• Commodification: Process of turning an item into something to be sold on a market
• Culture industry: refers to the mass production and standardization of cultural products like music, film, and television, which they argued serves to manipulate and control audiences within capitalist societies
• Standardization: “maintains that, in capitalist society, popular culture (and, by extension, popular music) is standardized, using the same formula to appeal to the masses 
• Passive listening: background-listening, headache-inducing, not following whats going on in the sounds
• Pseudoindividualization: Illusion of choice pushed by standardized culture
• Avant-Garde: New and experimental ideas within culture (art, music, it) which mixes past trends
• Atomization: Individuals are isolated from eachother and separated from meaningful societal structures (M-The loneliness epidemic for example)
• Reification : treating something non-material as a material object. (I.e Music as a product to be sold on the market)
• Conformism/conventionality Reference to the norms and the act of following those norms

• Lack of reflection, based off from general tastes
• Commercialization
• Rigid structured, repetitive
• Aversion to anything different (=”Country music is shit” polarization "The way you listen to music is wrong"-whining)
• Must conform (=Eurovision music)
• “High art” (classical music etc) lost resonance with public, but popular music filled up the gap because of its simplicity being more connected to the audiences “emotional truth” (= Tiktok, people listen only for a high, skipping parts). High art demands effort, but people dont have time for that effort (connected to cultural neoliberalism, the feeling that we need to work and do something all the time)…
• Popular music still gets hits because of emotional resonance
• passive listening (shallowness bypassing intellectual scrutiny to emotionally manipulate)
• Passivity + Pacified = People feel satiated and are numbed by the music so that they wont revolt.
• DULL EUPHORIA (intense feelings of happiness is dulled)
• The point with the music is that it makes you freeze up and feel the fun
• Music pacifies listeners and reinforces dominant social order
• Music is flattened ( to background noise for example)
• adorno not liking how music has formulas (mirroring capitalist mass production)
• <mark>Repetition = Submission: Hit songs train listeners to desire familiarity, mirroring how capitalism demands conformity</mark>
• Quality transformation: Music becomes part of everyday life rather than exceptional experience
• His insight that music, the art of music, strikes [public opinion] as a kind of natural datum rather than a historical, constructed phenomenon.
• train "active imagination" to mass audience to become a "good listener" /
• Corporate manufacturing and manufactured stardom (other ppl choose what you can hear, they push the music in your face)
• The preference of the listeners are manipulated by the system
• Standardization
• Ad nauseam
• Blurred between art and mass production
• Atomized individuals (socially isolated/disconnected/meaningful community ties lack!)
• Hits focus a single point of channeling emotions to the listener or to <mark> fulfill the longing for emotions</mark>. (tiktok!)

• →made to apply for "workers"

  →social control, exploitation of vulnerabilities for profit

  →Bowing to a ritual of socialization

  • Pseudoindividualization (jazz fakes improvisation, Adorno existed before the high tides of jazz).
  • The distribution of “weak stuff” (music and more) that weakens the ideas and cultural impulses that spread through society (=less bookstores today more arcades, less academic bookstores but more grocery stores and junk food)

• Simultaneously defending high culture against commodification while critiquing the institutions meant to preserve it, revealing the contradictions inherent in art's position within capitalist society.
• Subversive music should be structurally different and "weird" (like Schoenberg's atonality) because it forces the listener into discomfort
• When anything SUBVERSIVE enters the mainstream it loses its political meaning "Disruptive power". For example Punk and psychedelic rock that lost its innovative charm when it became popular/mainstream (Search about the death of Kurt Cobain for more knowledge around this). Imagine a song about why we should help dying children, but the song has a catchy melody, nice chorus and a buildup. Many won't notice the meaning and its political purpose. I think Adorno meant that any subversive music shouldn't play within the rules of the government it ought to be disobedient against.
• Beethoven's use of dissonance or Schoenberg's atonality are not just aesthetic choices but social acts that reveal the alienation and contradictions of modernity (Also see Weber's serialism)
• Just the subjective intentions of the composer ain't good enough because it is still through the lens of the culture industry (For instance, a protest song with a radical message but a conventional, catchy melody might fail to provoke critical thought because its form aligns with the very structures it claims to oppose)

• →Theres some holes in this argument though. The song Strange Fruit about racism and the horrors of lynching in America. It seems like the song contributed by creating social changes.The lyric is what created the social change even though the song is listenable.

