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

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?

In the early 1960s, when there was a lively interest in cinema theory in Europe, Lang's work was eagerly discussed among cineastes in publications ranging from the Cahiers du cinéma in Paris to the Frankfurt Filmstudio. After his return to Europe he frequently visited Adorno. At around this time there was a discussion with the young film empiricists in which Adorno found himself defending the aesthetic autonomy of Lang's approach to cinema. Lang, who was interested in the young people's opinions, took their side against Adorno. Both men wished to influence the younger generation. Adorno's assistant Regina Becker-Schmidt tells a nice story about these discussions. On one occasion Adorno was arguing with Lang about whether Ingmar Bergman's film The Silence was pornographic. When Becker-Schmidt was asked for her opinion, she sided with Adorno. Lang said there was nothing surprising in that since the young lady was Adorno's assistant, whereupon Adorno lost his temper, saying, "Since she is my student, she is capable of thinking for herself and has her own ideas." In a rage, Adorno grabbed his hat and coat, but unfortunately they were Lang's, not his own. "He then presented a comic sight. The hat was much too large and slipped down over his ears; the coat was far too long and Adorno's hands and arms disappeared inside them. Adorno looked at them in bafflement, but then—still furious—he shouted: 'And I suppose you think I have identified with you just because I am wearing your hat!' Everyone collapsed in laughter, and peace was restored."

ha!

^_^

<3

the more recent brown-paper cover edition of 'minima moralia' (same as the rest of the 'radical thinkers' verso series currently) has a different subtitle than the old black-cover edition (where the subtitle is only in the front matter): 'reflections from a damaged life' rather than 'reflections from damaged life'. i don't have the newer one, but based on pdfs it looks like it's otherwise a straight up reprint of the older edition. is there anything in it, or on it, to indicate that they did any updating in any way, apart from the subtitle?

I saw this film over the weekend, which has a fair amount of Adorno-based voiceover.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/the-vanquishing-of-the-witch-baba-yaga

what was the sign that it was adorno-based, did the narrator sound particularly cranky

the MoMA audience went to sleep?

As far as I know, there aren't any textual changes to the 'radical thinkers' Minima Moralia besides the subtitle (and the original phrase is Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, so translating "dem" as "a" seems slightly misleading).

maybe it preserved their copyright to change it lol

They have reacted testily to A...... dot org! I don't think there's any rights issue with this, but I'm still disappointed that the Hullot-Kentor Negative Dialectics hasn't materialized.

yeah i thought that was just eternally not done?

J, both editions of Minima Moralia are identical.

Well if its the same translator (EFN Jephcott)...

How do people engage w/Minima..? A few entries now and then or do you feel you ned to finish once you start? I will be giving this another once over as I know of/have read much more German Literature and culture.

old translations not uncommonly become 'updated'

I tend to approach Minima Moralia like Nietzsche's more aphoristic books or like, um, One-Way Street--I'll dip into MM if there's a particular section that's relevant to a concept I'm thinking about, but otherwise I try to read it through for the sake of the connections between the individual sections. I also think you don't need to have that much grounding in German literature and culture to approach that text, although it helps if you can keep in mind the general historical situation in which it was written, as well as some of Adorno's earlier debates with Benjamin.

Minima Moralia does lend itself to being read by picking a section at random much more than do any of Adorno's other books, of course.

i've never studied adorno closely, i read him in an undergrad course and intermittently since then. MM always struck me as attractive, alluring to read, but kind of impenetrable as a book. so many layers and twists of irony and negativity. but recently i've started reading it more seriously, with a better sense of what's going on, and wouldn't you know, it seems like i owe it partly to being more cultured - being able to catch all the insinuations and allusions and such, just so that individual aphorisms exhibit the appropriate tension and cohere, seem to be meaningful (even if you're not sure how, in detail). in some ways it's almost nothing BUT allusions.

i'm interested in hellenistic philosophy a la hadot, so i have been gratified to see how much of the text falls into place when read with that in mind - adorno even alludes to that conception of philosophy in the dedication, and addresses it intermittently in the book (often tied up with his concern with the intellectual division of labor and the possibility of amateur/non-academic intellectuals). same at the beginning of the essay 'why still philosophy?'. my early experience of adorno made his high-culture mandarinism seem like it HAD to be utterly a product of academia/scholarly life, so i guess it seemed remote from my imagination that he could think of himself, or be, more of a marginal/outsider figure as i would have actually preferred.

the other night i was skimming a bit of lydia goehr's intro to 'critical models', and i was a little chastened to find some details about the extent of his wordplay and allusiveness in the original german. i can do ok on a basic level making sense out of some german, and with philosophy it's always easier because the vocabulary is so limited and the syntax of individual sentences is usually intended to be fairly logical, but i don't try with MM - the text is way too much for me. so to find that it's MORE so…

I don't read MM randomly so much as I read it thematically, I guess you could say. I might take a spin through MM scanning for "music" or "visual art" or whatever is in my head at the time. MM is not really something I've ever read all the way through from cover to cover. I tend to pick up on different things each time. I read some sections often, others I can say I've never ever read. It's not really so much a book as a scrying apparatus that you look into in order to see your own reflection more clearly, or else something else becomes reflected. Either way.

