Paul Celan - music on . . .
SG
A younger and more enthusiastic friend of mine got me into reading the
poetry and even listening to the recordings of Paul Celan. I recently
found out I actually know a family which knew him, intimately. The
stories they told me about him are irreproducibly heart-breaking. Celan
also had some birth/cultural connections with Romania - even if it
would be hard to label him as an artist of only one extraction. The CD
of Celan reciting his own poetry I possess is highly disturbing,
hallucinatory, but also indescribably touching. It has something in
common with Alban Berg's music, which I like a lot, I find.
Another friend, specialized in 20th century music, tells me that if I
came to explore P.C.'s poetry, I should look into 20th century music
based on Celan's poetry (Boulez excepted (-: ). I am almost tabula rasa
in that respect, so I am waiting for pointers.
regards,
SG
Rob Barnett
also a Celan Symphony and a Celan opera by Peter Ruzicka.
There's a recording of the symphony on Thorofon:-
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2005/Feb05/Ruzicka.htm
--
Rob Barnett
Classical Editor, MusicWeb International
www.musicweb.uk.net
Editor, British Music Society Newsletter
david...@aol.com
Boulez was commissioned to write a cycle of orchestral songs for Jessye
Norman and the Berlin Philharmonic in the early 1980's. (Norman to
Boulez: "Send me one note at a time.") In part because of Boulez's
enthusiasm for Celan's translations of Rene Char and other French
poets--Boulez knew Char and has three times set his poetry--he selected
poems of Paul Celan. So far as I'm aware, Boulez hasn't begun to work
on the cycle. (The other poet he considered was Emily Dickinson.)
-david gable
Ian Pace
"Rob Barnett" <Rob.Ba...@btinternet.com> wrote in message
news:dp5kel$hmb$1...@nwrdmz01.dmz.ncs.ea.ibs-infra.bt.com...
> There are Celan pieces by Nyman, Galas, Wildberger, Birtwistle and Berio -
> also a Celan Symphony and a Celan opera by Peter Ruzicka.
>
> There's a recording of the symphony on Thorofon:-
> http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2005/Feb05/Ruzicka.htm
>
'fallen, fallen...und liegen und fallen' for mezzo-soprano, accordion and
tape, Rene Leibowitz's 'Vier Lieder', the first song of Luciano Berio's
'Stanze' for baritone, three male choirs and orchestra, Wolfgang Rihm's 'St
Luke Passion (Deus Passus)' (which finishes with a setting of Celan's
Tenebrae) and 'Vier Gedichte aus Atemwende' for baritone and piano,
Hans-Jurgen Von Bose's 'Todesfuge' for baritone solo, mixed choir and
orchestra, several works of Aribert Reimann including 'Funf Gedichte von
Paul Celan' for baritone and piano, 'Engfuehrung' for tenor and piano,
'Zyklus' for baritone and orchestra and 'Wir, die wie der Strandhafer
Wahren' for mezzo and piano, Paul-Heinz Dittrich's 'Engfuehrung', part of
'Kammermusik IV' for soprano, vocal ensemble, instrumental ensemble,
orchestra, tape and live electronics, 'Klaviermusik III nach dem Gedicht
"Stehen im Schatten" von Paul Celan, 'Singbarer Rest II nach Paul Celan' for
soprano solo, 'Singbarer Rest III ' for solo oboe, the sixth of Kurtag's
'Holderlin-Gesange', Nicolaus A. Huber's 'Tenebrae. Chanson einer Dame im
Schatten.2 Chöre nach Paul Celan' for mixed a capella choir, Michael
Denhoff's 'Atemwende (nach Paul Celan)', Jorg Birkenkotter's 'Sieben Stuecke
nach Gedichten von Friederich Holderlin und Paul Celan' for vocal and
instrumental ensemble, Bernard Rands' 'Canti del sole' for tenor and chamber
ensemble, Richard Barrett's large cycle for vocalists and instrumentalists
'Opening of the Mouth' (Barrett also prefaces various scores with Celan
quotations, as well as those of Beckett and others), and cycle 'Negatives'
for ensemble (in one piece the trombonist speaks Celan fragments into their
instrument), Roger Redgate's 'Celan Songs' for soprano and ensemble,
Johannes Kalitzke's 'Tübingen Jänner' for bass flute, cello and
sprechstimme. There are other Celan-based works of Ruzicka as well as the
above-mentioned, including 'Der die Gesänge zerschlug' for baritone and
chamber ensemble and 'Todesfuge' for singer, speaker, ensemble and tape.
Nicolaus A. Huber's 'Disappearances' for piano uses rhythms derived from the
speech of Celan's 'Tenebrae', and Rihm's 'Lichtwang (in memoriam Paul
Celan') for violin and orchestra is obviously inspired by Celan. Berio's
string quartet 'Notturno' is inspired by a fragment from Celan ('...ihr das
erschwiegene Wort'), as are Denhoff's piano cycles 'Irr-lichternder Hammer
aus Atemwende' and 'Mit von Steinen geschriebenen Schatten aus Atemwende'
and his solo cello work 'Cello-Einsatz (nach einem Epigramm von Paul
Celan)', as well as Dittrich's ''Klaviermusik III nach dem Gedicht "Stehen
im Schatten" von Paul Celan' and 'Singbarer Rest III ' for solo oboe.
This is not an exhaustive list by any means. Celan has been a major
inspiration to a wide range of contemporary composers, especially in the
German-speaking countries - his influence is matched only by that of
Frederich Holderlin and Samuel Beckett.
Ian
sidoze
Rob Barnett wrote:
> There are Celan pieces by...Birtwistle....
Probably my favourite work by Birtwistle (Pulse Shadows). Intense and
ingenious.
Ian Pace
between Celan and Theodor Adorno. In his essay 'Cultural Criticism and
Society' ('Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft' - I quote from the English
translation by Samuel and Shierry Weber (which received Adorno's
endorsement), in 'Prisms' (Cambridge, MA, 1967), pp 17-34), Adorno ended
with the following now notorious words:
'The materialistic transparency of culture has not made it more honest, only
more vulgar. By relinquishing its own particularity, culture has also
relinquished the salt of truth, which once consisted in its opposition to
other particularities. To call it to account before a responsibility which
it denies is only to confirm cultural pomposity. Neutralized and ready-made,
traditional culture has become worthless today. Through an irrevocable
process its heritage, hypocritically reclaimed by the Russians, has become
expendable to the highest degree, superfluous, trash. And the hucksters of
mass culture can point to it with a grin, for they treat it as such. The
more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the
more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most
extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter.
Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic
of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And
this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write
poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress
as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely.
Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it
confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.' (ibid, p. 34).
These sentiments became quite emblematic of a certain post-war mentality
amongst artists, especially in Germany. Gunther Grass was sympathetic at
first, as I believe was Heinrich Boell. Certainly such thoughts haunted many
avant-garde composers; with or without explicit reference, one can see signs
of this mentality in the work of Helmut Lachenmann, Mathias Spahlinger,
Dieter Schnebel, Gerhard Stabler, Heinz Holliger and others.
Celan encountered Adorno's 'Notes on Literature' in 1959 and attempted to
meet him later that year (a failed meeting he described in his story
'Conversation in the Mountains'. a remarkable bit of prose which I'll quote
from briefly:
'Poor lily, poor corn-salad. There they stand, the cousins, on a road in the
mountains, the stick silent, the stones silent, and the silence no silence
at all. No word has come to an end and no phrase, it is nothing but a pause,
an empty space between the words, a blank - you see all the syllables stand
around, waiting. They are tongue and mouth as before, these two, and in
their eyes there hangs a veil, and you, poor flowers, are not even there,
are not blooming, you do not exist, and July is not July' (from the
translation by Rosmarie Waldrop, in Paul Celan - 'Collected Prose'
(Manchester, 1986), p.19).
He speaks of the two of them as 'Jew and son of a Jew' (ibid, p.17) and
describes Jew 'Gross' and Jew 'Klein' (ibid, p.18) meeting in the mountains
(it's generally assumed that 'Gross' is Adorno and 'Klein' is Celan - Adorno
responded to this story by pointing out to Celan that the real 'Gross' he
should have met was Gershom Scholem).
Here is some of their imaginary conversation:
'You know and you want to ask: And even so you've come all the way, come
here even so - why, and what for?'
'Why, and what for ... Because I had to talk, maybe, to myself or to you,
talk with my mouth and tongue, not just with my stick. Because to whom does
it talk, my stick? It talks to the stones, and the stones - to whom do they
talk?'
'To whom should they talk, cousin? They do not talk, they speak, and who
speaks does not talk to anyone, cousin, he speaks because nobody hears him,
nobody and Nobody, and then he says, himself, not his mouth or his tonuge,
he, and only he, says: Do you hear me?'
'Do you hear me, he says - I know, cousin, I know.... Do you hear me, he
says. I'm here. I am here, I've come. I've come with my stick, me and no
other, me and not him, me with my hour, my undeserved hour, me who have been
hit, who have not been hit, me with my memory, with my lack of memory, me,
me, me...' (ibid, p. 20)
When the poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger challenged Adorno's thesis (in
Enzensburger, "Die Steine der Freiheit," in 'Nelly Sachs zu Ehren' ed W.
Berendsohn et al. (Frankfurt, 1961), p. 47, cited in John Felstiner - 'Paul
Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew' (New Haven, 1995, p. 188), claiming that the
work of Nelly Sachs had proved the falsity of Adorno's dictum, Adorno
replied in 1961:
'I do not want to soften my statement that it is barbaric to continue to
write poetry after Auschwitz; it expresses, negatively, the impulse that
animates committed literature. The question one of the characters in
Sartre's 'Morts sans sepulture' [The Dead Without Tombs] asks, "Does living
have any meaning when men exist who beat you until your bones break?" is
also the question whether art as such should still exist at all; whether
spiritual regression in the concept of committed literature is not enjoined
by the regression of society itself. But Hans Magnus Enzensberg's rejoinder
also remains true, namely that literature must resist precisely this
verdict, that is, be such that it does not surrender to cynicism merely by
existing after Auschwitz. It is the situation of literature itself and not
simply one's relation to it that is paradoxical.'
(Theodor Adorno - 'Committment', in 'Notes On Literature' Vol. 2, translated
Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York, 1992), pp. 87-88)
Celan could not accept Adorno's sentiments, writing 'No poem after Auschwitz
(Adorno): what sort of an idea of a "Poem" is being implied here? The
arrogance of the man who hypothetically and speculatively has the audacity
to observe or report on Auschwitz from the perspective of nightingales and
song thrushes.' (publishd in Joachim Seng, 'Die waher Flaschenpost: Zur
Beziehung zwischen Theodor W. Adorno und Paul Celan', Frankfurter Adorno
Blaetter, viii (1999), p. 151, cited in Lorenz Jaeger - 'Adorno: An
Intellectual Biography', translated Stewart Spencer (New Haven, 2004), p.
187).
Relations between Celan and Adorno remained strained until the latter's
death in 1969, though Celan confided in Adorno when feeling that allegations
of plagiarism against him (Celan) were part of a Dreyfus-like anti-semitic
campaign (see Jager, op cit, p. 187, and Felstiner, op. cit, p. 189). Adorno
did return to these issues in
his two epic late works, Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory
(1970, published posthumously):
'Genocide is the absolute integration. It is on its way wherever men are
leveled off - "polished off," as the German military called it - until one
exterminates them literally, as deviations from the concept of their total
nullity. Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death. The
most far out dictum from Beckett's End Game, that there really is not so
much to be feared any more, reacts to a practice whose first sample was
given in the concentration camps, and in whose concept - venerable once upon
a time - the destruction of nonidentity is ideologically lurking. Absolute
negativity is in plain sight and has ceased to surprise anyone. Fear used to
be tied to the principium individuationis of self-preservation, and that
principle, by its own consistency, abolishes itself. What the sadists in the
camps foretold their victims, "Tomorrow you'll be wiggling skyward as smoke
from this chimney" bespeaks the indifference of each individual life that is
the direction of history. Even in his formal freedom, the individual is as
fungible and replaceable as he will be under the liquidators' boots.
'But since, in a world whose law is universal individual profit, the
individual has nothing but this self that has become indifferent, the
performance of the old, familiar tendency is at the same time the most
dreadful of things. There is no getting out of this, no more than out of the
electrified barbed wire around the camps. Perennial suffering has as much
right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been
wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is
not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you
can go on living - especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who
by rights should have been killed, may go on living [this comment of
Adorno's is chillingly prescient of Celan's eventual fate - IP]. His mere
survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois
subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the
drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued
by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to
the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an
emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.'
(Theodor Adorno - 'Negative Dialectics', translated E.B. Ashton (New York,
1973), pp. 362-363)
Adorno referred to Celan at a few points in 'Aesthetic Theory'.
'Nature poetry is anachronistic not only as a subject: Its truth content has
vanished. This may help clarify the anorganic aspect of Beckett's as well as
of Celan's poetry. It yearns neither for nature nor for industry; it is
precisely the integration of the latter that leads to poetization, which was
already a dimension of impressionism, and contributes its part to making
peace with an unpeaceful world. Art, as an anticipatory form of reaction, is
no longer able - if it ever was - to embody pristine nature or the industry
that has scorched it; the impossibility of both is probably the hidden law
of aesthetic nonrepresentationalism. The images of the postindustrial world
are those of a corpse; they want to avert atomic war by banning it, just as
forty years ago surrealism sought to save Paris through the image of cows
grazing in the streets, the same cows after which the people of bombed-out
Berlin rebaptized Kurfuerstendamm as Kudamm [A punning abbreviation of
'Avenue of the Elector' to 'Avenue of the Cows' - translator's note]'
(Theodor Adorno - 'Aesthetic Theory', translated Robert Hullot-Kentor
(London, 1997), p. 219)
'Sealing art off from empirical reality became an explicit program in
hermetic poetry. In the face of all of its important works - those of Celan,
for instance - it is justified to ask to what extent they are indeed
hermetic; as Peter Szondi points out, that they are self-contained does not
mean that they are unintelligible. On the contrary, hermetic poetry and
social elements have a common nexus that must be acknowledged. Reified
consciousness, which through the integration of highly industrialized
society becomes integral to its members, fails to perceive what is essential
to the poems, emphasizing instead their thematic content and putative
informational value.'
(ibid., p. 321)
'In the work of the most important contemporary representative of German
hermetic poetry, Paul Celan, the experiential content of the hermetic was
inverted. His poetry is permeated by the shame of art in the face of
suffering that escapes both experience and sublimation. Celan's poems want
to
speak of the most extreme horror through silence. Their truth content itself
becomes negative. They imitate a language beneath the helpless language of
human beings, indeed beneath all organic language: It is that of the dead
speaking of stones and stars. The last rudiments of the organic are
liquidated; what Benjamin noted in Baudelaire, that his poetry is without
aura, comes into its own in Celan's work. The infinite discretion with which
his radicalism proceeds compounds his force. The language of the lifeless
becomes the last possible comfort for a death that is deprived of all
meaning. The passage into the inorganic is to be followed not only in
thematic motifs; rather, the trajectory from horror to silence is to be
reconstructed in the hermetic works. Distantly analogous to Kafka's
treatment of expressionist painting, Celan transposes into linguistic
processes the increasing abstracton of landscape, progressively
approximating it to the inorganic.'
(ibid, p. 322)
Ian Pace
<david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1136026916.4...@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
that the once-planned Boulez opera after Genet looks unlikely ever to
happen.
Ian
Paul Ilechko
I don't know any musical settings of Celan, but his best poetry is
musical in itself ... my favorite work is Death Fugue - you can read it
here:
SG
Thanks for going through the trouble of posting all this.
regards,
SG
SG
Paul Ilechko wrote:
> I don't know any musical settings of Celan, but his best poetry is
> musical in itself ... my favorite work is Death Fugue - you can read it
> here:
>
> http://www.certando.net/celan.html
I have a pretty good - while not complete - printed anthology of his
writings, including some correspondence. I can take him only in small
doses, so I am not looking for more now. If you look things up on the
Internet, you may actually find Celan reciting himself your favorite
work and a number of others, in German obviously.
regards,
SG
SG
david...@aol.com wrote:
> Boulez was commissioned to write a cycle of orchestral songs for Jessye
> Norman and the Berlin Philharmonic in the early 1980's. Norman to
> Boulez: "Send me one note at a time."
Who did she believe he was?! Webern?
regards,
SG
(-;
Lena
In some cases, "whiny and whimpering" with "a lot of vibrato", may also
come to mind. :) That is, this is a work which depends quite a bit on
how the soprano tackles it. Anyway, I couldn't begin to guess Samir's
taste here.
The work consists of interleaving string quartet movements and
movements scored for soprano and small ensemble. I think the piece
has a lot of potential, and the instrumental segments are good -- but,
whatever was intended by Birtwistle, I'd really like more of a nuanced
blending between the soprano and the rest of the cast than available on
the current recording (McFadden, Arditti Qt, etc.). Here, McFadden
often has a sort of a "I'm a typical modern music soprano" declamatory
bent which I at least dislike. "Intensity" appears mostly in the wish
to turn the thing off...
In what I think of as the best vocal parts here, the use of the soprano
is very nice, though - the voice functions as a sort of a wind
instrument, with the real winds matching or answering. (Check out for
instance the beginning of "White and Light" or "Tenebrae", or the
various uses of the voice in "Todtnauberg".) But otherwise I often
find McFadden to be mainly a pain in the neck.
Just in case: these aren't standard settings of poetry. For instance,
good luck in figuring out what she's up to, verbally. The "settings"
that do more direct justice to Celan consist one way of another of an
accompanied recitation of the poetry. (Birtwistle uses, for the most
part an English translation. I wonder if that constitutes a good
excuse for starting off a nice flamey 900-post thread. :):) )
Lena
Ian Pace
"Lena" <emsw...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1136051749.3...@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
years ago, I remember Birtwistle saying that he was more interested in the
formal aspects of the poems than their content. Whether this is a
particularly appropriate attitude to Birtwistle (and whether the two things
can be separated in this work) is highly questionable, also whether such
things can really be rendered appropriately in English translation. I don't
feel this to be one of Birtwistle's stronger works.
Ian
david...@aol.com
>Boulez setting Emily Dickinson is a weird thought. I think it's a great pity that the once-planned Boulez opera after Genet looks unlikely ever to happen.
Genet came ouf of the woodwork to see a Chereau production of The
Screens a few years before he died, and Chereau urged him to write a
libretto for Boulez. Shortly before Genet died he supplied Boulez with
some apparently unpromising sketches. They weren't terribly
substantial, and Boulez and other people who saw them thought their
quality was negigible. Then Genet suddenly died. Boulez started
working with a different librettist whose name escapes me. He promptly
died. At one point the possibility of Chereau supplying a libretto
based on Genet's The Screens was discussed, but that project, too, came
to nothing. Now that Boulez is 80, I hope he doesn't start working on
an opera. He'll never finish it. Better to finish any of numerous
other projects or compose anew in genres of more manageable scope.
Boulez's discussions of opera and the theatre of Claudel, Brecht,
Beckett, and Genet from the 1960's--after Genet had attended all the
rehearsals and performances of the Paris Opera Wozzeck with Boulez and
Boulez had seen Genet's The Screens--make fascinating reading. Alas,
the moment has passed. (Boulez conducted Milhaud's incidental music
for Claudel's Christophe Colombe at the Petit Marigny and on Decca
records in the early 50's when he worked for Jean-Louis Barrault.
Among other things he also arranged snippets of Tchaikovsky for a
production of The Cherry Orchard and wrote incidental music for the
Oresteia.)
-david gable
david...@aol.com
Paul Celan was never terribly interested in Adorno. On the other hand,
he was very close to a much more interesting critic: Peter Szondi.
-david gable
Ian Pace
<david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1136055925.1...@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> Paul Celan was never terribly interested in Adorno. On the other hand,
> he was very close to a much more interesting critic: Peter Szondi.
>
pronouncements (of which, while problematic, I can see the urgency at the
time they were written), albeit negatively. There's obviously a strong
dichotomy between Celan's youthful engagement with Marxism (some will claim
this never truly left him, but it doesn't seem to have been absorbed that
deeply) and Adorno's much more throughgoing absorption of some fundamental
elements of Marxist thinking (though it's rarely particularly explicit in
Adorno's work, actually in comparison with the late work of Benjamin, say).
But have you really read Adorno's work? Do you really think that the very
intricate arguments presented in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima
Moralia, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory (to name just a few of his
most important works) are so insignificant, and don't speak a great deal
about the struggle to come to terms with a decimated Europe in which
history, tradition, culture seemed unapproachable in the older ways? When
one of the most 'cultured' nations in Europe was also responsible for the
most monumental and systematic genocide? I don't agree with everything
Adorno said, but I think he engaged with these things in a way that was
deeply insightful. But let me also append a related quotation from Benjamin,
the seventh of his 'Theses on the Philosophy of History':
'Consider the darkness and the great cold
In this vale which resounds with mystery'
- Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
To historians who wish to relive an era, Fustel de Coulanges recommends that
they blot out everything they know about the later course of history. There
is no better way of characterising the method with which historical
materialism has broken. It is a process of empathy whose origin is the
indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the
genuine historical image as it flares up briefly. Among medieval theologians
it was regarded as the root cause of sadness. Flaubert, who was familiar
with it, wrote: 'Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour
ressusciter Carthage.'* The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly
if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The
answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those
who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably
benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever
has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession
in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.
According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the
procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist
views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural
treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without
horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds
and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their
contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the
same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free
of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted
from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates
himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush
history against the grain.
* 'Few will be able to guess how sad one had to be in order to resuscitate
Carthage.'
(Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', in 'Illuminations',
translated Harry Zohn (Glasgow, 1973), pp. 258-259)
SG
david...@aol.com wrote:
> Paul Celan was never terribly interested in Adorno. On the other hand,
> he was very close to a much more interesting critic: Peter Szondi.
I read quite a bit of Adorno (who, when it really counted, was really
about as Marxist as I am a Buddhist (-:), but no Szondi. Some pointers?
Another interesting musicologist, strongly influenced by Adorno (while
politically clearly to the right, not only of Adorno, but of center as
well) is the Italian Paolo Isotta - anybody read anything by him? He's
a madly passionate wagnerite, competent Furtwanglerite, and a little
less critical with the extreme right than what would make me
comfortable.
On a second thought, you would abhor him. He compares his own
conational Verdi with Wagner and says there's no comparison... with
some well-developed arguments too. Check out ' Le ali di Wieland' .
regards,
SG
david...@aol.com
English-language anthology of his writing. I've got it lying around
somewhere. Szondi wrote mainly on German Romanticism and was
interested in Schiller. (One essay is entitled something like "The
Naive is the Sentimental." Schiller's categories, obviously.) He was
also interested in "modern" French and German poetry. Mallarme, Trakl,
etc.
-david gable
Ian Pace
"SG" <SGG...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1136058277.1...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
>
> david...@aol.com wrote:
>
>> Paul Celan was never terribly interested in Adorno. On the other hand,
>> he was very close to a much more interesting critic: Peter Szondi.
>
> I read quite a bit of Adorno (who, when it really counted, was really
> about as Marxist as I am a Buddhist (-:), but no Szondi. Some pointers?
>
contemporary terms (most obviously developing the idea of the fetished
commodity into his concept of 'phantasmagoria', not unlike Benjamin's
'aura') and built upon and extended the work of prominent Marxist thinkers
such as Gyorgy Lukacs and Siegfried Kracauer. I don't see any evidence that
Adorno's work is ever really at cross-purposes with the Marxism he absorbed
relatively early on; indeed I think he's one of the most significant Marxist
thinkers of the 20th century who was never tarnished by flirtations with
Stalinism (unlike other contemporary figures, not least Lukacs for a while,
though eventually Lukacs did fall foul of the Stalinist authorities in
post-war Hungary). Where Adorno is highly vulnerable to criticism is in
terms of his refusal to translate his theorising into concrete actions
(though I'm going to remain agonistic on the events in the last year of his
life - calling the police in when students were disrupting his lectures - I
feel rather less starry-eyed about the late-1960s student protests than some
others). Here are a few relevant quotes:
'Marx died before he could develop the theory of class, and the working
class let the matter rest there. Even in its rudimentary form, the theory
was not merely the most effective tool of agitation but an active instrument
of conflict in the age of bourgeois democracy, the proletarian mass party,
and strikes, before the open victory of monopoly and the growth of
unemployment had become second nature. Only the revisionists entered into a
discussion of the class question, and they did so in order to cloak the
initial stages of their betrayal with the denial of class war, their
statistical appreciation of the middle strata, and their praise of a
generalized progress. The hypocritical denial of the existence of classes
moved the responsible exponents of theory to guard the concept of class as a
pedagogic tactic, without attempting to take it any further. This was a
source of weakness, and it means that the theory must take some of the blame
for the degeneration of practice. Bourgeois sociology of all nations
exploited this weakness to the full, Bourgeois sociology may have been
deflected from its own course by Marx, as if by a magnet, and become the
more strident in its own defense, the more it insisted on value-free
neutrality. Nevertheless, its positivist ideology, its close adherence to
the facts, was able to score points wherever the facts put a stunted theory
in the wrong.
For the theory had declined to the point where even in its own eyes
statements of fact had become an article of faith. The nominalism
characteristic of its method of research reduced the essential fact, namely,
class, to an ideal type and banished it to the realm of methodology, while
abandoning reality to a cult of unique events that the theory merely
garnished. This pattern went hand in hand with studies that found the
concept of class - for instance, in its specific political equivalent of the
Party - guilty of possessing those oligarchic features that the theory had
neglected or treated reluctantly in an appendix entitled "monopoly
Capitalism." The more thoroughly the facts were cleansed of the concrete
concept - namely, the concept of their relation to the present state of
exploitation, which is contained in all factual material and determines i t-
the more easily they fitted into the abstract concept that applies to all
times and places and over which that general framework has no influence
precisely because it is an abstraction.
