Was the strike worth it?

Was the strike worth it?

In the eyes of many scribes, the answer is an unqualified yes. But when it comes down to dollars and cents, the answer is murkier. The victories in new media that may pay big dividends in the future have come at a high price in the here and now.

The contract agreement that the Writers Guild of America clinched with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers last week includes precedent-setting deal points and establishes residuals formulas for the first time in the uncharted waters of new-media reuse -- gains that most likely would not have been achieved, or at least realized at the same level of compensation, had the biz not been paralyzed by the work stoppage.

For the WGA, it was all about setting precedent and cementing the idea that scribes deserve to be paid for Internet exploitation of their work. More specifically, they wanted a deal that paid them a percentage of distributor's gross, on the principle that "when you get paid, we get paid."

But the cost of achieving that principle through a strike has been considerable -- particularly for the busiest and most successful WGA members with the most to lose. Meanwhile, the money to be made through the hard-fought new-media residuals is not exactly eye-popping.

A TV writer, for example, will earn about $1,400-$1,600 a year for each streamed episode on which he is the credited writer -- while some showrunners may have lost as much as six figures from unproduced episodes. Screenwriters will probably earn less from this new income source, as Web streaming of movies is not nearly as ubiquitous as streaming of TV programs. Meanwhile, pic scribes have lost out on assignments and on rewrite and polish deals, and they will face the intangible costs of having lost the momentum a project may have had before the strike -- momentum that may or may not be regained.

On the TV side, a showrunner who was slated to make around $40,000 per episode on a 22-episode order for the 2007-08 season that has been downscaled to 12-15 segs is out at least $280,000. The deal the WGA cut for ad-supported Web streaming of series calls for a scribe to earn about $1,400-$1,600 a year for each seg on which she is the credited writer, and that's even after the compensation formula switches to a percentage of distributor's gross in the third year of the deal.

Financially, the deepest cut was felt in the TV biz last month, when the majors invoked force majeure provisions on more than 70 overall term deals. The wave of pinkslipping not only affected scribes but the nonwriting producers who have become so ubiquitous on the talent rosters of major studios during the past decade.

Of course, IATSE members and other industry workers also took a hit from the strike since their livelihoods were affected from its first day.

Beyond the immediate pain, network and studio brass have vowed that they will never load up again on so much overhead in the competitive frenzy to lock up creative talent. Writers who are solid performers but not superstars will be grappling with more one-off deals in the future, rather than the studio housekeeping deals that paid them $1 million or more over a few years to develop pilots and pitch in on series.

Networks, in varying degrees, are vowing to use the jolt provided by the strike to tame the madness of pilot season by cutting the volume of development -- not just this year but for good. If the nets hold to this promise, it will mean fewer opportunities for scribes and other constituents in scripted TV to draw their highest paydays, as pilot fees have traditionally been higher than regular episodic minimums. And, of course, the shutdown of scripted series production only spurred the broadcast nets to dive deeper into the well of writer-free reality programming.

With all of these payday opportunities at stake -- and the savviest of WGA members surely knew they were on the line when the walkout began Nov. 5 -- what was the motivating factor that put so many feet on the street? How could guild leaders have maintained such remarkable solidarity (albeit with some restlessness in the last few weeks) among its members?

Fear and loathing, that's how.

The fear stemmed from the same issues that keep the media conglom CEOs up at night. Nobody in the biz knows how the digital revolution in showbiz wrought by iTunes, TiVo, YouTube, the Wii and their ilk will change the entertainment-consumption habits of generations to come. The only certainty is that things are changing, at warp speed, thanks to the availability of paid downloads and Web streaming and the evolution of the DVR and digital video cameras as household appliances.

WGA leaders were supremely effective in summoning a demon from the guild's past -- the hated homevideo residual deal reached in 1985 -- to raise the specter of a similar injustice inflicted on scribes in the digital realm. "Won't get screwed again" was the rallying cry of WGA West prexy Patric Verrone from the time he was elected guild prexy in 2005.

That most of the majors have been offering ad-supported Web streaming of full-length TV shows for more than a year without offering any kind of compensation for scribes only made members more inclined to believe the WGA leaders' sketchy logic that if the guild didn't fight to the death for a fair shake, the studios would shut them out of Internet revenues forever.

The loathing part stemmed from a major tactical blunder by the AMPTP early on in the WGA negotiations. At the highest levels within the media congloms, it's recognized that the 32-page proposal to overhaul the residual payment system that the majors put on the table when negotiations began in July was akin to pouring gasoline on a fire.

Insiders say there was dissent among the AMPTP conglom leaders about the proposal and that it was in large part a maneuver to put the WGA on the defensive. In fact, it couldn't have been a bigger gift to guild leaders, as it provided them with so much ammunition to paint the majors as intransigent and focused only on rolling back writer compensation, not expanding it in the Internet realm.

The blow-up at the outset set the tone for negotiations that got more poisonous as they went on, in fits and starts, through the fall, with plenty of missteps and misplaced rhetoric emanating from Verrone, WGA West exec director David Young and, to a lesser degree, WGA negotiating committee chief John Bowman. The rollback proposal was so offensive to many members that the guild's success at shutting it down was a key point that Verrone and Young used to sell the contract at Saturday's membership meeting.

By the time the sides arrived at their day of infamy on Dec. 7, when the AMPTP broke off talks after demanding that the WGA drop six deal points (including the quixotic bid for jurisdiction on reality and animation), the bosses of the AMPTP congloms were firmly focused on putting the WGA talks in a deep freeze while they cut a deal with the Directors Guild of America that would serve as a basis for restarting the WGA conversation.

The DGA and WGA both wound up benefiting from this high-stakes chess move by the majors. The DGA went into its negotiations with incredible leverage given the strike and the majors' eagerness to cut a deal. The WGA strike gave the DGA some ammo, but the DGA also brought its experience, its research into the new-media marketplace and the strength of its industry relations to seal a deal that became the foundation for the WGA accord.

The DGA deal helped the WGA both in the contract terms and in the approach to negotiations, when the leaders of the AMPTP member congloms stepped in and became actively involved in hashing out the pact. In the end, all of the major players agree that movement in the WGA talks began when Disney CEO Robert Iger and News Corp. prexy Peter Chernin got into the same room with Verrone, Young and Bowman.

The momentum toward a deal further accelerated when the WGA retained respected showbiz lawyer Alan Wertheimer to help it sort through thorny issues, such as the definition of distributor's gross, shortly after the DGA pact was unveiled on Jan. 17.

But the real thaw in WGA-studio relations began about a week before the DGA pact was completed, when Endeavor partner Ariel Emanuel helped set up a private meeting for Bowman, Chernin, CBS Corp. chief Leslie Moonves and Warner Bros. chairman Barry Meyer at Chernin's home.

The gathering for drinks was cordial and focused on big-picture issues, clearing up some past misunderstandings and coming to terms on a process for the negotiations that will finally bear fruit for scribes.

Al Rocker

He really bothers me. I can't stand him.

Election 2008

This is shaping up to be an interesting election year. Everyone knows that the Democratic Primary might as well be the election. Whoever the Democratic nominie is is going to make history and has a 80% chance of becoming president.

A Woman? A black man? Historical either way.

I personally support Hillary.

I really like Barack Obama, he has charisma but I feel he is an unknown quantity. I feel his day will come, it has not come yet and it is not to be rushed. He doesn't have the foriegn policy knowhow, and he is not going anywhere so lets see what he does.

It is my beleif that it's time we had a woman president. I think Hillary fits the bill.

I want a president who is friendly with California, who will repair America's relations with the world, who will address climate change and unchecked pollution, join or recreate the Kyoto Protocal and will end our dependence on oil. I want a president who will fix the broken education system, correct the health care crisis and generally move our country in a new and hopefully better direction... a direction that will revive the economy and restore America to prominance.

