Standard issue

“Even those intellectuals who have all the political arguments against bourgeois ideology at their fingertips, undergo a process of standardization…What they subjectively fancy radical, belongs objectively so entirely to the compartment in the pattern reserved for their like, that radicalism is debased to abstract prestige, legitimation for those who know what an intellectual nowadays has to be for and what against.  The things they opt for have long since been just as accepted, in numbers just as restricted, in their hierarchy of values just as fixed, as those of student fraternities…their views…are allowed to partake only of pre-selected nutrition, cliches against cliches. [Van Gogh, Proust, books about forest animals, some stalwart spirit, and a few noisy jazz records that make you feel at once collective, audacious and comfortable]  Every opinion earns the approbation of friends, every argument is known by them before-hand.  That all cultural products, even non-conformist ones, have been incorporated into the distribution-mechanisms of large-scale capital, that in the most developed country a product that does not bear the imprimatur of mass-production can scarcely reach a reader, viewer, listener at all, denies deviationary longings their subject matter in advance.  Even Kafka is becoming a fixture in the sub-let studio…they no longer desire anything that does not carry the highbrow tag”

-Theodor Adorno, on ‘Expensive Reproduction’, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 206-7)

Assignment

“Because thought has by now been perverted into the solving of assigned problems, even what is not assigned is processed like a problem.  Though, having lost autonomy, no longer trusts itself to comprehend reality, in freedom, for its own sake.  This it leaves, respectfully deluded, to the highest-paid, thereby making itself measurable”

-Theodor Adorno, ‘IQ’, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 196)

Thought so.

“…the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar…knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience…Every thought which is not idle, however, bears branded on it the impossibility of its full legitimation, as we know in dreams that there are mathematics lessons, missed for the sake of a blissful morning in bed, which can never be made up”

-Theodor Adorno, “Gaps”, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 80-1)

A Task

“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”

-Theodor Adorno, “Johnny-Head-in-Air”, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005. Pg 56)

Underdogs

“In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so”

-Theodor Adorno, “They, the People”, 1951 (in Minima Moralia: reflections from damages life New York, NY: Verso. 2005)