When Habermas was first writing about the public sphere he used the ideal types of mass and public to define the degree of "publicness" of an opinion. I thought it might be useful to pursue the same path to define an aesthetic public sphere. That is why I am - among other things - reading Freud's mass psychology and ego analysis. In it Freud notes that the libidinous binding force of the mass is unrealizable or zielgehemmt - the pleasure derived is not from fulfillment but from deferment. It is this element that makes the bond permanent: the mass does not satisfy its victims, for if it did, it would cease to exist. It does not disappoint them, for if it did, it would cease to exist. Rather it promises and what it promises is another promise. This is an interesting vantage point to approach the culture industry from since it is this infernal characteristic that makes up for its noxious character: the products of the culture industry are not even vulgar, they do not even satisfy the most base and primitive desires, the way folk culture used to. Rather they induce a perpetual frustration. This is the point a lot of misunderstanding of Adorno originates from: people charge him with elitism since he supposedly favoured elite over popular culture. Far from this Adorno and Horkheimer claimed in Dialectics of enlightenment that the problem of the culture industry is that it is neither high culture that marks the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, nor is it popular culture of those excluded from elite culture, it is imposed on the masses by elites.
The following video by Britney Spears is a good case in point:
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