Enlightenment as Mass Deception (6/7)

 I
Lots of things assigned some meaning, these make the individual feel small.
And, more widely, provokes outrage against anyone who acts not like most.

Individuality comes to be symbolic, deliberate, public: Not so individual, huh?

You have to be stuffy and subversive or cool as a conformist; either way your
expressions of ‘nothem’ get packaged up and reproduced to even out the bar.

Forcing everyone into some sort of standard can make individuals an illusion.

This causes major difficulties for dealing personally with tragic loss, because
the relation to oneself has been referred always to the social, political cause.

Which of course may set things up for becoming oneself integral again whole.

Mass media opens the facade of ’sole’ in late capitalism as a possibility, but
improperly frames its assumptions as though unified of generally in specifics.

The ideal of an individual self is too complex for total unity; it’s a lifelong goal.

Everyone wants, not only to maintain their current well-being, but improve its
status continually as well. Society competes; we’re products of environment.

Control must be justified outside itself with reference to those it’s dominating.

II
Not everyone who says the word ‘bourgeois’ is socialist; some of
them are french, in which case the difference is impossible to tell.

Leaders of industry and capital (i.e. politicians) wanted to keep us
childlike, but technology superceded this: Like dirty internet video.

Basically, people got assigned their own pre-determinate box of ‘in-
dividual’s’ made it not too special; pre-made Easter baskets suck!

When I call you ‘Nazi’: If everything must be divided, and subividing
according to rigidly pre-ordained categories for succeed: I am right.

“The only reason why the [it] can deal so successfully with individ-
uality’s that the latter has always reproduced the fragility of society.”

You know it’s just airbrushed for B.S., but that makes no less im-
pressive that someone put the effort into making it fool/feel so real.

As evidenced by my homeland: Just because something is rigidly
bi-polar, disintegrating, essentially split does not mean collapses.

Hamlet is important because it shows the limits of empirical invest-
igation as those of subjectivity: But these do themselves transcend.

If god gaves you one face, do paint—but buy not—yourself another:

(‘Member Mickey Rooney at Potsdam?) Fulfillment is destruction’s.

III
Heroic average idolizes ‘cheap’

And high, paid stars look like the pictures that

Hock generic items for your self; there is

No lacking reason for the selection.

How beauty gets consumed in advertised

Affects perceptions of its meaning’s use

Is how Socrates’ irony could state

Beauty acquires valuable through usage.

Movies make culture bawl for Columbine,

Radio waves goodbye’s for whose sake the

Cultural commodity exists are also

Recommended individually.

Few dollars for millions of dollars’ flick,

And chewing gum be free beneath your seat;

A hoard increased still further by sales.

Representation votes to pay all wars—

Violence for sale, a prostitution flawed.

The ‘best’ so often is what is just there,

A pastiche of Pleasure Island, donkey-show;

And political parties mock human unkind:

You name it, we supply; peasants should think

All city streets cost more than industry.

The very substance of production is

Coupled within its pride put on parade,

An old Roman show, empire’s displayed force:

As though limits of representation. . . .

IV                                                                  
Today’s affair surfeits with culture to sickness. Un-
just like those who drop a hundred bill to win thirty
cents of goldfish. Have you ever thought about how
it means to spend thousands on some thing made
for far less because of who it is named? Especially
in art. Most unfair is that it refuses to even try con-
cealing the fact its an identical ‘original’. Art is sold
out & stated that this is the charm which makes its
style worthwhile to taste. The condition of late capit-
alism, at least. One’s effect is to deny and purpose
which is both social and popular, because it makes
the market nervous someone might change status:
Means there’s no reason they couldn’t have done it.

Even ‘pure’ art which does not participate into these
claims is made some sort of utility by its hegemony:

Dependent on the buyer, your objective is; I’d guess.

V
Art for Art’s Sake has degenerated in-
to ‘art for the sake of looking artistic.’

There’s so many Johns slammin’ her
up, no requirement needed for slut-art.

Since the Industrial Revolution (this 1
makes none suspcious of subversion—

Should, it’s the foundation of it) the art-
ist is tolerated as the madman and re-

Habilitating convicts: An example and
object of moralists’ derision to warn at.

To be an artist & business man both,
You have to be a nearly sadistic prick.

If you do buy into its magic, renounce
all claims to criticism of any integrity:

It’s as just the other side of gorgeous.

VI
The principle of idealistic aesthetics reverses the scheme of things to
purposelessness for the purposes of the demand for entertainment &
realm of purposelessness. But as disposable in terms of money is—
structure of cultural commodities—men in this antagonistic society of
art as itself, to a great extent, that is abolished by complete inclusion
completely assimilating itself to precisely that liberation from the in-
augurate. What might be called ‘commodity’ replaced by exchange: Are
gallery-visiting and factual known the connoisseur? The consumer is
industry, whose institutions he can see; Mrs. Miniver, just as one “has”
Everything is looked at from only something else, however vague, s/he
has an inherent value; it is valuable changed. The use value of art, it is
that and the fetish, the work’s social status, become its use value—pur-
posefulness without a purpose—which bourgeois art conforms socially:
Declared by the market. At last, in relaxation, purpose has absorbed the
the insistence that art should become absolute; a shift in the internal be-
gins to show itself. The uses which promise themselves from the work of
very existence of the useless which under-use the work of art, by need,
deceitfully deprive men of principle, of utility which it should use; value in
the reception of cultural valued; in place of enjoyment there’s ledge: The
prestige seeker replaces, comes to the ideology of the pleasure, ‘not
escape.’ One simply “has to” have t’o, subscribe to Life and Time. One
aspect: That it can be used for notions of this use may be no object only
to the extent that can be an ex-mode of being, it’s treated as a fetish;
rating (misinterpreted as it’s artistic),the only quality which is enjoyed.

