Authenticity Crisis and the Dream of Escaping Irony (23 Sept 2010)

A section of Andrew Potter's mostly compelling new book The Authenticity Hoax deals with Soviet kitsch and mentions a park in Hungary that's now home to Soviet-era monuments and statues. Hungarian authorities, anxious that the park would be misinterpreted as a cynical move to cater to what Potter calls oppression tourists, have given it this motto: "no irony, memento."

That strikes me as a good motto for everyone laboring under the burden of authenticity, which seems like an increasingly desperate attempt to avoid striking an ironic attitude about oneself. It's clear in the peculiar note of 2000s hipsterism, that mawkish nostalgia for juvenilia that passes for a "new earnestness," the evocation of the comforts of familiar things from the developmental period that predates cool -- the stuff people are into before puberty, before tastes matter to our sense of self. We want to build a self in the present that honors and remembers that pure self, before we had to try to be cool.

Potter, who previously co-authored The Rebel Sell, about anti-conformity marketing, argues that authenticity has supplanted cool as the au courant advertising strategy -- which, because he sees advertisers as following the proclivities of the consumer public rather than shaping them, means that authenticity is an idiotic fetish that middle class people have somehow managed to get stuck on in their quest for status. "Cool fizzled out when it was exposed as just another consumerist status hierarchy.... The trick now is to subtly demonstrate that while you may have a job, a family, and a house full of stuff, you are not spiritually connected to any of it. What matters now is not just buying things, it is taking time for you, to create a life that is focused on your unique needs and that reflects your particular taste and sensibility."

I agree with that analysis, but I think it's not quite fair to blame consumers for falling into authenticity traps, as Potter does when he declares "we should not blame those who are selling the authentic, but rather those who are buying." At that point the business journalist in him seems to get the better of him, as he ignores his own arguments about capitalism's role in trigger an authenticity crisis. Potter, a philosophy Ph.D who writes for Maclean's, a sort of Canadian Time magazine, does a good job tracing the history of the idea of authenticity, through Hobbes and Rousseau and Hegel and Benjamin (though it was a tease to use the phrase "jargon of authenticity" without citing Adorno), but that metaphysical spadework is dispensed with once we reach contemporary times, and individuals are expected to be able to transcend the social conditions into which they were born and reject myths of authenticity out of a common sense appraisal of the benefits of capitalism and liberal democracy. One of Potter's primary concerns is with the ways the fascination with authenticity is currently taking an aggressively atavistic form, with people yearning to roll back the Enlightenment and market capitalism and get in touch with pure nature. I don't think authenticity automatically implies a look back to a phony lost golden age (though it often does). Sometimes it is constructed as agreat leap forward; sometimes it is infused with technophilia, as when Mark Zuckerberg claims that people with integrity (i.e. authentic modern persons) share everything on Facebook to prove they have nothing to hide.

And Potter sometimes seems to border on adopting the right-wing narrative that regards eco-minded consumers and lifestyle connoisseurs as some sort of liberal fascists. But by and large his tone is shaped by an apparent desire to be accessible to general readers, which makes it reasonable and conversational. He gets into some issues in metaphysics without ever becoming obtuse or recondite (i.e., he wisely leaves Heidegger outside his bailiwick here).

Potter is quick to say alienated labor is simply "the way it is" -- you know, work sucks, get over it -- which strikes me as hasty. I don't quite understand his claim that alienation "does not mean that there is a problem and that something ought to be done about it," though I suspect it has something to do with his implicit rejection the idea of human species being (i.e. he implies that having meaningful work to do is not necessarily the goal/purpose of human life) and his advocation of tolerating a rigid separation of the private and public self -- which I am totally on board with. More on that below.

Anyway, blaming consumers for allowing authenticity to become a marketing tool holds them unfairly responsible for the ontological insecurity brought on by modernity (to put it in Anthony Giddens's terms). That insecurity, in my view, brings on the crisis of authenticity, which consumerism has attempted to ameliorate ever since. Marketing cool is one of many strategies, one that was especially suitable to a fragmenting media market that allowed each of us to regard ourselves as our own niche. Marketing environmental concern -- a point Potter is especially strong on -- seems to be the ascendant strategy currently.

