Can you enjoy pop music/culture and still love Adorno?

We are all prostitutes!

Theodore, you're a bore, but we dig your grumpy style!

mark s to thread!!!

(you know marky, i'm still trying to decode that essay.)

I think so, if you take Adorno's perspective as just another critical 'fashion' that's consumed and exchanged in a market of belief-systems. Mmm, tasty cynicism.

Yes: Minima Moralia is what you (=everyone) should read Nath. And when you read "The Culture Industry" again (which is anyway a angry-sad argt w. his friend W.Benjamin's "Age of Mech.Repro"), put words like "jazz buff" and "alt snob" and "indiebore" and "dad-rockist" into the appropriate slots, and it's suddenly surprisingly otm. Then think about what's WRONG w. words like "dad rock" and "rockism" (cf) ILM passim, and slot THAT in, and it starts to work a bit better.

(which essay jessy?)

The noise one? Oh blimey I'm working on a rewrite as we speak... Now it features QUEEN OF THE DAMNED!!

Very rarely do I get mad at books - it's not much use they just lay there doing nothing - but this Culture Industry is just pissing me off. Do I get it right: We - the public - force ourselves to be idiots and just gobble up what the industry serves us? We only like pop music because we are overexposed to it? We love pop music because 1 we are idiots who haven't learned to properly listen to music and 2 it's just cause well we recognize it so we like it.

werner heisenberg was way hotter

My dad says I should just stop reading it (and get on with my work - har har). But then I realize it is better to be mad at a book (anything) than being unimpressed with it. It's probably pissing me off because he's right in many ways. grrrr. And hey he uses long words. Reification! Even my dictionary doesn't know what it means! hah!

nath is it the edition edited by j.bernstein? HE IS A MORON IGNORE HIS INTRODUCTION AND DUMP IT FROM YR MEMORY BANKS!!

Two examples of reification: "talent" and "influence" (heh).

Two examples of reification: "talent" and "influence" (heh). Momus says getting to number one is a reification, but this is silly.

blimey just say Adorno and I turn into Doomintroll.......

Aaargh! Aaaargh! etc

YES MARK INDEED THATS THE ONE I AM READING. I WILL FORCED MY BRAIN TO CRASH. RE-BOOT. WEEE. heh. Heck I only carry it to work to bore myself to bits. I just look so intellectual and I heard bad boys fancy smart grrls. hehe

I will forced? Gawd. Next book is gonna be one on grammar porn.

Nested Answers in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

ee- a !reif 88==> cummings

adorno = MENTALIST

Just in case anybody's ever wondered where I come from on this - 'Culture Industry' is the biggest load of shit I've ever attempted to read in my life

ok then try mark prendergast's the ambient century

yes. if you ignore most of what he says and concentrate on how he looks. that adorno was a bit of a fox. but of course he's got nothing on carrie.

The very existence of Aphex Twin disproves everything Adorno said. Or something. I did an essay that said that. I got a 2;1. Theo was writing years and years ago. And probably didn't get enough sex. Bollocks to him.

blimey a 2:1!

Aye, very impressive, isn't it?

(Please note sdarcasm.)

God, I'm pissed again.

Adorno is obv. HOTT only when getting it on in some twisted Weekend- At-Bernies stylee with Jameson. Rowr.
(& yay to mark s for suggested rereading of 'Culture Industry')

I would totally second Mark's endorsement of 'Minima Moralia', a book which it's no exaggeration to say changed my life (and didn't stop me, at about the same time, entering the music industry). I would also recommend the very empirical 'The Authoritarian Personality', an investigation into the psychological roots of fascism.

'Minima Moralia' reads like a personal diary, a series of super-subtle, deeply melancholy reflections from someone 'damaged' by 'a life which does not live'. 'The Authoritarian Personality' reads like a straightforward psychology book, but it's totally fascinating, detailing the slippery mental slope that leads from venerating your father to saluting the fuhrer.

haha see no.9

(sorry nick that haha was pointed at the world not at you)

what or who is adorno

Is it true that Adorno was heckled by his hippie students in the late sixties? Anyone know why?

Or was that Marcuse?

it was during the 1968 student stuff in germany: he called the police => i don't know what started it off, perhaps he said the beatles were "noise"

Cor Mark can I haf a gander at this Queen Ov Dammed essay then?

only when i finish it haha: at the moment all it is as a big long halfwritten essay abt noise and its discontents with reminder inserts such as [note to self: discuss QOD here] and [note to self: VAMPIRES!!!]. Also a brilliant gag abt pigfuck which I have not yet found the correct delivery for...

Send it anyway! I will do the WAMPIRES STUFF as I probably won't understand the rest anyway.

'Adorno = fox' -- prove it. Not in any pic I've ever seen.

Everything TWA ever said was proved right by existence of Brazen Hussies. I once said that in a McDonalds and got a 3rd (cheeseburger) for it.

