A Critic at Large SEPTEMBER 15, 2014 ISSUE

The NaysayersWalter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the critique of pop culture.BY ALEX ROSS

TABLEOF

CONTENTS

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I Adorno andBenjamin,debating artin thetechnologicalage, sustained oneof the twentiethcenturys richestintellectualconversations.ILLUSTRATION BYPATRICK BREMER /LEFT: ULLSTEIN BILD /AKG; RIGHT: IMAGNO /AKG

nJonathanFranzens

2001 novel,TheCorrections,a disgracedacademicnamed ChipLambert,who has abandonedMarxist theory in favorof screenwriting, goes tothe Strand Bookstore, indowntown Manhattan, tosell off his library ofdialectical tomes. Theworks of Theodor W.Adorno, JrgenHabermas, FredricJameson, and variousothers cost Chip nearlyfour thousand dollars to

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acquire; their resale valueis sixty-five. He turnedaway from theirreproachful spines,remembering how eachof them had called out ina bookstore with apromise of a radicalcritique of late-capitalistsociety, Franzen writes.After several more book-selling expeditions, Chipenters a high-end grocerystore and walks out withan overpriced filet of wildNorwegian salmon.

Anyone who underwenta liberal-arts education inrecent decades probablyencountered the thornytheorists associated withthe Institute for SocialResearch, better knownas the Frankfurt School.Their minatory titles,filled with dark talk ofNegative Dialectics andOne-DimensionalMan, were once proudlydisplayed on college-dorm shelves, as markers

of seriousness; now theyare probably consigned totaped-up boxes ingarages, if they have notbeen discardedaltogether. Once in awhile, the present-dayWeb designer or businesseditor may open thebooks and see in themargins the excitedqueries of a younger self,next to pronouncementson the order of There isno document of culturewhich is not at the sametime a document ofbarbarism (WalterBenjamin) or The wholeis the false (Adorno).

In the nineteen-nineties,the period in which TheCorrections is set, suchdire sentiments wereunfashionable. With thefall of the Soviet Union,free-market capitalismhad triumphed, and noone seemed badly hurt.In light of recent events,however, it may be time

to unpack those textsagain. Economic andenvironmental crisis,terrorism andcounterterrorism,deepening inequality,unchecked tech andmedia monopolies, awithering away ofintellectual institutions,an ostensibly liberatingInternet culture in whichwe are constantlychecking to see if we arebeing watched: none ofthis would have surprisedthe prophets ofFrankfurt, who, uponreaching America, failedto experience thesensation of enteringParadise. Watchingnewsreels of the SecondWorld War, Adornowrote, Men are reducedto walk-on parts in amonster documentaryfilm which has nospectators, since the leastof them has his bit to do

on the screen. He wouldnot revise his remarksnow.

The philosophers,sociologists, and critics inthe Frankfurt Schoolorbit, who are oftengathered under thebroader label of CriticalTheory, are, indeed,having a modestresurgence. They arecited in brainy magazineslike n+1, The Jacobin, andthe latest iteration of TheBaffler. Evgeny Morozov,in his critiques ofInternet boosterism, hasquoted Adornos earlymentor SiegfriedKracauer, who registeredthe information andentertainment overloadof the nineteen-twenties.The novelist BenjaminKunkel, in his recentessay collection Utopiaor Bust, extolls thecriticism of Jameson,who has taught Marxistliterary theory at Duke

University for decades.(Kunkel also mentionsThe Corrections,noting that Chip gets hissalmon at a shopwinkingly named theNightmare ofConsumption.) Thecritic Astra Taylor, inThe Peoples Platform:Taking Back Power andCulture in the DigitalAge, argues that Adornoand Max Horkheimer, intheir 1944 bookDialectic ofEnlightenment, gaveearly warnings aboutcorporations drowningout democracy in pursuitof profit. And WalterBenjamin, whosedizzyingly varied careerskirted the edges of theFrankfurt collective,receives the grandtreatment in WalterBenjamin: A CriticalLife (Harvard), byHoward Eiland andMichael W. Jennings,who earlier edited

Harvards four-volumeedition of Benjaminswritings.

