“Few things distinguish the way of life that befits the intellectual so deeply from that of the bourgeois than that the latter does not recognize the alternative of work and pleasure.” What were the times when a cultural critic thought he could still sort people so neatly. That was in 1951 when Theodor W. Adorno wrote this in his “Reflections from the Damaged Life”, also called “Minima Moralia”. Today, the “citizens” want and should be “intellectuals” in this Adornite sense, regardless of the industry they work in, who strive for a “cunning interweaving of happiness and work”. In times of knowledge work and meaning economy, the so-called New Work, this is called “work-life blending”.
The more the proportion of communication in the salaried professions increased, the more permeable became, at least according to their official claim, the boundaries between wage work and self-realization – and thus also between the management of the world on the one hand and its interpretation on the other, how it is pursued in culture, for example in the arts, sciences or public discourse, originally with the aim of transcending the instrumental sphere. The creativity and critical awareness that are expected of employees not only in advertising agencies enter into constant exchange and competition with the creativity and criticism used on their own behalf and often and increasingly go into this. This entanglement with the purposes of organizations, as they determine an employment relationship, became more and more the blind spot of the production of ideas and imaginations, which prides itself so much on its independence.
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