Abstract
The truth potential of art is realized not only by great art (of educated elites) but also by the cultural industry that has become the art of the masses. Great art and cultural industry do not only contradict one another but often interpenetrate and overlap subversively. Especially in critical periods of crisis (and revolution) great art and cultural industry go together with political action. However, in more counterrevolutionary periods as nowadays post-truth democracy, Adorno's gloomiest interpretation of the cultural industry becomes topical again.
Keywords
In the famous chapter Culture Industry from the Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno are concerned with an industrially advanced figure of art, whose progress the authors measure with Marx at the level of productive forces. Therefore, as the subtitle, Enlightenment as Mass Fraud (‘Massenbetrug’), reveals, their truth is under discussion.
The products of culture industry are products of art, and like tissues and tomatoes, they are products of abstract human labour. They are produced by artists and consumed by the public (including the artists themselves).
Everyone belongs to the audience. Everyone, even those who do not visit museums, go to the cinema, read comics or listen to symphonies, is, according to Adorno, exposed to the social impact of art. 1 Art is practice, but one that renounces persuasion 2 . Nevertheless, yes: precisely for this reason, the most indirect participation in the spirit, which is concentrated in works of art, contributes in underground processes to the change of society. 3 Works of art have a practical effect ‘by the scarcely apprehensible transformation of consciousness’. 4 They are latent practices, incomplete speech-acts, representations without the intention of communication, whose historical genesis ‘refers back to interdependencies’ that ‘do not disappear tracelessly in them’ so that ‘the process enacted internally by each and every artwork’ ‘ presents itself to its audience as a model of possible practice’. What matters in art is not its effect but its intrinsic form-: ‘its intrinsic form nevertheless has an effect’. 5 Their closure (aesthetic autonomy) is not the same as incomprehensibility, ‘On the contrary, hermetic poetry and social elements have a common nexus that must be acknowledged’. 6 The more hermetic they are, the greater their possible effect. Yet its truth potential is only realized if it corresponds to an ‘objective need for a change of consciousness that could turn into a change of reality’. But art works can realize that only ‘through the affront of the prevailing needs and an alternative exposure of the familiar’. 7
The truth values (true/false) of this correspondence are distributed, though not always equally between the (great) art (of educated elites) and the culture industry (the art of the masses) (1). 8 The interplay of art, the culture industry and politics in the 1960s is an exemplary illustration of the updating of the aesthetic truth potential (2). Conversely, the renewed structural change of the public sphere into a post-truth Democracy shows that Adorno's gloomiest interpretation of the culture industry from the late 1940s has only now really become topical – prophetically in the best, original sense of a warning emphasis (3). 9
(1) Truth values
Horkheimer and Adorno described the hegemonic tendency of the culture industry in 1944 as a Verblendungszusammenhang, a context of total delusion or blindness. 10 As Husserl, Horkheimer and Habermas have argued, objectification and reification that is constitutive for technology and science has an imperial tendency to self-objectivation, which substitutes the practical, performative behaviour of social actors towards the world, with a thinking from the world. 11 The imperial tendency of technology and science, which does not exhaust its (emancipatory) possibilities, meets and reinforces the exploitation imperatives and the prevailing interests of late capitalism. As a market-compliant culture industry, Enlightenment becomes a ‘mass deception’, 12 and today at the latest as a market-compliant democracy. 13
However, culture's share in the creation, preservation and deepening of social relations of domination and exploitation, is by no means an invention of the culture industry: ‘Pure works of art, which negated the commodity character of society by simply following their own inherent laws, were at the same time always commodities’. From the very beginning, the -autonomy of art was ‘a moment of untruth’, ‘blindness’ and ‘lie’. 14 Because works of art as fait social, ‘tum one side toward society the domination they internalized also radiated externally. Once conscious of this nexus, it is impossible to insist on a critique of the culture industry that draws the line at art.’ 15
Adorno expressly includes in his opinion the most advanced work of modernism (Schönberg), not only in terms of productive forces, but also of transcending its capitalist production relations, in this fatal dialectic of progress. His famous dictum that after Auschwitz there would be no more poems free of barbarism also applies to the sentence that claims exactly that, as Adorno immediately unmistakably adds: ‘Even the outermost consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into gossip. Cultural criticism is opposed to the last stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that also eats up the knowledge that expresses why it became impossible to write poems today’. 16
