage zur Kritik der
Warengesellschaft 25 (2002), pp. 39-65.
12
Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1993),
p. 90.
13
Ibid., p. 91.
14
Ibid., p. 92.
15
Ibid.
destructive antithesis to production.16 Consumption proper, which I will

now refer to simply as consumption, stands outside of production as both
its antithesis and presupposition. It is likewise presupposed by circulation
although here, too, it is exteriorized. In terms of capital, then, consumption
actually exists outside the valorization process in both its productive and
circulating moments. Yet consumption remains the presupposition of the
valorization process because, although marginal with respect to the latter,
it is a requisite for social reproduction in general, even if it is not, in a
direct sense, a constitutive element of the self-valorization of value. From
the standpoint of the total society, consumption forms the necessary
process by which it reconstitutes itself. From the standpoint of the total
valorization process, consumption is presupposed as the necessary impulse
for the sale and, therefore, of the realization of surplus value, but it is only
the sale of the commodity that is the process self-positing end (M-C-M).
That is, whether, and how, the commodity is actually consumed is of no
moment from the standpoint of capital within the valorization process.
[O]nce [the sale] is assumed to have happened, it is immaterial, for the
movement of the individual capital, what later becomes of this
commodity.17 From the standpoint of the individual, consumption is
simply the fulfilment of a need or a desire (unless this need is the workers
need for self-reproduction, in which case the consumption that fulfils this
need remains, in a strict sense, part of the production process). Needs
beyond those necessary for the reproduction of labour-power result in
consumption that, from the standpoint of total capital, or the valorization
thereof, is superfluous. According to its own concept, value would like to
abstract away from all qualitative social content18 yet cannot, for doing so
would entail its own annihilation.
Adornos writings are very aphoristic and anti-systemic, but it should
be possible to sketch the basic outlines of his view of aesthetic or cultural
consumption by considering some key statements from Dialectic of
Enlightenment (Horkheimers coauthorship notwithstanding) and other
texts on the Culture Industry. Culture is a paradoxical commodity. It is so
completely subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it
is so blindly equated with use that it is no longer used.19 Rather than
attempting to explicate such a seemingly contradictory formulation, it may
16
Ibid., p. 90.
17
Marx, Capital, vol. 2, translated by David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1992), pp.
468-69.
18
See Larsen, Idiom.
19
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 131.
146 Chapter Eight
be more fruitful to simply restate it so that the predicates of culture are

more clear: culture is a commodity subject to the law of exchange and
whose original function is now obliterated by mindless utilitarianism.
Culture arose, according to Adorno, as negation of the social utility [...]
establish[ed] through the market.20 The use of art, then, consists in
confirming the very existence of the useless.21 Art, so defined,
negatively embodies opposition to market logic, if only potentially. The
stark irony of the Culture Industry is that even the separate, negative
sphere of aesthetics has adapted itself to the demands of the market,
allowing itself to become instrumentalized in compliance with needs
defined according to the logic of exchange. In consuming these cultural
assets, the consumer effectively materializes market rationale in his or
her person. The notion that the consumer, by exhibiting preferences
determined by commodity exchange, effectively embodies market
ideology indicates that, for Adorno, even this area of human praxis has
been completely rationalized by capital. This is consonant with Postones
assessment of the Frankfurt Schools pessimism, which mistook liberal
capitalisms transformation into state capitalism for the elimination of
capitalisms essential contradiction, understood as the opposition between
labour, understood as the transhistorical essence of human society, and
more obviously capitalist institutions like the market and private property.
Faced with either the abolition of these forms or their effective
collectivization under the aegis of the state, the Frankfurt School resorted
to a dubious conceptual innovation: noncontradictory capitalism. This
theoretical basilisk froze capitalist relations of domination into place and
was unable to account for subsequent historical transformations.
Adorno, too, falls victim to this theoretical regression and, despite its
richness in other respects, Dialectic of Enlightenment contains such
anomalies as a use value fetish originating in the positing of a
transhistorical labour as domination over nature. With regard to
consumption, there is a fundamental problem with Adornos premise that
the market has been able to rationalize even the sphere of consumption.
Adorno understands value as a category of the market. Consequently, the
increasing responsiveness of consumers to marketing, to needs posited by
the logic of the market, rather than by consumers themselves, is
interpreted as a diminishment of the autonomy of culture and an intrusion
of exchange value into the realm of pure use value. In adapting itself
entirely to need, the work of art defrauds human beings in advance from
20
Ibid., p. 127.
21
Ibid., p. 128.
the liberation from the principle of utility which it is supposed to bring

about. What might be called use value in the reception of cultural assets is
being replaced by exchange value.22 It is clear that Adorno thinks that the
sphere of consumption has been colonized by exchange value. The
mechanism by which this colonization occurs is perhaps most plainly
expressed in On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of
Listening. There, Adorno explains that the listeners response to music is
conditioned not by the act of listening or any pleasure derived thereof, but
by the cumulative success of the star or the work itself.23 The works
commercial effectiveness or market-defined relational value thus stands
in for whatever use value the work once had for the consumer. Musical
fetishism takes possession of the public valuation of singing voices.24 The
value of the work, according to this view, derives from market success,
rather than from consumer-defined need. Hence exchange value comes to
replace the use value of the artwork, now defined as a cultural asset,
whose use value thus becomes a pure fetish. Only art that refuses to be
enjoyed, in which the mask has been torn from the countenance of false
happiness,25 stills resists public valuation and fetishization. Adorno
believes that no quantum of enjoyment, posited by public, market-
mediated taste can be attributed to Schnbergs atonal compositions26
and, therefore, their use value remains their uselessness, or lack of
marketability. There is, clearly, something insightful in the concept of the
Cultural Industry, something that resonates strongly with the sympathetic
reader who senses the reality of commodity fetishism. Anyone who has
seen footage of hordes of shoppers trampling each other in their haste to
purchase the latest iteration of the Playstation or, for that matter, noted the
apparently irrational (and media-driven) obsession with celebrities, will
attest to the power of the Culture Industry over the behaviour of the
consumer and the seeming universal subsumption of once artistic forms
under entertainment. Likewise, the sensitive reader will note the
intractable negativity of Adornos philosophy in general, and his theory of
the Culture Industry in particular, vis--vis capital, the automatic subject.
But, retrospectively, one reads Adornos censure of jazz and wonders, if
22
Ibid.
23
Theodor W. Adorno, On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of
Listening, in J.M. Bernstein (ed.), The Culture Industry (London: Routledge,
2001), pp. 35-6.
24
Ibid., p. 36.
25
Ibid., p. 33.
26
One wonders whether Adorno would have rejected, tout court, atonal free jazz
along with jazz in general.
148 Chapter Eight
jazz was the height of instrumentalized culture, what is one to make of

American Idol, YouTube, and augmented reality?
It is helpful to compare Adornos notion of value as an effect of the
market, or public valuation, with Marxs theory of value as created by
abstract human labour and realized in circulation. Slavoj iek, in his
essay The Parallax View, explains that even the most sophisticated
theory of reification that of commodity fetishism falls into th[e] trap
[of elevating production as the site of truth], from the young Lukcs
through Adorno up to Jameson.27 iek can be understood to say that
value must be grasped as a duality of production and exchange, not simply
as an illusion imposed on use values by exchange relations alone. iek
speaks approvingly of Kojin Karatanis focus on the revolutionary
potential of workers qua buyers, quoting the Japanese critic as follows: If
workers can become subjects at all, it is only as consumers.28 This idea
deserves consideration, but it is important to keep in view the many
constraints imposed on consumption by capital, and to recall Marxs
cautionary words about free individuality in the sphere of consumption
and exchange.29 This kind of individual freedom is [...] at the same time
the most complete suspension of all individual freedom, and the most
complete subjugation of individuality under social conditions which
assume the form of objective powers.30 In his pessimism, Adorno is
perhaps closer to Marx on this point than is Karatani. Despite Adornos
considerable insights, though, insofar as the Culture Industry is concerned,
he treats value as a category of the market. From a strictly Marxian
perspective, this view is decidedly one-sided. Value, as Postone reminds
us, does not simply veil real social relations, it is a real social relation.31
According to Marx, value moves through both production and circulation,
but not through consumption, except insofar as this consumption can be
identified as directly productive consumption, hence still production.
Above, consumption proper was described as part of revenue, that part of
the surplus value destined for immediate consumption.32 Consumption
proper is the negative ground of the valorization (reproduction) of capital;
consumption is absolutely necessary to valorization as its presupposition,
but is the latters antithesis inasmuch as it removes commodities from the
27
Slavoj iek, The Parallax View, New Left Review 25 (Jan.-Feb. 2004), p.
122.
28
Ibid., p. 124.
29
Grundrisse, p. 649.
30
Ibid., p. 652.
31
Time, Labour, p. 62.
32
Grundrisse, p. 733.
reproductive circuit. Strictly speaking, consumption is a moment that lies