Answer to original question = Yes, I love both Adorno and pop music / culture. (But I love neither in an unqualified way.)

We - the public - force ourselves to be idiots and just gobble up what the industry serves us? We only like pop music because we are overexposed to it? We love pop music because 1 we are idiots who haven't learned to properly listen to music and 2 it's just cause well we recognize it so we like it.

No. The mistake many people make reading about the Culture Industry is to assimilate Adorno's idea of culture to the English debate between mass / popular culture and high culture. Adorno does not mean this. The entertainment industry functions as an example of what he takes to be a wider process: the technologisation and rationalisation of consciousness, experience, knowledge period. 'Culture' doesn't name an isolated realm of the social (art / entertainment), but the whole of the realm of value.

That culture is 'industrial' suggests not that some scheming profiteers are manipulating everyone's consciousness, likes and dislikes, but like so much in Adorno, functions dialectically: in opposition to the idea of an organic and natural culture which is somehow spontaneous or authentic. As he argues in relation to the idea of second nature in his essay on natural history, and elsewhere: (I paraphrase grossly) because the idea of nature is itself historical, nature as we tend to think of it cannot exist, instead we should think of a realm of second nature, an experience which we take to be 'natural' but is in fact the product of a historical becoming.

This doesn't mean that Adorno doesn't *also* think that much of the entertainment on offer is rubbish.

(i hate j.m.bernstein in an unqualified way => also the routledge cover is worse than all art evah)

Also: Do not think of Adorno as sitting in judgement on the masses from without. As an educator, and later as some kind of celebrity, he is also part of the Culture Industry: remember, 'The Whole is the False' [Minima Moralia].

"because the idea of nature is itself historical, nature as we tend to think of it cannot exist"

I think this is poor reasoning (on his part - if indeed it is what he claims). B does not follow from A.

With respect, I don't think I (yet) see the relevance of this (poor) argument to the culture industry argument either.

he wrote newspaper music reviews three or forus days a week, except when he was in exile in the US

the pinefox is a pawn in the hands of the False Consciousness Industry!!

I won't rephrase the argument now, since I don't have the source to hand. The relevance is that 'industry' is used not to designate a particular way of producing entertainment (industrial, organised rather than 'popular' meaning the spontaneous culture of the people (top-down not bottom-up)) but to prevent an appeal to natural or spontaneous culture as somehow intrinsically better. Remember the context is fascism as a mass movement. There is no choice between the culture industry and another type of culture, just as for all thinkers in the Hegelian tradition, there is a choice between the world of second nature and some 'real world'.

"In our drafts we spoke of 'mass culture'. We replaced that expression with 'culture industry' in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art."

just as for all thinkers in the Hegelian tradition, there is a choice between the world of second nature and some 'real world'.

Sorry: clearly that should read 'no choice'!!!

because the idea of nature is itself historical, nature as we tend to think of it cannot exist.

"No less delusive is the question about nature as the absolute first, as the downright immediate compared with its mediations. [...] it would be up to thought to see all nature, and whatever would install itself as such, as history, and all history as nature"

ie. history (social, mediate, changing) is nature; everything apparently 'natural' is historical (social, mediate, changing). This must be a dialectical formulation or we fall back into an ossified universal (natural) law of the type 'everything changes' or 'there is no immediate (natural) world'. (So, yes, my first way of putting this was undialectical.)

I guess the relevance to the culture industry argument would be that there is nothing natural about our likes and dislikes (historical); but that there is no natural like or dislike against which to compare it. The idea of spontaneous and natural appreciation of what is in fact a manufactured entertainment product is the ideological frosting on the cultural cup-cake.

"ie. history (social, mediate, changing) is nature; everything apparently 'natural' is historical (social, mediate, changing). This must be a dialectical formulation or we fall back into an ossified universal (natural) law of the type 'everything changes' or 'there is no immediate (natural) world'. (So, yes, my first way of putting this was undialectical.)"

I am a good deal keener on this formulation. But I think your reservations are the best bit. We should indeed see nature and history as interdependent and not wholly separate; but we had better not collapse the concepts of nature and history together, because it's clear that both of them, as they stand, do a useful work of definition that would be lost if we ran them together.

That is, yes, human experiences of nature are certainly (radically?) historical; indeed it can be argued that nature itself is historical, even beyond human existence ('natural history') (and I think that's what you are arguing?). But we should still reserve a conceptual space for Nature which is different from the one we reserve for History. (As for History as Natural - well, yes, but this is really the claim that Everything is Natural - which is so true as to be relatively unhelpful. Right?)

pinefox, I love you

(alex when is your first book being published please)

He wants to be your father, the great Librarian. ask yourself why you give him the time of bleeding day. Don't seek another father, leave home. Allow neither opinion or belief into your brilliant mind, they will only let you down.

i am beginning to like adorno. WOWSER.

If TWA had written a book called 'The Meat Industry' I'd campaign for Ted Nugent as world president