He blasted Heidegger's "jargon of authenticity" and he was right on target. I am not sure many dared blast his own "jargon of negativity", as stupefyingly turgid as any of Heidegger's verbal contortions. He was after all shielded by the Tarnhelm of leftism. Except Popper of course, who himself had been schooled in dialectical obfuscation but was soon enough able to see through the sham. It is so revealing to juxtapose the utter clarity of Popper's prose with the phony "depth" of Adorno's mumblings, as for example in that famous confrontation of the two on positivism in sociology. I said Adorno's mental gyrations are unfathomable, but on second thought the core idea is extremely simple: whatever I approve of is good, and whatever I reject is evil. And, of course, evil here is tantamount to western, and especially American, culture. This is dubbed "late capitalism" as if one is holding the watch of history on the palm of his hand, hence possessing divine insight into its cycles, its ends and its beginnings.
There is something uniquely obnoxious when somebody builds up his/her own personal predilections into a universal law. Adorno was, rightly, struck by the ghastliness of Nazism, but he attributed it to a non-existent cause. Nazism was supposed to be the culmination of "instrumental reason" that was the "essence" of western culture since the beginning of time really (he, together with Horkheimer, unearthed it even in the Bible). That Nazism had nothing to do with rationality, and that instrumentalism can be the core attribute of any ideology trying to impose itself violently, he simply brushes aside. At any event when he sought haven in America he must have felt, in accordance to this "theory", that instead of escaping evil he was in fact entering the very belly of the beast. That you need terribly impaired mental eyesight to conclude this is today obvious. This tendency to equate advanced western culture with incipient, latent, or even full-fledged fascism is rampant today in the midst of post-modernist leftism, whose rejection of reason quite naturally motivates it to seek Redemption in the mists of irrational fideism of all stripes. I am reminded of a Greek star of "creative" Marxism, Poulantzas, whose main plank was that fascism was the preordained culmination of advanced capitalism. He was writing this at the very moment when the dictatorships of Southern Europe, that he was ostensibly lambasting, were being swept away, with South America soon to follow suit. A couple of decades later the murderous autocracies of Eastern Europe were also toppled, but Poulantzas did not live to see this because by that time he had committed suicide.
By the way, this "late capitalism" line of thought egregiously equated western democracies with the Stalinist regimes, on the ludicrous grounds that they both practiced "instrumental reason" that worshipped economic efficiency and social regimentation. At a distance of forty years or so, one is aghast that this simplistic "sociology" had such a sweeping appeal among the educated youth of the time. Or then again it is not surprising at all, for what these quacks of liberation were peddling through murky verbiage were paradisial visions calculated to inflame emotion (including the libidinal urge, if you throw into the mix the subtext of unrestrained eroticism which accounts for so much of their appeal). No wonder that young people, like ourselves at the time, were captured by the lure of this cloud-cuckoo-land whose mystique was all the more intensified the less we understood about what these gurus were talking about.
So, Adorno was unable to fit in or to understand popular and democratic America. He declared sociology as his profession, and when Lazarsfeld put him to work actually practicing what sociology is about (namely observation of the social process, and not spinning out abstruse theory to be imposed upon reality) he obviously chafed at the "tyranny" of facts, contemptuously dubbed "positivism". That at least something intelligible like the F-scale came out of that sojourn in the galleys is a gain, probably due to Lazarsfeld's unflinching superintendence. In any case, the motive of "pure" theory soon took its revenge, when upon his return to West Germany, which lavished all sorts of academic privileges on him, he was back in full "negative dialectics" mode.
I was thinking intensely of all this as I was listening to John Coltrane over the past few days. Adorno's hatred of jazz is well-known. Again, that somebody may be so wrong-headed defies belief. All the more so if this somebody happens to be a renowned philosopher of art! It would have sufficed if he simply had said, I do not like that kind of music. That would have been honest. It would also render superfluous the thousands of pages of convoluted theorizing built upon that simple expression of a personal preference. But, no. Adorno, like the paradigmatic dogmatist -to put it mildly- that he is, wants to make you also hate what he hates. He feels he has an esoteric insight into art in itself. He possesses the template of aesthetic value that like a metaphysical cookie-cutter must be forced upon the worthless dough of diverse aesthetic endeavor, in order to eliminate everything that does not fit his apriori ideas of what alone counts as art. This template is, of course, an abstract expressionism of sorts together with atonal music. This alone, according to him, can bring out "social contradiction" in "late" modernity.