(Theodor Adorno - 'Reflections on Class Theory' (1942), translated Rodney
Livingstone, printed in Adorno - 'Can One Live After Auschwitz? A
Philosophical Reader', ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford, 2003), pp.100-101)
'People are still what they were in Marx's analysis in the middle of the
nineteenth century: appendages of the machine, not just literally workers
who have to adapt themselves to the nature of the machines they use, but far
beyond that, figuratively, workers who are compelled right down to their
most intimate impulses to subordinate themselves to the mechanisms of
society and to adopt specific social roles without reservation. Production
takes place today, as then, for the sake of profit. And far exceeding what
was foreseeable in Marx's day, human needs that were potentially functions
of the production apparatus have now become such functions in fact, rather
than the production apparatus becoming a function of human needs. People are
now totally controlled. Admittedly, even though they are fixed and adapted
to the interests of the apparatus, human needs are still present, dragged
along, as it were, and the apparatus can, therefore, make an effective
appeal to them. But the use-value side of commodities has now lost all its
remaining spontaneous "Naturalness." Not only are needs satisfied
indirectly, via their exchange value, but in the economically relevant
sectors they are generated by the profit motive, even at the expense of the
objective needs of consumers, such as adequate homes, to say nothing of
education and information about the most important matters affecting their
lives.'
(Adorno - 'Late Capitalism' (1969), in Tiedemeann (ed), op. cit, . p. 117)
Adorno did think that Marx's hopes and predictions for revolutionary change
in the near future were over-optimistic. It was in this light that Adorno
spent so much of his work analysing the role of culture and consciousness in
maintaining the status quo. Whether this constitutes a break with Marxism is
debatable - I see it more as an attempt to modernise the basic concepts of
Marxist thought.
'Marx's expectation that historically the primacy of the forces of
production was assured, and that this would necessarily burst asunder the
relations of production, proved all too optimistic. In this respect Marx,
the sworn enemy of German idealism, remained true to its affirmative view of
history. Trust in the world spirit helped to buttress later versions of the
world order that was supposed to be overthrown, according to the Eleventh
Thesis on Feuerbach.'
(ibid, p. 119)
[The eleventh thesis on Feuerbach is the famous 'The philosophers have only
*interpreted* the world, in various ways, the point, however, is to *change
it.' (Marx - 'Theses on Feuerbach', in 'The Marx-Engels Reader', ed. Robert
C. Tucker (New York, 1972), p. 109)]
It was with this in mind that Adorno updated Marx's type of idealist thought
to his own conception of negative dialectics. Whatever, Adorno's whole
intellectual trajectory would have been impossible without his grounding in
Marxism, I believe.
'There is a passage in 'Das Kapital': "As a fanatic of value utilization,
the exchange value ruthlessly compels mankind to produce for production's
sake." On the spot this strikes the fetish which the barter society makes of
the production process; beyond that, however, it violates the presently
universal taboo against doubting production as an end in itself. There are
times when the technological productive forces, while scarcely impeded
socially, work in fixed productive conditions without exerting much
influence on those conditions. The unleashing of forces no sooner parts with
the sustaining human relations than it comes to be as fetishized as the
orders. Unleashing, too, is but an element of dialectics, not its magic
formula.'
(Theodor Adorno - 'Negative Dialectics' (1966), translated E.B. Ashton (New
York, 1973), p. 307)
'Yet the doctrinal intransigence in Engels' case, in particular, was
precisely political. The revolution desired by him and Marx was one of
economic conditions in society as a whole, in the basic stratum of its
self-preservation; it was not revolution as a change in society's political
form, in the rules of the game of dominion. Their point was directed against
the anarchists. When Marx and Engels decided to translate even mankind's
primal history, its original sin, so to speak, into political economy -
although the concept of that very discipline, chained to the totality of the
barter relationship, is a late phenomenon - the motive that swayed them was
the expectation of revolution as directly imminent. They wanted to
revolution to come next day; hence their acute interest in breaking up
trends that would, they had to fear, be crushed like Spartacus once upon a
time, or like the peasant uprisings.
Marx and Engels were enemies of Utopia for the sake of its realization.
Their *imago* of the revolution put its stamp upon the image of the primal
world; the overwhelming weight of the economic contradictions in capitalism
seemed to call for its derivation from the accumulated objectivity of what
had been historically stronger since time immemorial. They could not foresee
what became apparent later, in the revolution's failure even where it
succeeded: that domination may outlast the planned economy (which the two of
them, of course, had not confused with state capitalism) - a potential
whereby the antagonistic trend shown by Marx and Engels, the antagonism of
economics toward mere politics, is extended beyond the specific phase of
that economics. By its tenacious survival after the downfall of what had
been the main object of the critique of political economy, dominion helped
an ideology to a cheap triumph: the ideology that will deduce dominion
either from such allegedly inalienable forms of social organization as
centralization, for instance, or from forms of consciousness abstracted out
of the real process - the *ratio*. This is the ideology which then, in open
agreement or under crocodile tears, will prophesy dominion an infinite
future, for as long as any organized society exists.'
(ibid, pp. 322-323)
'There is no denying that the antagonistic situation, what the young Marx
called alienation and self-alienation, was not the weakest agency in the
constitution of modern art. But modern art was certainly no copy, not the
reproduction of that situation. In denouncing it, transposing it into the
image, this situation became its other and as free as the situation denies
the living to be. If today art has become the ideological complement of a
world not at peace, it is possible that the art of the past will someday
devolve upon society at peace; it would, however, amount to the sacrifice of
its freedom were new art to return to peace and order, to affirmative
replication and harmony. Nor is it possible to sketch the form of art in a
changed society. In comparison with past art and the art of the present it
will probably again be something else; but it would be preferable that some
fine day art vanish altogether than that it forget the suffering that is its
expression and in which form has its substance. This suffering is the humane
content that unfreedom counterfeits as poitivity. If in fulfillment of the
wish a future art were once again to become positive, then the suspicion
that negativity were in actuality persisting would become acute; this
suspicion is ever present, regression threatens unremittingly, and freedom -
surely freedom from the principle of possession - cannot be possessed. But
then what would art be, as the writing of history, if it shook off the
memory of accumulated suffering.'
(Theodor Adorno - 'Aesthetic Theory', translated Robert Hullot-Kentor
(London, 1997), pp. 260-261)
The following quote might constitute a hidden response to Adorno's critics
of his over-theoretical approach (and a criticism of some other forms of
didactic Marxism, though not Marxism per se, I believe), which is worth
considering in the light of the events of his last year:
'The often -evoked unity of theory and praxis has a tendency to give way to
the predominance of praxis. Numerous views define theory itself as a form of
repression - as though praxis did not stand in a far more direct
relationship to repression. For Marx, the dogma of this unity was animated
by the immanent possibiltiy of action which even then was not to be
realized. Today it is rather the opposite situation that prevails. One
clings to action because of the impossibility of action. But Marx himself
reveals a concealed wound in this regard. He no doubt delivered the eleventh
thesis on Feuerbach in such an authoritarian fashion because he was not at
all sure of it himself. In his youth he had demanded the 'ruthless criticism
of everything that exists'. Now he mocked criticsm. But his famous joke
about the Young Hegelians, his coinage 'critical criticism', was a dud and
went up in smoke as nothing but a tautology. The forced precedence of praxis
brought the criticism which Marx himself practised to an irrational halt. In
Russia and in the orthodoxy of other countries, the malicious mockery of
critical criticsm became the instrument that permitted the status quo to
establish itself in such horrifying fashion. The only meaning that praxis
retained was this: increased production of the means of production. The only
criticsm still tolerated was that people still were not working hard enough.
This demonstrates how easily the subordination of theory to praxis results
int he support of renewed repression.'
(Adorno - 'Resignation' (1969), in 'The Culture Industry: Selected essays on
mass culture', ed. J.M. Bernstein (New York and London, 1991), pp. 199-200)
There is more interesting stuff about this in the essay 'Marginalia to
Theory and Praxis' which is in the volume 'Critical Models', but I've typed
enough for now.
Incidentally, some of you might be interested to know that the volume of
correspondence between Adorno and Berg was published in English this year,
translated by our very own Wieland Hoban, from Polity Press. Very worth
getting.
Ian
Ian Pace
<david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1136062828....@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Ian asks whether I think that certain of Adorno's writings "speak a
> great deal about the struggle to come to terms with a decimated Europe
> in which history, tradition, culture seemed unapproachable in the older
> form (rhetoric, style) of Adorno's "dialectic" or its content.
I also ask which of them you've read - see below.
>
> First of all, I don't believe that history, culture, and tradition
> necessarily became unapproachable "in the older ways" because of
> World War II, at least not in the sense that Adorno believed they did
> (or believed that he believed they did when he was writing).
So all the earlier notions of the civilising force of culture could still be
maintained after Nazi Kommandants could read Goethe and listen to Schubert
by night, and commit mass murder in the daytime, to use George Steiner's
phrase (something along those lines - I can't remember the exact quote and
don't have it to hand)
> Adorno
> uses great big fat undefined concepts like history, culture, and
> tradition, embedding these grandiose German idealist concepts in a
> German idealist rhetoric and discussing them using that rhetoric.
That's why I asked what you've read - if you had read Adorno's work in any
detail you'd see the extent to which it constitutes a scathing critique of
that type of grandiose Germanic idealism and its totalising tendencies. And
of course in that respect he was heavily indebted to Marx.
> No
> modest concrete particulars are allowed.
Nonsense.
> The whole discussion takes
> place at an impossibly high rhetorical altitude.
That is a rather funny comment coming from you! :)
> I find it largely
> meaningless. (The short clause from your post that I've quoted above
> seems to mean something until you attempt to pull it apart and find out
> what in the real world it is that you're actually talking about. You
> and Adorno are the last of the German Romantics, the ultimate
> starry-eyed idealizers.
The last thing you could call Adorno is 'starry-eyed'.
> You long nostalgically for the days when the
> poeticized rhetoric of German idealist Marxism legislated the future of
> mankind.)
There's nothing nostalgic about Marxism at all, quite the contrary. Nor is
it a form of legislating. How much Marx have you read, also?
>
> Let me mention one other little morsel of Adornoan rhetoric, his
> hyperbolic claim that there can be "no art after Auschwitz."
The precise quote, in the translation I provided before was 'To write poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric'. Did you read Adorno's later thoughts, partial
retraction, and further clarification of his statement?
> Human beings are capable of the most monstrous things. There has been
> murder after murder, war after war, holocaust after holocaust.
> That's the sad history of the human race. Or part of it.
And culture is entirely aloof from that?
> But today
> there are grass and flowers growing in Hiroshima, people living,
> working, and consuming culture there. They don't spend every waking
> hour contemplating the bomb
I think you'll find people living in Hiroshima still spend a lot of their
waking hours contemplating the bomb, not least because of the long-term
after-effects.
> or writing German idealist philosophy.
>
> I could appreciate Adorno's remark if it had been the despairing
> remark of a man who had witnessed the horrors of the Second World War
> first hand, seen what the Nazis had done.
He escaped and went to America, rather later than some others did. He was
acutely aware of his likely fate if he had stayed in Europe (and the fate
that Benjamin underwent). He certainly saw what the Nazis had done, saw the
country and culture that he had loved and believed in so strongly decimated
both from within and without. I think the above remark is contemptuous.
> But he was doing more than
> despairing.
That certainly is true. He was attempting to understand.
> He was a kind of cultural imperialist.
Please substantiate that. Adorno was an aesthetician, and like all
aestheticians he had views on what was more or less valuable in art. Don't
we do that here?
> He wanted to seize
> control of the fate of all future European art on the authority of his
> despair (his German idealist despair), define for once and for all what
> was "authentic," what "inauthentic,"
Before using that term, try reading Adorno's 'The Jargon of Authenticity'.
He was the scourge of that concept, especially its appropriation at the
hands of Heidegger.
> co-opt all future European
> culture for his German idealist philosophy including the theory that
> there can be no art after Auschwitz. In Adorno's view, only a
> certain heavy ponderous form of despairing German idealist modernism
> could or would or should be left standing.
Perhaps you could explain his positive remarks about Pierre Boulez, or John
Cage, or Mauricio Kagel, then?
> The ultra-conservative
> Brahmsian neoclassicism of Schoenberg's serial music was good.
You have clearly read hardly anything. Adorno was highly critical of
Schoenberg as well in many ways. To paint him as a 'Schoenberg good,
Stravinsky bad' adherent is woefully simplistic.
> Stravinsky's light French ballet music was an affront to German
> idealism.
That wasn't the major focus of his critique of Stravinsky, which for all its
problems (and I think there are many) still remains one of the most powerful
critiques of that composer, I believe.
>
> But what if your taste runs to something less ponderous, heavy, and
> Germanic than Schoenberg's most turgid serial music?
Actually, Adorno was much less enamoured of Schoenberg's serial music than
of his free atonal works.
> What if it runs
> to the fresh and glinting poetry of that former Resistance fighter Rene
> Char, for example?
I don't know any specific comments by Adorno on Char's work, but I'd be very
surprised if he didn't find it of great interest. I'll check with Wieland to
see if he knows of any references.
> Or to Matisse or Monet or jazz?
'The later work of the former Surrealist Andre Masson, which I saw in Paris
a few years ago, looks to my eyes, which are not expert in matters of
painting, as though there were nothing left of Renoir but the fragrance, the
objects having been reased; over there people talk in fact of a connection
between contemporary painting and Impressionist tendencies. If I am not
mistaken, moreover, at the end even Monet moved toward this kind of
dissolution of the material object in its own aura, to say nothing of
related ventures in music like Debussy's 'Jeux''
(from a letter from Adorno to Thomas Mann, January 18th 1954, printed in
Theodor Adorno - 'Notes On Literature' Vol. 2, translated
Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York, 1992), pp. 319-320)
Adorno greatly admired Jeux, so presumably one can read great interest in
the late Monet through this comment as well.
I don't know of anything by Adorno on Matisse. As for jazz, of course his
few essays on jazz have been the subject of the most heated debate. I
basically go along with those who say that Adorno's comments do make sense
in the context of the highly commercialised and formulaic jazz that he heard
in the 1930s, though his methodologies are too fixated on melody, harmony
and rhythm (as befits one from a German classical training) without really
appreciating the importance of such factors as timbre. Nonetheless there are
a great many people in the field of jazz and popular music studies who are
deeply indebted to Adorno's work and concepts on this subject, without
necessarily agreeing with him the whole way.
> (I know that you
> think Boulez's later more accessible music is--and I use the word that
> you've applied to it--"capitalist."
I can't remember where I have directly applied that word to Boulez's late
work. Certainly I think some of his early radicalism has become diluted as
he has become a more institutionalised figure.
> I think the word can't have the
> least intelligible applicability here.)
>
The possible effects of both institutions and the marketplace on the course
of contemporary composition is indeed relevant.
I'm going to return once again to a basic question - what have you read of
Adorno? The above would suggest the merest smattering if anything at all. I
think you should read his extremely intricate and detailed work before
making lofty pronouncements on it. I've read a fair amount (though in
English translation) but still find new insights in things I haven't
previously encountered. Above all Adorno's work resists summarisation or
reduction - more acutely so than most writers.
Ian
SG
david...@aol.com wrote:
> I don't like the
> form (rhetoric, style) of Adorno's "dialectic" or its content.
Why should you? Anyway, to put things a bit in my own perspective: as a
teenager, not having reached yet my present wisdom of watching sitcoms
instead of wasting time reading philosophy, the editorial offer one
could benefit from in Romania was rather scarce.
There wasn't a lot of "reactionary" philosophy allowed to reach the
printers, mind you, and "reactionary" all philosophy nonlethally kissed
by Marxism was seen as. Among the barely tolerated authors, there were
these "marginally Marxist" authors (like Adorno, whom I would call a
"Marxist malgré soi-même" - because he unlikely combines a
Spenglerian -- "decadent" and "bourgeois"-pessimistic -- outlook with a
stubborn use of boring Marxist slang)... [authors] whom, not lacking
talent, struggled to express themselves in ways which were not totally,
rigidly, ideologically dead. They were struggling against their own
upbringing and categorical insufficiency. Even just by comparing the
earlier, more party-line Adorno with the latter, subtler author, one
could notice signs of the mentioned struggle. Compared to hardcore
Marxists, even a bore like Marcuse, with his Freud-Marx combinatorial
obsession, could be perceived as a breath of relatively fresh air as
also, having to choose on aesthetics' terrain between Zhdanov and
Lukacs, a choice was not difficult to make. Perhaps that's the personal
reason I was more inclined toward seeing the "good" in an author like
Adorno, even if I realize that by the free world's standards, his
writings are on the ideologized side, as opposed to an epitome of
creative, unregimented style of writing.
Even in the texts offered by IP, one finds a lot of long sentences,
buzzwords and ideological dust (I mean, how many times can an author
use the words "reification/reified" in a single paragraph and still be
taken seriously?), but also one can suddenly read a lovely,
penetrating, concentrated passage about Celan rather than about
Adornian-ideology-forced-upon-Celan - I am talking about the very last
quoted paragraph in that long post. Of course, in a world in which
intellectual competition is so much richer, one does not necessarily
need to waste times on authors in the writings of whom truly relevant
passages are deeply buried in self-referential verbosity.
regards,
SG
Ian Pace
> There wasn't a lot of "reactionary" philosophy allowed to reach the
printers, mind you, and "reactionary" all philosophy nonlethally kissed
by Marxism was seen as. Among the barely tolerated authors, there were
these "marginally Marxist" authors (like Adorno, whom I would call a
"Marxist malgré soi-même" - because he unlikely combines a
Spenglerian -- "decadent" and "bourgeois"-pessimistic -- outlook with a
stubborn use of boring Marxist slang)... [authors] whom, not lacking
talent, struggled to express themselves in ways which were not totally,
rigidly, ideologically dead. They were struggling against their own
upbringing and categorical insufficiency.
> Even just by comparing the
earlier, more party-line Adorno
Which party-line was Adorno subscribing to in the Dialectic of
Enlightenment, or his book on Wagner, say?
> with the latter, subtler author, one
could notice signs of the mentioned struggle. Compared to hardcore
Marxists, even a bore like Marcuse, with his Freud-Marx combinatorial
obsession, could be perceived as a breath of relatively fresh air as
also, having to choose on aesthetics' terrain between Zhdanov and
Lukacs, a choice was not difficult to make. Perhaps that's the personal
reason I was more inclined toward seeing the "good" in an author like
Adorno, even if I realize that by the free world's standards, his
writings are on the ideologized side,
I'd like to see an example of what apparently is 'non-ideologized' writing.
> as opposed to an epitome of
creative, unregimented style of writing.
Precisely what Adorno valued the most - but he didn't think such a thing was
achieved easily.
> Even in the texts offered by IP, one finds a lot of long sentences,
As one tends to in most writing originally in German.
> buzzwords and ideological dust (I mean, how many times can an author
use the words "reification/reified" in a single paragraph and still be
taken seriously?),
As many times as one encounters the phenomenon.
> but also one can suddenly read a lovely,
penetrating, concentrated passage about Celan rather than about
Adornian-ideology-forced-upon-Celan - I am talking about the very last
quoted paragraph in that long post.
Adorno's thinking is anti-totalising throughout and in one sense of the word
anti-ideological (though I use the term more broadly than Adorno's use to
indicate reified consciousness). That's why it doesn't become formulaic, and
one reason why it consequently isn't easy to read. His resistance to
totalising grand theories is shown through his privileging of the fragment
and the epistemological use of the 'constellation' (especially in Minima
Moralia).
That quote on Celan is indeed a beautiful and intense piece of writing, but
an expansion rather than a break with his earlier writings. I do agree
though that the later Adorno is probably the most interesting work,
especially 'Aesthetic Theory'. That work was incomplete at the time of his
death; it's a shame we'll never know what else he would have gone on to
write. But there are some (including Lorenz Jager) who identify close
correspondences between that magnum opus and Adorno's earliest thoughts. The
newer translation of this work (by Hullot-Kanter) is generally regarded as a
significant improvement on the earlier one. A lot of the earlier
translations of Adorno are notoriously problematic (especially the
Philosophy of Modern Music and Negative Dialectics), though some new ones
are appearing (I haven't yet read the new Jephcott translation of Dialectic
of Enlightement).
Ian
Ian Pace
<david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1136066491.3...@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> I don't automatically think of the Nazis when I listen to Schubert or
> read Goethe. Far from it. The Nazis have not had the slightest effect
> on my relationship to earlier German art. (Wagner is a kind of
> apparent exception but I'm not interested in discussing him as such.)
> I certainly don't hold it against Goethe that Kommandants read his
> poetry.
That's not what's being suggested. But the idea of such culture as a
civilising force (which was quite fundamental to a great deal of pre-20th
century aesthetic thinking) does become untenable.
>
> I don't see a necessary or organic connection between an interest in
> the earlier poetry and music of Germany and Nazism.
I don't see the connection as being 'organic' either - actually the Nazis
perpetuated a hideously idealised view of the past and a resistance to
modernity in all its forms except for its application to ever-more efficient
means of killing. These are exactly the subjects that Adorno is dealing
with.
But on the other hand, I do see possible connections between Nazi ideology
and some strains of romanticism. That's not to say therefore romanticism is
off-limits, just that these things are worth exploring.
> The whole point of
> Hannah Arendt's notion of the banality of evil is that the Nazis were
> like everybody else. They lived and loved and worked and read poetry
> (or didn't) or listened to classical music (or didn't) just like
> everybody else.
Actually, the Nazis' relationship with culture, or at least Hitler's, was
particularly intense. Frederic Spott's book 'Hitler and the Power of
Aesthetics' (Woodstock, NY, 2002) is very interesting on this subject.
> Of course, the Nazis weren't normal in a horrible
> respect. What has that got to do with me and my relationship to
> Goethe?
>
> What food did the Nazis eat? I don't blame the Holocaust on a taste
> for beer and steak either or feel that I have to contemplate German
> idealist philosophy whenever I drink a German beer.
>
No-one is saying that you should, and that's not what Adorno's work is
about. The question of what it meant to write lyric poetry in the face of
the highest barbarism, whether the medium could any longer express anything
more than trivialities in such a context, was indeed a potent issue in
post-war Europe, though, whether or not one accepts Adorno's earlier
formulation.
Ian
wielhoban
> Peter Szondi? He wasn't terribly prolific.
Indeed, partly because he followed Celan to death by suicide shortly
after him. I don't know what's available in English, but he wrote an
introduction (rather an understatement) to literary hermeneutics, and
also a volume of three Celan studies - more were planned, but he didn't
live to finish them. It was the first real writing on Celan, and the
two were intellectually pretty close. Celan's suicide contributed to
Szondi's own cultural despair, and seems to have been a clear factor in
his own.
WH
PS Regarding Celan's extraction/national identity: he was born in the
Bukovina, which was then a Romanian part of the Austro-Hungarian empire
(now in the Ukraine), and among a German-speaking minority. After the
war he settled in Paris and lived there until his death. So in addition
to the alienation he experienced from the start (heightened also by
being a Jew in that setting), he then moved into the situation where he
was living in one country and writing in the language of another. Every
time he went to Germany he was in constant fear of anti-Semitism, and
never wanted to settle there, even though it was his cultural homeland.
So that was all a real mess, and clearly a factor in his depressions
and ultimate suicide.
Poldie
david...@aol.com wrote:
> Ian asks whether I think that certain of Adorno's writings "speak a
> great deal about the struggle to come to terms with a decimated Europe
> in which history, tradition, culture seemed unapproachable in the older
> form (rhetoric, style) of Adorno's "dialectic" or its content.
In that case you'd probably love Alan Sokal's book "Fashionable
Nonsense".
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312204078/103-9157074-0451015?v=glance&n=283155
If there's an event after which creating is impossible surely it's
empty post-modernist waffle after the "Social Text" hoax?
wielhoban
Ian Pace wrote:
> > He wanted to seize
> > control of the fate of all future European art on the authority of his
> > despair (his German idealist despair), define for once and for all what
> > was "authentic," what "inauthentic,"
>
> Before using that term, try reading Adorno's 'The Jargon of Authenticity'.
> He was the scourge of that concept, especially its appropriation at the
> hands of Heidegger.
Careful here - the term Adorno pounces on is "Eigentlichkeit", not
"Authentizität". I don't actually consider "authenticity" a very good
equivalent of "Eigentlichkeit", and the fact that it's a very general
word in English conceals the fact that we're dealing with a more
particular word/use in the German. That book could probably do with a
re-translation (if it weren't so exaggeratedly polemical and
contemptuous). What are your own thoughts on it?
WH
Ian Pace
<david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1136153219.9...@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
>>But the idea of such culture as a civilising force (which was quite
>>fundamental to a great deal of pre-20th century aesthetic thinking) does
>>become untenable.
>
> untenable without defining "civilizing." The arts, the sciences, and
> education can all be civilizing forces, depending on how you define
> civilizing.
The notion that civilized and cultured people were less likely to commit
terrible acts, that art and culture are a force for the good, certainly took
a knocking in the 20th century.
>
>>The question of what it meant to write lyric poetry in the face of the
>>highest barbarism, whether the medium could any longer express anything
>>more than trivialities in such a context
>
> So you say. Hasn't stopped a considerable amount of terrific lyric
> poetry from being written in the past quarter century.