Conversely, there are also moments of truth in the culture industry that represent a latent potential for resistance that, as (at the latest) the 1960s have shown, can be updated in a cultural revolution. ‘Automobiles, bombs and film hold the totality together until their levelling element demonstrates its power against the very system of injustice it served’. 17 This was related in 1944 to the war against the authoritarian state and the fascist inequality regime of continental Europe, which the culture industry served with cars, bombs and films, but whose destruction it was also involved in the name of equality
It is not only in the male-chauvinist war propaganda that the ambivalence of the culture industry becomes apparent. The culture industry is true precisely where ‘contemporary mass culture (...) rebels against the concept of meaning and the assertion that existence makes sense’, and it becomes true where ‘extremes touch at the very top and the very bottom’. 18 If it rebels against the concept of meaning, the culture industry is the exoteric side of the esoteric, hermetic and advanced works of modernity, which only design syntheses to ‘dissect’ them, while conversely in the avant-garde of the 1960s not only the arts overlap, fray and merge among themselves, but also with the culture industry. 19 In rebellion against any higher sense of suffering, ‘vulgar music’ merges with hermetic art: ‘Jacobinic, the lower music storms into the upper music’. 20 Gustav Mahler, who died in 1911, even anticipated the record industry, for example, with the style in which the second movement of the Fifth Symphony, the 1920s hit song from Berlin ‘If you see my aunt’, already sounded. 21 Anticipating John Cage, Mahler already opens the windows to demolish the ‘self-righteous smoothness’ of e-culture ‘from the excessive sound of military bands and palm garden orchestras’, the ‘whirl of timpani from afar’ and ‘vocal noises (...)’. 22 ‘His symphonies shamelessly parade with what lies in everyone's ears, melody remnants of the great music, bowls of folk songs, popular songs and hits’. 23
The ‘measure of expertise’ characteristic of the culture industry, the technical ‘perfection’ that makes Wagner's Tristan look old, ‘relates to nuances so fine as to be almost as subtle as the devices used in a work of the avant-garde’ can also serve the ‘truth’ that they still deny. 24 Andy Warhol's Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) of 1963 and countless works of the avant-garde of that time have directly followed the expertise, 25 the state of the productive forces embodied in the culture industry. Conversely, the comics and many of their other products now fill museums.
Their flawless perfection secretly communicates with the ‘style of the great work of art’, which ‘negates itself’ in the ‘necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity’. However, with a few exceptions, culture industry no longer fails because it is ‘only style’. Therefore, the culture industry reveals the secret of the aesthetic style of all cultural products, from the great works to the most pathetic of kitsch work, from best Weimar Classicism to the worst B-movies: ‘obedience to the social hierarchy’. 26 Thus, the culture industry reinforces the lower social classes’ well-founded ‘mistrust against traditional culture as ideology mingles with that of industrialized culture as fraud’ because the recipients of culture industry ‘secretly reject the degraded works of art together the junk the medium has made them resemble.’ At the same time of ‘compulsive imitation’ of advertising ‘by consumers of cultural commodities, the recognize (them) as false’. 27 The level of productive forces, not least of the cultural knowledge embodied in the culture industry, undermines obedience to the hierarchy. It is only guaranteed by the ‘technically enforced ubiquity of stereotypes’, 28 but could also turn against the shackles of the system at any time. 29 ‘Even in the weakest form of imitation, the urge to be modern is also a piece of productive power’. 30
That is why ‘the interest of countless consumers (…) with “good reason is focused on the technology, not on the rigidly repeated, threadbare and half-abandoned content.”’ 31 According to Adorno in a 1963 radio lecture, ‘the culture industry has ideological support precisely because it carefully guards itself against the progressive consequences of its technology that is inherent in the products’. 32 Only one tiny step seems to be missing for the culture industry to break apart the false consciousness because its advanced technology already undermines it. When the advanced rational domination of aesthetic material releases the ‘absurdity in the manner of Mark Twain’, the culture industry becomes a ‘corrective’ of esoteric artI because the performance ‘negates the burden of labour’. In ‘some revue films, and especially in grotesque stories and “funnies,” the possibility of this negation is momentarily glimpsed’. 33
