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

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?