I also think that we did need to go into Iraq. I think reform in the middle east is absolutely essential to global stability. I think it was the right idea , it was the people managing it (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld) that made it a bad thing and a huge waste of money. I think it is important not to confuse the two. Iraq is Europe's backyard, and I think if we went in and did things the way they were supposed to be done, they way that made tho most sense it would have been the right thing.

I also do not support drivers licenses for illeagle immigrants.

No matter what I'm just glad that change is in the air.

Stardust

I have always been a fan of fantasy. I watched this film on recommendation.

I liked it. It was better than I thought it would be.

I love Michelle Phifer. Claire Danes was perfect. So was Sienna Miller was cast perfectly as the bitch.

Robert DeNiro was a bit disappointing.

It's no lord of the rings but it's Fun and magical. Brought out the kid in me.

Horses

I love horses and was curious about their origin...

HORSES

PLACE OF ORIGIN

The ancestry of the horse--unlike that of human beings--is extraordinarily well documented and dates back more than 65 million years. The prehistoric "little daddy" of today's powerful steed has a poetic name--dawn horse, or eohippus. Fossilized remains of the tiny whippetlike animal (about the size of a rabbit, 10 to 20 in. high, with an arched back and multitoed feet) have been found throughout Europe and America. Down through the ages, it grew larger and larger, with bigger and bigger teeth (for grinding grass) and longer and longer legs.

By the Ice Age, horses roamed every continent but Australia in great herds and had become very much as we know them today, fully monodactylous with each lower "leg" (originally foot bones) ending in a huge middle toe with a giant nail forming a hoof. Sometime during that mysterious glacial period, the horse vanished from the Western Hemisphere entirely. One theory is that herds migrated from America to Siberia by a then existing land bridge. At any rate, the horse didn't appear in America again until Spain's conquistadores invaded Mexico in 1519 A.D.

You're Not a Kid Anymore When...

1. You enjoy watching the news.

2. The phone rings and you hope its not for you.

3. The only reason you're still awake at 4 am is indigestion.

4. People ask what color your hair USED to be.

5. You're proud of your lawn mower.

6. You start singing along with the elevator music.

7. Your car has four doors.

8. You've owned clothes so long that they've come back into style --TWICE.

9. 8 AM is your idea of "sleeping in".

10. You write thank you notes without being told.

11. You start Christmas shopping in August.

12. You don't like to drive after dark.

13. You say the words "Turn that music down!"

14. You point out what buildings used to be where.

15. You can't remember the last time you lay on the floor to watch television.

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

Source: most of one chapter from Dialectic of Enlightenment;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden 1998;
proofed and corrected Feb. 2005.

THE sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialisation, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.

Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else. The huge gleaming towers that shoot up everywhere are outward signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, toward which the unleashed entrepreneurial system (whose monuments are a mass of gloomy houses and business premises in grimy, spiritless cities) was already hastening. Even now the older houses just outside the concrete city centres look like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy structures of world fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans.

Yet the city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary – the absolute power of capitalism. Because the inhabitants, as producers and as consumers, are drawn into the center in search of work and pleasure, all the living units crystallise into well-organised complexes. The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general and the particular. Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed.

Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organisation and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardisation and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.

This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in today’s economy. The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness. The step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are confined to the apocryphal field of the “amateur,” and also have to accept organisation from above.

But any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is controlled and absorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and official programs of every kind selected by professionals. Talented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they would not be so eager to fit in. The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favours the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it. If one branch of art follows the same formula as one with a very different medium and content; if the dramatic intrigue of broadcast soap operas becomes no more than useful material for showing how to master technical problems at both ends of the scale of musical experience – real jazz or a cheap imitation; or if a movement from a Beethoven symphony is crudely “adapted” for a film sound-track in the same way as a Tolstoy novel is garbled in a film script: then the claim that this is done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot air.

We are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena as inherent in the technical and personnel apparatus which, down to its last cog, itself forms part of the economic mechanism of selection. In addition there is the agreement – or at least the determination – of all executive authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves.

In our age the objective social tendency is incarnate in the hidden subjective purposes of company directors, the foremost among whom are in the most powerful sectors of industry – steel, petroleum, electricity, and chemicals. Culture monopolies are weak and dependent in comparison. They cannot afford to neglect their appeasement of the real holders of power if their sphere of activity in mass society (a sphere producing a specific type of commodity which anyhow is still too closely bound up with easy-going liberalism and Jewish intellectuals) is not to undergo a series of purges. The dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven. All are in such close contact that the extreme concentration of mental forces allows demarcation lines between different firms and technical branches to be ignored.

The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will happen in politics. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organising, and labelling consumers. Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasised and extended. The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type. Consumers appear as statistics on research organisation charts, and are divided by income groups into red, green, and blue areas; the technique is that used for any type of propaganda.

How formalised the procedure is can be seen when the mechanically differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end. That the difference between the Chrysler range and General Motors products is basically illusory strikes every child with a keen interest in varieties. What connoisseurs discuss as good or bad points serve only to perpetuate the semblance of competition and range of choice. The same applies to the Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer productions. But even the differences between the more expensive and cheaper models put out by the same firm steadily diminish: for automobiles, there are such differences as the number of cylinders, cubic capacity, details of patented gadgets; and for films there are the number of stars, the extravagant use of technology, labor, and equipment, and the introduction of the latest psychological formulas. The universal criterion of merit is the amount of “conspicuous production,” of blatant cash investment. The varying budgets in the culture industry do not bear the slightest relation to factual values, to the meaning of the products themselves.

Even the technical media are relentlessly forced into uniformity. Television aims at a synthesis of radio and film, and is held up only because the interested parties have not yet reached agreement, but its consequences will be quite enormous and promise to intensify the impoverishment of aesthetic matter so drastically, that by tomorrow the thinly veiled identity of all industrial culture products can come triumphantly out into the open, derisively fulfilling the Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk – the fusion of all the arts in one work.

The alliance of word, image, and music is all the more perfect than in Tristan because the sensuous elements which all approvingly reflect the surface of social reality are in principle embodied in the same technical process, the unity of which becomes its distinctive content. This process integrates all the elements of the production, from the novel (shaped with an eye to the film) to the last sound effect. It is the triumph of invested capital, whose title as absolute master is etched deep into the hearts of the dispossessed in the employment line; it is the meaningful content of every film, whatever plot the production team may have selected.

The man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him. Kant’s formalism still expected a contribution from the individual, who was thought to relate the varied experiences of the senses to fundamental concepts; but industry robs the individual of his function. Its prime service to the customer is to do his schematising for him.

Kant said that there was a secret mechanism in the soul which prepared direct intuitions in such a way that they could be fitted into the system of pure reason. But today that secret has been deciphered. While the mechanism is to all appearances planned by those who serve up the data of experience, that is, by the culture industry, it is in fact forced upon the latter by the power of society, which remains irrational, however we may try to rationalise it; and this inescapable force is processed by commercial agencies so that they give an artificial impression of being in command.

There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him. Art for the masses has destroyed the dream but still conforms to the tenets of that dreaming idealism which critical idealism baulked at. Everything derives from consciousness: for Malebranche and Berkeley, from the consciousness of God; in mass art, from the consciousness of the production team. Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero’s momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter’s rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all the other details, ready-made clichés to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfil the purpose allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d’être is to confirm it by being its constituent parts. As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come. The average length of the short story has to be rigidly adhered to. Even gags, effects, and jokes are calculated like the setting in which they are placed. They are the responsibility of special experts and their narrow range makes it easy for them to be apportioned in the office.