The Frankfurt School,which arose in the earlynineteen-twenties, neverpresented a united front;it was, after all, a gaggleof intellectuals. One zonein which they clashedwas that of mass culture.Benjamin saw thepopular arena as apotential site ofresistance, from whichleft-leaning artists likeCharlie Chaplin couldtransmit subversivesignals. Adorno andHorkheimer, by contrast,viewed pop culture as aninstrument of economicand political control,enforcing conformitybehind a permissivescreen. The cultureindustry, as they calledit, offered the freedomto choose what is alwaysthe same. A similar splitappeared in attitudes

toward traditional formsof culture: classical music,painting, literature.Adorno tended to beprotective of them, evenas he exposed theirideologicalunderpinnings.Benjamin, in his resonantsentence linking cultureand barbarism, saw thetreasures of bourgeoisEurope as spoils in avictory procession, eachwork blemished by thesuffering of namelessmillions.

The debate reached itsheight in the wake ofBenjamins 1936 essayThe Work of Art in theAge of Its TechnologicalReproducibility, amasterpiece ofcontingent optimism thatpraises mass culture onlyinsofar as mass cultureadvances radical politics.Many readers willsympathize withBenjamin, who managed

Tto uphold a formidablecritical tradition whileopening himself to themodern world andwriting in a sensuousvoice. He furnishes atemplate for the pop-savvy intellectual, thepreferred model in whatremains of literary life.Yet Adorno, his dark-minded, infuriatingbrother, will not go away:his cross-examination ofthe Work of Art essay,his pinpointing of itsmoments of navet,strikes home. Betweenthem, Adorno andBenjamin were pioneersin thinking criticallyabout pop cultureintaking that cultureseriously as an object ofscrutiny, whether in tonesof delight, dismay, orpassionate ambivalence.

he worst that oneFrankfurt Schooltheorist could say

of another was that his

work was insufficientlydialectical. In 1938,Adorno said it ofBenjamin, who fell into amonths-long depression.The word dialectic, aselaborated in thephilosophy of Hegel,causes endless problemsfor people who are notGerman, and even forsome who are. In a way, itis both a philosophicalconcept and a literarystyle. Derived from theancient Greek term forthe art of debate, itindicates an argumentthat maneuvers betweencontradictory points. Itmediates, to use afavorite Frankfurt Schoolword. And it gravitatestoward doubt,demonstrating thepower of negativethinking, as HerbertMarcuse once put it.Such twists and turnscome naturally in theGerman language, whosesentences are themselves

plotted in swerves,releasing their fullmeaning only with thefinal clinching action ofthe verb.

Marx adapted Hegelsdialectic to the economicsphere, seeing it as anengine of progress. Bythe early twenties, aMarxist-Leninist statehad ostensibly emergedin Russia, but the earlymembers of theFrankfurt Schoolnotably, Adorno,Horkheimer, Marcuse,Friedrich Pollock, ErichFromm, Franz Neumann,and Leo Lowenthalwere far from starry-eyedabout it. Although Marxwas central to theirthought, they were nearlyas skeptical ofCommunist ideology asthey were of thebourgeois mind-set thatCommunism wasintended to supplant. Atthe very heart of Critical

Theory was an aversionto closed philosophicalsystems, Martin Jaywrites, in his historyThe DialecticalImagination (1973).

Nazism sundered thelives of the criticaltheorists, almost all ofwhom were Jewish.Benjamin committedsuicide on the Franco-Spanish border, in 1940;the others escaped toAmerica. Much of theirwork in exile focussed ontotalitarianism, althoughthey assessed thephenomenon from acertain remove. For them,the genocidal state wasnot merely a Germanproblem, something thatresulted from listening totoo much Wagner; it wasa Western problem,rooted in theEnlightenment urge todominate nature.Raymond Geuss, in thepreface to a new edition

of the Frankfurt SchoolsU.S.-government-sponsored wartimeintelligence reports, notesthat Nazi Germany, withits barrage of propagandaand of regulatedentertainment, was seenas an archetypallymodern society. Anti-Semitism was, from thisperspective, not merely amanifestation of hatredbut a means to an endaspearhead of societalcontrol. Therefore, thedefeat of Mussolini andHitler, in 1945, fell shortof a final defeat ofFascism: the totalitarianmind lurked everywhere,and America was hardlyfree of its influence.

