Dialectic of Enlightenment As Sport by Donovan Tom;

Author:Donovan, Tom;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algora Publishing
Published: 2015-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

WOD

This willful ignorance of the truth of the machine is not completely irrational. We are all dependent on modern industrial society. “The culture industry, however, reflects society’s positive and negative provision for those it administers.” (121) Ideology must take into account the fact that at some level every one of us knows we are helpless within the system. Despite the ideology of groups like the NRA, which try to convince us that owning guns will negate our helplessness, most of us know better. Most of us know the NRA itself is part of the modern sales apparatus and manipulates using consumerist–patriotic logic. Most of us know the American gun fetish is a harmful, fear-driven menace. In any case, the system must account for our knowledge, and so it has to cater to us with “no child left behind” and “freedom isn’t free” mantras. This is society’s way of admitting its irrationality and injustice. Rather than concealing the suffering, the culture industry, like the gun industry, takes pride in looking at it manfully. “Such is the world—so hard, yet therefore so wonderful, so healthy. The lie does not shrink back even from tragedy.” (122) The public is constantly told that more tragedies will occur, more terrorists will strike, more cities will flood, more stock markets will crash, more cancers will spread, more global warming will occur.

Rather than preventing tragedy our “enlightened” political and economic leaders prepare us for the next tragedy, and “mass culture does the same with tragedy. Hence the persistent borrowings from art.” (122) Since the culture industry has no style, it merely mimics art and the tragic substance of art. By aestheticizing tragedy, our entertainment culture can deflect “the charge that truth is glossed over, whereas in fact it is appropriated with cynical regret.” (122) This cynical regret makes misfortune, suffering, and tragedy seem like fate. Hollywood lives on fate-like tales. There is something for everyone, enough fate to go around for all. But genuine tragedy held onto human meaning when it showed a paradoxical heroic and hopeless resistance to a mythical threat. In the bourgeois distortion, people just learn to accept their place in the system. The goal here is to produce customers who don’t resist, for then they are reliable and predictable. With this, tragedy is abolished. Tragedy needs the antithesis between individual and society to give it substance. But when this is replaced, and replaced with the ability to survive one’s own ruin, tragedy loses its substance. Everybody in our society rises again. All one must do to cleanse one’s soul is to feign self-deprecation, go on the talk show circuit, and smile. Americans love a comeback story. Like Odysseus, as long as you tell a good tale, so long as you have your people control the narrative, you will be forgiven, for you are “forgiven,” and anyway, the point is now entertainment.

But our ideological entertainment masks the true human pull of entertainment. Entertainment does not completely negate tragedy. In fact, in Odysseus we can see that the legacy of sports harbors tragedy even as it attempts to be purely entertainment.

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