The development of the culture industry has led to the predominance of the effect, the obvious touch, and the technical detail over the work itself – which once expressed an idea, but was liquidated together with the idea. When the detail won its freedom, it became rebellious and, in the period from Romanticism to Expressionism, asserted itself as free expression, as a vehicle of protest against the organisation. In music the single harmonic effect obliterated the awareness of form as a whole; in painting the individual colour was stressed at the expense of pictorial composition; and in the novel psychology became more important than structure. The totality of the culture industry has put an end to this.

Though concerned exclusively with effects, it crushes their insubordination and makes them subserve the formula, which replaces the work. The same fate is inflicted on whole and parts alike. The whole inevitably bears no relation to the details – just like the career of a successful man into which everything is made to fit as an illustration or a proof, whereas it is nothing more than the sum of all those idiotic events. The so-called dominant idea is like a file which ensures order but not coherence. The whole and the parts are alike; there is no antithesis and no connection. Their prearranged harmony is a mockery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works of art. In Germany the graveyard stillness of the dictatorship already hung over the gayest films of the democratic era.

The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry. The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees the world outside as an extension of the film he has just left (because the latter is intent upon reproducing the world of everyday perceptions), is now the producer’s guideline. The more intensely and flawlessly his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen. This purpose has been furthered by mechanical reproduction since the lightning takeover by the sound film.

Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound film. They are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.

Even though the effort required for his response is semi-automatic, no scope is left for the imagination. Those who are so absorbed by the world of the movie – by its images, gestures, and words – that they are unable to supply what really makes it a world, do not have to dwell on particular points of its mechanics during a screening. All the other films and products of the entertainment industry which they have seen have taught them what to expect; they react automatically.

The might of industrial society is lodged in men’s minds. The entertainments manufacturers know that their products will be consumed with alertness even when the customer is distraught, for each of them is a model of the huge economic machinery which has always sustained the masses, whether at work or at leisure – which is akin to work. From every sound film and every broadcast program the social effect can be inferred which is exclusive to none but is shared by all alike. The culture industry as a whole has moulded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product. All the agents of this process, from the producer to the women’s clubs, take good care that the simple reproduction of this mental state is not nuanced or extended in any way.

The art historians and guardians of culture who complain of the extinction in the West of a basic style-determining power are wrong. The stereotyped appropriation of everything, even the inchoate, for the purposes of mechanical reproduction surpasses the rigour and general currency of any “real style,” in the sense in which cultural cognoscenti celebrate the organic pre-capitalist past. No Palestrina could be more of a purist in eliminating every unprepared and unresolved discord than the jazz arranger in suppressing any development which does not conform to the jargon. When jazzing up Mozart he changes him not only when he is too serious or too difficult but when he harmonises the melody in a different way, perhaps more simply, than is customary now. No medieval builder can have scrutinised the subjects for church windows and sculptures more suspiciously than the studio hierarchy scrutinises a work by Balzac or Hugo before finally approving it. No medieval theologian could have determined the degree of the torment to be suffered by the damned in accordance with the order of divine love more meticulously than the producers of shoddy epics calculate the torture to be undergone by the hero or the exact point to which the leading lady’s hemline shall be raised. The explicit and implicit, exoteric and esoteric catalogue of the forbidden and tolerated is so extensive that it not only defines the area of freedom but is all-powerful inside it. Everything down to the last detail is shaped accordingly.

Like its counterpart, avant-garde art, the entertainment industry determines its own language, down to its very syntax and vocabulary, by the use of anathema. The constant pressure to produce new effects (which must conform to the old pattern) serves merely as another rule to increase the power of the conventions when any single effect threatens to slip through the net. Every detail is so firmly stamped with sameness that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth, or does not meet with approval at first sight. And the star performers, whether they produce or reproduce, use this jargon as freely and fluently and with as much gusto as if it were the very language which it silenced long ago. Such is the ideal of what is natural in this field of activity, and its influence becomes all the more powerful, the more technique is perfected and diminishes the tension between the finished product and everyday life. The paradox of this routine, which is essentially travesty, can be detected and is often predominant in everything that the culture industry turns out. A jazz musician who is playing a piece of serious music, one of Beethoven’s simplest minuets, syncopates it involuntarily and will smile superciliously when asked to follow the normal divisions of the beat. This is the “nature” which, complicated by the ever-present and extravagant demands of the specific medium, constitutes the new style and is a “system of non-culture, to which one might even concede a certain ‘unity of style’ if it really made any sense to speak of stylised barbarity.” [Nietzsche]

The universal imposition of this stylised mode can even go beyond what is quasi-officially sanctioned or forbidden; today a hit song is more readily forgiven for not observing the 32 beats or the compass of the ninth than for containing even the most clandestine melodic or harmonic detail which does not conform to the idiom. Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is forgiven because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system. The constraint of the technically-conditioned idiom which stars and directors have to produce as “nature” so that the people can appropriate it, extends to such fine nuances that they almost attain the subtlety of the devices of an avant-garde work as against those of truth. The rare capacity minutely to fulfil the obligations of the natural idiom in all branches of the culture industry becomes the criterion of efficiency. What and how they say it must be measurable by everyday language, as in logical positivism.

The producers are experts. The idiom demands an astounding productive power, which it absorbs and squanders. In a diabolical way it has overreached the culturally conservative distinction between genuine and artificial style. A style might be called artificial which is imposed from without on the refractory impulses of a form. But in the culture industry every element of the subject matter has its origin in the same apparatus as that jargon whose stamp it bears. The quarrels in which the artistic experts become involved with sponsor and censor about a lie going beyond the bounds of credibility are evidence not so much of an inner aesthetic tension as of a divergence of interests. The reputation of the specialist, in which a last remnant of objective independence sometimes finds refuge, conflicts with the business politics of the Church, or the concern which is manufacturing the cultural commodity. But the thing itself has been essentially objectified and made viable before the established authorities began to argue about it. Even before Zanuck acquired her, Saint Bernadette was regarded by her latter-day hagiographer as brilliant propaganda for all interested parties. That is what became of the emotions of the character. Hence the style of the culture industry, which no longer has to test itself against any refractory material, is also the negation of style. The reconciliation of the general and particular, of the rule and the specific demands of the subject matter, the achievement of which alone gives essential, meaningful content to style, is futile because there has ceased to be the slightest tension between opposite poles: these concordant extremes are dismally identical; the general can replace the particular, and vice versa.

Nevertheless, this caricature of style does not amount to something beyond the genuine style of the past. In the culture industry the notion of genuine style is seen to be the aesthetic equivalent of domination. Style considered as mere aesthetic regularity is a romantic dream of the past. The unity of style not only of the Christian Middle Ages but of the Renaissance expresses in each case the different structure of social power, and not the obscure experience of the oppressed in which the general was enclosed. The great artists were never those who embodied a wholly flawless and perfect style, but those who used style as a way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth. The style of their works gave what was expressed that force without which life flows away unheard. Those very art forms which are known as classical, such as Mozart’s music, contain objective trends which represent something different to the style which they incarnate.

As late as Schönberg and Picasso, the great artists have retained a mistrust of style, and at crucial points have subordinated it to the logic of the matter. What Dadaists and Expressionists called the untruth of style as such triumphs today in the sung jargon of a crooner, in the carefully contrived elegance of a film star, and even in the admirable expertise of a photograph of a peasant’s squalid hut. Style represents a promise in every work of art. That which is expressed is subsumed through style into the dominant forms of generality, into the language of music, painting, or words, in the hope that it will be reconciled thus with the idea of true generality. This promise held out by the work of art that it will create truth by lending new shape to the conventional social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical. It unconditionally posits the real forms of life as it is by suggesting that fulfilment lies in their aesthetic derivatives. To this extent the claim of art is always ideology too.

