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

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?

i feel that when reading minima moralia and feeling the bitter truth of its incessant negativity it is important to remember that

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BSXLAnQIgAAqEgF.jpg

the bit on chubby insatiability gets me every time

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

― fields of salmon, Wednesday, October 22, 2014 5:51 PM (1 hour ago)

yeah, for real, before i was a philosopher i was a mathematician/arts person, and as i switched into philosophy this was one of the books i first encountered, and struggled to make even elementary sentence-to-sentence-level sense of, and even though i came away from that and into graduate school with a different orientation, somehow i picked up and kind of was fond of their views about enlightenment reason, and more than that just their contention that all of the shit they normally care about has to matter for philosophers, to an everything-about-our-practice-(as-intellectuals)-must-be-different extent, that won't be content with the kind of compartmentalization and self-inflicted uselessification that academia otherwise encourages / requires as a condition of entrance. so that i'm kind of very quietly constantly low-level nagged by my sense that whatever i'm doing, i'm not doing it enough like -that-.

(and i've already got enough of that shit gnawing at my every waking intellectual moment from my ACTUAL core concerns.)

For those of use not completely familiar what does the word 'totality' in "totality and homosexuality belong together" really mean (or how would A have been using it).

Alfred, I'm using the Dennis Redmond translation (available online). xyzzzz__, the original line is "Totalität und Homosexualität gehören zusammen." (The German for totalitarianism would be "Totalitarismus" or "Totale herrschaft.") I think totality there means basically the socioeconomic order in its normative and systemic form (Adorno's examples throughout the section are American, not German), but he also has in mind both Hegel's notion of totality, which he criticizes in the introduction to MM for too quickly sublating the singular, as well as Lukacs's emphasis on totality as the orienting principle of Marxist thought, as well as the traditional philosophical privilege given to what is purportedly universal, systemic, the higher unity arising from an internally conflicted social body. Throughout that section of MM, "24. Tough Baby," Adorno is trying to shift focus away from homosexuality as a mode of queer identity and practice to look at the structuring role of homosocial male bonds and repressed homoeroticism in normative (heterosexual) masculinity, so that "repressed homosexuality [...] emerges as the only approved form of what is heterosexual". However, Adorno does so in a way that's easily read as straightforwardly homophobic (I would say that the passage for the purposes of its rhetoric presumes a reader who views homosexuality as "unnatural"), and the passage relies on really problematic assumptions about homoeroticism being necessarily tied to unequal power relations, rather than having the potential to disrupt or displace heteronormative modes of domination. As Alfred points out, similar assumptions, as well as Adorno's influence, inform late 60s/70s left representations of fascism that personify fascist domination in the queer man and/or sadist (Moravia, Bertolucci, Pynchon, arguably Pasolini in Salo). So I don't want to defend Adorno here, and I usually need to look outside the Frankfurt School (except maybe for Marcuse) to think about gender and sexuality.

yeah, for real, before i was a philosopher i was a mathematician/arts person, and as i switched into philosophy this was one of the books i first encountered, and struggled to make even elementary sentence-to-sentence-level sense of, and even though i came away from that and into graduate school with a different orientation, somehow i picked up and kind of was fond of their views about enlightenment reason, and more than that just their contention that all of the shit they normally care about has to matter for philosophers, to an everything-about-our-practice-(as-intellectuals)-must-be-different extent, that won't be content with the kind of compartmentalization and self-inflicted uselessification that academia otherwise encourages / requires as a condition of entrance. so that i'm kind of very quietly constantly low-level nagged by my sense that whatever i'm doing, i'm not doing it enough like -that-.

(and i've already got enough of that shit gnawing at my every waking intellectual moment from my ACTUAL core concerns.)

― j., Wednesday, October 22, 2014 7:42 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

j. otm--I'm not a philosopher, I just work on literature, and have been shedding my last ties to the university, but Adorno acts as a bad conscience for me too. <3 and solidarity with your "ACTUAL core concerns"!

(Well, the examples throughout "Tough Baby" are Anglo-American, more precisely--Oxford is his main example of a closed homosocial order.)

(Also, Martin Jay's Marxism and Totality is fairly thorough about the history of the concept of totality before and throughout Marxist intellectual history, including a lengthy chapter on Adorno.)

(several xps)

well THAT'S not the kind of error one likes to hear about in a translation

http://books.google.com/books?id=TcurmCHEKmIC&pg=PT148&lpg=PT148&dq=adorno+totality+and+homosexuality+belong+together&source=bl&ots=-QWo_AQqQQ&sig=IrSSmMxhQxScb-GtPZOsJUElwAA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ESFJVKGuCYi3yASZtoCwDg&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=adorno%20totality%20and%20homosexuality%20belong%20together&f=false

adorno tends to link totality to the social totality, the way that society as a whole contingently is and operates; and thereby to the image of that totality that people operate with, try to compel others to conform to, etc (along liberal individualist lines of the sort you can find in emerson, thoreau, nietzsche, mill), all this thought of especially in terms of processes of privilege, dominance, oppression, repression, the disciplining of individual behaviors and desires, etc; as well as to, in familiar ways, capitalism and consumer culture; and as part of his philosophical project, totality is always linked to the ambition to, er, let's say, encompass reality in thought, to know the truth - to 'think' the real ahem., which ambition his tendency is generally to oppose as false, falsifying, while speaking on behalf of the particular (object, phenomenon - which is tied up in why he puts so much stock in modern art) and the particular individual (and his or her experience) by whom it is known, and their role in the historical actuality of knowledge of things, life in the world, etc.

