Grumpy Adorno
Jet-lagged on Laguna Beach, surrounded by the happy beneficiaries of monopoly capitalism, I saw convertibles filled with tattooed, tanned, muscled young men -- all their rebellion is fueled by the 400 horsepower engines and their lovingly detailed rides. From behind their dark, silver-rimmed sunglasses, and with jaundiced eye, they check out the skimpily clad, blonde teenage girls standing at the stoplight, and the girls arch their eyebrows as they arch their backs, ready to be bought and sold. They vie for the honor of being treated like chattel. Everyone is worshipping the idol of the money power and flaunting their leisure time, blessed by the California winter, the exclusivity of the neighborhood, the proximity of cars that cost more than country houses.
I thought of grumpy Adorno, regarding the indifferent, ignorant crowds of Southern California, their self-absorbed enjoyments, their tawdry consolations.
When Adorno wrote oh so many years ago "that only the deep unconscious mistrust of the masses" had prevented them from accepting empirical reality as it had been sold to them by the culture industry little did he know that it would be the Right-Wing in the US who would eventually be able to best exploit that margin of mistrust, that deep unconscious and turn the culture industry into a contemptible object of its darkest fantasy -- the "liberal media."
The truth that this army of resentment has accepted as its own is that the liberal media have stomped on their loves, debased their enjoyments, interfered with their joy -- and that they, the righteous masses, Nixon's moral majority would come to its own and triumph and see that justice be done and the order of the world restored. So with false promises of emancipation from the "liberal media," the Republicans demand ever greater degrees of submission to its leader.
From The Culture Industry Revisited, Adorno writes that the Culture Industry
"impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves. These, however would be the precondition for a democratic society which needs adults who have come of age in order ot sustain itself and develop. If hte masses have been unjustly reviled from abovea s masses, the culture industry is not among the least responsible for makign them into masses and then despising them, while obstructing the emancipaiton for which human beings are as ripe as the productive forces of the epoch permit."
From above the "masses" are flattered in official dictum and the higher-ups the most infantilized of all.
I thought of grumpy Adorno, regarding the indifferent, ignorant crowds of Southern California, their self-absorbed enjoyments, their tawdry consolations.
When Adorno wrote oh so many years ago "that only the deep unconscious mistrust of the masses" had prevented them from accepting empirical reality as it had been sold to them by the culture industry little did he know that it would be the Right-Wing in the US who would eventually be able to best exploit that margin of mistrust, that deep unconscious and turn the culture industry into a contemptible object of its darkest fantasy -- the "liberal media."
The truth that this army of resentment has accepted as its own is that the liberal media have stomped on their loves, debased their enjoyments, interfered with their joy -- and that they, the righteous masses, Nixon's moral majority would come to its own and triumph and see that justice be done and the order of the world restored. So with false promises of emancipation from the "liberal media," the Republicans demand ever greater degrees of submission to its leader.
From The Culture Industry Revisited, Adorno writes that the Culture Industry
"impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves. These, however would be the precondition for a democratic society which needs adults who have come of age in order ot sustain itself and develop. If hte masses have been unjustly reviled from abovea s masses, the culture industry is not among the least responsible for makign them into masses and then despising them, while obstructing the emancipaiton for which human beings are as ripe as the productive forces of the epoch permit."
From above the "masses" are flattered in official dictum and the higher-ups the most infantilized of all.
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