However, only in this confrontation with tradition of which style is the record can art express suffering. That factor in a work of art which enables it to transcend reality certainly cannot be detached from style; but it does not consist of the harmony actually realised, of any doubtful unity of form and content, within and without, of individual and society; it is to be found in those features in which discrepancy appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure in which the style of the great work of art has always achieved self-negation, the inferior work has always relied on its similarity with others – on a surrogate identity.

In the culture industry this imitation finally becomes absolute. Having ceased to be anything but style, it reveals the latter’s secret: obedience to the social hierarchy. Today aesthetic barbarity completes what has threatened the creations of the spirit since they were gathered together as culture and neutralised. To speak of culture was always contrary to culture. Culture as a common denominator already contains in embryo that schematisation and process of cataloguing and classification which bring culture within the sphere of administration. And it is precisely the industrialised, the consequent, subsumption which entirely accords with this notion of culture. By subordinating in the same way and to the same end all areas of intellectual creation, by occupying men’s senses from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the labor process they themselves have to sustain throughout the day, this subsumption mockingly satisfies the concept of a unified culture which the philosophers of personality contrasted with mass culture.

And so the culture industry, the most rigid of all styles, proves to be the goal of liberalism, which is reproached for its lack of style. Not only do its categories and contents derive from liberalism – domesticated naturalism as well as operetta and revue – but the modern culture monopolies form the economic area in which, together with the corresponding entrepreneurial types, for the time being some part of its sphere of operation survives, despite the process of disintegration elsewhere.

It is still possible to make one’s way in entertainment, if one is not too obstinate about one’s own concerns, and proves appropriately pliable. Anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in. Once his particular brand of deviation from the norm has been noted by the industry, he belongs to it as does the land-reformer to capitalism. Realistic dissidence is the trademark of anyone who has a new idea in business. In the public voice of modern society accusations are seldom audible; if they are, the perceptive can already detect signs that the dissident will soon be reconciled. The more immeasurable the gap between chorus and leaders, the more certainly there is room at the top for everybody who demonstrates his superiority by well-planned originality. Hence, in the culture industry, too, the liberal tendency to give full scope to its able men survives.

To do this for the efficient today is still the function of the market, which is otherwise proficiently controlled; as for the market’s freedom, in the high period of art as elsewhere, it was freedom for the stupid to starve. Significantly, the system of the culture industry comes from the more liberal industrial nations, and all its characteristic media, such as movies, radio, jazz, and magazines, flourish there. Its progress, to be sure, had its origin in the general laws of capital. Gaumont and Pathe, Ullstein and Hugenberg followed the international trend with some success; Europe’s economic dependence on the United States after war and inflation was a contributory factor. The belief that the barbarity of the culture industry is a result of “cultural lag,” of the fact that the American consciousness did not keep up with the growth of technology, is quite wrong. It was pre-Fascist Europe which did not keep up with the trend toward the culture monopoly.

But it was this very lag which left intellect and creativity some degree of independence and enabled its last representatives to exist – however dismally. In Germany the failure of democratic control to permeate life had led to a paradoxical situation. Many things were exempt from the market mechanism which had invaded the Western countries. The German educational system, universities, theatres with artistic standards, great orchestras, and museums enjoyed protection. The political powers, state and municipalities, which had inherited such institutions from absolutism, had left them with a measure of the freedom from the forces of power which dominates the market, just as princes and feudal lords had done up to the nineteenth century. This strengthened art in this late phase against the verdict of supply and demand, and increased its resistance far beyond the actual degree of protection. In the market itself the tribute of a quality for which no use had been found was turned into purchasing power; in this way, respectable literary and music publishers could help authors who yielded little more in the way of profit than the respect of the connoisseur.

But what completely fettered the artist was the pressure (and the accompanying drastic threats), always to fit into business life as an aesthetic expert. Formerly, like Kant and Hume, they signed their letters “Your most humble and obedient servant,” and undermined the foundations of throne and altar. Today they address heads of government by their first names, yet in every artistic activity they are subject to their illiterate masters.

The analysis Tocqueville offered a century ago has in the meantime proved wholly accurate. Under the private culture monopoly it is a fact that “tyranny leaves the body free and directs its attack at the soul. The ruler no longer says: You must think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a stranger among us.” Not to conform means to be rendered powerless, economically and therefore spiritually – to be “self-employed.” When the outsider is excluded from the concern, he can only too easily be accused of incompetence.

Whereas today in material production the mechanism of supply and demand is disintegrating, in the superstructure it still operates as a check in the rulers’ favour. The consumers are the workers and employees, the farmers and lower middle class. Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them. As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities. It is stronger even than the rigorism of the Hays Office, just as in certain great times in history it has inflamed greater forces that were turned against it, namely, the terror of the tribunals. It calls for Mickey Rooney in preference to the tragic Garbo, for Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop. The industry submits to the vote which it has itself inspired. What is a loss for the firm which cannot fully exploit a contract with a declining star is a legitimate expense for the system as a whole. By craftily sanctioning the demand for rubbish it inaugurates total harmony. The connoisseur and the expert are despised for their pretentious claim to know better than the others, even though culture is democratic and distributes its privileges to all. In view of the ideological truce, the conformism of the buyers and the effrontery of the producers who supply them prevail. The result is a constant reproduction of the same thing.

A constant sameness governs the relationship to the past as well. What is new about the phase of mass culture compared with the late liberal stage is the exclusion of the new. The machine rotates on the same spot. While determining consumption it excludes the untried as a risk. The movie-makers distrust any manuscript which is not reassuringly backed by a bestseller. Yet for this very reason there is never-ending talk of ideas, novelty, and surprise, of what is taken for granted but has never existed. Tempo and dynamics serve this trend. Nothing remains as of old; everything has to run incessantly, to keep moving. For only the universal triumph of the rhythm of mechanical production and reproduction promises that nothing changes, and nothing unsuitable will appear. Any additions to the well-proven culture inventory are too much of a speculation. The ossified forms – such as the sketch, short story, problem film, or hit song – are the standardised average of late liberal taste, dictated with threats from above. The people at the top in the culture agencies, who work in harmony as only one manager can with another, whether he comes from the rag trade or from college, have long since reorganised and rationalised the objective spirit. One might think that an omnipresent authority had sifted the material and drawn up an official catalogue of cultural commodities to provide a smooth supply of available mass-produced lines. The ideas are written in the cultural firmament where they had already been numbered by Plato – and were indeed numbers, incapable of increase and immutable.

Amusement and all the elements of the culture industry existed long before the latter came into existence. Now they are taken over from above and brought up to date. The culture industry can pride itself on having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consumption, on making this a principle, on divesting amusement of its obtrusive naïvetes and improving the type of commodities. The more absolute it became, the more ruthless it was in forcing every outsider either into bankruptcy or into a syndicate, and became more refined and elevated – until it ended up as a synthesis of Beethoven and the Casino de Paris. It enjoys a double victory: the truth it extinguishes without it can reproduce at will as a lie within. “Light” art as such, distraction, is not a decadent form. Anyone who complains that it is a betrayal of the ideal of pure expression is under an illusion about society. The purity of bourgeois art, which hypostasised itself as a world of freedom in contrast to what was happening in the material world, was from the beginning bought with the exclusion of the lower classes – with whose cause, the real universality, art keeps faith precisely by its freedom from the ends of the false universality. Serious art has been withheld from those for whom the hardship and oppression of life make a mockery of seriousness, and who must be glad if they can use time not spent at the production line just to keep going. Light art has been the shadow of autonomous art. It is the social bad conscience of serious art. The truth which the latter necessarily lacked because of its social premises gives the other the semblance of legitimacy. The division itself is the truth: it does at least express the negativity of the culture which the different spheres constitute. Least of all can the antithesis be reconciled by absorbing light into serious art, or vice versa. But that is what the culture industry attempts.

