Theodor Adorno..I don't get it...

(Small but kewl fact: he took his mother's rather than his father's surname, to go out into the world. Semi-enemies like Schoenberg always refer to him as Weisengrund, his dad's name...)

In answer to yr exact questions, JL, he is always more valuable to read, I think, if you start from the idea that he is hugely conflicted and may NOT have decided for himself. He wanted the world to be changed and better; he no longer knew if he knew that it ever could or would be. In that, he reminds me a lot of some of my favourite rock critics, though he is generally more rigorous about the presence and threat of delusion and wishful thinking. Too rigorous, probably.

_Minima Moralia_ is all I know of Adorno (and it's great) but I've always seen this passage as explicating two different dynamics: large-scale "bourgois nostalgia" i.e. the Noble Savage, Gothic aesthetics, archaic/hippy revival, etc. And, on a more personal level, the attraction of "Unenigmatic Sphinxes", or the attraction of otherwise intellectual men towards unintellectual or immature women. Adorno uses the example of Albertine from Proust, but I'd also add Lolita and Sophie von Kuhn from _The Blue Flower_. I'm still trying to wrap my head around T.A.'s more arcane subtleties, but I've never taken the tone of this passage to be sarcastic, especially since the Nazi culture he hated was one of bourgeois nostalgia for the simplicity of the "volk". I think it's an honest attempt to understand one of the strongest cultural currents of his time.

Someone has claimed (can't remember who) that it's the young Adorno's Sunday afternoon reading sessions on _The Critique of Pure Reason_ that are the most important source for understanding his work. This seems an interesting starting point.

I should also perhaps say that I find Adorno's work more interesting than Benjamin's, so I'm wary of tracing the influence between them directly. Adorno (possibly accompanied by Paul de Man) seems to me the most acute reader of the _Trauerspiel_ book; I suspect his differences with our Walter follow from WB's subsequent interpretation of his own earlier work.

Sorry this isn't a distillation, but Adorno's work militates directly against such projects, even if Adorno is often himself (for strategic reasons) guilty of gross simplification and distortions of his opponents' positions.

I disagree with much of Adorno but I really like him as a writer. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception" (written w. Horkheimer) is almost poetic in its scathing attack on Hollywood. And while Adorno was wrong about jazz, he justified his arbitrary distinctions between good and bad music much better than most left-wing critical theorists, particularly Althusser.

Don't know about this editing stuff but going from Benjamin's letters, many to Adorno, it didn't seem like they had a bad relationship due to such behind-the-back funny stuff.

Haven't read enough Adorno to know how much all this is a caricature of his actual thought, but I certainly remember the 'Culture Industry' chapter from 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' being v. pessimistic/dismissive abt pop cult. Adorno also the man who said "After Auschwitz there can no poetry", or someone else?

I believe that was Joe Corrigan.

Because Adorno is writing within a certain tradition of thinking critically about society -- most powerfully articulated in the last twenty years by Gillian Rose (see _Hegel contra Sociology_ for example) -- some of his work can appear to make deductions which a knee-jerk popularism will reject: ie. society and its cultural products just is in some sense wrong. This does not mean he exempts his own work from the picture. It's not a case of 'I am right and those poor fools are ignorant' so much as 'We're all lost, but reflection on this tragedy may help.' (Apologies to Adorno fans for the crude reduction). Without paying attention to the philosophical (*not* just the historical) grounds for his work, it's quite hard to get a sense of what Adorno is up to.

Now, Adorno's own aesthetic judgements (and I haven't read any of his work on music, for example) must also be open to question, but anyone doing so must consider first whether Adorno is pronouncing judgement for all time, sub specie aeternitas (sp?) as it were, or whether he understands such judgement itself as being historically bound, contingently over-determined, and more a matter of strategic intervention than last judgement.

Corrigan: no, it was Rough.

Fab idea that TWA has been badly translated: very seductive and convenient.

Not being a German reader, I cannot confirm the hypothesis. Certainly early translations (I am told) tended to break up long paragraphs, insert sub-titles which aren't in the original texts and in particular with the more philosophical work, break up the sentence structure. Since, if you believe Hullot-Kentor, the basic unit of the late Adorno's thought are long sentences, and its basic movement is paratactic, this could be quite an issue, no? Or am I missing something.

Oh, and by the way PF, you were absolutely right about TE on PdM in Aesthetic Ideology, he does clearly mark it as a joke. And a quick flick through _The Political Unconscious_ reminds me that I like Mr Jameson a lot more than I tend to think. Thanks!

that somewhat hits close to what I have been thinking about as I read this thread. It's more a theory than anything else. Maybe because of locale and time, he grew to interpret the world through a sense of both fear and wonderment? At the brutality, but the power to control as well. As if mirroring the growth, class division and then economic pressures that lead to facism, he became dualist in order to fully understand a split society and the causes. Finally in the ultimate questing to try and understand the mindset of the Nazi and their victims, he parrys with both perspectives, as both a survival mechanism and a man in constant self-examination, perhaps somewhat as a German, wondering how and if any man, including himself could possibly be so horrid.

Adorno vs. The USA is a hard one to call. One account would be that yes, when he was out in LA during the war, he *did* hate it, and is scarred for life as a consequence. Another would be that he takes up (rhetorically) the standpoint of an exile in _Minima Moralia_ and sticks with it -- and as we know, the motif of 'homelessness' has been recurrent in post-Nietzschean thinking / writing.

A third theory, and my personal favourite, is that America plays such a strange role in 'Continental' thought because in Hegel, history moves from East to West. America, as the West, becomes the site of the future for Hegel (in some extraordinary passages at the beginning of the Lectures on the Philosophy of History). This, for example, might explain (in part) Derrida's claim that 'deconstruction is America,' since the category of the future plays such an important role in his work of the last twenty years. Not that it would be equally possible for him to claim on this basis that 'America is impossible'!

This is actually a very interesting topic / line of argument (ideas of the 'geography of thought' etc I find interesting). EXCEPT for the bit about that dreadful, verbose, unenlightening, unfunny old bore JD, who by my lights should be paid no heed when he says self- aggrandizing but ultimately worthless things like that.

To: mark@evazev.demon.co.uk Subject: Re. 'Media Slag" Nice to be noticed - saw your (oddly asterisked) jibe at me on some Frankfurt- saddo discussion board. And if you're not just Mark S but Mark Sinker, then just who *is* the media slag here ?...... Andy Medhurst Buruma's the one I want to net, tho.

To: mark@evazev.demon.co.uk
Subject: Re. 'Media Slag"
Nice to be noticed - saw your (oddly asterisked) jibe at me on some Frankfurt- saddo discussion board. And if you're not just Mark S but Mark Sinker, then just who * is* the media slag here ?......
Andy Medhurst
Then *I* said: Buruma's the one I want to net, tho.

Medhurst's reply to my ridiculously long S& S letter was all crossness about the further discussion and exploration of his ideas as well. Academics are weird.

Fact that he thinks ILE = Frankfurt Discussion Board = krazy & komical.

"history moves from East to West. America, as the West, becomes the site of the future for Hegel (in some extraordinary passages at the beginning of the Lectures on the Philosophy of History). This, for example, might explain (in part) Derrida's claim that 'deconstruction is America,' since the category of the future plays such an important role in his work of the last twenty years"

Delueze showed 'geographilosophy'. And time placed on history by architect. What was this alike? This should be to build a high-electronically formed-luxury city to any Africa country with a reason of only profit and waiting them to get useful improvements from this city by their non-modern fundamental unqualified culture . So the point ,we have been on years and years, was post-modernism. As it is going on with the cultural and socially alienation programs by technology growing and its 'must-spread' state by capital in the world by globalization, I wonder what you are thinking how post-modernism could be shaped for the humanity? By reformism or by what Michael Hurdt told us on 'Emperor'? Note : Micheal Hurdt told on the book that there is now three opposite to emperor one of them post colonials and the other ones are fundementals who America want to terminate and the last ones are postmoderns who Michael thought they are showing to Emperor the ways he later become face to face . I think you may find it interesting.

I came across Theodor from a dance music perspective. Adorno does not like dance music, he does not like the body, he is very cerebral. He likes high art and dislikes popular culture.

"Their ecstasy is without content.... The ecstasy takes possession of its object by its own compulsive character. It is stylised like the ecstasies savages go into in beating the war drums. It has convulsive aspects reminescent of St Vitus's dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals. ... The same jitterbugs who behave as if they were electrified by syncopation, dance almost exclusively the good rhythmic parts" --Theodor Adorno "On The Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening"

There are some nice quotes from Simon Reynolds on:

"Frankfurt is simultaneously Germany's financial capital and a longstanding centre of anti-capitalist theory. Most famously, it gave the world the 'Frankfurt School' of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer et al: neo-Marxist thinkers who fled Nazism and landed up in Southern California, where their eyes and ears were affronted by the kitsch outpoutings of Hollywood's dream-factory. Today, the Frankfurt School is mostly remembered for its snooty attitude towards popular culture"

http://www.jahsonic.com/TheodorAdorno.html

Yours
Jan Geerinck

True , Walter Benjamin killed himself on his way to California.

Mark, did you spot any other factual errors?

Jan

Alex writes:
After all, the idea of culture, intended to describe what distinguishes us from that state of savagery we have supposedly escaped, always inextricably draws us back towards barbarism. If culture appears a flimsy safeguard against anarchy, might that not be because the concept draws its own urgency from the menace from which it promises to deliver us?

This is a strong thought, but I wonder how prevalent this particular notion of "culture" is (more prevalent in Adorno's day than ours, I'd guess). More common now would be to use the word to distinguish one "culture" from another: English culture vs. American; high vs. low; indie vs. pop (just as we mostly use the word "form" to distinguish various forms from each other ["call-and-response form" vs. "sonata form"] or to identify our concern as form rather than something else [a piece's chord pattern as opposed to the composer's motive for writing it] but rarely use "form" to distinguish form from formlessness). Of course the two uses - one defining culture against barbarism, the other defining cultures against each other - can run into each other, and they both can concern themselves with defending or breaking down the boundaries between cultures (or between culture and something else). But I'm suspicious of the word "menace" here. Words distinguish phenomena from their near neighbors - that's what words do - and therefore, obviously, there's always interplay between a phenomenon and its conceptual relatives, but the fact that a chair distinguishes itself from a bench, a floor, a couch, and a noose, and sitting distinguishes itself from standing, doesn't mean that chairs are menaced by such alternatives or are in a desperate battle to preserve their identities as chairs.