Both truth values, ‘true’ and ‘false’ apply to great works of art as well as to the culture industry: ‘The culture industry has its element of truth in its fulfilment of a need that originates in the ever-increasing renunciation demanded by society; but the sort of concessions it provides renders it absolutely false’. 34 This variable dialectic of true and false becomes evident in the universalization of the commodity form through ubiquitous consumer advertising, which can only suppress the nightmare of the underconsumption crisis, which returns with each round of rising profits in monopoly capitalism, by undermining the capitalist performance principle: ‘Amusement, free of all restraint, would be not only the opposite of art but its complementary extreme’. 35 Because the progress of Enlightenment and technology makes any form of withhold gratification deniable, the Minima Moralia contains a decisive rejection of the tacit conformism of psychoanalytic art and cultural theory: ‘artists do not sublimate’. 36 The ‘caricature of solidarity’ that characterizes the culture industry is also still a draft of real solidarity. 37 At the same time, the culture industry that keeps the public in submission has made it ‘increasingly difficult to keep the public in submission’. 38 In the rebellion against meaning, the truth potential of hermetic works communicates subversively with that of the culture industry: ‘The bourgeois want art voluptuous and life ascetic; the reverse would be better’. 39
(2) Culture industry, avant-garde and politics
World-changing possibilities open up for art where the avant-garde converges with the progressive tendencies of the culture industry. Despite his harsh criticism on the culture industry, Adorno saw Mahler's ‘art music’ as a schema of actin in which the truth-relevant effects of the union of art and industrial music appear as models in a ‘music of spontaneous action’. 40 In such a music ‘the totality to which it brings the depraved fragments together, immediately results in something new. However, it takes everything it needs from regressive hearing’. 41 The schema of action shows how regressive hearing can ‘abruptly change when art together with society leaves the path of repetition of the ever-same’, 42 Because the false consciousness of the masses and the culture industry, which increases the tendency of the masses to regression, is by no means only wrong, the ‘horror that Schönberg and Webern today [1938] spread as they did thirty years ago […] does not stem from their incomprehensibility, but from the fact that they are understood all too well’. 43 It is precisely this horror, however, that can trigger learning processes that disturb indifference and disappoint self-deception.
In the 1960s, truth-relevant effects that originate, as always, from the fragile and short-lived connection between the culture industry and the avant-garde were not long in coming. In the lecture ‘Die Kunst und die Künste’, which he gave to the assembled avant-garde audience at the Berlin Academy of the Arts in 1966, Adorno takes the lead of the movement when he observes that there has been an explosion of mutually corrective border violations, of anarchic mixing and fraying between the arts and between the esoteric avant-garde and the exoteric culture industry. The ‘mocking fulfilment of Wagner's dream of the total art work by the culture industry is countered by the ‘happenings’ which are ‘total art works’, which want to be ‘total anti-art works’. 44
Suddenly, the unpredictable path from Mahler's spontaneous, revolutionary action of art music to politically revolutionary action seemed very short. On 1 October 1964, students in Berkeley blocked a police car with a sit-in in support of a detained student who had distributed leaflets for freedom of speech at the university. After lengthy negotiations, the two police officers allowed the students' spokesman, Mario Savio, to climb onto the police car barefoot and make a speech from the roof. The first sentence of his unintentionally surreal speech became a truth disclosing happening with truth-relevant effects: ‘They're family men, you know. They have a job to do! Like Adolf Eichmann. He had a job to do. He fit to the machinery’. 45 Suddenly the latent authoritarianism of the democratic welfare state became apparent in one sentence. The seminars, in which authority and family were discussed, which at that time were carefully shielded from the general public, opened up to the mass audience of Stern and Spiegel. Suddenly, Schönberg and Webern were also understood by those who had never heard their music. The ‘dried-out’, ‘administered public’ was ‘re-politicized’. 46 When Malcolm X gave himself a (divine) name that rejects every predicative determination of himself, he made himself a model of a singular universal that locates itself in the world yet withdraws any heteronomy through authority and tradition. 47 When boxer Mohamed Ali tore up his draft notice in front of the world press and said: ‘They (the Viet Cong) never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn't put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. Shoot them for what? Just take me to jail’ 48 , The rift became apparent that separates the shining new world of white, heterosexual men from the nightmare which was and (in many places) still is for coloured, homosexuals and women – and Frantz Fanon became the first pop star of post-colonial theory.
