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

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.

He's a bigger misanthrope than homophobe, methinks. Is that better?

Or, let me ask: Why didn't A. like Nazis? They were vulgar/populist, they were against the sort of culture that A. was really into, they killed off maybe some people who he thought of as his peers (as the elites who really counted, I want to say); they were a personal inconvenience of the highest order. But does it go beyond that? It seem like almost an accident that A. and I both think the Nazis were bad.

Like I said, I haven't read MM, but my friend says that the whole book was basically him underlining how he wasn't gay, but Nazis and fascists sure are!

This is the sort of game he plays all the time, though this is Jameson summarizing him (in Marxism and Form, which, you can argue whether this is fair, but it reads like other A. that I've read):

In a similar way, the rise of the saxophone, in that commercial music which replaces the older folk art of the masses, has symbolic value: for with it vibration, the oscillation back and forth in place, supersedes the soaring of the violin as an embodiment of subjective excitement in the modern age, and a metallic sound, all pipes and valves, yet “sexually ambivalent” to the degree to which it “mediates between brass and woodwinds” (“being materially related to the former, while it remains woodwind in its mode of performance”), replaces the living warmth of the older instrument, which expressed life, where the newer one merely simulates it.

Yes, saxophones don't fit into the "natural" categories of woodwind or brass, but are "sexually ambivalent", and this is opposed to "life", is nothing but a "simulation" -- and if you can't read homosexuality onto this, then I can't help you. (But also, fears of being "penetrated" are all over his language, and I'm told his letters with WB are full of gay-baiting.)

And yes, homophobia was "of the times", sure. So might a lot of Adorno's sentiments; they may have "worked" for a particular set of people in a particular context. And noticing things like "the bass is missing when it's played on the radio" -- that's great, I'll give him that. He can sometimes notice a good detail. But the way he thinks doesn't work at all for me, and often disgusts me.

To say this as politely as possible: read MM before coming to an opinion. Sure, he was always a crank, but surviving WWII made him, shall we say, less sanguine about how socialism OR capitalism could help human progress.

homophobia is insignificant besides something as world-historic as the determined extermination of a race, n'est-ce pas?

Well, I dunno, the determined extermination of homosexuality comes pretty close? As my friend puts it: "He took part in a critique of fascism that was widespread, in which fascism is basically blamed on homosexuality. This particular critique culminated in Russia with Gorky's "destroy homosexuality (read: homosexuals) and fascism will disappear""

Also since when does living through WW2 make you a good thinker?

Occam's razor.

(your friend is talking shit)

Fairly typical homophobia of the time /= determined extermination of homosexuals, for God's sake.

Well, what I'm saying is, everything I've read of A. leads me to think he isn't, and so please give me some evidence to the contrary? Because a lot of people who I think are not entirely insane seem to really like A., and I can't figure out why (outside of maybe an appreciation of a sort of poetic saddo moodiness).

I'm not (nor is my friend) saying that A. was out personally slaughtering millions of homosexuals. I'm saying that he was a homophobe, and that this homophobia is tied in with all sorts of problems in his thinking and his worldview, and that this is a problem; and more than that, I'm asking what is so redeeming about him that we should suffer through this.

Adorno's critique of "the culture industry" -- how capitalism appropriates signifiers of rebellion and anarchy into ever more marketable items -- is his lasting contribution, methinks. Also, his dismissal of "common sense" as a totem. Richard Hofstadter's work redeploys a lot of Adorno's ideas in an American socio-political context: how anti-intellectualism, for example, becomes a virtue for the political class.

Also: the "homophobia" of Adorno (or Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Orwell, Alfred Kazin) should not prevent one from appreciating them.

No, and I normally wouldn't let it; but it seems symptomatic of Adorno's inability to get outside his own headspace.

Well, I haven't been terribly impressed by what I've read of his critique of "the culture industry" (I think it ignores what's interesting about those phenomena and replaces it with a shallow and weirdly elitist Marxist analysis, one that doesn't get how pop culture functions in people's lives on an individual level -- one that, shall we say, takes away people's humanity rather than insisting upon it, as Marx would).

Like any smart writer, he uses an "ism" to begin his smarter critique.

