#wintersmitth

Here, a translation of A Fate Inked jn Blood in Ukrainian!

And yes, i knew it's your art even before i checked

Yess I love it too! 🥹💙 It's a detail from this beautiful beautiful illustration by @greypetrel

Okay, okay, let's back up a bit because there's a legitimate argument that that person is appropriating to be an insufferable tool:

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer created the idea of the "culture industry" to point out how a lot of popular culture is mass-produced in such a way to induce people into passivity. That sounds like a conspiracy, but like a lot of theory, they mean it in a more general, cultural-forces kind of way, and in a sense it's kind of a modern, capitalist update of the concept of "bread and circuses."

You can read Wikipedia's summary of it here. Adorno and Horkheimer's conception of it has a lot of problems, especially in how it essentially became an excuse for snobbery about how the era's version of "high art" was more elevated than "popular art." Adorno was particularly interested in music and saw jazz as emblematic of the "culture industry" whereas classical music (and particularly modernist music) was elevated above that. The irony was that Western classical music had proved a really effective instrument of propaganda by the Nazis and other fascists (albeit modernist music was less so, and the Nazis banned it, but plenty of those composers still aligned with fascism). Meanwhile, the Nazis hated jazz for being music they associated with black people and Jews. A lot of what caused Adorno to dismiss jazz as overly simplistic and therefore, more apt to get people to take leave of their senses, was really just him applying a very Western-classical framework about what is "great" and "complex" in music to a style that developed around completely different music theory. (For a deeper explanation of that, see this extremely well-researched video about music theory and racism/imperialism.)

But I think that you can disagree with Adorno-Horkheimer's examples and agree with the broader principle that the forces of industry that are aligned with power aren't particularly interested in actually critiquing power. And so art that is made by industry is always going to be at least somewhat limited in how far it goes, and far more interested in entertaining you, which might mean it ends up as a distraction from what is going on in the world. I find it most valuable in pointing out why a lot of arguments about the "progressiveness" of something like the MCU are pointless, because even in their attempts at that, there is always a firm line they hit because they are a mass corporation that has connections to the US military and so they're never going to show certain aspects of American society in an overly negative light. I find it useful not so much for condemning all "popular art" (which is a much more problematic and looser line now than it was in Adorno and Horkheimer's time, and rightfully so) but specific kinds that are heavily corporatized, but also for keeping in mind that art in general always has an ideology to it, being "apolitical" is itself a political statement, and to be critical of the media you consume no matter where it originates. And not to act like just consuming media that has XYZ representation or other token gestures is itself the same as political activism, which is something a lot of the fandom Internet could use. Adorno would certainly have Words for people convincing themselves that arguing about shipping and headcanons is "activism."

So in that sense, there is a connection to the idea that a lot of dumb discourse defending adults who exclusively consume children's or other unchallenging media, that valorizes exclusively reading coffeeshop AUs as "self-care," is itself doing the work of the worst of capitalism. It's people letting mass produced products lull them into inaction and then treating that inaction as a "radical act." I think you can draw a line from the root of the argument being made here, to like, the cross-Internet rage from comic book movie fans when Martin Scorsese pointed out why he doesn't see them as "cinema." There was something deeply depressing about how people had let mass-production basically dictate their fantasies to them.

But:

a) the people who do this still have the free choice not to do it, as plenty of us regularly choose not to do this, or at least to not ONLY consume that kind of stuff

b) in fact, it's key to understanding what he's saying to acknowledge that you have that agency. The culture industry wants you to believe you don't. The article that I linked about not blaming all of your personal problems on "capitalism" makes it clear that a lot of the things that are framed as political, "radical" action online are really about giving yourself excuses for doing nothing.

c) Obviously just the fact that I'm comparing this to the Roman-era "bread and circuses" (panem et circenses) makes it clear that this is not something unique to or originally created by capitalism, though capitalism obviously does it particularly well and is perhaps a lot more intentional about it.

d) Adorno himself was a huge fan of what he considered "good" art who definitely was not condemning all art appreciation

e) I also just think it's deeply important when discussing any sort of communist theory to keep in mind that the vast majority of Tumblr users, in the way that this theory uses the term, would qualify as part of the bourgeoisie. A lot of people wrongly think bourgeoisie means like CEOs but it actually refers to the middle class. We'd at least be petit-bourgeoisie. And so I think that's important for framing arguments about what the bourgeoisie is "doing" to you. People who are writing multi-paragraph discourse posts justifying their obsession with Bluey as a childless adult are not capitalism's primary victims, and certainly were not in the way these theorists of yesteryear were thinking about them. And that's all the more reason why I'm not a fan of letting these people dismiss every problem in their relatively-privileged lives as "augh, capitalism!"

neil opening his inbox every day since 1990:

He will slay you with His tongue, oh-lei, oh-lai, oh, Lord

Oh-lei, oh-lai, oh-lei, oh, Lord, he will slay you with His tongue, oh-lei, oh-lai, oh, Lord