(3) The context of total delusion: Post-truth democracy
In the following I will take many of my examples from the 2016 electoral campaign in the United States that lead to the victory of Donald Trump.
(a) Fun is a molten (steel) bath
However, how can the truth potential of art in the culture industry become a force that reaches (and sometimes seizes) the masses, when the only utopia that actually reaches the masses in times of neoliberally-globalized and monopolized media, which are almost completely dominated by economic exploitation imperatives, resembles the ‘golden shimmer projected beyond the real’ Trump Towers, Trump performances, Trump Universities and Trump Cities?. 49 When public has reached a state ‘in which thought is being turned inescapably into a commodity and language into a celebration of the commodity’? 50 When even liberal and progressive stations hold it the way CBS boss Les Moonves did when he confessed that Donald Trump ‘may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS (...). Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? (...) The money's rolling in and this is fun (...). I've never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going. Donald's place in this election is a good thing?’ 51 If only eleven days later, during Trump's Chicago campaign appearance, a CBS reporter is recognized as a disembedded journalist, beaten down, arrested and imprisoned, and all that without the slightest change in the complete subsumption of public will-formation under the commodity form, the dictatorship of the audience share? The answer came from Donald Trump; he thought it was funny how the reporter was treated, ‘Fun is a steel bath’. 52
Especially after the referenda and election campaigns of 2016 (Brexit, US presidential election) it seems that the complete subsumption of the culture industry under the commodity form has only now, in the age of the World Wide Web, become an ‘almost comprehensively controlled system’. 53 The Internet has replaced the croaking radio, as the ‘universal mouthpiece of the Führer’, with the Twitter message of the presidential candidate’s victory that reached 150 million US citizens, long before the official result of the defeat of the candidate reached only the 80 million viewers who had viewed it on television. 54
(b) Embedded Journalism
The globalization of embedded journalism, invented in the British-American Iraq War in 2003, and its connection with the post-truth democracy of electronic content markets, in which the reality appropriate to the content of the message is immediately delivered, are the ‘mocking fulfilment of Wagner's dream of the total art work’. 55 The global media industry, now fully privatized, has long been prepared to systematically blurred any critical differentiation of politics, entertainment and business in the procurement, allocation and sale of information. In the words of Matthias Döpfner, CEO of the Springer Group, their credo is: ‘Content is our top priority’. 56
This means the purely market-strategic production of digitally diversifiable and occasionally re-combinable content, which is offered in any selection worldwide and whose production is exclusively oriented towards the comprehensively controlled market behaviour of the global audience and its completely recorded, local characteristics, so that the different public spheres are no longer confronted with one and the same reality, but with the representation of a reality that Has been adapted to the different public spheres from the outset. To this end, the Springer Group has created Upday, ‘a new mobile news aggregation service that Axel Springer has developed in partnership with Samsung Electronics. The service (...) uses a series of algorithms to track users' reading habits and select a personalized stream of content from across the web’. 57
What the market, with its unmistakable tendency to the reality of bankruptcy, does not achieve, the embedded journalism of the culture industry does by anticipating obedience: ‘The new media forms have devolved into entertainment, and instead of critical discourse we see the spectacle of a commentariat, across the ideological spectrum, that prefers outrage over complexity and dismisses dialectical uncertainty for the narcissistic affirmation of self-consistent ideologies each of which is parceled out to its own private cable network. Expression is displacing critique’. 58
If that is not enough, it is the ‘repressive tolerance’ (Marcuse) of the quality press, which adheres to standards of objectivity and neutrality, although everyone knows that one is the truth, the other the lie. On August 25, Clinton had attacked Trump because of his undisputedly close, never-denied sympathies and contacts with the American right-wing radicals and neo-Nazis, who call themselves ‘alt-right’, which Trump acknowledged with a single SPO sentence: ‘Clinton is bigot’. The next morning the Washington Post appeared under the repressively tolerant headline: ‘Clinton, Trump Exchange Racially Charged Accusations’. 59
(c) Power increases the more bluntly its existence is admitted
