Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 16:51:40 -0700 (PDT)
From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-gladstone.uoregon.edu>
Subject: M-TH: Re: Lukacs + Adorno


On Thu, 18 Sep 1997, Michael Hoover wrote:

> is what you've placed inside the first set of parentheses a paraphrase
> of Adorno's statement in *Negative Dialectics* (1973, London: Routledge,
> p320) that:
> "No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but
> there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb..."
> 
> isn't A commenting on the development of the means of terror and
> violence?...a kind of progress in which modern rationality is a
> coercive force?...similarly, didn't he (and Horkheimer) argue that
> modern technology had produced a debased "mass culture" that silences
> criticism?...in contrast to Walter Benjamin's assertion that 
> "mechanical reproduction" could have revolutionary implications by
> destroying the elitist "aura" of art, A&H maintained that culture
> & entertainment had been fused...moreover, they claimed that 
> advertising had triumphed in its quest to manipulate human desire
> and need - diversion, distraction, & amusement had become the norm..
> .a kind of progress in the dissemination & refinement of techniques
> of domination?

For Horkheimer, yes; for Adorno, no. "Dialectic of Enlightenment" was
co-written in 1944 by Adorno and the Horkster, and has some interesting if
outdated passages on the culture-industry (the idea of mass deception,
manipulation, etc.). The book was aimed more at explaining why Nazi
and Stalinist propaganda was so devilishly effective than at explaining
the blossoming film and media culture of the American superstate. 
Adorno's own work, on Wagner's operas ("In Search of Wagner") or the
Second Viennese School ("The Philosophy of Modern Music") offers a much
more nuanced, complex and subtle account of how the culture-industry
emerged and why it functions as it does.

> as a result of the above, didn't Adorno see late capitalism as 
> effectively stabilized?

Late capitalism was indeed restabilized by the New Deal and the American
hegemony. The national security state was obnoxious and cruel, but it did
spur the 1950-1975 Long Boom. Which is not a guarantee that capitalism
will be around forever, of course.

...and didn't his pessimism lead him to 
> conclude that avant-garde works of art were the only possible 
> authentic expressions of the contemporary state of the world?..
> .unlike Marx, I don't see A attempting to identify both the 
> emancipatory and repressive aspects of capitalism...in this sense, 
> he - and the Frankfurt School generally - offers one dimensional 
> analyses...envisioning only co-optation and reabsorption, we are 
> left with no possible future other than that of monopoly capitalism

The only legitimate aesthetic expression, yes; the only political or
social expression, not at all. Adorno's point is that aesthetics has, for
better or worse, become an industry in its own right. It has its own
dialectic of productive forces and relations of production (e.g. musical
instruments vs. orchestral organization, or camera speeds vs. cinema
production crews), its own historical development, internal and external
crises, etc. This is why it's possible to speak of great works of art
versus those that just don't measure up: Picasso versus, say, Coca Cola
advertisements from the 1940s. Modernist painting would not have been
possible without the invention of cinema, with its dislocation of the
visual field and valorization of urban signs and displays, which
seemingly doomed photography (and painting) to being peripheralized,
archaic forms. Picasso responded by absorbing photography into painting,
thus creating a new type of non-cinematic visual content, i.e. the
shattered planes, multiple faces and abrupt contrasts of Cubism, which tie
together all the varied shot angles and visual tricks of 1920s cinema into
a vibrating, glowing rebus. This is where Benjamin's analysis stops, 
but Adorno's later works go even further, by pointing out that Picasso's
innovation was possible only because of the underdevelopment of the cinema
in 1930s Spain vis-a-vis a more industrialized France, Britain and the
US: lacking an indigenous vocabulary of forms, he reinvented one by
reappropriating an international mass-culture -- kind of like seeing, for 
the briefest moment, a whole bunch of Hollywood movie stills and posters
through the grimy lenses of the radicalized peasants and proto-industrial workers
of the Popular Front. 

As far as the whole one-dimensional thing goes: this was precisely the
Frankfurt School's point, that all the phony hoopla and economic
prosperity of the Fifties and Sixties had not led to greater freedom, but
a dehumanized, repressive society of technocrats and mandatory
consumption, on both sides of the Berlin Wall. They argued that the Left
had to reinvent a utopian vision freed from the crude production-fetishism
of the Eastern bloc, and antagonistic to the crude consumerism of the
West -- the basic point, you will note, of the New Left which exploded
into existence in 1968. 

As far as the translations go: I'll never forget the shock I had while
studying in Germany, at discovering that Adorno really was a Marxist: it's
just that the translators were clueless. I'm talking HIDEOUS mistakes,
like "forces of production" rendered as "technological possibilites of
society", and things like that. The English version of "Negative
Dialectics", truly the greatest Marxist text of the late 20th century, is
so bad, you wonder if the CIA put up someone to do the job. 

Sorry for the overlong post. Will keep it shorter next time around.

-- Dennis




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