outside the valorization process, even if it occurs under conditions
imposed by the latter and, in many ways, reflects market logic. The
commodity expelled from the circulation of capital is no longer the
commodity as a moment of self-perpetuating value, as the presence of
value. It is, thus, its presence as use value, its being for consumption.33
Given this, one is obligated to ask whether capital actually rationalizes
consumption in the way that Adorno claims, by imbuing the use value of a
cultural commodity (defined either as pleasure or, paradoxically, as
uselessness) with an exchange value that proceeds from public valuation,
i.e. from a kind of marginal utility based on the commoditys
synchronization with a generalized, official taste. It seems evident that
the Culture Industry, whatever its merits as a concept, differs considerably
from Marxs view of consumption. It assumes value in two places where,
according to Marx, it cannot exist: in consumption proper and in the
person of the consumer. In strictly Marxian terms, value cannot be
personified, or embodied in a human like it can in a use value; a person is
not a commodity, even when her labour is commodified. The value of the
means of the workers own reproduction can be determined (and in fact is
the principal determinant of the value of labour power), but not the
value of living labours use value, because here there is no possible
equivalency. Marx indicates that labour relates to capital not as value to
value as in any other exchange, but as use value to value.34 The exchange
of wages for living labour power is in reality a not-exchange.35 Outside of
special conditions like slavery (which are not generalizable in capitalism),
value cannot be transmitted directly through a person; even if it were
possible for the consumer to consume and thus embody exchange value,
the worth of the person would not be in play in the production process.
Only living labour, the use value of capital, can valorize capital.
Before moving to a more speculative discussion of consumption, it
may be appropriate to condense what we have determined thus far.
Adorno, despite his recognition that certain aspects of consumption
those that do not directly serve the utility principle36 actually form part
of humankinds self-reproduction independently of the valorization
process, understands value as being essentially determined by the market
and, moreover, tends to identify capital with the utility principle,
something that seems closer to Max Webers culturalist account of
33
Ibid., p. 730.
34
Ibid., pp. 288-97 passim.
35
Ibid., p. 322.
36
Prisms, p. 86.
150 Chapter Eight
capitalism than to Marx. Only by denying the, strictly speaking, non-

capitalist aspects of consumption does it become possible to view it (hence
aesthetic consumption as well) as part of a totally rationalized system.
Capital, qua system, is imagined here as purely rational and utilitarian. But
value, as the essential principle of this system, is a pure abstraction
(although real), and is antithetical to utility in its objective form, use
value. Likewise, there is the matter (brought up by Larsen, Postone, and
Trenkle) of whether total bureaucratic control of both production and
consumption, of labour and the market, leaves in place the dialectical
antinomies of capital and its immanent transformative possibilities.
Adorno, despite adhering to the traditional Marxist concept of value,37
departs from that perspective in that he no longer sees labour, embodied
in the proletariat, as an emancipatory agent, in either its productive or
consumptive activity. But the more problematic assumptions outlined
above cause Adorno, in the absence of labour as a revolutionary agent,
to oppose the useless work of art to capital, understood as a pure
principle of utility. This is not to say that something about art does not
resist the commodity fetish. Rather, its oppositional nature must instead
reside in an antagonistic relationship to value as system (i.e. to the
valorization of value).
Returning to the subject of consumption, it may be worthwhile to take
up Karatanis point about workers as the subject of consumption. While
this represents, on one level, yet another attempt to reinstate the proletariat
as universal subject, there is a certain truth-value to the association of
subjectivity with consumption. In productive consumption, i.e.
consumption that belongs to the production process (and hence to the
valorization process), the subjective activity of consumption (e.g. of
materials by living labour) is directly subordinated to objectified labour, or
fixed capital, which itself acquires a kind of subjectivity vis--vis living
labour.
The whole process therefore appears as productive consumption, i.e. as
consumption which terminates neither in a void, nor in the mere
subjectification of the objective, but which is, rather, again posited as an
object. This consumption is not simply a consumption of the material, but
rather consumption [Verzehren] of consumption [Konsumption] itself; in
the suspension of the material it is the suspension of this suspension and
hence the positing of the same.38
37
See footnote no. 8 for the sense in which traditional Marxist is used here.
38
Grundrisse, pp. 300-1.
Clearly, in productive consumption, the objective moment predominates,

meaning that the subjects activity of consumption is itself consumed, or
instrumentalized as a moment of the valorization of value, whose given
form [is consumed] only in order to posit it in a new objective form.39
Consumption proper, however, remains an ineradicable remainder, the
subjectification of the objective, in which subjective activity, the
reproduction of both the individual and society, still prevails, albeit within
the narrow limits imposed by capital. The valorization process, which
treats consumption as a barrier, or constantly expanding limit, is at the
same time a barrier to consumption. The barrier imposed on consumption
by the valorization of value is not only a qualitative one, to be understood
in terms of choices determined by the market, but also a quantitative one
based on the need for fiscal discipline (this applies to capitalist and worker
alike). Theories about the emancipatory potential of consumption, as well
as criticisms of conspicuous consumption or over-consumption that fail to
understand the valorization process as both consumptions driving force
(valorization generates new and more varied needs and also posits
consumption logically as its negative ground, its necessary other) and its
limiting factor are destined to prescribe only palliative countermeasures to
the ecological impacts of consumption. Indeed, they run the risk of
misidentifying consumption as both the primary source of ecological
destruction and the site of resistance to capital. Many current efforts to
confront overconsumption focus, for instance, on limiting household
consumption while ignoring the relatively greater environmental impact
and energy expenditure of the construction of the house itself. Likewise,
the approach to consumption seen in postmodern cultural studies tends to
overemphasize the subjective moment of consumption, forgetting that the
kind and quantity of consumption is largely prescribed by ones access to
money or credit, and that many consumer needs are posited by production
itself, rather than by the consumer. If nothing else, we should retain the
Culture Industrys insistence that the consumers choices are largely
determined in advance, even if Adornos account of the mechanism by
which this occurs is technically inadequate.
The countertendency of increasing consumption in the face of the crisis
of value is illuminated by the following passage by Moishe Postone:
[T]he increasing importance of consumption to self-identity [...] should not
be understood only in terms of the growing dependence of capitalism on
mass consumption (a position that frequently regards such consumption
merely as generated and manipulated by advertising, for example); nor
39
Ibid., p. 301.
152 Chapter Eight
should such a study reify consumption in a culturalist manner as the site of

identity and resistance, analogous to the traditional Marxist reification of
production. Rather, it should also analyze the increasing subjective
importance of consumption in terms of the decline of work as a source of
identity.40
Upon examining the economic trajectory of the last forty years, one sees
that the height of so-called consumer culture has coincided with post-
Fordism and postmodernism. The reality behind the financialization of the
economy is that capital that cannot be reintroduced into the production
process must be offset by credit bubbles, consumed by manic commodity
fetishists, or simply destroyed like the millions of automobiles that cannot
be sold. The vast expansion of credit has enabled an explosion in
consumption. While overconsumption may not compensate for lack of
valorization opportunities, it accompanies the expansion of consumer
credit that forms part of what has come to be known as financialization, in
which the increased importance of so-called fictitious capital responds to
what the Wertkritik theorists have described as capitals internal limit to
valorization.41 Likewise, and in part, overconsumption enabled by credit
could be considered a reaction against the kind of fiscal discipline imposed
by capital on the monetary subject, who can normally accrue wealth only
by abstinence from consumption, through self-denial, saving, cutting
corners in his consumption so as to withdraw less from circulation than he
puts goods into it.42 Overconsumption could respond to an unconscious
recognition that real wealth is material, and to a weakening of the
discipline imposed by capital. Without the constraints imposed by abstract
labour and the valorization of value, humanity could regain its lost
subjectivity, wresting it away from the objective means of production
where it was misplaced. Only then would consumption take on its full
subjective importance as a means of self-reproduction for both individuals
and society.
Despite what I believe to be an inconsistency between the concept of
the Culture Industry and Marxs exposition of consumption in his
Grundrisse, Adornos work continues to be extremely relevant. Even if
40
Time, Labour, p. 370; my italics.
41
For the theory of how capital, in the wake of the unprecedented increase in
productive forces ushered in by the so-called Third Industrial Revolution, faces a
terminal crisis in its ability to incorporate labour and therefore create surplus-
value, see Robert Kurz, Der Kollaps der Modernisierung: Vom Zusammenbruch
des Kasernsozialismus zur Krise der Weltkonomie (Frankfurt am Main Eichborn
Verlag, 1991).
42
Grundrisse, p. 284.
Adornos account of how exchange value penetrates the realm of use value
(consumption proper) is technically incorrect, one senses that he is right on
at least two counts. First, as long as production remains production-for-
exchange and not production-for-consumption, consumers will remain
objectified insofar as they are posited as consumers by the blind, systemic
necessity to actualize value in sale. That is, consumers themselves do not
operate as such under conditions of freedom, under which what they
produced would be determined by how they chose to recreate themselves
subjectively via consumption. Production and consumption have been
sundered; no longer two moments of the same, socially reproductive
activity, production serves the self-expansion of value, while consumption
becomes marginalized. The activity of consumption is itself rendered
hollow by values need to reproduce itself. Adorno is only incorrect in
assuming that this is wholly the case, because even consumption driven by
the imperative for commodities to be sold satisfies real human needs,
regardless of whether these needs have been created by marketing. To
attempt to separate authentic needs from those induced by the market is
to risk the kind of moralizing demand for austerity that finds its analogue,
if not its source, in the wage-labourers battle, nearly always futile, to
accumulate wealth through self-denial. Second, we should insist, with
Adorno, that art maintains a kind of antagonism to society. Art is the
social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.43 As mentioned
above, where Adorno might be contested is in regards to the artwork as a
kind of anti-commodity that refuses to constitute itself as a use value, so as
not to be a porter of exchange value. It is difficult, if not impossible, to
imagine a work of art that, even if not produced by wage-labour or with the
intent to be sold, can elude the potential for commodification. Even certain
unaesthetic Neo-Avant-Garde works still find a market niche among
academics and professional critics devoted to their interpretation. If art is
antagonistic to society it is not because it is not a commodity or cannot
become one. Rather, art contains an intrinsic otherness vis--vis
valorization. Art can take the form of a commodity but cannot be only a
commodity. Inasmuch as art retains something of the ability to produce
enjoyment (or other emotions, regardless of how debased these might
be), it already points beyond the logic of valorization, which lacks any
subjective human qualities, indeed, which lacks any quality at all. Value
is, quite simply, quantity.
43
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 8.
154 Chapter Eight
Art, in order to be considered art at all, must conserve a subjectively-