Chronically disapprovingas these thinkers were,they were not disengagedfrom the culture of theirday. In order to dissect it,they bent over it. Onegreat contribution thatthey made to the art of

criticism was the ideathat any object, no matterhow seemingly trivial,was worth a searchingglance. In the secondvolume of the HarvardBenjamin edition,covering the turbulentfinal years of the WeimarRepublic, Benjaminvariously analyzesMickey Mouse (In thesefilms, mankind makespreparations to survivecivilization), childrensbooks and toys, a foodfair, Charlie Chaplin,hashish, andpornography (Just asNiagara Falls feeds powerstations, in the same waythe downward torrent oflanguage into smut andvulgarity should be usedas a mighty source ofenergy to drive thedynamo of the creativeact). You often feel atension between theintensity of the scrutinyand the modesty of thesubject, as if an electron

microscope were beingused to read the fineprint on a contract.Adorno, during hisAmerican exile, took itupon himself to analyzeastrology columns in theLos Angeles Times.Upon reading the adviceAccept all invitations,he hyperventilates: Theconsummation of thistrend is the obligatoryparticipation in officialleisure-time activities intotalitarian countries.

Benjamin took adifferent tack. In hismaturity, he struggled toreconcile materialist andtheological concerns: onthe one hand, theMarxist tradition ofsocial critique; on theother, the messianictradition thatpreoccupied the Jewishhistorian GershomScholem, a close friendfrom student days. (Thestruggle yielded

TBenjamins most famousimage, in the 1940Theses on thePhilosophy of History:the angel of historywho is blown backwardinto the future by thestorm of progress.) Themessianic urge set offsparks of mystical hopethat were fundamentallyforeign to Adorno.Tellingly, when Benjaminaddressed the subject ofastrology, he was moresympathetic thancensorious, seeing it asevidence of a largelyextinct identificationwith nature: Modernman can be touched by apale shadow of this onsouthern moonlit nightsin which he feels, alivewithin himself, mimeticforces that he hadthought long since dead.

o read thebiographies ofBenjamin and

Adorno side by side

Eiland and Jenningssnew book, seven hundredand sixty-eight pageslong, takes a place on theshelf next to StefanMller-Doohms hardlyless massive 2003 life ofAdornois to see thefraying of the grand oldEuropean bourgeoisie.Benjamin was born inBerlin in 1892; his father,Emil Benjamin, was anincreasingly successfulentrepreneur, his mothersomething of a grandedame. Berlin ChildhoodAround 1900, the mostlyrical of Benjaminsworks, conjures thesumptuousness of hisfamily home, althoughhis all-seeing eye piercesits burnished surface: AsI gazed at the long, longrows of coffee spoonsand knife rests, fruitknives and oyster forks,my pleasure in thisabundance was tingedwith anxiety, lest theguests we had invited

would turn out to beidentical to one another,like our cutlery.

Adorno was born inFrankfurt in 1903, inconditions of comparableease. His father, OscarWiesengrund, ran awine-merchant business,and his mother, MariaCalvelli-Adorno, hadsung opera. From earliestchildhood, Adorno, as hechose to call himself onleaving Germany, swamin music, formingambitions to become acomposer. Early on, Ilearned to disguise myselfin words, Benjaminwrote. Adorno hid insounds.

Benjamin had the morecomplicated personality.Staggeringly intelligent,he was so consumed bythe life of the mind thathe routinely lost track ofreality. Even Scholemfound him fanaticallyclosed off. At the same

time, Benjamin indulgedin bohemian tendencies:gambling, prostitutes,drinking, drugs. Afterfailing to win anacademic position, hetook on journalisticassignments, coming toprefer inconspicuousforms over thepretentious, universalgesture of the book. Hisfamily life was disorderly.Those who picture himas an innocent martyr,poring over Baudelaire ashistory closes in on him,may be disheartened toread of his calloustreatment of his wife,Dora Sophie, from whomhe begged money whileconducting a string ofsmutty affairs, as Doraput it. All he is at thispoint is brains and sex,she wrote.

