Episode 136: Adorno on the Culture Industry

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 136 is something like, how does the entertainment industry affect us? We read the culture industry enlightenment as Mass Deception by Theodor Adorno and max Horkheimer from 1944, as well as Adorno's 1963 article, Culture Industry Reconsidered. You can join the discussion, get the texts and lots More information@PartiallyExaminedLife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, complicit in my own helplessness in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:42 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, attentive but unimaginative in Austin, Texas.

0:48 Wes: This is Wes Alwan turning tragedy into the House of Moral Correction in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:55 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, massively deceived in Middleton, Wisconsin.

1:00 Mark: Beautiful. This seems like a good one to read. Our ground rules. They include, number one, try not to assume our audience has read what we're talking about or has any other background in philosophy. Number two, don't make arguments that hinge on something other than what we've agreed to read. Don't say you'd know what I was talking about if only you'd read Ted Cruz's Hegelian manifesto, the bad kind of abstraction. And number three, we will be rigorous and exact in all that we say, unless doing otherwise would be potentially more entertaining.

So this is our second foray into the Frankfurt School. And like our first foray, Erich Fromm, recently, we're not really going to talk about the Frankfurt School as a movement, although these guys were the founders, I guess, or among the founders. And this is a little more typical. I mean, they Frankfurt School guys, they mix Marx and Freud and they have things to say about culture. So that's definitely going on here.

1:52 Wes: I like that one sentence account of the Frankfurt School.

1:57 Unknown speaker: So.

1:58 Wes: So I think Adorno would have made a good dinner guest. Like, hey, this farm raised chicken is actually just indicates that you're complicit in the factory raised chickens because in the production of factory production of chickens because it sort of normalizes it or something like that anyway. Or, hey, Adorno, you want to go to see a movie on Friday? Oh, no, not an easy guy to make plans with.

2:24 Dylan: I'd rather go see a jazz ensemble

2:27 Mark: where the involuntary syncopation of the jazz players is a matter of elevating stumbling to a rule.

2:34 Wes: I love that, but I'm not sure that even a Beethoven. I went to see a Beethoven concert last night. I'M not even sure that would pass muster. Would anything pass muster?

2:43 Mark: Oh, I think he liked the old. He has a special place in his heart for all authentic culture, which I think is includes. Although he's really talking about bourgeois culture as the thing that happened before this. But what is characteristic of bourgeois art is that it's people who were. They didn't have to worry immediately about money. And so they could think about the internal logic of the artwork itself. And yes, that's an illusion. They were only able to do that because they were supported by kings or something like that. And a lot of them did then try to make money off of their things.

But he still thought that that was a secondary phenomenon. And what's happened now is that you can't even talk about creation of artwork without talking about how it will be commoditized. That is one of the things he has to say here, also about how the world is a giant shopping mall and a global cultural critique. Any other initial summaries or reactions before we get into the specifics here?

3:38 Seth: I agree with Wes. As a cocktail party guest, he would have been exceptionally tedious. But this essay is a quote factory.

3:47 Wes: Yes, it's a lot of great.

3:48 Seth: There's a lot of great tweetable content, ironically.

3:53 Wes: Yeah, well, I mean, a lot of great insights as well. True, but many of them probably wrong. But

4:00 Dylan: one of my initial reactions was a lot of great observations, but some of it seems anachronistic. Things have changed in mass culture and through technology in ways that seem to address some of the concerns that he has.

4:16 Seth: Or exacerbate them.

4:19 Dylan: Or exacerbate them. That would be the question.

4:21 Wes: Yeah, we should argue about that towards the end.

4:24 Mark: Yeah, that seemed one of the fun things about this. I was hoping from the follow up Culture Industry Reconsidered that it would be, you know, it's 20 years after the fact that he would be reflecting on how things have changed. But it's more. He's just.

4:35 Dylan: No, he didn't.

4:36 Mark: No, he's just kind of summing up the previous article and responding to some objections that we haven't read and so didn't seem that well.

4:43 Wes: The objection is basically that he's being a snob. That's the objection he's responding to.

4:47 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

4:48 Dylan: And if anything, he digs in on that.

4:50 Wes: Yeah. Snobbery is required because the good and the true are at stake.

4:55 Mark: We should put this in context. I know we've just been talking about Adorno. This is from the larger book is Dialectic of Enlightenment. The Culture industry is a chapter within that book. The book as a whole is written by Horkheimer and Adorno. Horkheimer definitely wrote the first essay. They both claim joint authorship on the whole thing, but normally Adorno is considered the main author of this essay. At least he wrote the first draft. So we'll probably not mention Horkheimer's name anymore. Or we could blame if there's an uncharacteristic sentence that we can say, oh, that's probably that Wily Horkheimer smuggled that in.

5:29 Wes: We're just going to make Adorno mean Adorno and or Horkheimer Adorkheimer a Doorkheim.

5:37 Seth: I'm sure that joke's never been made.

5:39 Wes: We would like that. We're making that. We're watering down his name and making it more vague in its associations.

5:46 Mark: And I hope it's been made because all that this podcast is about is reproducing cultural content. Nothing new coming out of here.

5:53 Seth: I am genuinely conflicted about whether we are part of the machine or not.

5:59 Wes: Should we start with what he. So at the beginning he's sort of responding to an idea that I think was commonly held that we might have concerning the origins of mass culture. And we might think this is just a product of technology and mass production and the way things get kind of sucked up into that, or maybe even the combination of that with American backwardness and philistinism. And he rejects that. So he has a more interesting thesis than that bare bones idea.

6:29 Dylan: And he means something by mass culture, something different than popular culture or folk culture.

6:34 Wes: Yeah. So in that follow up essay he said they purposefully chose the culture industry and not mass culture as their operative phrase. Because mass culture implies that it's a culture that's sort of the result of the spontaneous wishes of the masses, which sounds a lot like folk culture, when in fact he's going to give an account where it's imposed from the top down. It is. It is an ideology in the service of the powers that be.

7:01 Dylan: I also thought the word industry in particular should bring across the anti capitalist critique and the capitalist nature of mass culture, both in the United States, but also as a kind of seed of the National Socialists.

7:18 Seth: Yeah.

7:18 Mark: Did you want to talk in terms of a little more about the background of the book? I know you read the intro to it. Just as this whole thing came out of that these guys were Germans, they're writing in 1944. They were expats. Right. Certainly they were reflecting back on. Not that what is going on in America is the same exactly as what happened in pre war Germany that allowed Hitler to come to power. But that there are certainly that's one of the things that they're afraid of. There are some commonalities and at the very least they are trying to present a third way between if you look at Hitler's Germany as putting forward a we need to return to the Volk, we need to return to the old ways and reject modernity. And then on the other hand, what the us, what the Western powers were offering, which is rampant capitalism, he's trying to draw on Marx to present a third way.

8:11 Wes: Yeah, I mean he's explicitly arguing that it's cultural fascism. And even on around page 125 calls the distinction between business and private life, public life and private life that turns people into Nazis. He says that it's pretty explicit.

8:27 Dylan: He's less explicit about the following, but he clearly has in mind the media propaganda campaigns on the part of the National Socialists and the way they used film and media to engineer public opinion. And he sees it in America. He spends less time worrying about it directly to political ends, but maybe even more insidious ends that nonetheless deprive people of their freedom and make them mere objects of consumer activity. They're merely consumers then and they lose their freedom as a result of the top down engineering of the film industry. MGM controls your life. Disney makes you think that you're thinking for yourself, but you're not.

9:14 Seth: Before we get too far into the text, the subtitle of the essay is Enlightenment as Mass Deception and it is situated in a book called the Dialectic of Enlightenment. So I think it might make sense to just kind of tie back to that theme a little bit. The culture industry is a specific manifestation of something that they have a broader view of that I think it might help to just categorize.

9:40 Mark: Well, maybe one thing to say since we just covered Hegel Adorno, in fact one of his other books is called Negative Dialectics. And I gather that the big shift from Hegel is to say yes, just like Hegel thought you could sort of look at one historical period and predict what the next one is going to be because they're kind of reactions to each other. Or he has a lot, he writes a lot. We can tell from here he's a philosopher of art, he's a philosopher of music, he's a criticism. So he talks about how one style in culture will kind of kick off, ready the ground for another style. But what makes it negative, what makes it unlike Hegel, Is he doesn't think it's marching forward in progress. He thinks that it's just sort of flailing around based on the logic of the particular stage at hand.

10:21 Wes: I mean, maybe in the long term though, there's a synthesis. But in this case, the dialectical part is just the sense in which the Enlightenment turns into anti Enlightenment. This is what it says on page eight of the other essay we read. So that Enlightenment, which reflects the ascendance of knowledge as this kind of powerful reorganizing thing for human society turns into a means of mass deception. The technologies that we develop and our scientific progress towards knowledge ironically turn into their opposite. They become a means for the opposite. So those are the two antitheses. And I think Marx at least would say ultimately there's a resolution right politically in communism.

11:03 Mark: And there's some details in here about the Enlightenment view of individualism, how there was something contradictory about that. And you could see how that would break down. And there's other individual points about what you might consider the Enlightenment in terms of the rise of individual rights and the scientific method and all that.

11:21 Wes: But just bringing it back to the beginning, the other thing that I thought was interesting, his argument against the idea that mass culture is just a form of technology induced chaos, is the idea of sameness, the making of things identical as a feature of mass culture. So this is just in the first few pages.

11:38 Dylan: Yeah. In particular, by equating the whole of things with the parts, so that every whole is merely the sum of the parts. And so therefore there's no distinction between any whole and parts. There's nothing to be gained by things coming together. And so you just get kind of a proliferation of a big heap of things.

11:58 Seth: I just went back and I read the intro or the first part of the book just enough to try to get some context. And in those first few pages of the book, he talks about how the program of enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world, which is to say that knowledge meant power over nature. And knowledge is truly emergent. It's limitless and it has no maker. So it's not something you can design, it's something that just proliferates. And technology was the essence of this kind of knowledge. And that what human beings sought to learn from nature was how to dominate it, and in turn how to dominate human beings.

And so in his mind, the Enlightenment project, Enlightenment is totalitarianism. The Enlightenment project is about total domination through knowledge and technology. And one of the elements that gets you to the point of sameness is the idea that a project like this requires unity, there can't be anything outside of the system. So the idea that human behavior of all sorts of. Could be embodied in a science which could then be subsumed into a broader rubric of science. This notion we have of trying to connect all of the various physical sciences, you know, you're looking for that unifying theory which explains how gravity and all these other things fit together, is symptomatic of this limitless knowledge that just seeks to bring everything under its control.

There can't be anything outside of the system of knowledge. And in that sense, that's how it pushes, when we get to talking about the culture industry, the requirement for sameness. There can't be. You can't be different. There can't be any individuals that lie outside of the system. If there's anything outside, it has to be appropriated and subsumed underneath some kind of rubric.

13:54 Wes: Yeah. So on page 94, he starts with all these examples of what you might think are as cultural variety. Right. So different types of buildings, the more monumental buildings, are buildings that are kind of more utilitarian in structure. And he's going to argue that they are essentially the same in the sense that they serve the same overarching political purpose, which is to subjugate individual autonomy to capital. So that's where the sameness comes from. I think, even though aesthetically you might think there are all these different cultural manifestations, it's the overarching purpose which stamps them with sameness.

14:31 Mark: Which I think this, right off the bat we're getting an example of this thing that we're going to see throughout is when you say they serve an overarching purpose, like, well, whose purpose is that? Or what kind of explanation are we giving by saying this is the purpose of it? I don't want to try to answer that now, but we can't avoid that question that long.

14:49 Wes: Right.

14:50 Dylan: He Talks on page 99 a little more about the culture industry, putting an end to the distinctions. And he gives this image of a filing cabinet that creates order but not connections. Lacking both contrast and relatedness, the whole and the detail look alike. Their harmony, guaranteed in advance, mocks the painfully achieved harmony of the great bourgeois works of art. In Germany, even the most carefree films of democracy were overhung already by the graveyard stillness of dictatorship. So there he's clearly pointing to propaganda type films where you would be portraying a democratic type freedom, which was already just squeezed out of the situation.

15:31 Wes: Yeah. And in that place in particular, he's Talking about the sense in which art used to be focused, for instance, on subject matter, on a certain detail, internal logic. Yeah. And at the expense of the harmonic effect of the form as a whole. So the detail of the painting was more important than the overall composition. And in novels, plot structure was less important than, for instance, psychological penetration and so on. But the culture industry reverses that. It makes it more top down. And so the parts are sort of subjected to what he calls the formula, which reminded me of Dan a little bit. So it's this kind of malignant soul that determines the cultural product.