What escapes him utterly is that jazz itself is the most glaring example of modernist expressionism, a type of musical diction that grew out of the extremest conditions of social oppression. In jazz this tormented social reality has pride of place in the form of an exquisitely wrought symbol. That in America this highly subversive and critical mode of aesthetic expression became integral to the country's mass culture is in fact a token of the essential democratic pulse that underlies that culture, even though it might be hidden and counteracted by other social and political tendencies. Just try fitting "Strange Fruit" into Adorno's perverse evaluations.
Jazz is in itself a prime example of the modernist fragmentation of holistic form which was the distinguishing mark of traditionalist aesthetics (the aesthetics of the "ruling classes"). It is an idiom that overturns expectations of formal completion, one that leaves everything open for future experimentation. That is why improvisation is so central to it. But for Adorno improvisation is a "bourgeois" category, one that prioritizes individual sensitivity over the "grand rhythms" of a social process that he himself is only privy to. To put it simply, though, jazz is the sound of social liberation, a phrase that just "don't mean a thing" unless it is predicated upon creative individuals breaking out of the constraints of social rule and convention to "do it their way" without political or philosophical authority watching over their shoulder and trying to bend their work to fit "holistic" ends as some master defines them.
Another social fact entirely missed by our wise sociologist is that in the whole ferment of jazz as it spread out of the confines of the South to engulf Chicago and New York we had the first living example of the equality of the races, at the time when racial segregation and oppression were rampant in America. Jazz was the way that black society showed it mettle, in a way that transgressed social and racial barriers. It was the cultural preparation for that epic struggle for civil rights that exploded in the fifties and the sixties. That someone like Adorno is constitutionally blind to these aesthetic and social realities is just enough to indict his sociology and theory of art.
Another thing that Adorno is incapable of grasping is that there is no inherent contradiction between the aesthetic of expressionism and jazz, unless one wants to erect a totalitarian elitism. Art is by definition an open concept and open experience. It is a universe without pre-ordained goals and structures, in which an endless plurality of inventions coexist. Mass modes of artistic production are integral to it, to the same extent as remote forms of aristocratic feeling catering to select individuals or groups.
The Frankfurt school's disdain for popular culture is really a disdain for democracy (for "bourgeois" democracy as they disparage it in the standard mode of that kind of discourse, which of course does not bother to define in any intelligible terms what other kind of democracy they have in mind). There is nothing theoretically wrong with mass entertainment, unless one hypothesizes that the whole of our waking time must be taken up with worrying and wondering about the evils of this world and how we may put them aright. The latter is indeed an option either for psychologically disturbed types or for those subsidized by the "bourgeois" state (like Adorno himself) to engage in ceaseless ideological rumination.
There is obviously a down-side to democratic art, namely the reduction to the least common denominator and the pandering to "common" feelings and "common-sense" morality. But we do not need Adorno to awaken us to this dimension of democratic society: we have Tocqueville for it, thank you, and without the sinister condemnation of democracy itself that goes together with Adorno's "high" aesthetics to boot. We have known from the beginning that the trite and the superficial are inseparable ingredients of mass culture. But from this it does not at all follow that "common" feeling and common-sense in general are to be despised. In favor of what? In favor of the privileged intuitions of some wise man, perhaps? From today's perspective this is impermissible.
Ordinariness is no ontological drawback. Ordinary people who cannot fathom deliberately jumbled "philosophy" are not idiots or stooges. Nor are those who ever cried watching Love Story -despite the obvious kitch, especially with the hindsight of a generation. Whoever claims this is an insufferable bigot, however dense his prose. Condemnation of the empirical, of the ordinary, of the commonplace is already a program for the elimination of that segment of reality that does not conform to our "theoretical" requirements. It is a program for the elimination of humanity as is, in favor of a fantastic prototype that exists only in the agitated minds of certain narcissists.
Anyone who knows something about the epistemology of the Frankfurt school is aware that for them common sense thinking is a swear word, just like factuality. This is Hegelianism, minus the good aspect of Hegel, namely the insistence that ordinary logic and empiricism are still valid, even though "subsumed". For Adorno, however, they are simply to be bypassed, and their proponents, like Popper, denounced, as stooges of the status quo. In this he did not learn from his colleague Walter Benjamin (or was he a colleague?), for whom the mechanic reproduction of the work of art of course strips it of its "aura", of its sacredness as it were, but at the same timet makes it available to the widest possible audience. What is gained and what is lost in this democratic reduction of the aesthetic can only be decided after a meticulous critical assessment. Benjamin, in any case, does not this that it is an unredeemed loss.
