Intellectuals’ praise of mass culture masks self-denunciation

Evidence

The positive aspect for which the new mass music and regressive listening are praised - vitality and technical progress, collective breadth and relation to an undefined practice, into whose concepts there has entered the supplicant self-denunciation of the intellectuals, who can thereby finally end their social alienation from the masses in order to co-ordinate themselves politically with contemporary mass consciousness - this positive is a negative, the irruption into music of a catastrophic phase of society. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 106

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Directly relevant to testing Adorno on later pro-pop intellectual discourse (e.g. academic poptimism) — the same supplicant self-denunciation he names.

Related

• Mass media’s audience demands undermines their own ideological work (similarity 0.83)
• Mass music’s regressive listening confirms rather than merely diverts its audience (similarity 0.81)
• Mass culture absorbs critique preemptively so that no ideology need be injected (similarity 0.80)
• Masses accept mass culture as survival training, not out of stupidity (similarity 0.78)
• Enlightenment-era music and Schoenberg agree only in refusing to be enjoyed. (similarity 0.78)