“Conformism has replaced consciousness” – Weekend
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On September 11, 1903, Theodor Adorno was born – a German philosopher, a consistent critic of the cultural industry, who believed that it deprives humanity of reflection and makes it controlled. We re-read his works and found out how, with the help of culture, humanity has learned to protect itself from collisions with reality.
1
In fact, pleasure is an escape, but not an escape, as is commonly thought, from a terrible reality, but an escape from the slightest thought of confronting it. The freedom that entertainment promises us is freedom from thoughts that could lead to objections.
“Cultural industry: education as a way to deceive the masses”
2
The phrase that the world wants to be deceived has acquired a hitherto unimaginable truthfulness. People not only let themselves be fooled; if this guarantees them even the most fleeting pleasure, they themselves want to be plunged into deception.
“Aesthetic theory”
3
The escape from reality that any branch of the cultural industry promises us is framed in the same way as the bride kidnapping in the American cartoon, where in the dark the father himself holds up a ladder for the kidnapper. The culture industry presents the same everyday routine as paradise. Any escape is doomed in advance to lead the fugitive to the starting point. Pleasure provokes obedience, selflessly striving for it.
“Cultural industry: education as a way to deceive the masses”
4
Formally, freedom is guaranteed to everyone. No one should be held accountable for their way of thinking. Instead, from a young age, everyone is a prisoner of the system of churches, clubs, trade unions and all sorts of other associations, which are the most sensitive instrument of social control. Anyone who does not want to be ruined must take care not to be – by his standards – too lightweight.
“Cultural industry: education as a way to deceive the masses”
5
The power of the culture industry ideology is such that conformism has replaced consciousness.
“Cultural industry: education as a way to deceive the masses”
6
Any responsibility of a specific person is dissolved in the abstract idea of universal injustice. The scoundrel turns the matter around as if he was treated unfairly: “If only you knew, young man, what life really is!”
“Minima Moralia.” Reflections from a damaged life”
7
If humanism has any meaning at all, it consists precisely in the fact that humanism is the discovery that people in their activities do not dissolve in immediate natural determination.
“Problems of Moral Philosophy”
8
The movie shows a chronicle of events: the invasion of the Mariana Islands, including Guam. One gets the impression that these are not battles, but mechanical road work and blasting, carried out with immeasurably increased zeal, or “smoking out,” the destruction of insects on a telluric scale. Operations continue until there is nothing left but scorched earth. The enemy appears as both a patient and a corpse. Like the Jews under fascism, he is only an object for administrative and technical measures, and if he resists, then his opposition immediately takes on the same character.
“Minima Moralia.” Reflections from a damaged life”
9
The most satanic thing is that in a certain sense, more initiative is required here than in waging war the old fashioned way, and all the energy of the subject seems to be spent on achieving subjectlessness. Complete and utter inhumanity is the fulfillment of Edward Gray’s humane dream: the dream of war without hatred.
“Minima Moralia.” Reflections from a damaged life”
10
Music, if used for entertainment, helps to bring people into a state of silence, contributes to the death of speech as a way of expression, and leads to the inability to communicate. It becomes part of the silence caused by anxiety, work and resignation.
“On the nature of fetish in music and the regression of listening”
eleven
The recognition that films spread ideology is itself a widespread ideology.
“Minima Moralia.” Reflections from a damaged life”
12
Films that offer escapism are not so disgusting because they turn away from an exhausted existence, but because they do not do so with enough energy, since they themselves are equally exhausted because the satisfaction they create coincides with the shame of reality, with failure. There are no dreams in dreams.
“Minima Moralia.” Reflections from a damaged life”
13
Forgetting what has just happened is accompanied by anger because you first have to dissuade yourself of what everyone knows before you can dissuade others.
“What does “working through the past” mean?
14
Among today’s experts in lying, it has long lost its honest function – to deceive about something real. Nobody believes anyone, and everyone knows. They lie only in order to make it clear to another that they do not need him, that they do not value him at all, and the one who lies does not care what the other thinks about him.
“Minima Moralia.” Reflections from a damaged life”
15
Only by adapting to extreme insecurity can we now count on security. It seems like permission to escape, allowing you to find yourself in another place as quickly as possible.
“Minima Moralia.” Reflections from a damaged life”
16
Psychoanalysis likes to take credit for the fact that it restores to people the ability to enjoy, impaired by neurotic illness. <...> What state must the dominant consciousness have reached so that the obvious propaganda of the passion for wastefulness and fun under the splashes of champagne, hitherto characteristic only of embassy attaches in Hungarian operettas, began to be elevated with brutal seriousness to the maxim of correct life.
“Minima Moralia.” Reflections from a damaged life”
17
Part of the mechanism of domination [психоанализа] is a ban on the knowledge of the suffering produced by this domination, and from the gospel of cheerfulness leads a direct path to the creation of human slaughterhouses somewhere on the outskirts of Poland – so far away that any of his compatriots could convince himself that he did not hear the cries of pain. Here it is – a diagram of the unshakable “capacity of pleasure.”
“Minima Moralia.” Reflections from a damaged life”
18
A stereotype as a means of translating reality into a questionnaire, where there are many possible answers that are summed up and evaluated with plus and minus signs, in essence, leaves the world as distant, abstract, “unexperienced” as before.
“A Study of the Authoritarian Personality”
19
Having fun has always meant: not daring to think about anything, forgetting about suffering even where and when it is shown.
“Dialectics of Enlightenment. Philosophical fragments”
20
It seems as if the feeling of guilt, from which so many people defend themselves, does not correspond to any guilt at all, but comes from themselves, from the peculiarities of their mental structure.
“What does “working through the past” mean?
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