[Marxism-Thaxis] Adorno
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_W._Adorno Theory Adorno was chiefly influenced by Max Weber's critique of disenchantment, Georg Lukacs's Hegelian interpretation of Marxism, as well as Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history, although Weber's influence has until recently been underestimated. Adorno, along with the other major Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, argued that advanced capitalism had managed to contain or liquidate the forces that would bring about its collapse and that the revolutionary moment, when it would have been possible to transform it into socialism, had passed. As he put it at the beginning of his Negative Dialectics (1966), philosophy is still necessary because the time to realise it was missed. Adorno argued that capitalism had become more entrenched through its attack on the objective basis of revolutionary consciousness and through liquidation of the individualism that had been the basis of critical consciousness. Whilst Adorno's work focuses on art, literature and music as key areas of sensual, indirect critique of the established culture and modes of thought, there is also a strand of distinctly political utopianism evident in his reflections especially on history. The argument, which is complex and dialectic, dominates his Aesthetic Theory, Philosophy of New Music and many other works. Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated. He argued that the culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media, manipulated the population. Popular culture was identified as a reason why people become passive; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture made people docile and content, no matter how terrible their economic circumstances. * (See "Don't Worry; Be Happy") The differences among cultural goods make them appear different, but they are in fact just variations on the same theme. He wrote that "the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardised production of consumption goods" but this is concealed under "the manipulation of taste and the official culture's pretense of individualism". [10] Adorno conceptualised this phenomenon as pseudo-individualization and the always-the-same. He saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness. But the subtle dialectician was also able to say that the problem with capitalism was that it blurred the line between false and true needs altogether. The work of Adorno and Horkheimer heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. At the time Adorno began writing, there was a tremendous unease among many intellectuals as to the results of mass culture and mass production on the character of individuals within a nation. By exploring the mechanisms for the creation of mass culture, Adorno presented a framework which gave specific terms to what had been a more general concern. At the time this was considered important because of the role which the state took in cultural production; Adorno's analysis allowed for a critique of mass culture from the left which balanced the critique of popular culture from the right. From both perspectives — left and right — the nature of cultural production was felt to be at the root of social and moral problems resulting from the consumption of culture. However, while the critique from the right emphasized moral degeneracy ascribed to sexual and racial influences within popular culture, Adorno located the problem not with the content, but with the objective realities of the production of mass culture and its effects, e.g. as a form of reverse psychology. Many aspects of Adorno's work are relevant today and have been developed in many strands of contemporary critical theory, media theory, and sociology. Thinkers influenced by Adorno believe that today's society has evolved in a direction foreseen by him, especially in regard to the past (Auschwitz), morals or the Culture Industry. The latter has become a particularly productive, yet highly contested term in cultural studies. Many of Adorno's reflections on aesthetics and music have only just begun to be debated, as a collection of essays on the subject, many of which had not previously been translated into English, has only recently been collected and published as Essays on Music. His work on the culture industry has been criticized by such writers as Christian Bethune, who point out both that Adorno's critique is not based on a thorough knowledge of popular cultural forms, but also that it has an "end of history" tone to it. Taking Adorno's critique of popular music to its logical conclusion, one would have to conclude that Blues or rocknroll, jazz, rap or punk, w
[Marxism-Thaxis] Adorno
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_W._Adorno [edit] Adorno and Music Theory See also: Critical Theory, New musicology. Adorno's theoretical method is closely related to his understanding of music and Arnold Schoenberg and other contemporary composers' atonal (less so "twelve-tone") techniques (Adorno had studied composition for several years with Alban Berg), which challenged the hierarchical nature of traditional tonality in composition. For even if "the whole is untrue", for Adorno we retain the ability to form partial critical conceptions and submit them to a test as we progress towards a "higher" awareness. This role of a critical consciousness was a common concern in the Second Viennese School prior to the Second World War, and demanded that composers relate to the traditions more as a canon of taboos rather than as a canon of masterpieces that should be imitated. For the composer (poet, artist, philosopher) of this era, every work of art or thought was thus likely to be shocking or difficult to understand. Only through its "corrosive unacceptability" to the commercially-defined sensibilities of the middle class could new art hope to challenge dominant cultural assumptions. Adorno's followers argue that he