Reflection: Your Own Culture Industry

Prompts to consider

• Do the culture industry audit honestly. Think about what you consume for entertainment in a typical week. How much of it follows identifiable formulas? How much genuine surprise does it contain? When you feel pleasure from a film, a song, or a video, try to identify what the pleasure is: the pleasure of confirmation (things going as expected, patterns completing themselves) or the pleasure of genuine encounter with something new and difficult? Adorno says the first kind is what the industry produces. Does your honest audit support or challenge his diagnosis?
• Adorno argues that leisure under the culture industry is not rest from work but the extension of work's logic: the same passivity, the same reception of standardized inputs, the same absence of active creative engagement. Think about what you do in your leisure time that involves genuine active engagement, that asks something of you rather than delivering something to you. And think about what you do in leisure that is genuinely passive. Does the distinction map onto what feels more restorative? Or does Adorno get the relationship between passivity and rest wrong?
• The non-identical: Adorno's philosophical practice involves attending to what in any particular thing exceeds any concept applied to it. Think about a person you know well, whom you tend to think about through fairly fixed concepts (reliable, creative, difficult, generous). Try to attend to what in them genuinely escapes those concepts, the aspects of their particular being that your habitual descriptions miss. What do you find? And is this a philosophical exercise or a description of what it means to genuinely love someone?