More Magic

In my continuing exploration of how we are separated from an authentic life I turn next to Theodore Adorno. Preceding Debords work by fifteen years, Minima Moralia was an attempt to explain alienation after the horror of world war. He begins the dedication with these relevent reflections:
"What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of material production, without autonomy or substance of it's own."

Though it pre-dates the post-industrial "Information Age" spectacles that so horrified Debord, it foreshadows his critique and points accusingly at many of the same culprits.

"Reduced and degraded essence tenaciously resists the magic that transforms it into a facade."

While Adorno uses the term "magic", he actually explores the nature of the process in extremely objective terms. In terms of style, it is written in short , numbered essays, not unlike Society of the Spectacle and we are left with intrigueing little aphorisms which he describes as "points of attack" or "models for a future exertion of thought". In this, and in his use of the word "resist", he allows room for hope, which Debords totalitarian vision seems almost to renounce. It can at times seem that at least some of the overwhelming forces arrayed against authentic human existence are somehow supernatural but as I tried to explain in the last post, this too needs to be resisted, de-constructed, rationalized (without succumbing to rationalism). The whole (plugged in ) world sat on it's couches the last couple of weeks and watched the Olympics. One World , One Dream. We had a million messages inserted into our collective consciousness, none of it random. Some could observe the process and comment on it. Some have no idea there is a design to all of this. These types of cultural critiques help us to understand why. They do indeed present "points of attack"!

A great attack by Lewis Lapham in the new Harpers on the Spectacle that was The Death of Tim Russert. Rejecting the dominant bathos, he does what Russert never did, speaks truth to power. Russert was "an attentive and accomodating head waiter" and Lapham asks , "Why a requiem for a pet canary?"