seems to have managed the very idea that one can abandon tonality while still being able to rank artistic and ethical phenomena on a tentative scale, not because he was a sentimentalist about this ability but because he saw the drive towards totality (whether the Stalinist or Fascist totality of his time) as derivative of the ability to make ethical and artistic judgement, which, following Kant, Adorno thought part of being human. Thus his method (better: anti-method) was to use language and its "big" concepts tentatively and musically, partly to see if they "sound right" and fit the data. Adorno was concerned that a genuine sociology retain a commitment to truth including the willingness to self-apply. Today, his life can be read as a protest against what he would call the "reification" of political polls and spin as well as a culture that in being aggressively "anti" high culture, seems every year to make more and more cultural artifacts of less and less quality that are consumed with some disgust by their "fans", viewed as objects themselves[citation needed]. ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Adorno
Theodor W. Adorno First published Mon May 5, 2003; substantive revision Fri Aug 3, 2007 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/#2 2. Dialectic of Enlightenment Long before "postmodernism" became fashionable, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote one of the most searching critiques of modernity to have emerged among progressive European intellectuals. Dialectic of Enlightenment is a product of their wartime exile. It first appeared as a mimeograph titled Philosophical Fragments in 1944. This title became the subtitle when the book was published in 1947. Their book opens with a grim assessment of the modern West: "Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant" (DE 1, translation modified). How can this be, the authors ask. How can the progress of modern science and medicine and industry promise to liberate people from ignorance, disease, and brutal, mind-numbing work, yet help create a world where people willingly swallow fascist ideology, knowingly practice deliberate genocide, and energetically develop lethal weapons of mass destruction? Reason, they answer, has become irrational. ^ CB: Gee, interesting theory, but since they call themselves "Marxists" you'd think they might mention the concepts "capitalism", "class oppression" in looking for an explanation of "modernity's" discontents. Ya think ? Why not drop the "Marxist" tag to avoid this confusion. Put another way, what exactly is "Marxist" in Adorno's thinking ? ^ ^ Although they cite Francis Bacon as a leading spokesman for an instrumentalized reason that becomes irrational, Horkheimer and Adorno do not think that modern science and scientism are the sole culprits. The tendency of rational progress to become irrational regress arises much earlier. Indeed, they cite both the Hebrew scriptures and Greek philosophers as contributing to regressive tendencies. If Horkheimer and Adorno are right, then a critique of modernity must also be a critique of premodernity, and a turn toward the postmodern cannot simply be a return to the premodern. Otherwise the failures of modernity will continue in a new guise under postmodern conditions. Society as a whole needs to be transformed. ^ CB: Does it now ? Especially, since "the whole is false". Horkheimer and Adorno believe that society and culture form a historical totality, such that the pursuit of freedom in society is inseparable from the pursuit of enlightenment in culture (DE xvi). There is a flip side to this: a lack or loss of freedom in society—in the political, economic, and legal structures within which we live—signals a concomitant failure in cultural enlightenment—in philosophy, the arts, religion, and the like. The Nazi death camps are not an aberration, nor are mindless studio movies innocent entertainment. Both indicate that something fundamental has gone wrong in the modern West. ^ CB: How about white supremacy, the African slave trade , the genocidal usurpation of the Western Hemisphere and worldwide imperialism before these ? They should have read _The World and Africa_ by Dubois. Something had been done gone wrong in the modern West way before the Nazi death camps and studio movies. ^ According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the source of today's disaster is a pattern of blind domination, domination in a triple sense: the domination of nature by human beings, the domination of nature within human beings, and, in both of these forms of domination, the domination of some human beings by others. CB: Now there's a contradiction. Human beings are dominating nature and nature is dominating human beings at the same time. ^^^ What motivates such triple domination is an irrational fear of the unknown: "Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This has determined the path of demythologization … . Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized" (DE 11). In an unfree society whose culture pursues so-called progress no matter what the cost, that which is "other," whether human or nonhuman, gets shoved aside, exploited, or destroyed. The means of destruction may be more sophisticated in the modern West, and the exploitation may be less direct than outright slavery, but blind, fear-driven domination continues, with ever greater global consequences. The all-consuming engine driving this process is an ever-expanding capitalist economy, fed by scientific research and the latest technologies. ^ CB: Ok here's capitalism, but really it's scientific research. ^ Contrary to some interpretations, Horkheimer and Adorno do not reject the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Nor do they provide a negative "metanarrative" of universal historical decline. Rather, through a highly unusual combination of philosophical argument, sociological reflection
[Marxism-Thaxis] Adorno
