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Whoever Is Versed In The Jargon Does Not Have To Say What He Thinks, Does Not Even Have To Think It Properly. The Jargon Takes Over This Task.
-Theodor Adorno
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Whoever Is Versed In

Theodor Adorno
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Whoever Is Versed In The Jargon Does Not Have To Say What He Thinks, Does Not Even Have To Think It Properly. The Jargon Takes Over This Task.

Understanding the Quote: "whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what..."

This quote by Theodor Adorno reflects deeply on the theme of thinking. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Thinking, Doe, Tasks, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how Theodor Adorno interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About Theodor Adorno

Theodor Adorno is celebrated for insightful thoughts on thinking and doe. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Thinking
Doe
Tasks
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The Thought That Murders The Wish That Fathered It Will Be Overtaken By The Revenge Of Stupidity
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The Empirical Usability Of The Sacred Ceremonial Words Makes Both The Speaker And Listener Believe In Their Corporeal Presence.
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Triviality Is Evil - Triviality, That Is, In The Form Of Consciousness And Mind That Adapts Itself To The World As It Is, That Obeys The Principle Of Inertia. And This Principle Of Inertia Truly Is What Is Radically Evil.
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The Jargon Of Authenticity ... Is A Trademark Of Societalized Chosenness, ... Sub-language As Superior Language.
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Culture Is Only True When Implicitly Critical, And The Mind Which Forgets This Revenges Itself In The Critics It Breeds. Criticism Is An Indispensable Element Of Culture.
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In His State Of Complete Powerlessness The Individual Perceives The Time He Has Left To Live As A Brief Reprieve.
Individual
States
Perceive
The Law Of The Innermost Form Of The Essay Is Heresy
Law
Form
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It Is Not The Office Of Art To Spotlight Alternatives, But To Resist By Its Form Alone The Course Of The World, Which Permanently Puts A Pistol To Men's Heads.
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Writing Poetry After Auschwitz Is Barbaric.
Writing
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Death Is Imposed Only On Creatures, Not Their Creations, And Has Therefore Always Appeared In Art In A Broken Form: As Allegory.
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It Is Proust's Courtesy To Spare The Reader The Embarrassment Of Believing Himself Cleverer Than The Author.
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In Many People It Is Already An Impertinence To Say 'i'.
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But He Who Dies In Despair Has Lived His Whole Life In Vain.
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Art Is Magic Delivered From The Lie Of Being Truth.
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Even The Loveliest Dream Bears Like A Blemish Its Difference From Reality, The Awareness That What It Grants Is Mere Illusion.
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He Who Stands Aloof Runs The Risk Of Believing Himself Better Than Others And Misusing His Critique Of Society As An Ideology For His Private Interest. While He Gropingly Forms His Own Life In The Frail Image Of A True Existence, He Should Never Forget Its Frailty, Nor How Little The Image Is A Substitute For True Life. Against Such Awareness, However, Pulls The Momentum Of The Bourgeois Within Him.
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There's Not Much Need For Prophets Who Are In Synch With Their Society.
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The Culture Industry Perpetually Cheats Its Consumers Of What It Perpetually Promises. The Promissory Note Which, With Its Plots And Staging, It Draws On Pleasure Is Endlessly Prolonged; The Promise, Which Is Actually All The Spectacle Consists Of, Is Illusory: All It Actually Confirms Is That The Real Point Will Never Be Reached, That The Diner Must Be Satisfied With The Menu.
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Thought As Such… Is An Act Of Negation, Of Resistance To That Which Is Forced Upon It; This Is What Thought Has Inherited From Its Archetype, The Relation Between Labor And Material. Today, When Ideologues Tend More Than Ever To Encourage Thought To Be Positive, They Cleverly Note That Positivity Runs Precisely Counter To Thought, And That It Takes Friendly Persuasion By Social Authority To Accustom Thought To Positivity.
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The Work Of Art Still Has Something In Common With Enchantment: It Posits Its Own, Self-enclosed Area, Which Is Withdrawn From The Context Of Profane Existence, And In Which Special Laws Apply.
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What Is Or Is Not The Jargon Is Determined By Whether The Word Is Written In An Intonation Which Places It Transcendently In Opposition To Its Own Meaning; By Whether The Individual Words Are Loaded At The Expense Of The Sentence, Its Propositional Force, And The Thought Content.
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If Across The Atlantic The Ideology Was Pride, Here It Is Delivering The Goods.