mediated content, wherein the artist transforms and reproduces his or her
objective social life. Simply by possessing a qualitative social content
posited by the artist, even if this content is sedimented in its form44 and not
readily apparent, art opposes itself to the kind of automatic social
reproduction seen in capitals self-valorization, whose only attribute is
quantity. Art criticizes society by merely existing.45 We must insist on
viewing consumption, whether of traditional commodities or of works of
art, as retaining the real social content that even its subordination to capital
cannot eliminate. In short, it must be viewed as it might exist in a different
kind of social formation, as it would present [itself] from the standpoint
of redemption.46 Otherwise, one must speak of the end of art, agency and,
finally, also of hope.
44
Ibid., p. 5.
45
Ibid., p. 226.
46
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life,
translated by Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), p. 247.
CHAPTER NINE
FABIO AKCELRUD DURO IN CONVERSATION

WITH ROBERT HULLOT-KENTOR
The following interview was originally published in two parts at the

Brooklyn Rail, in June and July 2010. It is reproduced here under
permission.
PART I
Fabio Akcelurd Duro: Why are we in the Brooklyn Rail? Im from

Brazil. When I visited you last time in 2008 that was a good discussion, I
think theres even a Romanian translation of it somewhere our interview
was for a Brazilian journal of philosophy and literature1; so is this one,
which will appear in a book published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
in England. But in the U.S. our talks go into a freebie monthly newspaper.
Whats it about?
Robert Hullot-Kentor: The Brooklyn Rail is the centre of a common

readership here, which is something that can otherwise hardly be found in
the U.S. Its a lucky thing; I dont know anything like it. There are
common readerships in Canada Vancouver, for instance, is intellectually
intense in the sense of young people with jobs, knowledgeably,
aggressively busy with politics and with literature, the arts in France too,
and in Brazil as well as you were telling me yesterday and in many
other countries, but not at all in the U.S. Here intellect is almost
completely isolated from public life.
FAD: That isolation comes across in American academic journals; most of

them are jargon-bound, careerist, restricted.
1
Entrevista com Robert Hullot-Kentor. Artefilosofia. Ouro Preto: Universidade
Federal de Ouro Preto, v. 7, p. 96-108, 2009.
156 Chapter Nine
RHK: Yes, I agree. Thats why were here. Rail readers can be students
hanging around in shop front cafs in Brooklyn and the outer boroughs,
who might also be reading E. P. Thompsons The Making of the English
Working Class in their spare time. And if they arent reading it, they may
well go read it once they find out about a major work. The Brooklyn Rail
could be part of the making of what we absolutely lack, something like an
intelligentsia, in the historical sense of intelligentsia.
FAD: What do I know about the Rail? And obviously one reads
Thompson; hes essential reading. But, come on, theres plenty of
intelligentsia.
RHK: Maybe not. Not intelligentsia in the historical sense, which is what
I said.
FAD: iek, Jameson: theyre not intelligentsia?
RHK: No. Not in the historical sense. Theyre academics. The now long-
gone intelligentsia Arnold Hauser explains came into existence after
the defeat of the revolutionary hopes of 1848. They emerged as a loosely
related cultural elite, social critics, artists, and thinkers who had formerly
served as the middle classs own social conscience, a group that in fact
helped inspire the revolution, but found themselves dispossessed once the
middle class achieved its undisputed hold on the social structure.
FAD: Because after the revolution the middle class was no longer so
interested in having a sharp-minded social conscience breathing down its
neck.
RHK: Yes; it wasnt. Once the middle class was secure it jettisoned any
memory of the guilt of its own rise to power and cut its intellectuals adrift.
We would say they lost their funding. That group became the
intelligentsia. It was isolated on one side from the middle class who
hated them and whom they no less detested, and, on the other side, they
were isolated from the immiserated working class whose voice and
concerns they struggled to shape but who could hardly understand, let
alone accept these displaced intellectuals as their own flesh and blood.
FAD: I remember this now. Some part of the intelligentsia continued to

tumble economically, didnt it, and became bohemians. They no longer
Fabio Akcelrud Duro in conversation with Robert Hullot-Kentor 157
spoke for the beaten down; they were themselves among the economically
trampled. But this is European, not American history.
RHK: All the same, even by considerably different paths, the eventual
victory of the middle class and the fate of intellectuals in Europe and
America bear comparison. You see it in the spontaneous aversion
Americans have for anything remotely like an intelligentsia. Decades ago,
and probably outside the memory of most readers of this book, Spiro
Agnew Nixons Vice President achieved the prodigious deed of
actually teaching the whole nation a new word effete with a surefire
object of spite and attacking the left as effete intellectuals.
FAD: Great teaching technique!
RHK: Its historys schoolhouse: Notice that effete is a select and

intellectual word. By a complex ruse, a favourite of the right wing, the
perduring sting of humiliation whether that of an individual or of an
entire population is cunningly transformed into the self-evidence of the
humiliation of the figure who can then be attacked en masse with laughter
and confidence. But for that to work, as in this case, to be able to attack
the intellectuals with their own word effete depends on an enduring
middle class triumph, the victory of a mind a kind of mind anyway that
for several centuries now has been certain that there is nothing real to life
beyond buying and selling and has been no less positive that we are fine,
and even better off, without those thinking characters who go about
spreading their negative energy.
FAD: But what is the parallel you wanted to draw between the historical
intelligentsia the disdained intellectuals in your Agnew example and
the contemporary situation of students in the U.S.?
RHK: Its an inexact parallel; its a potential parallel. Academia isnt

going to become the source of a counterculture, not iek, and not
Jameson either. But there is a possible intelligentsia, a genuinely displaced
body of independent intellectuals, that could develop and take shape in the
form of college students today. They are a cohort of considerable urgency
and intelligence that knows it is stranded. The degrees are piling up and
there arent jobs and no expectation of suitable jobs in an economy in
which dispossession has become the fiercest form of possession, where
any economic recovery is sure to be a proportionately jobless recovery.
Its not, of course, that Im in any sense recommending that these students
158 Chapter Nine
exhume intelligentsia as such. That would be a project for restaurateurs

and sweatshirt designers. But there is something to learn from its history
by those who are in a situation that will likely continue to border
repeatedly on crises of considerable proportions. Unemployment is
extraordinarily painful, isolating, and destructive; one is deprived of the
world. Developing the solidarity of a common readership and critical
intelligence among allies economically hovering between something like
intelligentsia and bohemian, somehow getting an education in a
completely stupidifying situation, is an urgent possibility to consider given
what were in the midst of. It would make something productive out of the
circumstance.
FAD: Youre saying that if education no longer subserves economic

intentions it could be discovered for what education, in its own terms,
really is.
RHK: Exactly. The economy has now taken it on itself to debunk its claim
to possess education whole hand. A dispossessed and debt-burdened
student body may realize that of all things education is what they could
possess not only in the sense of piling up books, but in the form of
Sapere Aude!, the dare to know!
FAD: As to what to study, I know youve been reading Tocqueville a lot

lately.
RHK: Yes. He is top on my list right now in trying to understand a

country that teeters on the ungovernable where the people are
characterized essentially by the inability to represent the common good to
themselves. Come to think, I know youre interviewing me, but thats what
Id like to talk about.
FAD: Who Americans are and their inability to represent the common
good to themselves? Sure, lets discuss it. That would have something to
do with the exclusion of students and many others in the U.S. from the
common good if there is such a thing here. How does Tocqueville fit in
to this question?
RHK: Theres a note he made in Democracy in America, written in the