i think the reading of 'tough baby' is not so much 'haha totalitarians u r gay' as it is, 'repressive/victimized/delegitimized social identities are a byproduct of the processes of domination that also produce our (mythically - thus the beginning of the aphorism with a popular film trope) dominant, and surely repressed, social identities'. to put it crudely, i think the aim is probably to insinuate that, among other things, some of the root terms of the ways we would (under the effects of the ways we have been formed, in society as it now stands) tend to conceptualize the specific phenomena under discussion - going back to oppositions between masculinity and femininity, spontaneity and receptivity (big kantian distinctions), activity and passivity (recalling pretty much fundamental philosophical distinctions since like the dawn of western-culture time) - themselves end up being convicted, by close attention to the phenomenon and its ironies and contradictions and etc etc (all the usual adorno-via-marx-via-hegel things), of let's say an advance falsification of experience, so that, if they're not employed critically (w/ all that that entails for him, all his crazy negativity stuff), they stand under the suspicion of having tipped the scales on even the most mundane or seemingly natural of our judgments in favor of the oppressive social/material/historical totality which has been the primary force in shaping our individualities, rather than (this is the moment of hope that's hidden in various little places in MM - here e.g. in the aside, 'for people are even now better than their culture'), say, in deference to our unrepressed, individual experience, desires.

but he's got a problem with managing all those ironies and negations and exaggerated assertions and undrawn inferences and targeting them appropriately without also being complicit in the domination he wants to exploit (as the thinker, the writer of that thing). of course, he thinks he knows that and can't help that, to a certain extent; but he's still doing it (and it's him, from his social position, with his identity, that is). so.

Yeah, the dialectic of activity and passivity (so also subject and object, normative agents and victimized identities) is key here in a way that I didn't really deal with, and of course the problem of the counter-normative thinker's complicity with his (it's "his" here, at least) society runs all through Adorno in more and less articulated ways.

i feel like i must have said nearly the same thing elsewhere on ilx, or someone else did, or i read it somewhere - even down to the ambivalence between 'this is why it is like this in adorno' and 'tricky to pull off, doesn't really succeed here'. but i realize i've probably said much the same thing when teaching nietzsche (esp. whenever he says anything about women, often simultaneously nuanced/sympathetic and crude/offensive), who (far as i know, not being good on hegel) is much more of a model for this kind of philosophizing via the aphorist's weird both-ways mode of wielding/taking authority to judge over an existent state of affairs. i think it has something to do with the way that the form tends to (claim to) voice 'our' judgments in the course of critiquing/revealing something irredeemably suspicious about them, generally with the end of forcing a self-examination by the reader operating under false beliefs about the possibility of their being untouchably pure, commonsensically sound, etc., with the side hope by the aphorist of thinking that only freed of those false beliefs can a more fruitful recognition of the NOT irredeemably suspicious, NOR untouchably etc etc, character of those judgments, behaviors, institutions, etc., be had (and thus changed existences). some ways of doing this permit certain ways of concealing the 'i' actually doing the voicing of the judgments, or excusing or exempting or valorizing, or making it moot that he is doing so while voicing what 'we' think. for instance it seems offhand like nietzsche is generally in a less fraught position in that regard because of his form of individualism and 'immoralism' (which he usually treats as, among other things, licensing sort of a lack of caution/scruple for whatever the harmful/questionable effects of his stance/work as this separate-from-the-crowd-of-humanity voice might be). but adorno can't be because of his thought about e.g. complicity (which seems caught up e.g. in his association with benjamin, jewish thought, with the bit at the end of MM about the only responsible philosophy practiced in the face of despair is one that contemplates things from the standpoint of redemption). i've been interested for a while in better understanding what nietzsche learned from la rochefoucauld, who was right away suspected of being an atheist/egoist etc, which caused him to underline (or so i've read) the scrutinize-thyself-first-with-this-mirror aspect of his maxims that let him claim that it was consistent with versions of christianity. maybe a contrast with adorno shows differently how that might be working, because without the same sort of dogmatic framework of self-love/christlike love to work against, and not for various reasons taking nietzsche's approach, but working in a similar mode, he has to write as if he had the authority to do so while saying something that… i dunno, doesn't undermine it, but leaves it a problem, who could have that authority, and how.

?

I feel like this question of authority and the semi-concealed I often comes up in his comments on intellectuals and the division of labor (to say nothing of his reflections on philosophical thinking after the Shoah and the way that survivor's guilt informs that aspect of his thought), but I'll have to think harder about his relation to Nietzsche (I usually think about it more w/r/t Adorno's choice of forms). This is helpful in thinking about Adorno's rhetorical/ethical position, though.

(Also, Martin Jay's Marxism and Totality is fairly thorough about the history of the concept of totality before and throughout Marxist intellectual history, including a lengthy chapter on Adorno.)

― one way street, Thursday, October 23, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That book came out quite quickly after a bit of googling so thanks.

Lord knows how books came out before google

the wonders of the modern world etc etc.

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348243075l/1315909.jpg

second that martin jay. great primer on "western marxism" in general.

What I do deeply regret is that MM virtually created the "numbered Twitter essay" as a stream of dysphoric, so-pessimistic-they're-hard-to-argue soundbites. This is a tactic anyone can employ now. First, complain that every single thing in existence "paradoxically reveals its opposite" and so on and so forth. Then, cut and run before people can ask you to explain what you mean by that.

MM in 140 characters? So glad I'm not on it.

It's supposed to've worked as a hardcore EP, though: http://www.therestisnoise.com/2005/02/when_i_saw_on_c.html