Theodor Adorno Quotes About Culture

Quotes about: Culture

• The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness

  Theodor Adorno

  Culture, Conformity, Consciousness

  Theodor W Adorno (2005). “The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture”, p.104, Routledge

• Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz 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

  Writing, Self, Long

  "Cultural Criticism and Society". Essay by Theodor Adorno (1949), reprinted in his book "Prisms", 1967.

• 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

  Men, Differences, Culture

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.79, Univ of California Press

• 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 Adorno

  Triumph, Culture, Use

  Theodor W Adorno (2005). “The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture”, p.12, Routledge

• 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

  Joy, Culture, Conflict

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.206, Verso

• 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

  War, Ideas, Culture

  Theodor W. Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann (2003). “Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader”, p.46, Stanford University Press

• 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

  Self, Evil, Matter

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.238, Verso

• So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute.

  Theodor Adorno

  Hygiene, Irrelevance, Dying

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.232, Verso

• 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

  Men, Mirages, World

• 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

  Secret, Culture, World

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.40, Verso

• An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.

  Theodor Adorno

  Hands, Differences, Culture

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.79, Univ of California Press

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

  Theodor Adorno

  Stupidity, Culture, Reactions

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.46, Univ of California Press

• 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 Adorno

  Order, Feelings, Culture

• 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

  Culture, West, Utopia

  Theodor W. Adorno (1982). “Prisms”, p.72, MIT Press

• 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

  Revenge, Mind, Criticism

  Theodor W. Adorno (1982). “Prisms”, p.22, MIT Press

• 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

  Culture, Demand, Trouble

  "Culture Industry Reconsidered". Book by Theodor Adorno, 1963.

• 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

  Sacrifice, Men, Culture

  Theodor W. Adorno (1982). “Prisms”, p.72, MIT Press

• Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.

  Theodor Adorno

  People, Humanity, Culture

  Theodor W. Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann (2003). “Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader”, p.89, Stanford University Press

• 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 Adorno

  Real, Promise, Plot

  Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer (1997). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.139, Verso

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