It depends what you define as 'lyric poetry'. Here a quote from Celan might
be appropriate:
'German poetry is going in a very different direction from French poetry. No
matter how alive its traditions, with most sinister events in its memory,
most questionable developments around it, it can no longer speak the
language which many willing ears seem to expect. Its language has become
more sober, more factual. It distrusts 'beauty'. It tries to be truthful. If
I may search for a visual analogy while keeping in mind the polychrome of
apparent actuality: it is a 'greyer' language, a language which wants to
locate even its 'musicality' in such a way that it has nothing in common
with the 'euphony' which more or less blithely continued to sound alongside
the greatest horros.
This language, notwithstanding its inalienable complexity of expression, is
concerned with precision. It does not transfigure or render 'poetical'; it
names, it posits, it tries to measure the area of the given and the
possible. true, this is never the working of language itself, language as
such, but always of an 'I' who speaks from the particular angle of
reflection which is his existence and who is concerned with outlines and
orientation. Reality is not simply there, it must be searched and won.'
[Paul Celan - 'Reply to a Questionnaire from the Flinker Bookstore, Paris,
1958, in 'Collected Prose', translated Rosmaire Waldrop (Manchester, 1986),
pp. 15-16]
>
>>I do see possible connections between Nazi ideology and some strains of
>>romanticism. That's not to say therefore romanticism is off-limits, just
>>that these things are worth exploring.
>
> I think so, too. The question is whether we are obliged to have Nazism
> rubbed in our faces every single time we mention a recording by
> Schubert in casual conversation.
No-one is doing that, not Adorno or anyone else. Some of the claims made for
Schubert communicating the essence of humanity might be questioned, on the
other hand, in the light of what some of those who loved his music were
still able to do in the rest of their lives.
> Or whether we have to pay the
> slightest bit of attention to Adorno if we are historians studying
> Nazism.
>
In terms of looking at possible links between the cultural history of the
Nazis and earlier cultural histories, Adorno was a pioneer, whose work has
been tremendously influential on a wide range of other thinkers/writers on
the subject (not least in the field of Wagner studies).
Ian
Ian Pace
<david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1136156185....@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> Ian "can't remember where I have directly applied that word to
> Boulez's late work."
>
> Once in (written) conversation with me, you told me how much you
> loathed Boulez's Derive for chamber ensemble, which you've played
> several times. You described it as "capitalist music."
>
Ah yes - I think some of the more tongue-in-cheek aspects of my remarks
(both on here and in private communication) might occasionally pass you by!
It is a piece I pretty much loathe, yes, all flowery arabesques, like the
fizz from champagne without any of the body of flavour. A real big girl's
blouse of a piece. And one which resembles the world of elaborately packaged
but anonymous products that is characteristic of late capitalism.
:)
Ian
Bob Harper
(snip)
> The notion that civilized and cultured people were less likely to commit
> terrible acts, that art and culture are a force for the good, certainly took
> a knocking in the 20th century.
>
successors 'civilized and cultured people', perhaps. I suspect most
people don't.
Bob Harper
Ian Pace
"Bob Harper" <bob.h...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:NOWdnWNh2sP48iXe...@comcast.com...
using it to refer to perception rather than reality. But as far as
'cultured' is concerned, whilst I believe neither Stalin or Mao had that
much interest in culture, certainly Hitler and numerous other leading Nazis
(not least Reinhard Heydrich, born to a deeply musical family, and who
studied the violin avidly, and at the same time was one of the primary
architects of the Holocaust) had a deep level of absorption of high culture.
Ian
elm
> As for jazz, of course his
> few essays on jazz have been the subject of the most heated debate. I
> basically go along with those who say that Adorno's comments do make sense
> in the context of the highly commercialised and formulaic jazz that he heard
> in the 1930s,
So by this are you saying that Adorno only heard commercialised and
formulaic jazz in the 30's, or that you find all Jazz in the 30's was
commercialised and formulaic?
leonm
Ian Pace
"elm" <e...@elm.com> wrote in message
news:1h8in0o.n971b26jvou8N%e...@elm.com...
jazz are overall too heavy-handed, though, I feel.
Ian
Ian Pace
"wielhoban" <wiel...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1136150588....@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
Ian Pace wrote:
> > He wanted to seize
> > control of the fate of all future European art on the authority of his
> > despair (his German idealist despair), define for once and for all what
> > was "authentic," what "inauthentic,"
>
> Before using that term, try reading Adorno's 'The Jargon of Authenticity'.
> He was the scourge of that concept, especially its appropriation at the
> hands of Heidegger.
> WH: Careful here - the term Adorno pounces on is "Eigentlichkeit", not
"Authentizität". I don't actually consider "authenticity" a very good
equivalent of "Eigentlichkeit", and the fact that it's a very general
word in English conceals the fact that we're dealing with a more
particular word/use in the German.
Good point. Presumably 'Eigentlichkeit' is then the term regularly used by
Heidegger (and Jaspers)? How would you translate the term (if there is any
workeable English equivalent)? Also, any thoughts on how equivalent concepts
are used by other existentialist and related philosophers (Husserl, Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty, etc.)?
> That book could probably do with a
re-translation (if it weren't so exaggeratedly polemical and
contemptuous). What are your own thoughts on it?
I haven't really read, or felt I've genuinely understood, enough Heidegger
to really have an insightful view. Certainly, as in his book on Wagner,
Adorno is rather apt to see fascism creeping out of every possible
interstice, in a way that can become manneristic. But in the context of the
time both were written (especially, the Wagner book, written much earlier
(indeed the bulk of it gestated in the late 1930s, though it didn't appear
in print until 1952) when more critical thinking about the composer and his
relationship to contemporary events was in its relative infancy), I think
it's very important. I know what you mean about the book's being
'exaggeratedly polemical and contemptuous' (though perhaps feel these
qualities less strongly than you), and maybe today one has reason to be less
harsh on some aspects of Heidegger's work (you know it much better than I
do, what are your thoughts?). But as I say, I can see the necessity then of
such an approach. Amongst many fascinating sections of the book, Adorno's
criticism of Jaspers' ridiculous equating of racial theories with Marxism
and psychoanalysis, demonstrating (to my mind) how such a perspective is
only possible by assigning to culture and consciousness a fetish quality
(which in this context Adorno calls metaphysical), is particularly apposite.
I would say such a dilemma is endemic to existentialism, which is one reason
that Sartre was ultimately unsuccessful in trying to reconcile it with
Marxism.
I want to quote a few favourite bits from it that seem relevant to the
discussion at hand - if you think these translations are very unsatisfactory
(I can imagine they may be), I'd be very interested in how you'd modify
them:
'..the sacred quality of the authentics' talk belongs to the cult of
authenticity rather than to the Christian cult, even where - for temporary
lack of any other available authority - its language resembles the
Christian. Prior to any consideration of particular content, this language
molds thought. As a consequence, that thought accommodates itself to the
goal of subordination even where it aspires to resist that goal. The
authority of the absolute is overthrown by absolutized authority.'
[Theodor Adorno - 'The Jargon of Authenticity' (1964), translated Knut
Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London and New York, 1973), p.3]
'In Germany a jargon of authenticity is spoken - even more so, written. Its
language is a trademark of societalized chosenness, noble and homey at
once - sublanguage as superior language. The jargon extends from philosophy
and theology - not only of Protestant academies - to pedagogy, evening
schools, and youth organization, even to the elevated diction of the
representatives of business and administration. While the jargon overflows
with the pretense of deep human emotion, it is just as standardized as the
world that it officially negates; the reason for this lies partly in its
mass success, partly in the fact that it posits it message automatically,
through its mere nature. Thus the jargon bars the message from the
experience which is to ensoul it. The jargon has at its disposal a modest
number of words which are received as promptly as signals. "Authenticity"
itself is not the most prominent of them. It is more an illumination of the
ether in which the jargon flourishes, and the way of thinking which latently
feeds it. '
[ibid, p.3]
'Thus the important thing is not the planning of an *Index Verborum
Prohibitorium* of current noble nouns, but rather the examination of their
linguistic function in the jargon. Certainly not all its words are noble
nouns. At times it even picks up banal ones, holds them high and bronzes
them in the fascist manner which wisely mixed plebeian with elitist
elements.....The transcendence of the single word is a secondary one, one
tht is delivered ready from the factory, a transcendence which is a
changeling said to be the lost original. Elements of empirical language are
manipulated in their rigidity, as if they were elements of a true and
revealed language.'
(this comment (and others that expand upon this in the subsequent pages of
the book) seems very relevant to numerous r.m.c.r. discussions, indeed to
much discourse about music)
[ibid, p.4]
'"authentic" - already to be used with caution - even in an adjectival
sense, where the essential is distinguished from the accidental;
"inauthentic," where something broken is implied, an expression which is not
immediately appropriate to what is expressed; "radio braodcasts of
traditional music, music conceived in the categories of live performance,
are grounded by the feeling of *as if*, of the inauthentic." Inauthentic" in
that way becomes a "critical" term, in definite negation of something merely
phenomenal. However, the jargon extracts authenticity, or its opposite, from
every such transparent context.'
[ibid, pp. 4-5]
'The theological freeing of the numinous from ossified dogma has, ever since
Kierkegaard, involuntarily come to mean its partial secularization. In
mystical heresy, the unsatisfiable purification of the divine from myth,
which loves to tremble in the gesture of deeply involved questioning, hands
the divine over to whoever relates to it in any way. Liberal theology is
suddenly reborn, since content is to be found only in a relation, the other
pole of which removes itself from all definition as the "absolutely
indifferent," and marks all definition with the blemish of reification.
Complete demythologization totally reduces transcendence to an abstraction,
to a concept. Enlightenment, which the viri obscuri[22] accuse, triumphs in
their thought. In the same movement of the spirit, however, the positing
power of the subject, veiled unto itself, again conjures up the myth
inherent in all dialectical theology. That subjective power's highest value,
as absolutely different, is blind. Under compulsion the viri obscuri praise
committments instead of jumping into speculation which alone could justify
their own committments to their radical questioners. Their relationship to
speculation is confused. One needs it because one wants to be deep, yet one
shies away from it because of its intellectual nature. One would prefer to
reserve it for the gurus. The others still confess their groundlessness, in
order to give character to the paths of offered salvation, which are reputed
to be successful in extreme even if imaginary danger. However, they find
nothing but groundless thinking as soon as thinking refuses, through its
attitude, to support from the outset those commitments which are as
unavoidable in authenticity as is the happy ending in movies. If the happy
ending is lacking, then among the existential authentics existentialism
itself has nothing to laugh at.'
[22] [Viri obscuri: obscurantists, enemies of enlightenment. Historical
reference to fictive humanist (fifteenth and sixteenth century) authors of
letters against late forms of Scholasticism.']
[ibid, pp. 24-25]
(the above (which comes as a corollary to a discussion of a televisoin
preacher) looks like it's particularly misleadlingly translated, and the
English word 'authenticity' seems especially inappropriate here. The
argument communicates itself (and is penetrating), but the wording can be
confusing in English. especially the sentence beginning 'Liberal theology' -
though is it possible to translate such a hyper-dialectical sentence
better?)
'In its semantic directions positivism has constantly noted the historical
break between language and that which it expresses. Linguistic forms, as
reified - and only through reification do they become forms - have outlived
what they once referred to, together with the context of that reference. The
completely demythologized fact would withhold itself from language; through
the mere act of intending the fact becomes an other - at least measured in
terms of its idol of pure accessibility. That without language there is no
fact remains, even so, the thorn in the flesh and the theme of positivism,
since it is here that the stubbornly mythical remainder of language is
revealed. Mathematics is, for good reason, the primal model of positivistic
thought - even in its function as a languageless system of signs. Looked at
in reverse, the tenacious residuum of what is archaic in language becomes
fruitful only where language rubs itself critically against it; the same
archaic turns into a fatal mirage when language spontaneously confirms and
strengthens it. The jargon shares with positivism a crude conception of the
archaic in language; neither of them bothers about the dialectical moment in
which language, as if it were something else, wins itself away from its
magical origins, language being entangled in a progressing
demythologization. That particular neglect authorizes the social using of
linguistic anachronism. The jargon simply ennobles the antiquity of
language, which the positivists just as simply long to eradicate - along
with all expression in language. The disproportion between language and the
rationalized society drives the authentics to plunder language, rather than
to drive it on, through greater sharpness, to its proper due. They don't
fail to notice that one cannot speak absolutely without speaking
archaically; but what the positivists bewail as retrogressive the authentics
eternalize as a blessing.'
[ibid, pp. 34-35]
(a fantastic paragraph, I think, for all positivists to read! :) )
'...the antisophistic movement misuses its insight into such
misconstructions of freewheeling thought - misuses them in order to
discredit thought, through thought. This was the way Nietzsche criticized
Kant, raising the charge of over-subtle thinking in the same tone as that
adopted magisterially by Hegel, when he spoke of "reasoning." In the modish
antisophistic movement there is a sad confluence: of a necessary critique of
isolated instrumental reason with a grim defense of institutions against
thought. The jargon, a waste product of the modern that it attacks, seeks to
protect itself - along with literally destructive institutions - against the
suspicion of being destructive: by simultaneously accusing other, mostly
anticonservative, groups of sinful intellectuality, of that sin which lies
deep in the jargon's own unnaive, reflective principle of existence.
Demagogically it uses the double character of the anti-sophistic. That
consciousness is false which, externally, and, as Hegel says, without being
in the thing, places itself above this thing and manages it from above; but
criticism becomes equally ideological at the moment when it lets it be
known, self-righteously, that thought must have a ground. Hegel's dialectic
went beyond the doctrine that thought, in order to be true, needs some
absolute starting point, free of doubt. This doctrine becomes all the more
terroristic in the jargon of authenticity, as it more autocratically locates
its starting point outside the texture of thought.'
[ibid, p. 36]
(a powerful critique of types of un-self-reflexive ontology that seem to run
through a tradition of idealistic thought, reaching an apex in Heidegger.
Adorno follows this by citing, in a critical manner, Jaspers almost 'heroic'
notions of the 'root' of man - I must read Adorno on Dostoyevsky (who I
believe he admired) to see if he finds comparable problems there)
'...the jargon must defend, so as not to be lost, transitory social forms
which are incompatible with the contemporary state of the forces of
production. If it wanted to mount the barricades itself, then it would have
to engage itself not only for a position much scorned among its believers,
but possibly also for that rationality which the exchange society both
promises and denies, and through which that society could be transcended.
The bourgeois form of rationality has always needed irrational supplements,
in order to maintain itself as what it is, continuing injustice through
justice. Such irrationality in the midst of the rational is the working
atmosphere of authenticity.'
[ibid, p. 38]
'Allegedly hale life is opposed to damaged life, on whose societalized
consciousness, on whose "malaise," the jargon speculates. Through the
ingrained language form of the jargon, that hale life is equated with
agrarian conditions, or at least with simple commodity economy, far from all
social considerations. This life is in effect equated to something
undivided, protectingly closed, which runs its course in a firm rhythm and
unbroken continuity. The field of association here is a left-over of
romanticism and is transplanted without second thought into the contemporary
situation, to which it stands in harsher contradiction than ever before. In
that situation the categories of the jargon are gladly brought forward, as
though they were not abstracted from generated and transitory situations,
but rather belonged to the essence of man, as inalienable possibility. Man
is the ideology of dehumanization. Conclusions are drawn from certain
categories which remind us of somewhat primal social relationships, where
the institutions of exchange do not yet have complete power over the
relationships of men. From those categories it is concluded that their core,
man, is immediately present among contemporary men, that he is there to
realize his *eidos*. Past forms of societalization, prior to the division of
labor, are surreptitiously adopted as if they were eternal. Their reflection
falls upon later conditions which have already been victimized by
progressive rationalization, and in contrast to those the earlier states
seem the more human. That which authentics of lesser rank call with gusto
the image of man, they locate in a zone in which it is no longer permitted
to ask from where those conditions emerged; neither can one ask what was
done to the subjugated at any particular time, with the transition from
nomadic life to settledness - nor what was done to those who can no longer
move around; nor whether the undivided condition itself, both unconscious
and compulsive, did not breed and earn its own downfall. The talk about man
makes itself popular in the old-fashioned, half-timbered, gable-roof way.
But it also wins friends in a more contemporary way, in the gesture of a
radicalism which wants to dismantle whatever merely conceals, and which
concerns itself with the naked essence that hides under all cultural
disguises.'
[ibid, pp. 47-48]
(this quote is more specifically directed at Heidegger's thought)
'Once capitalism has grown uneasy about theoretical self-assertion, its
advocates prefer to use the categories of spontaneous life in order to
present what is man-made. They present those categories as if they were
valid now and here. The jargon busily splashes beyond all this, perhaps even
proud of its historical obliviousness - as if this obliviousness were
already the humanly immediate.'
[ibid, p. 51]
'The preterminological use of "authentic" underlined what was essential to a
thing, in contrast to what was accidental. Whoever is dissatisfied with
silly examples from textbooks needs to deliberate by himself; this will help
more than a developed theory to assure him of what is essential. What is
essential in phenomena, and what is accidental, hardly ever springs
straightforwardly out of the phenomena. In order to be determined in its
objectivity, it has first to be reflected on subjectively. Certainly, at
first glance, it seems more essential to a worker that he has to sell his
working power, that the means of production do not belong to him, that he
produces material goods, than that he is a member of a suburban gardening
club; although the worker himself may think that the latter is more
essential. However, as soon as the question directs itself to so central a
concept as capitalism, Marx and the verbal definitions of Max Weber say
something extremely different from each other. In many cases the distinction
between essential and inessential, between authentic and inauthentic, lies
with the arbitrariness of definition, without in the least implying the
relativity of truth. The reason for this situation lies in language.
Language uses the term "authentic" in a floating manner. The word also
wavers according to its weightiness, in the same way as occasional
expressions. The interest in the authenticity of a concept enters into the
judgement about this concept. Whatever is authentic in this concept also
becomes so only under the perspective of something that is different from
it. It is never pure in the concept itself. Otherwise the decision about it
degenerates into hairsplitting. But at the same time, the essential element
of a thing has its *findamentum in re*. Over and against naive usage,
nominalism is in the wrong to the degree that it remains blind toward the
objective element of meaning in words, which enters into the configurations
of language and which changes there. This element of objectivity carries on
an unresolved struggle with those acts that merely subjectively give
meaning. The consciousness of this objective element in what is authentic
was the impulse of Brentano's whole school, especially of Husserl, and also
contributed to Heidegger's doctrine of authenticity. The essance of a thing
is not anything that is arbitrarily made by subjective thought, is not a
distilled unity of characteristics. In Heidegger this becomes the aura of
the authentic: an element of the concept becomes the absolute concept.'
[ibid, pp. 100-101]
There's plenty more from this book I'd like to quote, including the final
section where Adorno examines the association of authenticity with death,
but I think that's enough to be going on with.
But would you agree that blithely associating Adorno with an old-fashioned
type of Germanic idealism (and I'm fully aware that his thought emerges from
that tradition, though he pushes it to its dialectical limits in such a
manner as to reveal its own inner contradictions) and appeal to certain
notions of 'authenticity' (in the English sense of the word) are a very
simplistic reading of his self-reflexive work? Isn't Adorno's work dominated
by attempts to resist dogmatic insistence that the aesthetic appeals to
'authentic' reified consciousness, whether provided by 'tradition' or the
culture industry?
Rather than defining 'authentic' art, Adorno seems to me to be the scourge
of all art and artists that would lay claim to such a definition.
One last quote, particularly for David:
'...it was very much Adorno's criticism that lent credibility to his claim
to represent an ongoing tradition. Like Horkheimer, Adorno was bound to high
German culture of the nineteenth century to a degree that is almost
impossible for us to imagine today. It is enough to read his fragmentary
study of Beethoven, on which he worked from the 'thirties onwards, to
discover an almost literally desperate love: he recognizes in the composer a
man of unbridled, violently authoritarian anger and judges him harshly, but
he also sees in him a kindred spirit in terms of the tenderest and highest
emotions. His attempt to confront Beethoven speaks of his love for Germany
as well as the sufferings that Germany cuased him, and it is scarecely
fortuitous that he never completed a work that in its conceptual design
repeated everything that the sociologist had already established about the
opposite poles of authoritarian personality and unprejudiced character. One
of Adorno's pupils, Albrecht Wellmer, summed up this impact as follows:
'With Adorno, it again became possible in Germany to be intellectually,
morally and aesthetically present and at the same time not to hate Kant,
Hegel, Bach, Beethoven, Goethe or Holderlin.' By the same token, it is
impossible not to be moved by some of the things that Horkheimer, too, wrote
about the music of Anton Bruckner and the poems of his Swabian compatriot,
Justinus Kerner. As a result, the doctrines of critical theory were
interpreted in two different ways, on the one hand as a radical critique of
existing conditions, while on the other - and this is epecially true of the
writings of Walter Benjamin - they provided access to the history of German
ideas, a history that would perhaps have been buried sooner than was in fact
the case. If we are justified in speaking of dialectics, then it is here: by
making Auschwitz the focus of his thinking, Adorno also made it possible for
his readers and listeners to cling to their love of the German language and
of German philosophy and music.'
[Lorenz Jaeger - 'Adorno: A Political Biography', translated Stewart Spencer
(New Haven and London, 2004), p. 180]
(note that this is in many other places a highly critical biography)
Ian
Ian Pace
<david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1136153219.9...@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> Or whether we have to pay the
> slightest bit of attention to Adorno if we are historians studying
> Nazism.
>
his views and beliefs are indeed highly questionable - Jager has some good
stuff on this), the work on the Authoritarian Personality and the residues
of fascist belief (for which he devised, as the head of a team, a set of
questions designed to measure this) is surely of interest to historians
studying Nazism and its aftermath.
Ian
Richard Schultz
: Ah yes - I think some of the more tongue-in-cheek aspects of my remarks
: (both on here and in private communication) might occasionally pass you by!
The technical term is "sauce for the goose."
-----
Richard Schultz sch...@mail.biu.ac.il
Department of Chemistry, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
Opinions expressed are mine alone, and not those of Bar-Ilan University
-----
And when I found the door was shut,
I tried to turn the handle, but --
tag gallagher
tag gallagher
Ian Pace
"tag gallagher" <t...@sprynet.com> wrote in message
news:GZ2uf.1357$%W1....@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net...
> Can you say concisely, please, what did Adorno mean here by "fascist"?
>
to do with a particular aptitude towards unquestioning deference towards a
form of absolute authority that one craves, with a consequent denying of
subjectivity. But it might be clearer if I explain in more detail about this
period of Adorno's work.
This is where, as I said, Adorno's views are questionable. I should first
point out that I know his work in this respect second-hand (what I'm about
to write is indebted to Jaeger's biography and Martin Jay's excellent book
'The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the
Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston and Toronto, 1973)), through
commentaries, not having been able to read the actual questionnaires in full
he created (I'm not sure if all of his work in this respect is published,
especially the empirical research conducted in Germany - can you help here,
Wieland?). The key text here is the book 'The Authoritarian Personality',
co-written with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt
Sanford (New York, 1950), which has been out-of-print in English for a long
time (though it is sometimes regarded as a classic sociological work), and
of which I don't have a copy.
Adorno devised a series of questions intended to gauge personality traits
that are akin to fascism. This research was first conducted in America,
beginning in 1943 (it was sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and the
Jewish Labour Committee, worried about the possible outbreak of fascism and
anti-semitism in the US), then later, in a modified form, in Germany. In the
American work, Adorno and his team identified several attributes of the
'Authoritarian Personality':
1. 'Conventionalism' (an unyielding commitment to the traditional values of
the middle class),
2. 'Authoritarian Submission' (submissive, uncritical attitude towards
idealised moral authorities of the in-group)
3. 'Authoritarian Aggression' (hostility towards those who violate
conventional values, and a tendency to seek these people out and reject,
condemn or punish them)
4. 'Anti-Intraception' (hostility to feelings and subjective fantasies)
5. 'Superstition and Stereotypy' (a disposition to think in terms of
mystical determinants of fate and in rigid categories)
6. 'Power and "Toughness"' (preoccupation with dichotomies of
domination-submission, strength/weakness, followers/leaders, identification
with powerful figures, over emphasis upon conventionalised attributes of the
ego, over-assertion of strength and toughness)
7. 'Destructiveness and Cynicism' (generalized hostility, vilification of
the human)
8. 'Projectivity' (belief in the existence of wild and dangerous forces in
the world as an outwards projection of unconscious emotional impulses)
9. 'Sex' (exaggerated concern with sexual "goings-on")
Horkheimer described (in a somewhat better fashion, in my opinion) the
authoritarian character as exhibiting 'a mechanical surrender to
conventional values; blind submission to authority together with blind
hatred of all opponents and outsiders; anti-introspectiveness; rigid
stereotyped thinking; a penchant for superstition, vilification,
half-moralistic and half-cynical, of human nature; projectivity' (Max
Horkheimer, 'The Lessons of Fascism" in 'Tensions That Cause War (Urbana,
Ill, 1950), p. 230, cited in Jay, op cit, p.240 n73) - one might consider
how often one encounters this combination of personality traits today
(including on r.m.c.r.).
Anyhow, Adorno and his team developed the 'F scale' (Fascist scale) to
literally gauge people on how fascist they were. Other scales include the
A-S scale (anti-semitism), E scale (ethnocentrism) and PEC scale (political
and economic conservatism). On top of the clear para-McCarthyite
implications of such an approach, this work seems to have been confused and
lacking in genuine scientific authority - one example Jaeger gives is
explaining opposition to the power of trade unions in terms of frustrated
Oedipal relationships with paternal authority (Jaeger, op cit, p.142).
