Adorno, Theodor W.

Dialectic of Enlightenment (Cultural Memory in the Present)

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Adorno presents a challenging look at the modern condition
Gather the Fragments...
A masterpiece of critical theory
The Black Book of Western Philosophy
This Amazon Page is a Disaster!!

Dialectic of Enlightenment (Cultural Memory in the Present)
Max Horkheimer , and Theodor W. Adorno
Manufacturer: Stanford University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0804736332
Release Date: 2002-03-28

Book Description

Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."

Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present.

The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization.

Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book.

This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory.

Customer Reviews:

Adorno presents a challenging look at the modern condition.......2007-05-07

Adorno and Horkheimer are associated with the Frankfurt school of thought in post-WWII Germany. In this book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, the two thinkers disect the post-war condition looking at all aspects of cultural identity as based on ancient enlightenment-esque ideals. This book illuminates the devestating results of progressivist models of history in late capitalism. Probably the most famous essay deals with the culture industry and how, in post-war capitalism, movies, books, television all become tools of subjegation through which a falsified sense of individuality is produced and commodified to the ends of keeping the consumers of this industry distracted enough to ignore the insideousness of that which we allow to control us.
A very dense read, poetic in areas, but challenging throughout. Adorno is often criticized for being a cynic, but I think that under his often scathing view of modern culture is a message that through exacting self-reflection change of the "total system" can occur.
These themes are expanded on in Adorno's other works: Minima Moralia, and Negative Dialectic.

Gather the Fragments..........2006-11-14

"Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts back to mythology" (xviii). This statement is likely one of the most explosive philosphical theses penned in the 20th century, for not only did it give expression to much of the suspicion and pessimism that people experienced in the early 20th century, particularly under the Nazi regime, but this statement set into motion much of the later suspicion concerning the Enlightenment project and its relation to not just freedom, but domination under freedom's guise.

Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments is the most important work ever written by any of the members of the Frankfurt School; it stands as a type of manifesto really for the possibility of Critical Theory as a post-positivistic discipline. It is easy to miss, but this is not just a work of philosophy - it is not a work written by old men with elbow patches on their jackets pondering various ideas in a scientific and socio-historical philosophical vacuum. Quite the opposite: this is a book that drew upon then-current sociology and anthropology (particularly pertaining to religion), in addition to the history of philosophy and philosophical currents such as Marxism (Western Marxism, to be specific). This is a book that draws - obviously - on history; it is a book that has much to say about media and the effects of what Adorno called "The Culture Industry".

Several authors, such as Jurgen Habermas and Leszek Kolakowski, have noted the the structure of the book - what we might call its "poetics" - is quite abnormal for a work of philosophy. The subtitle of the book comes well into play here as a means of understanding the book; "Philosophical Fragments" very much describes what it is like reading this work. The genuinely fragmentary nature of the book - it begins with an essay titled "The Concept of Enlightenment" before two excurses (one on Odysseus and the other on Marquis de Sade), the chapter "The Culture Industry", a series of theses titled "Elements of Angi-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment", and the closing section "Notes and Sketches" (which is anything but smooth) - only adds to the sense of urgency.

The attempt to ascertain "why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism" (xiv) animates the work. This regression ultimately has to do with the very nature of myth, which is "obscure and luminous at once" (xvii). It is with positivism that science believes it can banish all mystery from the world such that humans become masters of it (1); art itself has fallen prey to this myth (14). Perhaps surprisingly, this does not begin in the 18th century European Enlightenment, but with one of our most ancient of founding myths: Odysseus. The deceptive nature of the sacrifice in Odysseus is the beginning of our journey towards enlightenment, for it places us on a similar footing with the gods. The attempt of persons such as Sade to advocate a world without superstition not only turns us into beasts with "the innocence of wild animals" (77), but means that we still must hold onto one myth: that we can actually live in a world where all is entirely as it seems. Transgression of the previous morality (Catholicism) is the necessary mythical supplement to this view; it brings no pleasure but only violence. Both the Culture Industry and Anti-Semitism ultimately have the same totalitarian goal: to make everyone the same, as economic cogs in the machine, devoid of their individuality. Thus Enlightenment is necessarily violent against the Other, who doesn't fit in. The book ends with Notes and Sketches in a kind of anti-climax; Dialectic of Enlightenment is left open.

In many ways, this edition by Stanford University Press, in their uber-fine series "Cultural Memory in the Present", is like a critical edition in English. Dialectic of Enlightenment was printed various times and in various editions from 1944 thru 1969; this edition collects each of the prefaces for the various editions, and notes every single textual variant for each edition, some of which are seen as rather unimportant, but others of which show that the text was very much a continual work in progress for Horkheimer and Adorno. In addition to an Editor's Afterword, there is an essay appended at the end of the book titled "The Disappearance of Class History in "Dialectic of Enlightenment": A Commentary on the Textual Variants (1944 and 1947)", which many will likely to find insightful reading. This is an important addition to the library of many different fields - political thought, intellectual history, philosophy, theology, religious studies, and social theory, among others - regardless of how it has been produced. Stanford University Press should really be commended for producing it in such a way that it is a fine addition to one's library as well.

