Relevance of the later Adorno

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Sun, 20 Jul 1997 MSalter1@aol.com wrote:
> 
> Yes, an interesting problematic is the role of the literary form in which
> Adorno expressed his ideas...
> His praxis is - in part - a kind of defensive resistance to ideologiocal
> closure, and - as such - quite consistent with his admittedly one-dimensional
> and partial diagnosis of the down-wood trajectory of consumer capitalism.

Ah, but is Adorno so gloomy about consumer capitalism after all? I'm not 
so sure about this. He bashes Disney something awful -- something 
which Disney, in the context of the 1940s, probably deserved -- but he
also wrote lengthy tomes defending modernist music, the Second Viennese
School, Kafka, Klee, and Proust. This, at a time when modernism was
generally condemned as a decadent excrescence by the leading lights of
the East as well as the West. Adorno's version of negativity looks more
convincing when you keep the aesthetics in mind: what the American and
Soviet mass-cultures repressed, violated, manipulated or otherwise 
maligned in the fervid race to turn the planet into a plutonium-soaked
wasteland, returned in the human cry of protest of (an embattled) auratic
art. I.e. the best political defense is an aesthetics-minded offense --
something which the counter-culture would give programmatic form, in
the demand to radically democratize aesthetics, and abolish the
distinction between high and low art by some new collective
cultural practice (a stance not without its own contradictions, but
that's a subject for future postings).

> Some parallels here with Foucault - himself following Deleuze's reading of
> Nietzsche) I suggest, although the latter is as anti-dialectical (and hence
> as dialectical) as one can get.

Good point, but I don't mean to bash the post-strucs for what they could
not, historically, achieve -- for European intellectuals in the Seventies,
trying to imagine the world of information capitalism was as impossible as
Japanese intellectuals imagining, say, the management techniques
pioneered by Honda's American transplants in the late Eighties, or for
that matter Fred Jameson coming up with definitions of cyberspace in 1981,
when the global mass media was but a mewling infant. The
post-strucs did significant things in certain fields, and opened up
formerly elite theory/philosophy to a mass audience. But I'm not sure
Foucault or Deleuze ever recognized that the antagonisms of
heterosexist/hierarchical societies they were obsessed with are not
reducible to regimes of power (power over what? capital, of course) or
regimes of transcoding (the coding of what? juridical constants, of
course, or capital-friendly institutions) but are themselves the
mediations of vaster, more complex, and more deadly market processes.
Eurocapitalism will play when the Eurointellectuals are away.

-- Dennis