Slowly emerging from week of grading four-hundred pages worth of essays. Combine this with the respite of allowing myself to be swallowed in back episodes of The Office, and it is unsurprising that the following passage from Adorno's Negative Dialectics struck me:
This law is however not one of thinking, but real. Whoever submits to dialectical discipline, must unquestionably pay with the bitter sacrifice of the qualitative polyvalence of experience. The impoverishment of experience through dialectics, which infuriates mainstream opinion, proves itself however to be entirely appropriate to the abstract monotony of the administered world. What is painful about it is the pain of such, raised to a concept.
In short:
The hard, negating work of dialectics shows no synthetic and emergent new, but the toneless constancy of the bureaucratic world of the spectacle.
Or in other words:
Dialectical thought may clear away the veils of ideology, but what remains below is the mute fact of your office mate's self-recorded a capella "Rockin' Robin" ring tone.
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