The work of Theodor Adorno, the German-Jewish social and cultural theorist who died in 1969, isn’t likely ever to become “popular.” From the essays on modernist music written in the early days of the Third Reich before he was forced to seek exile in New York in 1938 to the series of densely complex studies of Kant and Hegel written… return to article
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Reader Comments (11)Page 1 of 1 pagesit’s important to introduce these people to “mainstream.” Adorno is an important figure of the past century, though himself, never read by anyone outside the esoteric, he is written about by many people whom are read, including Zizkek, who contributes to this magazine.
but in all honesty, nothing is better than deriding bush.
if i was me. i’d create stickers and place them up at all the public spaces in the downtown. to create a better and more interactice ascetic. adorno would probably hate that, but he never got along with the american filth.
Posted by j on Mar 9, 2005 at 9:18 AM I’m really growing to love reading IN These Times. The existence of this publication was first brought to my attention when I did a web search on Mr. Vonnegut.
Now, whether its an essay on Adorno—with Heideggarian thought shining through even in the commentary; Zizek—everyone ought to read the first chapter of “On Belief;” Bernie Sanders—the infidel us rep. from the state of my alma mater; or Vonnegut’s still sharp (at 81 years) commentary on the plite of the human race (”...power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.")—brilliant, I’m convinced anyone who wants an authentic, realistic take on where we’re at as a people, as a nation or as a world being hoodwinked by the free markets, will find it in their best interest to read this perodical.
Posted by George on Mar 9, 2005 at 7:27 PM Adorno was an odd and brilliant fish, and the fact that he was more or less silenced in the 1980s (his writings, of cours, he was dead by then) make him all the more credible. Great to find such gems on ITT, Vonnegut, Curtis White (a kind of successor to Adorno, I would say).
I agree with you, j, about the deriding Bush bit, but that remains on the surface. But sometimes, a deeper dig into what is behind the scenes, really helps solidify the derision. I read (very slowly, stopping every now and then to try and fibure out what in earth the writer was saying) Dialectics of Enlightenment in the early 80s and finally found what in my personal experience was a seminal work on our pop culture. It’s worthy successor, I find, is Curtis White’s The Middle Mind.
These are people who examine the fantastic dumbing down that is going on in the USA and unfortunately spreading to other countries, essentially as a means of controlling society. I thionk if Adorno had lived longer, he would have seen the hippie movement for what it was, a Blut und Boden philosophy, and that everything that looked so radical and leftwing in the 60smovement was in fact a prelude to a new fascism. He would also have pointed out the way all sub-cultures get coopted by the industry and stuff like that.
The stunning conformism of our times.
Posted by Talleyrand on Mar 10, 2005 at 12:06 AM Adorno , unlike most philosphers of the Enlightment and early modern era, was concerned with aesthetics as a signifier of the deeper ethics of a culture. He derided America because our country was a cultural and is a cultural wasteland, where the “business of America is business.”
If one understands how to appreciate beauty, one understands how to appreciate his fellow human beings, beyond the sentimental and sensational claptrap (Footprints anyone) that is foisted upon us by the mass-market. I’m glad people are realizing that the critique of capitalism has to be taken to the roots of its reality producing machinery of ideas.
As someone whose family and friends are consistently victimized (not the best word, since there is an element of complicity in their ‘victimization’) by the machinations of consumerist culture, I have always found Adorno to be an astute and enlightening critic on the drive toward mediocrity within the culture I reside.
I also wholeheartedly support bashing Bush, but with facts versus opinions (though on good day you can hear my contempt for the man as an individual as well). We’re living in a time of ‘rollbacks’ (to borrow a commercial phrase from Wal-Mart) that parallels the poor decisions of former incarnations of the US government. And when a man like Warren Buffet suggests that the current media/political climate is creating a ‘sharecropper society’ it becomes necessary for those of us of a progressive/leftist bent to vocalize the true dimensions of the scandal occurring in Washington. Will anybody care unless that message is wrapped up in hedonism? I don’t know.
Posted by AJCarter on Mar 10, 2005 at 11:11 AM For those of you who like discovering more about ideologies today, do visit the special newtopia issue, for example this article
http://newtopiamagazine.net/content/issue18/features/bracketstring.php
regards,GB
Posted by G.Brigaldino on Mar 12, 2005 at 4:23 PM Hmmmm...translating Adorno into Foucault. How odd. Whatever will they think of next?
Posted by George Balanchine on Mar 28, 2005 at 1:23 AM Don’t forget that Wittgenstein stated early on that ethics and aesthetics are one. He’s usually viewed as making no political or social commentary in works such as “Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics” and “Philosophical Investigations,” but one can, with a little thinking, draw profound connections between Wittgenstein’s later thought, and such figures as Benjamin, Adorno, and Pierre Bourdieu, to name just three. I have had many people simply dismiss Adorno as being too difficult, abstruse, mandarin; as being a “Marxist,” etc. His thought, however, still cuts like a well-honed razor through the diseased body of our hypercapitalist culture, and I thank Jamie Daniel for producing an astute review that make draw more people to Adorno’s work.
Posted by Wiesengrundling on Mar 28, 2005 at 8:40 AM To carry these analyses one step farther, lets take account of recent developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science—among them, existence itself—become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.
Posted by Bermuda Swartz on Mar 28, 2005 at 2:59 PM We should also feel indebted to Adorno for his classic study of the authoritarian family in Prussia of the 1930’s and Peoria in 2005.
Posted by Michael Rothman on Mar 29, 2005 at 11:35 AM Did I read that some think Adorno conservative in this article ? I would certainly like to meet that singular creature.
Conservatives view popular culture as corrupting.
Adorno, and many others, it would seem, view the populous themselves as corrupted, only salvable by the uplifting aesthetics of the intellectual elite (and if that takes mass starvation and gulags, so be it) but what if the Adornos had their way and everyone loved atonal music and Marx was recognized as the all-seeing, all knowing proto-feminist?
You’d have to move the bar, or you couldn’t hang on to that condescending smugness, could you?
How else, in the absence of name or family, can we keep our distance from the hoi polloi?
Posted by Bill Wager on Apr 1, 2005 at 12:35 PM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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