1830s that touches on it, which fascinates me and continues to be
revealing. Let me get Tocqueville off the shelf here, because otherwise Ill
misremember it. Tocqueville writes that he was fascinated watching our
kind be carried away by their disinterested, spontaneous impulse to

respond to anothers need. People, Tocqueville knew, do that everywhere;
someone trips, and you spontaneously put a hand out to catch them. But,
the Americans he continues and this is what he found fascinating
are hardly prepared to admit that they do give way to emotion of this
sort. They prefer to give the credit, he continues, to their philosophy
of self-interest. In other words, the common good is perceived, but we
cannot represent it to ourselves. We would want to say, even to joke: I
caught him so he wouldnt fall on me. Something like that.
FAD: Its ironic that Tocqueville calls this a philosophy. Americans are
hardly a philosophical people. In American English, when people talk
about their philosophy, its a synonym for tactic, or strategy; their
sales philosophy is their sales tactic, how they set up a shop window
display. These are a tactical, not a philosophical people.
RHK: Its true. This side of the Atlantic, a philosophy of education

would concern whether you count off for spelling or not. And, definitely,
one will not come across the idea of speculation in the philosophical
sense the sense of mind seeking to criticize its own narrowness but
only in the economic sense of the assertion of narrow interest through risk.
But, if Americans are not philosophical if they are tactical, strategic, and
pragmatic, as you say they are at every turn a systematic people. The
whole of American life now takes place exclusively within systematic
structures. But this is hardly recognized, not least because the idea of a
system seems to imply a rigorously complete order, while any individual
life is actually so tumultuous, so many people founder, life is so difficult
for many, that it is hard to imagine that the tumult is a function of the
antagonistic structure of the systems to which we are ineluctably
immanent. People are more likely to chalk up the tumult as evidence of
freedom from systems, and even, strangely enough, value the distress as
such with a sense of maybe we lost the house, but, you know, at least
were free. The systematic structures, without anyone needing to plan it,
veil themselves with their own turmoil.
FAD: But what are you driving at here? In claiming that the U.S. is
increasingly ungovernable, I understand youre referring to the fact that
the country is unable to pass legislation that adequately solves the
tremendous problems it now faces. By its might it leads the world in the
cataclysmic failure to pass legislation to protect the earth which, Ive
noticed, Americans now like to call the planet, as if there are many to
160 Chapter Nine
chose from. But what does this have to do with Americans, Tocqueville,
and systematic structures?
RHK: Tocqueville, in that passage, explains what everyone here already

knows: that the American character is recognizable most of all in its claim
to the paramount virtue of self-interest. His vignette hits the bulls-eye by
pointing out that Americans arent exactly sure who they are, or what
theyve done, unless they give credit to a philosophy of self-interest. He
at the same time knew perfectly well, of course, that we arent a
philosophical people; he says so at length. Even if there are philosophies
of self-interest, as of course there are many, Americans are not the kind to
get wrapped up in such subtleties. Even when the topic is theory, they
want to do theory; they want to get on with business. To make good on
Tocquevilles vignette, lets help him out a bit. Myself, I wish he had
written system instead of philosophy. We would read, then, that in
opposition to the emotion of disinterested goodwill Americans feel obliged
to give credit to a system of self-interest.
FAD: Where would that lead?
RHK: Then we could consider his vignette in terms of a relation between

a systematic structure of representation, on one hand, and the mimetic
impulse on the other, because the mimetic impulse is the power to
respond, to put an arm out spontaneously to catch someone tripping. We
would see that that system of representation amounts to a taboo that
prohibits an individual from representing to themselves the common good
the felt disinterested impulse and in just the same way as whats
called the American system of representational government prohibits the
nation from representing to itself the common good.
FAD: Wait a second. Stop. I dont want to lose track of what were talking
about, and it is already tangled. But just a moment ago you said that a
taboo prohibits an individual from representing to themselves the common
good. English is a second language for me, you know, and I try to keep
up with it. Why are you confusing the singular individual with the
plural, as in your phrase, representing to themselves? Youve done that a
few times already today. I hear it everywhere in American English now.
One couldnt possibly do something like that in Portuguese or French or
any European language today.
RHK: Youre not in any way interrupting the direction of what were
talking about. Because what youre noticing about contemporary English
is a linguistic level of what Tocqueville observed in his vignette of the
need Americans have to represent themselves exclusively in the form of a
philosophy of self-interest. That mashing together of the singular and
the plural pronouns an individualthemselves or, as were now likely
to say a person has to understand they cannot,phrases which you
rightly point out are everywhere are part of the rhythm of the language
trying to accommodate a non-discriminatory reference to male and female
at every turn. The effort marks a kind of achievement, but in every
instance it on one level also amounts to discrimination against the plural.
Whats happening results from a society that is in fact plural in all of its
structures, but where the only possible political-economic form of life is
individual in its form of self-preservation. Self-preservation demands that
we cant be interested in a sentence that goes, the individuals
themselves. That is, the plural has a compelling reality to us only in
exceptional instances even though the sum total of experience takes place
exclusively on that level. The tumult the systematic tumult we were
talking about earlier is in every sentence we speak. If we could imagine
language as having its own conscience, it is as if language in its
contemporary chaos of singular and plural insists on our noticing that at
this point we cant comprehend ourselves. Theres much more to say about
this.
FAD: The individualthemselves is a spurious plural that embodies the

actual force of the plural? But all the same the contrary is the case? Then
what is in fact being expressed in these garbled phrases, even in someone
who speaks carefully, as you do, is that the individual is experiencing
what to say? their, his, or her? own spuriousness in these
constructions?
RHK: We could also say that at this point what we hear in these jumbled
phrases and in the weirdly sexless sexualization of language, which is
another aspect of it, is a plural that remains a power of the disorganization
of the individual, rather than it the social whole becoming a capacity of
the individual in which individuality and sexuality as well would be
something more than the faade of a predatory form of a society that has
yet to make good on its potential for individuality; the garbled language is
a pretence of the emancipation of the individual, which very much still
remains to be achieved as we see, for instance, in the awful rate of
contemporary unemployment.
162 Chapter Nine
FAD: Youre saying that the social conflict is evident in the

disorganization of contemporary American English.
RHK: Thats it. High school and college students now graduate from these
institutions considerably impeded in their ability to write. This is of
national concern. All kinds of screws are being tightened both on students
and on teachers to somehow get the students to write coherently.
Draconian plans are being made to fix our dysfunctional educational
system, that is, to effect a cure by inflicting undilutedly what is doing the
damage in the first place. But education cannot resolve the problems. No
amount of education could keep George Bush, a graduate of Yale, from
speaking in stream of consciousness solecism and referring from the
national podium to childrens. Every sentence poses the problem of the
relation of the one and the many, but the capacity to set this relation right
is not within languages grasp. What we are watching happen to English
right now bears comparison to the dissolution of Latin in the early Middle
Ages after the collapse of Rome, whose social structure organized the
language and maintained its grammatical order. To fix the schools, to help
students write, it is the stupidifying social conflicts that must be addressed
as the problem of the common good.
FAD: Theres a lot to sort out. Lets take a break.
PART II
ROBERT HULLOT-KENTOR: The tape recorders on again, Fabio;

were in Part II of our discussion. In front of us we have a stack of books
and newspaper clippings in case we need them Tocqueville, of course,
several by Gordon Wood, and a recent book by Barry C. Lynn. You were
just saying, while we were at lunch, that one can graduate from a Brazilian
university with a Ph.D. and no debt.
FABIO AKCELRUD DURO: Higher education is a human right in

