"For obvious reasons, "fun" appears more often in Adorno's writings on the culture industry (including the works co-authored with Horkheimer) than in Aesthetic Eheory itself. Often left untranslated from the English -or rather, from the American- the term usually functions in these works as a kind of cipher for the emptiest and most mind-numbing experiences of the culture industry's relentlessly amusing products. "Fun is a medicinal bath," Adorno writes in a typically damning passage on laughter in Dialectic of Enlightenment, "The pleasure industry never fails to prescribe it [...]. In the culture industry, jovial denial takes the place of the pain found in ecstasy and in asceticism. The supreme law is that they shall not satisfy their desires at any price; they must laugh and be content with laughter."3 Here as elsewhere in Adorno's writings, "fun" is not even pleasure but the simulacrum of pleasure, a temporary release which enables the enjoying subject to forget the forces of domination and unfreedom to which he or she is actually in thrall. The provision of an impov erished escapism through fun is indeed one of the defining characteristics of the culture industry and its "pornographic" (DE 140) products: "The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory; all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu" (DE 139). Moreover, for Adorno "fun" is in many cases not even the specious satisfaction of simulacra or an anticipation which provides a sparkling fa?ade for political coercion; it is the coercion itself, a sadistic cultural mandate to enjoy. Fun in this case is a kind of commodity as such, the token of a pseudo-solidarity which is normative a priori. "In American conventional speech, having a good time means being present at the enjoyment of others, which in its turn has as its only content being present"4: one might say this is the vulgar version of Kant's sensus communis, in which both subjectivity and objectivity are sus pended in favor of a tacit mass deception which becomes its own truth. "Fun" is here no more and no less than the agreement that one is "having fun," a tautological performance of pleasurability that only serves to reinforce the status quo.
Adorno's critique of fun as the fake pleasure of normativity is connected with his criticism of psychoanalysis and the construction of the bourgeois subject: specifically, the construction of the bourgeois subject as one who is able to experience pleasure in normal (i.e., non-neurotic or -psychotic) ways. "What a state the dominant consciousness must have reached," he writes in a section of Minima Moralia entitled "Invitation to the dance," "when the reso lute proclamation of compulsive extravagance and champagne jollity [...] is elevated in deadly earnest to a maxim of right living. ". The aim of psychoanalysis is to mold the subject to enjoy what he or she is supposed to enjoy in order to be a normally-functioning subject, which is not so coincidentally the pre cise form of pleasure prescribed by the powers that be. Enjoyment of pleasures deemed taboo, not to speak of the unwillingness or refusal to enjoy at all, thus threatens one's own status as a full human subject. Thus, once again, "fun" is not pleasure but an interest-laden activity in the economic sense; to have fun means that one has proven oneself worthy of being a human being, a sovereign subject, and a citizen invested with rights and autonomy. Of course, for Adorno this autonomy is merely a sham autonomy, since it is granted only on the condition that one has already submitted to the dominant order. Thus "there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination" (MM 63).
In other sections of Minima Moralia, as well as in the essay "Free Time," Adorno also associates amusement with work in the same fashion as fun is associated with domination: not as its antithesis, but as its pendant. Cul turally sanctioned hobbies and leisure activities are so empty and un-f un (the paradigmatic activity of this phenomenon for Adorno is sunbathing, which "is not at all enjoyable, might very possibly be physically unpleasant, and certainly impoverishes the mind" [CI 191]) precisely because the act of "taking time off" is itself under the sign of administered labor: evenings and week ends. In a certain sense, they are as mandated as the labor itself: "Free time remains the reflex-action to a production rhythm imposed heteronomously on the subject, compulsively maintained even in the weary pauses" (MM 175). The "pseudo-activity" of the hobby or of the consumption of the culture industry's products is "misguided spontaneity" (CI 194), the freedom of cre ative action channeled into standardized, socially acceptable, and sterile forms of activity..."
Erica Weitzman, "No "Fun": Aporias of Pleasure in Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory", The German Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 2 (Spring, 2008)
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