Adorno Culture Quotes & Sayings

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after the holocaust is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation. — Theodor Adorno

All testify to the coercion and sacrifice which culture imposes on man. To rely on them and deny the decline is to become even more firmly caught in its fatal coils. — Theodor Adorno

In contrast to the Kantian, the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. — Theodor W. Adorno

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

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

This was my first indication of the quality I feel is most characteristic of Zora's work: racial health; a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature. — Alice Walker

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. — Theodor W. Adorno

By thinking you are cleverer and more talented than your buddies, many a career has been blotted. — Robert Genn

I'm not saying Cubans don't deserve asylum, but if it is a national security issue, there are people who are coming from Cuba on hijacked airplanes. Why isn't that a national security issue? — Edwidge Danticat

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

In the products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble only so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually by representatives of a benevolent collective; and then, in illusory harmony, they are reconciled with the general interest whose demands they had initially experienced as irreconcilable with their own. — Theodor Adorno

The greatest madness a man can be guilty of in this life, is to let himself die outright, without being slain by any person whatever, or destroyed by any other weapon than the hands of melancholy — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

A perfect weekend in London has to start on Friday night, by going to the theatre, the Donmar or the National. It's a cliche for an actor, but I enjoy going as much as possible. — Helen McCrory

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

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them. — Theodor Adorno

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture. — Theodor Adorno

Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer

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

Evil has insinuated itself into our very souls and rules over us from the very citadel erected to guard us against it. — Miroslav Volf

Newness only becomes mere evil in its totalitarian format, where all the tension between individual and society, that once gave rise to the category of the new, is dissipated. Today the appeal to newness, of no matter what kind, provided only that it is archaic enough, has become universal, the omnipresent medium of false mimesis. The decomposition of the subject is consummated in his self-abandonment to an ever-changing sameness. — Theodor Adorno

I never understood the need for a "live" audience. My music, because of its extreme quietude, would be happiest with a dead one. — Igor Stravinsky

The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought to help to forget. — Theodor W. Adorno

Standing there, I loved myself and I hated myself. That's what the black Mary did to me, made me feel my glory and my shame at the same time. — Sue Monk Kidd

Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness. — Theodor W. Adorno

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. — George Orwell

In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects. — Theodor W. Adorno

The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them. — Theodor W. Adorno

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline. — Theodor Adorno