The two major parties of the United States, the Democratic and Republican Parties, obey the same system imperatives. By manipulatively creating a political 'reality' that fits Hilary Clinton, the party establishment has taken out the only candidate whose program opposed the post-truth democracy of ubiquitous entertainment and was oriented towards social reality. The Clinton campaign, and this is a moment of hope for the sake of the hopeless, ultimately failed because Clinton's voters withdrew from the candidate's reality TV in order to orient themselves, like Sanders, on social reality rather than the fake reality that fits the content on offer. That's when Michelle Obama's lonesome call ‘Enough is enough!’ came too late.
Yet, this is exactly what made the simple copy of the irreversibly past of the white American steelworker, in turn a copy of bleak socialist realism, the best-selling reality of voter sales in 2016. During his last campaign appearance in Pennsylvania, Trump said: ‘We are going to win the great state of Pennsylvania and we are going to win back the White House. [Huge cheers]... When we win, we are bringing steel back, we are going to bring steel back to Pennsylvania, like it used to be. We are putting our steel workers and our miners back to work. We are. We will be bringing back our once-great steel companies’. 60 He could just as well have said he would restore the empire of Emperor Augustus on a scale of 1:1 – ‘slavery included. [Huge cheers]’. However, that, in contrast to the return of the Eisenhower years, would still have had the distant touch of a cosmopolitan utopia, as always imperially distorted, which Ronald Reagan, now deified, had once again conjured up when he took office: ‘The City on the Hill’. That was lip service, but with the lip service the last hint of old European human dignity disappears: ‘Those in charge no longer take much trouble to conceal the structure, the power of which increases the more bluntly its existence is admitted’. 61 This is the logic of self-radicalization that Hans Mommsen demonstrated in the Nazi mass crimes.
What will become of the truth potential of art and the culture industry when the ‘coherence’ of ‘thought’ has already broken down into atomized ‘signals’ to such an extent that the ‘quantity of organized amusement is converted into the quality of organized cruelty’? 62 The Dialectic of Enlightenment] still had in mind the incompetent beginnings of behavioural rat experiments with their labyrinths and signal lights that caused rodents to secrete gastric secretions. 63 In the meantime, the likes of social media and the endless chains of operant conditioning they set in motion have transformed the virtual echo chambers of the Internet into a gigantic human experiment. Under the laboratory conditions created for rats, they secrete vast amounts of hate speech secretions which, as social research has shown, they would never have secreted under real conditions, not even in the subconscious, but which – according to the Thomas-Theory of sociology – are real in their consequences. 64 ‘The more senseless the antagonism, the more rigid the (armed power) blocs’. 65 The logic of self-radicalization has been globalized. Without exception, all political parties are consuming themselves in a race to the bottom, which the Front National had already achieved on the day it was founded in 1972. ‘Drags of drags’. 66
While in January 2015, as in the comedy of socialism described by Marx and Hayden-White, the Greek voters on the periphery of Europe ‘laughed’ about the fact that they had voted ‘for democratic change’ with an overwhelming majority plus good reasons, in order to shake off the troika's long unbearable state of siege, and then failed because of the reality of Northern-European hegemonic power, the pro-Brexit and Trump voters literally ‘laughed because there is nothing to laugh about'. 67 – “Anyone who pays taxes is an idiot,” says Sergio Berlusconi, acting prime minister, to one of his television stations at prime time and wins the election with the votes of those who would have to starve without taxes. The pernicious love of the common people for the harm done to them outstrips even the cunning of the authorities. 68 Asked by Hilary Clinton about the billions in taxes he evaded, Trump, the US presidential candidate, who like Berlusconi owes his fame solely to show business, explains to those who should vote for him: ‘I am smart’. The ‘jollity’ of the new type of presidents, who promise their voters the expulsion of millions of Mexicans, shackles for Muslim citizens, the prison for the leaders of the opposition party and the world a trade war, ‘dispels the joy supposedly conferred by the sight of an embrace and postpones satisfaction until the day of the pogrom’. 69
In the content markets of the present day, what Horkheimer and Adorno described in the extreme case of fascist anti-Semitism is implemented one-to-one into the social structure: ‘In this sense fascist anti-Semitism is obliged to invent its own object. Paranoia no longer pursues its goal on the basis of the individual case history of the persecutor; having become a vital component of sociery it must locate that goal within the delusive context of wars and economic cycles before the psychologically predisposed ‘national comrades’ can support themselves on it, both inwardly and outwardly, as patients’. 70