But the goal of selling a claim to lost authenticity is as old as the forces that first broke up traditional ways of life and melted everything solid into air, to borrow Marx's phrase (from a passage Potter also cites). The first anti-irony wave was perhaps the cult of sensibility in the late-18th century, which was a response to the rising tide of commercialism and "interestedness" in English culture as capitalism began to reshape subjectivity and inculcate rational calculation as a socially tolerated morality. Hence all the literary fad novels full of weeping men and feeling heroines -- A Sentimental Journey, The Man of Feeling, the works of Fanny Burney and Frances Sheridan and countless other forgotten late 18th century writers. The characters are obsessed, just like we are, with displaying sincere emotions without letting the fact of the display and the self-consciousness of it invalidate the gesture -- and with outdoing the displays of others on the scale of "conspicuous authenticity" that Potter derides.

In other words, the need to prove authenticity and the capacity to "really" feel things is not a new status hierarchy, but one that emerges with capitalism and consumerism (which was born in the late-18th century). It undergirds the class distinctions that come into play as aristocratic titles and such get washed away. It always serves along side of the conspicuous consumption that Veblen famously described to establish class boundaries. It's been there all the time, helping differentiate those who consume vulgarly from those who consume tastefully -- or genuinely, authentically, organically, etc. And since authenticity has no metaphysical basis -- there's no intrinsic "real self" to display; it's defined negatively, as Potter notes; it's always contingent, as Rorty argued among many, many others -- the grounds of authenticity can always be shifting in order to freshly reinscribe the hierarchy. Fashions can change as class markers get appropriated without posing an existential threat. The problem is that privilege gets laundered as authenticity and gets to pass without being questioned. It becomes authentic to be inegalitarian.

The "authenticity hoax" is precisely the Romantic idea that we have a true self to which we must display our faithfulness. We think our integrity is at stake in consumerism when really what we are doing is attenuating the status system, replenishing the "code". We think we are recalling something -- a memento of the real self -- that isn't there at all; we blind ourselves to the truth of irony, an inescapable and paradoxical self-awareness that our self is a construct, a work in progress, an open-ended (and mortal) set of possibilities rather than a timeless essence. As Potter puts in in his introduction, "we need ... an individualism that makes its peace with the modern world while allowing for a meaningful life free of nostalgia, reactionary politics, or status seeking."

That sounds pretty utopian, but it's also what Rorty seems to be after in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. He argues that, since there is no true self, we are burdened with a crushing anxiety of influence -- a sense that we are creating ourselves out of someone else's language and merely establishing our non-existence as a unique being. Each person has a "need to come to terms with the blind impress which chance has given him, to make a self for himself by redescribing that impress in terms which are, if only marginally, his own." That is to say, we need to create "authenticity" out of rhetoric, a unique personal vocabulary and point of view, through creative restatements of what has already be said, of what already simply exists. We can't be free of contingency, but must seek freedom through it. And we cannot mistake our own definition of authenticity as being the true, universal one -- we must keep it private while adhering to an ideal of cosmopolitanism in the public sphere. One needs to be an ironist, in Rorty's terms -- one must accept that our descriptive language is open to influence and is not permanent or true. So basically, when we are setting up our Hungarian statue park of the self, we should flip the motto, and make it "Irony, no mementos."

You can't ever complete the quest for the authentic self, but you can't really ever get it wrong either. You don't have to borrow someone else's notion of the authentic itself. But the idea of authenticity as it's deployed by persuasion professionals (who strive to amplify the feelings of ontological insecurity, since our feeling insecure gets us to buy goods), tends to militate against that idea obviously, positing instead the notion that we have an inner truth that we are in danger of betraying. The sustaining consumerist myth is that authenticity is a matter of manifesting individual novelty and nonconformity rather than a private mode of assimilating inevitable influences. Consumerism perverts romanticism by adopting its critique of modernity and using it to co-opt the quest for authenticity, generating a cultural environment in which most efforts at self-fashioning intensify the feeling of insecurity and phoniness. Potter notes that "selling authenticity is another way of making it self-conscious, which is again, self-defeating."

