Before he became an apologist for the neo-cons, in his famous article-cum-essay “Kandy-Kolored, Tangerine-Flaked, Streamline Baby” Tom Wolfe says:
[C]ustomizing is beginning to be rationalized, in the sense that Max Weber used the word. This rationalization, or efficient exploitation, began in the late forties when an $80-a-week movie writer named Robert Peterson noticed all the kids pouring money into cars in a little world they had created for themselves, and he decided to exploit it be staring Hot Rod Magazine, which clicked right away and led to a whole chain of hot-rod and custom-car magazines. Peterson, by the way, now has a pot of money and drives Maseratis and other high-status-level sports cars of the Apollonian sort, not the Dionysian custom kind. Which is kind of a shame, because he has the money to commission something really incredible.
I sort of know what he means when referencing Weber’s conception of rationalization, but I want a quotable quote for my dissertation without having to trawl through Weber. Has anyone got any easy references they want to give me for a footnote? Either Weber or secondary pieces (journal articles, etc)?
I develop the above much further by thinking about the cultural industry (of which the Peterson Publishing company and the NHRA are major parts in the US) as an apparatus of affective capture within popular culture. So the culture itself is not exactly rationalized, only the creative and sometimes chaotic elements are captured.