Brazil. The state universities the countrys best schools are all strictly
free. Just as in Europe, all degrees medicine, architecture, and so on
are without tuition. In Brazil there is also free student housing though
not enough for all and there are student restaurants where you can eat
edible meals for two or three dollars.
RHK: Yes, same in Europe. When I studied in Germany you got dinner at
the university Mensa with a glass of wine for less than three dollars, and
had plenty of time to work on the ontological proof of purchase.
FAD: The ontological proof of purchase?
RHK: St. Anselm wanted to prove the reality of the divinity. I wanted a
direct extrapolation from his syllogisms to prove that ownership
necessarily precedes purchase.
FAD: Ontologically?
RHK: Not politically, thats for sure.
FAD: Wine at the Mensa must have been cheap.
RHK: Muchas gracias, Fabio. But the point were concerned with is that
while both European and American college graduates are now massively
unemployed, its one thing being unemployed and hugely in debt from
college expenses the situation of many American students and being
unemployed without that burden.
FAD: Its amazing how difficult the U.S. makes life for itself, given its
resources. There are other ways of doing these things.
RHK: To say the least, and in all regards. The Harvard economist Juliet
Schor some years ago, in The Overworked American, argued that if the
existing output of the U.S. economy were differently organized, each of us
could live a comfortable middle class life and have half of the year off.
Much is conceivable here, but nothing alternative is conceived not in a
way that gets a hearing. Whats needed is as apparent as it is out of the
question. Reviewing alternatives, whether its educational possibilities in
Brazil, Schors research, or discovering Rwanda provides universal health
care at $2 a person per year, we might as well be reading Ripleys Believe
It or Not; its important to know that things could be different, but it wont
touch the quick.
FAD: What touches the quick?
RHK: Realizing that all that now stands between ourselves and
catastrophe is comprehending the situation. The actual instruments gripped
164 Chapter Nine
are handheld devices, but Nero would have recognized what were
playing at.
FAD: That half brings us around to what we were most wanting to discuss
this morning the question of representation. We had already started
talking about education in the U.S. and its historical subordination to
commercial interests, which, since education isnt leading to jobs, has
reduced higher education in the minds of many Americans to a disposable
husk. If education doesnt lead to jobs, people are thinking, what good is it
anyway? And, if thats the thought, you were by contrast urging readers of
the Brooklyn Rail (and of Culture Industry Today) to make off with that
remaindered husk of education, the books and the sapere aude as the
better part of things, especially in the midst of unemployment, with some
affinity for a long disappeared intelligentsia.
RHK: Right; thats where we started.
FAD: And that got us into the question of representation and specifically
why the country cannot represent the common good to itself, either as
individuals or as a nation. This could have led us to a discussion of what
education as education for the common good would be.
RHK: Im glad it didnt. We dont need an edifying 17th century dialogue

on education and the common good. John Milton could credibly write
about education as inculcating in the student the love of humanity. We
would feel strange mouthing those words; they are unimaginably remote.
The related idea of education for the common good is no less archaic. It
comes from a long tradition of thought that presumed the individual could
be reconciled ethically with society. Aristotle was able to meditate on
virtue and the common good. But what education could we invent that
would teach us to do right by a society that dropped the bomb on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How does the virtuous life fulfil the common
good after that? Those explosions are, in a sense, still occurring; check the
front page of the newspaper; we have not gotten control of it. Thats why
any thought of the common good is so fragile and plainly vestigial. The
idea isnt available to us, while we cant just surrender it. The concept
needs to be developed, taking its own measure for what it now possibly
means, without losing the sense of its palpable desuetude.
FAD: The common good can only be conceived in a way that cant be
asserted?
RHK: Here Im agreeing with you.
FAD: But however fragile it is, this doesnt explain why Americans cant
represent the common good to themselves. Working from a passage in
Tocqueville this morning, you argued that the American system of
representational government prohibits the nation from representing to
itself the common good. You put this in terms of an opposition of
systematic representation to the mimetic impulse, with which you
identified the common good, and said that the individual is subject to the
same dynamic as the nation.
RHK: Thats the issue.
FAD: There wasnt time this morning, but I wanted to object to the way
youre setting this up. In counterposing system and mimesis, you are
asserting a romantic thesis of the opposition of some kind of natural
spontaneity to reflection. Our spontaneity can hardly be summed up as all
sweetness and light. Why identify the mimetic impulse with the common
good?
RHK:
FAD: And the homology you draw between the individual and the social
form of self-representation is the central idea of idealism.
RHK:
FAD: Hello...?
RHK: Im here. Im thinking; what do you think Im doing? Yes. I agree

with you in every regard; it seems that way. But the modern self is a
system just as the governmental structure is. If thats idealism, its the
nations own, not mine. We could figure this out better if we consider a
phrase from James Madison one I picked up from Gordon Wood.
Madison is recorded as having said that the true distinction of American
government lies in the total exclusion of the people, in their collective
capacity, from any share in the government. Thats the key. It couldnt be
more illuminating. It could be the description of an individual its what
Tocqueville saw in Americans and captured in the vignette we discussed
this morning and it is of course a description of the U.S. political social
structure.
166 Chapter Nine
FAD: Lets stay with the statement, then, as a description of society and
figure out what Madison meant. What does that mean that Americans are
excluded from the government?
RHK: Madison didnt say that Americans are excluded from the
government. He said that Americans are excluded from government in
their collective capacity. There must be much to say about what the
collective capacity is. But on one level, none of this is a secret. The
United States is a limited democracy; it is designed to restrain the power
of the majority. It is a sliver of democracy that succeeds through the
particular way it limits itself at imagining that it is democracy whole. The
flag over the backyard barbecue picnic means: No government allowed!
Nationalism in the U.S. is anti-state. Government is only legitimate if it
can seem not to exist. The much-cited system of checks and balances is
thought to secure this limit and protect the country from despotism, which
it does even if in the Bush years it did not keep the executive from
appropriating the judiciary branch and corrupting it for all foreseeable
decades. But the ingenuity of American democracy is that the voice of
the people can only be heard as a demand that this voice be muted. That
shapes our feeling of freedom, and its the rider effectively attached to
every bill that passes congress.
FAD: Whats a rider in American legislation? I dont know the idiom.
RHK: Its a particular interest attached as a condition to passing a bill.
FAD: I see where youre going. Its what Tocqueville was saying about
Americans as individuals, which we discussed this morning. Your point is
that if the people in their collective capacity are excluded from
government, then only particular interests can be governmentally
represented?
RHK: Yes. The system of governmental representation secures the

sovereignty of the people. They are cloaked in the purloined mantle of
absolutisms divine right of kings, whether they vote or not. But to inherit
that mantle they must also consent to the fate of the king in which that
sovereignty was once won for them. Because that blessing is only
confirmed in legislation that can resolve the conflict of particular interests,
colliding at loggerheads, if the solution, often detailed in closed caucus,
can be used as a fulcrum for political equality to subserve the pursuit of
economic inequality. This form of equality prohibits the discovery that the
universally shared insight on which economic life is based that equality

is not at all the goal of society but a faade for a rigged struggle be made
good on for the realization that would transform equality from a puzzling
power for the inevitable entwinement of emancipation and oppression into
a capacity to criticize that oppression. It doesnt sound good, I suppose,
but we need to make good on our hypocrisy and consciously see through
what we have already long ago seen through. Equality that functions as the
mechanism of social cruelty could become the capacity to defeat that
cruelty if it were understood to be a technique for the achievement of the
primacy of the object, or, what Rawls rightly named fairness. Equality is
a critique of unfairness, and as such it has still not had its day. But if that
did happen, as hard as it is for us to imagine, it could be discovered that
equality is not necessarily a condition of inflicted sameness which is the
situation we are in but, on the contrary, as a technique of the primacy of
the object, it would subsume that dreaded sameness, and fairness itself,
extricated from the motive of resentment, would become more than the
obligation of a middling moralism. Life otherwise remains at the level of
self-preservation, however much wealth anyone achieves, and can only
take shape as the satisfaction of particular interests, with the caveat that
these interests happen not to be ones own, however urgently they are felt
and pursued. To date, however, this relentlessly destructive condition
remains the sought-after achievement in which the limited democracy
instituted by the Constitution converges with capitalism nowhere
legislated by the Constitution and, when it does, government
successfully seems in American eyes as if it does not exist.
FAD: Contemporary crises are making it difficult to maintain this illusion,

arent they?
RHK: Thats the situation. When government threatens to, or in

emergency, as now must breach its precincts out of the need to provide
medical care or respond to natural destruction, it endangers life and limb
and every acknowledged ideal. It no longer serves equality in the pursuit
of inequality, and all are threatened with the life and death hazard of the
possible, inimical expression of the common good, in the collapse of
whats too big to fail, an entity that even in good times absorbs almost
every ounce of strength. The peculiarity of our situation is that we have no
alternative but to dread the expression of the common good as a threat to
our lives.
168 Chapter Nine
FAD: It really is perceived this way. In June a Tea Party Florida

congressman fumed at Obama for negotiating a fund to cover the damage
caused by the ruptured oil well in the Gulf. I saved the newspaper article
here. He could not imagine, he said Im reading a greater tragedy than
a private corporation [BP] being forced by the government to establish a
20 billion dollar fund.
RHK: So much for the shape of modern tragedy. The congressmans

constituents along the shore must have wondered whose side he was on.
But it isnt hard to follow his distress at the precedent Obama set: what if
the bill for devastation really were set on the table, and not just once; and
what if the government itself started adding up the tab on industry and
demanding it be paid, time after time? Who, finally, gets that bill?
FAD: The frequently discussed American paranoiac style is structured

