>So Dennis, what do you make of the Tom Frank/Baffler argument that
>capital has appropriated the counterculture to its own ends, selling
> stuff and making us into good subjects?
Um, I'm not Dennis, but . . .
I really think Tom Frank is smart, and he's a great writer--the recent piece in Artforum was particularly sharp. I think he's right about the extension of the means of consumption (at least in the U.S.) into those realms that once claimed to exceed capital. However, capital hasn't targetted the counter-culture specifically. That has only been one target among others (the media would be another complicated example . . .) I've never seen Tom pursue this part of the argument--tho I'd like to see what he has to say. (I have my own ideas of course.)
Dennis wrote:
>thinking doesn't think by examples. You're asking for an
>Adorno who is really a Fredric Jameson, someone who's already on our side
>of the great cultural watershed of WW II, and whose assumptions and
>cultural habitus is already that of our own. 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. 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 agree with your reading of Adorno--in general, he's got a more complicated idea of mass culture than he's frequently given credit for. Nonetheless, the idea that 60's culture was somehow more oppressive than some other decade's seems like a big problem--for all sorts of reasons. In this context, I don't think it's necessary to recoup Theodor's account by saying that he was really right (see, it really *was* mind-numbing) to see its value. For one thing, that reading forgets the other kinds of readings of mass culture that were possible on the other side of that great cultural divide (if we accept this periodization). To take two nonrandom examples: Benjamin and Heidegger. (I'm not advocating either: I'm just saying that they make the idea that Adorno was "right" kind of a problem.)
Christian