One does well to remember that this work should not be simply taken at face value. In their 1969 Preface, Horkheimer and Adorno mention that they ascribe a "temporal core to truth" (xi), which means that as an older text, what remains applicable in it should be used today, and what no longer applies should be left alone as having been applicable at one time in the past. Neither author ever endorsed the irresponsible usage of their work in the 1960s by protesting students who had become little more than mobs; that they have been linked to irresponsible New Left anti-politics (via their friend Herbert Marcuse) is not their fault. Rather, what Horkheimer and Adorno endorsed then (and would continue to endorse, were they still alive) is not a brutal application of a particular theory, but a sustained, thoughtful and well informed engagement of theory with the whole of the modern world. "As a critique of philosophy, it does not seek to abandon philosophy itself" (xii). In short, they believed in wisdom: and this is what philosophy is ultimately all about.

A masterpiece of critical theory.......2006-11-11

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, both prominents of the Frankfurter Schule of critical theory, wrote this work during WWII. In their own words, the purpose of the book was to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism. Obviously their experiences as Jewish intellectuals fleeing for the national-socialist regime to the United States was a strong impulse for this view, but the book is not limited to a critique of nazism or even totalitarianism altogether.

The main subject of the book, though that itself is already difficult to disentangle, is Enlightenment's betrayal of its own liberating capacity. Adorno & Horkheimer analyze this by means of various cultural metaphors, which in highly abstract, contradictory and aesthetic language (especially the parts by Adorno) trace the development of Enlightenment and its subsequent 'dark side' throughout an equally metaphorical history of culture and ideas. In a certain sense this may most remind readers not familiar with both authors of Foucault and his use of concepts like the Panopticon to express a view of power relations. The method of Adorno and Horkheimer is however not so much genealogical, as Foucault's is, as dialectical in its idealist form.

The book consists of an introduction, two "excursions" and two chapters on the Enlightenment itself, as well as a series of aphorisms provided at the end as "notes and sketches". Each part of the book consists of a very abstract, very metaphysical and almost entrancing analysis of, in turn, the development of Enlightenment as myth out of earlier myth, the form of modern Enlightenment as instrumental reason and mass deception, and the limits of Enlightenment to its own rationality, in the form of anti-semitism. The language of the book is extremely difficult, even in English, and in the best (and worst) traditions of continental philosophy it contains a very great amount of layers and meanings, not all of which are free of internal contradiction. Readers familiar to Situationist works are perhaps best prepared for the effect, which is somewhat similar in method, if not in style, to Guy Debord.

The introduction, "The Concept of Enlightenment", posits Enlightenment as thought liberating man from his natural shackles, and creating man as master of the earth. This process of liberation entails at the same time the possibility of man to protect himself from, and understand the workings of, nature, and also mankind's loss of being one with nature. In this process, the self is created as a subjectivity divorced from direct experience of the outside world. Man's memory of this is very vague and distant, but is present in everyone as a certain inchoate feeling of loss.

This is also the main subject of the first Exkurs, "Odysseus, or Myth and Enlightenment". The story of the Odysseia is here used in many ways to provide metaphorical expressions for the role of myth in and against Enlightenment. Myths are primitive descriptions of the world, and in being so are already classifications used as a form of instrumental reason, which is the seed of Enlightenment. The role of sacrifice to the Gods, for example, is presented as manipulation of those Gods, and in so doing already expression of an Enlightened mind avant la lettre. Odysseus' adventure with the Sirens is metaphor for man's loss as described above: Odysseus, the Enlightened ruler, knows his loss but is constrained by his knowledge from acting on it; and the shipmates, the great mass of modernity, is only vaguely aware of the loss, and are not affected. But Circe, the Cyclops, and many other themes are used besides.

The second Exkurs is "Juliette, or Enlightenment and Morality". The works of De Sade, in particular Juliette, here provide an expression of Enlightenments freeing and therefore contradictory character. Kant is contrasted with Juliette; where Kant is the restrained form of reason, reason as classifying and ordening power, Juliette is reason's destructive power of old orders. Because Enlightenment destroys the validity of any appeal to tradition, religion, etc., it falls pray to itself, in that Enlightenment's appeal to its own absolute values is undermined, in the same way that Juliette uses and is used by Catholicism in undermining it.

The third chapter is "Enlightenment as Mass Deception", covering the subject of the culture industry. Here Adorno rants against all the vapid and degraded culture forms he perceives in the United States, although he never states it as valid only for the US, of course. There are many interesting insights and observations about modern culture and still valid ones too in this chapter, but Adorno's general tone is that of the "hochbürgerliche" bourgeois annoyed about the offenses against good taste he sees. Yet to dismiss it based on that would be superficial, even if we cannot agree with Adorno's hatred for radio and jazz. His observations on American movies are very poignant, and in between his cultural criticism he hits on certain relations between the capitalist mode of production, its Enlightenment ideology, and the cultural superstructure that are very worthwhile for a patient radical.

The fourth chapter is called "Limits of Enlightenment", and addresses directly the subject of anti-semitism and fascism more generally. Fascism is posited as Enlightenment turned against itself (it must be noted Adorno & Horkheimer were among the first to state this, even if it is somewhat of a cliche now). Enlightenment's general instrumental reason knows only power as a measure of behavior. Therefore, it cannot tolerate the existence of groups that thrive, yet never have power, such as Jews and women. Whenever Enlightened society fails to satisfy the needs of its members, their anger is turned against such groups.

The last chapter, "Notes and Sketches", is as said a series of aphorisms, familiar to people who have read situationist works, or for example Walter Benjamin's notebooks.

Overall, this book is an extremely complex, but very worthwhile philosophical critique of modern culture, and a very pessimistic and negative analysis of Enlightenment and its possibilities. It is hard work to get to the bottom of it, but nevertheless rewarding for any student of philosophy.

