The Tragedy of Culture
The fear of missing out makes the world go round.
Works of art are ascetic and audacious, the culture industry is pornographic and pretentious.
So say Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Max Horkheimer, two German social philosophers active from the 1920s up until the 1960s.
In their essay Kulturindustrie published in 1947, they declare the powerlessness of the general public to think for themselves. Whenever they consume “cultural goods” such as movies, radio, and television, instead of relying on their own imaginations, public audiences are dependant on snackable, neatly packaged, all-in-one imaginary worlds for intellectual sustenance.
In any case, let’s doubt the omnipresence of such a statement for just one moment.
The desire to create comes naturally to me. The presence of this natural drive manifests itself in different ways. There’s the biological approach, where it’s like a drop of sweat slithering down my body. There’s the psychological path, where inaction on the creative impulse becomes an ever-present obstacle that interferes with the smooth functioning of my day-to-day responsibilities.
And then, there’s the social kick — thick shots of adrenaline to the heart — where the raw energy of an idea invades the territory of a particular social group I belong to. This happens as a result of either the progression of the relationship, or the development of new objectives within it. I start thinking of the creative constraints and how to break them, while also receiving spiritual energy from improvised discussions and enlightening conversations.
But like any desire, this “drive” can be shared with others, curbed to zero, or even increased.
While this feeling may purely be of my own construction, I'm not convinced it can exist without an initial amount of consumption. I get frustrated when I don’t create, but I get equally frustrated if I don’t consume. Rather than dismissing culture as a villainous problem, I would say that the emptiness of art is the inconvenient paradox.
Art can be felt, but it needs culture to be understood. Where we get confused is when we have no context. Appreciating art without consuming culture is as if physical intimacy existed as an isolated element outside of an interactive relationship — outside of a story you share with someone, outside of their story and their emotions.
It doesn’t. It never has and it never will. But now, I feel like I'm missing the point.
Returning to Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry has gifted us with the impossibility of consuming everything. The difficulty of achieving cognitive independence has been taken for granted. Staying up-to-date was fashionable, but now it has become essential. But “essential” according to whom?
Alas, we’ve come to trust the expression used by every industrialist to sway public opinion, and to excuse the unintended, inhumane consequences caused by their money-vacuuming tendencies:
I didn't really understand where I was taking things.
