Date: Mon, 03 May 1999 21:00:54 +0000
From: William Winstead <stimmung-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Ernst Bloch on Jazz


Dear Ralph and list,

Ralph - now I must say, it takes a brilliant intellect to refer to "the
childishness and intellectual incapacity of the respondents" (those
sympathetic to Bloch and Adorno), while nevertheless failing to engage
their ideas or those articulated by Zorn or Gelder. When you first
insult the list and then, after calling for a "serious consideration" of
Spencer's comments, do nothing more than lazily suppress Bloch's views
by referring, of all things, to the where he wrote them down - as if
this invalidated them somehow - all of this is difficult indeed to take
seriously. Really, one must engage the argument, not wave fingers from
the sidelines. 

Furthermore, I simply have no idea what you could possibly be referring
to when you write: "What we assume about music, art, poetry, dance,
dress, and all forms of cultural expression is rather different, as we
have more cultural experience to draw upon, theirs plus ours." You have
more to draw on than Adorno or Bloch? Did you have music lessons with
Alban Berg? Do you know who he is? Do you even know German? Just how
broad is your cultural experience? As broad as "theirs plus ours"? What
is, to put the question *seriously*, "experience, Erfahrung? Since you
have their experience (and ours!! - which is not mine, I might add),
then you must have had the *experience* of studying Kant's first
_Critique_ with Siegfried Kracauer. Adorno had this experience. Since
Kant discusses how experience is possible there, and since yours is so
very broad, perhaps you could enlighten us? But then again, maybe you
never met Kracauer? 

Next time, instead of refering to some unnamed Telos article on Adorno
to support your *wholly* unsupported views, try to provide one - at
least *one* - argument which deals with the arguments of Adorno or
Bloch. Telling this list that they came from Europe and that European
culture differs from American culture is neither an argument or news.
Saying that they are "wrong" about jazz or dance is not an argument
either.  It's called an assertion.

Kindest regards to all,

Bill Winstead



Ralph Dumain wrote:
> 
> I see that the wagons are already being circled to stave off serious
> consideration of the implications of Spencer's highlighting of a very
> important issue regarding Bloch and Adorno, only highlighting the
> childishness and intellectual incapacity of the respondents.
> 
> In the case of Bloch, one's initial reaction ought be staggering.  Correct
> me if I'm misinformed, but according to Timothy Brennan's new book on
> cosmopolitanism, Bloch composed (at least part of) THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE
> hiding in a hotel room in New York from American society, reflecting on the
> seeds of hope in the cultural past, concurrent with a refusal to look for
> same in his surrounding environment.  This is staggering.  While I can
> understand how difficult it is to adapt to radically different cultural
> circumstances, such anecdotes as these only suggest to me that European
> culture was moribund and deserved to die.
> 
> It is difficult to review history, i.e. going backwards, and to place
> oneself in the position of those who were moving forward in it while we look
> backward.  From an American perspective, at least one stemming from the
> post-World War II era, it is almost unimaginable what it was like to be a
> European from a certain time period, as the world--the conceptual and
> cultural as well as the political and technological world--has changed so
> drastically,  that those of us coming from a different experience just take
> a whole different set of presuppositions for granted.   What we assume about
> music, art, poetry, dance, dress, and all forms of cultural expression is
> rather different, as we have more cultural experience to draw upon, theirs
> plus ours.  We can be most charitable towards people like Bloch and Adorno
> precisely when we recognize the historical limitations of their place and
> time, as they struggled with the decisive crisis of European culture,
> chafing at its boundaries while unable to take a step beyond.
> 
> There is something much more productive we can do besides criticizing these
> folks for their provinciality.  Pace  Gelder and other respondents, there is
> a whole body of literature on Adorno's misunderstanding of jazz which is
> based on methodological critiques, not condemnation of Adorno.  I don't have
> my sources at hand, so I can't cite them.  I think one of the best of them
> appeared in TELOS, but there are several others.  For example, Adorno is
> seen by one critic as making incorrect judgments with good intentions,
> rather than being guided by racist assumptions.  Adorno's missteps regarding
> jazz have provided an entry point for many into an analysis of Adorno's
> fundamental methodological weaknesses in aesthetics, so it is not at all a
> matter of trashing Adorno for one misguided prejudice.
> 
> Yet the responses here have been defensive in the most arbitrary and puerile
> fashion, based on generalized dogmatic statements.  For example, whatever
> you think of middle-class whites dancing the jitterbug--and what do you
> really know about them--let's remember that the jitterbug is a black art
> form, and it is the black foundations of American culture that Bloch and
> Adorno were completely incapable of understanding, and that no one here is
> willing even to acknowledge.
> 
> Now instead of making sweeping statements about the culture industry in all
> times and places, more fine-tuned examination would be helpful.  I would
> suggest that Bloch and Adorno got America wrong.  To put it bluntly, they
> got Black America all wrong.  I would suggest that only _now_ does Adorno's
> framework fully come into its own with respect to American culture, because
> (a) American culture is now entering its own terminal crisis, whereas it was
> just coming into its own in the 1940s, (b) the culture industry has
> completely corrupted and destroyed black culture in way that was impossible
> during segregation.  If ever cultural creativity, autonomy, and freedom were
> illusions, it is now.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gelder-AT-em.uni-frankfurt.de <Gelder-AT-em.uni-frankfurt.de>
> To: frankfurt-school-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
> <frankfurt-school-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
> Date: Monday, May 03, 1999 4:26 AM
> Subject: Re: Ernst Bloch on Jazz
> 
> I seem to remember a Lloyd Spencer whose reactions to the 'Frankfurt
> School' went a bit deeper than all this school-marmish 'I was
> startled' and 'I was staggered' ... 'how unedifying' stuff. Whether
> or not Lloyd did the Soweto jive or not, there was a time when he
> knew that the concept 'culture industry' was coined to come to terms
> with some uncomfortable parallels between the Nazi attack on the
> intellectuals in the Weimer Republic, and what the mass media are
> doing to the world today. Including in South Africa, for that matter.
> Put in that context, Bloch and Adorno are not all that ridiculous -
> more like reminders of a time when intellectuals did not pander to
> populist esthetics.