Can you enjoy pop music/culture and still love Adorno?

I won't rephrase the argument now, since I don't have the source to hand. The relevance is that 'industry' is used not to designate a particular way of producing entertainment (industrial, organised rather than 'popular' meaning the spontaneous culture of the people (top-down not bottom-up)) but to prevent an appeal to natural or spontaneous culture as somehow intrinsically better. Remember the context is fascism as a mass movement. There is no choice between the culture industry and another type of culture, just as for all thinkers in the Hegelian tradition, there is a choice between the world of second nature and some 'real world'.

"In our drafts we spoke of 'mass culture'. We replaced that expression with 'culture industry' in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art."

just as for all thinkers in the Hegelian tradition, there is a choice between the world of second nature and some 'real world'.

Sorry: clearly that should read 'no choice'!!!

because the idea of nature is itself historical, nature as we tend to think of it cannot exist.

"No less delusive is the question about nature as the absolute first, as the downright immediate compared with its mediations. [...] it would be up to thought to see all nature, and whatever would install itself as such, as history, and all history as nature"

ie. history (social, mediate, changing) is nature; everything apparently 'natural' is historical (social, mediate, changing). This must be a dialectical formulation or we fall back into an ossified universal (natural) law of the type 'everything changes' or 'there is no immediate (natural) world'. (So, yes, my first way of putting this was undialectical.)

I guess the relevance to the culture industry argument would be that there is nothing natural about our likes and dislikes (historical); but that there is no natural like or dislike against which to compare it. The idea of spontaneous and natural appreciation of what is in fact a manufactured entertainment product is the ideological frosting on the cultural cup-cake.

"ie. history (social, mediate, changing) is nature; everything apparently 'natural' is historical (social, mediate, changing). This must be a dialectical formulation or we fall back into an ossified universal (natural) law of the type 'everything changes' or 'there is no immediate (natural) world'. (So, yes, my first way of putting this was undialectical.)"

I am a good deal keener on this formulation. But I think your reservations are the best bit. We should indeed see nature and history as interdependent and not wholly separate; but we had better not collapse the concepts of nature and history together, because it's clear that both of them, as they stand, do a useful work of definition that would be lost if we ran them together.

That is, yes, human experiences of nature are certainly (radically?) historical; indeed it can be argued that nature itself is historical, even beyond human existence ('natural history') (and I think that's what you are arguing?). But we should still reserve a conceptual space for Nature which is different from the one we reserve for History. (As for History as Natural - well, yes, but this is really the claim that Everything is Natural - which is so true as to be relatively unhelpful. Right?)

pinefox, I love you

(alex when is your first book being published please)

He wants to be your father, the great Librarian. ask yourself why you give him the time of bleeding day. Don't seek another father, leave home. Allow neither opinion or belief into your brilliant mind, they will only let you down.

i am beginning to like adorno. WOWSER.

If TWA had written a book called 'The Meat Industry' I'd campaign for Ted Nugent as world president