Get Ready
Adorno and Horkheimer are not the type of writers who pick a simple metaphor and sit back and congratulate themselves on their creativity. The metaphorical imagery runs rampant throughout the text and the reader who is not on their toes, intellectually speaking, will soon be left behind in a world of meaningless literalism. Let’s make the first one easy:
“The disenchantment of the world means the extirpation of animism.”
Or, put another way: Disillusionment with society means the destruction of the belief in multiple deities.
Odysseus
Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey is given a prime spot on the book, basking in the limelight as the ultimate expression of myth. Odysseus himself is analyzed quite closely for the way in his goes about his adventures, with the result being multiple metaphorical images:
“All the adventures Odysseus sur- vives are dangerous temptations deflecting the self from the path of its logic. Again and again he gives way to them, experimenting like a novice incapable of earning—sometimes, indeed, out of foolish curiosity, like a mime insatiably trying out roles.”
Darkness
Darkness is the go-to metaphor of our time. Leave it to the authors of this text to plumb the depths of its possibilities in one of the most idiosyncratically creative expressions of darkness as metaphor out there among what is literally millions of examples in published literature today:
“the violent men who are always on hand when there is someone to be dispatched, the lynchers and clan members, the bruiser who steps in when someone answers back, the terrible figures to whom everyone is delivered up as soon as the protective hand of power is withdrawn from them, as soon as they lose wealth and position, all the werewolves lurking in the darkness of history and sustaining the fear without which there is no domination.”
Worshiping Paranoia
At the root of fascism is the cult of celebrity and at the root of the cult of celebrity is paranoia. The authors point out that is no mere accident that the most successful fascist leaders have also been the most paranoid because paranoia acts like a mirror of constant self-reflection and repetition, the keys to religious faith:
“It is as if the serpent which told the first humans `Ye shall be as gods’ had kept his promise in the paranoiac. He creates everything in his own image.”
The Culture Industry
The culture industry—movies, television, fiction in all guises—is primarily an agent intent on conforming the masses. It does this quite subtly in America to the point that even those who think they have it figured out are often victims without realizing it:
“Managers can be relied on; even the minor employee Dagwood, who lives in reality no less than in the comic strip, is reliable. But anyone who goes hungry and suffers from cold, especially if he once had good prospects, is a marked man. He is an outsider, and—with the occasional exception of the capital crime—to be an outsider is the gravest guilt. In films such a person is, at best, an eccentric, an object of maliciously indulgent humor”
