Picarquín Chile 1999 gameboardism d11of42
page 106 The horoscopes that Adorno began studying in 1952 offer non-sequiturs, so-called “blanks,” which the reader can fill in emotionally so as to believe. A practical aspect aids in rationaliz- ing these blank desires as recreational contact:
“The semitolerant integration of pleasure into a rigid pattern of life is achieved by the ever-recurring promise that pleasure trips, sprees, parties and similar events will lead to practical advantages. One will make new acquaintances, build up ‘connections’ that prove helpful for the career” (65).
Because the columnist addresses their “fondest hopes,” the readers are “temporarily prepared to accept the most improbable promises” (78). What is compelling about the forecasts, however, is the status quo’s authoritarian grasp, which forcefills in the irrationalism gap, its corollary, with good sense and direction. “The common-sense advice itself contains [...] many spurious ‘pseudo-rational’ elements, calling for some authoritarian backing to be effective” (24). The nimbus of down-to-earth counseling in the forecasts falls into the gap: “the law according to which the reasonable attitudes are applied to ‘realistic situations,’ is arbitrary and entirely opaque” (39). Freedom means volunteer for nothing else to do: “there is in astrology an implicit metaphysics of adjustment” (28).
Adorno analyzes the wrap of fantasy in reality, the flight to reality, within the B-genre that reaches for the stars:
This wide-spread fad may owe its tremendous popularity to its ingenious solution of the conflict between irrationality and common sense.
The science fiction reader need no longer feel ashamed of being a superstitious and gullible person. The fantasies of his own making, no matter how irrational they are, and how much projective content of either individual or collective nature may be implied, appear no longer as irreconcilable to reality. (85)
Science fiction both updates Christianity and denies the provenance, defending against the depressing prospect with the fantasy-ring of reality:
“Thus, the term ‘another world’ which once had a metaphysical meaning, is here brought down to the level of astronomy and obtains an empirical ring” (85–86).
Contrary to the law of convergence, which holds that the development of life even on distant planets would be more or less continuous in terms of enabling conditions and outcome, science fiction follows out instead a “secularization of demonology” to bring back entities of “olden times” but “treated as natural and scientific objects coming out of space from another star” (86). In these borderlands of fantasy and science fiction, notions of soft and hard science add up to the “bill” that astrology presents “for the neglect of interpretative thinking for the sake of factgathering” (114–15). In the half-educated gathering, the “facts” of stellar movements and well-known psychological reactions contribute to “the readiness to relate the unrelated” (116). Factbased “wild constructs” arise, while “the spuriousness of the links goes unacknowledged” (115–16). The gathering that thus arises draws consolation from “fatality, dependence, and obedience.” The “will,” that is, “the will to change,” is reduced to private “worries” for which the column promises “a cure-all by the very same compliance which prevents a change of conditions” (117). But the reduction must be an internal adjustment supervised by the reader’s own insight:
“Meekness towards the more powerful seems to do less damage to so-called self-esteem if cloaked as the outcome of higher insight either into oneself or into those whom one obeys” (90).
The irrationality of astrology is not that of a dream world but in its processed form is comparable rather to what the so-called dream factory assembles (34).
“The message of the dream, however, the ‘latent dream idea’ as promoted by motion pictures and television reverses that of actual dreams” (46).
The promotional idea that the dream is seen to transmit is the wish – for controlled release, to be controlled. “It is an appeal to agencies of psychological control rather than an attempt to unfetter the unconscious” (ibid.). Adjustment works because it allows you, too, to roll off the assembly line: “The semi-irrationality of ‘everything will be fine’ is based on the fact that modern American Society [...] succeeds in reproducing the life of those whom it embraces” and grasps (43). The pitch to adjustment, reasonableness, and so on, is the hitch by which “threat and help converge” (46). The comforting trust conveying that in due time everything will come out all right corresponds to a child’s fantasies of what will happen when grown up (58). The column deploys a timeline in its counseling that dispenses “with contradictory requirements of life” by “distributing these requirements over different periods mostly of the same day” (56). A pseudo-solution results that swaps first–next sequences for the either–or impasses of life: “Pleasure thus becomes the award of work, work the atonement for pleasure” (58). The flight trajectory of fantasy is thus stuffed inside the twenty-four-hour span of time to give it all the illusion of quality time – like the boon for signing up with the Devil. “Sexuality itself is being desexualized, as it were, by becoming ‘fun,’ a sort of hygiene” (65).
The infernal rear view of power is staggered in fits and starts:
“Encouraging ‘behind-the-scenes’ activities is an inconspicuous form of conjuring up such tendencies usually projected upon out-groups. [...] The advice to finagle is countered – undone in the psychoanalytic sense – by interspersed reminders to keep within the realm of the permissible” (79).
The omnipotence in wish fantasying that pumps up outer reality makes the adjustment to a greater power that calls the shots:
“The pleasures ordained are no longer pleasures at all, but really the duties as which they are rationalized, the rationalization containing more truth than the supposedly unconscious wish” (66).
The culture industry turns around the relationship between wish fantasy and poetry into how-to rationalizations for adaptation to the practice of wishing well:
“The idea of the successful, conforming, well-adjusted ‘average’ citizen lurks even behind the fanciest technicolor fairy tale” (46).
These are the moments Adorno strung together under the slogan or rebus “psychoanalysis in reverse,” which he applied both to the culture industry and National Socialism. Pivotal to a reading of the mass-media psychology going into National Socialism, the provenance of the phrase lies in the benign plagiarism or teamwork among the Frankfurt Schoolers in exile.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::piet: listen to Auron McIntyre explaining the NRX [neo-reactionary] term 'moldbug' [CYarvin] invented for the hegelian 'cutting edge of consensus competitions raging among the enlarging of the largest, racing to larpopia i might add
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