Creativity, even as it pertains to self-creation, appears as a strict matter of consumption -- not as something attached to a broader sense of practice. So all our efforts can tend to feel like poses, stabs at fashionability, attempts to crack the consumerist code and reap the social benefits. That's in part because the search for self can't take place in private anymore, as Rorty seems to hope. It is now situated in social media, wherein the various gestures and experiments we make searching for ourselves get redeployed automatically as marketing, as signifiers of what is trending.

So I think the specific way to resist the evils of commodified authenticity is to police the public-private boundary more carefully. Rorty writes that we have to "overcome authority without claiming authority" -- to slightly shift that, I think that means we have to find ways to validate our self-making project that don't rely ultimately on commercialized modes of validation, which appear to have transpersonal authority. And we can't broadcast our identity, mediatize it, because that amounts to the same thing.

A Historical Note on the Hipster (12 Jan 2010)

Five or six years ago a commenter suggested I read Hal Niedzviecki, a Canadian journalist who writes about pop culture and consumerism. I went ahead and ordered his 2000 book We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture and when it arrived, I promptly filed it into the nether regions of my bookshelves and forgot all about it. Yesterday, in the midst of a sweep for a bag of books I was putting together to take to the Goodwill store, I came across it again and started reading it.

I don't agree with everything in his argument -- he dismisses the Adornoesque view of popular culture and tends to champion cultural consumerism as an integral, inevitable mode of identity production -- and much of it seems to have been rendered obsolete by the emergence of Web 2.0 and social networking and the like. (He has to explain what an MP3 is and spends a chapter explaining the concept that listening to one Girl Talk song conveys much more thoroughly.)

What is interesting though is who he means by "we": a generational cohort he sees as obliged to define their identities solely in terms of pop culture: he calls this "lifestyle culture" and he seems to regard it as inescapable. "To negate pop culture is to negate the very foundation of our lives -- a foundation that is no longer found in religious instruction, in the moral precepts of the state, in the bosom of the family, but in the frantic embrace of a pop emancipation we crave despite, and because of, who we are." (No wonder he hates Adorno -- he rejects and argues for the "negation" of the very basis of identity as Niedzviecki is willing to conceive it.) Since we define ourselves in terms of our tastes and our familiarity with pop culture, we can't admit that it is trivial. Instead we inflate its importance even more as we prolong our adolescence and nostalgize over Saturday morning cartoons.

"Lifestyle culture," he claims, "is our last, desperate, pervasive attempt to rebel against those who seek to reduce us to cogs in the machine." If that was the point of lifestyle culture, it has failed spectacularly; our everyday lives are more integrated with the machine than ever; social networks are harvesting and reselling the details of our cultural cry of self, conveniently translated already by our volunteer labor into terms of brands and trademarks already on the market. (After all, Facebook's founder has declared the end of privacy. Everything we do is fair game for corporate exploitation.) We continually need to assert our own coolness, and our efforts fuel the evolution of new cool signifiers. We work the lifestyle treadmill.

It's shocking that this seemed a new phenomenon in 2000. By 2010, that cohort had become generally known as "hipsters," and everyone was coming around to agreeing that their moment had passed. Not because anything they did has gone definitively out of fashion, but because they truly have become a "we" -- the mode of identity-fashioning through pop culture has become too ordinary a thing to demand a special label. People who behave like hipsters did back then are just normal now.

But when Niedzviecki was writing, there was still such as a thing as a consumer "underground" in which devotion to pop obscurities was expressed in hand-mimeographed fanzines and home-taped mix cassettes and other arduous analog means. That culture was just beginning to die its digital death, and outlines of hipsterism -- the zine mentality without the trouble of zines, the proud consumerism without the effort of digging up trivia and the sacrifice of marginalizing oneself -- was just beginning to become recognizable. Hipsterism is born when the cultural underground dies. It stems from the "crisis in authenticity" -- which is to say, it emerges when authenticity becomes a commodity. The mainstream expands and flattens out, lulls us with promises of mass participation: The internet was basically a build-out of the mainstream, and a way for it to incorporate all the stuff that once was considered outre or unmarketable.

