The intriguer and the hero are twin faces of the bourgeois individual

Evidence

The business and bustle of the intriguer, as this could still be perceived in the early period of great symphonic music in Haydn, in genially confident affirmative form before, with a critical turn, it came to constitute the essence of Beethovinian humour, originally derives from the unlimited effort demanded by competition, that zealous and conscientious industriousness which unintentionally put the noose around the neck of anyone who couldn’t keep up. The intriguer is the negative image of the bourgeois individual and embodies the inevitable contradiction with solidarity that such an individual implies, just as the hero and his spirit of freedom and sacrifice is supposed to represent the very same individual. They both belong to one another like two fragments of a broken world which have been welded together, one might almost say welded together like the bourgeois world and art itself. Today the life of both is at stake as they draw ever closer together. The hero no longer makes any sacrifices but now enjoys success. He does not come of age and assume freedom through his deeds for his career is simply the revelation of his conformity. Thus he is the intriguer who has ‘arrived’, whose confiscated appearance reveals itself with all its irresistability in the form of Clark Gable. Monopoly establishes the successful competitor in just the same way. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 124

Categorization

• DEFINE: Adorno defines intrigue as ‘the aesthetic cipher for the bourgeois triumph over the feudal order’ — the low-born schemer whose intelligence wins where feudal force would fail.
• CANDY: The observation that the petty intriguer ‘disappears along with the small competitor’ and becomes Clark Gable, the approved ‘arrived’ intriguer, is a compact cultural observation.