16:11 Mark: Well, and in keeping with this dialectical take on the advance of art, even what you're saying, it's not just the bad thing that culture industry offers us. And the good thing that was around before, it was in particular that detail where the focusing on the element outshone the focusing on the whole. That was something that came with expressionism and Romanticism. Romanticism, right. So, folks, go back to our Kant on aesthetics episode. That's sort of the starting point for enlightenment. Enlightenment obviously encompassed a number of years.

16:44 Wes: Romanticism rebels against the Enlightenment.

16:46 Mark: Yes, exactly. But they're both okay, I guess. I was. We haven't had one specifically on Romanticism. I thought as far as Adorno and Horkheimer were concerned, they're sort of part and parcel of modernity. Let's just say that modernity encompasses the Enlightenment and Romanticism. And now with this kind of critique, we are trying to get us toward postmodernity.

17:06 Dylan: Yeah, I think they lump Romanticism in with everything else as the before.

17:11 Wes: Yeah, Modernity starts around 1600 technically, so we're safe to lump those all into modernity.

17:19 Mark: So Kant is all about beauty, is about form. And when Adorno is looking back in here at what was cool about things before the present age, it's because of the focus on form taken in its deepest sense, the internal logic of the work that just as there's a dialectic between spurring one idea to another, one historical period to another, there is an internal logic that is dialectical in some. In the same way, I would think, where one part of a work of art is going to entail certain other things about it. And so making a well developed character or anything else like that is going to require obeying some not written rules.

In fact, they can't be written. That was kind of a big thing that from Kant to Santayana was emphasized that these rules are all post hoc. The that's kind of what makes a piece of art wonderful and individual, is that it's just. It's only when the creator is actually in there rooting around things. You can't just apply a formula and figure out what the rest of the details are going to be.

18:19 Dylan: But it's accessible to you. It gets revealed by you interacting with it. At the beginning of that section, page 98, he points to the Kantian schematism was a good thing. And the active contribution with which Kantian schematism still expected of its subjects is denied to the subject by industry. It purveys schematism as its first service to the customer.

18:42 Wes: Yeah. He calls it the schematism of production. So we have this really interesting idea that a Kantian cognitive category is actually being replaced with this cultural category that

18:52 Dylan: does this work, and that's the way in which you lose all your freedom.

18:55 Wes: Yep. You're not thinking with your own mind, you're thinking with the hive mind.

19:00 Dylan: Yeah. And to me, that understanding sort of made clear the tone of the paper. I mean, if you. You really feel like mass culture, the culture industry, is lobotomizing the entire populace and turning them into slaves, it'd be like the same kind of reaction you'd have to everybody becoming plugged into the matrix or something like that. Right. If it was actually happening. That kind of sense of appalling indignation at the ebbing enslavement of everybody.

19:28 Mark: All right, so I like how Dylan jumped ahead to get us to the work of art and what's wrong with works of art today? Because otherwise, this stuff earlier in the paper, I think just if you lead off with it like Adorno did here, it sounds crazy.

19:41 Wes: I agree. Yeah. I think this is like the first meaty section to discuss the.

19:45 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

19:45 Wes: And especially style.

19:47 Mark: So let's get some of this crazier stuff out of there. Page 95. Technical Rationality Today is the rationality of domination.

19:55 Wes: Oh, I thought you were advocating.

19:56 Dylan: He wants to go back and get it out of the way.

19:59 Mark: I want to at least get this on the table, and I think maybe then Seth will talk some more because he probably had notes from the beginning and was irritated that we skipped them.

20:07 Seth: That's all right.

20:07 Mark: What else do you want to say about the beginning, Seth?

20:09 Seth: I want to make the point that he wants to talk about the culture industry versus mass culture because he wants to avoid the idea that culture somehow emerges from people themselves. Mass culture suggests that the desire or what is being produced is somehow what people want. And he is adamant about the fact that he uses the term culture industry because it's a top down thing. The content or the objects of culture are produced by the industry for consumption by people, regardless of what their desires are.

20:41 Wes: It shapes their desires. Right?

20:42 Seth: It shapes their desires. The point is, it's an imposition.

20:45 Wes: It's not like I have all these preferences and then society is trying to meet my demands. It induces those demands in me. This idea that I have this freedom in my consumption is an illusion.

20:57 Seth: Right. Culture is not an art industrial culture, it's not art, it's a business. And it leverages technology in the same way that he was talking about early on about technology being the essence of this Enlightenment knowledge. Technology is at play in the manufacture of culture as well. And in the same sense, it works hand in hand with the form of Enlightenment knowledge to dominate the consumer.

21:22 Dylan: Especially the way you were describing it, it reminded me how much I thought of Plato's cave. But in Adorno and Horkheimer's interpretation that the culture industry is kind of a cave of that sort, I don't want to call it a Platonic cave, but a cave in which people are looking at the world in a very restricted manner and don't realize actually that they're looking at the world in such a restricted manner that is being in fact engineered by somebody. So rather than. Then, you know, rather than asking the question, who chained you into the cave that Plato doesn't ask and that you just free yourself, in this case it's MGM Studios that's chained you in the cave.

22:02 Seth: It's worth mentioning here that the technology he's speaking of is mass broadcast technology, for example, like radio, because that was a relatively new invention in that time that was effectively used by Hitler and of course also by Churchill, Hill and by Franklin Roosevelt. That it was basically a way for somebody who is a central authority or a central power to disseminate a message to the masses, but to do so in a way where there was no possibility of reply, that when you're at a rally or when you're meeting somebody face to face, or even when you're talking with them over the telephone, there's the possibility of a response and interaction, but when you're sitting in front of a radio, you become a passive listener. And this is all part of the experience of being dominated, that your subjectivity gets taken away.

22:47 Wes: Yeah. And the nuance to that is that it's not just that technology sort of rises willy nilly to dominate. Right. So he's making the argument that the culture industry is not simply the effect of technology rising to meet people's needs. And when he says technical rationality is the rationality of domination, it's the domination that comes first. It's the technology simply serves this impetus towards domination. It serves the powers that be within a society. And then the other thing I thought of was when Dylan mentioned the cave, the schema through which everything is filtered, he calls the logic of work. So that's sort of the central concept that's going to distort the products of the culture industry. That's what it's imprinting on things.

23:28 Seth: Yeah. This little section I think is worth quoting. So I'm going to read just a couple of sentences. Technical rationality today is the rationality of domination. It is the compulsive character of a society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs and films hold the totality together until their leveling element demonstrates its power against the very system of injustice it served. For the present, the technology of the culture industry confines itself to standardization and mass production and sacrifices what once distinguished the logic of the work from that of society.

These adverse effects, however, should not be attributed to the internal laws of technology itself, but to its function with within the economy today. So that's just to your point that ultimately he's tying this back in that the function these are playing inside the system is not driven by the systems, but rather driven by capital.

24:19 Mark: Right. So this is not a Heideggerian critique of technology, even though some of the things he says do sound a little like that through here. But it is a Marxist critique of just this is where capitalist society is at now. And by saying the technical rationality is really just about practical reason. Technology enables us to get things done. So whatever it is that the people in power want to get done, rationality, these technical tools, which don't even have to just be the radio, it could just be organizational methods. It could be the fact that we are having certain hiring practices and things like that.

24:51 Dylan: We have a 40 hour work week or a 50 hour work week.

24:53 Mark: Yeah, all these things that make things uniform, make people easier to control, make

24:58 Dylan: them into commodities, make them into consumers and workers.

25:01 Mark: One of the points he has to argue here is that being a consumer is the flip side of being a worker. They are one and the same thing. It's not just that we need you to work and we need to make money by selling our products is that the products are designed to make you at least the cultural products are designed to make you into a better worker.

25:18 Wes: Yeah, the consumption is just the logic of work imprinted on leisure time.

25:23 Dylan: We go to the mall after we're done working. And the movies.

25:26 Wes: Right.

25:26 Mark: The kind of thing that we enjoy is the kind of thing that the only purpose for, I think he says, is it's for people who are tired of work and need to get some break so that they can go back and work again.

25:37 Wes: So it doesn't make too many demands on mentally.

25:41 Mark: Yeah, it's a skill to pay attention, to follow what's going on in a movie. I remember showing my kids movies that seem pretty basic, but just to follow. Like, who's that guy? There's things that you have to pay attention to. And I think in the movies of his time, it was probably considerably more subtle. Like, I think it's a little harder sometimes to follow older movies than today's movies, where everything is telegraphed so far in advance. Although I think a lot of the kind of things he's complaining about movies like, you know, he doesn't say this, but like, music that tells you what to feel. But that's, like, entirely in keeping with the kind of complaint he has here.

26:18 Seth: Yeah. Well, I think when he was writing, he didn't probably have a huge section on film noir, but there's probably a whole second podcast to be done just on the references that he drops to try to figure out, like, why Greta Garbo is on the border of possibly actually being interesting and authentic and subtle.

26:35 Dylan: And Benny Goodman is not either, but Mickey Rooney is.

26:38 Wes: Yeah, he hates Mickey Rooney. But he calls Orson Welles. Like, doesn't he call him a criminal or something? By the way, he mentions Greer Garson, who is a great actress. Her husband's on the board of trustees for St. John Santa Fe, and she was a huge supporter of St John's so I just wanted to mention that since he directly calls her out as well.

26:58 Mark: The crass, modern way of reading this, you know, if you just do a surface level reading.

27:01 Unknown speaker: Is.

27:01 Mark: Isn't low culture bad? Isn't all these movies for stupid people? But he's very adamant that it's the entire culture industry. It's not. In fact, one of the things that it removes is the distinction between low and high culture. So that not only are high cultural products expected to be marketable and are evaluated in marketing terms, but low culture is expected to be really not as stupid in some ways as it was. It can't be pure amusement. It has to.

27:27 Wes: Yeah. It's intellectualized.

27:29 Unknown speaker: Yes.

27:29 Mark: Yes. So it's not even as enjoyable as a circus would be. It's not circuses that would be embarrassing, amateurish, that everything gets professionalized.

27:39 Wes: Yeah, that's on page 114, by the way, if you want to look at that. The intellectualization part becomes the everything is experienced as facsimile. And you were mentioning circuses. You sort of take the naivete out of low culture. Low culture by itself has positive things to it, but it's turned into what he calls trash in its fusion with high culture.

28:02 Mark: Even the supposed people who are into high culture, they just get pegged as one more demographic group to be aimed at. Even though there's an emphasis throughout here on how the culture industry promotes sameness, there's still sort of different levels. There's a recognition that some people are richer than others, or some people have more education than others, that there are different social classes. And that's not what is crushed down. They're not equalized by all means. But it becomes a matter of, oh, well, you can afford the four cylinder car and you just get the two cylinder car.

Or these movies are A list movies and they have all these stars. They're sort of aimed at a different crowd than the B list, wrestling pictures or whatever with fewer stars. Even supposedly revolutionary elements like it's okay to be a hipster as long as you're conforming as a hipster. Capitalism is very happy to aim its hipster line of clothes or whatever at you.

28:53 Dylan: Eventually we need to talk about whether this kind of power is any different than the kinds of power that were before, because that's central to his criticism. Is it really the case that MGM is different than other forms of political power or economic power that have existed before? I mean, his answer is yes. And the pervasiveness, at the very least in degree is such that it changes it qualitatively. Its quantitative difference makes it qualitatively different. And that the presence of technology in that way is a new thing.

29:25 Mark: I mean, he explicitly addresses at one point that, yeah, okay, in the days of monarchy it was, if you don't obey me, I will kill you. Now it's more, if you don't obey the trend, then you're economically out in the cold, then you're marginalized and you're a loser. And so that's what keeps us in the cave, is because we don't want to be losers, we don't want to be marginalized, we want to not starve. That's what the freedom has been is the freedom of the stupid to starve. There's a quote like that somewhere here, page 105.

29:54 Wes: And it basically, it's social coercion replaces the coercion of the state.

29:59 Seth: Yeah, I remember reading that section and I was immediately brought to mind of Foucault. But he is suggesting that this gets internalized, right?

30:07 Mark: Yeah.

30:07 Seth: In the same way that Foucault was talking about the internalization of the external strictures so that we sort of self regulate. But the difference here is that there's this enormous machinery in place to constantly reinforce.

30:19 Dylan: While there is something top down about it and something sort of conspiratorial about it. It's not quite the same thing as a monarch sitting above and saying you're going to do X, Y and Z. It's more that those who have power in the culture industry, they maintain their power by viewing everyone as consumers and everything is replaceable and every worker as fungible. And that activity itself is what's corrupting. It's what leads to its own natural activity to just give you what you think you want. Because I'm going to make every person their own demographic and I'm going to make them feel like they're choosing what they want to choose. But really what I ultimately want to do is make sure I manipulate them into choosing what I want them to choose. It's basically power by PR and advertising.

31:15 Wes: Yeah. So it is to a large degree, I think, intentional. I think he thinks, and he says that in the extra essay that we had intentionally integrates consumers from above.

