Adorno takes on the case of Susan Boyle

I honestly don’t care what Gordon Brown has to say about her, whether she’s a fellow Scot or not. Let’s see what someone a little more intelligent has to say on the matter (albeit 65 years prematurely):

Fortune will not smile on all – Just on the one who draws the winning ticket or, rather, the one designated to do so by a higher power – usually the entertainment industry itself, which presents itself as ceaselessly in search of talent. Those discovered by the talent scouts and then built up by the studios are ideal types of the new, dependent middle classes. The female starlet is supposed to symbolise the secretary, though in a way which makes her seem predestined, unlike the real secretary, to wear the flowing evening gown. Thus she apprises the female spectator not only of the possibility that she, too, might appear on the screen but still more insistently of the distance between them. Only one can draw the winning lot, only one is prominent, and even though all have mathematically the same chance, it is so minimal for each individual that it is best to write it off at once and rejoice in the good fortune of someone else, who might just as well be oneself but never is. – T.W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (trans. E. Jephcott)

And it takes the violence of this act committed against a single woman on national television in front of 20 million viewers for anyone to take note. No wonder she is in anguish at her all too personal realisation that the entertainment industry equates the potential for fickleness with progress. No wonder, for her, the myth has been most brutally dispelled, and yet there is no repentance. In a sublime twist of logic the industry doesn’t even take responsibility because of course the selection could have been made by the public. And all of the sudden it is the public who are blamed for ruining this woman. It was the pressure she was under from the viewers. They were the ones who could call in and vote. Or maybe it’s this abstract category of “fame” that facelessly and blamelessly has a habit of ruining people. I shan’t pretend I thought she was much of a talent, and were Adorno still alive I’m sure he would have been quick to point out that the Schönberg who wrote the music for Les Miserables wasn’t the one he was referring to. Nonetheless, I’m not quite sure how much more faux-sympathy I can take without any responsibility being taken and without any form of critique. Now even sympathy is sold to the spectator, hot off the press. Consigned to the looney bin, but is it really her that needs rehabilitation or the system that put her there?

I apologise for the Adorno-geekery.