All in all, in the place of Adorno's aesthetic theology we need a tolerant and pluralistic art, where enjoyment is predicated upon the effort to commune with all sorts of new and strange objects, forms and languages. Through this it is quite possible, although not obligatory (nothing is obligatory in art, as opposed to ethics for instance), to like both jazz and classical music -in fact attachment to both of these genres is one of the commonest facts. For the rest every individual is entitled to his/her loves and aversions. We grant Adorno his dislike of jazz, and we have no right to complain. But we beg to be spared the silly "philosophy" that he erected upon this uncontroversial but uninteresting personal choice.
There is something uniquely obnoxious when somebody builds up his/her own personal predilections into a universal law. Adorno was, rightly, struck by the ghastliness of Nazism, but he attributed it to a non-existent cause. Nazism was supposed to be the culmination of "instrumental reason" that was the "essence" of western culture since the beginning of time really (he, together with Horkheimer, unearthed it even in the Bible). That Nazism had nothing to do with rationality, and that instrumentalism can be the core attribute of any ideology trying to impose itself violently, he simply brushes aside. At any event when he sought haven in America he must have felt, in accordance to this "theory", that instead of escaping evil he was in fact entering the very belly of the beast. That you need terribly impaired mental eyesight to conclude this is today obvious. This tendency to equate advanced western culture with incipient, latent, or even full-fledged fascism is rampant today in the midst of post-modernist leftism, whose rejection of reason quite naturally motivates it to seek Redemption in the mists of irrational fideism of all stripes. I am reminded of a Greek star of "creative" Marxism, Poulantzas, whose main plank was that fascism was the preordained culmination of advanced capitalism. He was writing this at the very moment when the dictatorships of Southern Europe, that he was ostensibly lambasting, were being swept away, with South America soon to follow suit. A couple of decades later the murderous autocracies of Eastern Europe were also toppled, but Poulantzas did not live to see this because by that time he had committed suicide.
By the way, this "late capitalism" line of thought egregiously equated western democracies with the Stalinist regimes, on the ludicrous grounds that they both practiced "instrumental reason" that worshipped economic efficiency and social regimentation. At a distance of forty years or so, one is aghast that this simplistic "sociology" had such a sweeping appeal among the educated youth of the time. Or then again it is not surprising at all, for what these quacks of liberation were peddling through murky verbiage were paradisial visions calculated to inflame emotion (including the libidinal urge, if you throw into the mix the subtext of unrestrained eroticism which accounts for so much of their appeal). No wonder that young people, like ourselves at the time, were captured by the lure of this cloud-cuckoo-land whose mystique was all the more intensified the less we understood about what these gurus were talking about.
So, Adorno was unable to fit in or to understand popular and democratic America. He declared sociology as his profession, and when Lazarsfeld put him to work actually practicing what sociology is about (namely observation of the social process, and not spinning out abstruse theory to be imposed upon reality) he obviously chafed at the "tyranny" of facts, contemptuously dubbed "positivism". That at least something intelligible like the F-scale came out of that sojourn in the galleys is a gain, probably due to Lazarsfeld's unflinching superintendence. In any case, the motive of "pure" theory soon took its revenge, when upon his return to West Germany, which lavished all sorts of academic privileges on him, he was back in full "negative dialectics" mode.
I was thinking intensely of all this as I was listening to John Coltrane over the past few days. Adorno's hatred of jazz is well-known. Again, that somebody may be so wrong-headed defies belief. All the more so if this somebody happens to be a renowned philosopher of art! It would have sufficed if he simply had said, I do not like that kind of music. That would have been honest. It would also render superfluous the thousands of pages of convoluted theorizing built upon that simple expression of a personal preference. But, no. Adorno, like the paradigmatic dogmatist -to put it mildly- that he is, wants to make you also hate what he hates. He feels he has an esoteric insight into art in itself. He possesses the template of aesthetic value that like a metaphysical cookie-cutter must be forced upon the worthless dough of diverse aesthetic endeavor, in order to eliminate everything that does not fit his apriori ideas of what alone counts as art. This template is, of course, an abstract expressionism of sorts together with atonal music. This alone, according to him, can bring out "social contradiction" in "late" modernity.
What escapes him utterly is that jazz itself is the most glaring example of modernist expressionism, a type of musical diction that grew out of the extremest conditions of social oppression. In jazz this tormented social reality has pride of place in the form of an exquisitely wrought symbol. That in America this highly subversive and critical mode of aesthetic expression became integral to the country's mass culture is in fact a token of the essential democratic pulse that underlies that culture, even though it might be hidden and counteracted by other social and political tendencies. Just try fitting "Strange Fruit" into Adorno's perverse evaluations.