I've read little Adorno. I liked it as writing but thought it was essentially a work of the imagination rather than an exploration of the world; at least, I couldn't imagine what it would be like to test his ideas, or that he ever tried to test them in the lives of others, or even in his own. In the quotations that start this thread, I perceive (and enjoy) a romantic attacking the romanticism of others, but I wish he'd found a more interesting romanticism to attack.

Another link.

A third.

Half the time I think what he appears to be saying "doom for the culture industry etc" totally obscures how he says it or even to what extent he says it.

I taught Sociology of Culture and I sure as hell wouldn't say any such thing. I usually used Adorno as an example of the Frankfort School (people are duped by culture, blindly absorbing its messages--this links to facism/Nazi-ism, which were heavily symbol/media oriented and is not too different from Marx's Superstructure/Ideology) in contrast to Gramsci (culture can be used as resistance; hegemony is never complete) and to the later Production of Culture and Art Worlds perspectives (cultural analysis is about looking at activities, cooperation, and organizations), and in contrast to Marxist/post-structuralist/Cultural Studies/Feminist Approaches (audiences do not passively absorb, they are active consumers; the message sent is not necessarily the message received, audiences tweak meanings, example fan fiction)

Adorno has a political and historical context that can't be ignored, and some classic media studies if the 50s (Lazarsfeld) were inspired by putting his theories to the test.

This is just not what Adorno and Horkheimer say!! Take advertising - advertisers have to come up with all kinds of crap all the time because people see through things, advertising stops working, people get fed up being told the same bollocks day in, day out. The motor of the culture industry might be its constant need to keep overcoming people's resistance to it! And some of it just doesn't work at all -- not every product 'sells' well. A&H recognise that this is the case: the only other option is dividing the world up into brainless sheep and a fortunate elite who happen to be immune, and this is certainly not what A&H think is going on at all.

and if this is the case how does he react to camp or pop art or culture jamming or post foccualdian readings of porn or any of the other ways that we have found to fuck with the dominant culture ?

and does he favour single authors over group efforts (does he not like movies/pop music out of some distrust of "work by committee", ie producers, actors, studio musicans(sp), etc ?

also, he claims that pop culture is not authentic folk culture, b/c it is not created by the people--if thats the case, then what is authentic folk culture in the age of mass retrival of information ?

one last thing, how does he place the creators of mass media in classical marxist settings ?

Alex I'm interested in your comment upthread from six years back that you find Adorno a more interesting thinker than Benjamin.

I do too (everyone doing postgrad critical theory at my uni appears to disagree) but I haven't precisely worked out why.

I suspect it's partly because Adorno's more dialectical approach always seems to imply a sense of depth-in-thought, like, there's always further that you can travel into an idea or set of ideas. Benjamin seems to have a much clearer notion of a standard of perfection against which all things can be measured, even if that standard is actually even less attainable than under Adorno.

Adorno seems like the more ILX thinker to me - structurally, if not in terms of his actual likes/dislikes.

Well, yes the short answer is 'dialectics': I think in his later work in particular Adorno is just more thorough about thinking things through. I guess this needn't be a slur on Benjamin, since Adorno got an extra thirty years to work out what their common project might have turned into. Another way of linking at it which stresses that actually they have a lot in common would be to say that they share common concerns, but that their styles are different: I think Benjamin is far more popular in cultural studies than Adorno because his work emphasises the positive side of trying to invent new ways of thinking, while Adorno emphasises the negative (kind of like one of the differences between Deleuze (positive) and Derrida (who although his work is affirmative, tends to come across as a more negative thinker, given his stress on impossibility etc.). Of course Benjamin's also popular because what Adorno criticises as Benjamin's wide-eyed presentation of the facts, i.e. a lapse from thinking mediation rigorously, towards positivism, is endemic in the modern academy which isn't actually interested in a truly critical stance. If enlightenment as de-mythification gets hopelessly tangled up with the production of new myths, modern cultural studies seems to me far too happy with either critique or invention but not with the dialectic between them: which is why Adorno is the medicine we need at the moment!

The other answer, which is also hard to substantiate, is that Benjamin is too much of an activist, or even a voluntarist. Adorno's suspicion of privileging practice over theory seems to me a valuable political counter to the violence and counter-violence of the 1930s. Having seen political mobilization against the Nazis fail in the face of social conformism, Adorno was more concerned after the war with the idea of building healthy democracies than he was about revolutionary violence. I think Benjamin remains too closely aligned with Schmitt and Sorel.

There's an interesting Ben Watson review of an Adorno book in the latest Radical Philosophy: he has a dig at Frith / Hebdige and says 'Just as the best music demolishes your previous concepts of musical pleasure, so Adorno's rough treatment of all you hold dear is what's required to make you think for yourself.'

i prefer Theodor Odorono

'social conformism' is a pretty terrible characterization of how the nazis won, alex, and i'm not sure what you mean by the need for a 'counter to the violence' of the '30s. would that there had been better counter-violence, more activism, more voluntarism. the foolishness, perhaps, is trying to separate thought from action; but, faced with real, immediate challenges, how much leisure-time was there to do that? (ok another foolishness lies in the tactics of the german communist party; but i'm not sure if these are two arguments or one.)

I just got a copy of The Arcades Project and I'm so absolutely blown away by the scope of the endeavour that I don't even bother reading it, I just flip through it (presaging Deleuze and Guattari's "book that should be read like one listens to a record" by fifty years or so) and go "oooh!"

I like to think of Benjamin and Adorno as the guys in the Mac ads. "Hello, I'm a Mac—" ... "—and I'm a PC." They're very complimentary, even if on the surface they seem to squabble like an old married couple.

benjamin is the mac and adorno is the pc?

Surely not the first time Hodgman has been compared to Adorno?

benjamin is the mac and adorno is the pc?

Obv.

NRQ -- I wasn't trying to provide an analysis of the rise of Nazism: all I meant was that Adorno seems to me to have become more interested in the way that social systems as a whole operate in such a way as to allow something like Nazism to happen: isn't that what a project like the Authoritarian Personality is asking? And Adorno's later position is unambiguous: he pits theory against praxis as a dialectical counterpart to the tendency of e.g. the student radicals of the 60s to demand action.

Alex, your response makes clear what I was kinda incoherently suspecting, thanks.

Another question, this time for Mark S primarily but anyone can chime in:

Mark I know you hate Bernstein's editing job on 'The Culture Industry', do you dislike him for other reasons as you imply way upthread?

I'm reading his 'Adorno: Enlightenment & Disenchantment' and really enjoying it. He reads together Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics and says Adorno has an overrarching theory of the possibility of ethics - basically that rationalized reason diminishes the possibility of ethical existence by subsuming the search for ethics within the identity-thinking approach of universalist moral centralism.

This is vaguely (but compared to everything else highly relevantly) connected to where my masters thesis is heading, which covers the same issues but in relation to Dworkin/Unger/etc. debates about the ethical principles underpinning jurisprudence.

I'd be quite keen to try to get some distancing perspective on Bernstein via any more extensive beef you have with him.

The Culture Industry is haphazardly assembled, but if you read it as a bunch of intermittently thoughtful bits it accretes as well as Minima Moralia. A friend and I discussed the chapter on sporting events this weekend, actually.

I meant 'Adorno: Disenchantment & Ethics' before BTW.

I haven't actually read 'The Culture Industry' (although I've read a lot of overlapping stuff) so I have no position on it as regards coherence etc.

Do you like Adorno Alfred? I have a feeling you might. I am biased though: he really is the greatest.

He's too cranky; on occasion this sourness severely constricts the conceptual range of his thinking. He reminds me of Philip Larkin in this respect.

The more I read of/about him, the less I can stand him.

Just the opposite with me. He's my Super Ego.

My favorite grump.

You can handle his desperate homophobia? I mean, I'm more disturbed by what seems like a complete lack of sympathy for others, but the homophobia (which, I guess, is a symptom of that) isn't doing him any favors.

Eh. Symptom of the times, etc. And he didn't much like PEOPLE, after Nazi atrocities.

Do you, uh, see how that doesn't make any sense?

I never much noticed the homophobia, sorry.

He's a bigger misanthrope than homophobe, methinks. Is that better?

Or, let me ask: Why didn't A. like Nazis? They were vulgar/populist, they were against the sort of culture that A. was really into, they killed off maybe some people who he thought of as his peers (as the elites who really counted, I want to say); they were a personal inconvenience of the highest order. But does it go beyond that? It seem like almost an accident that A. and I both think the Nazis were bad.

Like I said, I haven't read MM, but my friend says that the whole book was basically him underlining how he wasn't gay, but Nazis and fascists sure are!

This is the sort of game he plays all the time, though this is Jameson summarizing him (in Marxism and Form, which, you can argue whether this is fair, but it reads like other A. that I've read):

In a similar way, the rise of the saxophone, in that commercial music which replaces the older folk art of the masses, has symbolic value: for with it vibration, the oscillation back and forth in place, supersedes the soaring of the violin as an embodiment of subjective excitement in the modern age, and a metallic sound, all pipes and valves, yet “sexually ambivalent” to the degree to which it “mediates between brass and woodwinds” (“being materially related to the former, while it remains woodwind in its mode of performance”), replaces the living warmth of the older instrument, which expressed life, where the newer one merely simulates it.

Yes, saxophones don't fit into the "natural" categories of woodwind or brass, but are "sexually ambivalent", and this is opposed to "life", is nothing but a "simulation" -- and if you can't read homosexuality onto this, then I can't help you. (But also, fears of being "penetrated" are all over his language, and I'm told his letters with WB are full of gay-baiting.)

