Culture becomes administrable precisely by being severed from practical action

Evidence

The process of neutralization - the transformation of culture into something independent and external, removed from any possible relation to praxis - makes it possible to integrate it into the organization from which it untiringly cleanses itself; furthermore, this is accomplished neither with contradiction nor with danger. … Through the sacrifice of its possible relation to praxis, the cultural concept itself becomes an instance of organization; that which is so provokingly useless in culture is transformed into tolerated negativity or even into something negatively useful - into a lubricant for the system, into something which exists for something else, into untruth, or into goods of the culture industry calculated for the consumer. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 161

Categorization

• DEFINE: Adorno defines ‘neutralization’ precisely here — the key mechanism by which culture is made safe for administration; this is exactly the term the reader must be able to deploy.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated task of running Adorno’s analysis on post-death artifacts: neutralized ‘transgressive’ art funded by institutions (museums, biennales, streaming-‘edgy’ content) is the direct 21st-century test case. — connects to: Hyperreal civilization must recycle its own lost faculties and imaginary. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 52; Bureaucratic planning and cultural rationalization create a totally administered society — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 35; Technical administration makes the possibility of liberation progressively more unimaginable — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 119 (+6 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion — that culture’s uselessness is converted into ‘something negatively useful, a lubricant for the system’ — is a dense, paradigm-twisting move worth sitting with.