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What Can Oppose The Decline Of The West Is Not A Resurrected Culture But The Utopia That Is Silently Contained In The Image Of Its Decline.
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Today Self-consciousness No Longer Means Anything But Reflection On The Ego As Embarrassment, As Realization Of Impotence: Knowing That One Is Nothing.
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If Time Is Money, It Seems Moral To Save Time, Above All One's Own, And Such Parsimony Is Excused By Consideration For Others. One Is Straight-forward.
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Lies Are Told Only To Convey To Someone That One Has No Need Either Of Him Or His Good Opinion.
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Exuberant Health Is Always, As Such, Sickness Also.
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In The Nineteenth Century The Germans Painted Their Dream And The Outcome Was Invariably Vegetable. The French Needed Only To Paint A Vegetable And It Was Already A Dream.
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One Must Have Tradition In Oneself, To Hate It Properly.
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Technology Is Making Gestures Precise And Brutal, And With Them Men.
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Those Who Cannot Help Ought Also Not Advise: In An Order Where Every Mousehole Has Been Plugged, Mere Advice Exactly Equals Condemnation.
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Life Has Become The Ideology Of Its Own Absence.
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In Psycho-analysis Nothing Is True Except The Exaggerations.
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Domination Delegates The Physical Violence On Which It Rests To The Dominated.
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Freedom Would Be Not To Choose Between Black And White But To Abjure Such Prescribed Choices.
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Estrangement Shows Itself Precisely In The Elimination Of Distance Between People.
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Intelligence Is A Moral Category.
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The Power Of The Culture Industry's Ideology Is Such That Conformity Has Replaced Consciousness
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There Is No Right Life In The Wrong One.
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Auschwitz Begins Wherever Someone Looks At A Slaughterhouse And Thinks: They’re Only Animals.
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The First And Only Principle Of Sexual Ethics: The Accuser Is Always In The Wrong.
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The Enlightenment Has Always Aimed At Liberating Men From Fear And Establishing Their Sovereignty. Yet The Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant.
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Intolerance Of Ambiguity Is The Mark Of An Authoritarian Personality.
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And How Comfortless Is The Thought That The Sickness Of The Normal Does Not Necessarily Imply As Its Opposite The Health Of The Sick, But That The Latter Usually Only Present, In A Different Way, The Same Disastrous Pattern.
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Vague Expression Permits The Hearer To Imagine Whatever Suits Him And What He Already Thinks In Any Case.
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Whoever Is Versed In The Jargon Does Not Have To Say What He Thinks, Does Not Even Have To Think It Properly. The Jargon Takes Over This Task.
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The Need To Let Suffering Speak Is A Condition Of All Truth. For Suffering Is Objectivity That Weighs Upon The Subject
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There Are No More Ideologies In The Authentic Sense Of False Consciousness, Only Advertisements For The World Through Its Duplication And The Provocative Lie Which Does Not Seek Belief But Commands Silence.
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In The Age Of The Individual's Liquidation, The Question Of Individuality Must Be Raised Anew.
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In Myths The Warrant Of Grace Was The Acceptance Of Sacrifice; It Is This Acceptance That Love, The Re-enactment Of Sacrifice, Beseeches If It Is Not To Feel Under A Curse.
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Dissonance Is The Truth About Harmony.
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In The End, Glorification Of Splendid Underdogs Is Nothing Other Than Glorification Of The Splendid System That Makes Them So.
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Words Of The Jargon Sound As If They Said Something Higher Than What They Mean.
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The Almost Insoluble Task Is To Let Neither The Power Of Others, Nor Our Own Powerlessness, Stupefy Us.
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When I Made My Theoretical Model, I Could Not Have Guessed That People Would Try To Realise It With Molotov Cocktails.
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In The General Tendency Toward Specialization, Philosophy Too Has Established Itself As A Specialized Discipline, One Purified Of All Specific Content. In So Doing, Philosophy Has Denied Its Own Constitutive Concept: The Intellectual Freedom That Does Not Obey The Dictates Of Specialized Knowledge.
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In The Abstract Conception Of Universal Wrong, All Concrete Responsibility Vanishes.
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Proletarian Language Is Dictated By Hunger. The Poor Chew Words To Fill Their Bellies.
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The Forms Of Art Reflect The History Of Man More Truthfully Than Do Documents Themselves.
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People At The Top Are Closing Ranks So Tightly That All Possibility Of Subjective Deviation Has Gone, And Difference Can Be Sought Only In The More Distinguished Cut Of An Evening Dress.