The eccentricity of the circus, peepshow, and brothel is as embarrassing to it as that of Schönberg and Karl Kraus. And so the jazz musician Benny Goodman appears with the Budapest string quartet, more pedantic rhythmically than any philharmonic clarinettist, while the style of the Budapest players is as uniform and sugary as that of Guy Lombardo. But what is significant is not vulgarity, stupidity, and lack of polish.

The culture industry did away with yesterday’s rubbish by its own perfection, and by forbidding and domesticating the amateurish, although it constantly allows gross blunders without which the standard of the exalted style cannot be perceived. But what is new is that the irreconcilable elements of culture, art and distraction, are subordinated to one end and subsumed under one false formula: the totality of the culture industry. It consists of repetition. That its characteristic innovations are never anything more than improvements of mass reproduction is not external to the system. It is with good reason that the interest of innumerable consumers is directed to the technique, and not to the contents – which are stubbornly repeated, outworn, and by now half-discredited. The social power which the spectators worship shows itself more effectively in the omnipresence of the stereotype imposed by technical skill than in the stale ideologies for which the ephemeral contents stand in.

Nevertheless the culture industry remains the entertainment business. Its influence over the consumers is established by entertainment; that will ultimately be broken not by an outright decree, but by the hostility inherent in the principle of entertainment to what is greater than itself. Since all the trends of the culture industry are profoundly embedded in the public by the whole social process, they are encouraged by the survival of the market in this area. Demand has not yet been replaced by simple obedience. As is well known, the major reorganisation of the film industry shortly before World War I, the material prerequisite of its expansion, was precisely its deliberate acceptance of the public’s needs as recorded at the box-office – a procedure which was hardly thought necessary in the pioneering days of the screen. The same opinion is held today by the captains of the film industry, who take as their criterion the more or less phenomenal song hits but wisely never have recourse to the judgment of truth, the opposite criterion. Business is their ideology. It is quite correct that the power of the culture industry resides in its identification with a manufactured need, and not in simple contrast to it, even if this contrast were one of complete power and complete powerlessness.

Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanised work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanisation has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardised operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time.

All amusement suffers from this incurable malady. Pleasure hardens into boredom because, if it is to remain pleasure, it must not demand any effort and therefore moves rigorously in the worn grooves of association. No independent thinking must be expected from the audience: the product prescribes every reaction: not by its natural structure (which collapses under reflection), but by signals. Any logical connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly avoided. As far as possible, developments must follow from the immediately preceding situation and never from the idea of the whole. For the attentive movie-goer any individual scene will give him the whole thing. Even the set pattern itself still seems dangerous, offering some meaning – wretched as it might be – where only meaninglessness is acceptable. Often the plot is maliciously deprived of the development demanded by characters and matter according to the old pattern. Instead, the next step is what the script writer takes to be the most striking effect in the particular situation. Banal though elaborate surprise interrupts the story-line.

The tendency mischievously to fall back on pure nonsense, which was a legitimate part of popular art, farce and clowning, right up to Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, is most obvious in the unpretentious kinds. This tendency has completely asserted itself in the text of the novelty song, in the thriller movie, and in cartoons, although in films starring Greer Garson and Bette Davis the unity of the socio-psychological case study provides something approximating a claim to a consistent plot. The idea itself, together with the objects of comedy and terror, is massacred and fragmented. Novelty songs have always existed on a contempt for meaning which, as predecessors and successors of psychoanalysis, they reduce to the monotony of sexual symbolism. Today, detective and adventure films no longer give the audience the opportunity to experience the resolution. In the non-ironic varieties of the genre, it has also to rest content with the simple horror of situations which have almost ceased to be linked in any way.

Cartoons were once exponents of fantasy as opposed to rationalism. They ensured that justice was done to the creatures and objects they electrified, by giving the maimed specimens a second life. All they do today is to confirm the victory of technological reason over truth. A few years ago they had a consistent plot which only broke up in the final moments in a crazy chase, and thus resembled the old slapstick comedy. Now, however, time relations have shifted. In the very first sequence a motive is stated so that in the course of the action destruction can get to work on it: with the audience in pursuit, the protagonist becomes the worthless object of general violence. The quantity of organised amusement changes into the quality of organised cruelty. The self-elected censors of the film industry (with whom it enjoys a close relationship) watch over the unfolding of the crime, which is as drawn-out as a hunt. Fun replaces the pleasure which the sight of an embrace would allegedly afford, and postpones satisfaction till the day of the pogrom. Insofar as cartoons do any more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment.

The enjoyment of the violence suffered by the movie character turns into violence against the spectator, and distraction into exertion. Nothing that the experts have devised as a stimulant must escape the weary eye; no stupidity is allowed in the face of all the trickery; one has to follow everything and even display the smart responses shown and recommended in the film. This raises the question whether the culture industry fulfils the function of diverting minds which it boasts about so loudly. If most of the radio stations and movie theatres were closed down, the consumers would probably not lose so very much. To walk from the street into the movie theatre is no longer to enter a world of dream; as soon as the very existence of these institutions no longer made it obligatory to use them, there would be no great urge to do so. Such closures would not be reactionary machine wrecking. The disappointment would be felt not so much by the enthusiasts as by the slow-witted, who are the ones who suffer for everything anyhow. In spite of the films which are intended to complete her integration, the housewife finds in the darkness of the movie theatre a place of refuge where she can sit for a few hours with nobody watching, just as she used to look out of the window when there were still homes and rest in the evening. The unemployed in the great cities find coolness in summer and warmth in winter in these temperature-controlled locations. Otherwise, despite its size, this bloated pleasure apparatus adds no dignity to man’s lives. The idea of “fully exploiting” available technical resources and the facilities for aesthetic mass consumption is part of the economic system which refuses to exploit resources to abolish hunger.

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. In front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape. Of course works of art were not sexual exhibitions either. However, by representing deprivation as negative, they retracted, as it were, the prostitution of the impulse and rescued by mediation what was denied.

The secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representation of fulfilment as a broken promise. The culture industry does not sublimate; it represses. By repeatedly exposing the objects of desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the athletic hero, it only stimulates the unsublimated forepleasure which habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a masochistic semblance. There is no erotic situation which, while insinuating and exciting, does not fail to indicate unmistakably that things can never go that far. The Hays Office merely confirms the ritual of Tantalus that the culture industry has established anyway. Works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish. Love is downgraded to romance. And, after the descent, much is permitted; even license as a marketable speciality has its quota bearing the trade description “daring.” The mass production of the sexual automatically achieves its repression. Because of his ubiquity, the film star with whom one is meant to fall in love is from the outset a copy of himself. Every tenor voice comes to sound like a Caruso record, and the “natural” faces of Texas girls are like the successful models by whom Hollywood has typecast them. The mechanical reproduction of beauty, which reactionary cultural fanaticism wholeheartedly serves in its methodical idolisation of individuality, leaves no room for that unconscious idolatry which was once essential to beauty.

