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

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.

"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"

Delueze showed 'geographilosophy'. And time placed on history by architect. What was this alike? This should be to build a high-electronically formed-luxury city to any Africa country with a reason of only profit and waiting them to get useful improvements from this city by their non-modern fundamental unqualified culture . So the point ,we have been on years and years, was post-modernism. As it is going on with the cultural and socially alienation programs by technology growing and its 'must-spread' state by capital in the world by globalization, I wonder what you are thinking how post-modernism could be shaped for the humanity? By reformism or by what Michael Hurdt told us on 'Emperor'? Note : Micheal Hurdt told on the book that there is now three opposite to emperor one of them post colonials and the other ones are fundementals who America want to terminate and the last ones are postmoderns who Michael thought they are showing to Emperor the ways he later become face to face . I think you may find it interesting.

I came across Theodor from a dance music perspective. Adorno does not like dance music, he does not like the body, he is very cerebral. He likes high art and dislikes popular culture.

"Their ecstasy is without content.... The ecstasy takes possession of its object by its own compulsive character. It is stylised like the ecstasies savages go into in beating the war drums. It has convulsive aspects reminescent of St Vitus's dance or the reflexes of mutilated animals. ... The same jitterbugs who behave as if they were electrified by syncopation, dance almost exclusively the good rhythmic parts" --Theodor Adorno "On The Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening"

There are some nice quotes from Simon Reynolds on:

"Frankfurt is simultaneously Germany's financial capital and a longstanding centre of anti-capitalist theory. Most famously, it gave the world the 'Frankfurt School' of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer et al: neo-Marxist thinkers who fled Nazism and landed up in Southern California, where their eyes and ears were affronted by the kitsch outpoutings of Hollywood's dream-factory. Today, the Frankfurt School is mostly remembered for its snooty attitude towards popular culture"

http://www.jahsonic.com/TheodorAdorno.html

Yours
Jan Geerinck

True , Walter Benjamin killed himself on his way to California.

Mark, did you spot any other factual errors?

Jan

Alex writes:
After all, the idea of culture, intended to describe what distinguishes us from that state of savagery we have supposedly escaped, always inextricably draws us back towards barbarism. If culture appears a flimsy safeguard against anarchy, might that not be because the concept draws its own urgency from the menace from which it promises to deliver us?

This is a strong thought, but I wonder how prevalent this particular notion of "culture" is (more prevalent in Adorno's day than ours, I'd guess). More common now would be to use the word to distinguish one "culture" from another: English culture vs. American; high vs. low; indie vs. pop (just as we mostly use the word "form" to distinguish various forms from each other ["call-and-response form" vs. "sonata form"] or to identify our concern as form rather than something else [a piece's chord pattern as opposed to the composer's motive for writing it] but rarely use "form" to distinguish form from formlessness). Of course the two uses - one defining culture against barbarism, the other defining cultures against each other - can run into each other, and they both can concern themselves with defending or breaking down the boundaries between cultures (or between culture and something else). But I'm suspicious of the word "menace" here. Words distinguish phenomena from their near neighbors - that's what words do - and therefore, obviously, there's always interplay between a phenomenon and its conceptual relatives, but the fact that a chair distinguishes itself from a bench, a floor, a couch, and a noose, and sitting distinguishes itself from standing, doesn't mean that chairs are menaced by such alternatives or are in a desperate battle to preserve their identities as chairs.

I've read little Adorno. I liked it as writing but thought it was essentially a work of the imagination rather than an exploration of the world; at least, I couldn't imagine what it would be like to test his ideas, or that he ever tried to test them in the lives of others, or even in his own. In the quotations that start this thread, I perceive (and enjoy) a romantic attacking the romanticism of others, but I wish he'd found a more interesting romanticism to attack.

Another link.

A third.

Half the time I think what he appears to be saying "doom for the culture industry etc" totally obscures how he says it or even to what extent he says it.

I taught Sociology of Culture and I sure as hell wouldn't say any such thing. I usually used Adorno as an example of the Frankfort School (people are duped by culture, blindly absorbing its messages--this links to facism/Nazi-ism, which were heavily symbol/media oriented and is not too different from Marx's Superstructure/Ideology) in contrast to Gramsci (culture can be used as resistance; hegemony is never complete) and to the later Production of Culture and Art Worlds perspectives (cultural analysis is about looking at activities, cooperation, and organizations), and in contrast to Marxist/post-structuralist/Cultural Studies/Feminist Approaches (audiences do not passively absorb, they are active consumers; the message sent is not necessarily the message received, audiences tweak meanings, example fan fiction)

Adorno has a political and historical context that can't be ignored, and some classic media studies if the 50s (Lazarsfeld) were inspired by putting his theories to the test.

This is just not what Adorno and Horkheimer say!! Take advertising - advertisers have to come up with all kinds of crap all the time because people see through things, advertising stops working, people get fed up being told the same bollocks day in, day out. The motor of the culture industry might be its constant need to keep overcoming people's resistance to it! And some of it just doesn't work at all -- not every product 'sells' well. A&H recognise that this is the case: the only other option is dividing the world up into brainless sheep and a fortunate elite who happen to be immune, and this is certainly not what A&H think is going on at all.

and if this is the case how does he react to camp or pop art or culture jamming or post foccualdian readings of porn or any of the other ways that we have found to fuck with the dominant culture ?

and does he favour single authors over group efforts (does he not like movies/pop music out of some distrust of "work by committee", ie producers, actors, studio musicans(sp), etc ?

also, he claims that pop culture is not authentic folk culture, b/c it is not created by the people--if thats the case, then what is authentic folk culture in the age of mass retrival of information ?

one last thing, how does he place the creators of mass media in classical marxist settings ?

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