The Black Book of Western Philosophy.......2005-05-03

The dialectic of Enlightenment is a history of appearances and false totalities that end up in totalitarianism. It is history presented as instrument of dominion. The false totalities of myth and rationality hides the primordial lie in which the law of identity appears in the world. By this logic, everything must be the same. Appearance is mythical in the sense that promise something that can never be fulfilled. The central argument of this wonderful book is that myth is already enlightenment because it tries to explain the world and gain utility from it; and enlightenment is already myth for it tries to exorcise everything different from it. As Adorno & Horkheimer puts it: "Enlightenment has a mythical horror to myth." The impulse for which Enlightenment tries to free itself from myth goes against itself in the form of saturating technical, formal rationality that will end up in the horror of ethnic genocide. This is the black book of Western philosophy.

This Amazon Page is a Disaster!!.......2005-02-05

This Amazon page is a disaster. The sample pages are from the earlier, terrible translation published by Continuum. One of the reader reviews is (as it notes) actually a review of the earlier translation. What is it doing here?? In fact, all of the reviews predate the publication of the new translation.
By all means read the Dialectic of Enlightenment! But be sure to use only the new translation published by Stanford.

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Sure he was a snob...
Perennial mirrors

The Adorno Reader (Blackwell Readers)
Theodor W. Adorno
Manufacturer: Blackwell Publishing Limited
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0631210776

Book Description

This volume is the essential collection of readings from the multidisciplinary work of Theodor Adorno, one of the most influential and admired German thinkers of the twentieth century.

In order to allow a ready appreciation of a specific area of Adorno's thought, The Adorno Reader organizes the most important of his writings into five sections: the task of philosophy, the concepts of philosophy, sociological writings, culture, and aesthetic criticism.

In addition to a general introduction, the editor has provided individual introductions to all of the material in the book. By explicating some of the more obscure terminology and arguments these introductions clearly situate each piece within the larger context of Adorno's writings and his philosophical tradition.

Customer Reviews:

Sure he was a snob..........2006-07-05

It's OK to concede this.

And he was an armchair academic who eschewed every opportunity for real-life praxis.

He was human, fallible, prone to snap judgments on subjects he didn't understand.

And YET...despite his snobbery (why wasn't he frequenting the great jazz clubs of South L.A. if he was so interested in essaying the subject?), and despite his vulnerability to any number of Sloterdijkian critiques...there are enough moments of tough, bristling intelligence to make it all so very worthwhile.

BUT DON'T START HERE. Go straight to the fount; with Adorno context is EVERYTHING. Pick up Aesthetic Theory (Hullot-Kentor translation) and Minima Moralia. Appetite whetted? Try Negative Dialectics next. And then come back here and write your own review. :)

Perennial mirrors.......2003-12-17

Do not be put off by Adorno's so-called "critique" of jazz music.
Adorno's critique, all critiques are embodied in jazz. His use of the essay-form itself shows his desire to put constraints on his art to free himself, from those boundaries he denounces, or boundaries which he feels will co-opt him. Besides, many who call him a "snob" for this are forgetting that jazz improvisation is a transgression of the idiom, which is what Adorno speaks of when he labels it a fashion. He speaks of the idiom, and the lack of possibilities on divers ONTOLOGICAL levels. No matter what he thought, he's still a super-cronopio.

Negative Dialectics (Negative Dialectics Ppr)

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Frankfurt School Genius
Masterpiece Theater
Read it at your own peril
Wait for new translation
unfashionable sense

Negative Dialectics (Negative Dialectics Ppr)
Theodor W. Adorno , and Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno
Manufacturer: Continuum International Publishing Group
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0826401325

Customer Reviews:

Frankfurt School Genius.......2007-02-08

Philosopher, Sociologist, Musicologist...and the list goes on with the accomplishments of this amazingly creative person. Adorno studied philosophy first (forming a long friendship with Walter Benjamin). He also studied composition with Berg in Vienna. One of this centuries most critical theorists, Adorno brings us thought provoking, difficult conceptualizations of the instrumentalisation of rationality and means for the utilization of art to oppose our modern, repressive society. Negative Dialects -his anti system- is one of his most important works. As stated by earlier reviewers, this oeuvre is best read when you've laid the necessary previous theoretical foundations. Then it's a joy...

Masterpiece Theater.......2004-09-08

I once had a professor who exclaimed to me that Negative Dialects was "impossible," "the most obscure, impenetrable philosophy every written." From that moment, I knew that I must read this book.
The first reading was a disaster. I'd read nothing else of Adorno, knew only very superficially Kant and Hegel, and consequently made it to about the end of the fifth page before throwing it down in disgust.
But I persevered, read Teddie's lectures, the Hegel Studies, the Culture Industry essays, and most importantly, read Kant's Critiques and Hegel's Logic--strangely, the fog started to disappear and little gems began popping up everywhere.
Other reviewers are correct that this text is obscure, but it is never willfully so. It has an analogous place in Adorno's Oeuvre to Difference and Repetition in Deleuze's. It is a skeleton key to his whole philosophy, but you can't understand it until you already understand that philosophy. So it goes. I say this only to frighten readers off who are about to make the same mistake I initially did. Truly, it is impossible to understand this book without a more than passing knowledge of Kant and Hegel, at least, and without some familiarity with Adorno's ideas. I'm serious about this: I don't mean "impossible to understand" in the sense that you'll think you understand it but really you don't. I mean it in the sense that it will read like Attic Greek, and will be, as my professor said, "impenetrable."
But if you feel prepared, then this book will be a goldmine. Adorno's critiques of Heidegger, Kant, and Hegel are included here in massive detail, and then bound up together in his grand vision of society and thought. And they are all so brilliant, you feel as though you've died and gone to philosophical seventh heaven. Whatever your bents as a thinker and whatever your opinions on the aforementioned giants, exposing yourself to Adorno's razor sharp dialectical blade will only enhance your capacities and broaden your opinions. This text, along with Bergson's Matter and Memory, may be the two most criminally ignored works in philosophy today. It is inexcusable to not come to terms with Adorno, even if only to rip him to shreds.
But that by the way. If you want to know what this book is "about" then I certainly can't tell you. The gist of it is that concepts do not fit objects without leaving a remainder, a fact which logical thought, our thought, must see as a contradiction. This sets dialectics in motion. "Negative" means basically that focus is directed to the remainder, to the "non-identity," instead of, as with Hegel, to reconciling that remainder with the concept. A similar line of thought, in case you're interested in another criminally neglected masterpiece, is pursued in Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption.
Good Luck, and may the force-field be with you!