The triumph over beauty is celebrated by humour – the Schadenfreude that every successful deprivation calls forth. There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh at. Laughter, whether conciliatory or terrible, always occurs when some fear passes. It indicates liberation either from physical danger or from the grip of logic. Conciliatory laughter is heard as the echo of an escape from power; the wrong kind overcomes fear by capitulating to the forces which are to be feared. It is the echo of power as something inescapable. Fun is a medicinal bath. The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it. It makes laughter the instrument of the fraud practised on happiness. Moments of happiness are without laughter; only operettas and films portray sex to the accompaniment of resounding laughter. But Baudelaire is as devoid of humour as Hölderlin. In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is drawing it into its worthless totality. To laugh at something is always to deride it, and the life which, according to Bergson, in laughter breaks through the barrier, is actually an invading barbaric life, self-assertion prepared to parade its liberation from any scruple when the social occasion arises. Such a laughing audience is a parody of humanity. Its members are monads, all dedicated to the pleasure of being ready for anything at the expense of everyone else. Their harmony is a caricature of solidarity. What is fiendish about this false laughter is that it is a compelling parody of the best, which is conciliatory. Delight is austere: res severa verum gaudium. The monastic theory that not asceticism but the sexual act denotes the renunciation of attainable bliss receives negative confirmation in the gravity of the lover who with foreboding commits his life to the fleeting moment. In the culture industry, jovial denial takes the place of the pain found in ecstasy and in asceticism. The supreme law is that they shall not satisfy their desires at any price; they must laugh and be content with laughter. In every product of the culture industry, the permanent denial imposed by civilisation is once again unmistakably demonstrated and inflicted on its victims. To offer and to deprive them of something is one and the same. This is what happens in erotic films. Precisely because it must never take place, everything centres upon copulation. In films it is more strictly forbidden for an illegitimate relationship to be admitted without the parties being punished than for a millionaire’s future son-in-law to be active in the labour movement. In contrast to the liberal era, industrialised as well as popular culture may wax indignant at capitalism, but it cannot renounce the threat of castration. This is fundamental. It outlasts the organised acceptance of the uniformed seen in the films which are produced to that end, and in reality. What is decisive today is no longer puritanism, although it still asserts itself in the form of women’s organisations, but the necessity inherent in the system not to leave the customer alone, not for a moment to allow him any suspicion that resistance is possible.

The principle dictates that he should be shown all his needs as capable of-fulfilment, but that those needs should be so predetermined that he feels himself to be the eternal consumer, the object of the culture industry. Not only does it make him believe that the deception it practices is satisfaction, but it goes further and implies that, whatever the state of affairs, he must put up with what is offered. The escape from everyday drudgery which the whole culture industry promises may be compared to the daughter’s abduction in the cartoon: the father is holding the ladder in the dark. The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes the resignation which it ought to help to forget.

...

Even today the culture industry dresses works of art like political slogans and forces them upon a resistant public at reduced prices; they are as accessible for public enjoyment as a park. But the disappearance of their genuine commodity character does not mean that they have been abolished in the life of a free society, but that the last defence against their reduction to culture goods has fallen. The abolition of educational privilege by the device of clearance sales does not open for the masses the spheres from which they were formerly excluded, but, given existing social conditions, contributes directly to the decay of education and the progress of barbaric meaninglessness. Those who spent their money in the nineteenth or the early twentieth century to see a play or to go to a concert respected the performance as much as the money they spent. The bourgeois who wanted to get something out of it tried occasionally to establish some rapport with the work. Evidence for this is to be found in the literary “introductions” to works, or in the commentaries on Faust. These were the first steps toward the biographical coating and other practices to which a work of art is subjected today.

Even in the early, prosperous days of business, exchange-value did carry use value as a mere appendix but had developed it as a prerequisite for its own existence; this was socially helpful for works of art. Art exercised some restraint on the bourgeois as long as it cost money. That is now a thing of the past. Now that it has lost every restraint and there is no need to pay any money, the proximity of art to those who are exposed to it completes the alienation and assimilates one to the other under the banner of triumphant objectivity. Criticism and respect disappear in the culture industry; the former becomes a mechanical expertise, the latter is succeeded by a shallow cult of leading personalities. Consumers now find nothing expensive. Nevertheless, they suspect that the less anything costs, the less it is being given them. The double mistrust of traditional culture as ideology is combined with mistrust of industrialised culture as a swindle. When thrown in free, the now debased works of art, together with the rubbish to which the medium assimilates them, are secretly rejected by the fortunate recipients, who are supposed to be satisfied by the mere fact that there is so much to be seen and heard. Everything can be obtained. The screenos and vaudevilles in the movie theatre, the competitions for guessing music, the free books, rewards and gifts offered on certain radio programs, are not mere accidents but a continuation of the practice obtaining with culture products. The symphony becomes a reward for listening to the radio, and – if technology had its way - the film would be delivered to people’s homes as happens with the radio. It is moving toward the commercial system. Television points the way to a development which might easily enough force the Warner Brothers into what would certainly be the unwelcome position of serious musicians and cultural conservatives. But the gift system has already taken hold among consumers. As culture is represented as a bonus with undoubted private and social advantages, they have to seize the chance. They rush in lest they miss something. Exactly what, is not clear, but in any case the only ones with a chance are the participants. Fascism, however, hopes to use the training the culture industry has given these recipients of gifts, in order to organise them into its own forced battalions.

Culture is a paradoxical commodity. So completely is it subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used. Therefore it amalgamates with advertising. The more meaningless the latter seems to be under a monopoly, the more omnipotent it becomes. The motives are markedly economic.

One could certainly live without the culture industry, therefore it necessarily creates too much satiation and apathy. In itself, it has few resources itself to correct this. Advertising is its elixir of life. But as its product never fails to reduce to a mere promise the enjoyment which it promises as a commodity, it eventually coincides with publicity, which it needs because it cannot be enjoyed. In a competitive society, advertising performed the social service of informing the buyer about the market; it made choice easier and helped the unknown but more efficient supplier to dispose of his goods. Far from costing time, it saved it.

Today, when the free market is coming to an end, those who control the system are entrenching themselves in it. It strengthens the firm bond between the consumers and the big combines. Only those who can pay the exorbitant rates charged by the advertising agencies, chief of which are the radio networks themselves; that is, only those who are already in a position to do so, or are co-opted by the decision of the banks and industrial capital, can enter the pseudo-market as sellers. The costs of advertising, which finally flow back into the pockets of the combines, make it unnecessary to defeat unwelcome outsiders by laborious competition. They guarantee that power will remain in the same hands – not unlike those economic decisions by which the establishment and running of undertakings is controlled in a totalitarian state. Advertising today is a negative principle, a blocking device: everything that does not bear its stamp is economically suspect. Universal publicity is in no way necessary for people to get to know the kinds of goods – whose supply is restricted anyway. It helps sales only indirectly. For a particular firm, to phase out a current advertising practice constitutes a loss of prestige, and a breach of the discipline imposed by the influential clique on its members. In wartime, goods which are unobtainable are still advertised, merely to keep industrial power in view.

Baudrillard

*Baudrillard*

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none.

The simulacrum is true.

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.

In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. Perhaps only the allegory of the Empire remains. For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territory. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction's charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This representational imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer's mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discursive. With it goes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models - and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact, since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer real at all. It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

These would be the successive phases of the image:



1 It is the reflection of a basic reality.

2 It masks and perverts a basic reality.

3 It masks the absence of a basic reality.

4 It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.



In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.

The transition from signs which dissimulate something to signs which dissimulate that there is nothing, marks the decisive turning pomt. The first implies a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notmn of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates an age of simulacra and simulation, in which there is no longer any God to recognize his own, nor any last judgement to separate truth from false, the real from its art)ficial resurrection, since everything is already dead and risen in advance.

When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.

Watergate. Same scenario as Disneyland (an imaginary effect concealing that reality no more exists outside than inside the bounds of the art)ficial perimeter): though here it is a scandal-effect concealing that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods are employed by the CIA and the Washington Post journalists). Same operation, though this time tending towards scandal as a means to regenerate a moral and political principle, towards the imaginary as a means to regenerate a reality principle in distress.

1 That there is nothing to fear, since the communists, if they come to power, will change nothing in its fundamental capitalist mechanism.

2 That there isn't any risk of their ever coming to power (for the reason that they don't want to); and even if they do take it up, they will only ever wield it by proxy.

3 That in fact power, genuine power, no longer exists, and hence there is no risk of anybody seizing it or taking it over.