Adorno, a cannier andless conflicted character,established himself inacademia, writing

dissertations on Husserland Kierkegaard. He alsostudied composition withAlban Berg, one of thesupreme musical figuresof the twentieth century.Adorno was industrious,imperious, brusquelybrilliantthe picture ofthe child prodigy whonever fully grows up. Butthere was a bohemianstrain in him, too.Kracauer, who beganguiding Adorno whenthe latter was still ofhigh-school age, wrote anautobiographical novelcalled Georg in whichAdorno appears as alittle prince namedFred, or Freddie.(Adorno was nicknamedTeddie.) Georg andFreddie go to all-nightfancy-dress balls and onenight end up in bedtogether, hovering on theedge of erotic contact.

Benjamin and Adorno

Benjamin and Adornomet in Frankfurt in theearly twenties, whenAdorno was still auniversity student. Atfirst, Adorno acted like aBenjamin disciple,virtuosically interrogatingculture high and low.Later, he behaved moreas master than asfollower, subjectingBenjamins work tosometimes scathingcriticism. In the newbiography, Adorno comesacross as a petty enforcer,trying to make Benjaminconform to FrankfurtSchool norms. Yet Eilandand Jennings maymisunderstand the give-and-take of therelationship. In one letter,Adorno urges Benjaminto stop paying halfheartedtribute to Marxistconcepts and instead topursue a moreidiosyncratic vision.Benjamin, for his part,was no hapless victim.

When Adorno sent alonga scenario for an ill-conceived music-theatrepiece based on MarkTwain, Benjaminsunconcealed disdainIbelieve I can imaginewhat you wereattempting hereprobably caused Adornoto abandon the project.The two served eachother best by challengingassumptions at everyturn; it was a mutualadmonition society.

With the advent of theNazis, Benjamin leftGermany at once, takingup residence primarily inFrance. Adorno, whosepost-doctoral thesis waspublished the day Hitlertook power, hesitated tobreak from Germany,occasionally makingslight gestures ofaccommodation with theregime. When his part-Jewish ancestry made hisposition impossible, he

settled for a time inOxford. In 1935,Horkheimer took theInstitute for SocialResearch to New York; in1938, Adorno reluctantlyjoined him. He and hiswife, Gretel, urgedBenjamin to follow them,casting New York in aseductive light. In oneletter, Adorno announcesthat Seventh Avenue inthe Village reminds usof boulevardMontparnasse. Greteladds, There is no needto search for the surrealhere, for one stumblesover it at every step.Presciently, though, sheanticipates that Benjaminwill be unable to leaveParis: I fear you are sofond of your arcades thatyou cannot part withtheir splendidarchitecture.

She was referring to theArcades Project,Benjamins would-be

magnum opusakaleidoscopic studycentered on the glass-covered shopping arcadesof nineteenth-centuryParis, interminglingliterary analysis andcultural history withsemi-Marxist sociology.At the heart of thescheme was Baudelaire,the prototype of thecompromised modernartist, who casts off themask of genius andsurrenders to the life ofthe street. Baudelaire isdepicted as a ragpicker,cobbling poetry fromdiscarded fragments. Atthe same time, he standsapart from the crowd,enacting a ceremony ofmourning for what wasand lack of hope for whatis to come. Baudelairesfascinated indecision inthe face of nascentpopular culture mirrorsBenjamins own. The factthat the Arcades Projectnever came to fruitiona

magnificent chaos ofmaterials was publishedin English in 1999suggests that, for thismost hypersensitive ofthinkers, the ambivalencewas paralyzing.