Read it at your own peril.......2002-07-18

Negative Dialectic is very thought-provoking and difficult text in itself, but it is worth of the effort. If you are interested in Adorno, it is a must-have. Yet the English translation is unbearably inadequate, you may make better sense of it, if you consult with the original German text. The companion piece to Negative Dialectics is Adorno's Prism. Get Prism first, and wait for a better translation of ND.

Wait for new translation.......2002-06-17

Famously bad translation of the central piece of Adorno's philosophy. I recommend getting Aesthetic Theory now and waiting for the next translator's attempt.

unfashionable sense.......2000-04-02

Michel Foucault once stated that it was a great tragedy that the Frankfurt School and the French post-structuralists were unaware of each other's work. He felt that the two schools of thought could have gained much from dialogue, and this text illustrates his point in its relatedness to postmodern discourses on the limits of knowledge and the ends of positivistic philosophy.

Adorno addresses the relationship between the concept and the nonconceptualities, which is nothing more that the relationship between discourse and the Other in post-structuralist phraseology. The text is extraordinarily difficult - not always a problem explainable via the difficulties of the ideas involved - and I often find myself spending an hour reading and re-reading a page or two before being able to come to terms with the content. Personally, I enjoy such difficult reading, however, and find it an avenue for developing critical reasoning skills at the sime time as I re-investigate the problems addressed in the difficult prose.

I highly recommend this text for anyone interested in pessemistic, carefully thought-out discourses on the limits placed on understanding by the "pigeon-holeing" of conceptualization, anyone who enjoys cracking hard nuts via time, sweat, and frustration, and anyone looking for a difficult text to read superficially and criticize emptily as being an example of the poverty of post WWII continental philosophy. In a sense, it is a book for all . . .

Aesthetic Theory (Theory & History of Literature)
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This is the core book of modern aesthetics. (SPANISH)

so what

Fundamentally The Intellectual Equivalent of White Flight

*The* aesthtic theory of modernism

in English we've never experienced Adorno's thought till now

Aesthetic Theory (Theory & History of Literature)
Theodor W. Adorno
Manufacturer: University of Minnesota Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Customer Reviews:

This is the core book of modern aesthetics. (SPANISH).......2005-05-01

a) Desde el punto de vista puramente artístico, la estética de Adorno es una estética sociológica. Adorno hace de inmediato la diferencia entre una filosofía del arte y una estética filosófica de tipo dialéctico. Adorno diferencia entre una filosofía o ciencia del arte y la estética filosófica porque en la primera, al igual que en Hegel, se da solamente una consideración externa del arte. La estética filosófica, por su lado, considera al arte como objeto social, es decir, en el plexo de relaciones con la sociedad. Por eso, la estética de Adorno se considera a menudo como una sociología del arte. Sin embargo, el arte tiene una doble relación con la sociedad. Por un lado, el arte es un plexo de problemas propios de la sociedad; por otro, en su proceder innovador apunta más allá de dicho conjunto de problemas. El arte moderno es cerrado porque no imita lo exterior, no posee ventanas, pero su oficio interno viene determinado por la transformación del mundo social: "La totalidad de fuerzas reflejadas en la obra de arte, aparentemente solo subjetiva, es presencia potencial de lo colectivo según la medida de fuerzas productivas de que se disponga." (TE, 64). La mimesis en este primer plano artístico viene determinada por la exigencia de imitar lo no existente, y en poner en evidencia la catástrofe social, al hacerse el arte igual (mimesis) a ella.

b) Desde una posición teológica, la teoría de Adorno es una estética negativa. Históricamente la estética ha tenido una relación cercana con la teología filosófica. Desde una estética afirmativa o idealista, el arte se entiende como símbolo de una idea estética, reflejo o participación de ésta. Por otro lado, desde la estética negativa el arte se entiende como imitación de lo decadente, donde se constituye en un fragmento del símbolo, en una cifra ilegible de una realidad remotísima. La representación no tiene ninguna conexión con lo ideal, no se confunde con la realidad ontológica. En su fijación con la catástrofe y el simulacro, el arte niega cualquier realidad trascendente. Pero precisamente, por su carácter de maldad y simulacro (por ejemplo, en el Barroco) se esconde la esperanza de que la verdadera realidad es buena: "Es en la mirada vuelta hacia el horror donde el arte moderno tiene su belleza que extrae de la esperanza." La teología se expresa en dos cuestiones fundamentales: en el concepto de utopía como de "lo que no es" (Nicht-seiendes), de lo otro y en el concepto de la esperanza extrema que se hace visible precisamente en renunciar al optimismo que significaría afirmación.