And yes, homophobia was "of the times", sure. So might a lot of Adorno's sentiments; they may have "worked" for a particular set of people in a particular context. And noticing things like "the bass is missing when it's played on the radio" -- that's great, I'll give him that. He can sometimes notice a good detail. But the way he thinks doesn't work at all for me, and often disgusts me.

To say this as politely as possible: read MM before coming to an opinion. Sure, he was always a crank, but surviving WWII made him, shall we say, less sanguine about how socialism OR capitalism could help human progress.

homophobia is insignificant besides something as world-historic as the determined extermination of a race, n'est-ce pas?

Well, I dunno, the determined extermination of homosexuality comes pretty close? As my friend puts it: "He took part in a critique of fascism that was widespread, in which fascism is basically blamed on homosexuality. This particular critique culminated in Russia with Gorky's "destroy homosexuality (read: homosexuals) and fascism will disappear""

Also since when does living through WW2 make you a good thinker?

Occam's razor.

(your friend is talking shit)

Fairly typical homophobia of the time /= determined extermination of homosexuals, for God's sake.

Well, what I'm saying is, everything I've read of A. leads me to think he isn't, and so please give me some evidence to the contrary? Because a lot of people who I think are not entirely insane seem to really like A., and I can't figure out why (outside of maybe an appreciation of a sort of poetic saddo moodiness).

I'm not (nor is my friend) saying that A. was out personally slaughtering millions of homosexuals. I'm saying that he was a homophobe, and that this homophobia is tied in with all sorts of problems in his thinking and his worldview, and that this is a problem; and more than that, I'm asking what is so redeeming about him that we should suffer through this.

Adorno's critique of "the culture industry" -- how capitalism appropriates signifiers of rebellion and anarchy into ever more marketable items -- is his lasting contribution, methinks. Also, his dismissal of "common sense" as a totem. Richard Hofstadter's work redeploys a lot of Adorno's ideas in an American socio-political context: how anti-intellectualism, for example, becomes a virtue for the political class.

Also: the "homophobia" of Adorno (or Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Orwell, Alfred Kazin) should not prevent one from appreciating them.

No, and I normally wouldn't let it; but it seems symptomatic of Adorno's inability to get outside his own headspace.

Well, I haven't been terribly impressed by what I've read of his critique of "the culture industry" (I think it ignores what's interesting about those phenomena and replaces it with a shallow and weirdly elitist Marxist analysis, one that doesn't get how pop culture functions in people's lives on an individual level -- one that, shall we say, takes away people's humanity rather than insisting upon it, as Marx would).

Like any smart writer, he uses an "ism" to begin his smarter critique.

Eh?

i wouldn't trust anyone's gloss of adorno, let alone jameson's

adorno is incredibly perceptive about how pop products are produced and disseminated. he disapproves of both in the sense that he disapproves of the whole edifice of modern life, but essays like 'the radio symphony' seem to notice things that nobody else even thought to look for. i've read a fair amount of adorno, but nowhere near a pro level, and i encountered nothing that seemed homophobic at all, huh.

in his mind (if i'm getting this at all right) the purpose of art was to express human liberty, and so the best art was that which defined the parameters of its own existence or struggled against the its own form (big up 12 toners & also beethoven). pop, made by craftsman/technicians following the shifting-same of "the hit," has no radical potential.

n.b. i don't think that "having no radical potential" is the same as being "bad" to TWA; i'm sure i remember a few sentences here and there that express admiration of charlie chaplin, maybe even doris day or somebody like that??

Why didn't A. like Nazis? They were vulgar/populist, they were against the sort of culture that A. was really into, they killed off maybe some people who he thought of as his peers (as the elites who really counted, I want to say); they were a personal inconvenience of the highest order. But does it go beyond that?

I think you're being a bit harsh here, Casuistry. Does one need to go beyond the fact that the Nazis killed off his peers no matter how genuine you think Adorno's feelings for those peers were? (And fwiw, I've read enough of his letters to Benjamin to surmise that Adorno had a great deal of affection for him.)

Think about it. You leave your country due to an oppressive regime, your friends/peers are being murdered, and you wind up in a country quite foreign to your own. Yes, Adorno was amazed by the unchanging weather of Los Angeles. But he was even more disoriented by it all. Tons of exiles were, Kracauer especially. How would you react to popular (or really ANY) culture?

Also, as gently as I can put it, you're quoting Jameson and your friend on Adorno rather than the man himself. You should really ferret out some primary evidence. Not to add fuel to the fire but there are very specific examples of Adorno's homophobia in his essay “Freudian Theory and The Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” particularly p. 136 and note 7 on p. 154 (from Routledge's The Culture Industry edited by J.M. Bernstein).

But it's reductive and just flat-out misinformed to state that "He took part in a critique of fascism that was widespread, in which fascism is basically blamed on homosexuality." If The Frankfurt School blamed fascism in 1930s Germany on any one thing, it was the rise of a petit bourgeois white collar class MUCH more than homosexuality.

And yes, homophobia was "of the times", sure. So might a lot of Adorno's sentiments; they may have "worked" for a particular set of people in a particular context.

As far as this is concerned, with the advent of the internet, I think his ideas are even more relevant. No doubt he would've seen the internet as an extremely logical capitalist development.

Finally, he was never as opposed to popular culture as people make him out to be. He had kind words for Chaplin, for instance. And he did recognize the privileged position from which he flung his pronunciamentos (see "Free Time").

Hell, you want a German exile conflicted about homosexuality, read Thomas Mann.

and i encountered nothing that seemed homophobic at all

See, I remember being startled by the use of sexual and particularly homosexual terminology (active, passive, penetrate, etc., etc., -- it just keeps building) in "On The Fetish-Character of Music...", and it kept startling me, especially with its heavy-handed worries about "passive" audiences, etc., etc. And it keeps cropping up in everything I read by/about him.

I guess I can't take his disapproval of "the whole edifice of modern life" too seriously since he has such a misguided understanding of the edifice of pre-modern life that he so cherishes.

(Also I think the idea that art is to express human liberty is pretty much bogus.)

Kevin, thanks.

I should like to think that Adorno (or anyone) would not like the Nazis for reasons that go deeper than "they killed off my peers", is what I meant.

See, I remember being startled by the use of sexual and particularly homosexual terminology (active, passive, penetrate, etc., etc., -- it just keeps building) in "On The Fetish-Character of Music...", and it kept startling me, especially with its heavy-handed worries about "passive" audiences, etc., etc. And it keeps cropping up in everything I read by/about him.

You're using late 20th century grad school sensors to interpret/be suspicious. That's no good.

No, there I'm using skills I picked up in high school English classes.

Also I did admit that I was quoting Jameson on Adorno, after all!

Reminds me of Nabokov's yarn about the Freudian interpreting Little Red Riding Hood.

Casuistry, I've read a bunch of Adorno and never read anything homophobic. Which doesn't mean he wasn't, but it certainly means he left enough worthwhile stuff that the homophobia (if it exists) isn't necessarily important.

ie: Understanding Endgame, Dialectic of Enlightenment, AT, his essays on Music, etc, none of which are homophobic, are still amazing.

Also check out “Opera and the Long-Playing Record” from Essays on Music edited by Richard Leppert. He was very cranky about recordings early on with “The Curves of the Needle” (guilty of sexism in that one too) and “The Form of the Phonograph Record” (both in the aforementioned anthology). But by the time he wrote “Opera and the Long-Playing Record” (in the 1960s), Adorno had scaled back on some of his negativity towards recordings, a characteristic of much of his later writing in general.

I shouldn't have used "The Frankfurt School" as a blanket term above. They were a varied bunch, to put it lightly.

And certainly Adorno disliked Nazis for reasons much deeper than they killed his peers. I think maybe you should read some more of his writing.

And fwiw, I scream and shout and jump up and down and hurl his words against the wall every time I read him. But I always come back for more. He extracts some very difficult questions out of me.

Kevin, have you ever gotten the feeling, reading Adorno, that he thought that people might earnestly enjoy music which he himself couldn't find any enjoyment in? And that their enjoyment of that music was, basically, ok?

His whole problem is with people enjoying music, Cas. He thinks that music is produced to keep the people satiated - a cynical view of a Capitalism structure that feeds the people what they want to keep them docile. Music isn't supposed to please people, it's supposed to challenge them. (I'm obv stating this more simply than he does.) Their enjoyment of that music is the opposite of okay for that reason.

I like to piss off my football fan buddies with Adorno's remarks on mass spectator sports.

"For the consumer there is nothing left to classify, since the classification has already been preempted by the schematism of production. This dreamless art for the people fulfils the dreamy idealism which went too far for idealism in its critical form... Not only do hit songs, stars, and soap operas conform to types recurring cyclically as rigid invariants, but the specific content of productions, the seemingly variable element, is itself derived from those types. The details become interchangeable..."

Well, that is what I take from him, Mordy, but I was wondering if he ever shook that.

Kevin, have you ever gotten the feeling, reading Adorno, that he thought that people might earnestly enjoy music which he himself couldn't find any enjoyment in? And that their enjoyment of that music was, basically, ok?

I actually think he himself derived some pleasure from jazz and Hollywood movies and whatever else he was picking on. In general, though, he was critiquing much larger structures than just, say, the demon jazz. He was asking: how much of our lives are untainted by capitalist rationalization? And if we can uncover an untainted portion, has that been brought into existence the labors of others operating within capitalist rationalization?

So I think the problem is less the enjoyment of music than enjoying it earnestly. I would imagine he would find earnestness a suspect concept in a capitalist economic system.

Basically, there's no escape. "Only by subordinating all branches of intellectual production equally to the single purpose of imposing on the senses of human beings, from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock on in the morning, the imprint of the work routine which they must sustain throughout the day, does this culture mockingly fulfill the notion of a unified culture which the philosophers of the individual personality held out against mass culture."

