― Haikunym (Haikunym), Friday, 29 August 2003 15:41 (twenty years ago) link
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.
― alext (alext), Monday, 17 November 2003 16:37 (twenty years ago) link
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 ?
― anthony, Tuesday, 20 January 2004 09:18 (twenty years ago) link
― Tim F, Sunday, 25 February 2007 22:32 (seventeen years ago) link
― max, Sunday, 25 February 2007 22:48 (seventeen years ago) link
― guymauve, Sunday, 25 February 2007 23:14 (seventeen years ago) link
― max, Sunday, 25 February 2007 23:53 (seventeen years ago) link
― tokyo rosemary, Monday, 26 February 2007 00:11 (seventeen years ago) link
― guymauve, Monday, 26 February 2007 05:47 (seventeen years ago) link
― gff, Monday, 26 February 2007 06:27 (seventeen years ago) link
― byebyepride, Sunday, 4 March 2007 13:01 (seventeen years ago) link
― Keith, Sunday, 4 March 2007 13:08 (seventeen years ago) link
― byebyepride, Sunday, 4 March 2007 15:35 (seventeen years ago) link
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.
― Tim F, Sunday, 27 May 2007 05:05 (seventeen years ago) link
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.
― byebyepride, Sunday, 27 May 2007 15:52 (seventeen years ago) link
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.'
― byebyepride, Sunday, 27 May 2007 15:55 (seventeen years ago) link
i prefer Theodor Odorono
― bobby bedelia, Sunday, 27 May 2007 16:02 (seventeen years ago) link
'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.)
― That one guy that quit, Sunday, 27 May 2007 16:10 (seventeen years ago) link
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.
― fields of salmon, Sunday, 27 May 2007 17:09 (seventeen years ago) link
benjamin is the mac and adorno is the pc?
― max, Sunday, 27 May 2007 17:13 (seventeen years ago) link
Surely not the first time Hodgman has been compared to Adorno?
― Casuistry, Sunday, 27 May 2007 17:53 (seventeen years ago) link
Obv.
― fields of salmon, Sunday, 27 May 2007 18:19 (seventeen years ago) link
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.
― byebyepride, Sunday, 27 May 2007 21:39 (seventeen years ago) link
Alex, your response makes clear what I was kinda incoherently suspecting, thanks.
― Tim F, Tuesday, 29 May 2007 12:35 (seventeen years ago) link
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.
― Tim F, Monday, 17 September 2007 15:27 (sixteen years ago) link
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.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Monday, 17 September 2007 15:39 (sixteen years ago) link
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.
― Tim F, Monday, 17 September 2007 16:10 (sixteen years ago) link
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.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Monday, 17 September 2007 16:17 (sixteen years ago) link
The more I read of/about him, the less I can stand him.
― Casuistry, Saturday, 16 August 2008 02:06 (fifteen years ago) link
Just the opposite with me. He's my Super Ego.
― Kevin John Bozelka, Saturday, 16 August 2008 02:14 (fifteen years ago) link
My favorite grump.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Saturday, 16 August 2008 02:26 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Casuistry, Saturday, 16 August 2008 02:36 (fifteen years ago) link
Eh. Symptom of the times, etc. And he didn't much like PEOPLE, after Nazi atrocities.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Saturday, 16 August 2008 02:45 (fifteen years ago) link
Do you, uh, see how that doesn't make any sense?
― Casuistry, Saturday, 16 August 2008 02:50 (fifteen years ago) link
I never much noticed the homophobia, sorry.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Saturday, 16 August 2008 02:53 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Casuistry, Saturday, 16 August 2008 02:55 (fifteen years ago) link
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.)
― Casuistry, Saturday, 16 August 2008 03:01 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Casuistry, Saturday, 16 August 2008 03:05 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Saturday, 16 August 2008 03:08 (fifteen years ago) link
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""
― Casuistry, Saturday, 16 August 2008 03:10 (fifteen years ago) link
Also since when does living through WW2 make you a good thinker?
― Casuistry, Saturday, 16 August 2008 03:12 (fifteen years ago) link
Occam's razor.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Saturday, 16 August 2008 03:12 (fifteen years ago) link
(your friend is talking shit)
Fairly typical homophobia of the time /= determined extermination of homosexuals, for God's sake.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Saturday, 16 August 2008 03:13 (fifteen years ago) link
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).
― Casuistry, Saturday, 16 August 2008 03:15 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Casuistry, Saturday, 16 August 2008 03:17 (fifteen years ago) link
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.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Saturday, 16 August 2008 03:19 (fifteen years ago) link
Also: the "homophobia" of Adorno (or Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Orwell, Alfred Kazin) should not prevent one from appreciating them.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Saturday, 16 August 2008 03:20 (fifteen years ago) link