Monday, September 15, 2003

from Adorno's Minima Moralia (1944) via Ezra Mark and Daniel Comiskey:

OUT OF THE FIRING LINE. — Reports of air attacks are seldom without the names of the firms which produced the planes: Focke-Wulff, Heinkel, Lancaster feature where once the talk was of cuirassiers, lancers and
hussars. The mechanism for reproducing life, for dominating and for destroying it, are exactly the same, and accordingly industry, state and advertising are amalgamated. The old exaggeration of skeptical Liberals, that war was a business, has come true: state power has shed even the appearance of independence from particular interests in profit; always in
their service really, it now also places itself there ideologically. Every laudatory mention of the chief contractor in the destruction of cities,
helps earn it the good name that will secure it the best commissions in their rebuilding.
[...]

The total obliteration of war by information,commentaries, with camera-men
in the first tanks and war reporters dying heroic deaths, the mish-mash of enlightened manipulation of public opinion and oblivious activity: all this
is another expression for the withering of experience, the vacuum between men and their fate, in which their real fate lies. It is as if the reified,
hardened plaster-cast of events takes the place of the events themselves. Men are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no
spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen.