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.

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