(d) People deprived of their subjectivity
Adorno was already of the opinion in the 1940s that the study on authoritarian personality, which he co-initiated, co-authored and co-published before the day of its publication (1950) had become obsolete because anti-Semitism, fascism and authoritarianism were no longer individually attributable characteristics of an authoritarian personality structure, but, as he suspects in 1948 in the supplementary remarks on authoritarian personality, which his co-authors did not want to publish, a direct expression of the ‘total structure of our society’. 71 The authoritarians of every colour are ‘people, deprived of their subjectivity are let loose as subjects’ . 72 Their prototype is the anti-Semite. 73 ‘Psychological dispositions do not actually cause fascism (...). Rather, fascism defines a psychological area which can be successfully exploited by the forces which promote it for entirely non-psychological reasons of self-interest’. 74 ‘The new form of blindness’, through ‘the mediation of the total society that encompasses all relationships and impulses, human beings are being turned back into precisely what the developmental law of societythe principle of the self, had opposed: mere examples of the species, identical to one another through isolation within the compulsively controlled collectivity. 75 What will become of the legitimising connection between the discursive claim to truth and political choice with which democracy stands and falls, when 24% of those entitled to vote bring a gang of right-wing radical multi-billionaires to the government, which, as most of them themselves know, has nothing in mind but to plunder them and the rest of the world in order to enrich itself?’
The more immeasurable the gulf between chorus and leaders, the more certainly is there a place among the latter for anyone who demonstrates superiority by well-organized dissidence. In this way liberalism’s tendency to give free rein to its ablest members survives in the culture industry. To open that industry to clever people is the function of the otherwise largely regulated market, in which, even in its heyday, freedom was the freedom of the stupid to starve. 76
Far right figures as Berlusconi and Donald Trump, currently shooting up like mushrooms out of the ground of the financial metropolises, are not only like one copied egg after another, but are literally ‘large-scale fascistic rackets which agree among themselves on how much of the national product is to be allocated to providing for the needs of the people’. 77 Assembly line figures of the culture industry such as Mussolini, Hitler, Berlusconi, Urban, Johnson and Trump cannot ‘speak a lie without believing it themselves’. 78 Their power ‘increases the more bluntly its existence is admitted’. It seems as if Adorno was right in his darkest nightmares of a humanity that has succumbed to complete self-objectification, so that the ‘mentality of the public’ is no longer conveyed by individual neuroses but has directly become ‘a part of the system’. 79 The Trump-campaign was seemingly incompetent, but as it soon turned out, perfectly organised by Cambridge Analytics and Facebook micro-targeting. It especially demonstrated the ‘the common determination of the executive powers to produce or let pass nothing which does not conform to their tables, to their concept of the consumer, and above all, to themselves’. 80 Enlightenment as mass deception . Melania Trump reads the same speech that Michele Obama gave eight years earlier at her presentation at the Democratic Party Congress in 2016 at the same Republican event: ‘Culture industry has finally posited imitation absolute’. 81
Through the fusion of global private ownership and global media technology, atomistic individualization has progressed so far that a reasonably uniform minimum of information, reflecting the state of scientific knowledge can no longer even be ensured in the state elections of dwarf states such as Schleswig-Holstein or Luxembourg. The progressive substitution of disputable knowledge by ad hoc constructed knowledge of salvation of ever shorter expiry dates, fragments, not only the contents, but also the forms and procedures in which the public dispute over them can still be settled at all. This creates an ideal environment for asserting the most powerful private interests and explains why the obscurantism of intelligent design can assert itself against the scientifically proven theory of evolution in broad segments of the political public; why the empirical findings of climate research are completely disputed; why all theories could be removed from economics, who are suspicious of the premises of neoliberal model platonism; why the social sciences' access to the political public is largely blocked; and why only sciences in which social reality no longer occurs (economics, psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology), in talk shows, news broadcasts, web communications, print and picture media, parliamentary and committee debates and in content markets have a chance of being heard and sold.
