From: rdumain-AT-igc.org
Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 01:36:57 -0500
Subject: Re: Teddie Goes 21st Century--3


Dennis Redmond continues on in chapter 4.  He begins, following a ridiculous remark which posits hip hop postmodernism as a continuation of jazz modernism, with his familiar but ever puzzling assertion that Adorno forsaw the 90s in the 60s.  Here's a slice:

"What needs to be clarified, then, is how exactly the prehistory of the EU relates to the posthistory of the Pax Americana. It was the special merit of the Frankfurt School to have emphasized the crucial function of mediation in thinking through all such theoretical (but also deeply political) problems, i.e. the task of drawing out the equivalences and solidarities between unlike things, while at the same time respecting their non-identity and historical distance from one another. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the central, mesmerizing skandalon of Negative Dialectics: the fact that an obscure work by a Central European intellectual, ostracized by the official Left on both sides of the Berlin Wall, and limited to the theoretical resources of the international philosophical schools, could foresee the bursting of the containment vessels of the national security states by a transnational capitalism gone supernova – a.k.a. the decades-long rise of East Asia and the EU from r!
!
uined, bombed-out semi-peripheries of the American Empire to thriving junior partners in the Imperium, and most recently to global creditor status and actual dominion over this latter, to the point where a newly multicultural, entrepreneurial and fantastically wealthy European Union has become more American than America itself."

Does this make any sense to you?  Not to me.  Redmond goes to some trouble to show how Adonro refuses to side with either Stalinism or Wewstern capitalism in the '60s, but  have yet to see any indication of how Adorno foresaw the present world economic order, nor of the cultural order, for that matter.

Redmond also geos to some lengths to compare Adorno to Sartre:  Here's another choice condundrum of his:

" What is at issue is not merely the tradition of the national intellectuals handed down by the French and German Enlightenment, or indeed the nationalisms-in-exile of a Heine or Hugo, but the specific vocation of the late modernist or cosmopolitan intellectual in the midst of an international consumer culture of radios, planes, petrochemicals and automobiles, riven by the clash of state-monopoly capitals. What seems at first glance to fundamentally separate the two thinkers – Adorno's uncompromising defense of the autonomy of the late modernist work of art, or what amounts to a kind of semi-autarkic delinking from the culture-industry, as opposed to Sartre's more nuanced strategy of a selective engagement which seeks to push the progressive features of the Francophone cultural zone in a radical direction – is really what most closely unites them: both strategies are designed to bring a series of regional, national and para-national cultural forms (Central Europe and Western E!
!
urope, respectively) into contact with their international content, thereby turning the hegemony of an American-led monopoly capitalism against itself, in what amounts to a kind of Americanization-in-reverse." 

Does this make a bit of sense to you?  Not to me.

Dennis, you put you rwork online and invite the public to react.  Now are you really interested in communicating ideas to the public or are you only thinking about your next academic job?  I don't appreciate being jerked around.  You make mighty big political claims for your work: now when are you going to deliver?