4 But more: 1, Berlinguer, am not frightened of seeing the communists seize power in Italy - which might appear evident, but not so evident, since:

5 It can also mean the contrary (no need for psychoanalysis here): I am frightened of seeing the communists seize power (and with good reason, even for a communist).


All the above is simultaneously true. This is the secret of a discourse that is no longer only ambiguous, as political discourses can be, but that conveys the impossibility of a determinate position of power, the impossibility of a determinate position of discourse. And this logic belongs to neither party. It traverses all discourses without their wanting it.

Of the same order as the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real, is the impossibility of staging an illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible. It is the whole political problem of the parody, of hypersimulation or offensive simulation, which is posed here.

For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive apparatus would not react more violently to a simulated hold up than to a real one? For a real hold up only upsets the order of things, the right of property, whereas a simulated hold up interferes with the very principle of reality. Transgression and violence are less serious, for they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous since it always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might really be nothing more than a simulation.

But the difficulty is in proportion to the peril. How to feign a violation and put it to the test? Go and simulate a theft in a large department store: how do you convince the security guards that it is a simulated theft? There is no "objective" difference: the same gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft; in fact the signs mclme neither to one side nor the other. As far as the established order is concerned, they are always of the order of the real.

Postmodernism # 3

Postmodernism?

Girl: So what the hell is postmodernism?

Guy: What isn't it?

Girl: What the hell does that mean?

What do you want it to mean?

Alright! Cut the shit and answer the question!

Alright. Read?... Postmodernism is.... a question.

A question?! Wh--

Yes exactly! Postmodernism is an un-answerable question propositioned to us to make us crazy. Postmodernism is the limbo, the wait between the question asked and the answer recieved. It's the cruel joke that answers are so abundant we are drowning in them... which is right, or wrong, or even relevent? How can you tell?

You ask questions?

Exactly.

So postmodernism is just a question you can't answer?

No. It's the answer you don't know you have.

What?! Those are two different things! You said--

Are they? Or are they the same thing but merely twisted, reversed, inverted inot themselves and thus appearing different?

Don't go all post-modern on me now!

Fine. I won't.

Too late actually, but what else is postmodern then, or what isn't postmodern actually!

Well if modernism is an old black and white photo, basic chemistry and light to creat images, to creat art, then postmoderism is best seen as streaming video on the web. Make sense. It is a million times more complicated than that wich spawned it.

Whoa. But what does that mean? I don't get it?

"Postmodernism emphasizes constructed, mediated and encoded processes that provide us with the effect of truth, meaning and reality. It is therefore wary of Big Science that unproblematically construes itself as knowledge either discovered or discoverable."
--Postmodernism and Big Science

You mean Big Science has failed us?

Not failed us, it just has not defined us, understood us or saved us. "Some branches of postmodern thought claim that scientific knowledge is a construct that makes reality in it's own image, but also that it is a system of thought that is insecure"--PSB

So science legitimizes it's self in the same way that, say, religion does.

Basically, yes.

So what does that mean for religion?

"The modern ends up being at war with itself and must inevitably become the post-moder; (modern coming from the Greek modo meaning: now) 'after just now'"
--Appignanesi

"There is no remainder in the mathamatics of infinity"
--Duston Hoffman "I Heart Huckabees"

Quetzalcoatl

Quetzalcoatl
"The new world reality, which is at the same time also a world unreality, is to a great extent free of causality."

Time and space don't exist according to the book I am reading, oh and crop circles apparently have sacred geometric constants linking it to Qabbala, and it seems that world is changing so fast that it could end or already has and the Ancient Mayan Calender runs out, says the world is over in less that six years.

Don't worry I'm not gonna lose any sleep, nothing can ruin my vacation or come between me and sleeping... all day. I'm on vacation and the world ending is not going to ruin this for me!!! I think the world already ended and I missed it... I was asleep.

What the BLEEP do I know?

Why do we need to learn to see the blanket truth all the time in the everyday stuff?

Well you wouldn't want to miss out on the big picture now would you? --I Heart Huckabees

The blanket truth is that everything is connected, intertwined and ultimately the same.

Consciousness creates reality, it creates matter by harnessing energy.

Much like planets are created out of cosmic gas and particles, electrons, protons and atoms are created out of tiny particles called thoughts. Thoughts condense to a point to be measured by intruments created also by human ideas.

Energy is both wave (undifined moving energy) and particle, just depending on who you ask and the probablitlity that they will say it is... make sense?

Good.

The point is that you can create your own reality be seeing that your reality is shaped by your mind and determined by how much you use it. You are the same as everything else and it is you.

Everything you could want or be you already have and are, you just don't see it yet.

All we really need to know is that we can change the world, every person can.

And once you see the world for what it is, once you get a unifed theory (a sense of enleightenment) you find you are changing the world.

Just watch, and see, go and just be.

Cognito Ergo Sum ...I think I like it.

**

Unified Theory

Why do we need to learn to see the blanket truth all the time in the everyday stuff?

Well you wouldn't want to miss out on the big picture now would you? --I Heart Huckabees

The blanket truth is that everything is connected, intertwined and ultimately the same.

Consciousness creates reality, it creates matter by harnessing energy.

Much like planets are created out of cosmic gas and particles, electrons, protons and atoms are created out of tiny particles called thoughts. Thoughts condense to a point to be measured by intruments created also by human ideas.

Energy is both wave (undifined moving energy) and particle, just depending on who you ask and the probablitlity that they will say it is... make sense?

Good.

The point is that you can create your own reality be seeing that your reality is shaped by your mind and determined by how much you use it. You are the same as everything else and it is you.

Everything you could want or be you already have and are, you just don't see it yet.

All we really need to know is that we can change the world, every person can.

And once you see the world for what it is, once you get a unifed theory (a sense of enleightenment) you find you are changing the world.

Just watch, and see, go and just be.

have to write a about postmodernism can you help me?

Fo schnizzel

I don't know where to begin though?

Begin with nothing, since that is where you are destined to end.

I think postmodernism is a term invented to confuse us, and prevent us from understanding things, like the truth!

What truth? What is truth?

Postmodernism is not hiding the truth it’s slapping you in the face with it; and so you reject it. The truth hurts. Postmodernism is just the messanger, the fiber optic digitally transfered photons illuminating plasma screen causing you to blink and think.

Pop!

If black and white TV is modernism, than postmodernism is DSL internet on a plasma screen. It's not just a way of looking at things that are abnormal and trying to reconcile them with the mainstream, it's the growing realization that the once 'normal' way of doing things is failing, crumbling, and possibly leading us towards global choas (Ahhhh!!!!! Global Warming)... or total spiritual/virtual unity as a planet (that’s hot).

Postmodernism is both an off-shot and a blowback of modernism. Modernism was about mechanics, science, reason, rationality, hierarchy and Order –purpose, place, and patron.

Postmodernism is thus about 'play' ‘placeless’ and disorder, --or ordered chaos. Its the coming together of all races religions and ideas having the differences all blending the meanings all changing and the play all the more enlightening than the purpose.

>>>>if accepted they change the way 'society' perceives itself and it becomes normal...<<<

Case in point: Hot Topic "Anarchy" shirts.

Anarchy and going to the mall to buy clothes is like smoking cigarettes while doing yoga.

You are not in either mode and committed to neither, you just are.

>>>it is part of the evolutionary process- about progress and change- I am not saying this is either good or bad-<<<

Good cuz it is both good and bad. Postmodernism is the break from modernism, without the next 'ism' to move into. In fact most people are so sick of 'ism's they would rather not have them. They want to move past them.

And thus was born: Post [after] modernism.