31:25 Mark: Well, at one point he talks about it's either the actual cooperation of the people on top or at least it's the common determination that they're both driven by the same economic logic. So it's not necessarily that there's a cabal of executives, but it's just they're driven by the same thing. And another place, page 98. Although the operations of the mechanism appear to be planned by those who supply the data, the culture industry, the planning is in fact imposed on the industry by the inertia of a society in irrational, despite all its rationalization.

And this calamitous tendency in passing through the agencies of business takes on the shrewd intentionality peculiar to them. So that makes it sound like it's very high level Marxist. Yes. Okay. It's the evil people in power that are doing this, but it's also the irrationality of the society as a whole. It's where it's shifted given the structures that we have in place.

32:12 Dylan: So hence you can have a company say, look, I'm just selling the stuff that people want. Look, they're buying it like crazy.

32:17 Wes: Yeah, I think the word Inertia is important. There's a status quo that forms and you stop asking why. You stop asking about the meaning of it or whether it's wise. And it just runs its course. It keeps going. That's the irrational part. The rational thing to do would be think about it and change it.

32:33 Dylan: This is the first essay in philosophy that I've ever read that has the word satanically in it.

32:40 Seth: That was one of the sections in the copy that I had that was. Had been highlighted prior to the scan, so I couldn't tell. It was like, I read that and I thought, is that. That must be another word. It can't. But I couldn't think of what it could possibly be. So.

32:53 Wes: Or that says things like, to impress the omnipotence of capital on the hearts of expropriated job candidates as the power of their true master is the purpose of all films. How about that?

33:04 Mark: Okay, well, so this is talking about the inertia and irrationality versus is the cabal. On the other, the intentional deception. I think that gets at. What does it mean is it's the purpose of all films. It says it's the purpose of all films, despite what plot the production designer may have selected. Right, Right. So, of course, individual producers of artworks, of films, even in the studio system, you know, they have things that they want to say. There's different morals in the different plots that they pick. But Adorno just thinks that that's all subservient to the overall social function of what the thing is.

33:38 Wes: Well, he does think, though, that the focus on the technical, so this idea of impressing the omnipotence of capital, it's the idea of the impressiveness of the technical. And there's that focus on the same page. 98. He's talking about the focus on the technical as opposed to the content, the sensuous elements of a film.

33:54 Seth: Okay, I read that section slightly differently. And this goes back to what you mentioned earlier, Wes, about making the product, making it consumable. So he says on page 98, even during their leisure time, consumers must orient themselves according to the unity of production, the active contribution which Kantian schematism still expected of subjects that they should from the first relate sensuous multiplicity to fundamental concepts is denied to the subject by industry. It purveys schematism as its first service to the customer. So even if I think I'm making a work of art, as a director, producer, writer, I'm still following some kind of a narrative structure that's going to have an arc that's going to reinforce the messages of the society which has produced me as well.

It's not just the laborers, but I'm part of that machinery of production. And he speaks later in the essay about how the industry is constantly craving clever people to come in who are able to translate that experience of being part of the framework of production into culture, which can then be consumed by workers and reinforce that message of production. And it starts with making sure that from the outset there's a villain, there's a hero, there's a heroine, there's a love interest. All of these things are given to you by the movie. You're not challenged.

35:18 Mark: You know how it's going to end as soon as it starts.

35:20 Seth: Yeah. And so as a producer, I just need to be clever enough to. To make it interesting so that you stay watching it, even though all these things are already known.

35:28 Wes: Yeah. And the message, which we'll get to later, but it's basically that life sucks, but it can't be changed. And so you can have these substitute gratifications, but you can't have anything else. That's going to be the overarching message of any culture industry work of art. Yeah.

35:43 Mark: He does talk a lot about how you can't have an inappropriate relationship that goes unpunished, is one of the examples he gives for from his time. But he also says on page 97, looking for where he talks about it being Jewish. Okay, yeah. This is the context. He's talking about how the culture industry is subservient to Chrysler and to the energy companies, to the banks. The culture industry leaders have to keep with the true wielders of power to ensure that their sphere of mass society, the specific product of which still has too much of cozy liberalism and Jewish intellectualism about it, is not subjected to a series of purges.

So that the most powerful broadcasting companies are still dependent on electrical industry, the film on banks, et cetera, et cetera. They're all economically intertwined. So there could be again, I think, specific messages in specific films that are not overtly in line with the whole. That goes sort of hand in hand with rebelliousness is tolerated so long as it has limits, so long as it can be controlled and co opted. In fact, that could be the hipster movie could be aimed at you. You're such a rebel that the corporation has a product for YouTube.

36:51 Wes: Right. The place Mark, where you talked about sexual transgression must result in punishment. He's also saying that you can have a film that inveighs against capitalism. That's permitted.

37:00 Seth: In fact, it's encouraged.

37:02 Wes: Right. And the idea that sexual transgression must be punished is not puritanism, but it's basically the idea that. So Free says, quote unquote, page 113. Not for a moment allowing him or her to suspect that resistance is possible. It's really the larger significance that you can't defeat the system. That's the whole point. So even if you're inveighing against capitalism, that idea that resistance is futile can still be the message of the film ultimately.

37:28 Seth: Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, if you think about how many movies are there where the quirky outsider. Right. All these teen movies where there's the straight laced kids and then there's the John Cusack. Right. Or sorry, that dates me.

37:42 Dylan: Dates you with everybody else in this conversation.

37:46 Seth: Somehow there's the one who's supposed to not fit or has the quirky point of view or does something or wears the weird clothes or whatever, ultimately has to get appropriated back into the system so that it's understood that even if it's. That they in turn are able to convince all of the straight laced people to adopt some of their weird ways, the point is there's some form of conformity and sameness that comes in. It's not the case that the loner gets shunned and there's no relationship ever formed and that they end up walking alone into the sunset or whatever. The narrative always has to be that you can't fight the system and it's couched in one way or another.

38:23 Wes: Yeah. Their victory is always their incorporation into the system. That is their.

38:27 Dylan: Exactly. And with the veneer that they've won. Right. But I would expect that Adorno and Horkheimer would say that it only appears that they won. That's the whole point of it, that they actually have become part of the system. And exactly the way everyone expected that the appearance of freedom when actually they were just brought back into the Borg.

38:45 Mark: Well, I would think that a lot of this has to do with the way he presents it. Usually the people that are in trouble get saved by some member of the establishment. It's a helpful police officer or something. Something he's reflecting on. What? I don't know. The crime films of his time. It's much more common now for the government to be portrayed as the incompetent enemy. We had David Brin on here who talked about this as. Yeah, the two things that are common in all modern films are that the main character has to be quirky and eccentric in some way.

That's very strange that that's a new thing and that the government people are never helpful. You never want to call the police, no matter how logical in a real life situation would be to call the damn police. No, we have to take it on ourselves. I have to rescue ET by myself or whatever. I think the overall point, even though the current situation is different from the film industry, as Adorno is describing it, still, it's the fact that we spectators, it's a. Oh, we're triumphing over the system, but the feeling is illusory. It's the fact that.

No, no, no. It's just a little fantasy that was put forward. The system is actually just as strong as ever. And it's just. You feel like you've rebelled against it by sympathizing with these rebellious characters. And that serves to calm you down. It doesn't serve to make you.

40:02 Wes: You're consuming a fantasy of rebellion, a substitute gratification.

40:05 Mark: Exactly.

40:06 Wes: Actually rebelling. Yeah. Lots of products, lots of advertising campaigns are structured around that very idea that they're somehow rebellious to.

40:15 Mark: If you get a cat mattress, you're

40:17 Dylan: rebelling against the establishment because it allows you to establish your identity. Right. By rebelling, you are declaring yourself unique in an individual and therefore asserting your freedom. And to the extent that an advertising company can make you feel like an individual, then you're going to feel all the more likely to buy their product because it makes you feel like you are your own person. That's the funny trick about it, right? Is you don't want people necessarily to feel simply like they're doing everything everybody else is doing. Even though getting on the bandwagon is part of a lot of advertising. You need to make the customer feel like they are not risking so much and being ostracized, but they're also defining themselves and articulating their own individuality and freedom. But by wearing your lipstick.

41:03 Mark: So they don't actually choose Charles Manson as their spokesperson. Because then you'd be a real rebel to use that.

41:09 Wes: Right. The countercultural protagonist in a film is never that mark you mentioned, the loser, or he talks about the loner. It's never the real outcast and societal loner. It would never go to the extreme where you couldn't actually identify with them and they have to be safe to some extent.

41:27 Mark: Although it's interesting to see how influential this essay was and how I think this could be seen as whether it's a direct influence or this got into the culture Enough so that I feel like there are plenty of sort of indie movies that were created almost specifically to break the rules here.

41:45 Wes: Well, yeah, you look at Natural Born Killers, you look at a lot of the entertainment where sociopaths are the protagonists.

41:51 Dylan: I do think that you have to think about what movies were like, and even the structure of the movie and recording industry in the 30s and 40s, it was very different than it is now. While there are some things in this essay that really, I think, continue to resonate, it's not at all clear that, again, it isn't. The criticism isn't somehow a product of a certain period of time in the technological development and distribution of television, radio and movies. It used to be that if you were an actor, you belonged to a studio. You didn't get hired by them, you belonged to them the way you belonged to a basketball team.

And you could get just traded around. You acted in whatever they told you to act in. It's different than that now. And there's just also. There are lots of big movie companies, and, you know, they certainly have tons of influence, but there's just enormous numbers of other ways of getting movies made.

42:48 Seth: So have you guys seen Zizek's Pervert's Guide to Cinema? That's maybe a coda to this episode to encourage people to go take a look at that. It's kind of a crazy, wacky little roller coaster of a ride. Zizek basically is applying the critique of the culture industry to films, specifically talking about how they function to reinforce social norms and all these sorts of things. And it's really fascinating, I have to say, and it's entertaining. It's quite entertaining, and you should take a look at it. And there's an argument to be made that the suggestions that he's making about how the content plays out, even though he had specific models in mind, talking about the studio system, he would not have seen film noir.

There's a bunch of things he would not have seen, still are at play, and can still be read into these films as text in that way. Although I do think there was probably some divergence of cinema, particularly in, like, the 70s, where maybe people started recognizing that that was the role it was playing and deliberately contravening those assumptions. But we seem to be back on it in a way.

43:55 Wes: The content isn't really the thing. Doesn't matter for him. I mean, in fact, it's one of the features of the culture industry that the content isn't really the point. So this is kind of page 98 into 99. One of his complaints is that there's all these cliches and stereotypes which serve the larger purpose of what he calls the schematism of production. Again, it's things like resistance is futile, enforcement of the status quo, things like that. And then he says, the details become interchangeable. So there's less focus on content and more focus on technique.

More focus on the technology that's producing this. You see in contemporary films are very, very well made technically, usually from every angle, from plot structure to acting, to all the kinds of ingredients you would want out of a great film. But that doesn't save it for Adorno from being what it is, which is this enforcement of the status quo.

44:52 Dylan: I kind of had a question about, like, the way he was viewing film. And the bottom last paragraph of 99, he says the whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry and the familiar experience of the moviegoer who perceives the street outside as a continuation of the film he has just left. Because the film seeks strictly to reproduce the world of everyday perception has become the guideline for production going on. Since the abrupt introduction of the sound film, mechanical duplication has become entirely subservient to this objective.

According to this tendency, life is to be made indistinguishable from the sound. Film far more strongly than the theater of illusion from film denies its audience any dimension in which they might roam freely in imagination contained by the film's framework, but unsupervised by its precise actualities. Without losing the thread. Thus it trains those exposed to it to identify film directly with reality. Certainly now, if you would watch a movie from 1936, there's nothing about that that you would confuse with reality. Right. There's not a single thing about it.

Furthermore, the idea that you would walk out of the movie theater and say, what I've seen in the movie is what I'm seeing in real life. I just find it going a step too far about it. And then to say that trains those exposed to identify film directly with reality, it made me also wonder, is it really the case that there was no such thing as irony in a film at all that moviegoers would identify with? Who knows? Maybe it's true.

46:20 Wes: Yeah. I want to defend old films here. There are a lot of great old films, and Orson Welles is not the hack that Adorno thinks he is.

46:28 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

46:28 Dylan: The claim is that you wouldn't confuse them with reality.

46:30 Seth: Yeah. So to defend their position here in this. I think what he's trying to say is that they're not fantastical the films he's talking about are the ones that have recognizable everyday characters that you can relate to. It's one of the criteria. If the film is going to play the role of amusing you and distracting you from the realities of your mechanized labor long enough so that you can go back and get at it again. It could do that by providing a flight of fancy where you would just be completely taken away in some kind of a. What do they used to call Busby Berkeley musical or some sort of fantasy.

But that without the intellectualized version of that, you would eventually become bored. So what he's trying to say is that the movies have to create characters that you can identify with to the extent that you can see in the film an extension of reality as you're experiencing it. And then they're going to tell that tale in that context, even if it is a structure that's superimposed on a fantastical or, say, science fiction Y kind of setting.