Just now I found it on my shelf (the "brown" Verso edition, identical to the other edition) and decided to start at the start, "For Marcel Proust," which I hadn't given particular notice to before. The theme I had picked out in my head before even opening it is "working life" and I found it right there on the first page. (I think I'm going to print it out and put it on my office wall, which ultimately might damage my reputation further in the corporate world.)

Dialectic of Enlightenment is still the book that ruined my life.

the Verso paperback looks as scary as -- of all things -- Mein Kampf.

That's a deeply saddening comparison. I will soothe my spirits with thoughts of Teddie at the beach:
http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ldgdwjmweV1qcumcb.jpg

wonder of Moravia and Bertolucci had his line connecting homosexuality and totalitarianism in mind.

With the necessary lengthy gloss:

100. Sur l'eau [French: at sea]. To the question of the goal of an emancipated society, one receives answers such as the fulfillment of human possibilities or the richness of life. As illegitimate as the inevitable question may be, so inevitable is the repulsive, out-trumping response, which recalls to mind the social democratic personality-ideal of the heavily bearded naturalists of the 1890s, who wanted to live it up. Tenderness would be solely what is most crude: that no-one should starve any longer. Anything else would apply, to a condition which ought to be determined by human needs, a human behavior which is formed on the model of production as its own purpose. The utopian image of the unrestricted, energetic, creative human being has been infiltrated by the commodity fetishism, which in bourgeois society brings with it inhibition, powerlessness, the sterility of monotony. The concept of dynamics, which complements bourgeois “ahistoricity,” is raised to something absolute, while it nevertheless, as the anthropological reflex of the laws of production, must be critically confronted in the emancipated society with need. The idea of unfettered doing, of uninterrupted creating, of chubby-cheeked insatiability, of freedom as intense activity, feeds on the bourgeois concept of nature, which from time immemorial has served to proclaim social violence as irrevocable, as a piece of healthy eternity. It was due to this and not any presumed equalization that the positive designs of socialism, against which Marx bristled, remained in barbarism. What is to be feared is not the slackening of humanity in a life of luxury, but rather the dessicated expansion of what, in the guise of the all-natural, is social – the collectivity as the blind rage of making. The naively mandated unambiguity of the tendency of development towards the raising of production is itself a piece of that bourgeois nature (Bürgerlichkeit), which permits development only in one direction, because, integrated into the totality, ruled by quantification, it is hostile to the qualitative difference. If one thinks of the emancipated society as one emancipated precisely from such a totality, then alignments become visible, which have little in common with the raising of production and its human mirror-images. If uninhibited people are by no means the most pleasant, and are not even the freest, then the society which freed itself of its fetters, could arrive at the thought that even the productive forces are not the final substrate of human beings, but are rather the historically specific form of these last under commodity production. Perhaps the true society would become bored with development, and would out of freedom leave possibilities unused, instead of storming alien stars under a confused compulsion. What would begin to dawn on a humanity, which no longer knew urgent necessity (Not: necessity, privation), is just how delusory and futile all the arrangements hitherto created to escape privation (Not) have been – arrangements which used wealth to reproduce privation (Not) on an expanded scale. Enjoyment itself would be touched by this, just as its contemporary schema cannot be separated from industriousness, planning, imposing one’s will, subjugation. Rien faire comme une bête (French: Doing nothing, like an animal), lying on the water and look peacefully into the heavens, “being, nothing else, without any further determination and fulfillment” might step in place of process, doing, fulfilling, and so truly deliver the promise of dialectical logic, of culminating in its origin. None of the abstract concepts comes closer to the fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace. Onlookers of progress such as Maupassant and Sternheim have helped to express this intention, shyly, in the only manner the fragility of the latter permits.

I wouldn't be surprised! That bullshit shows up in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as well.

xp

Though I should say that Adorno's comments on homosexuality in "Sexual Taboos and Law Today" were relatively progressive for 1963.

And the line in MM is more accurately translated as "totality and homosexuality belong together," which admittedly isn't that much better.

which translation you using?