  • Subversive music pushes a truth that cracks open ideology (Popular music makes ideology easy to digest, but critical music is tough to digest)
  • music's autonomy and social content are inseparable: (=Soviet permisfans, fascistic machinery-instruments)
  • "Good music" is supposed to challenge past structures (=Beethoven's Ninth symphony)

• →But vulnerable to ideological structures (Nirvana, ode to joy is an national anthem)

  • Music should critique society through its form not by its messaging
  • = Adorno might see music as a form of "meditation" or "language" which gives room to critique society (punk, goth, old rock…)
    • Protest songs are lost to commercialization

• Music taste is a result from "mechanical mass production"
• Musics Ideological control (=Adorno's time things were not as freely-moving as now, but I wonder what exactly is the ideology is today?)
• Individualism as pre-packaged conformity (=The free marketplace and the plethora of options makes us believe that we have the freedom to choose, but we dont. The freedom is fake)
• People feel like they need to flee boredom
• Our awareness is being sabotaged by the music we listen to. What else can sabotage our awareness? What does it even mean to have ones awareness sabotaged?
• We are atomized and isolated from everyone else. There is a culture of loneliness that praise this (Do you see this irl?)

• Abasement→degradation of consciousness (internalized ideal)
• Music as distraction: prevents people from reflecting on themselves and their world!
• Sabotage of awareness
• People really no longer feel alive and they blame "time" for that. Music makes them dream away their present reality is assuring.
• Entertainment introduces a narrow ideal which narrows down the individual's sense of possibility (=You feel like that the only thing to life is work, fuck, and do substances which is like 99% of song nowadays…)
• One feels as if they're participating in the music (You imagine yourself to be in the center of all attention) Takes you away. (=Ego tripping/centering, this is close to Charles Taylor concern in his book the ethics of authenticity where the individual is conditioned to only care about themself without engaging with anything "higher" than them. Music facilitates this)
• Music today trains the unconscious mind for unconditioned reflexes (follows society's ideological trend)

• To be able to listen fully means to have a developed consciousness
• Adorno argues that true intellectual/spiritual richness comes with deeply engaging with the EXTERNAL REALITY!
• = Adorno pro meant that art needs a purpose- art for art itself gives a false sense of truth/freedom. (think about the music created by large companies- what is the arts purpose? To satiate.)

• Noble superficiality ( Society fakes freshness/newness and most likely steals the ideas from the past and reuse them) Its basically Standardisation in disguise ?

• → This is a reason for why Adorno disliked jazz because to him it seemed like jazz tried to fake being new and fresh with its inprov, but instead played within standarlized licks that were reused and etc etc.

  • NOSTALGIA SONGS (fisher)
  • New music tries (This was written in Adornos time) to show quick innovativeness, but is same-y and slow (at least according to Adorno)
  • The use of the wrongly defined word "authenticity" trough music centers the individual and reinforces egocentric thought instead of encouraging engagement with the world (Charles Taylor, The ethics of authenticity).

• " The hits not only appeal to a "lonely crowd" of the atomized; they reckon with the immature, with those who cannot express their emotions and experiences, who either never had the power of expression or were crippled by cultural taboos. To people harnessed between their jobs and the reproduction of their working energies, the hits are purveyors of an ersatz for feelings which their contemporaneously revised ego ideal tells them they should have" (=Music making pockets of "fake" feelings where atomized individuals in need of expression and self-undertanding listen to in order to "self medicate"/ emotionally immature: I am bullied at school so i listen to music that makes me feel like i am the best person ever. Now the songs i listen to is talking about violence, i believe i should be experiencing the same feelings that are sung. This reinforces and satisfies immaturity. We lack the time and emotional capacity for genuine feelings. Listening to music makes me feel deep and smart.) 
• " The function of music is ideological not only because it hoodwinks people with an irrationality that allegedly has no power over the discipline of their existence. It is ideological also because it makes that irrationality resemble the models of rationalized labor. What people hope to escape from will not let them go. Their free time is spent dozing, merely reproducing their working energies ; it is a time overshadowed by that reproduction. The consumed music indicates that there is no exit from the total immanence of society." (= Today music about hustling and working ((neffex ex)) musics "irratiolality" decieves. Your leisure activity is structured the same way as your labour. Illusion of freedom.) 
• " Ideology is replaced by instructions for behaviour. (...). It (music) trains the unconscious for conditioned reflexes. We hear a great deal of talk about the skepticism of the young and about their (=scepticism?) of ideologies. These categories surely miss the mark insofar as they "confuse the hardboiled disillusionment of countless individuals with an undiminished awareness of the thing itself. " (=The sadness of society dosent come from a deep undertsanding of whats going on and why. The understanding is too shallow. People can feel critical trowards society, but still dont undertand/know what it affecs.
• " The very man whom all new music is not gray like cats in the night will eventually, on grounds of identification with the matter, reject what is inadequate to its idea and therefore to his own." (= DIRECT REFERENCE TO FRIEDRICH SCHELLING! Schelling critizised Hege and other idealists that their philosophy, by trying to expslain everything trough a single, abstract principle, failed to differentiate between different things. Hence the quote "-to land in the night in which all cows are black.")
• " the listener who remembers a hit song will turn into the song's ideal subject, into the person for whom the song ideally speaks"
• " The subtly habit-forming effect contrasts oddly with the crudeness of the stimuli themselves. In that sense pop music is ideology,"
• " by the type of hits which in America are classified as "nostalgia songs." They fake a longing for past, irrevocably lost experiences, dedicated to all those consumers who fancy that in memories of a fictitious past they will gain the life denied them."
• " Today, however, the relation to reality is no more seriously severed by the function of hearing than by the artificial daydreams of the optical culture industry."

