13 November 2007

"There is actually a neurotic mechanism of stupidity in listening, too; the arrogantly ignorant rejection of everything unfamiliar is its sure sign. Regressive listeners behave like children. Again and again and with stubborn malice, they demand the one dish they have once been served."

"That it happens, that the music is listened to, this replaces the content itself. The ecstasy takes possession of its object by its own compulsive character. It is stylized like the ecstasies savages go into in beating the war-drums. It has convulsive aspects reminiscent of St. Vitus' dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals. Passion itself seems to be produced by defects. But the ecstatic ritual betrays itself as pseudo-activity by the moment of mimicry."

---Adorno, "On the Festish Character in Music and Regression of Listening," The Culture Industry

"The renunciation of resistance is ratified by regression."

"Ecstasy is the motor of imitation. It is this rather than self-expression and individuality which forcibly produces the behavior of the victims which recalls...the motor reflex spasms of the maimed animal."

"Participation in mass culture itself stands under the sign of terror. Enthusiasm...reveals the fear of disobedience."

---Adorno, "The Schema of Mass Culture," The Culture Industry

You have to love Adorno for his bold and incisive statements. He truly is a critical thinker par excellence. With minds like Adorno's, culture qua cultural intellect still stands a chance.

He might disagree.

In The Culture Industry (1991) essays, Adorno brings everything from music, mass culture, television, film, and hobbies qua free time, to the issue of resignation qua ideology versus praxis under critical analysis and attack. Going beyond mere floccinaucinihilipilification, Adorno takes mass culture to task, doing everything short of burning it in effigy of protest.

In "On the Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening," Adorno blames the commodification of music - musical materialism - for the inability of individuals to communicate, speak, listen, and to pay attention. He goes on to write of the liquidation of the individual as the real signature of the new musical situation in which the act of buying the ticket for the musical event rather than the musical content is worshipped to the point of intoxication. Familiarity to music becomes the surrogate for quality, so individuals mistake having a voice for talent. According to Adorno, music is provocative nonsense because the radio wears out and exposes music - music deemed qualitatively 'good' only because it is recognizable from ad nauseum radio-play repetition.

There is a great truth to this today - and not just with music...

In "The Schema of Mass Culture," Adorno describes mass culture as adaptation, devoid of conflict, devoid of thinking, and leading to regression and decay. To him, the supreme prize in mass culture is to be "Mr. Average Customer". Mass culture is a system of signals signaling itself, in which visibility is thrust on everything possible with a monopolistic compulsion to handle, manipulate, and absorb everything. In mass culture, he identifies an organized mania for connecting everything with everything in a totality of public secrets as a sort of collective sickness.

He likens mass culture to competitive sports:

1) both require extreme accomplishments that can be exactly measured,

2) both provide training for life when things have gone wrong,

3) both turn consumers to howling devotees of the stadium, and

4) both are approved as passports to the monopolized life valid if paid for by blood with the surrender of life and an impassioned obedience to hated compulsion.

He then develops the mass culture concept further by identifying it as an industry, juxtaposed against true culture ("The Culture Industry Reconsidered," The Culture Industry):

For Adorno, true culture raised protest against petrified relations thereby honoring humans. The culture industry assimilates and integrates humans into those same petrified relations, thus forcing humans into debasement again.

Referring to Walter Benjamin's description of traditional art as having an "aura", Adorno describes the culture industry as having a decaying aura resembling a "foggy mist".

What passes as progress in the culture industry is nothing short of eternal sameness. This industry of standardization and rationalized distribution is the spirit of Marxian ideology because what it claims to preserve it destroys, and its consensus only serves to strengthen blind opague authority. As Adorno explains, the culture industry exploits the idea that the world wants to be deceived and so it drives people to force their eyes shut.

In "Free Time," Adorno writes throughout of a truncated, atrophied, defamed, and crippled imagination that is cultivated and inculcated into the individual. To combat this trend is critical thinking as a force of resistence, for as Adorno states, "the uncompromisingly critical thinker...is in truth the one who does not give up" because his "open thinking...takes a position as a figuration of praxis...more closely related to praxis truly involved in change than in a position of mere obedience for the sake of praxis" ("Resignation").

Indeed, this is the real genius of Adorno (ibid):

"It is rather the task of thought to analyse the reasons behind this situation and to draw the consequences from these reasons. It is the responsibility of thought not to accept the situation as finite. If there is any chance of changing the situation, it is only through undiminished thought."

Until individuals can take time in critical pause, they will encounter no true happiness:

"The happiness visible to the eye of a thinker is the happiness of mankind."

Although the culture industry commodifies the resigned (unthinking) individual, Adorno reminds all that thinking - critical thinking - can never be diminished, vanquished, or taken away. It is the individual's duty to safeguard this asset and to utilize it with an unwavering persistence.

Currently, not only are individuals holding fast to critical thought, but also they are exercising a daedal imagination with great conation. As I will soon explain, creative potentiality is manifest, materializing in mediated transcendence in multiple virtuality as our current reality.

Adorno would be proud...