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

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 ?

Alex I'm interested in your comment upthread from six years back that you find Adorno a more interesting thinker than Benjamin.

I do too (everyone doing postgrad critical theory at my uni appears to disagree) but I haven't precisely worked out why.

I suspect it's partly because Adorno's more dialectical approach always seems to imply a sense of depth-in-thought, like, there's always further that you can travel into an idea or set of ideas. Benjamin seems to have a much clearer notion of a standard of perfection against which all things can be measured, even if that standard is actually even less attainable than under Adorno.

Adorno seems like the more ILX thinker to me - structurally, if not in terms of his actual likes/dislikes.

Well, yes the short answer is 'dialectics': I think in his later work in particular Adorno is just more thorough about thinking things through. I guess this needn't be a slur on Benjamin, since Adorno got an extra thirty years to work out what their common project might have turned into. Another way of linking at it which stresses that actually they have a lot in common would be to say that they share common concerns, but that their styles are different: I think Benjamin is far more popular in cultural studies than Adorno because his work emphasises the positive side of trying to invent new ways of thinking, while Adorno emphasises the negative (kind of like one of the differences between Deleuze (positive) and Derrida (who although his work is affirmative, tends to come across as a more negative thinker, given his stress on impossibility etc.). Of course Benjamin's also popular because what Adorno criticises as Benjamin's wide-eyed presentation of the facts, i.e. a lapse from thinking mediation rigorously, towards positivism, is endemic in the modern academy which isn't actually interested in a truly critical stance. If enlightenment as de-mythification gets hopelessly tangled up with the production of new myths, modern cultural studies seems to me far too happy with either critique or invention but not with the dialectic between them: which is why Adorno is the medicine we need at the moment!

The other answer, which is also hard to substantiate, is that Benjamin is too much of an activist, or even a voluntarist. Adorno's suspicion of privileging practice over theory seems to me a valuable political counter to the violence and counter-violence of the 1930s. Having seen political mobilization against the Nazis fail in the face of social conformism, Adorno was more concerned after the war with the idea of building healthy democracies than he was about revolutionary violence. I think Benjamin remains too closely aligned with Schmitt and Sorel.

There's an interesting Ben Watson review of an Adorno book in the latest Radical Philosophy: he has a dig at Frith / Hebdige and says 'Just as the best music demolishes your previous concepts of musical pleasure, so Adorno's rough treatment of all you hold dear is what's required to make you think for yourself.'

i prefer Theodor Odorono

'social conformism' is a pretty terrible characterization of how the nazis won, alex, and i'm not sure what you mean by the need for a 'counter to the violence' of the '30s. would that there had been better counter-violence, more activism, more voluntarism. the foolishness, perhaps, is trying to separate thought from action; but, faced with real, immediate challenges, how much leisure-time was there to do that? (ok another foolishness lies in the tactics of the german communist party; but i'm not sure if these are two arguments or one.)

I just got a copy of The Arcades Project and I'm so absolutely blown away by the scope of the endeavour that I don't even bother reading it, I just flip through it (presaging Deleuze and Guattari's "book that should be read like one listens to a record" by fifty years or so) and go "oooh!"

I like to think of Benjamin and Adorno as the guys in the Mac ads. "Hello, I'm a Mac—" ... "—and I'm a PC." They're very complimentary, even if on the surface they seem to squabble like an old married couple.

benjamin is the mac and adorno is the pc?

Surely not the first time Hodgman has been compared to Adorno?

benjamin is the mac and adorno is the pc?

Obv.

NRQ -- I wasn't trying to provide an analysis of the rise of Nazism: all I meant was that Adorno seems to me to have become more interested in the way that social systems as a whole operate in such a way as to allow something like Nazism to happen: isn't that what a project like the Authoritarian Personality is asking? And Adorno's later position is unambiguous: he pits theory against praxis as a dialectical counterpart to the tendency of e.g. the student radicals of the 60s to demand action.

Alex, your response makes clear what I was kinda incoherently suspecting, thanks.

Another question, this time for Mark S primarily but anyone can chime in:

Mark I know you hate Bernstein's editing job on 'The Culture Industry', do you dislike him for other reasons as you imply way upthread?

I'm reading his 'Adorno: Enlightenment & Disenchantment' and really enjoying it. He reads together Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics and says Adorno has an overrarching theory of the possibility of ethics - basically that rationalized reason diminishes the possibility of ethical existence by subsuming the search for ethics within the identity-thinking approach of universalist moral centralism.

This is vaguely (but compared to everything else highly relevantly) connected to where my masters thesis is heading, which covers the same issues but in relation to Dworkin/Unger/etc. debates about the ethical principles underpinning jurisprudence.

I'd be quite keen to try to get some distancing perspective on Bernstein via any more extensive beef you have with him.

The Culture Industry is haphazardly assembled, but if you read it as a bunch of intermittently thoughtful bits it accretes as well as Minima Moralia. A friend and I discussed the chapter on sporting events this weekend, actually.

I meant 'Adorno: Disenchantment & Ethics' before BTW.

I haven't actually read 'The Culture Industry' (although I've read a lot of overlapping stuff) so I have no position on it as regards coherence etc.

Do you like Adorno Alfred? I have a feeling you might. I am biased though: he really is the greatest.

He's too cranky; on occasion this sourness severely constricts the conceptual range of his thinking. He reminds me of Philip Larkin in this respect.

The more I read of/about him, the less I can stand him.

Just the opposite with me. He's my Super Ego.

My favorite grump.

You can handle his desperate homophobia? I mean, I'm more disturbed by what seems like a complete lack of sympathy for others, but the homophobia (which, I guess, is a symptom of that) isn't doing him any favors.

Eh. Symptom of the times, etc. And he didn't much like PEOPLE, after Nazi atrocities.

Do you, uh, see how that doesn't make any sense?

I never much noticed the homophobia, sorry.

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