Though often prescient about the incipient dilemmas of consumerist identity, Niedzviecki at times seems blind to how the proto-hipsterism he celebrates ("This process -- in which passive consumers become semi-active hobbyists and then, finally, full-blown creators -- challenges the gatekeepers of culture by asserting the power of the everyperson to be hos or her own critic and creator") would metastasize. He is hopeful about what would become the definitive hipster strategy, what he calls "noncompliant compliance" -- "intelligent, meaningful creative actions that nevertheless acknowledge the primacy of pop culture." Without an underground, there is no other choice, he argues. Maybe he's right about that, but that still sounds like a Baudrillardian fatal strategy to me. I see no upside to the "collapse of the underground" -- what the Frankfurt schoolers talk about as the negation of negation.

I wish I had Niedzviecki's optimism. But he is able to sustain it because he hadn't anticipated how mainstream media companies and culture industries would be able to adapt to the long-tailing and nichefication of audiences, how our identity seeking becomes free immaterial labor for corporations -- no matter how small-scale or insular it may seem. Piracy and peer-to-peer sharing has hurt their profits, but the amateur culture and brand co-creation Niedzviecki sees as somewhat subversive and hopeful has more or less been a boon for businesses and hasn't proven a haven from the hegemonic ideologies of consumerism. Alienation endures. Niedzviecki recognizes that lifestyle culture leads to apolitical narcissism: "cogent political activism" is difficult, he notes, "in an age where everybody wants to be their own personal cause, their own undergound myth, subject of their own fan club." That sounds like a description of Facebook to me.

With hindsight, it's easy to see how Niedzviecki misdiagnosed the problem. He was concerned that inundated with culture, we would lose our identity. He imagines us all as desperate to do something that "can't be decoded and marketed back" to us. We never receded into the mass; instead mass culture mutated to cater to us as individuals and we thrived on the way it could decode us. Identity, as that kind of decoding, has become ubiquitous, a compulsion. Our identity is at once more palpable and more fragile that it has perhaps ever been -- we have a rich and subtle language of objects with which to express it, yet no one seems to understand who we really are, and we keep trying to understand ourselves. We can't escape turning ourselves inside out and signing over our desire to consumerism to try to ease the dislocation, solve the riddle.

Against curiosity (25 August 2008)

A problem I keep finding myself returning to is why I seem to spend more time tagging and arranging my music files than I spend listening to my music. Part of that is a cognitive illusion, but a telling one -- I'm listening to music the entire time I'm doing the iTunes bookkeeping work, but my concentration is on the data, not on the intricacies, harmonies, melodies and hooks of the music. It barely breaks through, and usually only when the song playing is so irritating, I have to skip to the next one.

In my mind, this is symptomatic of a larger problem, of consuming information about goods rather than allowing goods to facilitate sensual experiences. In part, this is so we can consume more quickly, a product of the time crunch we face in expanding our consumption -- we want faser throughput, since quantity seems to trump quality, and the pleasure in consuming seems to come from the acquisition of the next thing. To authorize that next acquisition, we need to satisfy ourselves that we are done with what we have. Processing it as information is a quick way of doing just that.

As a consequence of this eagerness to process more and more stuff, I end up amassing an embarrassingly thorough knowledge of the surface details of pop culture -- who wrote what and who sang what and who played on whose record and when this show was canceled or had this or that guest star or whatever. Worse, I invest far too much significance in brandishing this knowledge as some kind of accomplishment, as if life were a big game of Jeopardy. This useless depot of detail is what a show like Family Guy tries to reward me for having accumulated. Getting to laugh at it is like a kind of booby prize.

But iTunes metadata seems to me the best emblem of the information problem, of the trap we are lured into of substituting clerical data processing for thought and experience. Adorno seemed to anticipate this precisely in "The Schema of Mass Culture," whose title alone suggests its application to the digitization of all cultural distribution. He argues that art, in being manufactured for the masses, is reduced to the data about itself, which masks its subversive potential. "The sensuous moment of art transforms itself under the eyes of mass culture into the measurement, comparison and assessment of physical phenomena." This is like accessing iTunes metadata in place of hearing the song. Because the metadata for all the music is the same, all music from that perspective is also essentially the same. And the argument can be extended to all of digitally distributed culture.