objectively.
RHK: It is. And currently, much literally conspires to magnify this

feeling. We elect a government to provide a limited democracy so we can
pursue individual economic advantage. But people now feel challenged
and undermined by majority forces they can hardly fathom or control, and
what else can they conclude than that theyve been betrayed by a
pernicious government? In a sense, as we were just discussing, theyre
correct. But what has most of all happened is that the old Leninist program
Seize state power! has been achieved by private corporations of
several kinds. The NRA, for instance, is a semi-autonomous state power. It
has successfully pried away a sector of the states constitutive monopoly
on violence; by sheer force, it terrorizes Congress and defines laws. It
decides how we live. The finance industry, likewise, is able to work
outside of state supervision at levels of organizational power that vie with
the survival of the national economy. And a corporation, such as Wal-
Mart, which has captured large segments of the nations commercial
distribution system as did finance, by means of computerized systems
from this vantage defines what is produced and consumed, the price of
goods, the organization of entire sections of towns, traffic patterns and
increasingly, again, how people live. Wal-Mart is, in the words of Barry C.
Lynn, a private planning state in the heart of America.
FAD: Wasnt there an article here on the table about Wal-Mart recently
deciding to offer computer-based college classes to its employees?
RHK: Yes, and probably just to prove to the world that college doesnt
lead to a decent job. What Tocqueville, in the 1830s, dreaded as the
growing despotic administrative powers of the state have been
developed as the rationalizing powers of corporations that in Lynns
words have become the techniques for the enclosure and exploitation of
the American people. This is the major transformation the country has
undergone since 1990. Almost the whole of our experience is now defined
by these structures of corporate enclosure. There really is nowhere to turn.
Travel only continues because there is nowhere left to go; time in any
airport proves that. But since the defining structures of this corporate
enclosure are private entities, the country is as unable as it is unwilling to
understand the nature of the political coerciveness that has descended on
us. What is instead experienced is hostility, disappointment, that paranoia
of government you mentioned earlier, and a general inability to get our
bearings, while the real toll of what is transpiring remains outside of
consciousness.
FAD: Thats the crucial idea here, isnt it: the toll remains exterior to
consciousness. But why isnt it experienced? Thinking back over our
discussion so far, youve drawn three parallel ideas: the toll is exterior to
consciousness, as is the collective capacity to representation, as is mimesis
to the systematic structure of representation. Lets sort out the last one and
figure out how this fits together. You know, you still havent answered my
criticism earlier of the way you set this up. Maybe we could start with
what you mean by a system?
RHK: Lots could be said about what a system is. But for what were
discussing, a development since the 17th century, a system is a self-
antagonistic, coercive unity of functionally interdependent, qualitatively
neutral elements that are in principle isolated from each other, whose
isolation is at the same time maintained by the system. That would cover a
system of health management, a system of glaciers or rivers as considered
by environmentalists, an American city as a system of potential customers,
or the mind as a system of consciousness as Locke thought of it. A system
is external to the object that is immanent to it just in the sense that the
American system of representational government is external to the
politically equal, isolated elements it unifies, and to which it must remain
external to be legitimate.
FAD: Youve said this before?

170 Chapter Nine
RHK: I gather it sounds that way.
FAD: And you counterpose to the system of representation the collective

capacity not only as what is excluded from the democratic voice but as a
mimetic content. So, whats the other side to it what does mimesis mean
here?
RHK: We started talking about mimesis this morning. Its a necessarily

puzzling concept because while all concepts have non-conceptual elements
and are ultimately non-conceptual, mimesis seems to be an altogether anti-
conceptual concept because it is the idea of what obviates the diremption
of subject and object. It breaches subject and object, a boundary otherwise
defined by concepts. Mimesis means imitation, participation and
expression though, characteristically, at our socio-historical latitude and
longitude, it is as a copy function that it is most widely understood. Which
is only its remainder. Mimesis is how you make a certain gesture across
your forehead, or hear something in the inflection of your voice and think,
Oh, no, dreaded Uncle Sidney! That involuntary karaoke of the self
threatens to reveal all the rest of what were up to as the real put on.
Mimesis is primordial to empathy. In some sense, we exist internally to
one another, although we only have the most limited way of discussing
these things. Freuds concepts of cathexis and internal objects are
exceptional and to the point. It is explicitly the terrain of the most
important 20th century novelists Joyce, Woolf, and especially Kawabata.
To make it sound less strange even though this is one of those things that
everyone already knows but likes to go blank on it is what Ill be
thinking of you really amounts to.
FAD: And you set this mimetic content in opposition to the

representational system?
RHK: I didnt it did and does; that is how it developed. The United
States originated in a struggle over the nature of representation the Tea
Party, which is very much on our minds these days but we may not
recognize that the question of mimesis was, and remains, at the heart of
the matter. That Tea Party Gordon Wood is the authority here revolved
around a struggle between virtual and direct representation, which the
revolution decided in favour of the latter. The British had presumed and
argued, in opposition to the grievances of the colonists, that even in
London, in the House of Lords, at a distance of some three thousand miles,
the concerns of the colonies could be represented disinterestedly. I
emphasize disinterestedly in part to touch back on our morning

discussion of Tocquevilles comment, but most of all because
disinterestedness was once cognate with the idea of virtual representation.
FAD: To get this straight, virtual representation was the doctrine the
British asserted? It claimed a representationally binding legitimacy to that
act of Ill be thinking of you?
RHK: Yes; and that thinking of you had an ancient paternalistic aspect
that was profoundly resented. The emergence of the United States was
built on successfully debunking its legitimacy. The colonists denied
virtual representation as an oppressive superstition. Their interests
they were sure were not represented by the British House of Lords,
however virtuously disinterested those representatives in London persisted
to the contrary. The colonists demystified the claim to virtual
representation as a mask of economic domination and insisted on the
direct representation of their interests in their own legislative body. In an
act of autogenesis, the country became a parentless parent to itself in the
personified spirit of nationalism, put ethnographic descent in place of a
vanished tradition as a population of immigrants scrambling for who came
first, soon to engage in a vicious preoccupation with race, as they found
themselves competitors face to face at a goldmine of natural resources and
commercial possibility. An organization for the representation of
particular interests was developed, as if only interests could and can
rightly exist. In part, as Gordon Wood mentions, this was a throwback to a
kind of medieval self-government, which the colonists were long familiar
with. But, fully established, it was as we already heard from Madison
something unprecedented: a government from which the people in their
collective capacity had been excluded no less than had been virtual
representation, that vestige of mimetic participation once lodged in a
structure of antiquity.
FAD: The physical distance between the countries must have been a
critical factor in the rejection of the British claim to virtual representation.
RHK: Perhaps. But distance is one thing. What categorically undermined

the legitimacy of virtual representation was the space, not the distance.
We can travel considerable, even unthinkable distances and at those
removes and still think of each other with overwhelming intensity,
affection, obedience, suspicion, and so on. In space, however, these
experiences become problematic; we require the whole of modern
172 Chapter Nine
psychology and now pharmacology to make sense of them, usually

with the intention of achieving enough freedom from these feelings to be
able rationally to pursue self-interest. In modern representational terms,
however odd the comparison sounds, the influence of the moon can no
more be represented in us than the senator of the state of Oklahoma can
stand up in Congress and presume to represent Rhode Island.
FAD: You jumped ahead there in some way. But youre saying that virtual
representation does not occur in space, but direct representation is the only
credible form of representation in space?
RHK: Yes, direct representation is a geographically stipulated franchise,

spatialized on a mechanical model of voting in which representatives are
to serve as vehicles of each regions particular interests. But while the
representation is geographical, the question of the relationship of mind to
mind, mind to region, of mind to nature, became entirely aporetic other
than insofar as the region serves the interests of the population located
there. The quirk is that this spatialized form of representation effectively
has nothing to do with where it is. Up until environmentalists got in their
way, for instance, Americans were knowingly hunting the bald eagle
their own national symbol into extinction. The demystification of virtual
representation was followed by a new form of domination occurring in
space, but by magnitudes more rapacious as an engine for the domination
of nature.
FAD: Do you remember that passage in Tocqueville on Americans and

