Postmodernism’s false affirmation converts repressed despair into media violence.

Evidence

By this route postmodernism’s presumptive affirmation, by offering what is repression as satisfaction, makes the moment of self-negation permanent and thus an unintended celebration of death. Because postmodernist practice alters the empirical world without transforming it, its abstract affirmations belie the despair that sustains it. That despair manifests itself in aggression and violence, a violence now represented, exploited and celebrated in the media. The violence perpetuated by instrumental reason on sensuous particularity, what Adorno terms the ‘non-identical’, is answered only with violence. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 65

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The closure of the Sirens metaphor — once the non-identical is fully instrumentalized, representation turns to violence as the only residue. This is a dense, paradigmatic-threshold claim about what desublimation ultimately produces.
• XREF: Presses on whether Adorno’s Horkheimer-era totality argument still holds — the reader’s stated task of saying honestly where the analysis lands and fails. — connects to: Modernist violence is pseudoevent imposed by the novelist — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 401; Conspiracy bloggers explicitly cite postmodern relativism to justify distrusting mainstream news. — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 304