The underlying sameness of the medium for culture today reveals the truth about the phantasmal differences in form and genre. (As Adorno puts it, in his inimitable way, "the technicized forms of modern consciousness...transform culture into a total lie, but this untruth confesses the truth about the socio-economic base with which it has now become identical.") It's all more or less the same, allowing consumers to obey the command to enact the same self-referential decoding process, reinforcing the same lesson of eternal sameness.

The more the film-goer, the hit-song enthusiast, the reader of detective and magazine stories anticipates the outcome, the solution, the structure, and so on, the more his attention is displaced toward the question of how the nugatory result is achieved, to the rebus-like details involved, and in this searching process of displacement the hieroglyphic meaning suddenly reveals itself. It articulates every phenomenon right down to the subtlest nuance according to a simplistic two-term logic of "dos and don'ts," and by virtue of this reduction of everything alien and unintelligible it overtakes the consumers.

What Adorno would call "official culture" -- that which is made to be reviewed and talked about by professional commentators and promoted by professional marketers and consumed commercially -- seems to be so stuffed with data and information and objects and performers and whatnot that no one could ever in their right mind question its plenitude. There's so much, you'd have to be nuts to derive some satisfaction from all that. Think of all the stuff you can download! But the one thing missing amid all this data is the space for a genuine aesthetic experience, a moment of negativity in which an alternative to what exists, what registers as "realistic" can be conceived. Instead, one feels obliged to keep up with official culture so as to not find oneself an outcast. People go along not necessarily because they love pop culture but because "they know or suspect that this is where they are taught the mores they will surely need as their passport in a monopolized life." Pop culture knowledge becomes a prerequisite for certain social opportunities, a way of signaling one's normality, or one's go-along-get-along nature. "Today, anyone incapable of talking in the prescribed fashion, that is of effortlessly reproducing the formulas, conventions and judgments of mass culture as if they were his own, is threatened in his very existence, suspected of being an idiot or an intellectual." I think of this quote sometimes when it comes up that someone has never knowingly heard a Coldplay or John Mayer song, or hasn't seen an episode of American Idol. Really? Have you been under a rock? Are you lying? Why this makes me suspicious rather than elated, I don't know. And it especially reminds me of my record reviewing, when I tried to pretend there was inherent significance in the commercial output of E.L.O. or the Drive-By Truckers. And as the information about pop culture proliferates, we become more ignorant about politics and basic facts about how our economy operates.

Once participation in public official culture becomes a matter of collecting trivial, descriptive (as opposed to analytical) information about it, Adorno argues that "culture business" then plays out as a contest. Products "require extreme accomplishments that can be precisely measured." This I would liken to the data at the bottom of iTunes that tells you the number of songs you have and the number of days it would take to listen to them all. It's not intended to be a scoreboard but it can seem like one. This sort of contest culminates in collecting mania, where an object's use value has been shriveled to it's being simply another in a series.

To radically oversimplify, Adorno argued that mass culture, a reflection and paradigmatic example of monopoly capitalism, served to nullify the radical potential in art, debasing its forms and methods while acclimating audiences to mediocrity, alienation, hopelessness, and a paucity of imagination. It works to form individuals into a mass, integrating them into the manufactured culture, snuffing out alternative and potentially seditious ways for people to interact with one another while facilitating an ersatz goodwill for the existing order. "As far as mass culture is concerned, reification is no metaphor: It makes the human beings that it reproduces resemble things even where their teeth do not represent toothpaste and their careworn wrinkles do not evoke cosmetics." The contours of our consciousness are produced by our culture, and advertisements reflect those dimensions while fostering their reproduction.

Basically, through its ministrations, all the movements of the individual spirit become degraded and tamed and assimilated to the mass-produced cultural products on offer, which ultimately fail to gratify and perpetuate a spiritual hunger while occluding the resources that might have actually sated it. Pleasure becomes "fun," thought becomes "information," desire becomes "curiosity."

