Adorno's pessimism

[jln]

>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?

But isn't there a difference between anti-systematical thinking and
anti-totalizing thinking.  It seems that Adorno (and probably Horkheimer)
confuse these, and that's what leads to pessimism.  The trick is to have a
system which is not totalizing, which is dynamic.  This then would be the
answer to the postmodern critiques and resignation to the impoissibility to
critique.  I think one can find such a non-totalizing system by looking at
aesthetic thought and combining it with an Aristotelian or Thomistic
conception of the person as possibility waiting to be realized.  This lies
inherent in Marcuse's Eros and Civilization where he calls for a
revisioning of the role of imagination and a disjunction with the Kantian
turn in aesthetics to conceive of beauty only in terms of art.


JLN                             "The architectonic structure of the Kantian
jlnich1@pop.uky.edu                system, like the gymnastic pyramids of

                                   Sade's orgies and the schematized
                                   principles of the early bourgeois

                                   freemasonry reveals an organization of
                                   life as a whole which is deprived of
                                   any substantial goal."
                                     from  _The Dialectic of Enlightenment_