Adorno's pessimism

[Karen Sim]

When it comes to Adorno's pessimism, or his sense of futility in his 
project (or any "writer's," for that matter), this passage seems to be 
the most poignant a resignation:

In his text, the writer sets up house.  Just as he trundles papers, 
books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same 
disorder in his thoughts.  They become pieces of furniture that he sinks 
into, content or irritable.  He strokes them affectionately, wears them 
out, mixes them up, re-arranges, ruin them.  For a man who no longer has 
a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.  In it he inevitably 
produces, as his family once did, refuse and lumber.  But now he lacks a 
store-room, and it is hard in any case to part from left-overs.  So he 
pushes them along in fron t of his, in dangerfinally of filling his pages 
with them.  The demand that one harden oneself against self-pity implies 
the technical necessity to counter any slackening of intellectual tension 
with the itmost alertness, and to eliminate anything that has begun to 
encrust the work or to drift along idly, which may at an early stage have 
served, as gossip, to generate the warm atmostphere conducive to growth, 
but is now left behind, flat and stale.  In the end, the writer is not 
even allowed to live in his writing.

					Minima Moralia (87)

I have always felt that, he found the most "truthful" protest in 
Schoenberg's atonality, after which, in a way, he fashioned his 
anti-systematical thinking.  But like Schoenberg, Adorno too became 
trapped in an anti-system system.  Knowing this very well, Adorno 
resigned to the fact that the protest either turns into kitsch or 
becomes "stale and flat" as in his own works or Schoenberg's.  That he 
turned to music, the most intangible of all arts, for truth is very 
telling.  Don;t you think?

Karen.

On Fri, 10 May 1996, Jeffrey wrote:

> I've really just started studying Adorno, but from what I've read in
> Aesthetic Theory I simply cannot get around his pessimism.  All protest
> seems mired by its material and human origins.  I doubt this inescapability
> is unique to his aesthetics.  Is there any sense of real protest in Adorno?
> How will the end of the capitalist epoch come about if protest inevitably
> turns into kitsch?  Very open questions...
> 
> jeffrey
> 
> 
>