Adorno and Horkheimer - help?

[Yagen]

Hi,

Can anyone de-construct or help with resources for understanding Adorno & Horkheimer? Shit is doing my head in. :( Did a search and topic title search which turned up nothing.

[$lim_$weezy]

Susan Buck-Morss's "The Origin of Negative Dialectics" is a necessary precondition for understanding, in my opinion. You could PM me or post specific questions here and I could attempt to answer them, but then again I'm learning myself.

[Yagen]

Hi,

I'll make a library run tomorrow and try to find the book.

I just don't get it at all and I can't find anywhere that breaks it down simple enough with obvious examples or language. Every time I try and wrap my head around it I start to trigger some kind of deep seeded need to punch the everything I own.

Dialectic of Enlightenment - I've heard nothing but praise and read nothing but complete and utter waffle.

"...The separation of sign and image is irremediable. Should unconscious self satisfaction cause it once again to become hypostatized, then each of the two isolated principles tends toward the destruction of truth." p. 18

Essentially all of page 17 - 20 read like this. Paragraph after paragraph of shit I don't even begin to comprehend.

"Just as in ceremony the magician first of all marked out the limits of the area where the sacred powers were to come into play, so every work of art describes its own circumference which closes it off from actuality"

Ugh, what!?

[/rant]

The heart of the matter is I need to better understand what characteristics of authoritarian states Adorno and Horkheimer saw present in Liberal democratic states. The problem I'm encountering is every single piece of writing appears to be abstract, eccentric fucking garbage that doesn't even begin to give me my answer.

Enlightenment and myth coexist? Enlightenment and rationality are domination? Somehow Hitler Youth and modern warfare are obvious examples of this? What?

[cb9's_unity]

I don't know tons about either of them, but I did take a class on critical theory that focused on them. Right now I let my friend borrow the text we used for that class so I can't look over it again.

I would say that if you can find "How to look at television" by Adorno you should read it. The deeper philosophical and methodological ideas among the critical theorists are interesting, but they take time to sink in. In "How to look at television" Adorno is is really taking the tradition of Marxist analysis into the media error. He finds how capitalist values are narrowed within television and how they are then propagated back into capitalist society. What occurs is that with television the forces of capital find a way to conceal their own nature by developing popular narratives and themes that normalize capitalist relations. Adorno is using a materialist conception of history, seeing how the means of production developed and how society then reorganized around those means of production when they were deployed by dominant social powers.

To me Adorno shows how vibrant and relevant Marxism can be when it doesn't restrict itself to its same old debates. Marx was certainly spot on about many of the most fundamental motions of capital, but the development in the means of production in the 20th century requires us to use Marx's method to uncover trends in cultural and ideological development. These trends are still in relation to economic trends of capitalism, though they go beyond the realm of 'pure' economics that some Marxists seem to obsess over.

Unfortunately I've never seen anything to suggest that Adorno has anything interesting to say about revolutionary practice, which, though not a reason to reject his work at all, does diminish his importance somewhat.

[blake 3:17]

The section on Dialectic of Enlightenment in Understanding Hegelianism by Robert Sinnerbrink has a remarkably short and thoughtful overview and points to some very serious problems in it.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8346293-understanding-hegelianism