nature that we discussed the other day? Its to the point, if I can find it.
Here it is, Europeans think a lot about the wild, open spaces of America,
but the Americans themselves hardly give them a thought. The wonders of
inanimate nature leave them cold, and, one may almost say, they do not
see the marvellous forest surrounding them until the trees begin to fall
beneath the axe. What they see is something different. The American
people see themselves marching through wilderness.
RHK: That hits the spot; there we go camping. Though I dont see why
Tocqueville limited his observation to what Americans make of
inanimate nature. Because, now that everyone aspires to look like an 8th
grade gym teacher, if you watch people working out with weights and on
treadmills in health clubs, Tocquevilles marching through wilderness is
how Americans approach their bodies as well. For Americans, nature is
somewhere you bring your barbells, your skateboard; you ride your bike
over it; you go there to exercise. It is where you pursue your interest, and
where no one can tell you you cant. Thats how our peculiar cloud of
nationalism hovers over this landscape and its inhabitants.
FAD: Space, then, is no less the contrary of mimesis than it is the contrary
of nature? And, if Im following you, youre implying that a system, in the
modern sense, is the capacity to transform nature into space? I see. I was
confused. I thought Madisons statement about the exclusion of the
collective capacity meant the exclusion of the numerical majority. But
youve interpreted it in terms of the mimetic capacity.
RHK: Thats it. Where there is space, there are objects of systematic
management, but, categorically, there is no nature, or more exactly, as
Yves Simon points out, no natures. In American government we have a
system of interests, but no nature. Im repeating myself. But, as to
Madisons collective capacity, you werent exactly confused since the
numerical majority was excluded by the representational system that
developed, as we could hardly overlook now when one percent of the U.S.
population has forty percent of the wealth and the top twenty five percent
of the population altogether has more than eighty percent of the wealth.
FAD: Im aware of those statistics, and theyre appalling. But, to go back

to the first part of your thought about space and nature, is there a way in
this to say what space is?
RHK: There is at least plenty to think about in the fact that in the same
century that Pascal unforgettably perceived, as if for the first time, the
shock of modern space in the often quoted words, the silence of these
infinite spaces terrifies me, Hobbes wrote that space is the phantasm of a
thing existing without thought.
FAD: What did Hobbes meant by that?
RHK: We need some background. Hobbes was criticizing the Cartesian

dualism at the same time that he acknowledged the transformation of
reality that Descartes comprehended with unparalleled genius in the idea
that the body is in space while the mind is not. This dualism of mind and
body was and remains implicit in the mathematical mechanization of space
hardly something that Descartes simply foisted on us and amounts to a
fundamental philosophical structuration of the prohibition on casting a
spell. The emergence of space in the Cartesian dualism registered the end
174 Chapter Nine
of the witchcraft terrors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Space,

as such, is a kind of defence mechanism against those spells and frights. If
the mind is not in space, the ancient spells fall powerless. That was a
tremendous achievement in the disenchantment of reality. It was the
development of the capacity to dismiss the frights of the night that really
were none, and deserved to go their own way. Better we do without 17th
century Salem. But this achievement left us effectively in outer space,
locatable with tremendous, even atomic precision somewhere where we
dont know where we are.
FAD: Didnt Adorno say somewhere that space is absolute desolation?
RHK: Yes, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, but he didnt develop the

idea there. In Current of Music, however, he wants to understand how
radio broadcast spatializes music in a way that voids possible musical
experience.
FAD: In the earlier part of our conversation, you were pointing out that
space is contrary to mimesis; but in terms of what you were just
developing a moment ago with regard to Descartes, the point is that space
is the contrary of thought.
RHK: That seems like a confusion because we suppose that mimesis and
thought are two completely distinct capacities. But it was the emergence of
space itself that codified them as being these two spheres that are utterly
exclusive of each other. Space establishes the boundary that finally carves
away the mimetic element from thought. Thought becomes method as
what most of all is not transmittable across space; whereas mimesis is all
those experiences that, as we were saying earlier, breach space uncannily
you touch your elbow, and without being aware, as if compelled, as if
under a spell, I find myself touching my elbow.
FAD: But we do transmit thought by words across space.
RHK: The only way we can conceive of this, in space, is that what is
communicated is sound waves, which we code and decode; likewise, are
words on a page thoughts, or are they not? And how do we think we hear
music? In space, we code and decode mechanical again, more
accurately, kinetic phenomena, what physicists call corpuscular
movement, a concept of movement that is oblivious to all that antiquity
meant by the concept, let alone what van Gogh, for instance, meant when
he wrote his brother about movement in his paintings and what it strove
for.
FAD: Still, we do have the sense of participating in thought, whether in

having this conversation or in reading it, I would think.
RHK: Theres the puzzle. Evidently, were in deeper than we can

understand. And if we juxtapose Hobbes comment that space is the
phantasm of a thing existing without thought a very modern idea in its
grasp of disenchantment itself as the epitome of enchantment with
Madisons comment, that this government succeeded at excluding the
collective capacity of the people, then their thinking has been brought
into a relation with what weve most of all been wondering about in this
conversation, which is why we are unable to represent to ourselves the
common good. Incidentally, this is getting to be a pretty long
conversation; we should close it up, dont you think?
FAD: Sure, but just a couple of things. You still havent exactly said why
you think the country cant represent the common good to itself.
RHK: Youre right. The most important point always remains to be said,
doesnt it: What we have for a system of governmental representation only
comprehends interests. But the common good is not an interest, not even
the interest of the greatest happiness for the greatest number; it is even
opposed to the common interest. If we need to terrify ourselves into
understanding this, it is enough to remember that the I. G. in the initials of
I. G. Farben (Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie), meant Community
of Interest. We can all go to war in a community of interest, and often
have. By contrast, what cant be the object of an intention the common
good cannot be the fulfilment of an interest, those perfect summer days,
for instance, which are now disappearing into unprecedented heavy
weather, blazing heat and tornadoes. This is not to say that everything
unintended expresses the common good or that intentions cant go into the
common good though if they do, they disappear into it as the
extinguishing of the subject in the object. But the good itself does not
fulfil an intention, not anymore than shaping the toll of what transpires, if
it could be shaped, would fulfil an intention. As you were saying earlier,
the common good could not be an object of assertion not any more than
truth could be.
176 Chapter Nine
FAD: As youve discussed the transformation from virtual to direct

representation in terms of the emergence of modern space, it turns out to
be part of a development that goes considerably beyond the restructuring
of political representation. This all-encompassing transformation must
have many implications for aesthetics.
RHK: Art is the quintessential object of virtual representation. All of the

problems of modern aesthetics revolve around the question of how to
comprehend this irrevocably mimetic object in a spatialized social
structure that can only make sense of direct representation. It is largely
true that art became what we know as art when it became art in space; the
frame of a painting, which was once the symbolic threshold of the beyond
and of a potential movement, or translation, across that threshold,
became a limiting band of a mimetic organization in opposition to mere
space, in which, by contrast, investigations of a pictorial space would
develop over several hundred years that would present us with objects that
are anything but the phantasm of a thing existing without thought.
FAD: The angels to be seen on the walls of the Hagia Sophia were not in
space?
RHK: No; you cant pray to, or in the most profound sense, venerate an
object in space however much we may longingly mug at it. But Phillip
Gustons paintings certainly are situated in space; and the way thought
occurs stranded within his pictorial objects bears comparison with what
happens in Bonnards work. They draw the dialectic of space into pictorial
space itself in the way that, in Guston, thought is isolated in an eye, or in
rows of legs, all located within what sometimes looks to his detractors as
simply the unmastered larger field of the canvas. Or, compare that with
what happens in Bonnard, where thought is fragmented in its refraction
among isolated persons and mirrored reflections, and almost concretely
there, sealed in, inside a forehead perhaps tilted out toward the viewer, as
if one could wrap with ones knuckles on the thoughts contained there,
except for that at another angle that same head vanishes into the paintings
own abstract pulsation of colour. Artworks, by contrast, that want to
activate space and do without any kind of frame artworks that hope to
survive surrendering the mimetic boundary and instead absorb the
empirical world into themselves have set themselves an almost
insuperable challenge. If we had time for it, we could figure out a lot right
now about the nature of photographic space by considering why putting a
photograph in a frame looks so phony.
FAD: Youre suggesting that photography doesnt actually break with

empirical space?
RHK: Thats an interesting idea. It may be that photography is somehow

limited to the reproduction of mechanical, in the sense, of kinetic space
the impossibility that Rackstraw Downs work could be made from
photographs would seem to more than confirm that. But, I dont know;
wed have to give it quite a lot of thought
FAD: Well, if we arent going to talk about photography, you are all the
same touching on related debates arent you? over committed art, on
one hand, and high-modernism on the other.
RHK: Yes, and that is something we can discuss in a condensed way to

