kaymac 3.20.08

I think this reading and class had to be one of my favorites. This reading is what happens when a really smart postmodern theorist gets pissed at our world and decides to write about it. I can just see Adorno and Horkheimer going to Wal-Mart and walking into the shampoo section. Here, you have hundreds of different shampoos, all in different colored bottles and shapes advertising that they can make your hair longer, smoother, curlier, straighter, bouncier, flippier, browner, blonder, natural, permed, unnatural, redder, sexier, stringier, and so on and so forth.

My favorite quote that we discussed in class was this:

“Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness.” 57

I really liked how somebody in class related this to the gladiators in Roman times. In a way, our society is still like that. Only this time we have more advanced technology that doesn't actually kill people but ultimately, it's all the same. News programs constantly bombard us with "breaking news!" and "astonishing reveals!" about our society. People watch the news for this. The news says that this is what we want to watch. And relating this back to what Dr. Tillmann said about Anna Nicole Smith's death and people actually not caring about it, what the article failed to mention was that people still watched it. People still watched the stories on the news about Anna Nicole's death while a couple channels over there were stories on the news about the economy and the decline of the public education systems. So what came first, the chicken or the egg?

We have become mindless peons of our society. We perpetuate the sameness that is so apparent in our society. In my paper for Dr. Tillman's class, I spoke about how subcultures form because youth, through the disappointment in not finding an identity through ISAs, turn to each other in order to find their identity and that is how subcultures form. Then, like what A and H were saying:

“The concept of a genuine style becomes transparent in the culture industry as the aesthetic equivalent of power.” 47

which plays out like this: genuine style--->accepted/edited style--->next trend

So we try to oppose our society because we're unhappy with it and the differences are then produced into an accepted style which ultimately becomes the sameness that we opposed in the first place.

Please, tell me, how does this make any sense?