47:40 Wes: I also think he's just thinking about the medium of film here and its difference from other types of representation, its verisimilitude. And we should be thinking here of Kant and Schopenhauer, where the aesthetic for Kant, right, required this free play of the imagination. It required that something be left to the imagination. Which means it required that whatever the mimetic function of art, it be imprecise. And I forget if you guys read this part of Schopenhauer as well, but Schopenhauer talks about the aesthetic failure of a mannequin or anything that's too realistic.

If it gets too realistic, it fails to be aesthetic. And the flip side of the aesthetic is what Kant called the charms, right? That's the plot, that's all the explosions, and that's the stuff that interests us. And I think it's pretty clear that films are on the side of the charms and the interest. And they're less aesthetic. And to say they're less aesthetic, it sort of coincides with the medium of film, which is it's a very accurate visual picture of the world.

48:39 Dylan: But it becomes a criticism that's just like the Platonic criticism of poetry, right, or the Socratic criticism of writing, where you have, on the one hand, the criticism of poetry as being merely for entertainment or cookery and not for the good or the truth. And you have the Socratic criticism of writing as purging us from having to think about things and becoming sophistry. It seems like both of those things are going there. And then even to the extent that there's something about the criticism that's true, which may be there. It comes across as just another version of old man whininess about the changes of the world before him. And it's not like the way he used to be.

49:26 Wes: It is. I mean, the whole thing is like that.

49:29 Seth: This is a giant extended. You kids get off my lawn.

49:33 Dylan: There's a big part of it that feels that way.

49:35 Mark: Well, I'm still sympathetically. I'm trying to give some defense of the piece that Dylan was objecting to, which is not just that, okay, sound films are trying to duplicate the world, but that the point of it, however far it might fall from our present standards, from the mark. I mean, even just think about more modern films. Does it make it so that you then walk out of the theater and feel like the world is like what you just saw? And I've certainly felt that with some films, especially weird films, like, I walk out and I just like, wow, that was disorienting.

The whole world just looks different to me. What he's talking about very specifically is ones where, I think where the characters, like you were saying, they're supposed to be ones you can identify with, where the situations are supposed to be realistic in some way. And so you might then feel like the world is going to be just in the way that things are in the films, that people are going to fit stereotypes in the way that they do in films, that kind of stuff.

50:37 Wes: But he's not really talking about your expectations, though. He talks about movies as the duplication of empirical objects and the making of life and being indistinguishable from life.

50:48 Dylan: But isn't that the source of the rhetorical power along the lines of what Mark is saying? That is that indistinguishability, which gives it the veneer of truthfulness. But what it's actually saying is not. That's the mechanism which. It robs you your freedom. I mean, that's sort of the argument.

51:07 Wes: Yeah. The robbery of the freedom is the. So again, back to Kant. The aesthetic is supposed to be. It's an act of freedom. It's the free play of the imagination. It's the correlate of the moral. The freedom that you get in the moral realm, that kind of autonomy. There's aesthetic autonomy, which means being able to do something spontaneous with your imagination in response to a work of art. So that's one part of the autonomy. And the realism deprives you of that. And I really think he's not really talking about the realism of plot, although maybe he is, but I really think he's thinking about sound, the visual and auditory components of this. I think he's thinking about the medium primarily here. And the point of it is that the more realistic it is, the more robbed of the autonomy, the autonomous buzzing of the imagination you are.

51:56 Mark: All right, so that's how it affects when you leave the theater, the sort of thinking that is required for watching a movie, which is to pay attention to what's going on, that that's the way you're going to be when you go out. And that's what would make you a good worker. And not filling in the blanks of imagination.

52:12 Wes: Yes. We don't want any workers filling in any blanks.

52:15 Mark: And you could add in modern critiques and that just like what's so unrealistic in the movies that there's always music behind them. But now we walk around with our portable music devices and we create that soundtrack to make our lives even more like movies.

52:31 Wes: I know I couldn't get through a day if I didn't have my own soundtrack.

52:37 Mark: I just use a sinister theme, just like in the old time movies. And the villain comes on and the sinister theme plays. So I just play a sinister theme for myself on my ipod all the time because that's how I see myself.

52:49 Dylan: I don't listen to anything. In fact, I've gotten so that I don't even like listening to music when I'm doing the dishes or anything, really.

53:00 Wes: Why?

53:01 Dylan: It's a combination of things. One is I find that if I'm thinking about something, I don't want to be listening to something, listening to music.

53:11 Mark: Oh, you just giving your imagination free play, Giving your ability to think. No, join us. Join us. Blot it all out. Make it like a movie.

53:20 Wes: Well, I find myself listening to podcasts, which makes it impossible to think about. Like if you're going for a walk, you know, it used to be I would think about stuff, but in general. Yeah. Now I'm consuming some.

53:34 Unknown speaker: You can pause.

53:35 Mark: You can pause. It's not like the radio. You can pause it.

53:37 Wes: I do. I do pause.

53:39 Mark: So I think we haven't talked yet about style. We talked already about content and how maybe the content doesn't matter, but style is supposed to be one of the things, the ways that really uniformity gets imposed.

53:51 Wes: Yeah. So page 100 is where this all begins here. He's also arguing against another kind of thesis that seems plausible on the face of it, which is that the changes in style from the traditional, or what he's calling liberal Society are a matter of, quote, unquote, exhaustion of energy. This is a case in which he's going to have a more interesting explanation. So, in other words, it's not the fact that we simply fallen away from artistic tradition and nature. That's the whole exhaustion of energy idea. It's not the case that we have simply gotten lazier and less disciplined artistically. That's the idea he's going to argue against.

54:25 Seth: I think now's a good time to go to the text. So he's talking about the role of style and how style's a promise. And how great artists have been mistrustful of style. And he gets to the point where he says. Instead of exposing itself to this failure. In which the style of the great work of art has always negated itself. The inferior work has relied on its similarity to others, the surrogate of identity. The culture industry has finally posited this imitation as absolute. Being nothing other than style. It divulges style's secret obedience to the social hierarchy.

55:03 Mark: What I really liked about Adorno is the stuff that he hits in passing here. That he's obviously a really good philosopher about art, about music and what makes it work. But he just raises these positive things only in passing. In contrast to what's wrong with now. He says right before this, in every work of art, style is a promise. In being absorbed through style into the dominant form of universality, into the current musical, pictorial or verbal idiom. What is expressed seeks to be reconciled with the idea of the true universal. So it's kind of confusing a little bit.

The true universal. What would be with just what happens to be prevalent in the culture at the moment? This promise of the work of art to create truth by impressing its unique contours on the socially transmitted forms. Is as necessary as it is hypocritical. By claiming to anticipate fulfillment through their aesthetic derivatives. It posits the real forms of the existing order as absolute. So that's just what I exactly was saying. The real forms of the existing order is just whatever the style prevalent in the culture happens to be. But absolute is all art is kind of pushing towards universality.

To this extent. The claims of art are also ideology. Yet it is only in its struggle with tradition, a struggle precipitated in style, that art can find expression for suffering. The moment in the work of art by which it transcends reality. Cannot indeed be severed from style. That moment, however, does not consist in achieved harmony. In the questionable unity of form and content, inner and outer individual and society. But those traits in which the discrepancy emerges in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. So that's a really interesting and offhand description that deserves, like, a whole chapter by itself to decode this.

But what it sounds like is you're trying to express an emotion. Like, of course, I'll just use a song as an example. Because this is sort of what he's most directly talking about, but through a painting or whatever. And the tools that you have to do that are stylistic tools that you learned, you know, that are in the culture, whatever. And so let's say you use the blues. What would be bad about the way style gets applied now? Like, if you, oh, I'm going to put out a blues record, then, like. Well, unless you sound just like old, like previous blues, that's not going to work.

You're not even doing blues anymore. Or the, you know, the country purists are not going to accept you as country unless you're really doing a damn good imitation if. Unless you're singing with that damn accent, that Southern accent. But what really makes something work effectively to demonstrate suffering is when there's a tension that really what you're trying to express is the inexpressible. You're trying to express something that can't be put into words, that can't be put into any form whatsoever. But yet you're having to use these tools that are on hand, whether verbal or musical or whatever the art is to do it.

And it's that tension that he thinks that is part of what makes things great.

57:47 Wes: Yet the tension is between form and matter, right? Form and subject matter. The whole argument here is that, like these classical forms, when you choose a form for a work of art, you're not simply trying to achieve formal perfection. That's not its motivation. It is a means of struggle. It's a way of. Or he calls it a rigor against the chaotic expression of suffering. So, for instance, you might think of the sort of energy a violinist puts into a really vigorous classical piece. That same energy, if it weren't formally structured, would just be chaos.

It might just be something an insane person screaming at the top of their lungs. So you want to be able to express that. You want to be able to sort of express your insanity in the face of suffering. And the form is the means of doing that. And the whole point is to have a tension between the form and that expression. Whereas with the culture industry products, the form is sort of part of the syntax of both of Them from the very beginning. It's impressed on both what's being expressed and on the formal structure of what's being expressed at the bottom level.

Like that's what he talks about around page 101. Even the very artistic syntax is infected with mechanical reproducibility. Does that make sense?

59:02 Dylan: Well, it sounds a little bit different than what Mark was talking about. I thought that Mark was talking about the internal tension between the strictures. Maybe it's related, but the rules of the genre and your tension of making something within those rules. Is that what you mean?

59:21 Mark: Instead of exposing itself to this failure, the style of the great work has always negated itself. It leaves a lot of room for interpretation. So I think Wes, interpretation and my interpretation both work perfectly well. And there's probably another treatise that makes this a lot more clear. I can see what Wes was just saying about the conflict between form and content. I think it would work especially when you're just talking about an instrumental piece. I mean, is the content really just the emotional energy? I'm not sure that that seems like it might be a matter of form.

And I guess the examples that he would probably have in mind match more closely to what Wes is talking about. Because what I was thinking of is just forms of art in which there's room for improvisation. But everything he has to say about jazz and I think would probably work for any other art form that involves improvisation is wholly negative. So I'm not sure if there's room for oh, I'm doing the blues, but I'm doing it my own way. It's more a matter of what already established song are you playing and how exactly are you doing it, and are

1:00:24 Dylan: you doing it most like the way it ought to be done.

1:00:27 Mark: Right? Right.

1:00:28 Dylan: His criticism of a jazz musician doing Beethoven was exactly along the lines you just mentioned that you, rather than trying to render Beethoven most Beethoven, which is the proper thing to do, and that would be rendering it beautiful, you subvert it. But in not a way that. Well, I guess this is where I find it a little bit confusing is when he says to this extent, the claims of art are always also ideology. I take him to be then saying that two things are happening in a significant work of art is on the one hand it's couched in an ideology, and then internally it's also representing a kind of counter ideology that it's rubbing against the one that it's couched in and that that's part of what makes sort of it's a self commentary. And that way it Annihilates itself. So it would be like saying a country song ends up not really being

1:01:21 Mark: a country song because it transcends genre, because it's just so awesome.

1:01:25 Seth: Yeah.

1:01:26 Dylan: But then when he has something, his criticism of a jazz musician doing Beethoven, it seems like there's something about the improvisation present in jazz which is either not an ideology or is so much just a heap of miscellaneous note making that it can't actually do that work. I don't completely get it, but.

1:01:50 Wes: So I think the sentence before the mention of ideology is important. By claiming to anticipate fulfillment through their aesthetic derivatives, it posits the real forms of the existing order as absolute. To this extent, the claims of art are always ideology. The idea is that to the extent that you think of so cultured industry posits the forms as absolute. But real art understands that you are struggling against that very form, your attempt to express yourself. So this idea. Yet it is only in the struggle with tradition, a struggle precipitated in style, that art can find expression for suffering.

So you struggle against these forms that you've been handed down. You know, it could be sonnet form or. I don't know exactly what he's thinking about here, but it's in that tension between what you're doing with your specific subject matter and, let's see, your stylistic deviations, let's say your struggle with tradition that you can get this expression for suffering. If you simply say, I'm going to be formulaic. Here are the forms. Let's follow the form. Then you're no longer doing that. You've collapsed all the tension.

1:02:52 Dylan: But in a funny way, the cultural industry that he's criticizing has a kind of form which is utterly whatever it can be or necessarily be. So in a funny way, it's like having no boundaries at all to rub up against.

1:03:09 Wes: How do you mean?

1:03:10 Dylan: Maybe he doesn't think of it this way, but he thinks of it being very, very strict and such that you'll be cast out and therefore there's no speaking within it. What happens when you have genuine freedom from. Or the notion that the more political freedom you have, the less possibility there is for great art. Simply because there isn't enough to rub up against.