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Work While You Work, Play While You Play - This Is A Basic Rule Of Repressive Self-discipline.
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Insane Sects Grow With The Same Rhythm As Big Organizations. It Is The Rhythm Of Total Destruction.
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Quality Is Decided By The Depth At Which The Work Incorporates The Alternatives Within Itself, And So Masters Them.
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As Naturally As The Ruled Always Took The Morality Imposed Upon Them More Seriously Than Did The Rulers Themselves, The Deceived Masses Are Today Captivated By The Myth Of Success Even More Than The Successful Are. Immovably, They Insist On The Very Ideology Which Enslaves Them. The Misplaced Love Of The Common People For The Wrong Which Is Done To Them Is A Greater Force Than The Cunning Of The Authorities.
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Art As A Whole Is A Riddle. Another Way Of Putting This Is To Say That Art Expresses Something While At The Same Time Hiding It.
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Talent Is Perhaps Nothing Other Than Successfully Sublimated Rage.
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The Whole Is The False.
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Of The World As It Exists, It Is Not Possible To Be Enough Afraid.
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Newness Only Becomes Mere Evil In Its Totalitarian Format, Where All The Tension Between Individual And Society, That Once Gave Rise To The Category Of The New, Is Dissipated. Today The Appeal To Newness, Of No Matter What Kind, Provided Only That It Is Archaic Enough, Has Become Universal, The Omnipresent Medium Of False Mimesis. The Decomposition Of The Subject Is Consummated In His Self-abandonment To An Ever-changing Sameness.
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To Hate Destructiveness, One Must Hate Life As Well: Only Death Is An Image Of Undistorted Life ... Organic Life Is An Illness Peculiar To Our Unlovely Planet.
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In Sharp Contrasts To Traditional Art, Modern Art Does Not Hide The Fact That It Is Something Made And Produced: On The Contrary, It Underscores The Fact.
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So The Experience Of Death Is Turned Into That Of The Exchange Of Functionaries, And Anything In The Natural Relationship To Death That Is Not Wholly Absorbed Into The Social One Is Turned Over To Hygiene. In Being Seen As No More Than The Exit Of A Living Creature From The Social Combine, Death Has Been Domesticated: Dying Merely Confirms The Absolute Irrelevance Of The Natural Organism In Face Of The Social Absolute.
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What Human Beings Seek To Learn From Nature Is How To Use It To Dominate Wholly Both It And Human Beings. Nothing Else Counts.
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He Who Integrates Is Lost.
Integrating
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Love Is The Power To See Similarity In The Dissimilar.
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Romance
In Anglo-saxon Countries The Prostitutes Look As If They Purveyed, Along With Sin, The Attendant Pains Of Hell.
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Advancing Bourgeois Society Liquidates Memory, Time, Recollection As Irrational Leftovers Of The Past.
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The Inadequacy Of The Purely Purpose-oriented Form Is Revealed For What It Is-a Monotonous, Impoverished Boring Practicality.
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The Only Philosophy That Can Be Practiced Responsibly In The Face Of Despair Is The Attempt To Contemplate All Things As They Would Present Themselves From The Standpoint Of Redemption. Knowledge Has No Light But That Shed On The World By Redemption: All Else Is Reconstruction, Mere Technique. Perspectives Must Be Fashioned That Displace And Estrange The World, That Reveal Its Fissures And Crevices, As Indigent And Distorted As It Will One Day Appear In The Messianic Light.
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A Successful Work Of Art Is Not One Which Resolves Objective Contradictions In A Spurious Harmony, But One Which Expresses The Idea Of Harmony Negatively By Embodying The Contradictions, Pure And Uncompromised, In Its Innermost Structure.
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All Testify To The Coercion And Sacrifice Which Culture Imposes On Man. To Rely On Them And Deny The Decline Is To Become Even More Firmly Caught In Its Fatal Coils.
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The Blessing That The Market Does Not Ask About Birth Is Paid For In The Exchange Society By The Fact That The Possibilities Conferred By Birth Are Molded To Fit The Production Of Goods That Can Be Bought On The Market.
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Philosophy That Satisfies Its Own Intention, And Does Not Childishly Skip Behind Its Own History And The Real One, Has Its Lifeblood In The Resistance Against The Common Practices Of Today And What They Serve, Against The Justification Of What Happens To Be The Case.
