Theodor Adorno Quotes on Culture

41 quotes

1. 'In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon hearing the voice of a 'crooner'. Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impoverished and barren existence. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized.'

2. 'Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.'

4. 'The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.'

6. 'A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.'

10. 'All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.'

14. 'Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.'

22. 'Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.'

23. 'Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain.'

24. 'Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.'

25. '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. But in erecting truth directly amid the general untruth, it perverts the former into the latter.'

30. 'Genuine things are those to which commodities and other means of exchange can be reduced, particularly gold. But like gold, genuineness, abstracted as the proportion of fine metal, becomes a fetish.'

34. 'He who integrates is lost.'

38. 'History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.'

40. 'If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.'

43. 'In many people it is already an impertinence to say 'I'.'

46. 'In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.'

49. 'In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.'

50. 'In the nineteenth century the Germans painted their dream and the outcome was invariably vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable and it was already a dream.'

55. 'Life has become the ideology of its own absence.'

56. 'Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals. '

61. 'Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.'

65. 'Normality is death.'

69. 'People at the top are closing ranks so tightly that all possibility of subjective deviation has gone, and difference can be sought only in the more distinguished cut of an evening dress.'

77. 'Society is integral even before it undergoes totalitarian rule. Its organization also embraces those at war with it by co-ordinating their consciousness to its own.'

79. 'Taste is the ability to keep in balance the contradiction in art between the made and the apparent not-having-become; true works of art, however, never at one with taste, are those which push this contradiction to the extreme, and realize themselves in their resultant downfall.'

81. 'That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.'

83. 'The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good old days. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physical demythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, roofless wandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror.'

85. 'The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.'

86. 'The decay of giving is morrored in the distressing invention of gift-article, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give because one really does not want to.'

89. 'The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth. The total interconnectedness of the culture industry, omitting nothing, is one with total social delusion.'

94. 'The human is indissolubly linked with imitation: a human being only becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.'

95. 'The idea that after this war life will continue 'normally' or even that culture might be 'rebuilt' - as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation - is idiotic.'

96. 'The ideology of cultural conservatism which sees enlightenment and art as simple antitheses is false, among other reasons, in overlooking the moment of enlightenment in the genesis of beauty. Enlightenment does not merely dissolve all the qualities that beauty adheres to, but posits the quality of beauty in the first place.'

98. 'The intellectuals themselves are already so heavily committed to what is endorsed in their isolated sphere, that they no longer desire anything that does not carry the highbrow tag.'

99. 'The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.'

103. 'The new human type cannot be properly understood without awareness of what he is continuously exposed to from the world of things about him, even in his most secret innervations.'

109. 'The scientific industry has its exact counterpart in the kind of minds it harnesses: they no longer need to do themselves any violence in becoming their own voluntary and zealous overseers. Even if they show themselves, outside their official capacity, to be quite human and sensible being, they are paralysed by pathic stupidity the moment they begin to think professionally.'

114. 'The walk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.'

119. 'They are down to earth like their zoological forbears, before they got up on their hind-legs.'

124. 'Today it is seen as arrogant, alien and improper to engage in private activity without any evident ulterior motive. Not to be 'after' something is almost suspect.'

130. 'What has become alien to men is the human component of culture, its closest part, which upholds them against the world. They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of closeness.'

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