“At its highest, the philosophical idea of culture [Bildungsidee] sought to form and to preserve natural existence. It meant both the repression of the animalistic in humanity through their adaptation to one another, and the salvage of the natural in opposition to the pressure of the decrepit, man-made order over and against them. The philosophy of Schiller – that Kantian and critic of Kant – was the most pregnant expression of the tension between these moments, while in Hegel’s theory of culture – under the name of externalization [Entäußerung] – just as in late Goethe, it is the desideratum of adaptation, in the midst of their humanism, that triumphs. Where such tension dissolves, adaptation becomes all-triumphant, and its measure becomes the merely existent. It prohibits the positive from erecting itself over and against the given. By the power of the pressure that it exerts on people, adaptation perpetuates the amorphous which it was intended to form – aggression. Just this, according to Freud’s insight, is the source of civilization’s discontents.”
Theodore Adorno
“Commitment,”
“Art is not a matter of pointing up alternatives but rather of resisting, solely through artistic form, the course of the world, which continues to hold a pistol to the heads of human beings.”
“The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises.”
“The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu.”
Paul Greer 