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Adorno e o problema dos produtos culturais de massa.

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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Modern industrial life has forced almost all of us to specialize in something, often in mundane, repetitive tasks. This is good for economic productivity but not so good for individual self-fulfillment. I think this has created a narrowing of attention to the larger world. Moving from hunting and gathering to working on an assembly line has made us more machine-like and less attuned to the world around us because we only have to be skilled at one thing. — James Scott

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Uma das faces do absurdo ao repentinamente enxergar o mundo.

 

(...) perceiving that the world is “dense”, sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with wich we have clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. The stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us. Just as there are days when under the familiar face of a woman, we see as a stranger her we had loved months or years ago, perhaps we shall come even to desire what suddenly leaves us so alone. But the time has not yet come. Just one thing: that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd. – The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus, p.14.

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Sobre a ideia de divertimento e prazer na atualidade

In our societies, we experience fabricated leisure – a kind of planned ‘free time’ that is sandwiched between typically unpleasant work times. And we are bombarded with advertisements that promise we will have a great time if only we get the latest phone or the latest computer game. Ours is a culture that, under the guise of consumption, actually counsels the renunciation of enjoyment. In such a society, wants come apart from pleasures. If you get an expensive car because that’s what you think your status requires you to have, that is not the same as enjoying it. The individual who succumbs to this idea does not relish owning the car. She just thinks she must have and display it. We inhabit a world that devalues pleasure while apparently serving it up in large doses. Rather than enjoyment playing a central role in people striving to become otherwise than they are, our culture works a strange ascetic turn. I am what I desire. I am what I consume. We are absorbed in an existence as desiring and consuming subjects, living as though we really are just those selves and no more.

In late capitalism, the subjective character of enjoyment is appropriated into circuits of consumption. Philosophers have long remarked the self-subjugating effects of peoples’ absorption in the standard practices of their day, those taken to be ‘what everyone does’. In Being and Time (1927), Martin Heidegger pointed out that ‘We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure.’ If you like an activity because you have unthinkingly assumed an approving view of it from others, does this still count as an authentic pleasure? An experience that really feels good, feels good for you, as someone choosing freely. But what feels purely subjective to us might actually be deeply influenced by the contingent forms of feeling of our time – what our society and families and workplaces tell us that we can legitimately feel. We have a job on our hands to recognise how our ways of feeling and being are historically and culturally shaped. — Enjoy!, Sandy Grant

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Jesus, Paulo e o advento do cristianismo.

Jesus was an event within Judaism; it was not especially scandalous that a young Jewish radical went about proclaiming himself the Messiah, ambiguously calling himself “the son of Man,” and quarrelling with the rabbis about aspects of the law. But it was another thing entirely to claim—as Paul did—that Jesus came to earth to wash away an original sin contracted by humans in Eden; that this Jesus was crucified by the Romans, was buried, and rose from the dead; and that he would soon come again, in a rescue mission that would usher in a new eternal kingdom. In place of the intimate, familial struggle of the Jews and their God, Paul invokes a strict theology of sin and salvation. Kierkegaard, at his most Protestant-masochistic, says that Christianity’s singularity lies in its understanding of sin; if that’s true, it was Paul’s singularity rather than Jesus’. The new theology transfers Judaism’s healthy involvement in this life onto a palpitating anticipation of the next; the present becomes eternity’s duller portal. – The Radical Origins of Christianity, James Wood.

 

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Niestzsche, em observação de 1881, sobre viagem ao sul da Itália, em 1876.

“‘Como posso ter suportado viver até agora!’, enquanto o veículo rodava por Posillipo – luz do entardecer.

Não tenho força suficiente para o norte: lá reinam almas grosseiras e artificias que trabalham tão assídua e necessariamente quanto o castor em sua construção. E pensar que foi entre elas que passei toda a minha juventude! Eis o que me impressionou quando pela primeira vez vi chegar o entardecer com seu vermelho e seu cinza aveludados no céu de Nápoles [você poderia te morrido sem ter visto isso] – como um arrepio, como por pena de mim mesmo pelo fato de haver começado minha vida sendo velho, e me vieram lágrimas e o sentimento de ter sido salvo, ainda que no último instante.

Eu tenho disposição suficiente para o sul.”