When Benjamincommitted suicide,apparently in themistaken belief that hecould not leave Nazi-occupied France, hecarried with him anAmerican entry visa,which the Institute forSocial Research hadobtained for him. It ishard to picture whatmight have happened ifhe had made it to NewYorkor, for that matter,to Jerusalem, whereScholem tried to get himto settle. The story mightstill have ended sadly:Eiland and Jenningsemphasize that Benjaminhad been tempted bysuicide long before thecataclysm of 1940.

LAdorno, for his part, ekedout a living at variousinstitutes and think tanksin America, and when hereturned to Frankfurt, in1949, he became amonument of Germanintellectual life. He diedin 1969, of a heart attack,after a hike in theshadow of theMatterhorn.

ast year, theGerman publisherSuhrkamp, as part

of its ongoing criticaledition of Benjaminsworks, released a volumedevoted entirely to TheWork of Art in the Ageof Its TechnologicalReproducibility. Itcontains five distinctversions of the essay andrelated manuscripts,dating from the years1935 to 1940, and fourhundred pages ofcommentary. Benjaminmight have scorned thescholarly fuss, but he

knew the value of whathe had achieved. Theessays governingquestion, about what itmeans to create orconsume art when anywork can bemechanically reproduced,has grown ever morepressing in the digitalage, when Bachscomplete cantatas or theOxford EnglishDictionary can bedownloaded in moments.In Benjamins lifetime,intellectuals busiedthemselves debatingwhether the new formsphotography, film, radio,popular musicconstituted art. Benjaminpushed past such panel-discussion topics to themore fundamental issueof how technologychanged all forms,ancient andcontemporary.

First, Benjamin

First, Benjaminintroduces the concept ofthe aura, which hedefines as the here andnow of the artworkitsunique existence in aparticular place. Toknow Leonardo orRembrandt, one must bein a room with theirpaintings. Chartres existsonly at Chartres. Thejourney toward artresembles a pilgrimage.The treasures of thecanon have always beenembedded in ritual,whether it is medievaldogma or the art forarts sake theology of thenineteenth century. Inthe age of reproduction,however, aura decays.When copies competewith originals, and whennew works are producedwith technology in mind,the old values ofcreativity and genius,eternal value andmystery fall away. Farfrom lamenting this

development, Benjaminhails it: For the firsttime in world history,technologicalreproducibilityemancipates the work ofart from its parasiticsubservience to ritual.

Free of that velvet prison,art can assume a politicalrole. Benjamins dream ofa radicalized mass cultureemerged, in part, fromhis conversations withBertolt Brecht, whobelieved that popularmedia could bemarshalled torevolutionary ends, as inhis and Kurt Weills TheThreepenny Opera.Benjamin called theprocess reception indistraction, meaningthat the masses caninternalize, say, Chaplinsimages of a mechanizeddehumanization andbegin to question therules of society. Thesespectators approach

watching a film not assupplicants before analtar; rather, they takepleasure in the imagesand appraise themcritically. They do notpassively contemplate;they are alerteyewitnesses. Indeed, inthe documentary films ofDziga Vertov, the massesthemselves becomeactors, and the dividebetween author andpublic disintegrates.Benjamins essay isfuriously perceptive,although he never quitespecifies how afilmmaker can sustain anexplicitly radical agendawithin the commercialmainstream. Chaplinsdecision to flee toEurope in the fiftiesillustrates the difficulty.

When Adorno read TheWork of Art, he readilyaccepted the concept ofthe aura and its decay.Unsentimental about his

own highbrow milieu, hehad already done his bitto puncture theaffectations of bourgeoisaesthetics, and inparticular the fantasy thatclassical music floatsabove society, in anapolitical haze. In the1932 essay On theSocial Situation ofMusic, Adorno wrote,The same type ofconductor whoundertakes an insatiablyengrossed celebration ofthe Adagio of BrucknersEighth lives a life closelyakin to that of the headof a capitalist combine,uniting in his hand asmany organizations,institutes, and orchestrasas possible. Later in thedecade, in the study InSearch of Wagner,Adorno depicted thecomposer of the Ringas a master illusionist anda harbinger of Fascism.