But what could be wrong with curiosity? It seems like it should be an unadulterated good, a way of openly engaging with the world. Adorno, in a feat of rhetorical jujitsu, wants to have us believe it means the opposite. Because it is attuned not to anything more substantive than pop-culture trivia, curiosity "refers constantly to what is preformed, to what others already know." It is not analytical or synthetic; it simply aggregates. "To be informed about something implies an enforced solidarity with what has already been judged." Everything worth knowing about, from a social perspective -- anything you might talk about with acquaintances, say -- has already been endorsed, is already presented as cool even before anyone had that authentic reaction to it. Cultural product is made with cool in mind, whereas authentic cool, from Adorno's standpoint anyway, must always be a by-product. At the same time, curiosity surpressed genuine change, supplanting for it ersatz excitement for cynical repetitions -- think the fashion cycle, in which everything changes on the surface but nothing really changes. "Curiosity is the enemy of the new which is not permitted anyway," Adorno says. "It lives off the claim that there cannot be anything new and that what presents itself as new is already predisposed to subsumption on the part of the well-informed." This means attention to the surface details, which prompts "a taboo against inaccurate information, a charge that can be invoked against any thought." Basically this means that in our cultural climate, your thoughts about, say, Eric Clapton's guitar playing are invalid unless you know what model guitar he was playing and what studio he was recording in at the time. The trivia is used to silence the "inexpert." So "the curiosity for information cannot be separated from the opinionated mentality of those who know it all," Adorno argues. Curiosity is "not concerned with what is known but the fact of knowing it, with having, with knowledge as a possession." Life becomes a collection of data, and "as facts they are arranged in such a way that they can be grasped as quickly and easily as possible" -- in a spreadsheet, for example. Or a PowerPoint presentation. These media suit facts as opposed to thoughts, and encourage us to groom our data sheets for completeness and clarity rather than insight. "Wrenched from all context, detached from thought, they are made instantly accessible to an infantile grasp. They may never be broadened or transcended" -- the metadata fields are unchangeable -- "but like favorite dishes they must obey the rule of identity if they are not to be rejected as false or alien." Works don't seek to be understood; they only seek to be identified, tagged, labeled accordingly to make them superficially accessible.

The reduction of thought to data allows us to consume culture faster, enhance our throughput, and focus on accumulating more. The idea that you would concentrate on one work and explore it deeply, thoroughly, is negated; more and more, it becomes unthinkable, something it wouldn't occur to anyone to try. "Curiosity" demands we press on fervently, in search of the next novelty.

Adorno for pop critics (20 September 2006)

Yesterday I noticed that elsewhere at PopMatters was a review of Adorno's Philosophy of Music, which, as the author of the review, Patrick Schabe notes, has nothing to do with "new music" as anyone outside of academic music programs would understand it. Those interested in mounting an Adornoesque critique of contemporary pop music would be better served by reading "Perennial Fashion -- Jazz," from Prisms. The essay, which isn't about jazz so much as it is about whatever musical product is being manufactured and marketed for the masses, features this immortal observation:

The aim of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. 'Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,' the eunuchlike sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, 'and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.

I think of this whenever the need to concentrate on what I'm listening to makes me feel peevish and disgruntled. Isn't music supposed to make me relax? Then I know for sure I'm in the illustrious fraternity. When I start to write a record review and I try to conjure criteria by which to judge it, I feel a bit haunted by Adorno's words; I know nothing I will say will dispel the notion that I'm pounding out my own castrated, syncopated rhythm on my keyboard. In "On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening" (anthologized by Routledge in The Culture Industry), Adorno suggests that with the advent of commercialized music, "the concept of taste is outmoded" because "the subject who could verify such taste has become as questionable as has the right to a freedom of choice which empirically, in any case, no one any longer exercises." Taste may survive as a necessary fiction, more necessary for those who attempt to codify subjective judgments and share them as music writers, people who won't surrender to the idea that cultural product is just product whose significance lies merely in how sellable it is. Adorno notes "the golden age of taste has dawned at the very moment in which taste no longer exists."

