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This, I think, brings me to the centre of my criticism. The impression which your entire study conveys--and not only on me and my arcades orthodoxy--is that you have done violence to yourself. Your solidarity with the Institute [of Social Research], which pleases no one more than myself, has induced you to pay tributes to Marxism which are not really suited either to Marxism or to yourself. They are not suited to Marxism because the mediation through the total social process is missing, and you superstitiously attribute to material enumeration a power of illumination which is never kept for a pragmatic reference but only for theoretical construction. They do not suit your own individual nature because you have denied yourself your boldest and most fruitful ideas in a kind of pre-censorship according to materialist categories [...]
this is a masterpiece of criticism
[...] It was doubtless his book The Destruction of Reason which revealed most clearly the destruction of Lukács' own. [...]
burn centers in Frankfurt
[...] When Brecht, to take an example, devised a kind of childish shorthand to try and crystallize out the essence of Fascism in terms of a sort of gangsterism, he made his 'resistible' dictator, Arturo Ui, the head of an imaginary and apocryphal Cauliflower Trust, instead of the most powerful economic organizations. This unrealistic device proved to be a mixed blessing. By thinking of Fascism as an enterprise belonging to a band of criminals who have no real place in the social system and who can therefore be 'resisted' at will, you strip it of its horror and diminish its social significance. This invalidates the caricature and makes it seem idiotic even in its own terms: the despotic rise of the minor criminal loses its plausibility in the course of the play itself. Satire which fails to stay on the level of its subject lacks spice.
this begets the question of where the balance is you're trying to write dystopian fiction that still inspires. how powerful do you make the bad guy? how hopeless does the situation have to be? you want to create a scene that is horrifying enough to simulate reality but surmountable enough that the viewer leaves thinking, "I should fight back, too"
For all this, it is impossible to rid oneself of the feeling that here is a man who is desperately tugging at his chains, imagining all the while that their clanking heralds the onward march of the world-spirit. He remains dazzled by the power which would never take his insubordinate ideas to heart, even if it tolerated them. [...]
oh my god Adorno
[...] Committed art in the proper sense is not intended to generate ameliorative measures, legislative acts or practical institutions--like earlier propagandist plays against syphilis, duels, abortion laws or borstals--but to work at the level of fundamental attitudes. For Sartre its task is to awaken the free choice of the agent which makes authentic existence possible at all, as opposed to the neutrality of the spectator. But what gives commitment its aesthetic advantage over tendentiousness also renders the content to which the artist commits himself inherently ambiguous. [...]
[...] This is why the buffoonery of fascism, evoked by Chaplin as well, was at the same time also its ultimate horror. If this is suppressed, and a few sorry exploiters of greengrocers are mocked, where key positions of economic power are actually at issue, the attack misfires. The Great Dictator loses all satirical force and becomes obscene when a Jewish girl can hit a line of storm-troopers on the head with a pan without being torn to pieces. For the sake of political commitment, political reality is trivialized: which then reduces the political effect.
Reason, which is essential to keep the machinery in motion, necessarily contains its other. When you start to think, you cannot stop short at purely reproductive thinking. This does not mean that things will really work out like that, but you cannot think without thinking that otherness. The general stultification today is the direct result of cutting out utopia. When you reject utopia, thought itself withers away. [...]
ADORNO: The more superfluous a job of work is, the worse it becomes, the more it degenerates into ideology.
HORKHEIMER: And the more it is misapplied. Work today is not superfluous as long as people still go hungry. Work is perverted. Automation. We should take greater care to help others, to export the right goods to the right people, to seek cures for the sick. Nowadays there is a false abolition of work.
ADORNO: It amounts to production for its own sake.
HORKHEIMER: I couldn’t care less about sending spacecraft to the moon.
ADORNO: There is nothing sacred about technology.
HORKHEIMER: Marx already has the idea that in a false society, technology develops wrongly.
[...] the occult appears rather institutionalized, objectified and, to a large extent, socialized [...]
[...] The type of people we are concerned with take astrology for granted, much like psychiatry, symphony concerts or political parties; they accept it because it exists, without much reflection, provided only that their own psychological demands somehow correspond to the offer. They are hardly interested in the justification of the system. In the newspaper column to which this monograph is mainly devoted the mechanics of the astrological system are never divulged and the readers are presented only with the alleged results of astrological reasoning in which the reader does not actively participate.