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

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).