1:03:33 Wes: Exactly. He starts out by saying every style that we inherit, the traditions are expressions of social coercion. As an artist, your inventiveness doesn't rest on you being totally innovative. That would just be chaos. That's part of his point here. But it does rest on you taking these inherited forms and then struggling against them. But in the culture industry you simply just accept the inherited form and run the piece of art according to that formula.

1:03:59 Mark: And I know it sounds like that it's a counterexample to say, oh, but shouldn't the jazz musician be then expressing himself based on, instead of just reproducing Beethoven? But his objection to this seems to be that he thinks that all jazz musicians. And again, we probably have to read more of the many negative things he has to say about jazz. I know he has a whole book introduction to the sociology of music that I looked at one point that the whole thing seems to be just ripping on jazz. Here he seems to be equating saying the same things are wrong with the most high level jazz.

Like he acknowledges that there's an avant garde kind of jazz and the lowest class, but in this context about Beethoven, it's that he thinks that the way that one would change Beethoven would be so utterly predictable that you'd have to just syncopate it in a certain way and you'd be kind of super. If you do play on the beat, you do with a sneer, you do with a self satisfied superior air. Because that's just the image of the jazz musician and their relationship to things that you are. Even though again, it seems like it's rebellious, you are completely conforming in doing that.

It's totally unimaginative.

1:05:07 Wes: Yeah, go to page 101 where he. It's this imitation. It's pseudo natural. It's pseudo for him. The improvisation of it is, you know, this is at I think the bottom of 101 or somewhere towards the middle.

1:05:19 Mark: Well, the top of 101. If he jazzes at Mozart, he changes the music not only where it is too difficult or serious, but also where the melody is merely harmonized differently, indeed more simply than is usual today.

1:05:29 Wes: So at the very bottom of 101, so a jazz musician who has to play a piece, okay, that is the Beethoven thing syncopates. So it doesn't have to. I mean it really doesn't have to be Beethoven. It could be any jazz, I think where there's the syncopation and even improvisation, this deviation from form, right. Which is. That's such naturalness. He's calling it naturalness because it's supposed to be more like real life. Right? Real life isn't so structured. Such naturalness, complicated by the ever more pervasive and exorbitant claims of the specific medium, constitutes the new style, quote, unquote.

He's quoting someone else here. A system of non culture, to which one might even concede a certain unity of style, if it made any sense to speak of a stylized barbarism. So I think what he's objecting here to is the sort of there's no real struggle in jazz, according to him. I'm not saying this. The sense in which you're pretending to be natural or you're imitating the more chaotic, less formal features of life is not really what goes on in art. You need the form. You need the sort of totalitarian or socially coercive form to resist that expressively.

So again, it's about lack of tension. You need artificiality.

1:06:35 Mark: I did not listen to enough Charlie Parker.

1:06:37 Wes: Yeah, it's really hilarious to me that Orson Welles and jazz are decadent.

1:06:45 Mark: Well, actually, the way I was reading the thing about Orson Welles is, again, you might pull out somebody like Orson Welles as an exception. Like. No, Orson Welles was a genius. He's not just obeying the rules of the craft. In fact. Right. The next page talks about Orson Welles. The great influence of this stylization may already be more binding than the official rules and prohibitions. A hit song is treated more leniently today if it does not respect the 32 bars or the compass of the 9th than if it includes even the most elusive melodic or harmonic detail which falls outside the idiom.

In other words, there's some ways you could be rebellious that are okay with the culture industry, because they're not really rebellious. If you did something weird harmonically, if you were like Schoenberg, then you would be castigated. So next sentence, Orson Welles has forgiven all his offenses against the usages of the craft, because as calculated rudeness, they confirmed the validity of the system all the more zealously.

1:07:35 Wes: So, for instance, Orson Welles used to create, like a pit within the scene so he could get down low. He has all those camera shots which are very, very low coming up. They're very dramatic because it's him curled up in this pit, shooting upwards right at the characters, or it's the whoever's holding the camera, which is, I think, him sometimes. So, yeah, it's those kinds of techniques. Calculated rudeness is what he's calling it. Deviations from typical film craft. But for some reason, that's meaningless.

1:08:06 Dylan: Just a little bit afterwards, he says the rare ability to conform punctiliously to the obligations of the idiom of naturalness in all branches of the cultural industry becomes the measure of expertise. As in logical positivism. What is said and how it is said must be verifiable against everyday speech. The producers are experts. The idiom demands the most prodigious productive powers, which it absorbs and squanders satanically. It has rendered cultural conservatism's distinction between genuine and artificial style obsolete. A style might possibly be called artificial if it had been imposed from outside against the resistance of the intrinsic tendencies of form. But in the culture industry, the subject matter itself, down to its smallest element, springs from the same apparatus as the jargon into which it is absorbed.

1:08:52 Mark: It sounds like saying that the individual artists are already brainwashed. So even if they do something that's supposedly true to themselves, like they're still being faked.

1:09:00 Unknown speaker: Yes.

1:09:00 Dylan: Yeah. So one of the secrets of the culture industry is everything appears to be new when it's not new. And the criteria for appearing new is to appear utterly natural, as if it's coming out of the wellspring or the freedom of the person who's producing it. But his claim is that that's all just a satanic veneer, which is interesting because I guess the. I mean, the claim has to be something like, we all, as consumers and artists, are so subjugated that we have no awareness. We really are in a kind of cultural matrix or, you know, in the cave, and are unable to rest ourselves from it, which is where the whole heart of the elitism of the article and the point of view comes from.

That's just so hard to take, Even when I recognize some of the points as being really important is I feel like, well, so how is it that you see this and no other artist out there understands this or understands themselves as being part of a machine?

1:10:04 Mark: Wouldn't it be entirely typical for all historical ages that most artists are just regurgitating the stuff that they've heard and that it's only the exceptional that creates truly great art in the way he's describing.

1:10:15 Wes: Sure, sure, yeah. Haydn was Beethoven's teacher, and he would write Dummkopf all over Beethoven's compositions.

1:10:23 Dylan: What's that word mean?

1:10:24 Wes: Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. And Beethoven, of course, felt enormously competitive towards Haydn all his life, and of course ended up being better than him. But that agonism where you want to be better than someone, I think is actually quite important to it being art. It goes hand in hand with the tension that Adorno is talking about.

1:10:47 Mark: I think one of the things we're having trouble with here, or that maybe you could accuse Adorno of having a double standard about is novelty. That on the one hand, he seems to say that you strictly have to abide by the formula. That's what it demands. You would think, oh, it's just the audience demands that if you had a movie where the hero just dies, you know, at least without it being properly prepared, then the audience is not going to be cool with that. They're going to object. But the way he's describing that is those are the expectations the culture industry has set up.

And certainly back in the 1940s, we did not have a whole history of movies with anti heroes and crap like that that you could draw on. And so whatever the patterns that have been set up there, you have to follow them. However, there's also this thing about novelty. I think Dylan was describing it as it has to appear as novelty. It can't really be novelty. So there's constant apparent motion forward. But actually it's just all the same stuff that applies on page 109. I want to make sure we talk about this nonsense and humor. And the way he gets up to that is by talking about, well, the product prescribes each reaction of the audience.

That is not through any actual coherence which collapses once exposed to thought, but through signals. Any logical connection presupposing mental capacity is scrupulously avoided. Developments are to emerge from the directly preceding situation, not from the idea of the whole. So this already sounds like it contradicts. The first quote that Dylan gave about the conception of a work of art is hey, back in the Romantic era, they paid more attention to the individual effects and those overwhelmed the whole. But now, in this postmodern age, the whole is very tightly controlled here.

Well, he's saying, no, no, he here. There's no plot which could withstand the screenwriter's eagerness to extract the maximum effect from the individual scene. Finally, even the schematic formula seems dangerous, since it provides some coherence of meaning, however meager, when only meaningless is acceptable. Often the plot is willfully denied, the development called for by characters and theme under the old schema. Instead, the next step is determined by what the writers take to be their most effective idea. Obtuse ingenious surprises disrupt the plot.

The producers tendency to fall back perniciously on the pure nonsense which, as buffoonery and clowning, was a legitimate part of popular art up to Chaplin and the Marx Brothers emerges most strikingly in the less sophisticated genres. Whereas the films of Greer Garson and Bette Davis can still derive some claim to a coherent plot from the unity of the social psychological case represented, the tendency to subvert meaning has taken over completely in the Text of novelty song, suspense films and cartoons. The idea itself, like objects in comic and horror films, is massacred and mutilated.

And he talks more about novelty songs here.

1:13:20 Wes: But you really are damned if you do and damned if you don't. With a doorknob.

1:13:24 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:13:26 Wes: Because the first part of it really sounds like a critique of avant garde cinema. Right.

1:13:31 Mark: I guess that an avant garde cinema piece would still be looking at the internal coherence of the thing as a whole and say, what this requires is something that is not formulaic. But this is. We've got the formula. We stupidly follow the formula. But just like you're saying content ultimately doesn't matter. Part of the formula can be to throw an expectation out the window, but not in a smart way, like a dialectical way. We just want a surprise. In crime and adventure films, the spectators are begrudged even the opportunity to witness the resolution. This sounds like he has seen early versions of noir films or whatever where, okay, let's just end with everybody's dead.

1:14:11 Seth: Right.

1:14:11 Mark: I don't know if there's a film from 19, early 40s that follows that. Well, certainly every tragedy. He talks about tragedy later. But like in an unexpected. In a crime film, can you just end in horror where the criminal has done something horrible and the police pull out and we're begrudged the opportunity to win witness the resolution.

1:14:31 Seth: Typically not even in the noir films, the justice piece of it gets done in one way, shape or form. What does happen in the noir film that sort of chafes against his thesis is that oftentimes you don't get the romantic consummation. You know, you have the hero and the heroine not coming together or, you know, not having a happy ever after kind of thing. There's. And there was a different set of roles and archetypes that came out of that genre.

1:15:00 Wes: Yeah. I think even tragic endings would be a kind of resolution. So I wonder what he's talking about here.

1:15:06 Mark: The discussion of sex is right after that. And tragedy is not too far after that. Oh, no, no. The laughter is after the sex. Laughter is mostly page 112.

1:15:14 Wes: For me, it always works. Yeah, for me it usually is. Yeah.

1:15:19 Dylan: Hopefully it's not before.

1:15:21 Seth: Right.

1:15:21 Dylan: Hopefully it's just not laughing before, before, during and after.

1:15:25 Wes: Not me, it's the other person.

1:15:27 Mark: He said cartoon and stunt films were once exponents of fantasy against rationalism. They allowed justice to be done to the animals and things electrified by their technology by granting the mutilated beings a second life. I was trying to Picture what he's talking about. He's talking about Bugs Bunny cartoons and stuff of yeah, that you could have TNT blow up in his face. But justice can still be done to the animals and things electrified by the technology by allowing it to not die right there. However, today they merely confirmed the victory of technological reason over the truth. A few years ago they had solid plots which were resolved only in the world of pursuit in the final minutes. Really, he's being sentimental about cartoons from a few years ago and how they're not as good as now.

1:16:09 Wes: Well, he seems to be saying that Tom and Jerry, they could do things where they basically killed each other within the plot. Right? Do you remember that? And then they're resurrected for the very next scene.

1:16:21 Mark: But that sounds like what the thing he's about to say is bad.

1:16:23 Wes: That's the good thing. The bad thing is where you, instead of doing that, you prolong it. And the protagonist is tossed about like a scrap of litter. He says that's another non resolving situation. And the ideological idea is that resistance is futile. Life is just a struggle. There is no ultimate resolution. And so you should just embrace the status quo, which is the struggle. So he says, quote again, this is on page 110. Hammer into every brain the old lesson, that continuous attrition, the breaking of all individual resistance is the condition of life in this society. I'm not sure which cartoon that was,

1:16:59 Mark: but Donald Duck in the cartoon.

1:17:01 Wes: Oh, Donald Duck, yeah.

1:17:02 Mark: And the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators can accustom themselves to theirs.

1:17:10 Seth: Did Donald Duck really get beatings and cartoons? Wasn't he a Disney guy?

1:17:14 Dylan: Yeah, he was, but he was always the dumb one.

1:17:17 Wes: I guess the 40s were a little harsh. I don't know when Tom and Jerry

1:17:20 Dylan: came about, so maybe I just looked it up. Tom and Jerry's first One was from 1943. No, earlier than that.

1:17:25 Wes: So maybe he might have been 1940.

1:17:28 Dylan: Can I just say, just as an aside, when I was reading this, just because we had so many great quotes, I felt like I'd found the source of the way of speaking of every overly intellectual smart ass you've ever seen in a film with a Marxist tendency. It's a caricature of itself.

1:17:48 Wes: It's not just that. It's the whole manner of speaking in large parts of the humanities, the social sciences and English departments. It's critical theory and it dominates.