=bureaucratic elements to music and hyperrational capitalism behind a human enjoyment - Going back to Marx Weber's theory about rationalization process where we are in a demystified, mechanical and effectivized world, but long for the fantasy and the mysterious- capitalism uses this to its advantage

=I think the problem here i not that we are subjected to a lot of stuff we didnt ask for, but that for some people (a lot, i suppose) tend to stay in an stagnated position where they only consume/listen around their pre-chosen circle without going outside of it and growing as a person. We start with what is chosen for us, and we end with what is still chosen for us. We are subjected to a lot of stuff we didnt ask for and we dont know how to break free.

To try to say it a bit more my-way; I think that there is less and less adventuring towards discovering and uncovering new mystical truths outside of any kind of culture. Due to the digitized world and pressure-driven neoliberalist ideology we feel a huge pressure to do things so we always act like hurried nuggets, forgetting the screeching alarm in the background and the heavy machinery which deafens our capability to think. Our minds are extremely formable and it is formed by all its surroundings. Therefore you ought to be very careful and aware of what you chose to listen to and how you want to be affected by everything around you...

It seems like the spirit of adventure and discovery is getting chocked to death. Realive it by expanding and strengthen your self towards the world like the roots of a tree. The more roots you have the stronger you are.

It was pretty tough reading this. There is probably a lot of stuff i unknowingly skipped trough because he style he write in is so cryptic-. I also read a couple articles about this.

- The erosion of individual style and mergning with the collective
- Ritiuals are boring for the participants/observers whose minds arent fully absorbed by them. They are boring on purpose.
- When its so repetitive, so predictable, so boring- it forces us to start daydreaming.
- The dictators Hitler and Stalin wanted mindless obedience from the masses. They believed they could instill this with excessive repetition of simplicity in order to bypass reason
- Repetition deafens the capacity to think. (Similar to Adorno)
- Reaction to boredom: apathy and aggression
- It sits and stirs inside your mind without you fully knowing it. It sits inside your mind and sometimes surfaces (children at school found themselves drawing pictures of Stalin on their desks)
- Some case studies of composers.

- The scrolling on social media when youre bored is unhealthy for your mind. It sticks on to your concious and eats away your thoughts. id like to find a clearer way to understand this, though.
- I saw a video once where the guy in it said that boredom was dangerous. BOREDOM IN ITSELF ISNT DANGEROUS ITS HUMAN. There is a wide difference between doing somethig that makes you bored versus being bored and trying to do something versus being bored and chosing to sit with it.
- I wonder if people have the personal problem of trying to do "productive stuff" in order to avoid their boredom and to satisfy their need of being "someone" trough the eyes of society. I think I still kinda do this where I feel like i have to be "productive" and i rummage trough just "doing stuff", and ending up spending a lot of time on something "small". This is very similar to the conclusion of the book "Four thousand weeks" by Oliver Burkman: We feel suffocated by our freedom to choose so much we feel guilty about having to redject something in order to do anything else. Also Chesterton mentions that freedom means having limitations (or smth) in his book Orthodoxy).
- BRO IF YOU FEEL LIKE YOU ARE SO FUCKING BORED BY THE TEDIUM OF CONTEMPORARY LIFE YOU HAVE TO TEAR YOURSELF AWAY FROM IT AND CREATE YOUR OWN SPACE WITH THE DEPTHS OF CULTIVATING DEEP LOVE AND ADMIRATION WITH THE WORLD. DO THIS ALONE AND FEEL TROUGH THIS PROCESS SLOWLY BECAUSE IN ORDER TO FEEL ANYTHING REWARDING YOU HAVE TO PUT YOUR FEELING AND ATTENTION AND TIME INTO IT. READ A DIFFICULT LITERATURE BOOK, WATCH THREE LONG MOVIES THAT ARE NON-MAINSTREAM, STARE AT AND ADMIRE AN ARCHITECTURAL STRUCTURE. SAVOUR THE PRESENT MOMENT.

