What sort of a pleasure
comes together with an awareness, no matter how dim, that things should be
better? It is a world, Adorno claims, that gives us only a faint copy of
pleasure disguised as the real thing; repetition disguised as escape; a brief
respite from labour disguised as a luxury.
[…] Instead of being given
time for consideration and interpretation, we are engaged in the very sort of
classification and sorting that characterises the world of work we thought we
were escaping from.
[…] aesthetic freedom and
social freedom are for Adorno deeply interlinked.
[…] For Adorno, a large
part of the harm inflicted by popular culture is harm to our ability to act
freely and spontaneously. He claims that popular culture, as well as being a
source of pleasure, is also a kind of training; it engages us in, and
reinforces, certain patterns of thought and self-understanding that harm our
ability to live as truly free people.
[…] No space is left for
consumers to exhibit ‘imagination and spontaneity’ – rather, they are swept
along in a succession of predictable moments, each of which is so easy to
digest that they can be ‘alertly consumed even in a state of distraction’. And
if, as Adorno believes, in the wider world we are under ever-increasing
pressure to conform, to produce, and to pour our energies into our work, this
loss of a place where we can think freely, imagine, and consider new
possibilities is a deep and harmful loss. Even in our freedom from work, we are
not free to truly take the kind of free and spontaneous pleasure that might
help us recognise and reject the harmful lack of pleasure we find in our working
lives.
Our lack of aesthetic
freedom, then, also helps to build an obstacle to the realisation of social
freedom. If popular culture puts us to work even in our leisure – if we are
nowhere given space to think and experience freely and unpredictably – then we
will lose sight of the possibility of a world not completely dominated by work.
We will have increasingly less space to consider such a thing; and increasingly
less experience of anything different to what work demands.
— Owen Hulatt, Against guilty pleasures: Adorno on the crimes of pop culture
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