1:17:58 Mark: Well, doesn't he talk about the depiction of characters who have ideas in films is the way that they get neutralized so the way that Dylan just put it is whenever I see somebody in a movie that's talking like this, they sound. So it's, it's that Adorno has predicted his own marginalization through depiction of beady eyed intellectuals in films that you then don't identify with and you discount everything they have to say. So you've been ruined by films for this.

1:18:29 Dylan: It's not quite exactly this kind of critical theory. But think about the scene in Good Will Hunting where Will confronts the guy who's hitting on a Minnie Driver's character, who's a grad student who's talking about history and says, well, if you'd read this book. And of course he's got a photographic memory, so he takes him down there and humiliates him. But that guy, this sort of long blonde haired graduate student who's pontificating about stuff, who's just an ass. It's like this whole thing, the manner of it. Right.

1:19:03 Mark: You don't alienate a good portion of our audience.

1:19:05 Wes: Come on.

1:19:05 Dylan: No, I just found myself struggling with, on the one hand, finding things that were really both interesting and good points about the force of culture and the force of mass culture and the force of contemporary industrialized entertainment. But the rhetoric at times is so unmeasured, it feels like that it becomes a caricature of itself.

1:19:33 Wes: I had very, very mixed feelings about this. And I'd read this, it's been quite a while since I've read it. And I hated it when I first read it. And I felt like I was wrong, especially for the first half of this before I just got tired of reading it. Just thought, wow, this is really chock full of insights. And I think it's a little overstated at times. Then by the time I got to the end of it, I just felt so much antipathy towards the writer. I had dialogue going in my head about the refutations of some of these arguments, but especially, as Mark put it, the side explorations of. You don't have to believe a word of what he says about the culture industry to be interested in this question, for instance, of tension in art and things like that. So it is full of such insights.

1:20:19 Mark: Well, let's talk about sex. Which I think is just right on the next page or so here.

1:20:24 Wes: Yeah, 111. The culture industry endlessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises. So what it endlessly promises is sex. It has that titillating element. Of course it can't really deliver on that because then it would be Pornography, genuine art doesn't deliver on that either. But what it does is sublimates it.

1:20:46 Mark: Genuine works of art were not sexual exhibitions either. But by presenting denial as negative, they reversed, as it were, the debasement of the drive and rescued by mediation what had been denied. That's a little hard to figure out.

1:20:58 Wes: The idea of sublimation is that you are repressing. You are repressing sexual urges. But they get channeled into the aesthetic. The beautiful is your expression of that. So that's formal, but you can't do that with the content. So if you're titillating people and having people in skimpy dresses flirt with each other on film, that titillation can't be really consummated aesthetically. You just deny the audience that consummation.

1:21:24 Dylan: You suppress it.

1:21:25 Wes: Yeah, it's suppressed. It's alluded to, but you don't get any payoff.

1:21:29 Mark: Aesthetically, it goads the un sublimated anticipation of pleasure. Which, through the habit of denial, has long since been mutilated as masochism.

1:21:39 Dylan: There's no erotic situation in which innuendo and enticement are not accompanied by the clear notification that things will never go so far. The Hays Office merely confirms the ritual which the culture industry has staged in any case, that of Tantalus.

1:21:56 Wes: Works of art are ascetic and shameless. And then above that, by constantly exhibiting the object of desire, the breast beneath the sweater, the naked torso of the sporting hero.

1:22:06 Mark: I think anything after masochism is not helpful. What is the Hays Office?

1:22:11 Wes: The censor. Censorship.

1:22:13 Mark: Okay.

1:22:13 Dylan: I mean, I think the linking of it with the notion of Tantalus. Right. Is the kind of image that tantalizing.

1:22:21 Wes: Yeah, seriously. It comes from the myth of Tantalus. He was put into a situation. What is it, Dylan?

1:22:28 Dylan: He's famished, dying of thirst and dying of hunger. And he's on a rock. And every time he reaches down to get a drink from the water, the pool dries up. And every time he reaches up for the grapes to get the food, it is drawn up away from him. So he's in a constant state of thirst and starvation. With the remedy for that within inches of him. And when he reaches for it, it's pulled away. It's like blue balls all day long.

1:22:59 Mark: The way that Adorno describes this is that films reduce love to romance. Once reduced, much is permitted. Even libertinage as a marketable specialty. Parade by quota, with the trade description daring. The mass production of sexuality automatically brings about its repression. What do you think about that. The question always just seems to be like, well, what does that mean? Well, let's read the next sentence. Let's just keep reading the whole essay.

1:23:22 Wes: Well, the whole idea is that you start alluding to sexuality, but you can't fulfill on it. You go to the titillating route, but you can never go all the way.

1:23:31 Mark: What does that have to do with mass production, though?

1:23:33 Dylan: The example I would think of is the reinforcement of cultural stereotypes regarding women as being the arbiters of sexuality. And so they're the ones, you know, you have the guy who's like sort of coming in, you know, all sexually energized, but she shuts him down and that's the way it should be. And all kinds of puritanical notions about sexual relationships and marriage and stuff like that.

1:24:02 Wes: But I also think mass production is meant to be in counterpoint to high art, where that repression is paid off in sublimation. So you don't just get repression, you get an expression.

1:24:14 Mark: You could probably say the same thing. Even though Hollywood is not prudish anymore. I heard basically the same review of this. I think I remember Siskel and Ebert reviewing Porky's three or something and saying all these kind of movies are just. They're saying exactly what is being said here is their kind of promising pornography. But of course they can't deliver on it.

1:24:36 Wes: They do deliver on it, though. You have exposed breasts. A lot of 70s and 80s movies, by the way. It doesn't happen anymore. I saw an article about this. There is no sex in movies anymore. There is no obligatory topless scene. Because of the ubiquity of pornography, its availability online, it's no longer necessary. It's not titillating.

1:24:55 Mark: So the fact that pornography is mass produced is easily available. Does that mean the mass production of sexuality automatically brings about its repression? If that sentence is true, then that should apply now more than ever, because it's now way more mass produced.

1:25:09 Wes: I don't think he means repression culturally. I think he means repression within the work itself.

1:25:14 Mark: I just don't understand the sentence. The mass production of sexuality within the work itself. No, the mass production is about how the work itself extrinsic to it.

1:25:24 Wes: The idea is that in high art, sexual impulses are channeled into the aesthetic. In mass produced art, you don't get that sublimation into the aesthetic. It's just repression. So it's the structure of the artistic piece itself. Both of them always have a sexual component. This is the Freudian theory. It's just that in one of them it gets expressed and one of them gets repressed. Ironically, since you would think by having people in without a guy without a shirt on. Or a woman in a tight skirt as he mentions. That that is somehow less repressive. But in fact, it's more repressive in a 19th century novel. You don't see any of that, but it's still, on his view, sublimating sexual impulse.

1:26:05 Mark: Because you end up contemplating the pathos of the situation. In the case of a novel. And in the case of a painting of a nude, you end up. Even though it's presenting a sexual thing. Following Kant, you end up contemplating it disinterestedly rather than using it as pornography. So in that case, it's channeling the sexuality into. All right. So I just wanted to get some kind of example out there to see what he was talking about. I don't see why a film couldn't do that easily.

1:26:35 Wes: But, yeah, I agree with you on that.

1:26:38 Mark: The reason that he gives in the next sentence, because of his ubiquity. The film star with whom one is supposed to fall in love is, from the start, a cross copy of himself. Every tenor now sounds like a Caruso record. And the natural faces of Texas girls already resemble those of the established models. By which they would be typecast in Hollywood. The mechanical reproduction of beauty no longer leaves any room for the unconscious idolatry. With which the experience of beauty has always been linked. It's not just that somebody appears in a movie with a tight shirt.

And then there's no sex after that in the movie movie. It's the extrinsic factor of it being mass produced. The fact that every movie has this. That it's not just. If you're just contemplating that one movie and only one of them existed like this. Maybe that would be some sort of work of art. But it's the fact that it is such a freaking cliche. That that's what supposedly makes it so that you cannot have an authentic experience at all. That you're kind of seeing through. The individual thing that you're contemplating is just resonating in terms of the things it's an imitation of.

Which by extension is like he says here we even see things then outside movies as extensions of those things. That they're supposed to reflect each other. I don't know. I still don't completely see why this would mean you're repressing sexuality.

1:27:56 Wes: But I guess, yeah, I think. Yeah. I mean, there's something about. So what he calls the unconscious Idea idolatry. The idea is that idolatry, right. You treat the object itself as sacred. And so there's something about having a unique work of art, for instance, a painting hanging in a museum, as opposed to this thing that there are many, many copies of everywhere. And then films that are also essentially copies of each other in some sense. So I think he thinks there's something essential about that to beauty.

1:28:26 Seth: The issue about the mechanical reproduction of beauty is that it's doing two things. One is it's selling it as an unattainable ideal. So on the one hand, the presumption is that they're manufacturing beauty. They're taking somebody and they're creating an icon out of. In this case, he's talking about a her, but it could be a him. And there has to be some presumption that that could possibly be you as a consumer. You have to believe that in some sense that could be you. And at the same time it's not attainable. But as part of that mechanism, it also then fuels selling you whatever's in the gap between you and this unattainable idea.

So the manufacturing of the beauty of the movie star is the building of the brand of the movie star. And it's also simultaneously the selling of the products that are used to manufacture the beauty of the movie star. And you buy into that and you have to try to attain this ideal knowing that you can never actually get there. That's part of the cycle. And it's about that lack of fulfillment, the desire that can never be fulfilled,

1:29:32 Mark: which I'm trying to connect this to the. From that we just did a few episodes ago. The way you're describing is, you know, you're treating yourself like a commodity. You think you have to improve yourself to match this artificial ideal. And it's entirely because of this conformity and all that stuff that makes authentic appreciation. Well, I mean, Fromm's point is authentic relationships, which is just a side product in here, but I believe Adorno brings that up too. It would follow that if you have these bunch of lies spilling at you from the media, and part of the grip of the media and films in particular, are to make you perceive the whole world as an extension of them, as very similar in type to them, then you're going to have the same dysfunctional relationship to actual other people as you would to these individuals in the film.

1:30:23 Seth: Well, yeah. And it's also a mechanism to drive sameness, that if there's one ideal, one beauty ideal, and women from all over the country or all over the world are trying to emulate that ideal feel without being able to attain it, that the consequence is that they're going to start looking the same, they're going to start acting the same. And it's just another mechanism for eliminating and erasing your subjectivity, your individuality and your subjectivity, and compelling you to the same. I think of all of the examples that he's given, and he's talking about film and jazz and all that stuff, we.

You know, it's kind of questionable at points, but I think this is maybe the most relevant and strongest point that I still see echoed today. Right when there's so many issues right now in our culture about body images. And you see Hollywood starlets that are all being driven to have the same body morphism, and then simultaneously the magazines on the newsstands and the television shows talk about how did they get there, how did she lose so much weight after having a baby, blah, blah, blah. And while I don't think that maybe it's playing itself out in the culture and in the mass of women as much as he seems to think that it is, it's clearly the case that there's lots and lots of people that are being impacted, lots and lots of women in this case that are being impacted by those images and those characters that are being fed to them.

I mean, it's a constant source of conversation, women's body images in the media, et cetera, et cetera. It's just flat out talking about that same function. And then he follows that up, talking about laughter.

1:32:07 Wes: Yeah, I think that should be the next subject.

1:32:09 Mark: Well, it's funny how it comes straight out of this discussion of the mass reproduction of beauty. The triumph over beauty is completed by humor. This is still page 112. The malicious pleasure elicited by any successful deprivation. There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh about. Laughter, whether reconciled or terrible, always accompanies a moment where fear is ended. It indicates a release, whether from physical danger or from the grip of logic. So there's going to be good laughter and bad laughter reconciled. Laughter, the good kind, resounds with the echo of escape from power. Wrong. Laughter copes with fear by defecting to the agencies which inspire it. It echoes the inescapability of power.

1:32:51 Wes: I love the phrase wrong laughter.

1:32:56 Mark: Fun is a medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe.

1:33:01 Wes: That's great.

1:33:01 Mark: Makes laughter the instrument for cheating happiness. Right. The next thing he says, this is the weirdest part. To moments of happiness. Laughter is foreign only operetta and now film present sex amid peals of merriment. But Baudelaire is as humorless as Hölderlin. So in other words, pure joy. He's just got this very culturally dependent. I mean, when I think of having a joyous time, yes, of course there's laughter. That's an essential component. But he's thinking of these sublime sorts of experience of when you're in church and you're singing Silent Night, and it fills you with joy.

1:33:35 Wes: Well, not just that, but just the experience of beauty or sublimity that I think even Kant and Schopenhauer would agree with him. The laughter part is another charm thing. It's interest. It's what's interesting to us. And beauty is not what's interesting to us. It is what stands outside of interest. It's the formal aesthetic thing.

