Culture’s promise of happiness is equivocal because it exists only where freedom does not

Evidence

No authentic work of art or true philosophy, Adorno suggests, has been exhausted in its purity and isolation. According to their inner meaning, their insistence on their separation from the actual life-process of society, their ‘very rejection of the guilt of a life which blindly and callously reproduces itself’, implies, however implicitly or unconsciously, the promise of happiness, the promise of a state where freedom would be realized. But this promise must remain equivocal so long as culture is purchased at the price of domination. Culture, as it is now conceived of, exists because freedom does not. Culture’s power, which is co-extensive with its impotence, is its withdrawal from praxis; this renunciation was forced on culture by history. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 46

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Culture is ‘power co-extensive with its impotence’ — it promises freedom precisely by renouncing praxis, a purchase forced by history. Dense enough to sit with.
• SEED: Test this against a postmodern artifact: what happens when art openly mocks its own promise of happiness — is the equivocation resolved or only restaged?
• XREF: connects to: Bourgeois renunciation means surviving only by sacrificing full happiness — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 63; The culture industry offers only illusory promises of pleasure, never fulfillment — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 110; True happiness requires a freedom neither gender currently possesses (+2 more)