end this discussion. The idea of committed art derives from the unity of
political structure and culture that took fixed shape with the modern
system of nations in the Peace of Westphalia, which brought peace in the
doctrine of cuius regio, eius religio. Culture had become an entirely new
power as a nascent element of nationalism that offered every potential
weapon for the intentions of counter-reformation and a politically betrayed
reformation of which we and all of our advertisements, and now, political
advertisements are the progeny. It needs to be emphasized: This idea of
the unity of culture and politics was completely remote from medieval
culture, when no one, least of all the aristocracy, could have been
interested in the fusion of the two. Committed art, then, in the sense of
art that strives for an immediate political purpose, follows in the spirit of
that national transformation of culture, of culture as the vehicle of interest,
that thinks it will fight its way out of the steel lined paper bag were in by
proving that everything above and below the clouds is itself a function of
interests and that what presents itself as virtual representation is always
covertly direct representation. It dutifully portages culture, whatever the
explicit political statement. By contrast, what a moment ago you referred
to as high modernism a phrase that has done endless harm in the way
it doubles up with high culture is art that, when it is art, is as opposed
to culture as it is to nation, though not in the sense of claiming to be
something on the order of a world citizen, but as memory of nature in the
subject. It sounds exaggerated, and Im sure it could be better said if I
werent running out of steam, but the entire history of modern art has been
nothing less than a desperate struggle and longing for reality as the only
possible form in which we can shape what genuinely transpires, as the
shaping of the toll, such as the common good now can only be shaped.
178 Chapter Nine
FAD: Thank you!
References
Acton, Lord. Essays on Freedom and Power. New York: Beacon Press,
1948.
Adorno, T. W. Aesthetic Theory. Minnesota: University of Minnesota
Press, 1997.
. Current of Music. New York: Polity Press, 2007.
. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Cobban, Alfred. In Search of Humanity. New York: George Braziller,
1960.
Hauser, Arnold. The Social History of Art, vols. 2 and 3. New York:
Routledge, 2006.
Hobbes, Thomas. The Metaphysical System of Thomas Hobbes. London:
Open Court, 1905.
Lynn, Barry C. Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism. New York:
Wiley and Sons, 2010.
Simon, Yves R. The Great Dialogue of Nature and Space. Indiana: St.
Augustines Press, 2001.
de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. New York: Harper, 1966.
Wood, Gordon. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York:
Vintage Books, 1993.
. Representation in the American Revolution (Revised Edition).
Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2008.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Fabio Akcelrud Duro holds a Ph.D. from Duke Universitys Literature

Program. He is currently Professor of Literary Theory at the State
University of Campinas (Unicamp). He is the author of Modernism and
Coherence: Four chapters of a negative aesthetics (Peter Lang, 2008), co-
edited Modernist Group Dynamics (CSP, 2008), and published several
articles on Anglo-American modernism, the Frankfurt School and
Brazilian critical theory.
Jonathan Dettman is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish

and Portuguese and the Program in Critical Theory at the University of
California, Davis. He researches Latin American literature, film and
history. His dissertation examines the relationship between social and
aesthetic forms in post-Soviet Cuban novels. Recently published articles
appear in A Contracorriente and La Habana Elegante.
Rodrigo Duarte received his PhD from the University of Kassel in 1990
and in the same year became professor of Philosophy at the Federal
University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). Since 2006 he has been president of
the Brazilian Association for Aesthetics (ABRE). He published, apart from
numerous articles and chapters of collective works, the following books:
Marx e a natureza em O capital (Loyola, 1986), Mmesis e racionalidade
(Loyola, 1993), Adornos. Nove ensaios sobre o filsofo frankfurtiano (Ed.
UFMG, 1997), Adorno/Horkheimer & a Dialtica do esclarecimento
(Jorge Zahar, 2002), Teoria crtica da indstria cultural (Ed. UFMG,
2003), Dizer o que no se deixa dizer. Para uma filosofia da expresso
(Ed. Argos, 2008) and Deplatzierungen. Aufstze zur sthetik und
kritischen Theorie (Max Stein Verlag, 2009).
Robert Hullot-Kentor is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the

School of Visual Arts in New York City. He has written extensively on
Th. W. Adorno and translated several of Adornos major works, including
Aesthetic Theory and Philosophy of New Music. He is the author of Things
Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Th. W. Adorno (Columbia
U.P., 2008).
180 About the Authors
Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst in private practice in

Seattle, Washington. She is a member of the International Psychoanalytic
Association and a graduate of the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society,
where she now serves on the faculty. Dr. Nicholsen studied with Theodor
Adorno in Frankfurt am Main in 1965-66 and has translated a number of
his works, including Prisms (with Samuel M. Weber; Spearman, 1967,
reprinted MIT Press, 1982), Notes to Literature volumes I and II
(Columbia University Press, 1991 and 1992) and Hegel: Three Studies
(MIT Press, 1993), as well as a number of works by other members of the
Frankfurt School. She is the author of Exact Imagination, Late Work: On
Adornos Aesthetics (MIT Press, 1997) and The Love of Nature and the
End of the World: the Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern
(MIT Press, 2002).
Gerhard Richter is Professor of German and Director of the Graduate

Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis. He is the
author of Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (2nd ed.
2002); sthetik des Ereignisses: SpracheGeschichteMedium (2005);
Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers Reflections from Damaged
Life (2007); and the forthcoming Afterness: Figures of Following in
Modern Thought and Aesthetics. His edited volumes include Benjamins
Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory
(2002); Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship (2002); Sound Figures of
Modernity: German Music and Philosophy (co-ed., 2006); Language
without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity (2010); and the
forthcoming book by Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature: A
Conversation on Photography.
Heinz Steinert, b. 1942, Ph.D. and psychoanalytic training in Vienna,

Austria; worked as a delivery-van driver, dance musician, business-
location consultant, psychologist in the probation service; 1973-2000
Director of the Institute for the Sociology of Law and Criminology,
Vienna; since 1977 Professor of Sociology at the Goethe-University,
Frankfurt, Germany. Publications in the fields of sociology of law, the
welfare state, social history of discipline and punishment, Critical Theory
and the Frankfurt School, jazz, art, aesthetic theory, culture industry.
Books in English: (ed) Welfare Policy from Below: Struggles Against
Social Exclusion in Europe (2003); Culture Industry (2003); article
Sociology of Deviance in The Sage Handbook of Sociology, Calhoun et
al. (eds) (2005).
Culture Industry Today 181
Yoshikazu Takemine is Assistant Professor of German at Nihon

University, Tokyo. His research areas include Critical Theory, media
studies and German and Japanese cinema. His publications include Das
revoltionre Primat des stummen Films: Stummheit und Musik in Walter
Benjamins frheren Schriften, in Poetica 34-4 (2002), Adorno, His View
on Technical Reproduction (in Japanese: Seikyusha 2007) and Dialektik
der Gastfreundschaft. Zu Adornos Deutung der Odysseus-Figur, in
Figuren des Transgressiven das Ende und der Gast, edited by Kanichiro
Omiya (indicium 2009). He is currently working on a book dealing with
German film exiles.

Culture Industry Today

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Culture Industry Today

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Culture Industry Today

Culture Industry Today

Fabio Akcelrud Duro

This book first published 2010

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Copyright 2010 by Fabio Akcelrud Duro and contributors

ISBN (10): 1-4438-1955-7, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1955-8

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 43

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 71

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 93

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 113

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 133

Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 141

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 155

About the Authors ................................................................................... 179

FABIO AKCELRUD DURO

Strong concepts have a particular tendency to live double lives. In one

THE EXACT SENSE IN WHICH THE CULTURE

Boom Town Revenant

in China is still very laggard if compared with that in developed

Homophony and Spontaneous Generation

and the housing industry. These industrial appellations of which the

Syllabic Ear Training I

Syllabic Ear Training II

The One Appetite of Commercial Reason

rationality disintegrates markets and societies worldwide. Internally to the

elucidating the elements of Adornos own concept. Archaeological means

Vestigial Physiognomy and Lapsed Imperative

hospitality industry has perhaps thus become evident to us as well: these

Velocity of Aversive Disinterest

I too am against everything

Adorno did not in his essay go on to document the historical

I kept looking at the fetishes. I understood: I too am against everything. I

Thus Picasso on an afternoon in 1907 at the Trocadero Museum of

Sum Total of Insight Interdicted

infinitely expanded horizon of insight into the primitive in us and in reality

Removing the Barbarians from our Minds

word the primitive itself be shunned, as if nothing less than severing

WHAT BARBARISM IS?

An enormous nation happy in a style,

Prometheus stole fire to distract the

What interests us in the thought and writings of T. W. Adorno cannot

a single almost, semi, or formerly barbaric. In the Dialectic of

A New Form of Barbarism

another futures market and power of delusion.4 In Adornos words,

to date in history had otherwise been a movement from barbarism to

in this moment being forcibly vacated by the tens of hundreds of

as yet to open its eyes. Equality is a means to an end as a technique of

The Lid on the Garbage Can

red-brick buildings the latter already empty shells slated for

Lapsed Insight/Each Word

they now verge on an irreversible vacancy. They remain actual exclusively

In the awareness of their disintegration, as of the possibilities that they

Plain People in Plain Towns

anonymously intimate and intimately anonymous you as an economy of

to crack with pained tenderness even where it is conceptually hardened to

it.20 Benjamins pictograph of the sadist who gives nature expression in

wanted to make the experience of natural beauty central to his aesthetics.

THE MEANS OF INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION

Culture industry is not the media

commodification of the intellectual aspect of labour. Given that all work