Attempts to escape consumer passivity only deepen entanglement in it

Evidence

The ambivalence of the retarded listeners has its most extreme expression in the fact that individuals, not yet fully reified, want to extricate themselves from the mechanism of music reification to which they have been handed over, but that their revolts against fetishism only entangle them more deeply in it. Whenever they attempt to break away from the passive status of compulsory consumers and ‘activate’ themselves, they succumb to pseudo-activity. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 101

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core concept of pseudo-activity: any self-activation by consumers only reproduces the administered passivity it seeks to escape.
• XREF: Directly matches the reading purpose’s stated goal of running Adorno’s standardization/pseudo-individuation analysis on later culture.