Peter Gordon is probably right when he writes that the electronically advanced, capitalist organized and globalized culture industry ‘signifies not the return of fascism but the dissolution of critical consciousness, and it heralds the slow emergence of something rather different than political struggle: the mediatized enactment of politics in quotation marks where all political substance is slowly being drained away’. 82
(e) That the spell dissolves itself
The social movements that broke the context of blindness in the 1960s triggered a cultural revolution in world history. It ranges from the penetration of mass and avant-garde culture to the globalization of a victim-oriented culture of memory and human rights, which fades all mythical heroic epics; from the sexual revolution to the emancipation of women, which revolutionizes millennia-old relations of domination and exploitation and (despite the remaining power) has globally delegitimized patriarchy and even illegalized it in international and wide segments of national law; from the breakthrough of the ‘Color Line’ and the abolition of the centuries-old ‘white’ hegemony to homosexual marriage and the abolition of the ban on abortion in deep Catholic countries; from the globalization of a broad, post-conventional discourse to the historically singular, biopolitical revolutionization of system environmental relations.
However, these achievements are overshadowed by the return of the great social differences that reached their peak of 1900 for the second time at the beginning of the 21st century. 83 Massive social differentiation is not disastrous because it increases absolute poverty, which it does not. It is disastrous because, due to the discouraging effect, it drives the lower social classes, who have almost always and everywhere voted left, away into the anomie and from the ballot boxes, the left-wing parties further and further to the right and in the end the army of non-voters from the former ‘white’ working class, which no longer exists, into the arms of Boris Johnson, Alexander Gauland, Marie Le Pen, Björn Höcke and Donald Trump. 84 As a result, the entire cultural left is first threatened with marginalization into a gated community in the upper social segment of material and symbolic capital, then a new McCarthyism or worse.
Perhaps, however, the fact that in the second half of the 20th century had already once succeeded in blowing up the seemingly inescapable context of blindness that made Herbert Marcuse fear a democratic transition to fascism after Nixon's election and in preventing the imminent end of democracy in a post-truth democracy – this is something similar to a Kantian historical sign that a constitution that once had become moral progress in history cannot be reversed completely, or is very difficult to reverse completely. Even the post-truth democracy of the early 21st century is only a context of blindness, a ‘spell’ (Adorno) which, despite all the still empty claims and threats of the neurosciences and Adorno and Horkheimer's own dark suspicions, is also based on the freedom of those who (in a way) want to be blinded by it, at least – still because they can learn and want otherwise. Therefore, the hope is still justified that the truthfulness of the aesthetic happenings can irritate those who want to deceive themselves and cause a ‘second reflection’ (Adorno). In 1968, at the end of his lecture at the Frankfurt Sociologists' Conference, Adorno said: ‘As impenetrable as the bane [Bann] is, it’s only a spell [Bann]. If sociology is to do more than just furnish welcome information to agents and interests, by fulfilling those tasks for which it was once conceived, then it is up to it, with means which do not themselves fall prey to the universal character of the fetish, to ensure, be it to ever so modest an extent, that the spell dissolves itself’. 85
