THE EXACT SENSE IN WHICH THE CULTURE INDUSTRY NO LONGER EXISTS

Abstract

�� ��� Anyone who has been studying Adorno’s philosophy over the past number of decades, perhaps including years overlapping with the philosopher’s own life, may have noticed that despite the many new commentaries, despite the recently available publications of his correspondence and lecture courses, Adorno’s writings are becoming increasingly obscure. This is not because Adorno is now more difWcult to comprehend than he once was. On the contrary, the emerging obscurity of his philosophy is reciprocal with a newfound self-evidence in the writings. For this, the ready glosses and commentaries and years of growing familiarity are at least partly responsible, and we can start summing things up easily enough: ReiWcation is the rigid web spun over the world, isolating the universal from the particular; dialectics rends that web, potentiating the conXict of the one and the many in which the primacy of the object is manifest; relations of production are this; forces of production that; the spell, the taboo, the fetish and barbarism, they are something else again. But the motive force of these concepts, their noeud vital, is gone. If, some decades ago, taking Negative Dialectics in hand, a reader was astounded at that title’s daunting purport, now, in spite of himself, that same reader no longer distinctly sees how laying claim to the negative ever appeared to risk everything and confront all. Concepts that once spoke worlds for themselves, now stand mute in sight of the world. No doubt, one can put one’s shoulder to the historical weight that is heavily ballasted in the Xywheel of