So, like, indie fans who think they are expressing something unique about themselves by listening to Panda Bear aren't escaping this hegemony either. It is total and all-encompassing (and I personally see this as relating to his Understanding Endgame). There's a depressing finale when you realize that this is everything.

has that been brought into existence THROUGH the labors of others operating within capitalist rationalization?
xxpost or something

And yeah, I agree. Maybe he enjoyed some of this stuff, but the hegemony is the problem. It's not doing anything courageous. And I haven't read anything where he moved past that.

Personally, I disagree with Adorno. A part of my thesis is that while Adorno was looking at the production and distribution of pop culture, we need to look at its reception and performance. Look at how people take it and use/reuse it. Not at how it's originally intended. How do people subvert the hegemony with the pop culture it produces.

OK, good answer(s --xpost). In that I'm having a difficult time phrasing where I want to go from there.

I guess I want to start by saying: I find his worry about being "tainted by capitalist rationalization" to be similar to, and about as misguided as, worries over "selling out".

(I used "earnest" because in "Fetish-character" he specifically makes the [ridiculous?] claim that people don't actually *like* the "light music" they're being "forcefed".)

Right. The "no escape" part is crucial. Is NOT listening to Panda Bear an option? And by this, I don't mean, listening to Animal Collective or Britney Spears or whatever instead. IS there a different relationship to music besides listening to records (mp3s or whatnot), going to live shows, posting on ILM, etc.?

some xposts

XP Well, I think he's talking about two different kinds of "like." I'm sure he'd say those people think they like the music their being forcefed, but honestly how could they?

And I don't think "selling out" is similar. Adorno doesn't think anyone is outside the reach of the Capitalist hegemony. Nirvana was just as much a product of the Capitalist structure before they were signed to a major label as after. When Kurt was writing music in his living room, he was writing it in the context of the structure. Selling Out may have anti-Capitalist connotations, but I suspect Adorno would say that the term is misguided in that it only critiques the individual, not the system.

If anything, the term "Selling Out" actually feeds into the hegemony by creating safe rebellions for people. They can rebel from certain personifications of Capitalism (the big bad, evil record label) while safely remaining within the structure. It's a red herring.

Yes, exactly. Selling out would have meant nothing to Adorno.

I find his worry about being "tainted by capitalist rationalization" to be similar to, and about as misguided as, worries over "selling out".

Forget music for a bit and think of your own life. Are there areas of your life untainted by capitalist rationalization? Even something as intimate as the sex you have. Is it really all that intimate and unique?

You don't have to actually answer these, of course.

Actually, your problem without "selling out" might be Adorno's problem. You (I'm assuming) think it's silly because there's no difference before selling out and afterward. And Adorno would say the same.

But I think that if you think there's no difference because Capitalism doesn't do anything to art, so it doesn't matter if you're selling out, that you should relook at Adorno's argument. Because I think it's pretty clear that Capitalism does something to art. The question is what, and whether Adorno is actually correct that it can't be subverted.

Why would sex be unique? And why would that have more to do with "capitalism" rather than, say, "genetics"? And do you [does Adorno] really want to suggest that pre-capitalist sex was more intimate, more unique? Because, uh.

"Something".

I left it intentionally vague. Adorno has his argument for what Capitalism does to art. I'm asking whether you think it has any effect or not. Your equally vague anti"selling out" argument implies that you don't think it has any effect.

I'm not even convinced it's a grammatical question! (In the Wittgensteinian sense.)

To ask plainly, do you, Casuistry, believe that there's a relationship between Capitalism and art. And if there is one, what is it?

Like I said, Adorno gives his answer. You need to decide whether you agree with it.

I think that those are both far too vague ideas to tie together systematically. I think art exists in a wide, wide variety of different contexts, and that capitalism manifests itself in a wide variety of different ways, and that suggesting there is any direct connection between one megaconcept "capitalism" and one megaconcept "art" is -- well, I want to say willfully naive and detached from messiness of individual lives, but, ok, that's much too strongly phrased.

"Vague" isn't the word I wanted there. "Broad".

Why would sex be unique?

"Unique" was probably a poor word choice. But most people tend to think of sex as an intimate, private, um, exchange carrying no suggestions of an "outside," public world or economic system or whatever.

And why would that have more to do with "capitalism" rather than, say, "genetics"?

When do you have sex? Where do you have it? With whom? And do any of your answers bear absolutely no trace of capitalist rationalization?

And do you [does Adorno] really want to suggest that pre-capitalist sex was more intimate, more unique? Because, uh.

Actually, Adorno's views on pre-capitalist life are some of the things that piss me off the most because it sometimes seems he would have preferred, say, serfdom to being a pawn of the culture industry.

Again, there are no right or wrong answers here and I'm certainly not demanding answers from you. They're just thinking points.

And I'm not exempting myself from these questions either. I ask them all the time.

XXP Well, for Adorno, and for many, many, many post-Marxist scholars, a Capitalist society occurs as a sort of hegemony for the people living in it. They live their lives differently because the hegemony is in place. Maybe they devalue humanity and see things in terms of value/worth. Or maybe art becomes devalued as art and becomes only its economic worth. I mean, there are a lot of Marxist and post-Marxist scholars and lots of discussion about this. Saying peoples lives are "messy," doesn't really speak to this hegemony. Maybe you don't believe there's a hegemony. Maybe you think that the economic structure doesn't matter at all. But to just dismiss it suggests that you just aren't familiar with the arguments involved.

I'm sorry if this seems vague. If you're looking for texts to look at, I could recommend some.

I think there are always many hegemonies, of varying scales, and with varying effects, etc. But, always! Capitalism isn't special in that regard.

This is my favorite pic of Adorno:

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3409/527/1600/adorno_c.jpg

Assuming that the headphone wire rests naked in his pocket, attached to nothing, I think this photo perfectly sums up the probably doomed position of Adorno in a capitalist society.

Well, Cas, you're trying to argue against Adorno when you're really arguing against the entire premise. Adorno feels there /is/ something special about Capitalism and that it creates this particular kind of hegemony. And he's not alone.

It's sort of like arguing against Freud because you don't believe there's a subconsciousness. Like, okay? This is the model Adorno is using.

I'm not saying you're not entitled (or whatever). I mean, like I said above, my thesis is directly taking aim at a number of Adorno's premises. But if you want to discuss Adorno, to an extent you need to speak in his language. He's a tool to use (like Deleuze, or Foucault, or whomever).

Well, I agree that he's a tool.

</cheap shot>

Kevin, maybe you can help with this. I was talking to a friend who was telling me that most Adorno scholars today (like Zuidervaart maybe, or Habermas) see Adorno's radical critique - like in MM - as the first step to a restoration of damaged life. That's not actually total dystopia, but that in acknowledging the dystopia, a road will open up. The first question is 'how,' but I'm sorta confused about this works with Adorno's reading of Endgame (which seems hopelessly dystopian to me - with no possibility of redemption).

(I'm off to bed now; thanks for the discussion.)

I haven't read Adorno's reading of Endgame. Where does it appear?

But I can definitely see MM as a series of attempts to restore a damaged life. I'm pulling this out of my ass but:

I haven't read Endgame itself in eons. But IIRC, the duration of the play is pointless in the sense that the characters (and the audience, presumably) already know the outcome. But you have to endure to get to that outcome. So yes, very dystopic. Where Adorno and MM might come in his theorizing a different way to endure, to not play the game the way it's always been played.

And here I'm thinking of 36. "The Health Unto Death" and 38. "Invitation to the dance" from MM. Both critique "healthy" outlooks on life and suggest a kind of anti-socialization as an open road through dystopia. And given the very little I know about Beckett's personality, I'd say he embodied anti-socialization quite effectively.

P.S. "Totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together." Minima Moralia, p. 46.

P.P.S. I was reading Minima Moralia on the bus and a guy asked me about its style (apparently he saw it over my shoulder). Cruising?

Where Adorno and MM might come in IS his theorizing

P.P.S. I was reading Minima Moralia on the bus and a guy asked me about its style (apparently he saw it over my shoulder). Cruising?

lol.

And yeah, I considered that myself; that refusing to endure Endgame in the regular ways leads to redemption. But apparently that's not exactly it. Apparently Adorno would say you need all of Endgame to see how bad things are, and in recognizing that, after the play is over, you can begin to redeem. I just don't understand how/why that works.

And I'm not sure where else it is, but you can read Understanding Endgame on Jstor.

I'm not smart enough for this thread, but my main objection to Adorno and the Frankfurt School is their belief in a top-bottom model of cultural production and reception, giving consumers little to no agency in being able to define or transform what they receive.

Oh wait, I only skimmed the last few posts and didn't see that Mordy said basically the same thing here:

Personally, I disagree with Adorno. A part of my thesis is that while Adorno was looking at the production and distribution of pop culture, we need to look at its reception and performance. Look at how people take it and use/reuse it. Not at how it's originally intended. How do people subvert the hegemony with the pop culture it produces.

Are you familiar with studies like Ien Ang's Watching Dallas and Janice Radway's Reading the Romance? Those effectively demonstrate the limits of Adorno's theories on culture.

I'm not, jay, but I'll check them out. Should I read both of them?

I've read both but know the Radway very well. I think it's an absolutely brilliant, gawd-I-wish-I-wrote-it book. That said, I have no doubt Adorno would have laughed both of them off. Because at the end of the day (itself a phrase Adorno would have questioned), the one option people watching Dallas or reading the romance never exercise is to not watch/read at all. So it matters not a whit if people are reading against the grain or reusing culture in a way not originally intended. They're using the products of the culture industry. In fact, in these two instances, they're using products that spotlight the assembly line nature of industrial capitalist culture production.

Also, the women Radway studied aren't so much reading against the grain as they are making articulate choices amongst the books available to them. But again, for Adorno, the problem precedes the choice making anyway.

The Ang is much more about reading against the grain.

Hmmm. The Ang seems a bit more relevant to what I'm doing tho. I'm assuming that in both cases, tho, the audience is not challenging the actual production system in their reception/performance? (That's my argument in my thesis - that there's a way of using/reusing these productions that actually subverts and challenges the system that produced them.)

You're assuming correctly. And wow! I'd love to read your thesis when you're done.

