on the possibility of critique

The essence of popular culture is wit: that startling conjunction of things that do not seem to belong together. The dialectic of popular culture would be a dialectics to the second power: the reason of the phenomenal is not its hidden reason, but its manifest unreason. There is no moment of dissolution inherent to the structures of popular culture, but only the progressive accumulation of ruins.

The utopian moment  is not the refusal to recognize contradictions, not the demand for an illusionary moment of final reconciliation, but rather the belief in an architectonics of ruin: that while only the ruins of life are possible, these ruins are truly life and are either  building up to something, or going no where.  Optimism and pessimism are both utopian. It would be wrong to think that anything but the ruins of life are possible, yet it is just as wrong to think that these ruins are enough.