***************Modernism comes from the greek 'modo' meaning 'the now'. At the time it was built the Acropolis was modern.**************************

The fact is was are headed into uncharted waters. Technology is gaining speed, the world is shrinking, and growing in complexity, time and space no longer matter and eventually they can be manipulated...

it's crazy.

By 2020 desktop computers will be FASTER than the combined power of many brains.

That's right... enter: The Robots (A.I.? Shhhh!)

But where did it all begin?

______ say it with me _______


The movies!!!

Modernism gave us the camera, and when the pictures began to move... postmodernism was born.

Movies now quote other movies and it is EXCEPTIONALLY rare to see and original movie.

Quotes

“The moving finger writes and having writ moves on… nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line; nor all your tears was out a word of it.” –Omar Khayyam

“ For reason ruling alone is a force confining, and passion un attended is a flame that burns to it’s own destruction.” –Omar Khayyam

“We are not physical being having a spiritual experience we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” -- French Philosopher

The Meaning of Life

The Meaning of Life

The meaning of life, its purpose is to facilitate the betterment of something else. It is the evolution and progression of consciousness and the eternal (soul) into higher realms of being. Life exists to foster more life (better life), to foster evolution, it is the mid point between matter and energy; a consequence of this interplay/exchange. The nature of reality and the cosmos is so complex that it cannot be understood/comprehended… it can only be felt. You can be one with the universe, with everything (thus) including ‘god’, but you will not be able to describe this to someone. Life is about learning, about ascension and become one with the eternal in you and the universality of your being. The meaning of life is thus to give rise to more life, better life, higher life.

Live well.

Ideas

Ideas

“You can support the system… or you can transport the system… Sup’ trans’ systems?”

“Don’t waste your time if you have the ability to use it!”

“Time is the gift that keeps on giving provided you are excepting/accepting/taking.”

“All of life is a circle… and is circular… and goes around!”

“Energy is everything, anything and more than nothing.”

Enlightenment

Life is the pain…
…The pain of Learning…
Learning about Life.
Life lessons are painful… with a purpose behind.
Bliss is the place you can be once you learn to learn without pain.
This place is called…

Enlightenment.

Thoughts

Thoughts

•If all else fails, drug them.

•"What?" is a problem.

•Life is only painful because we make it that way. Life can be total bliss if you can rise above and learn.

•If you learn to live without pain you are ascending or evolved.

•I may not know y life’s full purpose, but I do know it is a very special gift which I do not, and cannot throw away leave un-used/explored.

•If you don’t think you look good try using your eye’s better and your heart more. Look until you see the good.

•We all want to be different, yet we fight over it. Difference is the only thing that creates similarity.

Enigma

Enigma…

That is what you are.

Don’t deny it, just except it, except your self for what you are. You are the universe, and it is you. Everything is connected and everything is inseparable; at the atomic level TOTALLY similar and constantly interacting and exchanging energy.

The world is too fantastic to comprehend and it’s intricacies and details to bizarre to be real, but it is, they are, even if you think otherwise.

Everything you think you thought your knew is untrue. Grip it, rip it and whatch that puff dissolve like the world as you knew it is going to, if you are ready…

STOP RIGHT NOW, YOU KNOW NOT WHERE YOU ARE GOING…

Where is you mind taking you, do you even know?

IF YOU DON’T, TURN BACK NOW!

How do you know? You don’t. You know that you don’t know anything.

You don’t know me. You say/think/assume you do, but guess what you don’t. And I don’t know you.

We are more than meets the eye.

I am deeper than my eyes can show, sharper than my wit expelled, and colorful as an oceanianic sunset. How can you possibly understand the complex shmorgasboard of logic and reason, the quagmire of religious and philosophical contradiction, the intricate web of facts fantasy images ideas and imaginings… the extreme and spiraling nature of my world, my mind, my universal construct.

It’s understatedly overwhelming to even think about it! Yeah… right?

You judge only the mind which {I myself and hopefully you as well} must be overcome. I am attempting to do so, but it is hard, very hard. Like a long hike up the mountain, full of hardship and endurance trials, but filled with bliss, views and vantage once you reach the top.

For you to truly see someone requires them to be looking at you (into you) and seeing the you, you perceive yourself to be; the true you that cannot be hidden in the moment of connection. Only at that moment do we become one and see that we are no different, only trapped and tricked by our minds to think so.

Looks can, and often do, deceive. Don’t let my looks (beauty if you like) fool you. Looks are heavily dependent on what is inside, physical beauty is 50% confidence, 35% genetics and 15% intelligence.

I consider myself more brains than beauty, but a healthy dose of both. I am not vain or narcissistic, I am confident and self assured. I am comfortable in my skin and accepting of who I am; what I want, who I want to be. I know not of ignorance, low self esteem, or victimhood. I have moved past those products of the mind.

I am me. What you see is what you get, even if you don’t get what you see…

I go with the flow. I try to be present, in the moment and free.

I love life, the world that gives it to me and I love you…

…after all you is/are me.

Odd? Sort of. But a better word for it is ENIGMA.

Bob says:Don’t worry (about it) be happy now.

ABC's

ABC

Appreciate an astronomical attitude
Be beneficial being beautiful
Carefully create caring corruption
Doubt dubious deeds diligently
Explicitly encounter exciting experiences
Form fortunate futures fast
Gain gifted gratitude gratefully
Have happy healthy heads
Instigate inner intuitions intuitively
Jiggle jovial jive joyously
Keep kneading kept kindness
Love lustful lingering life
Make malleable mind mentalities
Not no nothing never
Origin opens original opportunities
Passionately partake people’s perceptions
Quietly quote quaint quagmires
Respectfully reciprocate reasonable responses
Simply smile so smitten
Take terrific timing timidly
Up unveils underlying understandings
Voice vivid vivacious victories
Wonder wild worlds willingly
X-plain x-citing x-changes x-zileratingly
Yo you yield yes’s
Zoom zip zilch zero


Appreciate being carefully diligent, explicitly fortunate gifted heads intuitively jiggle kept love-like mentalities. Noting original perceptions, quietly reciprocate, so to unveil various wonders; xanido yields zones.

Life is Crazy

Life is crazy isn't it? A journey of ups and downs, in and outs creation and chaos. Just remember you are in total control of your life. manifestation. As I come to understand the world, and my place in it, I have begun to

If I have learned anything during my life's travels thus far, it's this:

WE ARE ALL THE SAME!

We are all searching for something that is missing from our lives; something that we feel is missing. We set out down the path of life, we explore foreign and exotic locals in search of that life changing experience that will somehow alter our existence, or help us escape our reality --our [sense of] self— if only for a short while. But sometimes we find we aren't comprehending that this is our reality, this moment, this feeling. By truly enjoying the moment, by uplifting yourself, by keeping your thoughts grounded in what you are doing in this moment... and loving it. This life is what we make of it. We get so caught up in making a living that we forget to make a life. We are so busy worrying about what we are going to do with our life, we forget that this is life, and it will pass us by if we aren't careful or conscious of it. Life is the people we meet and the experiences we share. It's the endless possibility of each day. Life is full incredible potential, but if not used, if not tapped it will fade away. Take the moment in and cherish it. You are so lucky, you have way more than most people in the world. You the whole world in front of you, and chance to make the world a better place. By making a better present.

Life is about learning, sharing and just being. Sometimes I get confused and think its about money, sex, and drugs, but then I realize those things don't fulfill my needs. They take you further from 'just being' or 'peace'.

Life is too short to waist doing something we don't want to do. Follow your bliss. Be true to yourself. Listen to your heart. We all need to get past our nationality, beyond religion, and immersed in the present, the now. All we ever have is the now, right?

Success is the journey, not simply the destination.

Live your life to the fullest, it's not about the years of life, it's about the life in the years.

Live well, respect your neighbors, be a good friend, and above all, smile. Remember, it's just life, so don't take it so seriously!