1:33:53 Dylan: Yeah. What's so interesting about that is you would never, on that, delight in something beautiful because they would be antithetical to one another. Because there's nothing sublime about delight. It's almost not ironic enough in some funny way.

1:34:08 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on how you want to define delight, but, yeah, I see what you're saying.

1:34:12 Dylan: I would be with Mark, and I would include delight with laughter. One sign of your delight would be your reaction of laughing.

1:34:20 Mark: Well, maybe that would be reconciled laughter, responding with the echo of escape from power. Because if really something is so wonderful and delightful that you're just like, ah, that's awesome, then you're not submitting. You're not.

1:34:33 Wes: Okay.

1:34:33 Mark: I can buy that. It's a. That the terrible laughter is basically gallows humor. You know, we might think that gallows humor is. You're kind of rebelling. Hey, you can't keep me down. I can still laugh. But no, that kind of laughing, according to Adorno, is just. You're accepting the inevitability of the situation.

1:34:54 Wes: But he's saying joy is austere. So I'm not sure he's associating joy with the good laughter.

1:34:58 Mark: Hmm.

1:34:59 Wes: Again, in the classic disinterested beauty scheme of things. I think it's hard to get laughter into that picture. And it's hard to even get delight, as Dylan was saying. It's hard to get any emotional affective response. It's a very limited conception of the aesthetic. Right.

1:35:15 Mark: In wrong society, laughter is a sickness infecting happiness and drawing it into society's worthless totality. That is a sentence.

1:35:25 Wes: This does get darker as it goes on, doesn't it?

1:35:28 Seth: Yeah. Joy, however, is austere.

1:35:32 Mark: Laughter about something is always laughter at it. Isn't that funny the entire modern way that we say it? No, you could laugh with. Or you could laugh at. No, it's always laughing at if you laugh with.

1:35:44 Wes: It's kind of true, though.

1:35:47 Seth: The way I was thinking about it as I was reading it was about how sort of, like, comic relief is inserted inappropriately into films these days. Like where after the release of fear, after a dramatic moment, they write in some kind of a comic line. So it gives you permission to not actually feel the emotions of the dramatic moment, but to release them through laughter about something else. And how that kind of use of humor and use of laughter in films diffuses any situation where you have to authentically, you know, come to grips with something.

So that's kind of how I was reading this section and I thought that tied into some previous comments he makes. I think it's around page maybe 110 where he talks about how the internal movement of the characters themselves would call out for certain kinds of developments which are ignored so that the plot can be further by whatever mechanism the writer or the director thinks is appropriate in order to fulfill the ideology. Do you guys remember that?

1:36:56 Wes: Yeah, it's 109. Often the plot is willfully denied the development called for by characters and theme under the old schema.

1:37:04 Seth: Right. So it goes hand in hand with this idea that this can't be too challenging because the idea is to have some level of intellectual amusement which will distract from the working conditions of mechanized labor long enough so that you build up the stamina to go back and face it again. If I were to challenge you with a movie where I didn't provide a place for you to laugh as an outlet to diffuse either the severity of the emotional content or the severity of the intellectual content, then you'd actually have to, like, experience those emotions and think about it. And that itself would not be tolerable. It would not serve the purpose of trying to make you forget that you're part of the system.

1:37:49 Wes: Oh, I see.

1:37:50 Mark: Well, in the next sentence, he mentions Bergson. So we did a whole episode on that. So I have to read that laughter about something is always laughter at it. And the vital force which, according to Bergson, bursts through rigidity and laughter is, in truth the eruption of barbarity. The self assertion which in convivial settings dares to celebrate its liberation from scruple,

1:38:10 Wes: abandons humanity, parodies what is best.

1:38:13 Mark: Yeah, well, this is the collective of those who laugh, parodies humanity, the audience. You know, comedians always talk about how they love just like getting people to laugh and the fact that, you know, in a live setting and all these people are laughing together, how awesome that is. But no, the collective of those who laugh parodies humanity. They are monads, each abandoning himself to the pleasure at the expense of all others. And with the majority in support of being ready to shrink from nothing, their harmony presents a caricature of solidarity.

1:38:42 Wes: So I guess the comedy club is out as well for Friday night.

1:38:45 Mark: Yes, the comedy club is seedy and probably they have jazz afterwards.

1:38:50 Wes: Running out of options.

1:38:55 Dylan: Wow, here's a perfect quote from later. The culture industry is corrupt not as a sink of iniquity, but is the cathedral of higher gratification.

1:39:04 Wes: So that's page 114 at this point we're getting this talk of he's not just criticizing low culture. So the sink of iniquity part. He's not criticizing culture industry as sort of the elevation of folk culture. The cathedral of higher gratification means that it's that synthesis of high art with folk culture and then the subjection of them both to the culture industry.

1:39:28 Mark: Just before that, on the bottom of 114, here's another one of his kind of asides. So he's given us like bad humor. However, amusement free of restraint would not only be the opposite of art, but its complementary extreme absurdity, in the manner of Mark Twain, with which the American culture industry flirts from time to time, could be a corrective to art. The more seriously art takes its opposition to existence, the more it resembles the seriousness of existence, it's antithesis. So in other words, you would think that art is supposed to be revolutionary the way he's lined it out.

But if it is entirely serious in opposing the current status quo, then it kind of starts to look like the status quo in that the seriousness of existence and it are both serious. So maybe a little bit of absurdity of Mark Twainy kind of, you know, he's, oh, Mark Twain, he's highbrow enough. We can bring him in here. He actually has nice things to say about circuses. And just like complete nonsense, pure amusement indulged to the full relaxed abandon to colorful associations and merry nonsense that might be actually something we could use that would let us really negate the burden of labor, not just have a reprise of it so we can go back to it.

However, this is cut short by amusement in its marketable form. It is disrupted by the surrogate of a coherent meaning with which the culture industry insists on endowing its products. While at the same time slyly misusing them as pretexts for bringing on the stars.

1:40:55 Wes: So it's this intellectualization. Again, you make it too coherent. You can't just be absurd.

1:41:00 Mark: So again, I feel like the Monty Python guys and the people that influenced them read this stuff or were reacting to a culture of just the Bob Hope jokes are too predictable.

1:41:12 Wes: But not just that. He talks about stitching together the scraps of nonsense into a feeble minded plot. So it's this idea that you even need a plot, that you need a coherent vessel to deliver these absurdities. But I think Monty Python does come close, at least their sketches to being free of all that.

1:41:29 Mark: Or you could interpret them exactly in the way that the quote earlier was, that there is no overall logic. They look at how can we get into the next sketch and let's do whatever our best idea is. So again, these critiques, they seem to cut both ways and be so flexible that you could use them to condemn anything. It's hard not to actually go right here. Yeah, but I guess the key is, it is not the bells on the fool's cap that jingle, but the bunch of keys of capitalist reason which even in its images harnesses joy to the purpose of getting ahead. There you go.

1:42:05 Wes: So the next phase is the fusion of high and low culture and the repetition of higher values in stereotyped form. And really, he starts to think about the sense in which this is all a vehicle for lies. So ultimately what he's concerned about is truth and falsity.

1:42:22 Mark: Amusement itself has become an ideal, taking the place of the higher values it eradicates from the masses by repeating them in an even more stereotyped form than the advertising slogans paid for by private interests. Inwardness, the subjectively restricted form of truth, was always more beholden to the outward rulers than it imagined. The culture industry is perverting it into a bare faced lie. It now appears only as the high minded prattle tolerated by consumers of religious bestsellers, psychological films and women's serials as an embarrassingly agreeable ingredient so they can more reliably control their own human emotions. Let's unpack that a little bit. I feel like every time I get to the end of a sentence, you have to read the next one. Like none of them make sense by themselves. He moves between topics so fluidly here.

1:43:05 Wes: Well, think about the transformation of, say, psychoanalysis into pop psychology. He even mentions that at some point, again, he's thinking about this fusion of high art and entertainment. And it's not that he objects to entertainment, but you get these bastardizations in these hybrids. So religious bestsellers, psychological films, this fusion of the high and the low.

1:43:25 Mark: And it seems to be part and parcel to the way he described earlier. You take what were legitimate values in a previous time and you just cast them in stone and say these are the formulae from now on. And in the same way here you're taking, it could even be ideas from philosophy and you put them in this different setting that makes them into lies. It's that old cliche about how maybe the founders of the various religions really were wonderful and spiritual and in touch with deeper truths, but once their teachings get commodified, get mass produced into official religions, of course they're going to be disastrous. To mass reproduce anything like that turns it inauthentic.

1:44:05 Wes: Yeah. When he says the subjectively restricted form of truth was always more beholden to the outward rulers, again, I think that's this idea of tension where it's a resistance to that, you know, my personal Christian conscience, for instance, in ancient Rome, something I could be killed for. When it just becomes popular, it can easily lose that character. Right. It can just simply become the prevailing opinion to which you conform.

1:44:29 Seth: Yeah.

1:44:30 Mark: And we think that inwardness, again, it's inwardness, the subjectively restricted form of truth. Kind of what seems true to you when you reflect on yourself and you feel like, oh, I'm getting to my true self. No, no, no, that's always kind of a cultural matter. Well, it's always been a cultural matter, but now the culture industry is perverting it into a bare faced lie.

1:44:48 Wes: Well, in the first instance, it's resistance, it is a cultural matter. But like in the case of style, it's resistance to that force. Now it simply goes with that force.

1:44:58 Dylan: That's right. I just think he's trying to claim a notion of authenticity that he's pointing to it being true in the past because of this tension, this resistance that is a kind of genuine nonconformity to now the whole notion of genuine nonconformity has been subverted by mass culture and the culture industry so that from his point of view, it's not even possible.

1:45:23 Mark: Well, we're getting into tragedy, which I think is probably a final topic to attack because at least it hooks up to past philosophers. He mentions Aristotle here in the very next sentence after we stopped. In this sense, entertainment is purging the affects in the manner once attributed by Aristotle to tragedy. The culture industry reveals the truth not only about style, but also about catharsis. Is by dumbing down, by presenting intellectual ideas and converting them to high minded prattle tolerated by consumers of religious bestsellers, psychological films, women's serials, et cetera, as an embarrassingly agreeable ingredient.

In other words, all that is noble, the noble philosophy, where is a real relationship with God, Say, when you're confronting film, it just becomes the stupid things that the priest character shows up spouting. There's nothing authentic about that that is not actually spurring you to authentic religious experience. It's creating a caricature, it's creating a cliche that then you don't really listen to. You just put him in his little box and somehow this is the truth about catharsis.

1:46:28 Dylan: No, I thought that the culture industry was revealing the truth not only about style, but also about catharsis. That just the like in the case of style, where style is now prescribed and constrained by the culture industry. The same thing is true about catharsis. So it's not genuine catharsis, but it is whatever the culture industry decides it ought to be. It's not something that naturally arises out of the tragedy. Is a similar problem with the sublime that we were talking about before and confronting beauty and the problem of the aesthetic in the culture industry is that you no longer have that possibility. Sublimation is suppression. And he doesn't reveal what catharsis has actually become, except to say that like with style, it is just defined by the culture industry as something that's being sold to you as your. Or just another experience.

1:47:28 Wes: Yeah, I think it's hard to say what he's thinking about just based on the sentence with catharsis.

1:47:32 Dylan: I was trying to link it up with what he said about style.

1:47:35 Mark: Right. Entertainment is purging the affects in a manner once attributed by Aristotle to tragedy,

1:47:40 Wes: but now I don't think he likes that. In the context of this time and psychoanalysis, there are alternate theories to the idea that the purpose of tragedy is to purge the affects. I don't think he likes that idea. The point of tragedy is to confront the forbidden impulse.

1:47:55 Mark: Well, I know he says other things about tragedy here besides this sentence. Can we jump ahead to 122? I have notes here. Films can show tragedy, but they have to show compassionate people making it remediable. It's not that films just show everything is hunky dory, but they can show necessary suffering. The whole point of film, especially as distraction or the culture industry, is distraction is to remember we're saying how films are supposed to imitate the world. Well, they imitate the surface of the world, we've already established they don't make you think deeply.

You can't have a philosopher. This is before My Dinner with Andre. That would have been not even a legitimate movie, according to this analysis. That completely breaks the formulas of just two people sitting around and having a discussion about philosophy. That is not a legitimate type of movie. If you have philosophy in a movie. If you have deep thought in a movie. No, it's not deep anymore. It's just some cliche character that is having the deep thought. It's all about surfaces to make you not think deeply at all. And so, likewise, if it shows tragedy, that's not supposed to make you then think deeply on your life and how it's an illusion of thinking deeply.

But it's still just looking at the surfaces of things. It's that, oh, well, tragic things can happen at world. But it's necessary suffering, and it ends up making the surface of existence look pretty.