I'll post a link when it's done. It's very relevant to ILM, actually. I'm using contemporary music as the model.

Personally, I disagree with Adorno. A part of my thesis is that while Adorno was looking at the production and distribution of pop culture, we need to look at its reception and performance. Look at how people take it and use/reuse it. Not at how it's originally intended. How do people subvert the hegemony with the pop culture it produces.

i dont know that much about this end of whatever-you-want-to-call-it (continental philosophy? 'theory'?) but this sounds a lot like the 70s cult-studies stuff from britain--dick hebdige and stuart hall.

i might be wrong tho.

Yeah... that stuff was subculture studies. And I'm doing Pop Culture. In some ways, cult-studies has the same problems that the "selling out" argument does. It doesn't really engage with the overwhelmingness of Adorno's argument.

This is my favorite pic of Adorno:

http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3409/527/1600/adorno_c.jpg

Assuming that the headphone wire rests naked in his pocket, attached to nothing, I think this photo perfectly sums up the probably doomed position of Adorno in a capitalist society.

According to a prof I worked with in grad school the image is a forgery — he was considering using it as the cover to this book, but then apparently the publisher discovered the original without the headphones. Producing an image that attaches Adorno to a technology of which he must undoubtedly have had suspicions (even if he liked his stereo opera LPs) seems like an attempt to induce that sense of futility.

Really interesting thread. Good luck with the thesis, Mordy.

I'm pretty sure I've seen that photo of Adorno but without the headphones. it looks totally fake to me.

But it would make perfect sense if the headphones were attached to nothing.

So, Minima Moralia, the section Tough Baby (#24), Adorno systematically connects totalitarianism with homosexuality, homosexuality with passivity, passivity with femininity, homosexual pleasure with sadomasochism. He suggests that people (well, men) (well, men gaining power, though also Oxford students) become "polarized" between macho tough guy (secret homosexual totalitarians) and intellectuals who are not macho and thus read as homosexual (but are secret heterosexual freedom-lovers). Homosexuality is read as performed by a "strong man" onto a "compliant youth". And he maps this onto tough guy tastes, such as cigars or whiskey, which are repugnant at first, but whose pleasures he can only interpret as a remembrance of getting past that initial repugnance [read: the pleasure in getting fucked anally must only come from the thrill of having made it past the pain of getting fucked].

So, OK, this seems plenty homophobic, designed to create a category of abomination (the homosexual) and suggest that the wrong people have been assigned to this category.

But perhaps more damning than that: This doesn't map up to how people talk about enjoying cigars, or whiskey, or for that matter receptive anal sex (though there was less discourse on this pleasure at the time -- though not none!). The types of pleasures that those who enjoy such things describe don't match up to a model where pleasure only comes from remembering past triumphs over unpleasantness; the actual pleasures taken are too nuanced, and make distinctions in quantity and quality that are very difficult to account for under this model.

And it seems like if he'd only listened to how other people were describing their pleasures, he wouldn't have thunk his way into this mess, into this gross inaccuracy! Which, as I tried to get at above, is the feeling whenever I read Adorno.

Are you familiar with studies like Ien Ang's Watching Dallas

Very nice book but it let me down a tiny bit. :-( I agree with most of what she said, but in a sense it lacked...The writing seemed a bit wishwashy. :-(

"I'll post a link when it's done"

YES PLEASE. I had a printed out thesis (from some link) which dealt with the same things but I lost it. :-((((((((

So, Minima Moralia, the section Tough Baby (#24),

But Casuistry, I already quoted from "Tough Baby" above. No one's denying the man wrote some repugnant shit nor that he had no feel for reception studies. And right, equating passivity with femininity with negativity is waaay problematic. But really, is his argument here ALL that different from the "homophobic jocks are really repressed homosexuals" arguments we've all made at times?

Maybe you should set Adorno aside and if you haven't already, read Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music, particularly the chapter on "Repetition." That's Adorno-lite which means not that the arguments are watered-down but rather they're more calmly stated, e.g. he doesn't call people "organisms."

(You weren't one the people arguing that homophobia wasn't there.)

But all right, is his argument that different? Well, for one thing, that argument is a bullshit argument, used as a blunt weapon or perhaps as wish-fulfillment. It's one of those arguments you can throw around for funsies but -- I dunno, I guess some people believe it; it seems obviously wrong and unworkable.

So maybe you're saying I'm misreading Adorno, and he's just being funsies here?

I don't really have any problem with calling people "organisms".

No, you're not misreading him. I think in Adorno's case it's being used as a blunt weapon and not for funsies. I also think he's aligning himself with the Oxford intellectual boys who most likely got picked on by the tough guys. This is his revenge, of sorts.

Is it a bullshit argument? Probably. Still, when reading it I can't help but think of how James Bond and Clint Eastwood work. And as someone who doesn't smoke and hates most non-girl drink alcohol, I've always wondered about smokers/drinkers' initial contact with the stuff - did they cough and gag? how long did it take to stop coughing and gagging? were they in the presence of others during this process? and why did they keep at it if they coughed and gagged in the first place?

But use that argument on Adorno's thick prose style.

I.e., it's only through coughing and gagging that you know you're truly breathing! Not passively inhaling the clear, thoughtless air given to us by nature to keep us entrenched in the natural system -- the very same air that animals breathe!

Actually, his prose style is a self-conscious attempt to instantiate his ideas on commodity capitalism, ratio, whatnot. Take, for example, this line from "Tough baby":

"If all pleasure has, preserved within it, earlier pain, then here pain, as pride in bearing it, is raised directly, untransformed, as a stereotype, to pleasure."

Most editors/authors would have cut out the parenthetical-type expressions so it reads more clearly: "If all pleasure has earlier pain, then here pain is raised directly to pleasure." Or they would have rearranged the words to enhance the clarity: "If all pleasure has earlier pain preserved within it, then here pride in bearing pain is raised directly to pleasure, untransformed, as a stereotype."

But Adorno doesn't want something sound bitey and easily grasped like the culture industry would produce.* He wants you to work through it which is why he puts up all those roadblocks before you get to the predicate.

Granted, this is a translation. But I took a Frankfurt School seminar taught by a German professor (where part of the time we read Adorno as literature if you can imagine that!) and I'm told that most English translations preserve the original difficulty (which is why I've always wondered about the relative clarity of his 1941 essay "On Popular Music").

* Yes, yes, his book is necessarily a product of the culture industry too. Contradictions. What to do? What to do?

"pride in bearing pain is raised directly to pleasure, untransformed, as a stereotype."

Actually, that does change the meaning slightly. But you get my drift.

That, indeed, would be the whole point of my last pair of comments, using this line of thought to air (or pleasure) that you have to "work to get".

And I can only imagine reading Adorno as literature, is the thing.

Mordy I have always had problems getting over the "capitalist hegemony" hump in reading this kind of stuff. I do want to understand the attraction of the idea so I can appreciate Adorno etc more. So yes, please recommend texts.

(It's not so much that I don't understand what they mean, as that I can't agree with the concept of the hegemony as an all-encompassing, inescapable prison whose tentacles etc etc. But as I say, I do want to be able to think that way at least temporarily ...)

been reading minima moralia on-off for most of a month now

would make a great book-club choice

I just turned in my thesis w/r/t Adorno (which I was talking about here 7 months ago). If there's still an interest in people reading it, let me know and I'll try to figure out a way to clandestinely distribute it to interested ILXers. I think it turned out really nicely, kinda a cybertheory + music crit + Frankfurt School hybrid.

http://69.175.59.226/~cinesta1/images/uploads/Adorno.jpg

He can smile!

mordy I wld read your thesis

don't really get the 'adorno smiling' mean

there are photos of HITLER smiling too

yeah your mind is going to unblow itself now

no one ever claimed that Hitler was incapable of trivial things like 'pleasure', innit.

girl on the right looks kinda kitschy - good think Teddy's got his eye on the girl on the left

don't really get the 'adorno smiling' mean

cuz the guy wrote some of the most dismal books of the twentieth century.

Teddy kinda hated everything - Alfred OTM

he didn't hate Paul Celan!!!

i like him alright but then i hate everything

"dour" is not a slam (Minima Moralia is one of my touchstones), but, boy, was he granitic.

O

he obviously does not hate the blond next to him

On the cover sleeve of my copy of MM, Adorno is shown playing a piano, wearing an expression like he's just been told he has to step on dead babies for the next twelve hours.

i like him alright but then i hate everything

― the girl with the butt tattoo (harbl), Wednesday, August 4, 2010 7:27 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha i have to say adorno is one of the few humanities favorites who survived my grad school education and i think it is because i dig his grouchiness

foxy blondes love it when I point out that all my happiness comes in the perception of misery.

picture taken before Teddy told her how he feels about jazz and Cadillacs

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Adorno-Revolutionaries-Ben-Watson/dp/0956817602

tempted by this new addition to the 'Adorno industry'.

reading and pondering adorno's "committment" essay where he makes a distinction between committed art (social realism, art with a political message) and autonomous art (beckett, kafka, in film terms i guess he would mean lynch and cronenberg). Basically committed art sucks as it ony sets up false dichotomies and presents to the reader/viewer a set of names to be responsible for the ills of work under capitalism. whereas autonomous art rules as its so disruptive and beyond-the-pale. so basically any movie which tries to highlight or depict human rights issues (any committed art) is flawed. as horribly fatalist as that all sounds, theres a grim recognition as its hard to think of any literature or film on human rights issues that doesnt categorise, moralise or instigate some smug self-satisfaction in the viewer/reader.

yeah, i think that's right. he doesn't have any interest in didactic literature. it's so hard in adorno's Weltanschauung to create any art outside the all-consuming context of capitalism that the very rare opportunities where it happens (kafka/beckett) are so completely foreign to the system. even a critique of capitalism participates in capitalism and there's no resistance from within the system - only co-option. but these metaphysical/post-apocolyptic/post-historical visions of humanity operate on a different axis (which is why communism works too, i guess, since it doesn't critique capitalism so much as establish an imagined utopian community after the end of capitalism).