Anyone who agreed with the statement 'There will always be wars and
conflicts, people are like that' would have been unlikely to score 'low' on
the F scale. If one agreed that 'One should avoid doing things in public
which appear wrong to others, even though one knows that these things are
really all right', one would have been labelled 'conventional'. Agreeing
that 'Sciences like chemistry, physics and medicine have carried men very
far, but there are many important things that can never possibly be
understood by the human mind.' was a sign of 'authoritarian submission', and
if one thinks that 'although leisure is a fine thing, it is good hard work
that makes life interesting and worthwhile', one forfeits the right to be
seen as a sensitive, caring individual. One respondent who declared 'We have
a good basis for our political system. The majority of people are not
interested or equipped enough to understand politics, so that the biggest
proportion of U.S. politics is governed by the capitalistic system.' was
labelled 'semi-educated' and 'confused'. In a highly didactic manner, any
opposition to particular socialist ideas (such as having legal ceilings on
salaries or allowing the state to intervene in the economy) was declared as
a symptom of fascist thinking, as amazingly was a belief that nuclear
technology should be kept a secret from the Soviet Union (though Adorno
himself changed his mind on this in the 1950s, and was hostile to the
establishment of a 'peace committee' in Frankfurt). Seeing Russia as the
primary threat to the United States was equated with anti-semitism (the
close link between anti-semitism and anti-communism in the 1930s was never
far from the researchers' minds; also this was at the time when the US was
allied to Stalin's Soviet Union, before anti-communism really took off,
though I think the research extended just a little into the post-war years).
Nearly all of those questioned were white, native-born, gentile,
middle-class Americans.
Bertolt Brecht, to whom Adorno wrote about the research, was deeply
critical, seeing totalitarian implications in this attempt to uncover latent
fascist tendencies before they are given wider expression (the antagonisms
between Brecht and Adorno were wide-ranging and lasting - I won't go into
detail about them here). Also, the authoritarian/fascistic/anti-semitic
tendencies were seen as maladies rather than the product of concrete
reasons, circumstances, etc.; the onus of responsibility was placed upon the
individuals rather than seeing them as products of the wider social order
(this suggests the extent to which the work was underpinned by liberal/New
Deal thinking, more so than Marxism). In earlier related work from the
1930s, Adorno had contrasted 'fascist' with 'revolutionary' tendencies; here
the dichotomy was between the 'fascist' and the 'democratic'. One should
bear in mind the necessity for Adorno and his team to adapt their categories
so as not to offend their American hosts to much, a phenomenon which has
been observed by some in much of the work from Adorno's American period -
this was another aspect of which Brecht was scathingly critical.
Adorno returned to Germany in 1949, where together with Max Horkheimer he
re-established the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. In 1950-1951,
he and his students attempted to transplant some of his empirical
sociological techniques learned in America to try and find out the feelings
of ordinary Germans about National Socialism after the war. Instead of
individual interviews and questionnaires, however, this time the research
was conducted through group discussions (involving various societies, groups
of people in a pub, etc.) chosen so as to constitute a reasonably
representative cross-section of the population. But, if anything this work
seems to have been even more arcane than that conducted in America. In
particular, as Jaeger points out, there was a massively dubious assumption
involved that any criticism of the Allied occupiers with a yearning to
return to National Socialism.
Bear in mind that this was in the context of the dismantling of German
industry and massive famines and food shortages. There is evidence of the
early 1945-46 famines having been enacted deliberately as a strategy to keep
the German population under control, by refusing to allow Red Cross relief
supplies into the country. Minutes of the Potsdam Conference apparently make
clear that the living standards of Germans were to be kept low (see Jaeger,
op cit, p.158). Adorno encountered one participant who believed that the
famines were organised from the top down, and interpreted such a belief
solely as irrational paranoia. The later food shortages at the time of the
chronic winter of 1947-48 are a little more complicated and afflicted much
of Europe, though it's arguable that the US could have done more to prevent
this (see Tony Judt's recent book 'Post War: A History of Europe since 1945'
(London, 2005), pp. 86-99, for one perspective on this).
So to the Frankfurt team, anything said against the measures enacted by the
Americans in particular was interpreted as betokening latent fascist and
anti-democratic tendencies.* Statements were often taken out from their
original rather specific contexts so as to be able to be interpretable as
symptoms of much broader tendencies. Monika Plessner, who spent time at the
Institute during this period, commented on some of the questionable uses of
psychoanalysis: '..when I admitted that words for colour in the scale of
brown in statements by the participants in our conversations did not
convince me of their anally based anti-Semitic personality structure, we all
had a good laugh together.' (Monika Plessner, 'Miteinander reden heisst
miteinander traeumen: Gruppen-studie mit Horkheimer', Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung (28 Sept, 1991), cited in Jaeger, p. 155).
[*This sort of thinking uncannily parallels the later phenomenon of equating
criticism of the conduct of the state of Israel with anti-semitism. It
should be pointed out in this context that Horkheimer expressed opposition
to Zionism in a letter to Leo Lowenthal in 1945 - cited in Jay, op cit, p233
n46. I am not aware of any comments by Adorno on Zionism.]
The Frankfurt team investigated in depth the manifestations of 'guilt' in
post-war Germans (Adorno wrote an essay on this the title of which is
translated as 'Guilt and Defence' in the English translation of Jaeger - I
don't know of this ever having has appeared in English - in Adorno's
collected writings in German it appears in Volume ix/2, beginning on page
131, according to Jaeger). They looked at the extent to which people
acknowledged or disputed the policies of extermination and whether they had
offered any resistance. One of the most contentious aspects of this study
involved associating any perception of the injustice of the Treaty of
Versailles with a form of defence against guilt, so that, in Adorno's works,
such criticism of the treaty 'continued to reflect the cliche that was used
after 1918 by the whole of the nationalist reaction, not just by Hitler
alone. The fact that Hitler came to power is something for which the
"shameful peace of Versailles" is said to be to blame'. ('Guilt and
Defence', p. 237, cited in Jaeger, op cit, p. 157). He would also find
similar ways of interpreting the belief that the Americans were treating
prisoners-of-war brutally (there is much evidence that this was indeed the
case - many starved to death and it was a capital offence for civilians to
give them food) or that the destruction of Dresden was unnecessary or
disproportionate.
This period of Adorno's work seems one of his weakest, relying on rather
half-baked psychoanalysis (as the philosopher Helmuth Plessner pointed out -
see Jaeger, op cit, p.161) and a generally amateurish approach to
sociological method. Of course, that is to interpret it from the perspective
of the hugely more sophisticated analyses of fascism that have developed in
the interim period, and I'm sure many others attempting to interpret it in
the immediate post-war years may have been equally simplistic and dogmatic
in assigning causes and effects. Also, as I indicate above, I've only read
this work second-hand, from a variety of commentators some of who are
unsympathetic, and I'm interested to know the thoughts of anyone who's read
the original texts in more detail (also - what does Stefan Muller-Dohm, in
his highly acclaimed recent biography, have to say about these subjects?).
Adorno himself seems to give voice to a certain post-war mentality which
found fascism at every juncture - I can see why people believed that then,
without thinking such a view is ultimately very enlightening. It doesn't
seem to compare with the penetrating nature of his work on the Dialectic of
Enlightenment, the books on Wagner, Mahler and Berg, or his searching late
magnum opuses.
Other works deeply relevant to the above are the chapter 'Elements of
Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment' in Adorno and Horkheimer's
'Dialectic of Enlightenment', translated John Cumming (New York and London,
1972) or Edmund Jephcott (Standford, 2002) and the essay 'Anti-Semitism and
Fascist Propaganda' in the Adorno collection 'The Stars Down to Earth and
other essays on the irrational in culture', edited Stephen Crook (New York
and London, 1994).
Ian
Ian Pace
> Is there anything that can't be linked to anything?
>
Try likening George W. Bush to a peace-loving, humane, compassionate,
internationally-minded intellectual, and I think you'll find it difficult.
Ian
tag gallagher
Ian Pace wrote:
> "tag gallagher" <t...@sprynet.com> wrote in message
> news:YW2uf.1355$%W1....@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net...
>
>>Is there anything that can't be linked to anything?
>>
>
>
> Try likening George W. Bush to a peace-loving, humane, compassionate,
> internationally-minded intellectual, and I think you'll find it difficult.
>
> Ian
George doesn't seem to find it difficult, and he got an awful lot of
people to believe him.
tag gallagher
Ian Pace wrote:
> "tag gallagher" <t...@sprynet.com> wrote in message
> news:GZ2uf.1357$%W1....@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net...
>
>>Can you say concisely, please, what did Adorno mean here by "fascist"?
>>
>
> That is hard to do in a precise way - let's say at heart for Adorno it had
> to do with a particular aptitude towards unquestioning deference towards a
> form of absolute authority that one craves, with a consequent denying of
> subjectivity.
Sounds like academia.
But it might be clearer if I explain in more detail about this
> period of Adorno's work.
>
> This is where, as I said, Adorno's views are questionable. I should first
> point out that I know his work in this respect second-hand (what I'm about
> to write is indebted to Jaeger's biography and Martin Jay's excellent book
> 'The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the
> Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston and Toronto, 1973)),
I found it impenetrable. I was told it was intentionally so.
> Adorno devised a series of questions intended to gauge personality traits
> that are akin to fascism.
I assume this is tautological, and ultimately dependent on Adorno's
definition -- which smacks of the sort of insistence on "objectivity"
which is itself fascistic. As does much of what you recount below about
his subservience to ideological or tactical positions. But I'm still
interested in his working definition,because otherwise it's just static
even to use the word "fascist."
The nine traits below do strike me as almost a parody on what the
Frankfurt School supposedly disliked in America.
I'm not trying to give you hard time. I've spent some time trying to
figure out what "fascist" meant in Italy in Mussolini's time. There's
some intersection with the German concept, but basically it's another
universe, and unfortunately what he think of in the US as "fascist" has
only a little to do with Mussolini's "Fascism."
On the other hand, it seems to me that Croce and Gramsci are much better
at dealing with the sorts of things the Frankfurt people tried to, and
in infinitely simpler language and more direct routes, and with far
greater impact on Europe between ww2 and today.
In any case, I don't see it useful to identity fascism as
authoritarianism, although we do so constantly in everyday speech. One
can't eliminate authoritarianism from people and one wouldn't want a
population only of sheep even if one could. It really doesn't explain
Hitler to say that Nazi Germany had nine personality traits that almost
everyone in the world has.
Ian Pace
>
>
> Ian Pace wrote:
>> "tag gallagher" <t...@sprynet.com> wrote in message
>> news:GZ2uf.1357$%W1....@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net...
>>
>>>Can you say concisely, please, what did Adorno mean here by "fascist"?
>>>
>>
>> That is hard to do in a precise way - let's say at heart for Adorno it
>> had to do with a particular aptitude towards unquestioning deference
>> towards a form of absolute authority that one craves, with a consequent
>> denying of subjectivity.
>
> Sounds like academia.
Depends where!
>
>
> But it might be clearer if I explain in more detail about this
>> period of Adorno's work.
>>
>> This is where, as I said, Adorno's views are questionable. I should first
>> point out that I know his work in this respect second-hand (what I'm
>> about to write is indebted to Jaeger's biography and Martin Jay's
>> excellent book 'The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt
>> School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston and
>> Toronto, 1973)),
>
> I found it impenetrable. I was told it was intentionally so.
You mean Jay's book? That was the first in-depth work I read on the
Frankfurt School, when I was a student. I found it very clear and
accessible.
Or do you mean Adorno's work in general?
>
>
>> Adorno devised a series of questions intended to gauge personality traits
>> that are akin to fascism.
>
> I assume this is tautological, and ultimately dependent on Adorno's
> definition -- which smacks of the sort of insistence on "objectivity"
> which is itself fascistic.
No, I can't accept that - if one thing runs throughout Adorno's work, it's
the privileging of the subject against reified 'objectivity'.
> As does much of what you recount below about his subservience to
> ideological or tactical positions. But I'm still interested in his
> working definition,because otherwise it's just static even to use the word
> "fascist."
It's a very hard word to define in a way that's neither too narrow or too
broad. I think it's something more specific than simply ultra-right wing
thinking (though of course the two frequently overlap), and can be found in
people on other parts of the political spectrum as well (including
liberals). There have been attempts to define fascism in terms of the
relationship between corporate power and the state, which are interesting to
me as a socialist, but I don't ultimately find them satisfactory. The
definition I suggested above for Adorno's view of the kernel of fascist
thinking is a reasonable one, I think; obviously it only really makes sense
to call such a thing 'fascist' if manifested in a particularly extreme form.
Fascism is fundamentally different to totalitarianism, I think. Both can be
directed from the top and rely on degrees of consent and participation from
lower down, but the degree of emphasis is extremely marked. Totalitarianism
instils consent through fear and coercion (though sometimes after a while
this can become unconscious - Havel and Zizek are interesting on this
subject), whereas fascism relies on active and willing consent from the
outset. The 'totalitarian' model of Nazi Germany, which was prevalent
amongst early post-war historians, seems to have less currency today,
whereas it still seems an entirely appropriate model for Stalin's Russia.
Though of course both definitions are simplifications - an article by
Richard Evans in the latest issue of BBC History Magazine (in conjunction
with the second volume of his trilogy on the Third Reich, which I'm going to
read soon) challenges some of the prevalent notions of the degree of support
from ordinary people that the Nazis received (arguing against the simplistic
notions of Daniel Goldhagen and Robert Gellately), and how such support
emerged. And I'm sure there's lots yet to learn about the symbiotic
relationships between different strata of society in the Stalinist regimes
of Eastern Europe.
What would be your definition of fascism?
>
> The nine traits below do strike me as almost a parody on what the
> Frankfurt School supposedly disliked in America.
Maybe, but those traits could be found much more overtly in Nazi Germany and
fascist Italy. Remember that the study was commissioned in order to gauge
the possibility of the type of fascism that was being experienced in Europe
emerging in the US. I haven't described in any detail the Frankfurters'
thoughts on anti-semitism, but they are intricate, powerful, and equally
fundamental to their work.
>
> I'm not trying to give you hard time. I've spent some time trying to
> figure out what "fascist" meant in Italy in Mussolini's time. There's
> some intersection with the German concept, but basically it's another
> universe, and unfortunately what he think of in the US as "fascist" has
> only a little to do with Mussolini's "Fascism."
Well, obviously fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were different animals, but I
do think there are sufficient similarities to warrant talking about their
political systems under a certain umbrella, specifically fascism. A great
deal of Adorno's post-war work deals with the notion of 'creeping fascism'
to be found in particular in the USA. I don't think it's arcane to identify
connections between American capitalist society and the overt fascism
previously found in Germany and Italy (and various other European regimes).
But the manifestations of a type of fascistic mentality, and the reliance
that US society places upon it, is obviously less obvious on the surface
(though that doesn't necessarily make it any better). And here I think the
concept of the 'authoritarian personality' (see my comment below) is
important.
>
> On the other hand, it seems to me that Croce and Gramsci are much better
> at dealing with the sorts of things the Frankfurt people tried to, and in
> infinitely simpler language and more direct routes, and with far greater
> impact on Europe between ww2 and today.
I don't know Croce's work, but I know a reasonable bit of Gramsci's (I
realise the former was a major influence on the latter) - it's a while since
I read Gramsci, though, I must go back to it sometime soon. Certainly he's
an extremely important thinker, though I have issues with his work. His
writings on culture are much more broad-based and less incisive than those
of Adorno et al, I feel; also Gramsci is in danger of treating the
'proletariat' as a reified category. His model of hegemony is somewhat less
subtle than that of Adorno, also. All I'm saying, essentially, is that I
don't think one thinker supplants the other.
>
> In any case, I don't see it useful to identity fascism as
> authoritarianism, although we do so constantly in everyday speech. One
> can't eliminate authoritarianism from people and one wouldn't want a
> population only of sheep even if one could.
The term 'authoritarian personality' is really a misleading one - it
identifies less the person who takes control as that who willingly succumbs
to it. To resist that is the opposite of being a sheep.
> It really doesn't explain Hitler to say that Nazi Germany had nine
> personality traits that almost everyone in the world has.
>
Certainly that would hardly provide any sort of exhaustive explanation. I do
agree with you that such personality traits are widespread - perhaps to
understand the rise of the Nazis one needs to look at that in conjunction
with economic collapse, national humiliation, fear of communism, etc., to
see how the Nazis could capitalise upon those elements of personality, as
manifested en masse, in order to engineer consent and support (rather like
all propagandists and advertisers do as well)?
But because those personality traits can be found to a greater or lesser
degree in many places at a particular time in history (and I don't accept
all of them are found in just about all people) doesn't make them
inevitable.
Ian
tag gallagher
Ian Pace wrote:
>>I found it impenetrable. I was told it was intentionally so.
>
>
> You mean Jay's book? That was the first in-depth work I read on the
> Frankfurt School, when I was a student. I found it very clear and
> accessible.
Well, it was neither for me. And it was about fifteen years ago, and I
have found almost all writing by the Frankfurters to be off-putting
(turgid, verbose, tortured, vague, self-serving) and so I am not in a
good position to criticize them, or contend with you about them.
>>>Adorno devised a series of questions intended to gauge personality traits
>>>that are akin to fascism.
>>
>>I assume this is tautological, and ultimately dependent on Adorno's
>>definition -- which smacks of the sort of insistence on "objectivity"
>>which is itself fascistic.
>
>
> No, I can't accept that - if one thing runs throughout Adorno's work, it's
> the privileging of the subject against reified 'objectivity'.
But, Ian, he's not talking about anything. He says he's talking about
"fascism" but he is merely setting up a strawman and dumping his pet
peeves onto it. Frankly, I don't know how "objectively" one can define
an "object" which only exists as a subjective collage of dislikes, even
if one limits it to Nazi German;but when you stretch this to other
European states and to human history in general, you might as well be
discussing ether. It's not at all clear which aspects or institutions
or Germany 1933-45 were "fascist," and what the magic quality is that
made the same aspects and institutions "not fascist" during prior
regimes -- or else they were all incipiently "fascist" and the word has
no relevant meaning. Societies are always going to be authoritarian, if
only to decree which side of the street we drive on. The question to me
is what makes them kill and torture and imprison and regimate and rob
and lie and demonize certain groups and attack other countries.
There have been attempts to define fascism in terms of the
> relationship between corporate power and the state, which are interesting to
> me as a socialist, but I don't ultimately find them satisfactory.
This seems to me to correspond with Mussolini's Fascism (big F);
"corporatism" was supposed to be a way of mitigating class conflict by
involving the government as a third party suppressing the other two,
ideally in their own best interests. It's a solution that made a lot of
sense at the time, given the peculiarities of Italy's industrial
development, and it to some degree continues today in the government's
large stock holdings in major banks and industries. It also corresponds
to the mergers of industry, military and government that we have seen in
Japan and the US. Except in the case of Italy, it was not corporations
that birthed Fascism. And it is well to recall that, prior to 1938,
very few opposed Mussolini's regime and that its treatment of opponents
was far milder than one would expect from a "fascist dictatorship."
e
> Totalitarianism
> instils consent through fear and coercion (though sometimes after a while
> this can become unconscious - Havel and Zizek are interesting on this
> subject), whereas fascism relies on active and willing consent from the
> outset.
They probably both took this notion from Renzo De Felice. He's also the
one who insists the lower middleclasses were Fascism's core supporters.
(They'd emerged since ww1 and feared sinking back into the lower
classes.) There is a small interview-book of him in English about
Fascism that's superb. He argues that Nazism aimed to mobilize
individuals into masses, whereas Fascism wanted to empower individuals
(everyone can be Mussolini!) and foster debate -- in other words, a
variation on the Liberalism that Italy's mandarins had been trying to
impose on it since unification -- but that everything got screwed up as
ww2 approached. Except at its end and beginning the Fascist Party was,
as the cliché goes, a leisure-time organization. One could be a fervent
Marxist or Catholic or monarchist or militarist or farmer and still be a
Fascist. One of Mussolini's mantras was the rejection of any ideology
as part of Fascism. The Party was simply an instrument of political power.
If Adorno equates "fascism" with sheep-like attitudes toward authority,
then Italian Fascism was fundamentally anti-fascist.
SG
I was about to revisit "my" poor thread, simplistically entitled "Paul
Celan - music on . . .", but even if only from the new title, I see
things have gone far, far beyond my level of (un)sophistication. Long
live Spissitude (now that I lost it !!
What 'bout meself? Back to "I love Lucy", then.
in (cowardly) Solidarity,
SG
wielhoban
Ian Pace wrote:
> This is where, as I said, Adorno's views are questionable. I should first
> point out that I know his work in this respect second-hand (what I'm about
> to write is indebted to Jaeger's biography and Martin Jay's excellent book
> 'The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the
> Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston and Toronto, 1973)), through
> commentaries, not having been able to read the actual questionnaires in full
> he created (I'm not sure if all of his work in this respect is published,
> especially the empirical research conducted in Germany - can you help here,
> Wieland?).
There's certainly a mass of interview selections and analyses
examining, for example, "ordinary people"'s perception of Jews and
anti-Semitism after the war, and asking them about their perception
during it (and before). The question of possible parallels to the
situation of black people in America is also raised. There are all
sorts of responses, which are sorted into certain categories. In fact,
I find that work very interesting, and it isn't ideologically blinkered
in the way that some other material might be. (It doesn't attempt to
tick off and quantify all the chracteristics, for example).
WH
wielhoban
> I was about to revisit "my" poor thread, simplistically entitled "Paul
> Celan - music on . . .", but even if only from the new title, I see
> things have gone far, far beyond my level of (un)sophistication.
That goes to show how connected these things are. It's worth pointing
out, however, that Celan (ironically) was closer to Heidegger than
Adorno; he engaged with his philosophy over the course of many years.
As it happens, Celan's sporadic mistress, the poet Ingeborg Bachmann,
who is equally associated with the changes in German consciousness
after the Nazis, wrote her PhD on Heidegger. It's very short-sighted to
see in Heidegger - as Adorno ultimately did - some sort of brownshirt
ideologue. His involvement with the Nazis is indisputable, but actually
quite complicated.
WH
Ian Pace
>
>
> Ian Pace wrote:
>>>I found it impenetrable. I was told it was intentionally so.
>>
>>
>> You mean Jay's book? That was the first in-depth work I read on the
>> Frankfurt School, when I was a student. I found it very clear and
>> accessible.
>
> Well, it was neither for me. And it was about fifteen years ago, and I
> have found almost all writing by the Frankfurters to be off-putting
> (turgid, verbose, tortured, vague, self-serving) and so I am not in a good
> position to criticize them, or contend with you about them.
>
>
>>>>Adorno devised a series of questions intended to gauge personality
>>>>traits that are akin to fascism.
>>>
>>>I assume this is tautological, and ultimately dependent on Adorno's
>>>definition -- which smacks of the sort of insistence on "objectivity"
>>>which is itself fascistic.
>>
>>
>> No, I can't accept that - if one thing runs throughout Adorno's work,
>> it's the privileging of the subject against reified 'objectivity'.
>
> But, Ian, he's not talking about anything.
I was speaking more generally about Adorno's work.
> He says he's talking about "fascism" but he is merely setting up a
> strawman and dumping his pet peeves onto it.
I don't think that type of authoritarian personality is a strawman - those
traits can certainly exist in conjunction in large degree and do play a
major part in the mentality of those who are drawn towards fascism.
Obviously the particular questionnaire here is weighted towards an American
context.
> Frankly, I don't know how "objectively" one can define an "object" which
> only exists as a subjective collage of dislikes, even if one limits it to
> Nazi German;but when you stretch this to other European states and to
> human history in general, you might as well be discussing ether.
But that's the point - the authoritarian personality isn't limited to Nazi
Germany.
> It's not at all clear which aspects or institutions or Germany 1933-45
> were "fascist," and what the magic quality is that made the same aspects
> and institutions "not fascist" during prior regimes -- or else they were
> all incipiently "fascist" and the word has no relevant meaning. Societies
> are always going to be authoritarian, if only to decree which side of the
> street we drive on.
There are questions of degree, which surely you'd agree make a vast
difference? Determining which side of the street to drive on is one thing,
determining whether Jewish people must wear the yellow star in public
something else entirely? But then there are also questions of genuine
democratic participation in decision-making, which are highly
anti-authoritarian. A certain increased scepticism in the post-war years
about the behaviour of those governing us may have led to a decrease in the
authoritarian personality (though maybe less so in the US).
> The question to me is what makes them kill and torture and imprison and
> regimate and rob and lie and demonize certain groups and attack other
> countries.
Adorno had plenty to say on that, especially in the context of anti-Semitism
(on which his writings are penetrating, I think). I can copy some bits if
you like.
>
> There have been attempts to define fascism in terms of the
>> relationship between corporate power and the state, which are interesting
>> to me as a socialist, but I don't ultimately find them satisfactory.
>
> This seems to me to correspond with Mussolini's Fascism (big F);
> "corporatism" was supposed to be a way of mitigating class conflict by
> involving the government as a third party suppressing the other two,
> ideally in their own best interests. It's a solution that made a lot of
> sense at the time, given the peculiarities of Italy's industrial
> development, and it to some degree continues today in the government's
> large stock holdings in major banks and industries. It also corresponds
> to the mergers of industry, military and government that we have seen in
> Japan and the US. Except in the case of Italy, it was not corporations
> that birthed Fascism.