1:49:16 Wes: Yeah. The point here is that in a typical tragedy, right, you have someone who's flawed under a certain theory, and then they end up dead, right? And this kind of tragedy, it goes back to this idea of. At the very end of the section, he talks about tragedy being turned into a routine. And it's the valorization of what he calls health. So the idea is you display tragedy not as this thing again, with a consummation or an endpoint. It's the ongoing struggle of life, and you use it to valorize those who struggle. And the point is, again, the enforcement of the status quo.

You don't get to defeat the system. The tragedy is just being in the system. You don't get completely crushed or killed by the system in a way of a classical tragedy, and you don't defeat it. So he has this line. Tragedy included in society's calculations and affirmed as a moment of the world becomes a blessing. It deflects the charge that truth is glossed over, whereas, in fact, it is appropriated with cynical regret. It imparts an element of interest, the insipidity of censored happiness, and makes that interest manageable. So the other part of the function here is we are getting all these substitute gratifications.

We're not getting the consummation of things. And we need something to make that interesting. So we have to valorize that as a heroic struggle. Tragedy in this kind of altered form becomes a way of amplifying our satisfaction of the crappy shit we get out of mass culture, Right?

1:50:48 Mark: And just continuing the quote, it consummates some of the earlier ideas. Here, to the consumer who has seen culturally better days, it offers the surrogate of long abolished depth and to regular moviegoers the veneer of culture they need for purposes of prestige. This is the merging of the high art and the low art. To all it grants the solace that human fate in its strength and authenticity is possible even now in its unflinching depiction, inescapable. The unbroken surface of existence in the duplication of which ideology consists solely today appears all the more splendid, glorious and imposing, the more it is imbued with necessary suffering.

It takes on the aspect of fate, however, then he says, right after that, I mean, that still sounds like tragedy. Takes on the aspect of fate. That sounds like traditional Greek tragedy. However, here tragedy is leveled down to the threat to destroy anyone who does not conform. Whereas its paradoxical meaning once lay in hopeless resistance to mythical threat, tragic fate becomes the just punishment into which the bourgeois aesthetics has always longed to to transform it. The morality of mass culture has come down to it from yesterday's children's books.

Nice. So it seems like there are two ways that you could have bad things happen to people in movies. According to this one, it's just you're being punished for being bad. And so the lesson you're supposed to learn is conform, conform, conform. If you don't do that, then you'll end up like this. But on the other hand, the way you were just describing and the way the earlier senses were describing it. Wes, it's like the cartoon where the suffering is extended as opposed to simply getting smashed by the hammer and then coming back alive. In the next scene where it's continued.

Then it treats us to expect awfulness in our day to day existence and be okay with that.

1:52:32 Wes: Yeah. He says in the next page, 123. The masses demoralized by existence under the pressure of the system and manifesting civilization only as compulsively rehearsed behavior in which rage and rebellion everywhere show through, are to be kept in order by the spectacle of implacable life and the exemplary conduct of those it crushes. So you go into the movie theater and you see a story about someone who's heroic against all the forces that crush them. And you identify that in the sense of being. You have your office job, your crappy existence, and that becomes a kind of heroic way of getting through things. It's an interesting idea.

1:53:13 Mark: So to kind of wrap this up, I mean, I know we didn't really get to in any depth or in many of the points here. Talk about Are these critiques still applicable to today? I guess it's been my claim through this whole thing that the critiques are irritating enough that you could apply them to anything. Yet yes, you could use them to condemn, I think rightly so, quite a lot of what's still going on today. By saying that the culture industry, too much of it still is imposed from top down, and too much of our apparently spontaneous desires or creative impulses are because we already have become sheep.

And while I don't think this is unique to the modern age, I think that the technical means of mass production make it much easier for that to happen. It's not like you just go over to the next town and people think completely differently. And so you could sort of become worldly by exposing yourself merely to the people in the next town. Now, though, there's a lot of sort of more prima facie diversity and things to look into. Go to Zizek or somebody like that. As a modern commentator on how ubiquitous the military industrial complex, the capitalistic system still tends to just take everything that is fake thrown out of it and turned it into an image of itself and how hard it is to think outside those boxes.

And we ran into that, for instance, in our New Work episode when we try to think, is there a way that you could be. One of the points in this article that was brought up that we hadn't talked about yet is that problems are not admitted as legitimate. The culture industry has reduced our language. Just like it reduces our ability to imagine, it reduces language. So that problems like a tragedy here, the way we were just considering it, it has to be interpreted in terms of sort of the dominant paradigm, that either it's justice being done, that the tragic hero was bad, and so you learn from that not to be bad, or it's saying that even though things seem bad to you in your present life, that's okay.

That's the human condition and you should be okay with that. To think of outside that and think, well, how could we actually fix things? So tragedy is not inevitable. It's not fate. That would require some creative thinking. That the culture industry. I don't know if I would. I more think of it just in terms of politics or culture, rather than manipulations of capitalists who run TV and film companies. It seems like it's more global than that. It's just the dominant forces in our culture make it difficult to think outside the box. So, yes, that critique is still accurate today.

1:55:47 Wes: Yeah, his critique goes much further than that, of course.

1:55:49 Mark: But maybe the Internet will Eventually completely decentralize communications and all this stuff. But right now, just as he says, you know, there were ham radio operators back in his day, but they were condemned as amateurs. And even though we have the Internet now, it's still like a few big companies and traditional media outlets and maybe some things that were just penny ante. Things grow into giant media conglomerates, but still power tends to accumulate even in a distributed communications network. And so we're still going to have these sort of patterns that he picks out.

1:56:20 Wes: Yeah, I think there have always been concentrated power and dominant ideologies though that make people conform. So I don't think that's a particularly new thing.

1:56:27 Dylan: Well, he thinks that technology is the end game of enlightenment and industrialization in the form of capitalism is what's new.

1:56:37 Wes: Basically it co opts the struggle. Before you could struggle, now the struggle has been co opted. That's the unique thing about mass production.

1:56:45 Mark: And maybe even if the content is different, it's the form of your behavior as a consumer that still is. Hey, I can use my iPhone to look at any website I want. I don't have to look at just the cnn. I don't know, I can. But no, it's still having to shell out money for this thing and then being attached to it physically looking at it every five minutes through your day, you could update the critique.

1:57:08 Wes: Yeah, self distraction is a big thing. You might think that there's some sort of political value. And I have my list of political websites that I go look at. I'm getting all this different range of points of view, but at a more structural level, you might just see it as me distracting myself for the sake of fitting into the hegemony, for the sake of being commoditized.

1:57:33 Mark: And it could be, I think I heard this in some YouTube video about this article or about the book in general. But that the fact that we know about these things like oh, I'm up on the news, I'm a Bernie supporter or whatever, that somehow makes me morally. It replaces often actually doing something. Again, it's kind of the fantasy of being politically efficacious without actually doing anything. And so you could say that this whole media immersion still is a soporific that just makes you a better stooge of the capitalist machine.

1:58:05 Dylan: Well, it's the whole mistake that educating makes things happen. Just because you know about it doesn't mean you'll do anything about it.

1:58:11 Wes: Well, I did start a hashtag campaign.

1:58:13 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:58:16 Mark: Seth, any closing thoughts?

1:58:19 Seth: Well, there's a lot going on here and there are definitely a lot of references. So one thing that I want to return to very briefly was that I think I did a little extra research and Adorno thought that art only had that its lack of utility is its purpose, and that once it becomes instrumental, or once production becomes instrumental, you no longer have art. And there was, I guess, some notion of instrumental reason and some other kinds of reason that are behind this. But the idea is basically that you have to have in the back of your mind this idea that art is somehow something different and that culture is produced for a purpose, and that purpose is business.

It's driven by capital. It's to make money. And I understand what he's saying, but I not 100% sold on the connection between the instrumental nature of cultural production in the service of capital and then all of the erasure of subjectivity, the repression of resistance, the negation, of the possibility of stepping outside or being outside. It feels intuitively, in some sense, that that's right. Like it seems like we can see examples of that playing itself out. I suspect, however, that it's a bit more nuanced than that, as I'm reading this, especially in the section where he was talking about film, the film that came to mind as maybe something which simultaneously could be the greatest exemplar of this and then simultaneously might be a counterexample, is the movie Cool Hand Luke, starring Paul Newman, where Newman is clearly an outsider who goes to jail for cutting the heads off parking meters.

And it's never explained why he was doing that particular thing. And then once he's in prison, he just chafes against the restrictions and the rule of the somewhat aggressive warden and so on. And there's never any assimilation. He just simply is somebody who doesn't fit. And he consistently pushes against that. And it's an interesting study in the context of what this article was about or this essay.

2:00:38 Mark: But he can suck a lot of eggs.

2:00:42 Dylan: He just doesn't know how to communicate.

2:00:44 Seth: What we have here is a failure to communicate. But I very much enjoyed reading this. I'm looking forward to when we get to Habermas, to see how Habermas responds, at least I understand he was at least in part responding to this in some of his essays, but this is a worthy reading.

2:01:06 Mark: Yes, there are going to be more Frankfurt School ahead. However, next time we're going to pick up on a different thread of this by reading Some Distinction, a Social Critique of the Judgment of taste from the 1979 book by Pierre Bourdieu. So more on the Sociology of Art. For an exact reading selection, which we just haven't decided yet, check out our new page, partiallyexaminedlife.com upcoming and you can read along with us.

2:01:32 Unknown speaker: Hey there lovers of philosophy. Brian Wilson here with a breakdown of our current Not School offerings for April. If you often find yourself wondering if your subjective interpretations of reality could be incorporated into a cogent structural psychology, then you're going to want to check out Brian Wise's Not School group tackling Part two of of Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained. But if that's not enough for you, if you're sitting in traffic on your way to work thinking, fine. Not School can help me understand Dennett's heterophenomenology, but I need some deep German philosophy that can help me understand Aristotelian ontology.

Well, Frank Metzlaff and Preston Price have you covered as they'll be tackling Hegel's Science of Logic this April. But wait, there's more. I'll be leading a seminar on books one through three of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, building on last month's seminar on Plato's Crito. This event is sure to sell out almost as fast as the Taylor Swift concert in Nashville. Almost was in quotation marks there, but it's hard to get that across in an oral medium. This seminar will be happening on April 10th and as part of our ongoing Intro Readings and Philosophy series.

To register for any of these seminars or organize your own, you simply have to become a PEL citizen. Meaning pay $5 a month. $5 being a crazily low rate to pay for for this kind of personal interaction instruction. And of course it also includes the full length ad free versions of the entire PEL podcast back catalog. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me@brianartiallyexaminedlife.com and I hope to see you at a seminar soon.

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So subscribe to that.

2:04:22 Wes: Is there a link for that?

2:04:23 Mark: It's nakedlyexaminedmusic.com it's also just one of the categories of posts within our regular blog. They're all on the same place, so there you go. Have a wonderful escape from tragedy. I hope we've served to distract you from the remedial badness of your life,

2:04:40 Seth: the mechanized nature of your labor.

2:04:43 Mark: Good night everybody.

2:04:44 Wes: Good night.

2:04:45 Seth: Good night.

2:04:45 Mark: It's not just the places and things

2:04:50 Unknown speaker: the people I'm with are okay

2:04:55 Mark: My

2:04:55 Unknown speaker: love's a spectacular thing I would miss it if it went away but something is wrong in the world if you approach from my west if anything's gone from the world it's my impressions of bliss Laden tablecloths Fleshing what's new out of jetsam and daly mots I pass around look at the ground Nothing is eating the way that it should Nothing is striking at sea level Good why don't I win A new flash on the lawn it's all too familiar the thickness of sleep at the coming of dawn it's all too familiar Thought I'd never get tired of the street I live on I'm tired of tired and resting up I'm sick of falls and getting up I'm sick and tired of letting up my gun Letting you in and sick of pushing you out again it's all too familiar it's all too familiar it's all too familiar My.

I've seen this before When I was deep into thoughts the patterns I found and from everywhere caught the same checkered plaid I originally bought it's all too

familiar

I'm tired of tired and resting up I'm sick of falls and getting up I'm sick of sick and tired of letting up my gun Letting you in but don't think I'm pushing you out again it's all too familiar it's all too familiar it's all too familiar My God there's much to be gained from such realizations that magic tricks do not age well if left in the heat Incentive works only so many times English does not offer infinite rhymes Now I'll settle myself in the new way along the same street which is all too familiar Recognizing the same style that'll satisfy for a while Adorno would crack if he'd seen all the leaving I've done

2:07:39 Mark: Adorner references aren't too obscure, are they?

2:07:42 Unknown speaker: As I compress this mess into tunes Fun for profits and spun

2:07:48 Mark: no profits so far which is

2:07:53 Unknown speaker: all too familiar it's all too familiar it's all too familiar it's all too familiar it's all too familiar it's all too familiar it's all too familiar it's all too familiar it's all too familiar it's all too familiar it's all too familiar My God It.