ginny t. Horkheimer & Adorno

I can't get my brain to work. This cannot be a good sign that we're only a quarter of the way through the semester and I'm already starting to get PoMo fatigue. I've been wrung through the culture machine and i am worn out.

Though I find myself staring down yet another uplifting theory (the death of creativity and independent thought at the hands of the culture industry--just what I need I restore my faith in humanity!) I still like those Horkheimer and Adorno boys. Their ideas strike me as somewhat Marxian, and if I have learned nothing else in the class so far, it's that I tend lean that way myself. Though this piece was written in the shadow WWII, it was already evident we were becoming a culture that bows down to the all mighty dollar, taking our cues and measuring our worth by how successful, i.e. marketable and reproduceable, our ideas are, rather than how creative or authentic they are.

Clearly, that's just as true in 2006 as it was in 1946. If anything, we've gotten worse. Like we've discussed in class, you can't even breathe in 2006 without taking part in/supporting the consumer culture industry. And while I used to think that most people were merely innocently drawn into the machine, more as matter of survival than by choice, H & A suggest '...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 irrational despite all its rationalization..." (p. 44)

So...we're a materialistic, disposable & disconnected society because we are a materialistic, disposable & disconnected society. The Man (culture industry) can only get away with manipulating us (the soceity) because we let them, because our ability to have independent and original thoughts have been stripped by the culture industry.... That sounds irrationally...rational. And totally discouraging.