Nor in Germany, though they played a vital role in securing their ultimate
success in taking power (when a consortium of big business placed a lot of
pressure on Hindenburg to install Hitler as Chancellor, which he was
otherwise reluctant to do). There is a small amount of rather simplistic
monocausal work on the role of big business in making fascism possible;
however, nowadays even more mainstream historians such as Evans will draw
attention to how this was certainly a factor if not necessarily the primary
cause.
But there is a difference between Fascism as an ideology or even a political
movement at its inception, and Fascism in power, which brings a whole host
of other factors into play.
> And it is well to recall that, prior to 1938, very few opposed Mussolini's
> regime and that its treatment of opponents was far milder than one would
> expect from a "fascist dictatorship."
>
Sure, that's why I say the totalitarian model isn't really satisfactory.
>
> e
>> Totalitarianism instils consent through fear and coercion (though
>> sometimes after a while this can become unconscious - Havel and Zizek are
>> interesting on this subject), whereas fascism relies on active and
>> willing consent from the outset.
>
> They probably both took this notion from Renzo De Felice. He's also the
> one who insists the lower middleclasses were Fascism's core supporters.
> (They'd emerged since ww1 and feared sinking back into the lower classes.)
> There is a small interview-book of him in English about Fascism that's
> superb.
That sounds very interesting - I must check it out.
> He argues that Nazism aimed to mobilize individuals into masses, whereas
> Fascism wanted to empower individuals (everyone can be Mussolini!)
But surely only individuals of certain classes?
You could say that Marxism wants to mobilize individuals, specifically the
proletariat, into masses as well; the need for unity and collective action
is indeed paramount, but (a) in one sense the proletariat already exist as a
mass because of capitalism (and their whole identity is a product of
capitalism) and (b) it's only by acting collectively against the ruling
classes that they have a chance of securing freedom for themselves as
individuals in a post-capitalist future.
> and foster debate -- in other words, a variation on the Liberalism that
> Italy's mandarins had been trying to impose on it since unification -- but
> that everything got screwed up as ww2 approached.
Well, I would argue that that's the inevitable consequence of Liberalism.
> Except at its end and beginning the Fascist Party was, as the cliché goes,
> a leisure-time organization. One could be a fervent Marxist or Catholic
> or monarchist or militarist or farmer and still be a Fascist.
I find it hard to see how one could be a Marxist and a Fascist, though the
other categories are compatible. Fascism continues to protect private
property.
> One of Mussolini's mantras was the rejection of any ideology as part of
> Fascism. The Party was simply an instrument of political power.
And economic (and imperial) power.
>
> If Adorno equates "fascism" with sheep-like attitudes toward authority,
> then Italian Fascism was fundamentally anti-fascist.
>
Adorno's view of fascism takes too little account of economics, certainly.
But how about the role of nationalism in Italian Fascism as well?
Ian
Ian Pace
ideology in particular? In particular, I'm interested to know how these
questions relate to his book on Nietzsche (which I haven't read).
Ian
Ian Pace
English!
Ian
wielhoban
unfounded claims. But the whole ideology of breeding/race/homeland is
remote from him, even if his cultural patriotism seems to evoke it. He
makes a big thing of the German language, but is essentially placing it
on a level with ancient Greek, which he sees as the primal
philosophical language (and indeed the two languages are more closely
related than Greek and English, say), and speaking more of the
language's possibilities and structures than the national background of
that language. Nazi ideology and propaganda made an infinitely cruder
use of language, without any trace of the structural distinctions he
used it to develop in his philosophy. I don't think that Heidegger was
interested in any sort of collectivist movement either; his philosophy,
while not exactly focused on a specific, individual actor (something
which led Adorno to consider it dehumanising), is very much geared
towards the circumspection of a particular observing consciouness,
something more static and analytical than dynamic. It's closer to
Eastern philosophy in that respect, as his later association with the
Kyoto School highlights.
It's not directly in his philosophy, which you had asked about, but the
Nazis' anti-Semitism was also not shared by Heidegger. His teacher
Husserl, his mistress Hannah Arendt and the poet he admired most,
Celan, were all Jews. The fact that he removed the dedication to
Husserl from Sein und Zeit and, as was standard procedure for a
university rector, barred Jews (i.e. also Husserl) from the Freiburg
university library, was simply down to his ruthless careerism. I don't
think it would have made any difference to him whether Jews or Chinese
were being singled out in that way; he simply wanted to distance
himself from anything or anyone that might impair his success. That's
damnable enough, as it is, but it's not anti-Semitism. Though he
remained in the party and never reneged, he soon realised that Nazism
had rather less philosophical potential than he had initially seen in
it.
WH
Ralph
everyone on the Nazi food chain, and just leave Hitler as culpable.
wielhoban
demonstrated. Classic dualist thought, aka the "Dubya syndrome" (for us
or against us).
WH
Ralph
boot, by throwing a mantle of piety around that Nazi apologetics by
attacking Bush or Dubya.
Here is more on Heidegger by Alex Steiner
All this publicity to what was previously an obscure chapter in the life
of a well-known philosopher has caused a ripple of shock and dismay. For
example, a viewer of the BBC series recently wrote of his consternation
that “the depth of his [Heidegger's] collaboration with the Nazis has
only recently ... been brought out.” The long-standing myopia in the
case of Heidegger can be directly ascribed to a systematic cover-up that
was perpetrated by Heidegger himself during and after his Nazi period,
and carried on by his students and apologists to this day. Before we
explore the story of the cover-up, itself a long and fascinating page in
the annals of historical falsification, let us first establish the facts
of Heidegger's relationship with the Nazis.
The facts can no longer be seriously contested since the publication of
Victor Farias' book, Heidegger and Nazism in 1987.[2] Farias is a
Chilean-born student of Heidegger's who spent a decade locating
virtually all the relevant documents relating to Heidegger's activities
in the years from 1933 to 1945. Many of these documents were found in
the archives of the former state of East Germany and in the
Documentation Center of the former West Berlin. Since the publication of
Farias' landmark book, a number of other books and articles have been
published that explore the issue of Heidegger's Nazism. An excellent
summary of the historical material can be found in an article written in
1988, Heidegger and the Nazis.[3] Much of the material presented in this
section is borrowed from this article.
Heidegger was born and raised in the Swabian town of Messkirch in the
south of modern Germany. The region was economically backward, dominated
by peasant-based agriculture and small scale manufacturing. The politics
of the region was infused by a populist Catholicism that was deeply
implicated in German nationalism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Modern
culture and with it the ideals of liberalism as well as socialism were
viewed as mortal threats. The growing influence throughout Germany of
the Social Democratic Party was commonly identified as the main
“internal enemy” in this region. In the ensuing decades this area would
become one of the bastions of support for Nazism.
Heidegger's family was of lower middle class origin. His mother came
from a peasant background and his father was an artisan. He was a
promising student and won a scholarship to attend secondary school in
Konstanz. There he attended a preparatory school for the novitiate. The
school was established by the Catholic Church hierarchy as a bastion of
conservatism against the growing influence of liberalism and
Protestantism in the region. Nevertheless some of the secular faculty of
the school held decisively democratic and progressive ideals. Their
lectures were among the most popular at the school. We do not know
exactly how these progressive ideas were received by the young
Heidegger. We do know that at an early and formative period he was
already confronted by the interplay of ideas that were battling for
supremacy in his part of Germany. We also know that by the time
Heidegger received his baccalaureate degree, he had rejected the
vocation of priest in favor of that of scholar. He also became heavily
involved in the partisan and cultural struggles of his time. By the time
he was in his early twenties, he was a leader in a student movement that
embraced the ideals of right-wing Catholic populism.
The reactionary and xenophobic forces in the region were strengthened
following the First World War and the Russian Revolution. The outcome of
the war, enshrined in the Versailles treaty, was not only a humiliating
defeat for the nationalists, but also resulted in the loss of territory
to France. The lost territories became a cause celebre among right-wing
nationalist circles after the war. The Russian Revolution on the other
hand, while inspiring the working class in Germany, spread fear and
horror among the largely Catholic peasants in the rural south. A sense
of crisis of world historic dimensions dominated the ideology of the
right-wing nationalist movements of the period. The zeitgeist of crisis
was given voice by the philosopher Oswald Spengler, who in turn was
inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche. We know that Heidegger early on in his
career expressed sympathies for the nationalist viewpoint. It is also a
fact that the sense of crisis that emerged in this historical confluence
would be a theme that Heidegger the philosopher would retain his entire
career.
Documentary evidence exists that Heidegger expressed sympathy for the
Nazis as early as 1932. Given his previous history, this should not come
as a shock. Immediately following Hitler's seizure of power, Heidegger
joined the Nazis. Heidegger was a dues-paying member of the NSDAP (the
Nazi party) from 1933 to 1945. He became the rector of Freiburg
University in April of 1933, three months after Hitler came to power.
His infamous inaugural address was delivered on May 27, 1933. Heidegger
apologists have claimed that this address represented an attempt to
assert the autonomy of the university against the Nazis' effort to
subordinate the sciences to their reactionary doctrines.
In fact, the address was a call to arms for the student body and the
faculty to serve the new Nazi regime. It celebrates the Nazi ascendancy
as “the march our people has begun into its future history.” Heidegger
identifies the German nation with the Nazi state in prose that speaks of
“the historical mission of the German Volk, a Volk that knows itself in
its state.” There is even a reference to the fascist ideology of
zoological determinism when Heidegger invokes “the power to preserve, in
the deepest way, the strengths [of the Volk] which are rooted in soil
and blood.”
On June 30, 1933 Heidegger gave a speech to the Heidelberg Student
Association in which he gave his views on the role of the university in
the new Nazi order. The following excerpt speaks for itself. It provides
a glimpse of Heidegger's commitment to the Nazi ideals of blood, race
and absolute subservience to the Führer.
“It [the university] must be integrated into the Volksgemeinschaft and
be joined together with the state ...
“Up to now, research and teaching have been carried on at the
universities as they were carried out for decades.... Research got out
of hand and concealed its uncertainty behind the idea of international
scientific and scholarly progress. Teaching that had become aimless hid
behind examination requirements.
“A fierce battle must be fought against this situation in the National
Socialist spirit, and this spirit cannot be allowed to be suffocated by
humanizing, Christian ideas that suppress its unconditionality ...
“Danger comes not from work for the State. It comes only from
indifference and resistance. For that reason, only true strength should
have access to the right path, but not halfheartedness ...
“University study must again become a risk, not a refuge for the
cowardly. Whoever does not survive the battle, lies where he falls. The
new courage must accustom itself to steadfastness, for the battle for
the institutions where our leaders are educated will continue for a long
time. It will be fought out of the strengths of the new Reich that
Chancellor Hitler will bring to reality. A hard race with no thought of
self must fight this battle, a race that lives from constant testing and
that remains directed toward the goal to which it has committed itself.
It is a battle to determine who shall be the teachers and leaders at the
university.”[4]
After the war Heidegger tried to paint an exculpatory picture of his
term as rector, claiming that he was defending the integrity of the
university against the Nazis' attempts to politicize it. Unfortunately
for him the documentary evidence provided by this speech and others like
it blow up his attempted alibi.
Existing documentary evidence from Heidegger's period as rector traces
the following events:
On August 21, 1933 Heidegger established the Führer -principle at
Freiburg. This meant that the rector would not be elected by the faculty
as had been the custom, but would henceforth be appointed by the Nazi
Minister of Education. In that capacity, the Führer -rector would have
absolute authority over the life of the university. On October 1, 1933
his goal was realized when he was officially appointed Führer of
Freiburg University. For Heidegger this was a milestone on the way to
fulfilling his ultimate ambition, which was to become the leading
philosopher of the Nazi regime. He envisioned a relationship in which he
would become the philosopher-consul to Hitler.
On September 4, 1933, in declining an appointment to the University of
Munich, he wrote, “When I put personal reasons aside for the moment, I
know I ought to decide to work at the task that lets me best serve the
work of Adolf Hitler.”[5]
On November 3, 1933, in his role as Führer -rector, Heidegger issued a
decree applying the Nazi laws on racial cleansing to the student body of
the university. The substance of the decree awarded economic aid to
students belonging to the SS, the SA and other military groups. “Jewish
or Marxist students” or anyone considered non-Aryan according to Nazi
law would be denied financial aid.[6]
On December 13, 1933, Heidegger solicited financial support from German
academics for a book of pro-Hitler speeches that was to be distributed
around the world. He added on the bottom of the letter that “Needless to
say, non-Aryans shall not appear on the signature page.”[7]
On December 22, 1933, Heidegger wrote to the Baden minister of education
urging that in choosing among applicants for a professorship one should
question “which of the candidates ... offers the greatest assurance of
carrying out the National Socialist will for education.”[8]
The documentary evidence also shows that while Heidegger was publicly
extolling the Nazi cause, he was privately working to destroy the
careers of students and colleagues who were either Jewish or whose
politics was suspect. Among the damning evidence that has been revealed:
Hermann Staudinger, a chemistry professor at Freiburg who would go on to
win the Nobel prize in 1953, was secretly denounced by Heidegger as a
former pacifist during World War I. This information was conveyed to the
local minister of education on February 10, 1934. Staudinger was faced
with the loss of his job and his pension. Some weeks later Heidegger
interceded with the minister to recommend a milder punishment. The
motivation for this action had nothing to do with pangs of conscience or
compassion, but was simply an expedient response to what Heidegger
feared would be adverse international publicity to the dismissal of a
well-known scholar. He wrote the minister, “I hardly need to remark that
as regards the issue nothing of course can change. It's simply a
question of avoiding as much as possible, any new strain on foreign
policy.”[9] The ministry forced Staudinger to submit his resignation and
then kept him in suspense for six months before tearing it up and
reinstating him.
The case of Eduard Baumgarten provides another example of the crass
opportunism and vindictiveness exhibited by Heidegger. Baumgarten was a
student of American philosophy who had lectured at the University of
Wisconsin in the 1920s. He returned to Germany to study under Heidegger
and the two men struck up a close friendship. In 1931, however, a
personal falling out ensued after Heidegger opposed Baumgarten's work in
American pragmatism. Baumgarten left Freiburg to teach American
philosophy at the University of Gottingen. On December 16, 1933,
Heidegger, once more in his role as stool pigeon, wrote a letter to the
head of the Nazi professors at Gottingen that read, “By family
background and intellectual orientation Dr. Baumgarten comes from the
Heidelberg circle of liberal democratic intellectuals around Max Weber.
During his stay here [at Freiburg] he was anything but a National
Socialist. I am surprised to hear that he is lecturing at Gottingen: I
cannot imagine on the basis of what scientific works he got the license
to teach. After failing with me, he frequented, very actively, the Jew
Frankel, who used to teach at Gottingen and just recently was fired from
here [under Nazi racial laws].”[10]
Dr. Vogel, the recipient of this letter, thought that it was “charged
with hatred” and refused to use it. His successor, however, sent it to
the minister of education in Berlin who suspended Baumgarten and
recommended that he leave the country. Fortunately for Baumgarten he was
able to get a copy of the Heidegger letter through the intercession of a
sympathetic secretary. It is only due to this circumstance that this
piece of documentary evidence still exists. It is impossible to guess
how many other poisoned letters were penned by Heidegger in this period.
Baumgarten was fortunate enough to win back his job after appealing to
the Nazi authorities. These facts were brought to light during
de-Nazification hearings in 1946.
Mention might be made of an incident with Max Müller. Müller, who became
a prominent Catholic intellectual after the war, was one of Heidegger's
best students from 1928 to 1933. He was also an opponent of Nazism. He
stopped attending Heidegger's lectures after the latter joined the Nazi
party on May 1, 1933. Several months later, Heidegger used his authority
as Führer -rector to fire Müller from his position as student leader on
the grounds that Müller was “not politically appropriate.”[11] That was
not the end of the story. In 1938 Heidegger, although no longer rector,
once again intervened with the authorities to block Müller from getting
an appointment as a lecturer at Freiburg. He wrote the university
administration that Müller was “unfavorably disposed” toward the
regime.[12] This single sentence effectively meant the end of Müller's
academic career. Müller, learning of this, paid a personal call on
Heidegger asking him to strike the incriminating sentence from his
recommendation. Heidegger, playing the role of Pilate, refused to do so,
lecturing Müller by invoking his Catholicism. “As a Catholic you must
know that everyone has to tell the truth.”[13]
Finally, there is the matter of Heidegger's treatment of his former
teacher, Edmund Husserl. Husserl founded the philosophical school of
phenomenology and had an international reputation equal to that of
Heidegger. Husserl was also a Jew. He fell under the edict of the racial
cleansing laws and was denied the use of the University library at
Freiburg. In carrying out the Nazi edicts, Heidegger was not simply
doing his duty as a Nazi Führer -rector. There is plenty of evidence to
suggest that Heidegger enthused in accomplishing a mission with which he
closely identified. According to the testimony of the philosopher Ernst
Cassirer's widow, Heidegger was personally an anti-Semite. In the past
few years other evidence has come to light to suggest that Heidegger's
anti-Semitism did not disappear after the war. One eyewitness, Rainer
Marten, recounted a conversation with Heidegger in the late 1950s in
which the distinguished professor expressed alarm at the renewal of
Jewish influence in the philosophy departments of German universities.[14]
Apologists for Heidegger, most recently Rüdiger Safranski, have sought
to exonerate him from any personal responsibility for the fate of
Husserl. They point out that Heidegger never signed any edicts
specifically limiting Husserl's access to the university facilities.[15]
Yet this narrowly construed defense hardly absolves Heidegger of his
complicity as an agent in carrying out Nazi anti-Jewish edicts, edicts
that he knew would have a devastating impact on former friends and
colleagues. Nor is any explanation possible that would redeem Heidegger
from the shameful act of removing his dedication to his mentor Husserl
from Being and Time when that work was reissued in 1941.
After the war Heidegger would make much of the fact that he resigned his
post as rector after June 30, 1934. This coincided with the infamous
“Night of the Long Knives,” which saw forces loyal to Hitler stage a
three-day carnage resulting in the assassination of Ernst Röhm and over
one hundred of his Storm Troopers. Heidegger was later to maintain that
after this date he broke definitively with Nazism. Yet in a lecture on
metaphysics given a year after this event Heidegger publicly refers to
“the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism.”
“The stuff which is now being bandied about as the philosophy of
National Socialism—but which has not the least to do with the inner
truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between
global technology and modern man)—is casting its net in these troubled
waters of ‘values' and ‘totalities'.”[16]
It is also true that Heidegger began to distance himself from certain
aspects of National Socialism. Farias' book convincingly argues that
after 1934 Heidegger counterposed to the existing Nazi regime an
idealized vision of a National Socialism that might have been. According
to Farias, this utopian Nazism was identified in Heidegger's mind with
the defeated faction of Röhm. The thesis of Heidegger's relationship
with Röhm has generated a great deal of controversy and has never been
satisfactorily resolved. It is however an incontrovertible fact that
Heidegger did believe in a form of Nazism, “the inner truth of this
great movement,” till the day he died.
There is another biographical fact that the Heidegger apologists cannot
pass over. Heidegger was a life-long friend of a man named Eugen
Fischer. Fischer was active in the early years of Nazi rule as a leading
proponent of racial legislation. He was the head of the Institute of
Racial Hygiene in Berlin which propagated Nazi racial theories. One of
the “researchers” at his institute was the infamous Dr. Joseph Mengele.
Fischer was one of the intellectual authors of the Nazi “final
solution.” Heidegger maintained cordial relations with Fischer at least
until 1960 when he sent Fischer a Christmas gift with greetings. It
would not be stretching credibility too far to suppose that as a result
of his personal relationship with Fischer, Heidegger may have had
knowledge at a very early period of Nazi plans for genocide.[17]
The record shows that after the war Heidegger never made a public or
private repudiation of his support for Nazism. This was despite the fact
that former friends, including Karl Jaspers and Herbert Marcuse, urged
him to speak out, after the fact to be sure, against the many crimes
perpetrated by the Nazi regime. Heidegger never did. He did however make
a fleeting reference to the Holocaust in a lecture delivered on Dec. 1,
1949. Speaking about technology, he said:
“Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry—in essence, the same as
the manufacturing of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination
camps, the same as the blockade and starvation of the countryside, the
same as the production of the hydrogen bombs.”[18]
In equating the problems of mechanized agriculture with the Holocaust,
thereby trivializing the latter, Heidegger demonstrated his contempt for
the Jewish victims of the Nazis. We will return to this theme when we
examine Heidegger's philosophy.
For the most part Heidegger chose to remain silent after the war about
his activities on behalf of the Nazis. The few occasions in which
Heidegger did venture a public statement were notable. The first
instance in which he makes any assessment of this period was a
self-serving document that was written for the de-Nazification
commission. We will comment on that in the next section. The most
important postwar statement Heidegger made about his prewar political
activity was in a 1966 interview with the magazine Der Spiegel. This
interview was first published, at Heidegger's insistence, after his
death in 1976. A great deal of the discussion centers on the question of
technology and the threat that unconstrained technology poses to man.
Heidegger says at one point:
“A decisive question for me today is: how can a political system
accommodate itself to the technological age, and which political system
would this be? I have no answer to this question. I am not convinced
that it is democracy.”[19]
Having set up an ahistorical notion of technology as an absolute bane to
the existence of mankind, Heidegger then explains how he conceived of
the Nazi solution to this problem:
“ ... I see the task in thought to consist in general, within the limits
allotted to thought, to achieve an adequate relationship to the essence
of technology. National Socialism, to be sure, moved in this direction.
But those people were far too limited in their thinking to acquire an
explicit relationship to what is really happening today and has been
underway for three centuries.”[20]
It is thus beyond dispute that at the time of his death Heidegger
thought of Nazism as a political movement that was moving in the right
direction. If it failed then this was because its leaders did not think
radically enough about the essence of technology.
wielhoban
familiar with the Farias book. That doesn't affect what I wrote before.
If you consider my words Nazi apologetics, you are evidently divorced
from reality.
WH
Ralph
Having reviewed some of the pertinent facts in the career of German
philosopher Martin Heidegger, we must now turn to the myths and evasions
that constitute the building blocks of his postwar reputation. The
official version of the story, propounded by Heidegger and his
supporters, has it that his 1933 turn to Nazism was a youthful mistake,
a brief flirtation by a scholar who was naïve about politics and the
ways of the world. Within a few months, so the story goes, the young
philosopher realized his mistake, resigned his position as rector of
Freiburg University and refused henceforth to take part in Nazi
activities. Furthermore, the legend continues, even during his period as
rector, Heidegger tried to protect the integrity of the university from
the worst predations of Nazism and personally intervened with the Nazi
authorities on behalf of a number of Jewish students and colleagues.
Finally, even if one is not convinced by this account of events, the
most one can say, according to his defenders, is that Heidegger the man
suffered from a character flaw. Heidegger's personal failing, however,
is an entirely separate matter from his philosophy, which must be judged
"on its own merits." Concretely this means that any assessment of
Heidegger's philosophy that tries to relate it to his Nazism is deemed
illegitimate by his apologists. This viewpoint further implies that
there is nothing in Heidigger's pre-Nazi philosophy, particularly in
Being and Time that bears any affinity to Nazi ideas. Similarly, the
later turn [Kehre] in Heidegger's philosophy has been interpreted as a
purely internal reaction, unrelated to politics, to problems encountered
in the initial formulation of his thought.
This is a multi-layered effort at damage control. One can view the
cover-up as a redoubt upon whose walls Heidegger's supporters stand
fighting to prevent a breach. If the facade, the story of Heidegger's
youthful indiscretion, is broken, all is not lost. The inner wall,
Heidegger's actions as rector in defiance of the Nazis, still stands.
Even if this line of defense is broken, and the supporters are forced to
concede the defects of Heidegger the man, there still stands the last
line of defense, the so-called autonomy of Heidegger's philosophy.
Marshaling an impressive array of intellectuals in his defense, many
with impeccable anti-Nazi credentials, Heidegger managed to maintain his
reputation relatively intact until the middle of the 1980s.
One can trace the beginnings of the campaign to rescue Heidegger's
reputation from the verdict of posterity to the efforts of Heidegger
himself. The outlines of the legend of the politically naïve scholar are
already adumbrated in the biographical essay Heidegger submitted to the
de-Nazification committee in 1945. Here he wrote:
“In April 1933, I was unanimously elected Rector (with two abstentions)
in a plenary session of the university and not, as rumor has it,
appointed by the National Socialist minister. [That appointment would
come later when Heidegger was made Führer of the university, something
he fails to mention. A.S.] It was as a result of pressure from my circle
of colleagues ... that I consented to be a candidate for this election
and agreed to serve. Previously I neither desired nor occupied an
academic office. I never belonged to a political party [This is not
exactly the full story as we know that in his early 20s he was the
president of a right-wing Catholic youth movement. A.S.] nor maintained
a relation, either personal or substantive, with the NSDAP or with
governmental authorities. I accepted the rectorship reluctantly and in
the interest of the university alone.”[1]
Having painted a picture of his reluctant enlistment as rector, the
letter proceeds to describe how its author joined the Nazi party, almost
as an afterthought, in order to facilitate administrative relations with
the university.
“A short while after I took control of the rectorship the district head
presented himself, accompanied by two functionaries in charge of
university matters, to urge me, in accordance with the wishes of the
minister, to join the Party. The minister insisted that in this way my
official relations with the Party and the governing organs would be
simplified, especially since up until then I had no contact with these
organs. After lengthy considerations, I declared myself ready to enter
the Party in the interests of the university, but under the express
condition of refusing to accept a position within the Party or working
on behalf of the Party either during the rectorship or afterward.”[2]
[He fails to explain here why, if his party membership was motivated by
his desire to facilitate his work as rector, he renewed it every year
until 1945, long after his duties as rector were terminated. A. S.]
