> But mass-culture in Adorno's
>day, all the way until the Sixties, really, was a dreadfully oppressive,
>racist, mind-bendingly patriarchal and stupefying affair; what we see
>nowadays -- the occasional black and white film, for example -- is just
>the high-quality stuff which survived.
I think this is a pretty one-sided account. You can't reduce a culture to its ostensible political views. Post-war mass culture had its strengths and its weaknesses. It's a generationally biased view to see everything up to the sixties as crap, and for that matter to see the sixties as such a great advance. But most of all, mass culture - however innovative - is always limited by the restricted cultural lives of its working class audience.
> The counter-culture was the
>prison-break from this particular form of mass-culture, but Adorno died
>before he had a chance to reflect seriously on this.
I rather wish that he had lived to pass his usually crabby views on the counter-culture. (Certainly the correspondence between Adorno and Marcuse on the student revolutions recently published in New Left Review is a foretaste of what he might have said.) I don't share Dennis' lionisation of the counter-culture. My mother, when she was social secretary at the Reading University once booked an unknown band called the Rolling Stones. I'm sure it was a very exciting time, and all that. But let's face it, the counter-culture of the Sixties is in power today.
Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, Germany's green foreign affairs officer, Rudy Deutshke and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Regis Debray
- today these people are all part of the establishment.
And what did the counter-culture bequeath to us:
an oedipal distrust of fathers,
a culture that celebrates victimhood,
politicians who are not afraid to cry,
a disdain for theory,
a worship of sensation and intuition,
humanitarian intervention,
the vicious prejudice against the East inherited from 'Western Marxism',
a hatred of mass consumption and the consuming masses,
a paganistic hostility to scientific enquiry.
-- Jim heartfield