Adorno on Popular Culture (International Library of Sociology)

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: A layer of scholarship is antibody to liberation. The bonafide purpose of an introduction to a first rate thinker is to give the student a precis of the first rate.

But the obvious question, one raised by Adorno in his lectures on Kant, is why the student needs a mentor to explain the guru.

Adorno's answer was that Kantianism exists in partial independence from Kant and even from Kant's thought, in the sense that Kant raised concerns that Kant did not have the time to think through.

There is nothing mystical about this. It may result in part from the fact that Kant himself, in Keyne's image, heard "voices in the air" in the form of thoughts that arose out of material struggles during Kant's epoch.

Unfortunately, Witkin seems unaware of this possibility and provides instead a precis of "Adorno on Popular Culture" which reduces Adorno's thought to a biographical series of complaints about the way in which popular culture moronizes its consumer.

This biographical approach forces Witken unconsciously and by default into the role of answering Adorno, and laying Adorno to rest; Witkin becomes an Adorno antibody in the manner of antibodies to the HIV virus which are the diagnosis of AIDs.

In Adorno's own words and Adorno's own theory (which is almost never self-applied by texts in the Adorno industry) the thing represented is conquered by its representation in a way that has the Tedster, probably, spinning in his grave.

Witkin's Adorno machine is constructed by a scholar who is tone deaf to the music of the dialectic.

Witkin's Adorno machine emits racist music about jazz and Witkin seems to fail to realize that in the 1930s and 1940s, the word "jazz" was coterminous with popular music in an era before Coltrane. Adorno should not be forgiven, in writing about American music, for his apparently complete failure to inform himself about country blues and Scott Joplin but when asked to write about Jazz, he used the word in the same way ordinary GI's of occupied Germany used the word.

Witkin's major case against his Adorno machine is Woody Allen, a filmmaker who probably knows about Adorno: an Adorno figure appears in Woody's Hannah and Her Sisters.

Allen's films considered as a static *oeuvre* are thought by Witkin to constitute a riposte or counterexample to Adorno, for they are films with mass appeal that do not reject "inwardness and erudition."

The problem is the failure to apply Adorno's deep methodology. When he appeared in the 1920s in Weimar Germany, his colleagues were struck by the thoroughgoing influence of dialectical thinking on Adorno's details of thought and for better or worse, this makes a thinker unlikely to think in terms of a closure, which Witkin is seeking in raising the case of Woody Allen.

Witkin fails both the appreciate Hegel, and read Variety: for in fact, ever since the 1980s, Allen's personal and professional reputation have been under continual attack beginning with accusations about his relationships with his step-daughter.

The horror was based on the failure, of a large number of moviegoers, to connect with a Manhattan island of inwardness and erudition that was, in this period, diminishing both in Manhattan, and, at a rapid rate, elsewhere.

During Reagan's presidency, universities in self-defense conducted a *kulturkampf* on universites, and inwardness and erudition, in the form of commodified education, the replacement of tenured faculty with adjunct faculty, and student moronization.

The modal Allen clone became in this period a figure under increasing suspicion, and Allen himself expresses his rather bitter reaction to this in Deconstructing Harry.

The dialectic was not suspended, and a frozen, hypostatized Adorno not counter-exampled and demolished by Allen's now very retro oeuvre. Instead the gradual brutalization of the Allen "type" becomes a confirmation of Adorno's critique and more interesting than old Woody Allen films.

University faculty too often survive by pretending to celebrate liberation while in fact performing an older ideological function: thought control, and ensuring that things don't get outa hand. The reassurance, however, that popular culture is in any way a medium by means of which ordinary people can express their needs or find satisfaction is malarkey.

The reassurance requires Witkin's nonsensical theory of transparency of communication (something predemolished by Adorno in The Jargon of Authenticity) in which the mechanisms of popular culture provide a way for fellow spirits to communicate in Buber's mode, and eliminates a "third" term consisting of a shared set of ideals, considered unnecessary and indeed Quixotic.

The problem is that for Cervantes as for Adorno, humanity is the reverse of a brutalized, face-to-face, "I and thou" humanity which in fact is the face of one-on-one authority. Don Quixote was able to escape this exhausting struggle not by reification but by integrating an ontology into his praxis in a redemptory way..

It is dehumanizing to so erase the possibility of shared ideals and Witkin fails to show how this creates anything but twilight struggle in the name of "authenticity."

As I write, abstract ideals labeled Quixotic a year ago are proving to have weight, like the physicist's light. The Bush administration finds itself today in front of an obsidian wall, carved with serpent shapes, expressing abstract Enlightenment ideals and although it may circumvent this barrier it will be perceived, world-wide, as untrue to its own professed ideals. This will have enormous consequences for the United States in the real world of economics and diplomacy.

American media uses a jargon of authenticity and indeed, a debased, confrontational I and thou ethical style to REDUCE the hard work of arms inspectors to a series of completely misleading sound bytes. It is an anti-Quixote in that it refuses to test its results against any texts, whether chivalric novels or the Charter of the UN.

In this context, we do not need to exorcise Adorno but instead to channel him.