Eh?

i wouldn't trust anyone's gloss of adorno, let alone jameson's

adorno is incredibly perceptive about how pop products are produced and disseminated. he disapproves of both in the sense that he disapproves of the whole edifice of modern life, but essays like 'the radio symphony' seem to notice things that nobody else even thought to look for. i've read a fair amount of adorno, but nowhere near a pro level, and i encountered nothing that seemed homophobic at all, huh.

in his mind (if i'm getting this at all right) the purpose of art was to express human liberty, and so the best art was that which defined the parameters of its own existence or struggled against the its own form (big up 12 toners & also beethoven). pop, made by craftsman/technicians following the shifting-same of "the hit," has no radical potential.

n.b. i don't think that "having no radical potential" is the same as being "bad" to TWA; i'm sure i remember a few sentences here and there that express admiration of charlie chaplin, maybe even doris day or somebody like that??

Why didn't A. like Nazis? They were vulgar/populist, they were against the sort of culture that A. was really into, they killed off maybe some people who he thought of as his peers (as the elites who really counted, I want to say); they were a personal inconvenience of the highest order. But does it go beyond that?

I think you're being a bit harsh here, Casuistry. Does one need to go beyond the fact that the Nazis killed off his peers no matter how genuine you think Adorno's feelings for those peers were? (And fwiw, I've read enough of his letters to Benjamin to surmise that Adorno had a great deal of affection for him.)

Think about it. You leave your country due to an oppressive regime, your friends/peers are being murdered, and you wind up in a country quite foreign to your own. Yes, Adorno was amazed by the unchanging weather of Los Angeles. But he was even more disoriented by it all. Tons of exiles were, Kracauer especially. How would you react to popular (or really ANY) culture?

Also, as gently as I can put it, you're quoting Jameson and your friend on Adorno rather than the man himself. You should really ferret out some primary evidence. Not to add fuel to the fire but there are very specific examples of Adorno's homophobia in his essay “Freudian Theory and The Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” particularly p. 136 and note 7 on p. 154 (from Routledge's The Culture Industry edited by J.M. Bernstein).

But it's reductive and just flat-out misinformed to state that "He took part in a critique of fascism that was widespread, in which fascism is basically blamed on homosexuality." If The Frankfurt School blamed fascism in 1930s Germany on any one thing, it was the rise of a petit bourgeois white collar class MUCH more than homosexuality.

And yes, homophobia was "of the times", sure. So might a lot of Adorno's sentiments; they may have "worked" for a particular set of people in a particular context.

As far as this is concerned, with the advent of the internet, I think his ideas are even more relevant. No doubt he would've seen the internet as an extremely logical capitalist development.

Finally, he was never as opposed to popular culture as people make him out to be. He had kind words for Chaplin, for instance. And he did recognize the privileged position from which he flung his pronunciamentos (see "Free Time").

Hell, you want a German exile conflicted about homosexuality, read Thomas Mann.

and i encountered nothing that seemed homophobic at all

See, I remember being startled by the use of sexual and particularly homosexual terminology (active, passive, penetrate, etc., etc., -- it just keeps building) in "On The Fetish-Character of Music...", and it kept startling me, especially with its heavy-handed worries about "passive" audiences, etc., etc. And it keeps cropping up in everything I read by/about him.

I guess I can't take his disapproval of "the whole edifice of modern life" too seriously since he has such a misguided understanding of the edifice of pre-modern life that he so cherishes.

(Also I think the idea that art is to express human liberty is pretty much bogus.)

Kevin, thanks.

I should like to think that Adorno (or anyone) would not like the Nazis for reasons that go deeper than "they killed off my peers", is what I meant.

See, I remember being startled by the use of sexual and particularly homosexual terminology (active, passive, penetrate, etc., etc., -- it just keeps building) in "On The Fetish-Character of Music...", and it kept startling me, especially with its heavy-handed worries about "passive" audiences, etc., etc. And it keeps cropping up in everything I read by/about him.

You're using late 20th century grad school sensors to interpret/be suspicious. That's no good.

No, there I'm using skills I picked up in high school English classes.

Also I did admit that I was quoting Jameson on Adorno, after all!