Theodor Adorno: Comments, Questions?

[Dimokratia]

I currently have the misfortune of reading "The Dialectic of Enlightenment" this ultimate pessimist, and Max Horkheimer (though from what I understand this is primary Adorno's Work)

I was wondering if anyone on this board enjoyed book, and or could offer me some help on understand, comprending, or even liking it.

[Faceless]

Yes, he is difficult to understand isnt he. if you have any questions i can (try) to answer them.

personally i very much enjoyed reading his work, just because it was such a challenge.

I do think his pessimism with regard to culture is well founded, and his understanding of its purpose and results are quite accurate. Just look around us.

Still, I think he overemphasises the independence of culture, there are other more profound forces at work and ultimately, unless we get plugged into computers in some sort of terminator apocalypse scenario, there are always other humans, symbols of disrepair, and other such cracks in the web which culture has created. lukacs said something along the lines of adorno had taken up residence in the grand hotel abyss. Not too far from the truth. Adorno was a cultured man, maybe too cultured to realise that it is not a key determinate in class struggle

[The Feral Underclass]

There will be a "public" seminar discussion at our Social centre about Adorno in a couple of weeks if you live anywhere near Sheffield...

If you're interested in coming let me know and I can give you details.

[Dimokratia]

Sorry, across the pond, so the seminar is out

My personal problem with Adorno is his absolute pessimism, also the fact that he sees people as purely tabula rasa, that no person can make independant judgements on culture, that non-cultured peopel cannot help but be swept up in the Culture Industry. Basically, what you said, but I do not see the basic human condition as despair. Marxism is first and formost life-affirming, Adorno doesn't seem to have the will to live. My main question is that, why did he write books instead of taking his own life? Or a better question, why do I have to read this book so I feel like committing suicide myself?

In the spirit of critique, Adorno seems to be raging against a human-created world. As Marx points out: Man cannot exist outside Civilization, and Civilization cannot exist outside of Man. Once Nature is subdued, civilization is the only reality, all fabricated by humana hands and minds. The Question arrises: If everything is constructed in our experience, can anything possiblity real or legimimate? This seems to be his main point, and source of pessimism. And seeing how easily some people are influenced by pop culture, I can understand his concerns, but I do maintain hope that most will pass away with time, only leaving the best of a bad situation.

Indeed, most of the flilth that he was raging against has disappeared, although it is consantly replaced by new products of the same genus. It is a non-permenant good, so much the better for the Culture Industry. But within the Industry itself, their remains the possiblity of real art, and the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater. Given Adorno's embrace of irrational forms of music, art, and other expression, it seems that he endorses baby-flinging. Or maybe I am way to much of an optimist, and time is not the solution, but a Molitov Cocktail is, but time seems to be a more prudent solution.

Am I wrong anywhere in my analysis?

[gilhyle]

By far, the best thing I have read by Adorno is his recently published book on Kant. Really good. Adorno, it seems to me, comes more from Kant than he wished to believe (maybe via Schopenhauer)

The basis problem I have with Adorno is that his concept of the negative is itself entirely undialectical. The negative remains a pure, sacred, inviolable, ever-present moment. It is a conceptual equivalent of his conception of the self as educated consciousness.

Maybe the more nuanced Benjamin really did kill himself in the end, in part, because he saw the point you see schematically in Adorno. Maybe not.