Benjamins pivot toward

Benjamins pivot towardpopular culture was,however, another matter.In a 1936 letter, Adornocomplained that hisfriend had too cavalierlyconsigned bourgeois artto the counter-revolutionary category,failing to see thatindependent spiritsthelikes of, say, Berg, PabloPicasso, and ThomasManncould still carveout a space of expressivefreedom. (Adornobelieved that Benjaminwas too much under thespell of Brecht, whoappeared ready to casthighbrow forms on therubbish heap.) Benjamin,Adorno said in his letter,had startled art out ofevery one of its tabooedhiding places, but he wasin danger of falling undernew illusions,romanticizing film andother pop forms. Adornowrote, If anything canbe said to possess an

auratic character now, itis precisely the filmwhich does so, and to anextreme and highlysuspect degree. Thecinema was the newChartres, a venue ofcommunal rapture.

This is an insight asprofound as any found inBenjamins essay. Popculture was acquiring itsown cultic aspect, oneneatly configured fortechnologicaldissemination. Why, afterall, would the need forritual subside when theeconomic systemremained the same?(Benjamin once wrote,Capitalism is a purelycultic religion, perhapsthe most extreme thatever existed.) Celebritieswere rising to the statusof secular gods: publicitystills froze their faces inthe manner of religiousicons. Pop musicianselicited Dionysian

screams as they dancedacross the altar of thestage. And their aurabecame, in a sense, evenmore magical: instead ofdrawing pilgrims fromafar, the pop masterpieceis broadcast outward, to acaptive worldcongregation. It radiatesand saturates.

When Adorno issued hisown analyses of popculture, though, he wentoff the beam. He was tooirritated by the newOlympus of celebritiesand, even more, by theenthusiasm they inspiredin younger intellectualsto give a measured view.In the wake of TheWork of Art, Adornopublished two essays,On Jazz, and On theFetish Character ofMusic and theRegression of Listening,that ignored theparticulars of pop soundsand instead resorted to

crude generalizations.Notoriously, Adornocompares jitterbugging toSt. Vitus dance or thereflexes of mutilatedanimals. He shows nosympathy for theAfrican-Americanexperience, which wasfinding a new platformthrough jazz and popularsong. The writing ispolemical, and notremotely dialectical.

In the 1936 letter toBenjamin, Adorno offersa subtler argumentmore of a plea for parity.Commercial logic istriumphant, he says,ensnaring culture highand low: Both bear thestigmata of capitalism,both contain elements ofchange. . . . Both are tornhalves of an integralfreedom to which,however, they do not addup. It would be romanticto sacrifice one for theother. In particular, it

Iwould be a mistake toromanticize the newmass forms, as Benjaminseems to do in hismesmerizing essay.Adorno makes theopposite mistake ofromanticizing bourgeoistradition by denyinghumanity to thealternative. The twothinkers are themselvestorn halves of a missingpicture. One collateralmisfortune of Benjaminsearly death is that itended one of the richestintellectual conversationsof the twentieth century.

f Adorno were tolook upon thecultural landscape of

the twenty-first century,he might take grimsatisfaction in seeing hisfondest fears realized.The pop hegemony is allbut complete, itssuperstars dominatingthe media and wieldingthe economic might of

tycoons. They live fulltime in the unreal realmof the mega-rich, yetthey hide behind a folksyfaade, wolfing downpizza at the Oscars andcheering sports teamsfrom V.I.P. boxes.Meanwhile, traditionalbourgeois genres arekicked to the margins,their demographicsundesirable, their lifestyles uncool, theirformal intricacies illsuited to thetransmission networks ofthe digital age. Opera,dance, poetry, and theliterary novel are stillcalled litist, despite thefact that the worlds realpower has little use forthem. The old hierarchyof high and low hasbecome a sham: pop isthe ruling party.

