Avant-garde culture thrives where administration has not fully taken hold

Evidence

However, the equalization of the tensions felt today between culture and its objective conditions threatens culture with spiritual death by freezing. In its relation to reality there is a dialectic of non-simultaneity. Only where the development towards the administrated world and social modernity had not yet asserted itself so successfully - in France and Austria, for example - did the aesthetically modern, the avant-garde, thrive. When reality, however, dwells upon the current standard, a tendentious levelling of consciousness takes place. The more easily consciousness adjusts to integral reality, the more it is discouraged from going beyond that which is there once and for all. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 166

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘dialectic of non-simultaneity’ mechanism — consciousness freezing into the given — is the same administered-petrification logic the reader is trying to run on post-1969 culture. Connects to his free-time-as-administered-continuation thesis. — connects to: Avant-garde art depends on concrete political conditions, not just aesthetic logic — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 243; avant-garde shock loses its subversive force once it becomes expected and institutionalized — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 564; The avant-garde is absorbed and neutralized as entertainment by advanced industrial society — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 319