El carácter teológico de esta "Teoria Estetica" se constituye desde dos nociones: 1) de la mimesis de lo catastrófico propio del ámbito sociológico se convierte en una mimesis de lo posible precisamente por la constitución monadológica del arte de crear mundos cerrados, 2) mediante el concepto de memoria, donde el arte trata de imitar una naturaleza redimida de la dominación técnica. El arte mediante la mimesis se constituiría en una memoria de la naturaleza para-sí.

c) Desde el punto de vista filosófico, la estética de Adorno es una estética dialéctica que tiene como fin una realidad reconciliada desde los términos de la razón y no desde los términos de la teología. En este sentido, la teoría estética tiene como programa construir un tipo de racionalidad que supere definitivamente el concepto de racionalidad instrumental. Se trata de una racionalidad mimética que en vez de identificar bajo un mismo principio, es identificarse racionalmente con lo otro. La Teoría Estética es la crítica de la racionalidad instrumental desde el punto de vista constructivista de la racionalidad mimética que se hace presente en el arte moderno auténtico.

so what.......2003-08-15

If he doesn't like Curtis Mayfield. Should he?

Fundamentally The Intellectual Equivalent of White Flight.......2002-09-12

I do not understand Adorno's fame or appeal. The consequences--witting or unwitting--of many of his ideas are frighteningly inhuman. This is to speak only of the ideas I found scrutable. But really, the parts I didn't understand could have been a map to the unattended cook's entrance of Heaven; but it would not mitigate that which concerned me most about what I DID understand.
No offense to the Schoenberg estate, and no offense to those who enjoy experimentations with tonality, but to my sensibility the elevation of Arnold Schoenberg to aesthetic eminence just seems representative of the lengths to which many will go to avoid thinking about black traditions in art, literature and music. Adorno's music writings insist that only classical music might liberate us from the pull of ideology and/or 'mere' existence. It offends me that a man who will not even try to appreciate Coltrane's A LOVE SUPREME--and moreover a man who would immediately equate said album to one of the means by which we maintain and spread cultural sickness--insists that he has navigated some sort of means for salvation to which we all should turn.
Not being grossly essentialist, I would expand the concept of 'black' within this context to mean "people who do not insist on the idea that resentment and worldweariness are ontic categories and/or define these traits as, to use K. Burke's term, 'necessary equipment for living'." This means that each of us can escape Adorno's grasp. Let's consider: Curtis Mayfield was paralyzed by an accident backstage during a concert venue. He could not move below the neck. For the rest of his years he persevered, making one more album. Adorno, on the other hand, escaped the Final Solution, then returned to Germany for the rest of his life. For most of the time, he enjoyed not a little comfort. And yet somehow Adorno was melancholy, almost comically so. Mayfield made music Adorno couldn't understand. Was the humanity of Mayfield's perseverence something Adorno couldn't understand as well?
If black world traditions of music, art, speech etc. were just as advertised--traditions--shouldn't many of us develop a useful understanding of those traditions? (Or could we at least recognize the courage of Fela Kuti and Adorno's failure to match up?) The task does not even seem particularly difficult, yet the rewards are great. Yes, many times more people will 'understand' pieces within these traditions than people would 'understand' a piece by Schoenberg. But the summitt of the former, I am certain, towers over the summitt of the latter.
It would behoove us to address the reasons that Adorno's work is scoured day and night, with the intent purpose of locating 'genius.' And it behooves us as well to investigate into why the semantic vagaries of a term like "tha bomb" renders the same scavenger hunters for Adorno totally lost. It is noted about Adorno's book that paragraphing and cohesion and coherence are abandoned, forgotten or arranged idiosyncratically so as to instigate some kind of paradigmatic challenge, apparently. But minimal immersion within a vernacular culture would provide any student with the means of vernacular comprehension and comfort, if not vernacular mastery. Adorno's supporters strain for any act or utterance from Adorno to have profound meaning. A short survey of vernacular urban culture, for example, would provide a wealth of possibility for finding profound meaning. No strain, but a fair, competent consideration of many aspects of vernacular urban culture will reveal clearly the wealth of possibilities within that culture. Why insist on the insistence of genius? Why accept, especially, a flat denial of art's social value or social nature, in a way that always places Adorno's aesthetic theory in a position of strength compared to more 'grounded' ones? Doesn't this automatic suspicion help to hide the excesses of the idea of ideological contamination and underpinnings?
Finally, consider two victims of the Nazis: Bruno Schulz and J. Huizenga. Schulz' comic outrageousness still inspires; Huizenga made the perceptive argument that man is by nature 'one who plays,' and that that was the best way to understand ourselves and to liberate ourselves. The Nazis killed these two. But is not, in a fundamental way, Adorno, who, in his declaration that, "There is no poetry after Auschwitz," reduces those two to ash and dust? To proscribe such essential ways to see the world with love, hope, and the possibility of one's agency, in the name of theory or aesthetics, is to me something that cannot be defended. Adorno did not fall then. Neither did he risk falling: he had escaped to LA. Yet he felt it imperative to strip certain sensibilities from our psyche, sensibilities that might get us over such attempts to destroy humanity as the Final Solution. Has Adorno stooped to a level of 'inhumanity'? In some real way, his concepts of ideology and classical music in effect see his brethren who enjoyed Klezmer music as getting what should be expected: victims of ideology are victimized to the last.