Finally he presents evidence of his opposition to Nazism after his
resignation as rector in 1934.
“After my resignation from the rectorship it became clear that by
continuing to teach, my opposition to the principles of the National
Socialist world-view would only grow.... Since National Socialist
ideology became increasingly inflexible and increasingly less disposed
to a purely philosophical interpretation, [The "purely philosophical
interpretation" is apparently how Heidegger wishes to convey to the
reader his initial attraction to Nazism, which unfortunately had lost
its metaphysical lustre by 1934. A.S.] the fact that I was active as a
philosopher was itself a sufficient expression of opposition ...
“I also demonstrated publicly my attitude toward the Party by not
participating in its gatherings, by not wearing its regalia, and, as of
1934, by refusing to begin my courses and lectures with the so-called
German greeting [Heil Hitler!]... [We now know from some of the
documentation published by Farias that this last statement is a patent
lie. A.S.]
“There was nothing special about my spiritual resistance during the last
eleven years.”[3]
By presenting himself as accidentally caught up in a form of
"philosophical" Nazism for a brief period that was later transformed
into one of "spiritual resistance" Heidegger tried to build a wall
around his philosophical views. The methods he employed were silence
about much of his activity before and after 1933, evasions, half-truths
and outright lies.
In Heidegger's philosophy, the category of "silence" denotes not simply
the absence of speech, but is itself an active form of being in the
world. Likewise in his practice "silence" has meant the active
suppression of evidence about his Nazi years. Much of Heidegger's
correspondence and other personal documents have been unavailable to
scholars for decades. These documents are kept under lock and key by the
Heidegger family and sympathetic scholars. Furthermore, in the immediate
postwar years, the academic community in Germany had been loathe to
publicize anything related to Heidegger's Nazism. One early scholar who
did much original research in this area, Guido Schneeberger, found that
he could not find a publisher for his book. He eventually published his
findings on his own in 1962.
Nor has Heidegger shied away from out-and-out falsification of his own
history. A well-documented example involves the republication of his
1935 lecture on metaphysics. The 1953 edition of this lecture includes
the infamous depiction of the “inner truth” of Nazism. The full
statement in the 1953 edition reads as follows:
“The stuff which is now being bandied about as the philosophy of
National Socialism—but which has not the least to do with the inner
truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between
global technology and modern man)—is casting its net in these troubled
waters of ‘values' and ‘totalities'.”[4]
The publication of this article caused a bit of consternation in
Germany. Some questioned why Heidegger chose to reprint this article in
this exact form. He responded:
“It would have been easy to drop the aforementioned sentence, along with
other ones you cite, from the printed manuscript. But I did not and I
will keep it there in the future because, for one thing, the sentences
belong historically to the lecture course ...”[5]
We now know that Heidegger did indeed make changes to the 1935 text when
he prepared it for republication. For one thing, the more general "inner
truth and greatness of this movement" is actually the much more specific
“inner truth and greatness of National Socialism” in the original
lecture. When an assistant helping him prepare the galley proofs for
publication noticed this phrase, without any explanatory text, he asked
Heidegger to remove it. Heidegger responded that he would not do so.
Nevertheless, without telling his assistant, Heidegger did change the
text a few weeks later. He removed the direct reference to “National
Socialism” and substituted the general term “this movement.” He also
added the explanatory comment about technology in parenthesis. Heidegger
always maintained until his death that he never altered the text of this
lecture. He reiterated this point in his 1966 Der Spiegel interview. In
a later attempt to finally settle this controversy, a search was made of
the original 1935 manuscript of the lecture. The page containing the
controversial phrase was missing.[6]
The same methods—suppression of evidence, evasions and
falsifications—were employed by the legions of Heidegger interpreters
and apologists. They were, until the publication of Farias epochal book,
largely successful in preventing any critical scrutiny of Heidegger's
ideas and their relation to his politics. An ironic chapter in this
enterprise was played out by the deconstruction theorist, Paul De Man.
De Man did much to publicize Heidegger among the American intelligentsia
in the 1960s. Then there came the posthumous revelation in the late
1980s that De Man's hands had not exactly been clean. He had been a Nazi
collaborator in occupied Belgium during World War II and in that
capacity had written some anti-Semitic articles for a Nazi-sponsored
literary magazine. After De Man's war-time essays were published there
ensued a lively controversy about the relationship between De Man's
war-time activity and his subsequent ideas on deconstruction.[7]
An even more sinister champion of Heidegger was the French translator
Jean Beaufret. Beaufret, a former Resistance fighter, published several
volumes of conversations with Heidegger before his death in 1982. For 35
years he was the most consistent defender of Heidegger in France. His
credentials as a former Resistance fighter lent added weight to his
defense of a former Nazi. Yet it seems that all along Beaufret had a
hidden agenda. He had been for some time a secret sympathizer of the
notorious Holocaust revisionist historian Robert Faurisson. Beaufret,
like Faurisson, denied the existence of the Holocaust and more
specifically of the gas chambers. In a letter sent to Faurisson,
Beaufret was quoted as saying:
“I believe that for my part I have traveled approximately the same path
as you and have been considered suspect for having expressed the same
doubts [concerning the existence of the gas chambers]. Fortunately for
me, this was done orally.”[8]
Beaufret's credentials were never questioned until Faurisson published
his letters in the 1980s.
As part of their public relations campaign Heidegger and his apologists
were particularly keen to enlist the testimony of German Jewish
philosophers who had themselves suffered under the Nazis. To this end
the well-known philosopher and German émigré Hanna Arendt was solicited
to write an essay for an anthology honoring Heidegger on the occasion of
his eightieth birthday. Arendt's essay, “Heidegger at Eighty,” contains
the following cryptic allusion to Heidegger's political activities:
“Now we all know that Heidegger, too, once succumbed to the temptation
to change his ‘residence' and to get involved in the world of human
affairs. As to the world, he was served somewhat worse than Plato
because the tyrant and his victims were not located beyond the sea, but
in his own country. [The reference is to the sojourn Plato undertook to
Syracuse. He hoped to counsel the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysus. After a
relatively brief experiment in seeking to temper Dionysus rule with a
dose of wisdom, Plato returned to Athens, concluding that his attempt to
put his theories into practice had been a failure. A.S.] As to Heidegger
himself, I believe that the matter stands differently. He was still
young enough to learn from the shock of the collision, which after ten
short hectic months thirty-seven years ago drove him back to his
residence, and to settle in his thinking what he had experienced ...
“We who wish to honor the thinkers, even if our own residence lies in
the midst of the world, can hardly help finding it striking and perhaps
exasperating that Plato and Heidegger, when they entered into human
affairs, turned to tyrants and Führers. This should be imputed not just
to the circumstances of the times and even less to preformed character,
but rather to what the French call a déformation professionelle. For the
attraction to the tyrannical can be demonstrated theoretically in many
of the great thinkers (Kant is the great exception). And if this
tendency is not demonstrable in what they did, that is only because very
few of them were prepared to go beyond ‘the faculty of wondering at the
simple' and to ‘accept this wondering as their abode.'”[9]
According to the legal brief presented by Arendt, Heidegger's
unfortunate lapse was due neither to the circumstances in which he
lived, nor to his character and certainly has no echo in his ideas. The
fact that Heidegger became a Nazi, which she euphemistically describes
as, having “succumbed to the temptation to change his ‘residence' and to
get involved in the world of human affairs,” can be ascribed solely to
the occupational hazard of being a philosopher. And if other
philosophers did not follow in these footsteps, that can be explained by
the fact that they did not take thinking as seriously as Heidegger. They
were not prepared to "accept this wondering as their abode."
Arendt's piece is notable for its sheer effrontery. She manages to make
Heidegger into the victim who fell prey to the greatness of his thought.
To say that “He was served worse than Plato” is to imply that he was
tossed about by forces beyond his control, that he bore no
responsibility for his own actions. As if recognizing the absurdity of
her position, Arendt shifts the argument from the body of her text into
a long explanatory footnote. In this note she descends from the lofty
rhetoric of her musings on Plato to some of the concrete issues
surrounding the Heidegger affair. She returns to the theme of
Heidegger's primal innocence and political naiveté, writing that “...
the point of the matter is that Heidegger, like so many other German
intellectuals, Nazis and anti-Nazis, of his generation never read Mein
Kampf.”[10]
Actually there is good evidence to suppose that Heidegger not only did
read Hitler's opus, Mein Kampf, but approved of it. Tom Rockmore has
convincingly argued that in his speech assuming the rectorate of
Freiburg, Heidegger's “multiple allusions to battle are also intended as
a clear allusion to Hitler's notorious view of the struggle for the
realization of the destiny of the German people formulated in Mein
Kampf.”[11]
At a later point in her note, Arendt seeks to turn the tables on
Heidegger's critics by trotting out the legend, manufactured by
Heidegger himself, of his redemptive behavior following his “error.”
“Heidegger himself corrected his own ‘error' more quickly and more
radically than many of those who later sat in judgment over him—he took
considerably greater risks than were usual in German literary and
university life during that period.”[12]
Even in 1971, Hannah Arendt certainly knew better, or should have known
better, than the tale she relates in this embarrassing apologia. She
certainly knew for instance of Heidegger's 1953 republication of his
essay discussing the “inner truth of National Socialism.” She was also
aware, through her friendship with Karl Jaspers, of the deplorable
behavior Heidegger exhibited toward Jaspers and his Jewish wife.
(Heidegger broke off all personal relations with Jaspers and his wife
shortly after he became rector. It was only after the war that Heidegger
tried to repair their personal relationship. Despite an intermittent
exchange of letters, the two philosophers could never repair their
personal relationship as a result of Heidegger's refusal to recant his
support of Nazism.)
The reference to the “considerably greater risks” he took, is, like
Heidegger's "spiritual opposition" to Nazism, an echo of Heidegger's own
postwar fabrications. Why then did Hannah Arendt, a prominent liberal
opponent of fascism, weigh in with such fervor in the attempt to
rehabilitate Heidegger's reputation? One can only guess. Perhaps there
was an element of loyalty to her former teacher, a loyalty that was
strained but not broken by her persecution at the hands of the Nazis and
her years in exile. (At one point she found herself in a Nazi prison.
Later when war broke out, she was trapped in Nazi-occupied France, from
which she managed a daring escape.) The most charitable interpretation
of her grotesque defense of Heidegger is that she turned away from a
truth that she could not face.
When Victor Farias' book hit the stores, it had an electrifying effect
on Heidegger's followers in France. Following the publication of his
Heidegger and Nazism in October of 1987, no less than six studies on the
subject of Heidegger and Nazism were published in the following nine
months. This should not have been a surprise. It was in France, after
all, that Heidegger's influence found its deepest roots in the postwar
period. The French debt to Heidegger extends from the existentialism of
Sartre in the early postwar period to the more recent waves of
structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction associated with
Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Also weighing
in with their own interpretations of Heidegger's relation to Nazism were
the postmodernists Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard.
One could, broadly speaking, break down the type of responses to Farias
into three main categories. The first is the unconditional defense of
Heidegger by his most orthodox keepers of the flame. This group is
represented by Francois Fedier, who, since the death of his teacher
Beaufret, has been the most consistent defender of Heidegger in France.
Fedier continues to deny that Heidegger ever had any problem with Nazism
and simply dismisses the rectorate period as a youthful flirtation that
has no bearing on Heidegger's thought. Fedier's response, in light of
the voluminous material in Farias's book and others published since,
commands little credibility outside of the most ardent devotees of the
Heidegger cult.
The second type of response, represented by Derrida and his followers,
is to acknowledge in general that there is a problem with Heidegger's
philosophy insofar as it allowed him to realize its implications by
becoming a Nazi. But then Derrida tries to turn the tables on Farias by
insisting that the ultimate cause of Heidegger's turn to Nazism was the
fact that Heidegger had not sufficiently emancipated himself by 1933
from pre-Heideggerian ways of thinking, particularly rationalism and
humanism. According to Derrida's tortured logic, once Heidegger
succeeded in liberating himself from "metaphysics" following his post
1935 "turn," his philosophy became the best form of anti-Nazism.
This perverse viewpoint was aptly summed up by one of Derrida's
students, Lacoue-Labarthe, who said that “Nazism is a humanism.” By this
he meant that the philosophical foundations that underpinned the
Enlightenment tradition of humanism had as their consequences the
domination of humanity in the service of an all-encompassing
universal-totalitarianism. Such thinking has become a common stock in
trade of Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe and their followers. The notion that
Nazism is just another expression of Enlightenment universalism has
recently been expressed by the Americans Alan Milchman and Alan
Rosenberg. They write, “This principle of sufficient reason, the basis
of calculative thinking, in its totalizing, and imperialistic, form, can
be seen as the metaphysical underpinning which made the Holocaust
possible.”[13]
From this premise, Lacoue-Labarthe builds a sophisticated defense of
Heidegger. Unlike the orthodox Heideggerians, he concedes that
Heidegger's thought was consistent with his Nazism. However,
Lacoue-Labarthe then seeks to rescue Heidegger by claiming that the
post-1935 Heidegger who had overcome metaphysics and humanism, was free
from any Nazi blemish. This bizarre argument is then carried to its
logical conclusion by other deconstructionists who insist that not only
is the second coming of Heidegger free of the fascist taint, but that
his work for the first time makes it possible for us to “think the
Holocaust.” Lest the reader thinks this is a polemical extravagance,
listen to the words of Milchman and Rosenberg,
“While facets of Heidegger's thinking can provide insight into the
experience of the Extermination, make it possible for us to think
Auschwitz, the Holocaust can also help us to penetrate the opaqueness of
the later Heidegger's thinking.”[14]
Heidegger's accusers on the other hand have been dubbed “totalitarians”
in some of the annals of the deconstructionists. Once more, as we saw in
Arendt's piece, Heidegger was portrayed as a victim of small-minded and
envious enemies. Weighing in on the French debate from the other side of
the Rhine was the long-time Heidegger interpreter Hans-Georg Gadamer. In
a curious echo of Arendt's 1971 essay, “Heidegger at Eighty,” Gadamer
returns to the image of the well-meaning but naïve thinker retreating
from his attempt to educate the prince of Syracuse.[15]
In contrast to the philosophical obscurantism practiced by Derrida and
Lacoue-Labarthe, some voices have been raised in the French discussion
that clearly acknowledge the problem posed by Heidegger's lifelong
relationship to fascism. Most prominent among these is Pierre Bourdieu
who wrote a major study on Heidegger long before Farias' book even
appeared. This book was republished in French in a somewhat revised
format after the controversy elicited by Farias's book broke. The
Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, attempts to ground Heidegger's
philosophy in the historical context from which Heidegger emerged. At
the same time Bourdieu avoids the temptation of simply reducing
Heidegger's thought to a reflex of his historical and class position.
Bourdieu engages in a textual analysis of Heidegger's work in an attempt
to show the intrinsic relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and
his politics. His textual analysis is distinguished from the type of
“immanent” reading of texts characteristic of Derrida and other
deconstructionists that artificially isolate texts from the historical
circumstances in which they were produced.
Perhaps the most curious and damning recent defense of Heidegger came
not from France but from Germany. Ernst Nolte, a historian and long-time
friend of the Heidegger family, published a biography of Heidegger in
1992, Martin Heidegger: Politics and History in His Life and Thought.
Prior to the publication of this book, Nolte was already notorious as a
revisionist historian of the Holocaust and apologist for Nazism. Nolte
has to be given his due as he was much more consistent and far more
intellectually honest than some of the French defenders of Heidegger.
For Nolte, Heidegger's turn to Nazism does not represent any problem at
all. Not only does Nolte insist on the intimate connection between
Heidegger's philosophy and his Nazism, but he also defends Nazism as a
necessary response to the internal and external threat posed by the
Russian Revolution. To Nolte Nazism was a necessary response to
Bolshevism and Heidegger, by turning to Nazism, was merely responding to
the call of historical necessity. Nolte even goes so far as to defend
the Holocaust as a defensive measure made necessary by the hostility of
world-Jewry to the National Socialist regime. Nolte's defense of the
Holocaust is couched in the following rhetorical question:
“Could it be the case that the National Socialists and Hitler carried
out an ‘Asiatic' deed [the Holocaust] only because they considered
themselves and their kind to be potential or actual victims of a
[Soviet] ‘Asiatic' deed. Didn't the ‘Gulag Archipelago' precede
Auschwitz?”[16]
There is a symmetry between the early apologists for Heidegger and
Nolte's effort. Whereas the original defenders sought to minimize
Heidegger's political involvement, then to build a wall between his
politics and his philosophy, Nolte inverts the terms of the argument.
Not only was Heidegger a politically engaged thinker from the start in
Nolte's view, but he made the right choice. He writes, “Insofar as
Heidegger resisted the attempt at the [Communist] solution, he, like
countless others, was historically right.... In committing himself to
the [National Socialist] solution perhaps he became a ‘fascist.' But in
no way did that make him historically wrong from the outset.”[17]
Elsewhere Nolte returns to the story of Heidegger the otherworldly
thinker who became briefly ensnared in political matters that he did not
understand. This fertile image, introduced by Hannah Arendt, is turned
on its head by Nolte. Doubtless he did not wish to let a Jew get in the
last word here. He writes of Heidegger's support for Hitler that, “...it
was not an episodic ‘flight' from the realm of philosophy into everyday
politics but was sustained by a ‘philosophical' hope ... [and was]
essential to his life and thought.”[18]
In other words, Heidegger's thought and his practice were cut from the
same cloth. He was not just a Nazi, but in the words of Thomas Sheehan,
he was “a normal Nazi.”
Finally, mention should be made of the most recent biography of
Heidegger, Rüdiger Safranski's Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil,
first published in English in 1998. This book, unlike Nolte's effusive
support for Heidegger's Nazism, is a retreat back to a more orthodox
defense of Heidegger. Once again, we are presented with a schizophrenic
division between Heidegger the man and the philosopher. The author
diligently presents the known facts of Heidegger's association with
Nazism. It is no longer tenable to deny these facts. At the same time he
provides a largely positive reading of Heidegger's ideas.
While avoiding the excesses and logical gymnastics of Lacoue-Labarthe
and other deconstructionists, Safranski seems incapable of making any
essential judgment about his subject. This deficiency, a common
trademark of modern biography and historiography, is considered an
advantage in today's dismal cultural context. The watchwords here are
“detached” and “balanced.” Despite the minutiae of facts, there is
little understanding. In its own way, this book is another contribution
to the cover-up. In the end, Safranski weighs in on the side of those
who praise Heidegger for making it possible for us to "think Auschwitz."
He writes:
“The fact that Heidegger rejected the idea that he should defend himself
as a potential accomplice to murder does not mean that he shied away
from the challenge ‘to think Auschwitz.' When Heidegger refers to the
perversion of the modern will to power, for which nature and man have
become mere ‘machinations,' he always explicitly or not, also means
Auschwitz. To him, as to Adorno, Auschwitz is a typical crime of the
modern age.”[19]
We cannot let pass commenting on the arrogance of Safranski's
juxtaposition of Heidegger with Theodore Adorno. Adorno despised
Heidegger and had nothing but contempt for Heidegger's “jargon of
authenticity,” which he viewed as a form of philosophical charlatanry
passing itself off as profound insight. This dismal book, despite its
account of the facts, represents but another apology for Heidegger's
involvement with Nazism. It has nevertheless met with largely positive
reviews.
A typical example is Richard Rorty, who wrote, “Heidegger was oblivious
of the torment of his Jewish friends and colleagues, but after a year of
hectic propagandizing and organizing, he did notice that the Nazi
higher-ups were not paying much attention to him. This sufficed to show
him that he had overestimated National Socialism.
“So he retreated to his mountain cabin and, as Safranski nicely says,
traded decisiveness for imperturbability. After World War II, he
explained, imaginatively albeit monomaniacally, that Americanization,
modern technology, the trivialization of life and the utter
forgetfulness of Being (four names, he thought, for the same phenomenon)
were irreversible.”[20]
Once again we meet the quotidian figure of the well-meaning but bruised
thinker who “retreated to his mountain cabin.” At least this time we are
spared another return from Syracuse. We should point out that there is
no basis even in Safranski's book to draw the conclusion that Heidegger,
after “a year of hectic propagandizing and organizing,” his period as
rector at Freiburg, “withdrew'' from the political fray. What Safranski
does say is that over a period of several years following his
resignation as rector, Heidegger gradually loosened his involvement with
Nazism, without cutting them completely until 1945.
It turns out that Heidegger has defenders beyond the legion of French
deconstructionists. Rorty represents a tendency that has emerged in
recent years among American pragmatists, a tendency that has tried to
amalgamate pragmatism with elements of continental philosophy. In his
capacity as something of a public spokesman for American pragmatism,
Rorty has above all sought to enlist the followers of Heidegger to his
cause. In the following section we will briefly examine the
philosophical basis for this curious amalgam of two seemingly disparate
traditions. Yet even the most cursory examination reveals that when
Rorty focuses on the relationship between Heidegger's politics and his
philosophy, we are served up with another version of the by now familiar
theme of Heidegger accidentally stumbling into Nazism.
In an essay that had been revised as recently as 1989, well after
Farias' book was published, Rorty wrote that, “... Heidegger was only
accidentally a Nazi.” He then expanded on this thought in a note with
the following explanation, “His [Heidegger's] thought was, indeed,
essentially anti-democratic. But lots of Germans who were dubious about
democracy and modernity did not become Nazis. Heidegger did because he
was both more of a ruthless opportunist and more of a political
ignoramus than most of the German intellectuals who shared his doubts.”[21]
Although Rorty tosses in some harsh words in Heidegger's direction, to
wit his characterization of Heidegger the “ignoramus” and “opportunist,”
the gist of his presentation is another caricature of the naïve
philosopher getting in over his head. By this time, we have become quite
familiar with this argument. We have seen variations of it in
Heidegger's own apology for his term as rector, in the orthodox
defenders of Heidegger in France, in the reflections of personal friends
such as Hannah Arendt, and in its inverted pro-Nazi form in Nolte's
biography. That this argument can be repeated ad nauseam, in the face of
an ever-mounting array of facts demonstrating that Heidegger's relation
to Nazism was more than incidental, shows that we are dealing here not
with an objective, scholarly judgment, but with bad faith and apologetics.
The debate in France lasted for about two years following the
publication of Farias' book in 1987. Nowadays, very little is heard in
France about Heidegger's politics. In contrast, since the beginning of
the 1990s the discussion has continued unabated in the United States,
Great Britain and other English-speaking countries. In fact, three
separate books have appeared on the subject since 1997. Of these, Julian
Young's book, Heidegger, philosophy, Nazism, is foursquare in the
tradition of the Heideggerian whitewash. In fact, the author announces
his intentions right at the beginning, where he says that, “This work
aims to provide what may be described as a ‘de-Nazification' of
Heidegger.”[22]
Tom Rockmore sums up the flavor of Young's book in a recent review.
Rockmore writes, “In sum, according to Young, despite the many texts to
the contrary (for instance, the comment in the Spiegel-Gesprach, where
Heidegger questions the democratic ideal), the same philosopher turns
out to be more or less like you and me: to wit, a proponent of liberal
democracy. This is to say not a credible but an incredible picture of
Heidegger ...”[23]
It is evident that a quarter century following the death of Heidegger,
the cover-up still continues. At the same time, we do not wish to
suggest that there has been an absence of countervailing tendencies
working to expose Heidegger's politics. In fact, we have seen just this
past year the publication of what may be the most important examination
of Heidegger's philosophy in the context of his politics, namely
Johannes Fritsche's work, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in
Heidegger's Being and Time.
tag gallagher
Ian Pace wrote:
>>But, Ian, he's not talking about anything.
>
>
> I was speaking more generally about Adorno's work.
I was speaking about his definition of "fascism."
>>He says he's talking about "fascism" but he is merely setting up a
>>strawman and dumping his pet peeves onto it.
>
>
> I don't think that type of authoritarian personality is a strawman - those
> traits can certainly exist in conjunction in large degree and do play a
> major part in the mentality of those who are drawn towards fascism.
> Obviously the particular questionnaire here is weighted towards an American
> context.
>
>
>>Frankly, I don't know how "objectively" one can define an "object" which
>>only exists as a subjective collage of dislikes, even if one limits it to
>>Nazi German;but when you stretch this to other European states and to
>>human history in general, you might as well be discussing ether.
>
>
> But that's the point - the authoritarian personality isn't limited to Nazi
> Germany.
But the question is what "fascism" is. I'm not talking about his
notions of "the authoritarian personality." I'm objecting to his
equation of those notions with a definition of "fascism."
>>It's not at all clear which aspects or institutions or Germany 1933-45
>>were "fascist," and what the magic quality is that made the same aspects
>>and institutions "not fascist" during prior regimes -- or else they were
>>all incipiently "fascist" and the word has no relevant meaning. Societies
>>are always going to be authoritarian, if only to decree which side of the
>>street we drive on.
>
>
> There are questions of degree, which surely you'd agree make a vast
> difference? Determining which side of the street to drive on is one thing,
> determining whether Jewish people must wear the yellow star in public
> something else entirely? But then there are also questions of genuine
> democratic participation in decision-making, which are highly
> anti-authoritarian. A certain increased scepticism in the post-war years
> about the behaviour of those governing us may have led to a decrease in the
> authoritarian personality (though maybe less so in the US).
So then "fascism" isn't about authoritarianness. It's about degree
(degree of what?) and application (of what?). (I mostly agree with you
about the US, but I am seeking to find out what "fascism" is and your
reply indicates that people denounce it but have no idea what it is, and
that Adorno, sort of like Bush, uses terms to persecute -- in theory --
anyone he doesn't like.)