Jazz is in itself a prime example of the modernist fragmentation of holistic form which was the distinguishing mark of traditionalist aesthetics (the aesthetics of the "ruling classes"). It is an idiom that overturns expectations of formal completion, one that leaves everything open for future experimentation. That is why improvisation is so central to it. But for Adorno improvisation is a "bourgeois" category, one that prioritizes individual sensitivity over the "grand rhythms" of a social process that he himself is only privy to. To put it simply, though, jazz is the sound of social liberation, a phrase that just "don't mean a thing" unless it is predicated upon creative individuals breaking out of the constraints of social rule and convention to "do it their way" without political or philosophical authority watching over their shoulder and trying to bend their work to fit "holistic" ends as some master defines them.
Another social fact entirely missed by our wise sociologist is that in the whole ferment of jazz as it spread out of the confines of the South to engulf Chicago and New York we had the first living example of the equality of the races, at the time when racial segregation and oppression were rampant in America. Jazz was the way that black society showed it mettle, in a way that transgressed social and racial barriers. It was the cultural preparation for that epic struggle for civil rights that exploded in the fifties and the sixties. That someone like Adorno is constitutionally blind to these aesthetic and social realities is just enough to indict his sociology and theory of art.
Another thing that Adorno is incapable of grasping is that there is no inherent contradiction between the aesthetic of expressionism and jazz, unless one wants to erect a totalitarian elitism. Art is by definition an open concept and open experience. It is a universe without pre-ordained goals and structures, in which an endless plurality of inventions coexist. Mass modes of artistic production are integral to it, to the same extent as remote forms of aristocratic feeling catering to select individuals or groups.
The Frankfurt school's disdain for popular culture is really a disdain for democracy (for "bourgeois" democracy as they disparage it in the standard mode of that kind of discourse, which of course does not bother to define in any intelligible terms what other kind of democracy they have in mind). There is nothing theoretically wrong with mass entertainment, unless one hypothesizes that the whole of our waking time must be taken up with worrying and wondering about the evils of this world and how we may put them aright. The latter is indeed an option either for psychologically disturbed types or for those subsidized by the "bourgeois" state (like Adorno himself) to engage in ceaseless ideological rumination.
There is obviously a down-side to democratic art, namely the reduction to the least common denominator and the pandering to "common" feelings and "common-sense" morality. But we do not need Adorno to awaken us to this dimension of democratic society: we have Tocqueville for it, thank you, and without the sinister condemnation of democracy itself that goes together with Adorno's "high" aesthetics to boot. We have known from the beginning that the trite and the superficial are inseparable ingredients of mass culture. But from this it does not at all follow that "common" feeling and common-sense in general are to be despised. In favor of what? In favor of the privileged intuitions of some wise man, perhaps? From today's perspective this is impermissible.
Ordinariness is no ontological drawback. Ordinary people who cannot fathom deliberately jumbled "philosophy" are not idiots or stooges. Nor are those who ever cried watching Love Story -despite the obvious kitch, especially with the hindsight of a generation. Whoever claims this is an insufferable bigot, however dense his prose. Condemnation of the empirical, of the ordinary, of the commonplace is already a program for the elimination of that segment of reality that does not conform to our "theoretical" requirements. It is a program for the elimination of humanity as is, in favor of a fantastic prototype that exists only in the agitated minds of certain narcissists.
Anyone who knows something about the epistemology of the Frankfurt school is aware that for them common sense thinking is a swear word, just like factuality. This is Hegelianism, minus the good aspect of Hegel, namely the insistence that ordinary logic and empiricism are still valid, even though "subsumed". For Adorno, however, they are simply to be bypassed, and their proponents, like Popper, denounced, as stooges of the status quo. In this he did not learn from his colleague Walter Benjamin (or was he a colleague?), for whom the mechanic reproduction of the work of art of course strips it of its "aura", of its sacredness as it were, but at the same timet makes it available to the widest possible audience. What is gained and what is lost in this democratic reduction of the aesthetic can only be decided after a meticulous critical assessment. Benjamin, in any case, does not this that it is an unredeemed loss.
All in all, in the place of Adorno's aesthetic theology we need a tolerant and pluralistic art, where enjoyment is predicated upon the effort to commune with all sorts of new and strange objects, forms and languages. Through this it is quite possible, although not obligatory (nothing is obligatory in art, as opposed to ethics for instance), to like both jazz and classical music -in fact attachment to both of these genres is one of the commonest facts. For the rest every individual is entitled to his/her loves and aversions. We grant Adorno his dislike of jazz, and we have no right to complain. But we beg to be spared the silly "philosophy" that he erected upon this uncontroversial but uninteresting personal choice.
