Defending culture requires indicting the reasons for its existence, not defending its fact

Evidence

Adorno regards the conservative defence of high art and culture as reflecting an unreflective hypostatization of culture that protects the economic status quo. He perceives the end of culture as the suspension of its reified status, its resubmersion in the actual life-process of society. And this final joining of culture and society would token the realignment of mental and manual labour, to whose radical separation culture owes its existence. Dialectical criticism, as opposed to conservative cultural criticism, aims to heighten ‘cultural criticism until the notion of culture is itself negated, fulfilled and surmounted in one’. Whatever the hyperbole involved in this statement of the procedures and goals of cultural criticism, its point is to reveal the gap between the claims of culture and the world it inhabits. High culture exists because what it promises does not. One can only defend culture by indicting the reasons for and not the fact of its existence. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 48

Categorization

• DEFINE: States the exact critical procedure to run on new artifacts: negate, fulfil, surmount the notion of culture in one — the method the reader wants to apply.
• APHORISMS: ‘One can only defend culture by indicting the reasons for and not the fact of its existence’ — a genuinely reusable critical maxim.
• XREF: connects to: Culture’s truth depends on immanent critique of its own untruth. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 966