FYI mordy somebody started a marxism thread over the weekend that you never commented on Psychoanalysis and Marxism as incompatible, warring schools.

i guess im trying to think of examples that contradict adorno's stance. godard's "weekend" is an example of both committed and autonomous art, for example. to think that having any political message at all is inherently flawed is quite depressing tbh

i don't think this is 'pure' adorno but i've always felt that his philosophy needn't be so total looking at objects and even a piece participating in capitalism can have an element or location of resistance, so something could be flawed in its political engagements and still have areas that are revolutionary. i like hal foster's 'punctum' a place in the object where the real slips through the screen; he connects it to lacan's pun 'troumatic' trou (hole) + trauma - that the shock brings the real back. i think such an idea is easily incorporated in a culture industry crit.

and thx dayo - i saw that thread but i really didn't have anything interesting to add. obv per my post ^ i don't think psychoanalysis needs to conflict w/ marxism and they can fruitfully intermingle etc.

Doesn't the idea that "political" or "message" art is compromised predate Adorno or am I wrong?

i think his thought was partially responding to ppl like benjamin who felt that the primary conflict was between fascism that aestheticized politics and communism that politicized art. adorno had other problems w/ benjamin too, acc to martin jay he felt 'aura' was compromised by fascist romanticism itself. in a general sense adorno is just much more skeptical about the ability of anything ever to resist capitalism. i think this is a different take than someone who says that the purity of art is compromised by having a 'message,' not to mention bc adorno would obviously balk at the term purity.

It turns out I had that essay in a book on my shelf – I'm going to read it now – I'm kneejerk inclined to agree with it because I watched The Constant Gardener recently

Can committed art be timeless?

Also dumb Cardamon wants to know if Sartre was in favour of commitment in art?

Off to read essay

idk maybe read this and report back: http://www.sunypress.edu/p-4442-sartre-and-adorno.aspx

i found it for u :)

Besides the essay “Commitment,” in which Adorno attacks Sartre’s argument for the committed writer in What Is Literature?,3 his most sus- tained treatment of Sartre’s philosophy is a three-page subsection in Negative Dialectics titled “Existentialism.” Adorno contends here that Sartre’s philosophy dishonors his own literature, for unlike his plays (such as The Flies and The Respectful Prostitute), which shed light on the cruelty of an unfree reality, Sartre’s philosophy honors an unreal free- dom: it “raises the inevitable, the sheer existence of men, to the status of a mentality in which the individual is to choose, without his choice being determined by any reason, and without there really being another choice” (ND, p. 51). Despite its pretenses, therefore, Sartre’s existential- ism collapses into the idealistic view that subjectivity is “the sole sub- stantial being,” and that social conditions hardly do more than provide it with an occasion for the exercise of its putative autonomy (ND, p. 50).

chapter goes on to claim adorno is reusing a criticism of kierkagaard and that it is a bit unfairly pointed towards sartre, partic

As an initial matter, there is no “severance of the subject,” accord- ing to the teachings of Being and Nothingness, because the subject is inextricably a part of the world. As we shall come to see in greater detail, Sartre’s concept of “being-for-itself,” which refers to the subject, and is characterized by the intentional nature of translucent conscious- ness, is surely distinguished from the empirical self, which is “out in the world.” But, as Sartre plainly states, the subject, although not the empirical self, must nevertheless live this self “in the mode of not being it.” Far from being “hypostatized,” as Adorno states, the subject’s inex- orable freedom, the consequense of its ability “to put its past out of play by secreting its own nothingness” (B&N, p. 64)

xpost what about the scene in "battle of algiers" (committed art f'sure) where the french commander is questioned about his methods towards activists/terrorists and he fires back at them saying (roughly paraphrasing here) "do you want algeria to remain french?" and is met with a roomful of silence. suddenly, hes not the stereotypical bad guy anymore and its the silence of the journalists that seems more chilling and condemnable than any methods he uses as hes just a cog in the hegemonic machine. is this an example of the "punctum", you are referring to upthread perhaps, mordy?

maybe, i can't speak w/ expertise to the particular example but i think it's important to differentiate between adding a new wrinkle to the already existing dialectic + what adorno is looking for which is immense and powerful and hard to describe. here is how he writes about beckett in 'understanding endgame':

The catastrophies that inspireEndgarnehave exploded the individual whose substantiality and absoluteness was the common element between Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and the Sartrian version of existentialism. Even to the concentration camp victims, existentialism had attributed the freedom either inwardly to accept or reject the inflicted martyrdom. Endgame destroys such illusions. The individual as a historical category, as the result of the captalist process of alienation and as a defiant protest against it, has itself become openly transitory. The individualist position belonged, as polar opposite, to the ontological tendency of every existentialism, even that of Being and Time. Beckett's dramaturgy abandons it like an obsolete bunker. In its narroumcss and contingency, individual experience could nowhere locate the authority to interpret itself as a cipher of being, unless it pronounced itself the fundamentally characteristic of being. Precisely that, however, is untrue. The immediacy of individuation was deceptive: what particular human experience clings to is mediated, determined. Endgame insinuates that the individual's claim of autonomy and of being has become incredible. But while the prison of individuation is revealed as a prison and simultaneously as mere semblance - the stage scenery is the image of such self-reflection-, art is unable to release the spell of fragmented subjectivity; it can only depict solipsism.

so maybe the revelation that the french commander's autonomy is false could operate as a 'punctum' in this sense, but a condemnation of the journalists seems like a quick elision of said lacuna?

In the early 1960s, when there was a lively interest in cinema theory in Europe, Lang's work was eagerly discussed among cineastes in publications ranging from the Cahiers du cinéma in Paris to the Frankfurt Filmstudio. After his return to Europe he frequently visited Adorno. At around this time there was a discussion with the young film empiricists in which Adorno found himself defending the aesthetic autonomy of Lang's approach to cinema. Lang, who was interested in the young people's opinions, took their side against Adorno. Both men wished to influence the younger generation. Adorno's assistant Regina Becker-Schmidt tells a nice story about these discussions. On one occasion Adorno was arguing with Lang about whether Ingmar Bergman's film The Silence was pornographic. When Becker-Schmidt was asked for her opinion, she sided with Adorno. Lang said there was nothing surprising in that since the young lady was Adorno's assistant, whereupon Adorno lost his temper, saying, "Since she is my student, she is capable of thinking for herself and has her own ideas." In a rage, Adorno grabbed his hat and coat, but unfortunately they were Lang's, not his own. "He then presented a comic sight. The hat was much too large and slipped down over his ears; the coat was far too long and Adorno's hands and arms disappeared inside them. Adorno looked at them in bafflement, but then—still furious—he shouted: 'And I suppose you think I have identified with you just because I am wearing your hat!' Everyone collapsed in laughter, and peace was restored."

ha!

^_^

<3

the more recent brown-paper cover edition of 'minima moralia' (same as the rest of the 'radical thinkers' verso series currently) has a different subtitle than the old black-cover edition (where the subtitle is only in the front matter): 'reflections from a damaged life' rather than 'reflections from damaged life'. i don't have the newer one, but based on pdfs it looks like it's otherwise a straight up reprint of the older edition. is there anything in it, or on it, to indicate that they did any updating in any way, apart from the subtitle?

I saw this film over the weekend, which has a fair amount of Adorno-based voiceover.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/the-vanquishing-of-the-witch-baba-yaga

what was the sign that it was adorno-based, did the narrator sound particularly cranky

the MoMA audience went to sleep?

As far as I know, there aren't any textual changes to the 'radical thinkers' Minima Moralia besides the subtitle (and the original phrase is Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, so translating "dem" as "a" seems slightly misleading).

maybe it preserved their copyright to change it lol

They have reacted testily to A...... dot org! I don't think there's any rights issue with this, but I'm still disappointed that the Hullot-Kentor Negative Dialectics hasn't materialized.

yeah i thought that was just eternally not done?

J, both editions of Minima Moralia are identical.

Well if its the same translator (EFN Jephcott)...

How do people engage w/Minima..? A few entries now and then or do you feel you ned to finish once you start? I will be giving this another once over as I know of/have read much more German Literature and culture.

old translations not uncommonly become 'updated'

I tend to approach Minima Moralia like Nietzsche's more aphoristic books or like, um, One-Way Street--I'll dip into MM if there's a particular section that's relevant to a concept I'm thinking about, but otherwise I try to read it through for the sake of the connections between the individual sections. I also think you don't need to have that much grounding in German literature and culture to approach that text, although it helps if you can keep in mind the general historical situation in which it was written, as well as some of Adorno's earlier debates with Benjamin.

Minima Moralia does lend itself to being read by picking a section at random much more than do any of Adorno's other books, of course.

i've never studied adorno closely, i read him in an undergrad course and intermittently since then. MM always struck me as attractive, alluring to read, but kind of impenetrable as a book. so many layers and twists of irony and negativity. but recently i've started reading it more seriously, with a better sense of what's going on, and wouldn't you know, it seems like i owe it partly to being more cultured - being able to catch all the insinuations and allusions and such, just so that individual aphorisms exhibit the appropriate tension and cohere, seem to be meaningful (even if you're not sure how, in detail). in some ways it's almost nothing BUT allusions.

i'm interested in hellenistic philosophy a la hadot, so i have been gratified to see how much of the text falls into place when read with that in mind - adorno even alludes to that conception of philosophy in the dedication, and addresses it intermittently in the book (often tied up with his concern with the intellectual division of labor and the possibility of amateur/non-academic intellectuals). same at the beginning of the essay 'why still philosophy?'. my early experience of adorno made his high-culture mandarinism seem like it HAD to be utterly a product of academia/scholarly life, so i guess it seemed remote from my imagination that he could think of himself, or be, more of a marginal/outsider figure as i would have actually preferred.

the other night i was skimming a bit of lydia goehr's intro to 'critical models', and i was a little chastened to find some details about the extent of his wordplay and allusiveness in the original german. i can do ok on a basic level making sense out of some german, and with philosophy it's always easier because the vocabulary is so limited and the syntax of individual sentences is usually intended to be fairly logical, but i don't try with MM - the text is way too much for me. so to find that it's MORE so…

I don't read MM randomly so much as I read it thematically, I guess you could say. I might take a spin through MM scanning for "music" or "visual art" or whatever is in my head at the time. MM is not really something I've ever read all the way through from cover to cover. I tend to pick up on different things each time. I read some sections often, others I can say I've never ever read. It's not really so much a book as a scrying apparatus that you look into in order to see your own reflection more clearly, or else something else becomes reflected. Either way.

