[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, were
[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, and literary and
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