Here's some "Marxism" in it (smile) 3. Critical Social Theory Dialectic of Enlightenment presupposes a critical social theory indebted to Karl Marx. Adorno reads Marx as a Hegelian materialist whose critique of capitalism unavoidably includes a critique of the ideologies that capitalism sustains and requires. The most important of these is what Marx called "the fetishism of commodities." Marx aimed his critique of commodity fetishism against bourgeois social scientists who simply describe the capitalist economy but, in so doing, simultaneously misdescribe it and prescribe a false social vision. According to Marx, bourgeois economists necessarily ignore the exploitation intrinsic to capitalist production. They fail to understand that capitalist production, for all its surface "freedom" and "fairness," must extract surplus value from the labor of the working class. Like ordinary producers and consumers under capitalist conditions, bourgeois economists treat the commodity as a fetish. They treat it as if it were a neutral object, with a life of its own, that directly relates to other commodities, in independence from the human interactions that actually sustain all commodities. Marx, by contrast, argues that whatever makes a product a commodity goes back to human needs, desires, and practices. The commodity would not have "use value" if it did not satisfy human wants. It would not have "exchange value" if no one wished to exchange it for something else. And its exchange value could not be calculated if the commodity did not share with other commodities a "value" created by the expenditure of human labor power and measured by the average labor time socially necessary to produce commodities of various sorts. Adorno's social theory attempts to make Marx's central insights applicable to "late capitalism." Although in agreement with Marx's analysis of the commodity, Adorno thinks his critique of commodity fetishism does not go far enough. Significant changes have occurred in the structure of capitalism since Marx's day. This requires revisions on a number of topics: the dialectic between forces of production and relations of production; the relationship between state and economy; the sociology of classes and class consciousness; the nature and function of ideology; and the role of expert cultures, such as modern art and social theory, in criticizing capitalism and calling for the transformation of society as a whole. The primary clues to these revisions come from a theory of reification proposed by the Hungarian socialist Georg Lukács in the 1920s and from interdisciplinary projects and debates conducted by members of the Institute of Social Research in the 1930s and 1940s. Building on Max Weber's theory of rationalization, Lukács argues that the capitalist economy is no longer one sector of society alongside others. Rather, commodity exchange has become the central organizing principle for all sectors of society. CB: This is already in Marx before Luckacs. The qualitative shift is indicated in labor power becoming a commodity, wage-labor. It defines capitalist economy, distinguishing it from pre-capitalist economies where commodity exchange is on the "periphery" of society. (See _Capital_ Vol. I) ^ ^^ This allows commodity fetishism to permeate all social institutions (e.g., law, administration, journalism) as well as all academic disciplines, including philosophy. "Reification" refers to "the structural process whereby the commodity form permeates life in capitalist society." Lukács was especially concerned with how reification makes human beings "seem like mere things obeying the inexorable laws of the marketplace" (Zuidervaart 1991, 76). Initially Adorno shared this concern, even though he never had Lukács's confidence that the revolutionary working class could overcome reification. Later Adorno called the reification of consciousness an "epiphenomenon." What a critical social theory really needs to address is why hunger, poverty, and other forms of human suffering persist despite the technological and scientific potential to mitigate them or to eliminate them altogether. The root cause, Adorno says, lies in how capitalist relations of production have come to dominate society as a whole, leading to extreme, albeit often invisible, concentrations of wealth and power (ND 189-92). Society has come to be organized around the production of exchange values for the sake of producing exchange values, which, of course, always already requires a silent appropriation of surplus value. Adorno refers to this nexus of production and power as the "principle of exchange" (Tauschprinzip). A society where this nexus prevails is an "exchange society" (Tauschgesellschaft). Adorno's diagnosis of the exchange society has three levels: politico-economic, social-psychological, and cultural. Politically and economically he responds to a theory of state capitalism proposed by Friedrich Pollock during the war y
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Adorno
On Jul 14, 2009, at 1:37 PM, c b wrote: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_W._Adorno > > Adorno's theoretical method is closely related to his understanding of > music and Arnold Schoenberg and other contemporary composers' atonal > (less so "twelve-tone") techniques (Adorno had studied composition for > several years with Alban Berg), which challenged the hierarchical > nature of traditional tonality in composition. Nonsense. That "hierarchical nature of traditional tonality in composition," if it ever existed, ended with the first notes of *Tristan*. > ...the Second Viennese School...demanded that composers relate to > the traditions more as a canon of taboos rather than as a canon of > masterpieces that should be imitated... Which, no doubt, is why Wozzek is entirely structured in traditional forms, why Webern orchestrated (and virtually recomposed) the *Ricercar à six," why Schoenberg wrote both "tonal" and "twelve-tone" works at the same time. Sure. Shane Mage > This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it > always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire, > kindling in measures and going out in measures." > > Herakleitos of Ephesos ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
