its own memory, forgetting that it is only there for others, it becomes a fetish, a self-
conscious and thereby relativized absolute. Such was the dream of Jugendstil beauty. But
art is also compelled to strive for pure self-immanence if it is not to become sacrificed to
fraudulence. The result is a quid pro quo. An activity which envisions as its subject a
liberated, emancipated humanity, possible only in a transformed society, appears in the
present state as an adaptation to a technology which has degenerated into an end in itself,
into a self-purpose. Such an apotheosis of objectification is the irreconcilable opponent of
art. The result, moreover, is not mere appearance. The more consistently both
autonomous and so-called applied art reject their own magical and mythical origins and
follow their own formal laws, the greater the danger of such an adaptation becomes. Art
possesses no sure means to counter such a danger. Thorstein Veblen’s aporia is thus
repeated: before 1900, he demanded that men think purely technologically, causally,
mechanistically in order to overcome the living deceit of their world of images. He
thereby sanctioned the objective categories of that economy which he criticized; in a free
state, men would no longer be subservient to a technology which, in fact, existed only for
them; it would be there to serve them. However, in the present epoch men have been
absorbed into technology and have left only their empty shells behind, as if they had
passed into it their better half. Their own consciousness has been objectified in the face of
technology, as if objective technology had in some sense the right to criticize
consciousness. Technology is there for men: this is a plausible proposition, but it has
been degraded to the vulgar ideology of regressionism. This is evident in the fact that one
need only invoke it to be rewarded from all sides with enthusiastic understanding. The
whole situation is somehow false; nothing in it can smooth over the contradiction. On the
one hand, an imagined utopia, free from the binding purposes of the existing order, would
become powerless, a detached ornament, since it must take its elements and structure
from that very order. On the other, any attempt to ban the utopian factor, like a
prohibition of images, immediately falls victim to the spell of the prevailing order.
The concern of functionalism is a subordination to usefulness. What is not useful is
assailed without question because developments in the arts have brought its inherent
aesthetic insufficiency into the open. The merely useful, however, is interwoven with
relationships of guilt, the means to the devastation of the world, a hopelessness which
denies all but deceptive consolations to mankind. But even if this contradiction can never
be ultimately eliminated, one must take a first step in trying to grasp it; in bourgeois
society, usefulness has its own dialectic. The useful object would be the highest
achievement, an anthropomorphized ‘thing’, the reconciliation with objects which are no
longer closed off from humanity and which no longer suffer humiliation at the hands of
men. Childhood perception of technical things promises such a state; they appear as
images of a near and helpful spirit, cleansed of profit motivation. Such a conception was
not unfamiliar to the theorists of social utopias. It provides a pleasant refuge from true
development, and allows a vision of useful things which have lost their coldness.
Mankind would no longer suffer from the ‘thingly’ character of the world,^16 and likewise
‘things’ would come into their own. Once redeemed from their own ‘thingliness’, ‘things’
would find their purpose. But in present society all usefulness is displaced, bewitched.
Society deceives us when it says that it allows things to appear as if they are there by
mankind’s will. In fact, they are produced for profit’s sake; they satisfy human needs
only incidentally. They call forth new needs and maintain them according to the profit
Theodor W.Adorno 15