Late Capitalist Cartoons

"Cartoons and stunt films were once exponents of fantasy against rationalism. They allowed justice to be done to the animals and things electrified by their technology, by granting the mutilated beings a second life. Today they merely confirm the victory of technological reason over truth." -- Horkheimer and Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception"

"Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators will become accustomed to theirs." -- ibid.

And so, choices. Horkheimer and Adorno seem not to consider them choices, actually, but of two occurrences on a closed social order. They bear the relation not of choices, but of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries or something: we used to have one, and now we have the other. But it has never been demonstrated to me that you are obliged to keep your bios in the same century as the one wear you keep your zoe, and, so, choices. Or a choice, between the second life of mutilated beings, and beatings to which the spectators have become, qua spectators, accustomed. The difference between the choices is not obvious; Horkheimer and Adorno evidently favor the former, allying it with truth over technological reason. But really, would not the granting of second lives to mutilated beings simply accustom one to the beatings that mutilate in the first life? Shouldn't the relative equanimity of Daffy Duck, his beak blown to the back of his head by rifle fire yet again, inure us to rifles? The history of cartoons, since their inception, is the history of backbreaking fallings down with backs rendered unbroken in the next installment. What else would accustom one to his beatings?

The interior logic of the cartoon is what changes; what accustoms is what makes sense. To grant of a second life to a mutilated being is to operate according to the special sort of justice that has nothing to do with reason, especially not technological reason: which is to say, justice outside of the Law. It is a grant that produces justice and truth. Technological reason gives Donald Duck and the unfortunate victim and the spectators all of the accustomed beatings that are reasonable, once one has taken on the premises that are offered by the Late Capitalist Cartoons. So, choices. Hidden is the justice in grants, the justice without premises, of truth without technological reason. Find it, I guess, and give your mutilated beings second lives.