[Marxism-Thaxis] Adorno & Leibniz
June 3, 2006 Comrade Dumain - Have I got the article for you! This is "Das Invividuelle denken. Der vollstaendige Individuenbegriff bei Leibniz u. seine Wieder- aufnahme bei Adorno" (Guido Kreis, Bonn). It's slated to appear in the Conference Bulletin of the World Leibniz Congress in Hanover this July. I'm trying to make it to the Congress to obtain a copy, but the world Leibniz Society also sells them outright. Horkheimer discussed monads too, but not as extensively as Adorno. I'm trying to order the big, new, fat edition of Adorno's lectures from 1962-1963. You're right that the new Leibniz/Spinoza bio is usefull. The author (I don't know how he figured this out) quite appropriately contends Leibniz enjoyed a more or less unilinear increase in political influence, especially after he curried favor with Czar Peter. The biographical legends [A.W. Ward] have it that the philosopher's influence declined after the expiry of the Electoress Sophie in 1714, but Leibniz was already well integrated (to put it mildly) in the secret diplomacy network. The Marxist work on Leibniz leaves plenty of room for improvement. The much-vaunted works of Hans Heinz Holz and Jon Elster say nothing about Russia and secret diplomacy. As I'm sure you know, Marx ran a private Leibniz museum out of his own home in his last years. Some quite intriguing Leibniz memorablia were assembled. WILLIAM FR. DRISCHLER ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Adorno & Leibniz
Thanks for the info. Please tell me more about Marx's "Leibniz library." I know nothing about it. Also, do you have a specific reference to Adorno's lectures? There are many volumes being trasnlated to English of late. Can you provide bibliographical references for Holz and Elster? Thanks. -Original Message- >From: William Drischler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Sent: Jun 3, 2006 7:52 PM >To: marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu >Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: [Marxism-Thaxis] Adorno & Leibniz > >June 3, 2006 > >Comrade Dumain - > >Have I got the article for you! > >This is "Das Invividuelle denken. Der vollstaendige Individuenbegriff bei >Leibniz u. seine Wieder- aufnahme bei Adorno" (Guido Kreis, Bonn). It's >slated to appear in the Conference Bulletin of the World Leibniz Congress in >Hanover this July. I'm trying to make it to the Congress to obtain a copy, >but the world Leibniz Society also sells them outright. Horkheimer discussed >monads too, but not as extensively as Adorno. I'm trying to order the big, >new, fat edition of Adorno's lectures from 1962-1963. > >You're right that the new Leibniz/Spinoza bio is usefull. The author (I >don't know how he figured this out) quite appropriately contends Leibniz >enjoyed a more or less unilinear increase in political influence, especially > after he curried favor with Czar Peter. The biographical legends [A.W. >Ward] have it that the philosopher's influence declined after the expiry of >the Electoress Sophie in 1714, but Leibniz was already well integrated (to >put it mildly) in the secret diplomacy network. > >The Marxist work on Leibniz leaves plenty of room for improvement. The >much-vaunted works of Hans Heinz Holz and Jon Elster say nothing about >Russia and secret diplomacy. > >As I'm sure you know, Marx ran a private Leibniz museum out of his own home >in his last years. Some quite intriguing Leibniz memorablia were assembled. > > >WILLIAM FR. DRISCHLER > > > >___ >Marxism-Thaxis mailing list >Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu >To change your options or unsubscribe go to: >http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis Ralph Dumain's The Autodidact Project http://www.autodidactproject.org The C.L.R. James Institute http://www.clrjamesinstitute.org ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
Re: [Marxism-Thaxis] Adorno & Leibniz
Again, I'm hoping you can provide the references I requested. Did I also mention I'd be interested in locating Horkheimer's reference to monads? Re Marxist work on Leibniz: I am unfamiliar with analyses of Leibniz's political role. I'm really interested in Marxist analyses of Leibniz's philosophy. At 11:52 PM 6/3/2006 +, William Drischler wrote: June 3, 2006 Comrade Dumain - Have I got the article for you! This is "Das Invividuelle denken. Der vollstaendige Individuenbegriff bei Leibniz u. seine Wieder- aufnahme bei Adorno" (Guido Kreis, Bonn). It's slated to appear in the Conference Bulletin of the World Leibniz Congress in Hanover this July. I'm trying to make it to the Congress to obtain a copy, but the world Leibniz Society also sells them outright. Horkheimer discussed monads too, but not as extensively as Adorno. I'm trying to order the big, new, fat edition of Adorno's lectures from 1962-1963. You're right that the new Leibniz/Spinoza bio is usefull. The author (I don't know how he figured this out) quite appropriately contends Leibniz enjoyed a more or less unilinear increase in political influence, especially after he curried favor with Czar Peter. The biographical legends [A.W. Ward] have it that the philosopher's influence declined after the expiry of the Electoress Sophie in 1714, but Leibniz was already well integrated (to put it mildly) in the secret diplomacy network. The Marxist work on Leibniz leaves plenty of room for improvement. The much-vaunted works of Hans Heinz Holz and Jon Elster say nothing about Russia and secret diplomacy. As I'm sure you know, Marx ran a private Leibniz museum out of his own home in his last years. Some quite intriguing Leibniz memorablia were assembled. WILLIAM FR. DRISCHLER ___ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