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Tenderness Between People Is Nothing Other Than Awareness Of The Possibility Of Relations Without Purpose.
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By Abstaining From All Definite Content, Whether As Formal Logic And Theory Of Science Or As The Legend Of Being Beyond All Beings, Philosophy Declared Its Bankruptcy Regarding Concrete Social Goals.
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Freud Made The Discovery- Quite Genuinely, Simply Through Working On His Own Material- That The More Deeply One Explores The Phenomena Of Human Individuation, The More Unreservedly One Grasps The Individual As A Self-contained And Dynamic Entity, The Closer One Draws To That In The Individual Which Is Really No Longer Individual.
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Self
Individual
The Body's Habituation To Walking As Normal Stems From The Good Olddays. It Was The Bourgeois Form Of Locomotion: Physicaldemythologization, Free Of The Spell Of Hieratic Pacing, Rooflesswandering, Breathless Flight. Human Dignity Insisted On The Right Towalk, A Rhythm Not Extorted From The Body By Command Or Terror. Thewalk, The Stroll, Were Private Ways Of Passing Time, The Heritage Ofthe Feudal Promenade In The Nineteenth Century.
Heritage
Body
Way
That All Men Are Alike Is Exactly What Society Would Like To Hear. It Considers Actual Or Imagined Differences As Stigmas Indicating That Not Enough Has Yet Been Done; That Something Has Still Been Left Outside Its Machinery, Not Quite Determined By Its Totality.
Men
Differences
Culture
The Taboos That Constitute A Man's Intellectual Stature, Often Sedimented Experiences And Unarticulated Insights, Always Operate Against Inner Impulses That He Has Learned To Condemn, But Which Are So Strong That Only An Unquestioning And Unquestioned Authority Can Hold Them In Check.
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Men
Intellectual
There Is No Love That Is Not An Echo.
Echoes
No Love
The Dialectic Cannot Stop Short Before The Conceptsof Health And Sickness, Nor Indeed Before Their Siblings Reason And Unreason.
Sibling
Health
Sickness
The Positive Element Of Kitsch Lies In The Fact That It Sets Free For A Moment The Glimmering Realization That You Have Wasted Your Life.
Lying
Elements
Realization
He Who Has Loved And Who Betrays Love Does Harm Not Only To The Image Of The Past, But To The Past Itself.
Betrayal
Past
Doe
The Film Has Succeeded In Transforming Subjects So Indistinguishably Into Social Functions, That Those Wholly Encompassed, No Longer Aware Of Any Conflict, Enjoy Their Own Dehumanization As Something Human, As The Joy Of Warmth. The Total Interconnectedness Of The Culture Industry, Omitting Nothing, Is One With Total Social Delusion.
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Culture
Conflict
All The World's Not A Stage.
World
Stage
Kitsch Evokes A Future Utopia Looking Back At A Past That Is Selectively (mis)remembered, Thereby Helping To Stabilize The Present Toward Which Kitsch Is Otherwise Deeply Anatagonistic.
Past
Kitsch
Helping
It Would Be Advisable To Think Of Progress In The Crudest, Most Basic Terms: That No One Should Go Hungry Anymore, That There Should Be No More Torture, No More Auschwitz. Only Then Will The Idea Of Progress Be Free From Lies.
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Thinking
Ideas
The Poor Are Prevented From Thinking By The Discipline Of Others, The Rich By Their Own.
Thinking
Discipline
Rich
The Task Of Art Today Is To Bring Chaos Into Order. Artistic Productivity Is The Capacity For Being Voluntarily Involuntary.
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Order
Tasks
The Task Of Art Today Is To Bring Chaos Into Order.
Art
Order
Design
In The End, The Writer Is Not Even Allowed To Live In His Writing.
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Ends
The Usual Reproach Against The Essay, That It Is Fragmentary And Random, Itself Assumes The Givenness Of Totality And Suggests That Man Is In Control Of This Totality. The Desire Of The Essay, Though, Is Not To Filter The Eternal Out Of The Transitory; It Wants, Rather, To Make The Transitory Eternal.
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Usual
The Idea That After This War Life Will Continue 'normally' Or Even That Culture Might Be 'rebuilt' - As If The Rebuilding Of Culture Were Not Already Its Negation - Is Idiotic.
War
Ideas
Culture
The Objective Tendency Of The Enlightenment, To Wipe Out The Power Of Images Over Man, Is Not Matched By Any Subjective Progress On The Part Of Enlightened Thinking Towards Freedom From Images.
