Commodity alienation masquerades as closeness while true culture stays uncomprehended

Evidence

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. The great works of art and philosophical constructions have remained uncomprehended not through their too great distance from the heart of human experience, but the opposite; and this incomprehension could itself be accounted for easily enough by too great comprehension: shame at involvement in universal injustice that would become overwhelming as soon as one allowed oneself to understand. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 168

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The reversal — that art is unintelligible because it is too close to experience, not too far, and that comprehension threatens unbearable shame at complicity — is a dense, paradigm-shifting claim resistant to one-sentence summary.
• XREF: Connects to the ‘culture industry’ thesis from Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Horkheimer) and anticipates later affect theory about the unbearable recognition of one’s own complicity. — connects to: Cultural alienation became marketable and co-opted rather than disruptive — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 71; Radical socialization through exchange produces absolute solitude and alienation — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 67; Old folk-art injustice retains a lament; mass-culture alienation masks itself as togetherness — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 227 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Cultural alienation became marketable and co-opted rather than disruptive #corroborates (0.85) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 71
• Radical socialization through exchange produces absolute solitude and alienation #expands (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 67