Liitle notes

As I go through old books as part of my "book wrastlin'" project, I'm flipping through them for pages I bookmarked or otherwise noted somehow (usually with a little scrap of paper jammed into the spine). Here's one I found in David Held's Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas, in a chapter called "The Frankfurt School: critical theory and aesthetics:"

The desire for distraction reflects needs to escape from the responsibilities and drudgery of everyday life. The lack of meaning and control people experience registers accurately a truth about their lives—they are not masters of their own destiny. They are 'caught' within the present mode of production, with its rationalized and mechanized labour processes and all its hierarchies. The pattern of recurring crises in the mode of production, its continuous expansions, recessions and depressions, engenders strains, fears and anxieties about one's capacity to earn a living, etc. Capitalism creates conditions of dependence upon the powerful, who can give or withhold things greatly wanted. It also creates dependency needs. Situations continuously arise in which people cannot cope. They are often beset by ego weakness and narcissistic defenses which aid them to compensate for their feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. More often than not, these feelings are expressions of objective conditions in reality; that is a reality that is inadequate and quite inferior when measured against its promise [...] One can 'take flight' and escape into the world of entertainment. It offers fun, relaxation and relief from demands and effort. Temporarily, boredom can also be overcome without labour and concentration (both of which are necessary for the enjoyment of autonomous art.) Irrational susceptibilities and neurotic symptoms, ever present within most human beings, are open, as a consequence, to exploitation by the mass media. The 'natural' corollary of capitalist industrial production is the culture industry.

An equation from Allouche and Shallit's Automatic Sequences

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