Just now I found it on my shelf (the "brown" Verso edition, identical to the other edition) and decided to start at the start, "For Marcel Proust," which I hadn't given particular notice to before. The theme I had picked out in my head before even opening it is "working life" and I found it right there on the first page. (I think I'm going to print it out and put it on my office wall, which ultimately might damage my reputation further in the corporate world.)

Dialectic of Enlightenment is still the book that ruined my life.

the Verso paperback looks as scary as -- of all things -- Mein Kampf.

That's a deeply saddening comparison. I will soothe my spirits with thoughts of Teddie at the beach:
http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ldgdwjmweV1qcumcb.jpg

wonder of Moravia and Bertolucci had his line connecting homosexuality and totalitarianism in mind.

With the necessary lengthy gloss:

100. Sur l'eau [French: at sea]. To the question of the goal of an emancipated society, one receives answers such as the fulfillment of human possibilities or the richness of life. As illegitimate as the inevitable question may be, so inevitable is the repulsive, out-trumping response, which recalls to mind the social democratic personality-ideal of the heavily bearded naturalists of the 1890s, who wanted to live it up. Tenderness would be solely what is most crude: that no-one should starve any longer. Anything else would apply, to a condition which ought to be determined by human needs, a human behavior which is formed on the model of production as its own purpose. The utopian image of the unrestricted, energetic, creative human being has been infiltrated by the commodity fetishism, which in bourgeois society brings with it inhibition, powerlessness, the sterility of monotony. The concept of dynamics, which complements bourgeois “ahistoricity,” is raised to something absolute, while it nevertheless, as the anthropological reflex of the laws of production, must be critically confronted in the emancipated society with need. The idea of unfettered doing, of uninterrupted creating, of chubby-cheeked insatiability, of freedom as intense activity, feeds on the bourgeois concept of nature, which from time immemorial has served to proclaim social violence as irrevocable, as a piece of healthy eternity. It was due to this and not any presumed equalization that the positive designs of socialism, against which Marx bristled, remained in barbarism. What is to be feared is not the slackening of humanity in a life of luxury, but rather the dessicated expansion of what, in the guise of the all-natural, is social – the collectivity as the blind rage of making. The naively mandated unambiguity of the tendency of development towards the raising of production is itself a piece of that bourgeois nature (Bürgerlichkeit), which permits development only in one direction, because, integrated into the totality, ruled by quantification, it is hostile to the qualitative difference. If one thinks of the emancipated society as one emancipated precisely from such a totality, then alignments become visible, which have little in common with the raising of production and its human mirror-images. If uninhibited people are by no means the most pleasant, and are not even the freest, then the society which freed itself of its fetters, could arrive at the thought that even the productive forces are not the final substrate of human beings, but are rather the historically specific form of these last under commodity production. Perhaps the true society would become bored with development, and would out of freedom leave possibilities unused, instead of storming alien stars under a confused compulsion. What would begin to dawn on a humanity, which no longer knew urgent necessity (Not: necessity, privation), is just how delusory and futile all the arrangements hitherto created to escape privation (Not) have been – arrangements which used wealth to reproduce privation (Not) on an expanded scale. Enjoyment itself would be touched by this, just as its contemporary schema cannot be separated from industriousness, planning, imposing one’s will, subjugation. Rien faire comme une bête (French: Doing nothing, like an animal), lying on the water and look peacefully into the heavens, “being, nothing else, without any further determination and fulfillment” might step in place of process, doing, fulfilling, and so truly deliver the promise of dialectical logic, of culminating in its origin. None of the abstract concepts comes closer to the fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. Onlookers of progress such as Maupassant and Sternheim have helped to express this intention, shyly, in the only manner the fragility of the latter permits.

I wouldn't be surprised! That bullshit shows up in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as well.

xp

Though I should say that Adorno's comments on homosexuality in "Sexual Taboos and Law Today" were relatively progressive for 1963.

And the line in MM is more accurately translated as "totality and homosexuality belong together," which admittedly isn't that much better.

which translation you using?

i feel that when reading minima moralia and feeling the bitter truth of its incessant negativity it is important to remember that

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BSXLAnQIgAAqEgF.jpg

the bit on chubby insatiability gets me every time

Dialectic of Enlightenment is still the book that ruined my life.

― fields of salmon, Wednesday, October 22, 2014 5:51 PM (1 hour ago)

yeah, for real, before i was a philosopher i was a mathematician/arts person, and as i switched into philosophy this was one of the books i first encountered, and struggled to make even elementary sentence-to-sentence-level sense of, and even though i came away from that and into graduate school with a different orientation, somehow i picked up and kind of was fond of their views about enlightenment reason, and more than that just their contention that all of the shit they normally care about has to matter for philosophers, to an everything-about-our-practice-(as-intellectuals)-must-be-different extent, that won't be content with the kind of compartmentalization and self-inflicted uselessification that academia otherwise encourages / requires as a condition of entrance. so that i'm kind of very quietly constantly low-level nagged by my sense that whatever i'm doing, i'm not doing it enough like -that-.

(and i've already got enough of that shit gnawing at my every waking intellectual moment from my ACTUAL core concerns.)

For those of use not completely familiar what does the word 'totality' in "totality and homosexuality belong together" really mean (or how would A have been using it).

Alfred, I'm using the Dennis Redmond translation (available online). xyzzzz__, the original line is "Totalität und Homosexualität gehören zusammen." (The German for totalitarianism would be "Totalitarismus" or "Totale herrschaft.") I think totality there means basically the socioeconomic order in its normative and systemic form (Adorno's examples throughout the section are American, not German), but he also has in mind both Hegel's notion of totality, which he criticizes in the introduction to MM for too quickly sublating the singular, as well as Lukacs's emphasis on totality as the orienting principle of Marxist thought, as well as the traditional philosophical privilege given to what is purportedly universal, systemic, the higher unity arising from an internally conflicted social body. Throughout that section of MM, "24. Tough Baby," Adorno is trying to shift focus away from homosexuality as a mode of queer identity and practice to look at the structuring role of homosocial male bonds and repressed homoeroticism in normative (heterosexual) masculinity, so that "repressed homosexuality [...] emerges as the only approved form of what is heterosexual". However, Adorno does so in a way that's easily read as straightforwardly homophobic (I would say that the passage for the purposes of its rhetoric presumes a reader who views homosexuality as "unnatural"), and the passage relies on really problematic assumptions about homoeroticism being necessarily tied to unequal power relations, rather than having the potential to disrupt or displace heteronormative modes of domination. As Alfred points out, similar assumptions, as well as Adorno's influence, inform late 60s/70s left representations of fascism that personify fascist domination in the queer man and/or sadist (Moravia, Bertolucci, Pynchon, arguably Pasolini in Salo). So I don't want to defend Adorno here, and I usually need to look outside the Frankfurt School (except maybe for Marcuse) to think about gender and sexuality.

yeah, for real, before i was a philosopher i was a mathematician/arts person, and as i switched into philosophy this was one of the books i first encountered, and struggled to make even elementary sentence-to-sentence-level sense of, and even though i came away from that and into graduate school with a different orientation, somehow i picked up and kind of was fond of their views about enlightenment reason, and more than that just their contention that all of the shit they normally care about has to matter for philosophers, to an everything-about-our-practice-(as-intellectuals)-must-be-different extent, that won't be content with the kind of compartmentalization and self-inflicted uselessification that academia otherwise encourages / requires as a condition of entrance. so that i'm kind of very quietly constantly low-level nagged by my sense that whatever i'm doing, i'm not doing it enough like -that-.

(and i've already got enough of that shit gnawing at my every waking intellectual moment from my ACTUAL core concerns.)

― j., Wednesday, October 22, 2014 7:42 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

j. otm--I'm not a philosopher, I just work on literature, and have been shedding my last ties to the university, but Adorno acts as a bad conscience for me too. <3 and solidarity with your "ACTUAL core concerns"!

(Well, the examples throughout "Tough Baby" are Anglo-American, more precisely--Oxford is his main example of a closed homosocial order.)

(Also, Martin Jay's Marxism and Totality is fairly thorough about the history of the concept of totality before and throughout Marxist intellectual history, including a lengthy chapter on Adorno.)

