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1920s. Put another way, exile in Southern California ultimately trans formed the terms for understanding the impact of Modernism, at least in the minds of the intellectuals influenced by the Institute for Social Research, which had moved to Santa Monica at the beginning of the war.69 Adorno, who wrote the Dialectic oj Enlightenment with Max Horkheimer in Los Angeles during the war, said after his return to Frankfurt years later, It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that any con temporary consciousness that has not appropriated the American experi ence, even if in opposition, has something reactionary about it.70 In Los Angeles where Adorno and Horkheimer accumulated their data, the exiles thought they were encountering America in its purest, most prefigurative moment. Largely ignorant of, or indifferent to, the peculiar historical dialectic that had shaped Southern California, they allowed their image of first sight to become its own myth: Los Angeles as the crystal ball of capitalisms future. And, confronted with this future, they experienced all the more painfully the death agony of Enlightenment Europe.7 1 The Frankfurt critique of the Culture Industry became the primary theoretical representation of this encounter. The focus of their time in Los Angeles being Hollywood, and its specular double Hollywood!, the Germans were soon adding a Hegelian polish to homegrown noir sensibility. They described the Culture Industry not merely as political economy, but as a specific spatiality that vitiated the classical proportions of European urbanity, expelling from the stage both the masses (in their heroic, historychanging incarnation) and the critical intelligentsia. Exhibiting no apparent interest in the wartime turmoil in the local aircraft plants nor inclined to appreciate the vigorous nightlife of Los Angeless Central Avenue ghetto, Horkheimer and Adorno focused instead on the little single-family boxes that seemed to absorb the world-historic mission of the proletariat into family-centered consumerism under the direction of radio jingles and Life magazine ads. The sun rises over Mount Hollywood in Adorno and Horkheimers famous opening section of The Culture Industry:
Even now, the older houses just outside the concrete city center look like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy structures of world fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans. Yet the city housing projects

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