Adorno's often criticized for his rampant elitism, which consists mainly of insisting that collectively our ability to even hear music has regressed to the point where authentic music has become incomprehensible to our infantile ears. As Martin Jay explains it in The Dialectical Imagination, Adorno believed that one of the effects of commercialized popular music was to regress a listener to an infantile state where "like children who demand only food they have enjoyed in the past, the listener ... could only respond to a repetition of what he heard before." Such a listener's attitude toward culture is like "that of the meaningless leisure of the unemployed." Commercialized music, by destroying the link between performance and listening (you can hear it in an inferior reproduction with no apprehension of what's been lost, whenever its convenient for you the listener with no attention to the work involved in creating it) also destroys the Benjaminian aura of a musical work, which destroys its critical function, its ability to comment negatively on the culture and suggest something larger.

Adorno had none of the faith that later pop culture theorists have had in the ability of consumers to subvert culture industry brainwashing and find liberating, creative use for Justin Timberlake or episodes of Grey's Anatomy. That we mistake playing with the culture industry's toys for a kind of real freedom shows only how impotent and short-sighted we've become. As far as Adorno is concerned, popular music is never about active engagement but always about relaxation, of lulling to sleep the individual's critical awareness, of wallowing in passivity. (Is dancing a passive response to rhythmic music? Yes, in Adorno's mind. It's mimicking the martial movement of troops massed and marching past the dictator's parade stand.)

Critics try to invent standards that will insulate themselves from the consequences of music commercialization, from the reality of exchange value, which levels off all other forms of value and slowly but surely introjects itself into the populace so that top-sales lists are popularly held to be synonymous with best lists. "If one seeks to find out who 'likes' a commercial piece, one cannot avoid the suspicion that liking and disliking are inappropriate to the situation, even if the person questioned clothes his reactions in those words." I can pretend to subjective opinions based on criteria of my own devising, but my own ability to hear has already been too compromised to make these criteria anything but postures of resistance to the market, or collaboration with it -- I can either condemn sell-outs (or laud bands for "authenticity") or hype bands and build their PR image; that is what is left to the music reviewer.

Adorno has this cutting comment for my delusion: As a pop-music critic, I am like "The couple out driving who spends their time identifying every passing car and being happy if they recognize the trademarks speeding by, the girl whose satisfaction consists solely in the fact that she and her boyfriend 'look good,' the jazz enthusiast who legitimizes himself by having knowledge about what is in any case inescapable." As for the masses? "Where they react at all, it no longer makes any difference whether it is to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or a bikini."

The general idea is that the standardization that comes with preparing a piece of music for the market makes whatever difference may exist between products superficial. Such works cease to be "autonomous" and thereby forfeit aesthetics. "An approach in terms of value judgments has become a fiction for the person who finds himself hemmed in by standardized musical goods. He can neither escape impotence nor decide between the offerings where everything is so completely identical that preference in fact depends merely on biographical details or on the situation in which things are heard." In other words, we choose favorite bands the way we choose favorite sports teams, when really they all play the same game by the same rules and are ultimately exchangeable for one another. We celebrate bands or singers for the cult of personality built up around them, or because we heard the music in conjunction with certain epochs in our own lives.

This relates to what neuroscientist Daniel Levitin found -- in This Is Your Brain on Music (reviewed here) he argues that the cerebellum, the lizard part of the brain that synchronizes movement, is as involved in music listening as the frontal lobe, the cognitive part. Adorno would probably argue that now the cerebellum works at the expense of the frontal lobes, so that we have a mechanical, rhythmic response to music that is pleasurable without ever having out intellect engaged. Levitin also suggests that at times of emotional tumult -- teenage years, etc. -- our brains are more likely to tag certain pieces of music with emotion and have them serve as emotional cues for the rest of our lives. Then as our brain wiring hardens, this tagging ability diminishes, and it becomes harder to become emotionally attached to new music. We recur to the stuff that is "nostalgic" -- the only music we're wired to instinctively appreciate. If Adorno's right, and we've let our intellectual means for appreciating music atrophy, and we've instead become reliant on these emotional/instinctive methods for assimilating music, at a certain point we become frozen; without the intellectual basis upon which to enjoy music we haven't heard before, we're incapable of taking pleasure in anything new. This lost ability is serious stuff to Adorno, because real music, like all real art, when heard with the intellect, offers listeners a means by which to criticize a given reality, to synthesize alternatives. Without it, we're trapped in the status quo, and worse, self-deluded into enjoying it as plentitude.