(several xps)

well THAT'S not the kind of error one likes to hear about in a translation

http://books.google.com/books?id=TcurmCHEKmIC&pg=PT148&lpg=PT148&dq=adorno+totality+and+homosexuality+belong+together&source=bl&ots=-QWo_AQqQQ&sig=IrSSmMxhQxScb-GtPZOsJUElwAA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ESFJVKGuCYi3yASZtoCwDg&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=adorno%20totality%20and%20homosexuality%20belong%20together&f=false

adorno tends to link totality to the social totality, the way that society as a whole contingently is and operates; and thereby to the image of that totality that people operate with, try to compel others to conform to, etc (along liberal individualist lines of the sort you can find in emerson, thoreau, nietzsche, mill), all this thought of especially in terms of processes of privilege, dominance, oppression, repression, the disciplining of individual behaviors and desires, etc; as well as to, in familiar ways, capitalism and consumer culture; and as part of his philosophical project, totality is always linked to the ambition to, er, let's say, encompass reality in thought, to know the truth - to 'think' the real ahem., which ambition his tendency is generally to oppose as false, falsifying, while speaking on behalf of the particular (object, phenomenon - which is tied up in why he puts so much stock in modern art) and the particular individual (and his or her experience) by whom it is known, and their role in the historical actuality of knowledge of things, life in the world, etc.

i think the reading of 'tough baby' is not so much 'haha totalitarians u r gay' as it is, 'repressive/victimized/delegitimized social identities are a byproduct of the processes of domination that also produce our (mythically - thus the beginning of the aphorism with a popular film trope) dominant, and surely repressed, social identities'. to put it crudely, i think the aim is probably to insinuate that, among other things, some of the root terms of the ways we would (under the effects of the ways we have been formed, in society as it now stands) tend to conceptualize the specific phenomena under discussion - going back to oppositions between masculinity and femininity, spontaneity and receptivity (big kantian distinctions), activity and passivity (recalling pretty much fundamental philosophical distinctions since like the dawn of western-culture time) - themselves end up being convicted, by close attention to the phenomenon and its ironies and contradictions and etc etc (all the usual adorno-via-marx-via-hegel things), of let's say an advance falsification of experience, so that, if they're not employed critically (w/ all that that entails for him, all his crazy negativity stuff), they stand under the suspicion of having tipped the scales on even the most mundane or seemingly natural of our judgments in favor of the oppressive social/material/historical totality which has been the primary force in shaping our individualities, rather than (this is the moment of hope that's hidden in various little places in MM - here e.g. in the aside, 'for people are even now better than their culture'), say, in deference to our unrepressed, individual experience, desires.

but he's got a problem with managing all those ironies and negations and exaggerated assertions and undrawn inferences and targeting them appropriately without also being complicit in the domination he wants to exploit (as the thinker, the writer of that thing). of course, he thinks he knows that and can't help that, to a certain extent; but he's still doing it (and it's him, from his social position, with his identity, that is). so.

Yeah, the dialectic of activity and passivity (so also subject and object, normative agents and victimized identities) is key here in a way that I didn't really deal with, and of course the problem of the counter-normative thinker's complicity with his (it's "his" here, at least) society runs all through Adorno in more and less articulated ways.

i feel like i must have said nearly the same thing elsewhere on ilx, or someone else did, or i read it somewhere - even down to the ambivalence between 'this is why it is like this in adorno' and 'tricky to pull off, doesn't really succeed here'. but i realize i've probably said much the same thing when teaching nietzsche (esp. whenever he says anything about women, often simultaneously nuanced/sympathetic and crude/offensive), who (far as i know, not being good on hegel) is much more of a model for this kind of philosophizing via the aphorist's weird both-ways mode of wielding/taking authority to judge over an existent state of affairs. i think it has something to do with the way that the form tends to (claim to) voice 'our' judgments in the course of critiquing/revealing something irredeemably suspicious about them, generally with the end of forcing a self-examination by the reader operating under false beliefs about the possibility of their being untouchably pure, commonsensically sound, etc., with the side hope by the aphorist of thinking that only freed of those false beliefs can a more fruitful recognition of the NOT irredeemably suspicious, NOR untouchably etc etc, character of those judgments, behaviors, institutions, etc., be had (and thus changed existences). some ways of doing this permit certain ways of concealing the 'i' actually doing the voicing of the judgments, or excusing or exempting or valorizing, or making it moot that he is doing so while voicing what 'we' think. for instance it seems offhand like nietzsche is generally in a less fraught position in that regard because of his form of individualism and 'immoralism' (which he usually treats as, among other things, licensing sort of a lack of caution/scruple for whatever the harmful/questionable effects of his stance/work as this separate-from-the-crowd-of-humanity voice might be). but adorno can't be because of his thought about e.g. complicity (which seems caught up e.g. in his association with benjamin, jewish thought, with the bit at the end of MM about the only responsible philosophy practiced in the face of despair is one that contemplates things from the standpoint of redemption). i've been interested for a while in better understanding what nietzsche learned from la rochefoucauld, who was right away suspected of being an atheist/egoist etc, which caused him to underline (or so i've read) the scrutinize-thyself-first-with-this-mirror aspect of his maxims that let him claim that it was consistent with versions of christianity. maybe a contrast with adorno shows differently how that might be working, because without the same sort of dogmatic framework of self-love/christlike love to work against, and not for various reasons taking nietzsche's approach, but working in a similar mode, he has to write as if he had the authority to do so while saying something that… i dunno, doesn't undermine it, but leaves it a problem, who could have that authority, and how.

?

I feel like this question of authority and the semi-concealed I often comes up in his comments on intellectuals and the division of labor (to say nothing of his reflections on philosophical thinking after the Shoah and the way that survivor's guilt informs that aspect of his thought), but I'll have to think harder about his relation to Nietzsche (I usually think about it more w/r/t Adorno's choice of forms). This is helpful in thinking about Adorno's rhetorical/ethical position, though.

(Also, Martin Jay's Marxism and Totality is fairly thorough about the history of the concept of totality before and throughout Marxist intellectual history, including a lengthy chapter on Adorno.)

― one way street, Thursday, October 23, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That book came out quite quickly after a bit of googling so thanks.

Lord knows how books came out before google

the wonders of the modern world etc etc.

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348243075l/1315909.jpg

second that martin jay. great primer on "western marxism" in general.

What I do deeply regret is that MM virtually created the "numbered Twitter essay" as a stream of dysphoric, so-pessimistic-they're-hard-to-argue soundbites. This is a tactic anyone can employ now. First, complain that every single thing in existence "paradoxically reveals its opposite" and so on and so forth. Then, cut and run before people can ask you to explain what you mean by that.

MM in 140 characters? So glad I'm not on it.

It's supposed to've worked as a hardcore EP, though: http://www.therestisnoise.com/2005/02/when_i_saw_on_c.html

If Taylor Swift ever wants to change subject from the usual she could do worse..

lol

In the preface to a book of essays,[ 2 ] Adorno cites in detail a letter from the composer Schoenberg to Rudolph Kolisch:

You worked out the row for my string quartet (except for one small matter: the second consequent is: 6th note C sharp, 7th G sharp) correctly. It must have taken a great deal of effort, and I doubt I would have had the patience. Do you really think it is of any use to know that? [ … ] it can act as a stimulus for a composer who is still inexperienced in the use of rows, suggesting one way to approach a piece — a purely technical indication of the possibility to draw on rows. But this is not where we discover aesthetic qualities. [ … ] I have attempted to make this clear to Wiesengrund on several occasions, and also to Berg and Webern. But they don’t believe me. I cannot say it often enough: My works are twelve-note compositions, not twelve-note compositions.

Since italics don't work correctly in ILX block quotes:

"My works are twelve-note compositions, not twelve-note compositions."

lol all the same

o rite forgot abt that

i haven't seen the 'night music' book the passage is quoted from, no doubt adorno goes on to chide schoenberg somehow

why is that lol-worthy? he was just emphasizing the importance of making considered music over pure formalism.

the idea that schoenberg's technique was a merely arbitrary constraint meant to create willfully impenetrable music is a canard, and a tired one. if music needs to be hummed along to to be enjoyed, well, i can hum along to many sections of the 3rd string quartet, and even there is the same sense of inevitability as in a schubert piano sonata.

this is the adorno thread, obviously it is for loling at adorno

Found a lot to like from this talk on music crit, especially the bit on make-believe.

http://shirtysleeves.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-translation-of-reflexionen-uber.html?m=1

"procession of verbal phantoms (…) from which one would recoil in horror": only moments away from grasping there's no such thing as influence IMO

I choose to believe that this is an oblique response to recent developments in the Pfork thread.

And yeah, the part about make-believe is otm, a variation on Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief. I'm also on board with this definition:

criticism is the paradoxical unity of a thoroughly passive, almost pliant abandonment to the object and the firmest resoluteness of judgment.

Sibelius is good, though, and more modern(ist) than Adorno gave him credit for.

annoyingly big ted doesn't seem actually to say what *makes* sib bad not good (it seems almost like a technical judgment, like a carpenter who can't do adequate dovetail joints is a bad carpenter, so a composer who can't do what is a bad composer?)

i also like sibelius and the orinciple that everyone has to pass through the exact same set of portals in the same order to qualify as basically able seems like not a useful idea?

i enjoyed berg flying into a rage at the very idea of r.strauss tho (and also the image of TWA getting a massive wigging from teacher)

All sorts of chewy enjoyable detail left hanging and funny. The bit on the Egk, the student who couldn't explain Bach Vs Teleman properly (who nevertheless passed).

It bespeaks a very linear, Western-centric understanding of history, still in thrall to standard Hegelian dialectics. His later emphasis on the 'negative' opened up the field somewhat, but I'm not sure he was fully cognizant of its implications. It really is too much to ask, though, given how influential he's been otherwise – and the same can be said of most thinkers of his stature.

xp

agreed yes (tho as this piece is from 1967 it's evidence he never changed significantly in that area)

i very much like the idea of music on the radio playing with a running critical commentary over the top of it

Come to think of it, reaction videos are a disappointing approximation of that suggestion.

Normal week in Brazil, 2019:

Olavo Carvalho - the political guru of Jair Bolsonaro - stated that Theodor Adorno was the composer of Beatles’ song.

“The Beatles were semi-literate in music, they barely knew how to play the guitar. Who composed their songs was Theodor Adorno” https://t.co/uotpR84LU0

— Carolina Alves (@cacrisalves) September 8, 2019

Amazing.

everyone's got something to hide except me and max horkheimer

I think he's confusing Hamburg with Frankfurt.

Besides, I'm pretty sure it was the other way around: Adorno studied composition under Johann Lennonberg.

The ability is lost to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed.

— Theodor Adorno (@TheodorAdorno17) December 25, 2022

I just love finding shit like this pic.twitter.com/JxsUYdW7ZN

— julie autumn shoes (@h0mmelette) October 3, 2023

i do not love it :(

but sometimes i can appreciate the humour of the nauseating void

lol look at mark s way upthread knowing what i'm talking about, couldnt be me

literally though https://t.co/Cx9Gw2rFCe pic.twitter.com/7cgILVm0Zk

— Critical Theory Working Group (@crit_theory_grp) November 19, 2023

yes and (or is it no and? no but?)

I love to hate / hate to love these dorks

I call him Ted