• The cultural assumption that devaluates the body, “weakness”, tenderness, softness, emotion (values connected to femininity). And Early in western culture to subordinate/sacrifice the feminine flesh. The anorexic feels ashamed of her body-her self, that dosent fit in to society. She wants acceptance, to fit in.
• Anorexics are cartesian: male-mind female-body. It is masculinity that is looked at as the good and only. Anorexics reject their feminity.
• So-called “male philosophy”:  Plato, Descartes, Hegel: Devalues feminity ( platos devaluation of women, Hegels master and slave dialectic and descartes dualism)
• “Philosophical Anorexics”:  Poet Glück and the Irish poet Eavan Boland: their women are obsessed with their bodies and food
• Females start cutting or denying parts of femininity in order to “give space” for the other in relationships. The female seen as too much so she cuts herself away and makes herself smaller.
• The achievement of a “self” is a rejection of self: (=So far i think of the culture of discipline, “less is more”, female is seen as the parent and as the person that sacrifices herself for something. Therefore the new culture of women being dependent “themselves” etc..)
• Culture romanticizing/showing some narrow ideal at the cost of the female body
• The anorexic blames Eve for the biblical fall of Adam and Eve. The females fault, female as fault. A part of herself as fault.
• Male dominated society structure- more male values appreciated. Anorexics torwards these male values: Controll, power, discipline. (=The authour was a competitive runner in her teens and i read some of her other book about it, direct source)
• Anorexia strips away her femininity (= Anorexia takes the mind and the body, if you didt figure it out the less weight a women has the less her “feminine” aspects are visible)
• Culture makes the female believe that the feminine is lack. (=The feminine seen as weak and pathethic, Most of the old stuff we consumed as kids were trough the POV a guy, making us think that is “neutral”
• The starvation part was “chosen”, it isnt something willed on them by culture. So why? The anorexic has a “male mind”, the body is not the self. Thinking being female is an unjust disadvantage. Cartesian divide between body and mind. Seeking the control and  forced burning
• Hunger pain turned into hunger strike. (=refusal)
• Hatred of body- hatred of self
• Need for males to fill the emptiness/lack
• Parallel to modernism: Anorexic wanting to reject herself in order to transcend to something “higher”
• Males treading females as just a body and nothing more (= there was a good example of a professor the author had but idc to try to find it again lel) And the female responding to this as just a body. (= They are really a victim even if they initiated it either way because of the structures of society. See quote. )

• One about a daughters likeness with the father and the mothers self negation. The daughters identification with the father leads her to be an anorexic in training, because she looks different. She dosent want to be like her mother.
• Nexst part of the same poem its about the grandmother repressing herself for the grandfather in marrage: “This is what marrage is”
• By trying to align herself with the father- the little girl gets into the same position as her mother and grandmother- powerlessness.

• "Yes, I am an evil body. Yes, I am a witch. Because I am this, I will destroy myself, this part of myself. I will become something else. I will become male, or at least not-female.""

  "The speaker is an Eve who has accepted the male definition of herself as inherently evil, desiring, fleshly, and thereby responsible for the Fall and death of the human race. This punitive Eve longs to redeem herself through the loss of sexual difference and of the body that has caused all the problems in the first place. In a reverse parody of the psychoanalytic account of male self-differentiation from, and womb-longing for, his mother, here Eve wants to rejoin Adam, to literally become him again, to fit back into the rib from which she has ostensibly come, a fit accomplished by the "burning" of her body that she performs in the earlier stanzas of the poem.

  "he lack of food leads to the lack of body, which leads to the lack of sin, which leads to a male subject position, or least to that prelapsarian state of gender identity before sexual difference—before the inevitable split and rejection when "us" is not necessarily different from "them," when the boys will still play with us at recess."

• "the anorexic self-image is a black hole, a cavernous nothingness; a disruption of the sense of linear time, so that the present becomes a synecdoche for past and future and all of lived experience; an experience of the mind and body as radically split, with the mind struggling to control the body; an increasing isolation, a sense of superiority to and lack of emotional contact with others; a complete suppression of sexuality, as well as loss of secondary sexual characteristics; and a marked identification with the masculine and simultaneous rejection of the feminine, along with a paradoxical attempt to accede to beauty standards of thinness."

  "The lack of food leads to the lack of body, which leads to the lack of sin, which leads to a male subject position, or least to that prelapsarian state of gender identity before sexual difference—before the inevitable split and rejection when "us" is not necessarily different from "them," when the boys will still play with us at recess"

  "Certain female children dedicate themselves to hunger, that is, to starving away their flesh, in an attempt to thwart the death with which the cultural narrative has equated them."