Men
Thinking
Progress
Art Is The Social Antithesis Of Society, Not Directly Deducible From It.
Art
Social
Art Is
When All Actions Are Mathematically Calculated, They Also Take On A Stupid Quality.
Stupid
Risk
Quality
The Splinter In Your Eye Is The Best Magnifying-glass Available.
Eye
Glasses
Splinters
The Basest Person Is Capable Of Perceiving The Weaknesses Of The Greatest, The Most Stupid, The Errors In The Thought Of The Most Intelligent.
Stupid
Intelligent
Errors
Jazz Is The False Liquidation Of Art - Instead Of Utopia Becoming Reality It Disappears From The Picture.
Art
Reality
Becoming
The Phrase, The World Wants To Be Deceived, Has Become Truer Than Had Ever Been Intended. People Are Not Only, As The Saying Goes, Falling For The Swindle; If It Guarantees Them Even The Most Fleeting Gratification They Desire A Deception Which Is Nonetheless Transparent To Them. They Force Their Eyes Shut And Voice Approval, In A Kind Of Self-loathing, For What Is Meted Out To Them, Knowing Fully The Purpose For Which It Is Manufactured. Without Admitting It They Sense That Their Lives Would Be Completely Intolerable As Soon As They No Longer Clung To Satisfactions Which Are None At All.
Fall
Eye
Self
People Have So Manipulated The Concept Of Freedom That It Finally Boils Down To The Right Of The Stronger And Richer To Take From The Weaker And Poorer Whatever They Still Have.
People
Stronger
Stills
The Most Powerful Person Is He Who Is Able To Do Least Himself And Burden Others Most With The Things For Which He Lends His Name And Pockets The Credit.
Powerful
Names
Pockets
The Specific Is Not Exclusive: It Lacks The Aspiration To Totality.
Aspiration
Totality
Exclusive
History Does Not Merely Touch On Language, But Takes Place In It.
History
Doe
Language
Everything About Art Has Become Problematic; Its Inner Life, Its Relation To Society, Even Its Right To Exist.
Art
Relation
Inner Life
He Who Has Laughter On His Side Has No Need Of Proof.
Happiness
Laughter
Joy
Art Respects The Masses, By Standing Up To Them For What They Could Be, Rather Than Conforming To Them In Their Degraded State.
Art
States
Mass
Humanity Had To Inflict Terrible Injuries On Itself Before The Self, The Identical, Purpose-directed, Masculine Character Of Human Beings Was Created, And Something Of This Process Is Repeated In Every Childhood.
Character
Self
Childhood
Love Is The Ability To Discover Similarities In The Dis-similar. The Audience Has A Right Not To Be Fooled - Even If It Insists On Being Fooled.
Love Is
Ability
Similarity
True Thoughts Are Those Alone Which Do Not Understand Themselves.
A German Is Someone Who Cannot Tell A Lie Without Believing It Himself.
Lying
Believe
None Of The Abstract Concepts Comes Closer To Fulfilled Utopia Than That Of Eternal Peace.
Utopia
Abstract
Fulfilled
Fear And Destructiveness Are The Major Emotional Sources Of Fascism, Eros Belongs Mainly To Democracy.
Emotional
Democracy
Source
Only Thought Which Does Violence To Itself Is Hard Enough To Shatter Myth.
Doe
Violence
Enough
Thinking No Longer Means Anymore Than Checking At Each Moment Whether One Can Indeed Think.
Mean
Thinking
Moments
The Invocation Of Science, Of Its Ground Rules, Of The Exclusive Validity Of The Methods That Science Has Now Completely Become, Now Constitutes A Surveillance Authority Punishing Free, Uncoddled, Undisciplined Thought And Tolerating Nothing Of Mental Activity Other Than What Has Been Methodologically Sanctioned. Science And Scholarship, The Medium Of Autonomy, Has Degenerated Into An Instrument Of Heteronomy.
Surveillance
Authority
Undisciplined
There Is Something Embarrassing In... The Way In Which, ... Turning Suffering Into Images, Harsh And Uncompromising Though They Are, ... Wounds The Shame We Feel In The Presence Of The Victims. For These Victims Are Used To Create Something, Works Of Art, That Are Thrown To The Consumption Of A World Which Destroyed Them.
Art
Suffering
Way
Dialectic Thought Is An Attempt To Break Through The Coercion Of Logic By Its Own Means.
