Relevance of the later Adorno

[Dennis R Redmond]

There have been some recent posts asking the question, so what
the heck was Adorno scribbling about in the late Sixties, when everyone
else was, presumably, rioting in the streets (even Foucault was somewhere
in Tunisia, instigating trouble), and was it really that
important? It's a legitimate question, and one complicated by the fact
that the English-language translations of Adorno's thornier works have
been dismal. I've been lucky enough to have some training in German, so
I can report that Adorno is a theoretical delight, but you'd never know it
from the English-only versions (fortunately, Bob Hewlott-Kentor has some
people working on some new translations, so maybe this'll change soon). 

There are two problems with labelling the later Adorno as non-activist, or
non-Marxist or whatever. Well, he was indeed an activist Marxist, but in a
peculiarly German context. West Germany in the Sixties was 
an incredibly stifling, rigorously conservative and nationalist 
society, with very little media or film culture (the great
directors were chased away by the Nazis) and a terrible burden of guilt
for WW II. In such a situation, most Germans immediately identified with
rich, powerful, consumer-oriented America as their social and political
model. Trouble is, Adorno had lived in Los Angeles for years, and knew
there were serious problems with the American utopia, so in a way he was
doubly alienated from postwar Europe: too American to be German, but too
German to ever be American. Now, a French radical like Sartre could thumb
his nose at the Americans, mostly because France had a rich, dynamic
culture all its own; German radicals just didn't have that option. If
Adorno had lived longer, he would've lent the student movement support
the way Ernst Bloch did, but his death in 1969 prevented that particular
reconciliation.

And then there's the problem of defining activism. After all, everyone
is different in this world, and has different gifts, abilities, etc.
Probably a socialist consciousness, if such a thing were possible, would
celebrate what people can achieve in the prevailing division of labor,
while condemning the violence this division inflicts upon
people. I really don't expect Michael Jordan to be a world-class soccer
player; but I do experience a sense of wonder and aesthetic satisfaction
at watching Jordan inside the paint (an aesthetic which depends,
crucially, on an all-star supporting team, the canny direction of
coach Phil Jackson, an entire sports industry, loyal fans, and ultimately
a richly inventive and largely African American inner city 
basketball culture) -- a sense which really has nothing to
do with Jordan's pay or compensation, but which must be played off
against the outrages committed by Nike upon Indonesian workers in order to
pad Jordan's contract. The Chicago Bulls and the Jakarta slums are the
Heaven and Hell of late capitalism. Maybe in a truly free society, playing
basketball and making sneakers would be undertaken sheerly for the fun of
it, and not for exchange-value. But I digress.

In the case of the Frankfurt School, each thinker definitely had different
responsibilities, and each trusted the others' specializations. Horkheimer
was definitely a secondary intellectual figure, but he was an
administrator par excellence, steered the Frankfurt members across the
Atlantic when the Nazis came to power, made sure the School had enough to
eat while in America, hobnobbed with the sociologists, and arranged for
the transfer back to West Germany in the Fifties. Marcuse was always the
popularizer and student simpatico, who could transmit Frankfurt School
ideas in very clear and effective ways. Adorno, on the other hand, was the
conceptual specialist, who worked overtime on the concepts and
constellations of late monopoly and early global capitalism: what Marx
called the relations of production, presently extended to a whole new set
of internationalized class agencies, multinational markets, and
transnational bodies of capital (the multinationals and their ilk).
Adorno's "Negative Dialectics" is the underexplored guidebook to such
mediations. My own personal feeling is that the global Left, if there's
going to be one, badly needs such guidebooks, and the first step towards
constructing a Resistance to the malling of the planet will have to
be the patient work of sifting through the rubble of the monopoly
capitalisms (from the American New Deal to Stalinism to Maoism) for
clues as to where the total system is going, and why. If we don't even
understand what global capitalism is or how it works, it's most unlikely 
we'll ever be able to organize against it.

Not that this post is about setting up any icons. Of course Adorno can be
a pain. He can be overlong, too abstract, occasionally snobbish, at
times impossibly Eurocentric. Occasionally, one wishes more of Brecht's
sarcastic populism had rubbed off on him. His work on film is dubious --
an embarrassing deficiency in one of the 20th century's greatest
art-forms -- though he occasionally says interesting things about film
music. And he didn't know a damn thing about jazz. But then, to paraphrase
Brecht, woe to the intellectual movement which needs heroes encased in
marble.

Probably we need to dump the whole notion of worshipping a single Great
Thinker of whatever stripe, and instead forage, Java-style, for the
thinkware which we need to run whatever theory-web we're employing at a
given moment. For me, this would mean using Adorno for models of an
immanent dialectics, Sartre for a transcendent dialectics, Fredric Jameson
for a media/video dialectics and Pierre Bourdieu for a Eurostate
dialectics, but then, I'm weird. Other folks will choose other
strokes (and indeed ought to do so!).

-- Dennis