VII
Creative 
work as m-
ass culture fun-
ction, industry ap-
pears vanish’d & un-
derstood as a process’
commodification. There’s
a nonquantifiable aspect in
artistic work, its sale for it to
be considered desirable object
to own. Necessarily this product
of intention, masquerading as pub-
lic service: Someone had to pay
it to get there. Sometimes new
media divide things between
them; like radio & movies.
This directs the “liberal
deviations” to areas
so they can most
be appropriated
for investors’
profit and
comfort.

VIII
Radio’s a different scene. It charges admittants no pittance, mediated
directly to the consumer, and now seems like objective expertise 
which suits corporate terrorism admirably in becoming the 
universal mouthpiece of bourgeois ideology which
masquerades ‘fact-based’ hardened news.
You do’ve your alarmist updates, 
breaking stories & cover-
ups; (y)our Nazis 
treat a wire-
less ac-
cess 
as 
God’s 
outward-
lie visible OK 
on their intentions. 
The 24/7 connection of 
awareness invented by their 
religion of sociology turned out to 
the omnipotence of media molding its 
public images controlled. That gigantic fact 
that its ‘investigators’ penetrate global let no con-
sumer grasp its true meaning any longer, the Viewer’s 
speech is lies anyway. The inherent tendency of the inform-
ative culture in industry is to make the speaker’s word, the truth 
commanded, asbolutely: A modality has become inevitably indication. 

The 
droning 
variety of a 
very same com-
modity under the dif-
ferent names of propriet-
ors is the scientific praise of 
technological laxatives which the 
announcer, melting toffee voice recom-
mends as real no longer works because of 
its silliness. “One day th’ edict of production, t-
he actual advertisement (whose actuality is at pre-
sent concealed by the pretense of a choice) can turn 
into the open command of the Führer.” If you deny ‘fascist’ 
as possible, that’s how it started to begin; they all tell a near-
est authority the story very same, in defense solely of the nation’s 
needs (their own happening to co-incide—how you know they’re pat-
riots instead of insurgent subversives) would seem anachronistic to re-
commend they use one personal understanding: Leaving room for error un-
planned means anyone roughly directed from control might give orders to turn 
the holocaust right back: Mistake that lets it happening as it thought ‘never again’
 

IX
When your political rhetoric’s a bumper sticker and art is dramatized samples of 
compassionate ‘activism’ your culture is already a parody of fascism because 
the death purported in a real terror state doesn’t even endless the hilarity 
of repetition. They are moving all the oil money into universities, so y-
our own kids’ degree can also now be bathing in the blood of 3rd-
world babies and middleastern dissidents; oh, but th’ alumni 
who give real money take all the real decisions, so if yo-
u study some, a thing that has to do with meaning in-
stead of means, funding and manufactured death, 
well; we’ll pull the purse tight as relates read-
ing novels (‘no time for that fun, don’t yo-
u know there be a culture war going 
on!’)? Now that the entire econo-
my has been made a single, 
commodifying day-trade, 
perhaps people will ex-
change words with 
your neighbor as 
easily with in-
visible dol-
liars to 
they 

who probably don’t purposely sponsor human rights violations (long as they pay the fines, part of doing business—right?); but it’s not the type of place I’d be very willing to produce a lot of fine and/or gorgeous artwork for.

X.
Criticism and respect disappear in the culture industry;

the former becomes a mechanical expertise, the latter

is succeeded by a shallow cult of leading personalities.

Consumers now find nothing expensive. Nevertheless,

they suspect that the less anything costs, the less it is

being given them. The double mistrust of traditional cult-

ure as ideology is combined with mistrust of industrializ-

ed culture as a swindle. When thrown in free, the now de-

based works of art, together with the rubbish to which the

medium assimilates them, are secretly rejected by the

fortunate recipients, who are supposed to be satisfied by

the mere fact that there is so much to be seen and heard.

Everything can be obtained. The screenos and vaudevilles

in the movie theater, the competitions for guessing music,

the free books, rewards and gifts offered on certain radio

programs, are not mere accidents but a continuation of

the practice obtaining with culture products. The symphony

becomes a reward for listening to the radio, and—if tech-

nology had its way—the film would be delivered to people’s

homes as happens with the radio. It is moving toward the

commercial system. Television points the way to a develop-

ment which might easily enough force the Warner Brothers

into what would certainly be the unwelcome position of

serious musicians and cultural conservatives. But the gift

system has already taken hold among consumers. As

cult-ure is represented as a bonus with undoubted private

and social advantages, they have to seize the chance.

They rush in lest they miss something. Exactly what, is not

clear, but in any case the only ones with a chance are the

participants. Fascism, however, hopes to use the training

the culture industry has given these recipients of gifts,

in order organize them into its own forced battalions.

www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/SWA/Culture_industry_6.shtml