Officially tolerated bohemian licence degrades the freedom it claims to license into a fiction.
Evidence
In spite of this seeming plausibility, however, the feeling of untruth cannot be overcome totally: namely, the feeling that the non-planned is degraded to a costume of itself and, consequently, that the freedom involved becomes a fiction. One need only compare the synthetic artists’ quarter of New York, Greenwich Village, with the Parisian Rive Gauche of pre-Hitler days. In the New York district licence continues to exist as an officially tolerated institution; for this reason it has become what the Americans call ‘phoney’. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 174
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- SEED: Direct test case for the reader’s goal: run this Greenwich Village analysis on post-Adorno cultural districts (e.g. Brooklyn, Shoreditch, a gentrified coworking quarter) — does institutionalized licence still read as ‘phoney’?
- XREF: Echoes the real-life comparison of greenwich village pre/post that cultural geographers and urbanists (Sharon Zukin on loft living, Lofland) have since developed in Adorno’s wake.