Mean
Break Through
Coercion
The Man For Whom Time Stretches Out Painfully Is One Waiting In Vain, Disappointed At Not Finding Tomorrow Already Continuing Yesterday.
Time
Men
Yesterday
The Very People Who Burst With Proofs Of Exuberant Vitality Could Easily Be Taken For Prepared Corpses, From Whom The News Of Their Not-quite-successful Decease Has Been Withheld For Reasons Of Population Policy. Underlying The Prevalent Health Is Death. All The Movements Of Health Resemble The Reflex-movements Of Beings Whose Hearts Have Stopped Beating.
Taken
Heart
Successful
The Culture Industry Not So Much Adapts To The Reactions Of Its Customers As It Counterfeits Them.
Stupidity
Culture
Reactions
All Satire Is Blind To The Forces Liberated By Decay. Which Is Why Total Decay Has Absorbed The Forces Of Satire.
Decay
Blind
Satire
The Metaphysical Apologia At Least Betrayed The Injustice Of The Established Order Through The Incongruence Of Concept And Reality. The Impartiality Of Scientific Language Deprived What Was Powerless Of The Strength To Make Itself Heard And Merely Provided The Existing Order With A Neutral Sign For Itself. Such Neutrality Is More Metaphysical Than Metaphysics.
Reality
Order
Betrayed
Rigour And Purity In Assembling Words, However Simple The Result, Create A Vacuum.
Simple
Vacuums
Purity
The Bourgeois ... Is Tolerant. His Love For People As They Are Stems From His Hatred Of What They Might Be.
People
Hatred
Might
The Noiseless Din That We Have Long Known In Dreams, Booms At Us In Waking Hours From Newspaper Headlines.
Dream
Long
Waking
Philosophy ... Must Not Bargain Away Anything Of The Emphatic Concept Of Truth.
Philosophy
Bargains
Concepts
The Creed Of Evil Has Been, Since The Beginnings Of Highly Industrialized Society, Not Only A Precursor Of Barbarism But A Mask Of Good. The Worth Of The Latter Was Transferred To The Evil That Drew To Itself All The Hatred And Resentment Of An Order Which Drummed Good Into Its Adherents So That It Could With Impunity Be Evil.
Order
Evil
Hatred
He Who Matures Early Lives In Anticipation.
Anticipation
Early Life
What Has Become Alien To Men Is The Human Component Of Culture, Its Closest Part, Which Upholds Them Against The World. They Make Common Cause With The World Against Themselves, And The Most Alienated Condition Of All, The Omnipresence Of Commodities, Their Own Conversion Into Appendages Of Machinery, Is For Them A Mirage Of Closeness.
Men
Mirages
World
On Their Way Toward Modern Science Human Beings Have Discarded Meaning. The Concept Is Replaced By The Formula, The Cause By Rules And Probability.
Way
Causes
Modern
The Straight Line Is Regarded As The Shortest Distance Between Two People, As If They Were Points.
Distance
Two
People
Truth Is Inseperable From The Illusory Belief That From The Figures Of The Unreal One Day, In Spite Of All, Real Deliverance Will Come.
Real
One Day
Belief
Life Has Changed Into A Timeless Succession Of Shocks, Interspaced With Empty, Paralysed Intervals.
Life
Empty
Timeless
He Who Stands Aloof Runs The Risk Of Believing Himself Better Than Others And Misusing His Critique Of Society As An Ideology For His Private Interest.
Running
Believe
Risk
The Darkening Of The World Makes The Irrationality Of Art Rational: Radically Darkened Art.
Art
World
Rational
The Important Thing Is Not The Planning Of An Index Verborum Prohibitorum Of Current Noble Nouns, But Rather The Examination Of Their Linguistic Function.
Important
Noble
Nouns
Bourgeois Society Is Ruled By Equivalence. It Makes The Dissimilar Comparable By Reducing It To Abstract Quantities. To The Enlightenment, That Which Does Not Reduce To Numbers, And Ultimately To The One, Becomes Illusion.
Numbers
Enlightenment
Doe
The Power Of Works Of Art Still Continues To Be Secretly Nourished By Imitation... Kitsch
Art
Kitsch
Imitation
The Recent Past Always Presents Itself As If Destroyed By Catastrophes.
Past
Catastrophe
Ifs
It Is Barbaric To Write Poetry After Auschwitz.
Auschwitz
The Gods Look In Pleasure On Penitent Sinners.
