the ongoing battle with false consciousness...

After reflecting on the lecture on Thursday, at first I was rather idealistic and honestly thought for a second that the pluralism (diversity of thought) and demystification (people no longer being smitten by the commodity) that Adorno and Horkeimer spoke of was a viable option that we, as a culture, could (and would!) reach. Then within seconds my doubt of humanity struck, and I was left with the more postmodern and realistic assertion that complete consciousness raising is nearly impossibe, for culture is not a giant mass of fixed subjects who all move together in perfect unison but rather as Mimi White says is permeated with uneven development. This uneven development (simultaneous traces of social formations past, present and future) causes constant tension and conflict in culture, mostly due to the instability of the subject. I find myself feeling like a hypocrite some days, and other days I embrace the fact that I must negotiate my surroundings differently in order to get by (is a hypocrite still a hypocrite if she knows it??). Of course I feel a sense of satisfaction and smugness in intuitively just 'knowing' what a TV character is going to say or do...is my comfort in standardization of the culture industry always a crime? On the other hand I also find myself completely bored, disgusted and frustrated with white-heterocentric-patriarchal hegemonic discourse that is impossible to escape. It is exhausting but necessary to deconstruct ourselves on a continual basis. We must use our agency to navigate through culture and be aware of the competing discourses and ideological problematics that make our world so complicating and overwhelming, but so engaging and worthwhile at the same time. The fact that false consciousness is finding some resistance, even if it is fleeting and temporal, and has not become completely reifying to us as a culture provides me with a sense of hope.