THEODOR ADORNO QUOTES Quicklyfind - Quotes on just about anything!
Verified "In general they are intoxicated by the fame of mass culture, a fame which the latter knows how to manipulate; they could just as well get together in clubs for worshipping film stars or for collecting autographs. What is important to them is the sense of belonging as such, identification, without paying particular attention to its content. As girls, they have trained themselves to faint upon hearing the voice of a 'crooner'. Their applause, cued in by a light-signal, is transmitted directly on the popular radio programmes they are permitted to attend. They call themselves 'jitter-bugs', bugs which carry out reflex movements, performers of their own ecstasy. Merely to be carried away by anything at all, to have something of their own, compensates for their impovrished and barren existance. The gesture of adolescence, which raves for this or that on one day with the ever-present possibility of damning it as idiocy on the next, is now socialized." Quoted in The Sociology of Rock by Simon Frith, 1978, ISBN 0094602204, from Adorno's 'Perennial fashion-jazz' "Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture." ibid "When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realise it with Molotov cocktails." M Jay, The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research (London, 1973), p279. Unverified "When intellectual formulations are treated simply by relegating them to the past and permitting the simple passage of time to substitute for development, the suspision is justified that such formulations have not really been mastered, but rather they are being suppressed."