Looks
Pleasure
Sinner
Rampant Technolgy Eliminates Luxury, But Not By Declaring Privilege A Human Right; Rather, It Does So By Both Raising The General Standard Of Living And Cutting Off The Possibility Of Fulfilment.
Life
Cutting
Luxury
Kitsch Parodies Catharsis...it Is In Vain To Try To Draw The Boundaries Abstractly Between Aesthetic Fiction And Kitsch's Emotional Plunder. It Is A Poison Admixed To All Art; Excising It Is Today One Of Art's Despairing Efforts.
Art
Emotional
Effort
Suffering Has As Much Right To Be Expressed As A Martyr Has To Cry Out. So It May Have Been False To Say That Writing Poetry After Auschwitz Is Impossible.
Art
Writing
Suffering
There Is No True Life Within A False Life.
True Life
The Error In Positivism Is That It Takes As Its Standard Of Truth The Contingently Given Division Of Labor, That Between The Science And Social Praxis As Well As That Within Science Itself, And Allows No Theory That Could Reveal The Division Of Labor To Be Itself Derivative And Mediated And Thus Strip It Of Its False Authority.
Division Of Labor
Errors
Derivatives
Horror Is Beyond The Reach Of Psychology.
Psychology
Horror
To Say 'we' And Mean 'i' Is One Of The Most Recondite Insults.
Mean
Comeback
Insult
Thus Is Order Ensured: Some Have To Play The Game Because They Cannot Otherwise Live, And Those Who Could Live Otherwise Are Kept Out Because They Do Not Want To Play The Game. It Is As If The Class From Which Independent Intellectuals Have Defected Takes Its Revenge, By Pressing Its Demands Home In The Very Domain Where The Deserter Seeks Refuge.
Revenge
Home
Independent
The Joke Of Our Time Is The Suicide Of Intention.
Sad
Suicide
Intention
Everything That Has Ever Been Called Folk Art Has Always Reflected Domination.
Art
Domination
Folks
In Organized Groups Such As The Army Or The Church There Is Either No Mention Of Love Whatsoever Between The Members, Or It Is Expressed Only In A Sublimated And Indirect Way, Through The Mediation Of Some Religious Imagine In The Love Of Whom The Members Unite And Whose All-embracing Love They Are Supposed To Imitate In Their Attitude Towards Each Other. It Is One Of The Basic Tenets Of Fascist Leadership To Keep Primary Libidinal Energy On An Unconscious Level So As To Divert Its Manifestations In A Way Suitable To Political Ends.
Religious
Attitude
Army
In The End Indignation Over Kitsch Is Anger At Tis Shameless Revelling In The Joy Of Imitation.
Joy
Kitsch
Shameless
The Individual Mirrors In His Individuation The Preordained Social Laws Of Exploitation, However Mediated.
Mirrors
Law
Individual
Everybody Must Have Projects All The Time. The Maximum Must Be Extracted From Leisure ... The Whole Of Life Must Look Like A Job, And By This Resemblance Conceal What Is Not Yet Directly Devoted To Pecuniary Gain.
Life
Jobs
Looks
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 The Process Of Material Production, Without Autonomy Or Substance Of Its Own.
Life
Substance
Spheres
Knowledge, Which Is Power, Knows No Limits, Either In Its Enslavement Of Creation Or In Its Deference To Worldly Masters.
Knowledge
Limits
Creation
The Aim Of Jazz Is The Mechanical Reproduction Of A Regressive Moment, A Castration Symbolism. 'give Up Your Masculinity, Let Yourself Be Castrated,' The Eunuchlike Sound Of The Jazz Band Both Mocks And Proclaims, 'and You Will Be Rewarded, Accepted Into A Fraternity Which Shares The Mystery Of Impotence With You, A Mystery Revealed At The Moment Of The Initiation Rite.
Giving Up
Symbolism
Sound
The Human Is Indissolubly Linked With Imitation: A Human Being Only Becomes Human At All By Imitating Other Human Beings.
Empathy
Imitating Others
Imitation
Laughing In The Cultural Industry Is Mockery Of Happiness.
Laughing
Mockery
Industry
Anti-semitism Is The Rumour About The Jews.
Jew
Rumours
Anti Semitism
Cultural Criticism Finds Itself Faced With The Final Stage Of The Dialectic Of Culture And Barbarism. To Write Poetry After Auschwitz Is Barbaric. And This Corrodes Even The Knowledge Of Why It Has Become Impossible To Write Poetry Today. Absolute Reification, Which Presupposed Intellectual Progress As One Of Its Elements, Is Now Preparing To Absorb The Mind Entirely. Critical Intelligence Cannot Be Equal To This Challenge As Long As It Confines Itself To Self-satisfied Contemplation.
