Minima Moralia

I haven't blogged in a while, and much of the recent posts have been random in nature or related to jazz. In other news, I finally finished Adorno's Minima Moralia, part of my attempt to read more Frankfurt School writers, as well as to learn more about the man whose essays on the irrational in culture fascinated me a few months ago. Here, Adorno also addresses some of his concerns over fascism, authenticity, the culture industry, aesthetics, and philosophy. Unfortunately, he does not quite address his previous criticism of jazz, which he unfairly (in my opinion) lumped into the culture industry's negative impact on society. However, he did not make the absurd notion he did in his essay on the music that its influences from military marches prepares it for fascist use. Perhaps had Adorno taken a deeper look at the racial issues of jazz rather than writing off the prominence of black musicians in it as a fad or primitivist move, he could have seen some of its antifascist proclivities which opposed the herrenvolk democracy of the Jim Crow Fordist US. Of course, there are moments in Minima Moralia in which Adorno powerfully dissects racism and anti-Semitism, as well as the question of emancipation of oppressed groups without a change in the capitalist order which he believes prevents social emancipation.

Anyway, it goes without saying that jazz music and the ways in which the masses comprehend or respond to Hollywood, popular music, or art is a bit more nuanced than Adorno made it out to be. And I'm still trying to figure out exactly how I feel about his theses against occultism in relation to my areas of interest in the Caribbean, although I suspect a few anthropologists who have written about the region have addressed some of his ideas directly or indirectly. Nevertheless, Adorno's always thought-provoking and forces the reader to confront their preconceived notions about art, social relations, and knowledge. Adorno is priceless when it comes to understanding totalitarian society and aesthetics, and for those reasons, particularly in the current political climate, should be taken seriously. Next on the list is Fromm's Escape from Freedom, which from what I can tell so far, has some similar ideas about the social psychology of fascism and the role of the entertainment industry and "late industrialism" in fomenting the conditions of totalitarianism. Benjamin, Wilhelm Reich and Georges Bataille will also be on my reading list, for additional perspective.

The following are my favorite quotes that I remembered to jot down from the Verso 

"An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences." 

"The melting-pot was introduced by unbridled industrial capitalism. The thought of being cast into it conjures up martyrdom, not democracy." 

"The discovery of genuineness as a last bulwark of individualistic ethics is a reflection of industrial mass-production."

"Instead of expecting miracles of the pre-capitalist peoples, older nations should be on their guard against their unimaginative, indolent taste for everything proven, and for the successes of the West."

"Munich before the First World War was a hotbed of that spirituality whose protest against the rationalism of the schools led, by way of the cults of fancy-dress festivities, more swiftly to Fascism than possibly even the spiritless system of old Rickert."

"He who offers for sale something unique that no-one wants to buy, represents, even against his will, freedom from exchange."

"...everything that had ever been called folk art has always reflected domination."

"Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar."

"German words of foreign derivation are the Jews of language."

"The poor chew words to fill their bellies."

"...only fools tell their masters the truth."

"One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly."

"The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying-glass."

"The same rationalistic and empiricist apparatus that threw the spirits out is being used to reimpose them on those who no longer trust their own reason."

"The direct statement without divagations, hesitations or reflections, that gives the other the facts full in the face, already has the form and timbre of the command issued under Fascism by the dumb to the silent. Matter-of-factness between people, doing away with all ideological ornamentation between them, has already itself become an ideology for treating people as things." 

"In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so. The justified guilt-feelings of those exempt from physical work ought not become an excuse for the 'idiocy of rural life.' Intellectuals, who alone write about intellectuals and give them their bad name in that of honesty, reinforce the lie. A great part of the prevalent anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, right up to Huxley, is set in motion when writers complain about the mechanisms of competition without understanding them, and so fall victim to them. In the activity most their own they have shut out the consciousness of tat twam asi. Which is why they then scuttle into Indian temples."

"Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse."