Subject: Re: a & h and d of e
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 97 00:09:55 +0000
From: Giles Peaker <G.Peaker-AT-derby.ac.uk>


>Ken McKendrick wrote

>1.  what gives adorno and horkheimer the "legitimacy" (for lack of a 
>better term) to pronounce reality as unreconciled (this harkens back 
>to my comment about the  "magical dialectical wand.")

At the risk of relying on experience (and for the moment ignoring the 
texts completely) I suggest two things. One - precisely because we can 
conceive that it might be otherwise (even if not successfully). 
(And, if this is reconciled reality, God help us, because we can't). 
Two - and for similar reasons. The paintings of the later Cezanne.
(Failures on a titanic scale).

>2.  does a and h argue this dissonance because it is experienced in the 
>atomized 
>subject - ie. the subject experiences reality as a contradiction.

Dissonance is not the right term (at least for Adorno). Dissonance 
(aesthetically) is surely the subject's attempt to preserve the lack 
of reconciliation (in the art work) in the face of its apparent 
disappearance (albeit an attempt which imports the very form 
of  that false reconcilation - dissonance as construction, when mimesis 
is mimesis of the reified world - "the state of freedom, of 
something that can be consciously be produced and made"- letter 
to Benjamin 18 March 1936). Admittedly, it can seem as though
the only possibility of experiencing the lack of reconcilation is 
through the work of art (at least by the time of Aesthetic Theory),
and this answer begs the question of the basis for the assertion of the 
lack of reconcilation. So, on to...

>and 
>3. what kind of problems does a universalist argument for subjective 
>atomization 
>raise for the idea of understanding.

c.f. the question of political agency and action. A glib answer would be 
that Adorno universalises the position of the late modern intellectual.
(note his insistence that subjectivity in modernity is damaged individual
bourgeois subjectivity). This is not to argue with his suggestion of that 
subjectivity, but it does beg the question of different forms of social 
experience. (Should one ask South Korean shipyard workers about this?
or indeed those Parisian sub proletarians who only appeared in light 
operas 
for Adorno?). On the other hand, what if the conditions (and therefore 
forms)
of 'subjective atomization' are universal? Back to Hegel (but not Marx, 
by and 
large).

Glib answers I know, but its late in the UK, and sometimes the 11th 
thesis on Feuerbach 
preys on my mind.

yours

Giles
---------------------------------------------------



Giles Peaker, Historical and Theoretical Studies
School of Art and Design, University of Derby, Britannia Mill, 
Mackworth Road, Derby. DE22 3BL (U.K.)
(01332) 622222 ext. 4063    G.Peaker-AT-derby.ac.uk
Editorial Collective:
Detours and Delays. An Occasional Journal of Aesthetics and Politics
http://art.derby.ac.uk/~detours/detours.html