Writing
Self
Long
An Emancipated Society, On The Other Hand, Would Not Be A Unitary State, But The Realization Of Universality In The Reconciliation Of Differences.
Hands
Differences
Culture
Modernity Is A Qualitative, Not A Chronological, Category.
Categories
Modernity
Qualitative
Tact Is The Discrimination Of Differences. It Consists In Conscious Deviations.
Differences
Discrimination
Conscious
Happiness Is Obsolete: Uneconomic.
Obsolete
For A Man Who No Longer Has A Homeland, Writing Becomes A Place To Live.
Writing
Men
Emigration
In So Far As The Culture Industry Arouses A Feeling Of Well-being That The World Is Precisely In That Order Suggested By The Culture Industry, The Substitute Gratification Which It Prepares For Human Beings Cheats Them Out Of The Same Happiness Which It Deceitfully Projects.
Order
Feelings
Culture
It Is One Of The Basic Tenets Of Fascist Leadership To Keep Primary Libidinal Energy On An Unconscious Level So As To Divert Its Manifestations In A Way Suitable To Political Ends.
Political
Energy
Levels
No Harm Comes To Man From Outside Alone: Dumbness Is The Objective Spirit.
Men
Spirit
Harm
Once The Last Trace Of Emotion Has Been Eradicated, Nothing Remains Of Thought But Absolute Tautology.
Lasts
Emotion
Tautology
The Lie Has Long Since Lost Its Honest Function Of Misrepresenting Reality. Nobody Believes Anybody, Everyone Is In The Know. Lies Are Told Only To Convey To Someone That One Has No Need Either Of Him Or His Good Opinion.
Lying
Believe
Reality
Indeed, Happiness Is Nothing Other Than Being Encompassed, An After-image Of The Original Shelter Within The Mother. But For This Reason No One Who Is Happy Can Know That He Is So. To See Happiness, He Would Have To Pass Out Of It: To Be As If Already Born. He Who Says He Is Happy Lies, And In Invoking Happiness, Sins Against It. He Alone Keeps Faith Who Says: I Was Happy.
Mother
Lying
Shelter
The Triumph Of Advertising In The Culture Industry Is That Consumers Feel Compelled To Buy And Use Its Products Even Though They See Through Them.
Triumph
Culture
Use
Wrong Life Cannot Be Lived Rightly.
Life
Life Changing
Wrong Life
Art Is Permitted To Survive Only If It Renounces The Right To Be Different, And Integrates Itself Into The Omnipotent Realm Of The Profane.
Art
Survival
Different
If Philosophy Is Still Necessary, It Is So Only In The Way It Has Been From Time Immemorial: As Critique, As Resistance To The Expanding Heteronomy, Even If Only As Thought's Powerless Attempt To Remain Its Own Master And To Convict Of Untruth, By Their Own Criteria, Both A Fabricated Mythology And A Conniving, Resigned Acquiescence.
Philosophy
Acquiescence
Way
Very Evil People Cannot Really Be Imagined Dying.
Evil People
People
Evil
The Sublime Is Only A Step Removed From The Ridiculous.
Sublime
Steps
Ridiculous
The New Human Type Cannot Be Properly Understood Without Awareness Of What He Is Continuously Exposed To From The World Of Things About Him, Even In His Most Secret Innervations.
Secret
Culture
World
It Is Incumbent Upon Philosophy ... To Provide A Refuge For Freedom. Not That There Is Any Hope That It Could Break The Political Tendencies That Are Throttling Freedom Throughout The World Both From Within And Without And Whose Violence Permeates The Very Fabric Of Philosophical Argumentation.
Philosophy
Philosophical
Political
Fascism Is Itself Less 'ideological', In So Far As It Openly Proclaims The Principle Of Domination That Is Elsewhere Concealed.
Principles
Fascism
Domination
In The Products Of The Culture Industry Human Beings Get Into Trouble Only So That They Can Be Rescued Unharmed, Usually By Representatives Of A Benevolent Collective; And Then, In Illusory Harmony, They Are Reconciled With The General Interest Whose Demands They Had Initially Experienced As Irreconcilable With Their Own.
Culture
Demand
Trouble
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