The Internet threatensfinal confirmation ofAdorno andHorkheimers dictum

that the culture industryallows the freedom tochoose what is always thesame. Champions ofonline life promised autopia of infiniteavailability: a long tailof perpetually in-stockproducts would reviveinterest in non-mainstream culture. Oneneed not have read AstraTaylor and other criticsto sense that this utopiahas been slow in arriving.Culture appears moremonolithic than ever,with a few giganticcorporationsGoogle,Apple, Facebook,Amazonpresiding overunprecedentedmonopolies. Internetdiscourse has becometighter, more coercive.Search engines guide youaway from peculiarwords. (Did youmean . . . ?) Headlineshave an authoritarianbark (This Map ofPlanes in the Air Right

Now Will Blow YourMind). Most Readlists at the top of Websites imply that youshould read the samestories everyone else isreading. Technologyconspires with populismto create an ideologicallyvacant dictatorship oflikes.

This, at least, is thedrastic view. Benjaminsheirs have suggested howmessages of dissent canemanate from the heartof the culture industry,particularly in givingvoice to oppressed ormarginalized groups. Anynarrative of culturalregression must confrontevidence of socialadvance: the position ofJews, women, gay men,and people of color is agreat deal more secure intodays neo-liberaldemocracies than it wasin the old bourgeoisEurope. (The Frankfurt

Schools indifference torace and gender is aconspicuous flaw.) Thelate Jamaican-bornBritish scholar StuartHall, a pioneer of culturalstudies, presented adouble-sided picture ofyouth pop, defining it, inan essay co-written withPaddy Whannel, as acontradictory mixture ofthe authentic and themanufactured. In thesame vein, the NPR popcritic Ann Powers wrotelast month aboutlistening to Nico &Vinzs slickly soulful hitAm I Wrong in thewake of the unrest inFerguson, Missouri, andcatching the songsundercurrents of unease.Pop is all aboutcommodification: thesoft center of whatadapts, Powers writes.But sometimes, whenhistory collides with it, asimple song gainsdimension.

One way or another, theFrankfurt School modeof criticismits skepticalardor, its relentlessscouring of mundanesurfaceshas spread far.When online recappersexpend thousands ofwords debating thedepiction of rape onGame of Thrones, orwhen writers publishhistories of sneakers or ofthe office cubicle, theyshow intense awarenessof mass cultures abilityto shape society. And insome cases the analysistakes a recognizablydialectical turn, as in HuaHsus 2011 essay, forGrantland, on KanyeWest and Jay-Zs albumWatch the Throne. Adispassionate hip-hopfan, Hua Hsu pondersthe spectacle of twoleading rappers makingan album againstausterity, in which theymark their ascension to aworld of MoMA and

Rothko, Larry Gagosian,and luxury hotels acrossthree continents, and atthe same time forfeit ahip-hop tradition offantasy and protest.Citing the Kanye trackPowerGrab acamera, shoot a viral /Take the power in yourown handsHsu writes,This version of power isentrancingit explainsan entire generation. Butit also confuses ubiquityfor importance, thefamiliarity of a celebritysface for true authority.There is no telling howAdorno and Benjaminmight have negotiatedsuch contemporarylabyrinths. Perhaps, on apeaceful day, they wouldhave accepted thecompromise devised byFredric Jameson, who haswritten that the culturalevolution of latecapitalism can be

understood dialectically,as catastrophe andprogress all together.

These implacable voicesshould stay active in ourminds. Their dialectic ofdoubt prods us to pursueconnections betweenwhat troubles us andwhat distracts us, to seethe riven world behindthe seamless screen.There is no documentof civilization which isnot at the same time adocument of barbarism:Benjamins great formula,as forceful as a Klieglight, should be fixed assteadily on pop culture,the ritual apparatus ofAmerican capitalism, asit has been on the artworks of the Europeanbourgeoisie. Adornoasked for only so much.Above all, these figurespresent a model forthinking differently, andnot in the glib sensetouted by Steve Jobs. As

Alex Ross has been contributing toThe New Yorker since 1993, and hebecame the magazines music criticin 1996.

the homogenization ofculture proceeds apace, asthe technology ofsurveillance hovers at theborders of our brains,such spaces are becomingrarer and more confined.I am haunted by asentence from VirginiaWoolf s The Waves:One cannot live outsidethe machine for moreperhaps than half anhour.