Nonconformist culture gets co-opted by mass-distribution before it can reach anyone
Evidence
Every opinion earns the approbation of friends, every argument is known by them beforehand. That all cultural products, even non-conformist ones, have been incorporated into the distribution-mechanisms of large-scale capital, that in the most developed country a product that does not bear the imprimatur of mass-production can scarcely reach a reader, viewer, listener at all, denies deviationary longings their subject matter in advance. … Even Kafka is becoming a fixture in the sub-let studio. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 228
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes of Bourdieu’s field of cultural production and the modern insight that counterculture is absorbed into the market; Kafka as ‘fixture in the sub-let studio’ directly parallels the death of the outsider the market interiorizes. — connects to: Mass culture inverted tragedy’s defiance into the punishment of nonconformists; Mass culture reproduces subjects already shaped by systemic coercion rather than influencing them — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 716; Mass culture absorbs critique preemptively so that no ideology need be injected — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 112 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Mass culture absorbs critique preemptively so that no ideology need be injected
#corroborates(0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 112 - Mass culture reproduces subjects already shaped by systemic coercion rather than influencing them
#corroborates(0.72) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 716 - Mass culture creates the very needs it then claims to satisfy
#expands(0.70) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 113