  "She participates in a fetishistic structure in that her denial of her body that results in a more "masculine" body becomes a fetish intended to cover what she perceives as lack, her female body. She makes herself indeterminately gendered. The anorexic body functions as a disavowal of gender or as a postponement of a choice between masculine and feminine". (= There are typical "ana" aesthethics that are seen as child-like. Ive heard people regress into their childhood interests when their disorder gets bad)

  "Self-starvation is a process anorexics have decided for themselves, a subject position they have chosen , paradoxically, as a means of self-definition. The starved body becomes their identity, their identity  is the process of self-cancellation. This is not something willed upon them by culture—everyone around them becomes united in an attempt to facilitate a "cure." Still, there is something strange in these torturous twists. If anorexia is a choice, why do so many women choose it? (…) For anorexics the body is experienced as entirely distinct, as "other"; the body is not the self. The body is gendered female, while the mind that attempts to control it is gendered male.[60] Bruch writes in The Golden Cage that"

  "many [anorexics] experience themselves and their bodies as separate entities, and it is the mind's task to control the unruly and despised body. Others speak of feeling divided, as being a split person or two people. . . . when they define this separate aspect, this different person seems always to be a male. . . . They had felt throughout their lives that being a female was an unjust disadvantage, and they dreamed of doing well in areas considered more respected and worthwhile because they were "masculine." Their overslim appearance, their remarkable athletic performances, with perseverance to the point of exhaustion, give them the proud conviction of being as good [as men]"

  "It is, I argue, crucial to reread modernism when we are trying to understand anorexia, because it is in modernism we find the kind of truth claim that may be even more influential than the dominant media images and beauty ideals for women that are so often said to "cause" the disease.(…) The individualism of the modernist artist or artist figure sets a paradigm for the anorexic, who wants beyond all things to be different, to stand out as superior. The claim to superiority and truth within modernism most often involves the renunciation of the feminine, just as the anorexic excises the outward sign of her femininity in her quest for distinction."

  "Indisputable ontological "truths" to which only the privileged, enlightened, masculine subject has access. Anorexia stands as the internalization of these "truths"—what the anorexic thinks will gain her membership to the club. Any analysis of our culture today that includes eating disorders like anorexia as part of its inquiry needs to look to modernist literature to understand the mystic writing pad, the palimpsest that underlies those disorders."

  "I assumed to a certain extent that there was something essentially wrong with me, something tainted or polluted, because I was defined as body, as sex. It was an impossible circle: I got attention for sexual attractiveness, and this made me then interact accordingly. But that same attractiveness was used to discount me as a person, and it was the recognition of my value as a person—of which I was uncertain—that I was after in the first place. Yet, because I had willingly put myself in that position, I also felt to a certain extent that there was something fatally flawed within me. If I was treated as body, not being, there must be something in me that deserved it, that solicited this response."

  "he treated me as body, nonagent, nonbeing."

  "if he had been treating me like a sexual object, well, I had presented myself that way."

  "I willingly participated in this dynamic, since, to the naive and immature woman, it seems to offer a kind of power that masks the dehumanization actually taking place(…) From the perspective of one set of assumptions about the world—the business-as-usual perspective that says, "Boys will be boys," and "If women ask for it, what's the harm"—my experience with this professor wasn't harassment at all. From the perspective of some versions of feminist theory, I had constructed myself according to the dictates of a system that made me a willing participant in my own harassment.(…) I felt that I had missing limbs, these were limbs I had at least partially amputated myself. I was emotionally frozen and did not regain a sense of feeling until I articulated my experience."

  "In The Golden Cage , Bruch reports that for many of her anorexic patients, the fathers treated the anorexics "intellectually as sons; [one] was particularly proud that [his daughters] all knew how to throw a ball 'correctly' (namely, like a boy).... It is significant that the fathers value their daughters for their intellectual brilliance and athletic achievements [and] rarely if ever do they pay attention to their appearance as they grow into womanhood, though they will criticize them for becoming plump" (26). Taking the cue from Daddy and the world defined as his tradition, the anorexic identifies with those aspects of herself that are termed "masculine" and therefore valued. She struggles against those aspects of herself designated "feminine" in a struggle that becomes articulated in bodily terms. Yet, in her emptiness, in her desire to please and to succeed at pleasing, she struggles to attain ideal physical femininity, even as she strives to cancel it out. Her thin body is her masculine achievement that, until her anorexic artistry goes too far, is the embodiment of cultural standards of female beauty."