*The* aesthtic theory of modernism.......1999-03-02

Adorno keeps your mind at thinking, not consuming thoughts. Even when you disagree with his brilliant idiosyncrasies they provoce you to think about modern art, philosophy and society.

in English we've never experienced Adorno's thought till now.......1998-06-20

Theodor Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory" is in one respect about the end of art;it was written partially in response to his friend Walter Benjamin. Benjamin's views on the ends of art and the pontentialities, the encrusted meanings waiting to me unleashed in mass produced art. Benjamin had thought there was an emancipatory moment in art in now the age of mechanical production. Since Adorno had outlived Benjamin until 1969, Adorno's task was to furnish us with the conception of art now as a pennyless child gazing into the candystore, an art in exile, an art where the disintegration of cultural pillars have long eroded away. Schoenberg's varigated orchestral scores was the ultimate rebellion in a private world, the subject at last trying to find truth and resemblance within the aesthetic crumbs leftover from the 19th century.

Adorno's " Aesthetic Theory" is not only a treatise, a counterflow, a tone-poem of fragments, symphonic forms exploded into motives and cells of thought, it is a bridge between all arts,although the relativily new form of film is neglected. Adorno had thought this fragmentary style of writing as satisfying with the collapse of system-building within philosophic thought.The aesthetic strategy of Adorno's thought then is one which interfaces, interrelates, crosses itself in its various readings of art. And the reader expects this complexity to be apparent. Robert Hullot-Kentor's translation is indeed something which encourages this reading of Adorno. He allows us to enter Adorno's thought in its full complexity. So, graphically he allows the undivision of paragraphs to remain as Adorno had originally composed in draft form. Adorno's thought continually overflows,continually creates layers, multilayers of references. Hullot-Kentor's term "paratactical form" is the localized struture of Adorno's thought and if form at all survives it is within this density of Adorno's thought and not any external structure. The first English translation by C. Lenhardt(1984)! maintains these divisions within the body of text and is still indespensible despite all the American jargon.Adorno's thought on first encounter needs all the divisions one can find,but once learned you can move beyond it into Hullot-Kentor's. The introduction to Hullot-Kentor provides a good history of Adorno's work with aesthetics a subject he came to late within these treatise-like dimensions. Adorno has been the focus of numerous studies, Frederic Jameson,Martin Jay, Albrecht Wellmer,Peter Berger, as well as art critics Donald Kuspit. Lambert Zuidervaart has a book-length critique of "Aesthetic Theory". All have used Adorno's thought to advance a particular cause mostly justified.Jameson's diatribes with the post-structural cadre for one, Wellmer in making a bridge to the communicative theories of Adorno's former assistant Jurgan Habermas. Who has been left out of this theoretical landscape? has been the practicing artist, and understandibly so for those I've mentioned are not burdened with the daily committment to creation of the artistic object and the set of philosophic problematics that entails. As a practicing composer myself I came to Adorno long ago, his "Philosophy of Modern Music" was a seminal text, a breath of fresh air from the self-serving pitch-set-theory ideas of academia. In fact Adorno's legacy is only now entering the mainstream of thought in musicology, with profound contributions into the creativity,and historical dimensions in opera,social sub-themes in the 19th century or new music. "Aesthetic Theory" is a fundamental resource for the composer, the poet, the performing artist,especially within the collapse of genre distinctions in today's art. Within the complexity of Adorno's thought we find the crossing of genres. Although he had structured his thought for quite different reasons for the search in locating truth and meaning and non-meaning wherever it may reside.In "Aesthetic Theory"although you may only find the grand auteurs,Kafka,! Mahler,Wedekind,Proust,certainly Beckett(where Adorno had found a pinnicle of his idea of the disintegration of value) we today can find parallels for creativity in the collapse of genre distinctions today. Certainly the positive side of postmodernity has been the proclivity toward research. A composer for instance may learn the complexity of Central American culture as pre-compositional studies for a set of piano preludes, a wonderful enrichment of the genre. If nothing else Adorno's thought compells one toward research and the meaning in art from a conceptual global perspective. For that's the definition of truth that Adorno adheres to. Truth must reside for everyone, truth is not an elitist endeavor. The truth content in a Beethoven symphony for instance is in its relative accessible directness of musical gesture. You, anyone understands his musical motives immediately. It was this clearness of meaning which produced a conceptual impasse within for instance Mahler who could not resolve the dilemma of the symphonic form apart from accreting its length. Today then a composer in his/her search for instance can no longer ignore the complex use of text, and the challenge that represents, or a playwright in the subtle use of lighting. Every creative artist must explore his/her creativity beyond the four-corners of the page, and I'd like to offer this perspective as one part of Adorno's legacy.

History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965
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More readable than the old translation of negative dialectics

History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965
Theodor W. Adorno
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Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, a Draft and Two Schemata

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Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)

Adorno: An Intellectual Biography

Dream Notes

ASIN: 0745630138

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Despite all of humanity's failures, futile efforts and wrong turnings in the past, Adorno did not let himself be persuaded that we are doomed to suffer a bleak future for ever. One of the factors that prevented him from identifying a definitive plan for the future course of history was his feelings of solidarity with the victims and losers. As for the future, the course of events was to remain open-ended; instead of finality, he remained committed to a Hölderlin-like `openness'. This trace of the messianic has what he called `the colour of the concrete' as opposed to mere abstract possibility.Early in the 1960s Adorno gave four courses of lectures on the road leading to Negative Dialectics, his magnum opus of 1966. The second of these was concerned with the topics of history and freedom. In terms of content, these lectures represented an early version of the chapters in Negative Dialectics devoted to Kant and Hegel. In formal terms, these were improvised lectures that permit us to glimpse a philosophical work in progress.The text published here gives us an overview of all the themes and motifs of his philosophy of history: the key notion of the domination of nature, his criticism of the Existentialist concept of a 'historicity' without history and, finally, his opposition to the traditional idea of truth as something permanent, unchanging and ahistorical.

