Aesthetic Theory (Theory & History of Literature)

Rating:
Summary: *The* aesthtic theory of modernism
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: so what
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Fundamentally The Intellectual Equivalent of White Flight
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: so what
Review: If he doesn't like Curtis Mayfield. Should he?