Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 22:37:55 +0100
From: S Mure <panic-AT-freeuk.com>
Subject: Re: Adorno autonomously


In article <BB0F4F3AD0-AT-tasc.tasc.ac.uk>, L Spencer
<L.SPENCER-AT-tasc.ac.uk> writes
>Few of us are in any position today to endorse whole-heartedly the 
>positions adopted by Adorno on the relationship between high art and 
>popular culture. On the one hand we have most of us grown up familiar 
>with aspects of popular culture (including for some of us, 
>non-European cultures) which were clearly strange, alien 
>even threatening to Adorno. On the other hand, there are very few us 
>us as "cultured" as Adorno.

This is very true and I find myself quite confused as to my position in
relation to the very popular culture that socialised and saturated me. I
find the grip of culture to be almost total nowadays, with the mutual
estrangement that it complements and creates. This is not a result of a
'nihilistic, defeatist world-view', it's my experience of life. 
I want to defend things in popular music that seem to be of worth - say
the music of Captain Beefheart, The Fall or dub reggae (e.g. Lee Perry)
- without thereby affirming what appears to me as a total system. I also
find the music that Adorno allowed some saving grace - Beethoven and
others - quite discredited now, a celebration of the division of labour
that created Culture as a separate domain in the first place.

>From the present vantage point I think that Adorno's work is best
understood as a *critique* of Art *as such*, rather than focussing on
his upholding of certain forms of art above others. More and more, art
appears as just a bunch of tricks and mystifications. 

As to the Western Intellectual's 'culture of despair' referred to
elsewhere; to paraphrase Adorno, 'thought is happiness' and as long as
you have the capacity of thought, happiness is not impossible. Adorno's
work is all about sustaining that capacity in the face of the total
assault it faces under late late capitalism. 

To ramble - when I listen to the best dub reggae I feel spaces being
opened in my mind which almost nothing else is capable of creating. But
then most of that was made in the 70s, before the cultural universe
closed completely... 
>
>But what is strange is that those of Adorno's present-day "disciples" 
>who want to make his pronouncements sacrosanct and who wish to hold 
>to every aspect of his aesthetic judgements are so often - perhaps 
>always - individuals with very little aesthetic feeling of their own. 
>
>Adorno was a great musicologist. But his musical writings are taken 
>as Holy Writ only by the tone deaf. And across other areas of intellectual 
>pursuit on stumbles again and again on the same kind of dependency - utterly 
>defeating Adorno's 
>ideal of autonomy and maturity (Mundigkeit).

I have heard of these acolytes, but never come across one. Could you
point me in the direction of one or two?
-- 
Simon Smith