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More readable than the old translation of negative dialectics.......2007-01-28

It's translated into contemporary English, sometimes I concede with jarring effect. Older Adorno texts were translated by bitter, twisted, and prematurely aged graduate students into something isomorphic with prewar Hoch Deutsche, making them murky beyond belief.

Here, the import of Negative Dialectics is that at some point, the so-often-misrepresented thought midcentury has a ground.

Why in fact should there be no concentration camps, even if God is dead, was a question which was in my experience answered with moral seriousness until about 1980, perhaps more precisely until 1982, when with the permission of Holocaust victim descendants, a group that at times called itself the Falange entered a refugee camp (which is where women and kids take refuge) and started systematically slaughtering people.

Called unserious, it was the deliberate failure to reify dialectical terms so as to somehow justify any specific instance of suffering.

As did Kant, it called on us to remember that we're not able to stand outside of philosophizing.

As far as I can understand, the notion of a constellation is one in which we simultaneously realize that a "thing" was the product of an act in history (some Greek guys pointing to stars and finding shapes) but with permanent reality, a reality as real as we are going to get.

For example, cf p. 173 of this book for "freedom". Here we realize that whatever else it is, ordinary Americans don't mean by "freedom" what they have, for trivially, had they had it they would not seek it. But we do, usually getting what we call jack: cf. most of Ray Carver's stuff.

Ray Carver documents adventures in all twelve tones. Most superficial readers read-into his stuff a religious *aufhebung* based on his confession of alcoholism but most such confessors do anything but come to Jesus, using the word "spiritual" and not "religious".

Perhaps (to continue philosophizing based on this starting point) that we really have it, because "freedom" means "the pursuit of happiness", permission to enter a race.

But from his European perch, I can see Adorno replying that Spartacus had this, Hobbes' troglodyte had this, Hegel's Slave had this.

And we have to realize that dialectically, as Americans, we have to shuttle between two forms of language.

In one, we are "free" and have "choice". So they tell us, even when we're perp-walked for making "bad" choices (hey, I thought I was free, o never mind).

In the other we find the daily language of I have to go to work I have to go to church I have to pick up the kids. This form of language speaks of at least a partial determination, in which we have agreed to sacrifice some freedom in pursuit of a final goal which we do, I concede, get to choose, sort of (we can't choose, of course, to become rich criminals...I guess...although this is precisely who we celebrate).

My head hurts.

But what Adorno has done, with far more mastery than the overrated head case of a late Wittgenstein, and far more personal self-control (cf. Wittgenstein's Poker), is show that the existence of the confusion is prior to Wittgenstein's attempts to demonstrate a false syllogism: if it is a confusion, it cannot exist.

[The late Wittgenstein is a male syllogism, seen when we males are lost when driving: there is a confusion, I'm lost, but since I am an adult male as was the late Wittgenstein, I cannot be confused therefore the Question is a pseudo-problem.]

[My guess is that when in California and driving with nee Karplus to the all you can eat fish place, Adorno would pull into a gas station and ask directions. Fortunately for the ladies, Wittgenstein wasn't married.]

"Freedom" can like "art" name something not quite existing, a child in the birth canal. Why the hell not? Admitting the confusion PREVENTS us from killing in the name of "freedom".

This is moral seriousness on steroids. Contrast "analytic" philosophy which today makes the kow-tow to prephilosophical thinking apologetically so the janitor won't turn out the lights or ask for a living wage, and then proceeds unreflectingly yet under the name of philosophy to reach silly conclusions such as "it is a necessary truth that all people have a brain".

There is not now, and I hope there never will be, Adorno for Dummies. But this series of lectures is accessible because the lecture format, in which we watch a man thinking, is a scene of Negative Dialectics.

Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)

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Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)
Robert Hullot-Kentor
Manufacturer: Columbia University Press
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Philosophy Of New Music
Adorno: An Intellectual Biography
Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, a Draft and Two Schemata
Dream Notes
Correspondence: 1943 - 1955

ASIN: 0231136587

Book Description

Theodor W. Adorno was a major twentieth-century philosopher and social critic whose writings on oppositional culture in art, music, and literature increasingly stand at the center of contemporary intellectual debate. In this excellent collection, Robert Hullot-Kentor, widely regarded as the most distinguished American translator and commentator on Adorno, gathers together sixteen essays he has written about the philosopher over the past twenty years.

The opening essay, "Origin Is the Goal," pursues Adorno's thesis of the dialectic of enlightenment to better understand the urgent social and political situation of the United States. "Back to Adorno" examines Adorno's idea that sacrifice is the primordial form of human domination; "Second Salvage" reconstructs Adorno's unfinished study of the transformation of music in radio transmission; and "What Is Mechanical Reproduction" revisits Adorno's criticism of Walter Benjamin. Further essays cover a broad range of topics: Adorno's affinities with Wallace Stevens and Nabokov, his complex relationship with Kierkegaard and psychoanalysis, and his critical study of popular music.

Many of these essays have been revised, with new material added that emphasizes the relevance of Adorno's thought to the United States today. Things Beyond Resemblance is a timely and richly analytical collection crucial to the study of critical theory, aesthetics, continental philosophy, and Adorno.

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Adorno at his absolute finest
It's Adorno, less than 5 stars would be Sacrilege

Philosophy Of New Music
Theodor W. Adorno
Manufacturer: Univ Of Minnesota Press
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Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (Radical Thinkers) (Radical Thinkers)

ASIN: 0816636664

Book Description

In 1947 Theodor Adorno, one of the seminal European philosophers of the postwar years, announced his return after exile in the United States to a devastated Europe by writing Philosophy of New Music. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even Schoenberg reviled it. Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical reproduction as internal to composition itself, rather than as a matter of the reproduction of musical performance. Consisting of two distinct essays, “Schoenberg and Progress” and “Stravinsky and Reaction,” this work poses the musical extremes in which Adorno perceived the struggle for the cultural future of Europe: between human emancipation and barbarism, between the compositional techniques and achievements of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. In this completely new translation—presented along with an extensive introduction by distinguished translator Robert Hullot-Kentor—Philosophy of New Music emerges as an indispensable key to the whole of Adorno's illustrious and influential oeuvre. Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was the leading figure of the Frankfurt school of critical theory. He authored more than twenty volumes, including Negative Dialectics (1982), Philosophy of Modern Music (1980), Kierkegaard (Minnesota, 1989), Dialectic of Enlightenment (1975) with Max Horkheimer, and Aesthetic Theory (Minnesota, 1997). Robert Hullot-Kentor has taught at Harvard and Stanford universities and written widely on Adorno. He has translated various works of Adorno, including Aesthetic Theory.

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Adorno at his absolute finest.......2006-08-05

Perhaps the only things more polemical than Adorno's critique of Schoenberg and Stravinsky are the reactions that followed. Unfortunately, many people still assume that they understand Adorno's views and arguments concerning these two composers. The reductionist tendency to simplify Adorno's view to "Schoenberg good, Stravinsky bad" shows just who has and who hasn't actually read this book. It is never so simple. Adorno is frequently critical of Schoenberg in very perceptive ways. Of course there's no mistaking who Adorno favors, but to consider this book as a good-vs-evil study is far too limiting. Not only is this a great study of the then current state of musical thought, it is also an interesting overview of twelve tone music, how it works, what it seeks to do, and why it's important.

The format of the book is especially nice. Adorno's favored paratactical prose style can be incredibly difficult when multi-page paragraphs begin to accumulate. For the most part in Philosophy of New Music, each new paragraph is marked by a heading. This keeps the ideas organized and focused. Adorno's paragraphs seem to function as a spinning out of an idea in a very fluid manner and the length of his sections are just the right length to allow the reader to comfortably follow him without getting bogged down. His theses is developed piece by piece, but clearly dividing up the ideas helps the reader see the logical progression. Having read other Adorno writings, I found this to be unusually clear and concise. I wonder how much more useful Aesthetic Theory would be if he had used this structure.

The remarkable clarity is probably due, to a large extent, to Robert Hullot-Kentor's translation. I've read many other translators with varying degrees of success (Ashton's attempt at Negative Dialectics being one of the worst), but Hullot-Kentor is by far the best. Adorno's writing is riddled with allusions and references that are frequently vague or obscure. Hullot-Kentor does a great service to readers by including additional references and background information. His detailed understanding of Adorno's complicated thought is evident in every sentence. Reading Adorno has, to me at least, never been so straightforward.

In addition to the translation, Hullot-Kentor provides an excellent foreword providing both a context and an overview of what is inside. His description of the translation process is, as always, interesting. Hullot-Kentor has found a way to provide very readable English translations while maintaining Adorno's linguistic artistry.

It's Adorno, less than 5 stars would be Sacrilege .......2006-06-25

Bought this yesterday with my father's day gift certificate. Went here to see what others had thought of it and was surprised to see no review posted yet! What gives? Are you guys sleeping on the job?

The translators preface by Robert Hullot-Kentor who also did Aesthetic Theory is vintage translator expressing the torments of trying to merge two different worlds. I enjoyed it and know just what he means. Quine is right about that. But it is harsh! RH-K is a believer in Adorno and what Adorno says in the text. Does one have to empathize with a text to translate it well just as a musician must be in the mood of the music to express that mood? I wonder. Maybe so.

Adorno gave these guys grief. I am sure it applies to our music as well. I read this not simply thinking of the "new music" but the continuing type and wonder if we can associate the trite with the sensuous and the good with the abstract? But then what makes the good so good? Reading on....

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Essays on Music
Theodor Adorno
Manufacturer: University of California Press
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0520231597

Book Description

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), one of the principal figures associated with the Frankfurt School, wrote extensively on culture, modernity, aesthetics, literature, and--more than any other subject--music. To this day, Adorno remains the single most influential contributor to the development of qualitative musical sociology which, together with his nuanced intertextual readings of musical works, gives him broad claim as a continuing force in the study of music. This long-awaited collection of twenty-seven essays represents the full range of Adorno's music writing. Nearly half of the essays appear in English for the first time; all of the essays are fully annotated; and the previously translated essays have been corrected and missing text restored, making this volume the definitive resource on Adorno's musical thought.

Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, a Draft and Two Schemata

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Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, a Draft and Two Schemata
Theodor W. Adorno
Manufacturer: Polity Press
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ASIN: 0745631991

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Dream Notes
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