>>The question to me is what makes them kill and torture and imprison and
>>regimate and rob and lie and demonize certain groups and attack other
>>countries.
>
>
> Adorno had plenty to say on that, especially in the context of anti-Semitism
> (on which his writings are penetrating, I think). I can copy some bits if
> you like.
Ian, I have immense respect for you, but I can't respect people who
deliberately write as wretchedly as Adorno does. I only entered this
discussion to ask what he meant by "fascism."
>>This seems to me to correspond with Mussolini's Fascism (big F);
>>"corporatism" was supposed to be a way of mitigating class conflict by
>>involving the government as a third party suppressing the other two,
>>ideally in their own best interests. It's a solution that made a lot of
>>sense at the time, given the peculiarities of Italy's industrial
>>development, and it to some degree continues today in the government's
>>large stock holdings in major banks and industries. It also corresponds
>>to the mergers of industry, military and government that we have seen in
>>Japan and the US. Except in the case of Italy, it was not corporations
>>that birthed Fascism.
>
>
> Nor in Germany, though they played a vital role in securing their ultimate
> success in taking power (when a consortium of big business placed a lot of
> pressure on Hindenburg to install Hitler as Chancellor, which he was
> otherwise reluctant to do). There is a small amount of rather simplistic
> monocausal work on the role of big business in making fascism possible;
> however, nowadays even more mainstream historians such as Evans will draw
> attention to how this was certainly a factor if not necessarily the primary
> cause.
Ian, you say "fascism" but I don't know what you're talking about.
Sure, corporations in the US "discipline" employees horribly, and the
employees for the most part accept it unquestioningly. Sure, big
business makes "fascism" (whatever it is) possible, but it makes many
other things possible as well, and almost every other segment of society
also make "fascism" possible. Is this news? Is this telling us
anything? What happened in Nazi Germany is not what happened in Italy.
Why do people like Adorno so often assume that Germany is the paradigm
for discussing isms? Why do people learned in German philosophy and
whatever Adorno is almost systemically ignore Italians?
>
>
>>He argues that Nazism aimed to mobilize individuals into masses, whereas
>>Fascism wanted to empower individuals (everyone can be Mussolini!)
>
>
> But surely only individuals of certain classes?
No, everyone. There was a utopian current to it all. Mussolini never
quite lost his proletarian roots. (He never accumulated money; when he
died his family hadn't a lira.) His rule in Italy was not absolute; in
some regions the local satraps had all the authority. In other areas
(e.g., Emilia) Mussolini imposed a lot of progressive, socialist
programs. The early years of the regime were full of young people
thrilled and excited about a utopian future. Of course eventually, by
the mid 1930s, bureaucratic decay set in and it all became a farce of
infested privilege, and then came the war. Where before the regime had
encouraged debate, now it became authoritarian and people were afraid to
say a word, and Mussolini became a kind of god, and they adopted the
German goose step.
>
> You could say that Marxism wants to mobilize individuals, specifically the
> proletariat, into masses as well; the need for unity and collective action
> is indeed paramount, but (a) in one sense the proletariat already exist as a
> mass because of capitalism (and their whole identity is a product of
> capitalism) and (b) it's only by acting collectively against the ruling
> classes that they have a chance of securing freedom for themselves as
> individuals in a post-capitalist future.
Sure. But this was what Fascism set out to oppose. So if you want to
say that the above paragraph characterizes "fascist" behavior, then in
Italy Fascism was anti-fascist.
The notion of government (political power) in Italy is rather bizarre.
But there is a certain strain continuous from Giolitti through
Mussolini and into the postwar. The anti-Fascist Croce, for example,
was offered the leadership of the Liberal Party, after ww2 just as the
Cold War was starting in Italy and everything was becoming polarized
between the Christian Democrats and the Communists, and Croce said he
would accept leadership only on condition that the Liberal Party have no
other agenda except to facilitate discussion between the other parties!
>
>
>>and foster debate -- in other words, a variation on the Liberalism that
>>Italy's mandarins had been trying to impose on it since unification -- but
>>that everything got screwed up as ww2 approached.
>
>
> Well, I would argue that that's the inevitable consequence of Liberalism.
What? war? or screw-up? "Liberal" had specific meanings in Italy
1900-50 that I doubt it has in Britain or anywhere else.
>>Except at its end and beginning the Fascist Party was, as the cliché goes,
>>a leisure-time organization. One could be a fervent Marxist or Catholic
>>or monarchist or militarist or farmer and still be a Fascist.
>
>
> I find it hard to see how one could be a Marxist and a Fascist, though the
> other categories are compatible. Fascism continues to protect private
> property.
Well, what is hard for you was second nature for Italians. Croce was
one of the people most responsible for introducing Hegel and Marx to
Italy. The film magazine "Cinema" published at the state film school
and headed by Mussolini's son Vittorio was staffed mostly by Communists.
Umberto Barbaro was one of the most prominant profs and critics and
outspokeningly Communist. He was never troubled during the Fascist
regime but when the Christian Democrats took power he and other like him
were quickly discharged and went into exile in eastern Europe.
You keep defining "Fascist" (Italian) as though it were in some way
equivalent to "fascist" (Germany or Adorno). It's not.
>>One of Mussolini's mantras was the rejection of any ideology as part of
>>Fascism. The Party was simply an instrument of political power.
>
>
> And economic (and imperial) power.
No, the Party had no economic power. As for empire, that was a heritage
of the powers that had ruled Italy since 1860 -- a whole succession of
imperial wars (inspired by the example of England and France, whom
Italians wanted to be equal to), along with a functioning police system
Mussolini didn't need to improve. There were factions with the Party
that were militaristic and philosophically believed in the Futurist
doctrines of war and glory as necessary to build strong people, blah
blah blah. There were also factions diammetricaly opposite. Mussolini
himself seemed to oscilate back and forth between them, before becoming
a total asshole.
johnebravo836
david...@aol.com wrote:
[snip]
> There are only myths and
> "narratives" made up by cultures or members of cultures, myths that
> mask -- you guessed it -- underlying political power struggles.
Curiously enough, the relativist thesis that there are only myths made
up by cultures that mask underlying political power struggles is itself
invariably treated as if it were some kind of objective, universal truth
that applies to all cultures. ;)
tag gallagher
"Culture Theory" and the Frankfurters are merely wretchedly written
glosses on, and distortions of, Croce's historicism.
johnebravo836
wielhoban wrote:
[snip]
> It's not directly in his philosophy, which you had asked about, but the
> Nazis' anti-Semitism was also not shared by Heidegger. His teacher
> Husserl, his mistress Hannah Arendt and the poet he admired most,
> Celan, were all Jews. The fact that he removed the dedication to
> Husserl from Sein und Zeit and, as was standard procedure for a
> university rector, barred Jews (i.e. also Husserl) from the Freiburg
> university library, was simply down to his ruthless careerism. I don't
> think it would have made any difference to him whether Jews or Chinese
> were being singled out in that way; he simply wanted to distance
> himself from anything or anyone that might impair his success. That's
> damnable enough, as it is, but it's not anti-Semitism.
That's a rather generous or charitable characterization. A less
charitable way of putting it would be that he cynically jumped on the
anti-semitic bandwagon. Now, the fact that it's a less charitable
interpretation doesn't necessarily make it an unfair interpretation.
That being the case, I fail to see why jumping on an anti-semetic
bandwagon shouldn't be regarded, for all practical purposes, as
anti-semetism too.
wielhoban
johnebravo836 wrote:
> That being the case, I fail to see why jumping on an anti-semetic
> bandwagon shouldn't be regarded, for all practical purposes, as
> anti-semetism too.
In its pragmatic results, of course. I'm talking about thoughts,
motives and the like. (Assuming those are of interest to anyone).
WH
wielhoban
found at the World Socialist Web, I think it was called) a few years
ago. I then delved further into the matter via Farias and others. What
I also did was to read Heidegger in order to decide for myself what
there was to be gained from his writings. Have you done that? It's not
hard to recycle other people's reasoning, and there are enough experts
on either side of the fence. It's not my job or even inclination to
defend Heidegger, but I consider it ridiculous to dismiss his
philosophy entirely because of his involvement with Nazism. Do you
refuse to listen to Gesualdo's music because he murdered his wife and
infant?
WH
johnebravo836
wielhoban wrote:
OK, well here's a hypothetical example: if Hitler's diary were to be
discovered tomorrow, and in it he made it absolutely, unequivocally
clear that he really didn't dislike Jews personally at all, but he
realized it was a *perfect* pretext for getting everybody all worked up
-- in other words, he only cynically used it as a means to acquire, hold
and increase his power -- you wouldn't conclude that he wasn't really an
antisemite after all, would you? :) I sure as hell wouldn't . . .
Frank Berger
"johnebravo836" <johneb...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:420cspF...@individual.net...
I might conclude that he wasn't an anti-semite, but that his persecution of
the Jews for the reasons given might be even MORE reprehensible than had he
believed the Nazi propoganda about Jews.
wielhoban
anti-Semite, that wouldn't change the degree of his guilt remotely. If
you recall the question from Ian that prompted this little Heidegger
discussion, however, it was as to the difference between Heidegger's
ideas and those of the Nazis. In other words, the question of what he
THOUGHT.
WH
Ralph
your straw man that one should be allowed to read Heidegger despite his
biography that has not been opposed in that essay or by me. The simple
fact of the matter is you saw fit to whitewash a figure who was deeply
enmeshed in the Nazi era in both theory and practice. He has been
discredited because of this, across the political spectrum. All your
high minded bloviating about freedom of thought, is as worthless as your
absolution of Heidegger from being an anti-Semite, and your declaration
that Nazism was a mere trifle for him.
johnebravo836
wielhoban wrote:
I certainly wouldn't regard your take on it as unreasonable. However, I
think there's another equally valid way of looking at it: if someone
cynically targets a particular group for extinction, it would make no
difference to me if they were to say "Hey, it's nothing personal". ;)
I'd call them anti-X just the same. But at this point, the difference is
merely over definitions, not about anything with any moral significance.
Ian Pace
"tag gallagher" <t...@sprynet.com> wrote in message
news:Ogzuf.4168$M%4.1...@newsread3.news.atl.earthlink.net...
>
>
> Ian Pace wrote:
>
>>
>> Nor in Germany, though they played a vital role in securing their
>> ultimate success in taking power (when a consortium of big business
>> placed a lot of pressure on Hindenburg to install Hitler as Chancellor,
>> which he was otherwise reluctant to do). There is a small amount of
>> rather simplistic monocausal work on the role of big business in making
>> fascism possible; however, nowadays even more mainstream historians such
>> as Evans will draw attention to how this was certainly a factor if not
>> necessarily the primary cause.
>
> Ian, you say "fascism" but I don't know what you're talking about. Sure,
> corporations in the US "discipline" employees horribly, and the employees
> for the most part accept it unquestioningly. Sure, big business makes
> "fascism" (whatever it is) possible, but it makes many other things
> possible as well, and almost every other segment of society also make
> "fascism" possible. Is this news? Is this telling us anything? What
> happened in Nazi Germany is not what happened in Italy. Why do people like
> Adorno so often assume that Germany is the paradigm for discussing isms?
> Why do people learned in German philosophy and whatever Adorno is almost
> systemically ignore Italians?
>
I was specifically referring to fascism in Nazi Germany and the role of big
business in making that possible - it was maybe unclear from my second
sentence, which could have implied I was generalising from that particular
instance. I suppose I use 'fascism' to cover what went on in both Italy and
Nazi Germany and extrapolate outwards - that's problematic, but can we agree
that 'fascist' is a reasonable term for both regimes?
Ian
Ian Pace
<david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1136320356....@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> Mr. Gallagher has a problem with Adorno's definition of "fascism" and
> specifically with Adorno's failure to come up with one. So do I.
> Unfortunately the problem with Adorno's usage is not specific to a
> single word but to virtually every concept he introduces. The problem
> is basic and general. All of the writing by Adorno and Ian Pace found
> in this thread is literally unintelligible and for the very reason that
> Adorno's usage "fascism" is unintelligible. Unlike Mr. Gallagher, who
> describes his topic and marshals evidence, Adorno starts with an
> idealist concept, "fascism," but he never bothers to define it.
> We're supposed to divine what he means by it, and it's so vague a
> concept as to survive unchanged as it floats through shifting context
> after shifting context. Or so Adorno seems to think.
I think for the most part the term 'fascism' for Adorno refers primarily to
the type of culture and society in Nazi Germany, from which he extrapolates
to find parallels in other societies (including the US).
>
> When Mr. Pace characterizes the terrible fate of a "subjectivity"
> in the modern "capitalist state" as it comes up against a
> "reified objectivity," I can only wonder what he's talking about.
> These terms of Mr. Pace's are like Adorno's concept, "fascism,"
> undefined idealist concepts.
I would have the thought the basic philosophical concepts of subject and
object are reasonably straightforward. Reification (a term coined first by
Gyorgy Lukacs, I think) is the process by which a mere concept becomes
transformed into an immutable object.
> When we read Mr.Pace, we are supposed to
> trust him when he asserts that "subjectivities" are necessarily
> pitted against a "reified objectivity" under certain conditions
> without actually being told what on earth it means for that to happen.
> What does Ian mean when he uses the terms "subjectivity" and
> "objectivity" here?
In the particular context of Adorno's use of the terms, to which I was
referring using a certain shorthand, the issue at stake is the possibilities
for the individual subject to be allowed freedom, expression,
self-determination in the face of the objective conditions that are provided
by capitalist society. Now that should be reasonably clear - I would have
thought that most people can see how individuals' freedom to act is
constrained by external factors (most obviously the need to make enough
money to eat, maybe provide for a family, keep a roof over one's head,
etc.). Adorno looks more deeply into this, especially in the context of
culture, to examine the degree to which the artist is able to convey
subjective expression in their work in the face of the demands that the
culture industry places upon them - particularly in the form of demanding
that the artist work with familiar tropes without mediation to such an
extent as would get in the way of maximum immediacy and transparency. This
would have ruled Bach out of the equation, I believe (and that's the side of
Bach that Adorno explores in 'Bach Defended Against his Devotees', pointing
out (as other Bach scholars, including Lawrence Dreyfus, have pointed out in
different ways since) that Bach doesn't simply inhabit genres and fulfil the
expectations that such genres provide, but actually works against convention
in quite radical ways).
>
> Subjectivity has two meanings. First, subjectivity is the conscious
> state characteristic of the perceiving subject. Subjects perceive
> objects. (These terms are sometimes exchanged in common parlance.
> What we call the "subject" of a film is actually its object.)
> Second, in common parlance we refer to the subjectivity characteristic
> of opinions and tastes: tastes and opinions are "subjective" to
> the extent that they are defined by the unique appetites specific to
> the individual. Turning to Mr. Pace's usage, it's not quite clear
> what he means by a subjectivity. If he simply means "the
> individual," why doesn't he say so? If he's referring to a
> perceiving subject in the sense of the first of my two definitions,
> it's hard to see how a capacity endowed by nature could be altered by
> transformations in the nature of society however much our metaphorical
> "perceptions" are influenced by the culture we live in.
But you have argued a position very close to that in the thread on Mozart
and HIP, that the perceptions of the individual subject are affected by
wider cultural processes. I agree with you very much there, and so would
Adorno (and he also shared some of your views on HIP! :) ). I'm hesitant to
try and summarise Adorno's views (because his ultra-dialectical writing
resists summary, and I have read no more than half of his output, and in
English), but I'd hesitantly suggest that he believes that the possibility
of free subjective expression for most individuals, at least to a much
greater degree than has yet been experienced, is something that has not yet
been achieved, and probably is impossible under late capitalism. That sort
of view is common to many diverse types of Marxists. Adorno also seems to
believe that the modern concept of subjectivity only really originates with
the bourgeois subject in capitalist, post-feudal times (and he thought this
concept hadn't really been developed fully in Tsarist Russia, which informs
his critique of Stravinsky - I'm not saying I agree with him here, though).
> As Ian
> uses the term, "subjectivity" exhibits an ill-defined metaphorical
> extension that ultimately leaves the reader guessing.
As I implied above, "subjectivity" in this context is about the free and
unfettered expression of the individual subject. Will that do?
>
> And what is "reified objectivity" or a "reified objectivity"?
It's a shorthand, as I said (there are plenty of references to this in more
detail in the many quotations I copied). "Reified objectivity" refers to a
particular set of social conditions, with all their concomitant effects upon
individual consciousness, that have become seen to be immutable and
'inevitable' in an 'objective' manner. Adorno (and other very different
Marxist thinkers, not least Brecht) would stress the particularity of these
conditions and how the resulting consciousness is predicated upon such a
particular situation. The essential point is that this state of affairs
shouldn't be seen as something which need necessarily exist for time
immemorial.
> Why is it evil? Why is it an evil that "capitalist society"
> inevitably engenders?
Talking in messianic terms of good and evil doesn't achieve very much. What
is being questioned is whether this is a necessary state of affairs, and
whether the supposedly free individual is really so free after all under
capitalism.
> Mr. Pace never says. He holds his truths to be
> self-evident.
I don't talk in terms of 'evil' and the like. But I don't accept that this
is necessarily the best of all possible worlds, either. Critical examination
of existing conditions and the bases from which they have emerged, is one
way of illuminating how things could be otherwise.
>
> In their original meanings, subjectivity and objectivity are not
> inimical but merely complementary concepts. There are perceiving
> subjects and perceived objects, period. Why is objective information
> or the capacity for objectivity the enemy of the individual (if
> that's what Mr. Pace means by a subjectivity)?
See above. No-one is denying the necessity of objective information or the
capacity for objectivity. What *is* being questioned is whether the
objective conditions provided by capitalism reduce the individual to a mere
cog in the machine.
> Perhaps like so many
> leftists interested in culture today, Mr. Pace himself is an enemy of
> "positivism,"
I certainly am no fan of positivism, that's true. I find it a
backward-looking ideology which only really recognises what has been rather
than what could be.
> which for these cultural critics means a reliance on
> everything from common sense to material evidence to mathematical
> proofs.
'Common sense' is a highly problematic concept, which historically has been
used to signify many extremely different things. To me it smacks of populist
bullying, appealing to empirically observed consensus in a particular
locality and historical moment, extrapolating from that towards universals.
Material evidence: no problem with that, though of course it can be
interpreted in many different ways. Of course, that again only tells of what
has been rather than what could be (though the two things can obviously be
related).
Mathematical proof: I was a mathematician once (my degree is in maths), and
I respect the rigour of mathematical proof highly. But I also know that all
mathematical systems are founded upon a set of axioms that have to be taken
as read.
> According to one very fashionable strain of thought today,
> there are no objective facts or truths.
That's the post-modernist viewpoint, which I have little truck with. The
various writings of Christopher Norris and Terry Eagleton attacking
free-for-all relativism are worth reading on this subject. If you read some
of my posts on new music here, you'd see how little sympathy I have with
many of the manifestations of post-modernism in music today. I'd like to
quote something from Jean-Francois Lyotard at this point:
'Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens
to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local
cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and "retro" clothes in Hong
Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for
eclectic works. By becoming kitsch, art panders to the confusion which
reigns in the "taste" of the patrons. Artists, gallery owners, critics, and
public wallow together in the "anything goes," and the epoch is one of
slackening. But this realism of the "anything goes" is in fact that of
money; in the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful
to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield.
Such realism accommodates all tendencies, just as capital accommodates all
"needs", providing that the tendencies and needs have purchasing power. As
for taste, there is no need to be delicate when one speculates or entertains
oneself.'
Jean-François Lyotard - The Postmodern Condtion: A Report on Knowledge,
translated Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota
Press: Minnesota, 1984 (original text, 1979))
Usually just the first sentence of this is quoted by many post-modernists,
to signify approval of this state of affairs. But Lyotard's position is more
penetrating than that - he points out that in the absence of other criteria
of value, the only arbitrator becomes the marketplace. This is a vital point
wilfully ignored by later post-modernists.
> There are only myths and
> "narratives" made up by cultures or members of cultures, myths that
> mask -- you guessed it -- underlying political power struggles.
> According to this view, modern science is just one more source of myths
> and narratives in "the class struggle."
You're conjoining a variety of different viewpoints into a strawman target.
Obviously the above has something to do with Michel Foucault, who stressed
the extent to which supposedly 'objective' scientific enquiry into such
subjects as medicine, psychiatry, law, sexuality actually reflected
prevailing ideological viewpoints and needs that were anything but neutral.
So that, for example, changing definitions of 'madness' were often framed
for purposes of exclusion of certain groups (including homosexuals), rather
than being dispassionate and scientific. That is a powerful and important
point, I believe. But it doesn't at all imply the ultra-postmodernist
viewpoint of a thinker like Jean Baudrillard, say (whose views you seem to
be presenting in the first clause of the first sentence), or even Lyotard to
some extent, that therefore there is no such thing as science, truth,
rationality, etc.
The sort of view I hold does value science and scientific enquiry, whilst
also being aware of how scientific disciplines can be corrupted by the
external pressures placed upon them. To give one example, the drug company
Apotex sponsored research at the University of Toronto, headed by the
renowned scientist Dr Nancy Oliveiri, into the effectiveness of the drug
deferiprone, which they manufactured. Her research uncovered the fact that
this drug could be very harmful, even life-threatening. Apotex wanted to
stop this research being made public at all costs, so withdrew their funding
from the project and threatened to sue Oliveiri if she went public. After
Oliveiri went ahead and published, there were lots of machinations,
resulting in her (temporarily, thankfully) being demoted from her position
under pressure from Apotex (fuller details can be found in Naomi Klein - 'No
Logo' (London, 2000), p. 100). When there are these sorts of pressures being
brought to bear upon scientists whose research is underwritten by commercial
companies, then one does need to ask how dispassionate and objective some
scientific enquiry really is. The very areas of science that are given
support and are thus able to develop also surely reflects the interests of
those who give financial support to them. This is the sort of scepticism
about some science that I think is important.
> Is modern science what Mr.
> Pace thinks a "subjectivity" is up against in modern "capitalist
> society"?
That sentence looks hysterical - what I will say is that science doesn't
tell us everything. And there are problems with overly 'scientist'
approaches to musicology, for example.
> Is a "reified objectivity" a misplaced trust in modern
> science? Or could Ian simply be taking the side of good old heart
> against bad old brains? It's impossible to tell.
Try reading more of what I write, and you'll see my position is considerably
more nuanced than that. I do believe that there are important things that
aren't so easily rationalisable (which is not to say that they won't ever
be), musical perception being one of them. To rationalise that totally would
require intimate knowledge of every living subject, which is surely
impossible. So I'm not going to dismissive the instinctive, the irrational,
the emotive, and other comparable subjective impulses, no. But the
subjective isn't necessarily at cross purposes with the rational and the
scientific, either: in applying such methods, as any philosopher or
intellectual or scientist knows, there are many subjective decisions to be
made.
Incidentally, have you ever read Adorno's essay 'The Ageing of the New
Music' (1955) (which is included in Adorno - 'Essays on Music', edited
Richard Leppert (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002), pp. 181-202)? That
interesting essay (with which I by no means agree unequivocally) deals with
some of these questions in the context of contemporary music.
>
> You'll find more of the same if you examine the passages from Adorno
> Ian has quoted. Take the first three sentences of the passage from
> Adorno that Ian first quoted (I've numbered the sentences):
>
> '[1]The materialistic transparency of culture has not made it more
> honest, only more vulgar. [2]By relinquishing its own particularity,
> culture has also relinquished the salt of truth, which once consisted
> in its opposition to other particularities. [3]To call it to account
> before a responsibility which it denies is only to confirm cultural
> pomposity."
>
> As they're used in context, the idealist concepts Adorno uses here
> are not sufficiently well defined, and all three of these sentences are
> ultimately unintelligible.
>
> In sentence 1, what does "the material transparency of culture"
> mean? Although I know what the words "material,"
> "transparency," and "culture" mean, there is no way for me to
> gain a concrete notion of what Adorno means by "the material
> transparency of culture." I can see that the transparency is
> metaphorical, but I can't see what it's a metaphor for.
It's probably not a great translation (Wieland - is it clearer in German?).
The sentence refers, I think, to the way in which culture reveals in a
transparent manner the materialist urges in the society from which it
emanates. Now, that is an extravagant claim, of course, but bear in mind
that the extract I cited comes at the end of a medium-length essay in which
these issues are dealt with in more detail (this is the problem with quoting
sections of Adorno out of context).
>
> In sentence 2, I have some vague idea what it would mean for
> "culture" -- itself a vague and overly general concept as Adorno
> uses it -- to relinquish its "particularity," but I don't see
> what "truth" -- a grandiose but also vague and ill-defined concept
> in context -- means in this sentence. How is it that "truth"
> consists in the opposition of one particularity to another? For that
> matter, is Adorno talking about the nature of truth here, or is he
> simply expressing a preference for objects of culture that are unique
> and distinct in an impossibly vague way?
Adorno is precisely opposing the sort of relativist viewpoint you outlined
above. He does believe that some notion of 'truth' exists and such a thing
can be attained in culture (and as you know, that sort of thinking has a
long history - try Keats for example). Adorno is speaking of the ability of
culture (in the form of cultural products) to express something that is
particular and individual rather than simply reflecting more general
concerns that appertain at the time of its creation - i.e. contrasting the
subjective impulse with what he elsewhere calls 'passive art' which merely
conveys impersonal beliefs (which he would have called 'ideological') that
are current, in an unmediated fashion. In response to your last question, he
certainly is 'expressing a preference for objects of culture that are unique
and distinct', but going further than that, expressing a preference for
those within such a category which illuminate something that otherwise is
not apparent.
>
> And so it goes through sentence after sentence.
