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"I repeat," he said, raising a finger lance, while the wineglass continued to tremble in his other hand, "I repeat, that it is our duty, our religious duty to feel. Our feeling, you see, is our manly vigor, which awakens life. Life slumbers. It wants to be awakened, roused to drunk nuptials with divine feeling. Because feeling, young man, is divine. Man himself is divine in that he feels. He is the very feeling of God. God created him in order to feel through him. Man is nothing more than the organ by which God consummates His marriage with awakened and intoxicated life. And if man fails to feel, it is an eruption of divine disgrace, it is the defeat of God's manly vigor, a cosmic catastrphe, a horror that never leave the mind."

-- Mann, Magic Mountain

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But the world of substances, Peeperkorn said --[...] the world of substances was such that they all concealed both life and death simultaneously, all were both therapeutic and poisonous. Pharmacology and toxicology were one and the same thing -- we were healed by poisons, and a substance considered an agent of life could, under certain circumstances, in a single convulsion kill within seconds.

-- Mann, Magic Mountain

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-- Leonid Pasternak, Tolstoy and The Night Before the Exam

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Progress, degradation, survival, revival, modification, are all modes of the connexion that binds together the complex network of civilization. It needs but a glance into the trivial details of our own daily life to set us thinking how far we are really its originators, and how far but the transmitters and modifiers of the results of long past ages. Looking round the rooms we live in, we may try here to see how far he who only knows his own time can be capable of rightly comprehending even that. Here is the honeysuckle of Assyria, there the fleur-de-lis of Anjou, a cornice with a Greek border runs round the ceiling, the style of Louis IXV and its parent the Renaissance share the looking glass between them. Transformed, shifted, or mutilated, such elements of art still carry their history plainly stamped on them; and if the history yet farther behind is less easy to read, we are not to say that because we cannot clearly discern it there is there is no history there.

-- Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture

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"Freud made a distinction between hypnosis and mass psychology by defining the former as taking place between two people only. However, the leaders' appropriation of mass psychology, the streamlining of their technique, has enabled them to collectivize the hypnotic spell. The Nazi battle cry of 'Germany awake' hides its very opposite. The collectivization and institutionalization of the spell, on the other hand, have made the transference more and more indirect and precarious so that the aspect of performance, the 'phoniness' of enthusiastic identification and of all the traditional dynamics of mass psychology, have been tremendously increased. This increase may well terminate in sudden awareness of the untruth of the spell, and eventually in its collapse. Socialized hypnosis breeds within itself the forces which will do away with the spook of regression through remote control, and in the end awaken those who keep their eyes shut though they are no longer asleep."

-- Adorno, Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda

It's an interesting piece knowing how critical Adorno was of Kracauer's writings on fascist propaganda, which he derides in pretty shocking terms as stupid and mechanical. What he means by that seems to be that his former friend and mentor's thought lacks what is both the most novel and the most mechanical part of Adorno's own essay, which is otherwise just a tendentious summary of Freud's book and its Kracauer-like application to the past decades of Nazi propaganda. This is his argument that the regression at the core of Freud's theory of the mass must be situated in the historical moment of 20th-century Enlightenment, such that it represents only phony regression or theatrical reversion to the primal horde. It's also what leads him to argue that the modern subjects of fascism who submitted to a pseudo-archaic spell will "in the end" awaken themselves.

The charitable reading of this is that it's a historically specific and dialectical account of fascist mass psychology in a way that Freud's theory is not; the less charitable reading -- and Adorno seems rarely to have read any of his contemporaries charitably -- is simply that Adorno's thought-machine has one more production stage than Kracauer's thought-machine, the "dialectilizer." Was there any evidence of such an internally-generated "awakening" in any fascist regime? Isn't the proclamation that there was or would be itself evidence of a kind of "remote control" thinking, derived from a pretty tendentious philosophy of history?

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An ideology is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the 'idea' is applied; the result of this application is not a body of statements about something that is, but the unfolding of a process which is in constant change. The ideology treats the course of events as though it followed the same 'law' as the logical exposition of its 'idea.' Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historical process -- the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, the uncertainties of the future -- because of the logic inherent in their respective ideas.

-- Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

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Prior to total administration, the subject who viewed, heard, or read a work was to lose himself, forget himself, extinguish himself in the artwork. The identification carried out by the subject was ideally not that of making the artwork like himself, but rather that of making himself like the artwork. This identification constituted aesthetic sublimation; Hegel named this comportment freedom to the object. He thus paid homage to the subject that becomes subject in spiritual experience through self-relinquishment, the opposite of the philistine demand that the artwork give him something. As a tabula rasa of subjective projections, however, the artwork is shorn of its qualitative dimension. The poles of the artwork’s deaestheticization [Entkunstung der Kunst] are that it is made as much a thing among things as a psychological vehicle of the spectator. What the reified artworks are no longer able to say is replaced by the beholder with the standardized echo of himself, to which he hearkens.

-- Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

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By using violence against the very air that groups breathe, the human being's immediate atmospheric envelope is transformed into something whose intactness or non-intactness is henceforth a question. In other words: air and atmosphere -- the primary media for life, in both the physical and the metaphorical sense -- only became an object of explicit consideration and monitoring in domains such as aero-technics, medicine, law, politics, aesthetics and cultural theory in response to their terrorist deprivation. -- Sloterdijk, Spheres III

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Irritationen ergeben sich aus einem internen Vergleich von (zunächst unspezifizierten) Ereignissen mit eigenen Möglichkeiten, vor allem mit etablierten Strukturen, mit Erwartungen.

-- Niklas Luhmann

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What have we gained by this knowledge? Something very significant. Time, which frames all events, seemed to us to be the only objectively consistent factor, compared to the variegated changes of its contents, but now we see that the subject controls the time of its environment. While we said before, 'There can be no living subject without time,' now we shall have to say 'Without a living subject, there can be no time.'

-- Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans

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Now let me say again, wearily — don't be too eager to hear this — your soul now stands in the way of my own.

— Marina Tsvetaeva, in an excerpt from Girlfriend, featured in Bride of Ice: Selected Poems

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Edward Wadsworth, Dazzle Ships in Drydock at Liverpool (1919)

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-- Ruskin, study of clouds in Turner's Campo Santo, Venice

Between the earth and man arose the leaf. Between the heaven and man came the cloud.

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Es ist eine Frage für sich, ob durch diese Wissenschaft das Seiende seiender wurde oder ob sich nicht etwas ganz anderes zwischen das Seiende und den erkennenden Menschen schob, wodurch das Verhältnis zum Seienden zerrieben, der Instinkt für das Wesen der Natur dem Menschen ausgetrieben -- und der für das Wesen des Menschen erwürgt wurde.

-- Heidegger, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit

It's an open question whether, through this science, beings were more intensely or if instead something entirely different inserted itself between beings and the thinking human being, through which the relationship to beings was ground down, through which the instinct for the essence of nature driven out of man -- and that instinct for the essence of the human was strangled.

Seiender as a comparative is pretty clever.

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Denn im echten Rückgang in die Geschichte nehmen wir den Abstand von der Gegenwart, der uns erst den Zwischenraum schafft für den Anlauf, der notwendig ist, um über unsere eigene Gegenwart hinauszuspringen, d. h. sie als das zu nehmen, als was genommen zu werden jede Gegenwart als Gegenwart einzig verdient: daß sie überwunden werden soll. Wahrhafter Rückgang in die Geschichte ist der entscheidende Anfang eigentlicher Zukünftigkeit. Kein Mensch ist je von der Stelle und an der Stelle, an der er gerade steht, über sich hinausgesprungen.

-- Heidegger, Wesen der Wahrheit

For in the real retreat into history we acquire that distance from the present which first makes possible the run-up that is necessary to spring beyond our own present, i.e to take it as the only thing which every present deserves to be taken as: namely, as something to be overcome. True retreat into history is the all-deciding beginning of authentic futuricity. No one has ever managed to jump over himself from the spot and on the spot upon which he is currently standing.