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Throughout his book, Niedzviecki seems to be restating, presumably at second hand, many of the points in the controversial and massively influential 1944 essay "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," by the German-Jewish refugee scholars Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno (from their book "Dialectic of Enlightenment"). All human needs, they write, are "presented to individuals as capable of fulfillment by the culture industry," but "individuals experience themselves through their needs only as eternal consumers, as the culture industry's object." The point here is "the necessity, inherent in the system, of never releasing its grip on the consumer, of not for a moment allowing him or her to suspect that resistance is possible."

There's plenty more one could quote; later in the essay Horkheimer and Adorno have a long paragraph describing the "pseudoindividuality" of Hollywood starlets, "serially produced like the Yale locks which differ by fractions of a millimeter." They conclude, "The peculiarity of the self is a socially conditioned monopoly commodity misrepresented as natural." I don't think this similarity of theme is accidental, but I don't think Niedzviecki is borrowing ideas without credit either. Probably Horkheimer and Adorno's vision of culture has just percolated so widely in the academic world that it wasn't possible to receive a liberal-arts education in the '90s, as Niedzviecki presumably did, without imbibing it.

You could even say that the criticisms leveled at the angst-ridden Frankfurters over the years also apply to Niedzviecki: Like any convert to a systematic ideology, he is overzealous, and he now sees pop culture in dark, Manichaean, monolithic and humorless terms. (Famously, Horkheimer and Adorno thought that jazz and the movies were fatally debased forms, incapable of genuine aesthetic expression.) To suggest that all struggling artists or musicians share the same scripted dreams of "specialness" and superstardom -- that if they don't want to be Britney or Spielberg, they want to be Cobain or Tarantino -- is patently false, and Niedzviecki knows better. I suspect he is still trying to explore and debunk his own dreams of alt-world stardom, and I can sympathize. Perhaps a subtler way of making his point would be to argue that, in a world where every form of cultural expression has become an exchangeable commodity, no individual can be so strange and no artist so confrontational as to escape it entirely.

What all this points toward is the likelihood, already mentioned, that Niedzviecki's book isn't really about what he thinks it's about. It's unquestionably true that a stylized pseudo-individuality is among the hallmarks of our age, but that's only one limb of a much larger beast. Niedzviecki seems insufficiently alive to the constantly contradictory, push-me-pull-you nature of contemporary pop culture, a system that resembles top-down dictatorship at the top and grass-roots democracy at the bottom, and which could be said to combine the psychoses and superstitions of both.

I'm not sure that celebrity worship, and the dream of celebrity, for instance, is really about individuality at all. It's more about transcending individuality, and leaving behind its pain and isolation for an identity that is general and universal. In what sense is Tom Cruise an individual? His emotional life, wacky religious beliefs and childbirth principles are public property, more urgent and present to many of us than the fact that our government has been torturing prisoners in secret jails.

When Niedzviecki visits the theme parks of Orlando, Fla., he writes compellingly about the fact that the throngs gathered there seem bored and dissatisfied. (Horkheimer and Adorno make the same observation about movie audiences.) But to argue that anyone goes to Walt Disney World or Universal Studios believing that it's in any way an individual experience is stretching his theoretical rubber band past the breaking point. Surely the point of theme parks is to replicate real or imagined collective experiences of the past -- the county fair, the vaudeville show, Fourth of July in the town square -- while somehow supercharging them. (Does the disillusionment come from recognizing that such things can't be resurrected, or that they weren't worth it in the first place?)

Yes, the 10,000 kids in the "Canadian Idol" gravel pit are all hopelessly deluded, and share virtually the same delusion. But every high school in North America has 15 girls who all think they'll become Mariah Carey, when their real destiny is "Good evening, Holiday Inn Express at Saugatuck Center. How may I direct your call?" That's not a news flash. Niedzviecki tries and fails to make the same point at a karaoke bar, where the patrons are just goofballing, play-acting at stardom for an evening. Nobody is fooling themselves; nobody believes that Simon Cowell's people will somehow hear their tape. (The same is probably true for the vast majority of backyard wrestlers. Would Niedzviecki feel more kindly to them if they were playing Batman or Spider-Man?)

When he discusses the rise of "neo-traditionalism," as with the Arizona Catholic teens or the case of his own brother, who became an ultra-Orthodox Jew despite a secular upbringing, Niedzviecki basically has to admit that the issue isn't individuality but other troublesome categories such as "authenticity" and "meaning." As another European expat scholar, George Steiner, has put it, we live in a "post-culture" (he means post-Auschwitz and post-Hiroshima) in which all the moral certainties of Western civilization have been stripped away and we wander about with no clear purpose, like ants whose hill has been blown up by a kid with a firecracker.

Some of us try to stride confidently forward, into late capitalism's model of conformist individualism. Some try to dig existing collective institutions out of the crushed anthill and breathe new life into them (hence the recent rise of fundamentalist religion, Islam included). Most of us are stuck somewhere in between, trying to piece together identities out of incompatible shards of culture: the flag, vegetarianism, Bill O'Reilly, Iranian cinema, the Isaac Mizrahi clothes at Target sewn by some Chinese teenager. Hell, we might as well all answer that e-mail spambot. Am I VIP? I don't know; probably not. But there will be genuine celebrities in the building. Why be left out?

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