Once you get the hang of the basic concepts, it's not that difficult (though
some of the translations don't facilitate things). Adorno's work is very
compressed and self-reflexive in the extreme. Every argument he presents is
counterposed against the opposite it implies (that is the nature of
dialectical thinking - but few follow it through to such an extent as
Adorno) and forms of intricate mediation occur within a few sentences.
That's why it can be difficult to read and needs concentration - you'll
almost never find a simple statement followed by plain fleshing-out, which
can be a lot easier to read. The consistent inner dialectic in Adorno's
writing is relentless and one of the reasons why it resists summarisation.
> Of course, as we read
> Ian or Adorno we are vaguely aware that "capitalism" has done
> something bad to "culture." How we're not really told. How it
> could we're not really told.
Do you not believe that capitalism constitutes a particular social and
economic system? And if you do, do you not think it's valid to examine the
effects of such a system on cultural production and its possibility? That's
what Adorno does - his work is very critical in this respect, certainly,
which one would expect from a Marxist (which I do believe Adorno was, albeit
an unorthodox one by the standards of his time - and one whose particular
brand of Marxism I do have some issues with as well). But, in a manner that
is absolutely true to Marx, Adorno is never implying that somehow things
were better before capitalism came along (and he's harshly critical of
neo-feudalists or neo-primivitists who express this sort of ideological
viewpoint either in their thinking of their art); I believe he does see
capitalism as a necessary stage in societal evolution (as do I, and as most
definitely did Marx), but believes this isn't the endpoint of history.
> And what has been done we're only
> told using grandiose abstract and idealist concepts like subjectivity,
> objectivity, particularity, and truth.
Those are important concepts which shouldn't be that difficult.
>
> In some late 19th- and 20th-century poetry, we are asked to do without
> the relationship of words to concrete particulars, to relate them only
> to one another, idealist concept to idealist concept.
So many of the poets' spin goes - but do you think almost anyone ever really
achieved that? Most poets continued to use words that do refer to external
phenomena in a reasonably concrete fashion, and can surely not have expected
the reader to make themselves totally oblivious to that fact.
> In a poem by
> Mallarme, the poet uses a word like "rose" or "absence" the way
> Ian and Adorno uses terms like subjectivity, objectivity, truth,
> particularity, and "capitalist socieity." Mallarme observed that a
> rose in his poem was not the rose found in any bouquet: in his poems
> the word was stripped to a kind of ideal general core.
But which still brings the aura of some type of rose to the reader.
> In a poem, we
> don't necessarily have to have a concrete conception of what a fancy
> word like "truth" means in order to appreciate the play of words
> and meanings constituting the poem.
Do you think Keats thought that?
> But Ian Pace and Adorno aren't
> writing symbolist poems. Although Ian and Adorno reduce words to the
> vague state of idealist concepts -- truth, subjectivity, objectivity,
> particularity -- they still seem to think they're talking about the
> real world in its concrete particularity. They aren't. Not
> intelligibly.
These concepts are very real, at least to me. I see their manifestation, in
various forms, all around me.
>
> A physicist named Sokal has written a book in which he examines the use
> of terms borrowed from mathematics and the hard sciences by certain
> fashionable, mostly French, critics of culture including Lacan, Julia
> Kristeva, Foucault, Guattari, et al. Sokal is readily able to
> demonstrate that these terms as used by these writers are devoid of
> meaning, incoherent non-sense. The title of his book is Fashionable
> Nonsense.
I am perfectly well aware of the original Sokal paper, and have read it. It
tells one mostly about the rather superficial interpretations one gets from
readers of the academic periodical 'Social Text', not much more. I haven't
read all of 'Fashionable Nonsense', but what I have seems to suggest wild
extrapolation from this that hardly befits the standards of scientific
rigour that Sokal himself seems to want to insist upon.
But you are bringing up the work of Lacan, Kristeva, Foucalt, Guattari - are
you aware of quite how different these thinkers are to Adorno?
> Most of what Mr. Pace has written in this thread and most of
> what he quotes from Adorno could serve Sokal as further examples of the
> kind of "fashionable nonsense" he discusses in his book: literally
> as non-sense, language that is at bottom unintelligible.
>
It's not unintelligible at all, and many very intelligent people have not
found it as such. Once more, I would suggest you read some quantity of it in
more detail before engaging in such contemptuous dismissals.
Ian
tag gallagher
No, we can't, unless you tell what it was that went on in both countries
that constitutes this currently undefined ism. And even then, it might
be more misleading that useful, as up will pop Adorno (and you) saying
all sorts of things that aren't applicable to Italy, and also because
you'd probably agree that Japan, Russia, China, the US, England and at
least half the other states in the world are or were fascist, and that
Adorno himself has fascist tendencies, in which case the term still
wouldn't be too clear. Did I misunderstand you, or did you not agree
that there was far more similarity between Nazi Germany and Stalinist
Russia than between either of them and Fascist Italy?
In any case, we can still join hands to call someone "a fascist pig."
Not much doubt what that means.
Ian Pace
>
>
> Ian Pace wrote:
>
>>>But, Ian, he's not talking about anything.
>>
>>
>> I was speaking more generally about Adorno's work.
>
> I was speaking about his definition of "fascism."
>
>
>
>>>He says he's talking about "fascism" but he is merely setting up a
>>>strawman and dumping his pet peeves onto it.
>>
>>
>> I don't think that type of authoritarian personality is a strawman -
>> those traits can certainly exist in conjunction in large degree and do
>> play a major part in the mentality of those who are drawn towards
>> fascism. Obviously the particular questionnaire here is weighted towards
>> an American context.
>>
>>
>>>Frankly, I don't know how "objectively" one can define an "object" which
>>>only exists as a subjective collage of dislikes, even if one limits it to
>>>Nazi German;but when you stretch this to other European states and to
>>>human history in general, you might as well be discussing ether.
>>
>>
>> But that's the point - the authoritarian personality isn't limited to
>> Nazi Germany.
>
> But the question is what "fascism" is. I'm not talking about his notions
> of "the authoritarian personality." I'm objecting to his equation of
> those notions with a definition of "fascism."
OK, making that equation is questionable, I agree. As I said in my earlier
short reply, I think Adorno's point of reference is Nazi Germany, and he's
looking to find comparable elements in American society (after all, that's
why he was commissioned to do the study).
>
>
>>>It's not at all clear which aspects or institutions or Germany 1933-45
>>>were "fascist," and what the magic quality is that made the same aspects
>>>and institutions "not fascist" during prior regimes -- or else they were
>>>all incipiently "fascist" and the word has no relevant meaning.
>>>Societies are always going to be authoritarian, if only to decree which
>>>side of the street we drive on.
>>
>>
>> There are questions of degree, which surely you'd agree make a vast
>> difference? Determining which side of the street to drive on is one
>> thing, determining whether Jewish people must wear the yellow star in
>> public something else entirely? But then there are also questions of
>> genuine democratic participation in decision-making, which are highly
>> anti-authoritarian. A certain increased scepticism in the post-war years
>> about the behaviour of those governing us may have led to a decrease in
>> the authoritarian personality (though maybe less so in the US).
>
> So then "fascism" isn't about authoritarianness. It's about degree
> (degree of what?) and application (of what?). (I mostly agree with you
> about the US, but I am seeking to find out what "fascism" is and your
> reply indicates that people denounce it but have no idea what it is, and
> that Adorno, sort of like Bush, uses terms to persecute -- in theory --
> anyone he doesn't like.)
Well, do bear in mind that Adorno was haunted by Nazi Germany throughout his
life, and that seemed to serve as his yardstick. It is obsessive, certainly,
though I'd be hard pressed to criticise someone for that, especially someone
who would have gone to the gas chambers themselves if they'd remained in
their country of birth. I can see why he was hyper-sensitive to any
trappings of that in all things he encountered. I think in essence he was
defining as 'fascist' all those aspects of culture and personality that
played a part in facilitating the Nazis terrible reign.
>
>
>>>The question to me is what makes them kill and torture and imprison and
>>>regimate and rob and lie and demonize certain groups and attack other
>>>countries.
>>
>>
>> Adorno had plenty to say on that, especially in the context of
>> anti-Semitism (on which his writings are penetrating, I think). I can
>> copy some bits if you like.
>
> Ian, I have immense respect for you, but I can't respect people who
> deliberately write as wretchedly as Adorno does. I only entered this
> discussion to ask what he meant by "fascism."
I respect what you say, and I think this discussion is very important (and
overall the thread seems a productive one, albeit somewhat OT). I was just
pointing out that Adorno does enter into more specific discussions of the
very question you raise in other writings.
>
>>>This seems to me to correspond with Mussolini's Fascism (big F);
>>>"corporatism" was supposed to be a way of mitigating class conflict by
>>>involving the government as a third party suppressing the other two,
>>>ideally in their own best interests. It's a solution that made a lot of
>>>sense at the time, given the peculiarities of Italy's industrial
>>>development, and it to some degree continues today in the government's
>>>large stock holdings in major banks and industries. It also corresponds
>>>to the mergers of industry, military and government that we have seen in
>>>Japan and the US. Except in the case of Italy, it was not corporations
>>>that birthed Fascism.
>>
>>
>> Nor in Germany, though they played a vital role in securing their
>> ultimate success in taking power (when a consortium of big business
>> placed a lot of pressure on Hindenburg to install Hitler as Chancellor,
>> which he was otherwise reluctant to do). There is a small amount of
>> rather simplistic monocausal work on the role of big business in making
>> fascism possible; however, nowadays even more mainstream historians such
>> as Evans will draw attention to how this was certainly a factor if not
>> necessarily the primary cause.
>
> Ian, you say "fascism" but I don't know what you're talking about.
As I said in the short reply, I'm specifically referring to Nazi Germany
here. Your point about how studies of fascism are overly concentrated in
Germany and not enough on fascist Italy is an important one, certainly. One
might compare the amount of scholarly work on either, the ratio is
disproportionately weighted in terms of the former. I'd suggest that there's
also a vast amount yet to be investigated about the society, culture, and
relations between different strata in Stalin's Russia and other communist
regimes, imperial Britain, France, Belgium, in the US, etc.
> Sure, corporations in the US "discipline" employees horribly, and the
> employees for the most part accept it unquestioningly. Sure, big business
> makes "fascism" (whatever it is) possible, but it makes many other things
> possible as well, and almost every other segment of society also make
> "fascism" possible. Is this news? Is this telling us anything?
No, but in this context I was speaking of crucial events in the context of
the Nazis.
> What happened in Nazi Germany is not what happened in Italy. Why do people
> like Adorno so often assume that Germany is the paradigm for discussing
> isms? Why do people learned in German philosophy and whatever Adorno is
> almost systemically ignore Italians?
Simply that a lot more work has been done on it, as I said above. Obviously
Adorno was from Germany himself, and was half-Jewish, so these issues had a
particular immediacy for him. You're absolutely right to say fascist Italy
should be looked at more often - the lack of quite such direct
intentionality in the Holocaust (which isn't to excuse Mussolini's regime
from anti-semitism and complicity in the Holocaust itself ) perhaps makes
people think that Italian fascism isn't quite as pressing a concern?
>
>>
>>>He argues that Nazism aimed to mobilize individuals into masses, whereas
>>>Fascism wanted to empower individuals (everyone can be Mussolini!)
>>
>>
>> But surely only individuals of certain classes?
>
> No, everyone. There was a utopian current to it all. Mussolini never
> quite lost his proletarian roots. (He never accumulated money; when he
> died his family hadn't a lira.) His rule in Italy was not absolute; in
> some regions the local satraps had all the authority. In other areas
> (e.g., Emilia) Mussolini imposed a lot of progressive, socialist programs.
> The early years of the regime were full of young people thrilled and
> excited about a utopian future.
Well, I don't want to get to deep into this subject, but I do believe that
supposedly 'socialist' policies enacted on a purely national basis (which
includes Stalin's 'socialism in one country') are flawed from the outset,
and don't really satisfy my definition of socialism (which is nothing if not
international). Of course Mussolini's background was in a type of
syndicalist movement that emerged from socialists, though I would say in a
truly degenerate form.
> Of course eventually, by the mid 1930s, bureaucratic decay set in and it
> all became a farce of infested privilege, and then came the war. Where
> before the regime had encouraged debate, now it became authoritarian and
> people were afraid to say a word, and Mussolini became a kind of god, and
> they adopted the German goose step.
>
>
>>
>> You could say that Marxism wants to mobilize individuals, specifically
>> the proletariat, into masses as well; the need for unity and collective
>> action is indeed paramount, but (a) in one sense the proletariat already
>> exist as a mass because of capitalism (and their whole identity is a
>> product of capitalism) and (b) it's only by acting collectively against
>> the ruling classes that they have a chance of securing freedom for
>> themselves as individuals in a post-capitalist future.
>
> Sure. But this was what Fascism set out to oppose. So if you want to say
> that the above paragraph characterizes "fascist" behavior, then in Italy
> Fascism was anti-fascist.
I'm not saying that above paragraph does characterise "fascist" behaviour at
all. Also, I do believe that an acceptance of the necessity of collective
discipline towards the furtherance of socialist ends is not at all the same
as the authoritarian personality (in the former case, it is a means to an
end, in the latter, it is an end in itself).
> The notion of government (political power) in Italy is rather bizarre. But
> there is a certain strain continuous from Giolitti through Mussolini and
> into the postwar. The anti-Fascist Croce, for example, was offered the
> leadership of the Liberal Party, after ww2 just as the Cold War was
> starting in Italy and everything was becoming polarized between the
> Christian Democrats and the Communists, and Croce said he would accept
> leadership only on condition that the Liberal Party have no other agenda
> except to facilitate discussion between the other parties!
Interesting!
>>
>>>and foster debate -- in other words, a variation on the Liberalism that
>>>Italy's mandarins had been trying to impose on it since unification --
>>>but that everything got screwed up as ww2 approached.
>>
>>
>> Well, I would argue that that's the inevitable consequence of Liberalism.
>
> What? war? or screw-up? "Liberal" had specific meanings in Italy 1900-50
> that I doubt it has in Britain or anywhere else.
What I'm saying is that Liberalism will inevitably become authoritarian when
the going gets tough. By 'Liberalism' I mean a type of politics that
essentially accepts the rule of capital whilst trying to maintain some
cosmetic freedoms (in terms of individual morality, freedom of speech, civil
rights, etc.) for the individual. But Liberalism requires the primacy of the
former, I believe, and will easily jettison the latter when it becomes
necessary in order to protect the former. That is an inherent contradiction
in liberal capitalism.
>
>
>>>Except at its end and beginning the Fascist Party was, as the cliché
>>>goes, a leisure-time organization. One could be a fervent Marxist or
>>>Catholic or monarchist or militarist or farmer and still be a Fascist.
>>
>>
>> I find it hard to see how one could be a Marxist and a Fascist, though
>> the other categories are compatible. Fascism continues to protect private
>> property.
>
> Well, what is hard for you was second nature for Italians. Croce was one
> of the people most responsible for introducing Hegel and Marx to Italy.
But Croce was an anti-fascist?
> The film magazine "Cinema" published at the state film school and headed
> by Mussolini's son Vittorio was staffed mostly by Communists. Umberto
> Barbaro was one of the most prominant profs and critics and outspokeningly
> Communist. He was never troubled during the Fascist regime but when the
> Christian Democrats took power he and other like him were quickly
> discharged and went into exile in eastern Europe.
Well, there's plenty of evidence of former communists turning towards the
far right, so this doesn't surprise me. One of the worst recent examples of
this is to be found in the decline of the group 'Socialism ou Barbarie' in
France (worth referencing in the context of the Chomsky-Faurisson affair).
But I do believe the two positions to be incompatible simultaneously.
>
> You keep defining "Fascist" (Italian) as though it were in some way
> equivalent to "fascist" (Germany or Adorno). It's not.
No, certainly, but don't you think there are some links, not least in terms
of the cult of power and strength and the leader?
>
>
>>>One of Mussolini's mantras was the rejection of any ideology as part of
>>>Fascism. The Party was simply an instrument of political power.
>>
>>
>> And economic (and imperial) power.
>
> No, the Party had no economic power.
I mean that the Party didn't act against the interests of capital.
> As for empire, that was a heritage of the powers that had ruled Italy
> since 1860 -- a whole succession of imperial wars (inspired by the example
> of England and France, whom Italians wanted to be equal to),
I was referring to the conquest of Ethiopia/Abyssinia. Of course this was
chickenfeed compared to the British and French empires.
> along with a functioning police system Mussolini didn't need to improve.
> There were factions with the Party that were militaristic and
> philosophically believed in the Futurist doctrines of war and glory as
> necessary to build strong people, blah blah blah. There were also
> factions diammetricaly opposite. Mussolini himself seemed to oscilate
> back and forth between them, before becoming a total asshole.
>
This is the aspect that particularly interests me, though - don't you think
those doctrines of war and glory, whether espoused by Futurists or others,
played a significant part in the type of collective consciousness that
sustained Mussolini's rule?
Ian
Ian Pace
OK, you want to maintain a more specific definition of 'fascism' referring
in particular to Mussolini's Italy. That's fine and probably useful, I was
using perhaps a more common generic use of the term.
> And even then, it might be more misleading that useful, as up will pop
> Adorno (and you) saying all sorts of things that aren't applicable to
> Italy, and also because you'd probably agree that Japan, Russia, China,
> the US, England and at least half the other states in the world are or
> were fascist,
As I said, it is a matter of degree. If one uses 'fascist' to refer to the
types of society in Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy collectively (whilst
taking account of their differences), one can indeed find elements of those
societies in all the above models. But how much so is surely a significant
issue?
> and that Adorno himself has fascist tendencies,
I don't accept that.
> in which case the term still wouldn't be too clear. Did I misunderstand
> you, or did you not agree that there was far more similarity between Nazi
> Germany and Stalinist Russia than between either of them and Fascist
> Italy?
No, I don't agree with that. Stalinist Russia was a different type of
society entirely. The differences have much to do with the degree of active
(specifically, that not engendered primarily by fear) consent from below,
though of course this is a more complicated issue in Nazi Germany than
sometimes previously thought. Worth bearing in mind that in November 1932
(when elections were genuinely free) the combined vote for the Communists
and Social Democrats was 13.1 million as against the Nazi's 11.7 million.
And in more recent times, Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives never won more
than about 42% of the popular vote, as against nearly all the remainder
going to the centre party (of varying names, Liberal, SDP, Liberal
Democrats) and Labour, who always had more in common with each other than
with the Conservatives.
Ian
tag gallagher
Ian Pace wrote:
> In the particular context of Adorno's use of the terms, to which I was
> referring using a certain shorthand, the issue at stake is the possibilities
> for the individual subject to be allowed freedom, expression,
> self-determination in the face of the objective conditions that are provided
> by capitalist society. Now that should be reasonably clear - I would have
> thought that most people can see how individuals' freedom to act is
> constrained by external factors (most obviously the need to make enough
> money to eat, maybe provide for a family, keep a roof over one's head,
> etc.).
Indeed. But such is the universal human condition, and as such we are
all of us subjected to fascism, no? The question unaddressed here is in
what way the fascism existing today in, say, Sweden can be identified
with the fascism exiting in German in 1943. As previously pointed out,
anything can be connected to anything.
Adorno looks more deeply into this, especially in the context of
> culture, to examine the degree to which the artist is able to convey
> subjective expression in their work in the face of the demands that the
> culture industry places upon them - particularly in the form of demanding
> that the artist work with familiar tropes without mediation to such an
> extent as would get in the way of maximum immediacy and transparency. This
> would have ruled Bach out of the equation, I believe (and that's the side of
> Bach that Adorno explores in 'Bach Defended Against his Devotees', pointing
> out (as other Bach scholars, including Lawrence Dreyfus, have pointed out in
> different ways since) that Bach doesn't simply inhabit genres and fulfil the
> expectations that such genres provide, but actually works against convention
> in quite radical ways).
I have found in film criticism that this observation occurs INVARIABLY
when the critic has absolutely nothing else to say on the artist's
behalf. Surely originality and authenticity are not to be found by
"working" "against" convention (even in quite radical ways), because to
do so is merely another way of being conventional.
The fact of the matter is that every crucifixion and nativity scene
screams out against Adorno's half-assed idiocy that an artist is
(fascistically!) stunted by existing tropes! He'd have to condemn a
thousand years of ancient Greek theater as well.
> As I implied above, "subjectivity" in this context is about the free and
> unfettered expression of the individual subject.
Not to be found on this earth, outside the penultimate episode of
Rossellini's Francesco giullare di Dio.
> "Reified objectivity"
The essential point is that this state of affairs
> shouldn't be seen as something which need necessarily exist for time
> immemorial.
Like in Anglo-American academia.
Critical examination
> of existing conditions and the bases from which they have emerged, is one
> way of illuminating how things could be otherwise.
But as soon as you start "reifying" terms like "fascism" or "liberal,"
you screw yourself.
SG
tag gallagher wrote:
> Ian Pace wrote:
> But as soon as you start "reifying" terms like "fascism" or "liberal,"
> you screw yourself.
Now one has to acknowledge this is cruel and unusual punishment indeed.
regards,
SG
tag gallagher
Ian Pace wrote:
> Well, do bear in mind that Adorno was haunted by Nazi Germany throughout his
> life, and that seemed to serve as his yardstick. It is obsessive, certainly,
> though I'd be hard pressed to criticise someone for that, especially someone
> who would have gone to the gas chambers themselves if they'd remained in
> their country of birth. I can see why he was hyper-sensitive to any
> trappings of that in all things he encountered. I think in essence he was
> defining as 'fascist' all those aspects of culture and personality that
> played a part in facilitating the Nazis terrible reign.
I don't doubt his sincerity.
> I respect what you say, and I think this discussion is very important (and
> overall the thread seems a productive one, albeit somewhat OT). I was just
> pointing out that Adorno does enter into more specific discussions of the
> very question you raise in other writings.
I know: recall that I started out by confessing I can't do justice to
Adorno because I don't find the effort of reading him to be worth it,
for me. Since this is r.m.c.r., I was trying to think of some sort
analogy between Adorno's prose and piano music, like three or four
Thalberg pieces played simultaneously.
> As I said in the short reply, I'm specifically referring to Nazi Germany
> here. Your point about how studies of fascism are overly concentrated in
> Germany and not enough on fascist Italy is an important one, certainly. One
> might compare the amount of scholarly work on either, the ratio is
> disproportionately weighted in terms of the former. I'd suggest that there's
> also a vast amount yet to be investigated about the society, culture, and
> relations between different strata in Stalin's Russia and other communist
> regimes, imperial Britain, France, Belgium, in the US, etc.
Yes, I agree. But we need to decide what we're talking about, what
we're investigating. Just labelling things fascist doesn't get us
anywhere. (An alternate myth about the Garden of Paradise is that we
fell not when Adam bit the apple but when Eve started naming things.)
When I set out trying to read up on Italian Fascism, I found book after
book that told me Fascism was bad bad bad and Mussolini was barf, with a
zillion examples of bad barf. The books didn't tell me anything about
why his regime lasted twenty years with so little opposition. And the
most obvious conclusion I drew from this is that almost everytime I read
a word about Mussolini or (Italian) Fascism, I find the writer has been
drugged by the word "fascism" just the same way so much rhetoric in
Bush's America is drugged by a word like "democracy," and that people
accept these labels as the definitive answers to all questions. I don't
feel Adorno's work has shown me why Hitler, for example, was so loved
and exerised so much charm; instead he just keeps protesting.
>>Sure, corporations in the US "discipline" employees horribly, and the
>>employees for the most part accept it unquestioningly. Sure, big business
>>makes "fascism" (whatever it is) possible, but it makes many other things
>>possible as well, and almost every other segment of society also make
>>"fascism" possible. Is this news? Is this telling us anything?
>
>
> No, but in this context I was speaking of crucial events in the context of
> the Nazis.
But on what basis do you decide which events are crucial? Do you mean
crucial to your thesis? Is your thesis, then, dictating your selection
of events?
> Simply that a lot more work has been done on it, as I said above. Obviously
> Adorno was from Germany himself, and was half-Jewish, so these issues had a
> particular immediacy for him. You're absolutely right to say fascist Italy
> should be looked at more often - the lack of quite such direct
> intentionality in the Holocaust (which isn't to excuse Mussolini's regime
> from anti-semitism and complicity in the Holocaust itself ) perhaps makes
> people think that Italian fascism isn't quite as pressing a concern?
I think it's simply cultural specialization. People who spend their
lives learning German and reading German philosophers are unlikely to
give comparable attention even to French things, let alone Italian.
Also, Croce is out of style in academia, especially in Italy (but he's
coming back). It is odd, however, that our self-designated left so
totally ignores Croce's historicism as the root of all the postmodernist
jingle-jangle, or that the political people ignore that it was the
Italian Communist Party that set the tune for Eurocommunism during most
of the decades following ww2.
By the way, it's often argued that Mussolini made the single greatest
contribution to defeating Hitler, because his screwed-up invasion of
Greece fatally delayed Hitler's invasion of Russia.
>
> I'm not saying that above paragraph does characterise "fascist" behaviour at
> all. Also, I do believe that an acceptance of the necessity of collective
> discipline towards the furtherance of socialist ends is not at all the same
> as the authoritarian personality (in the former case, it is a means to an
> end, in the latter, it is an end in itself).
I grasp what you're saying, and agree, but in pratice means and ends
become indistinguishable often.
>
> What I'm saying is that Liberalism will inevitably become authoritarian when
> the going gets tough.
It didn't during the huge factory strikes in Italy in 1920 (?). Giolitti
simply folded his hands and let things take their course while industry
screamed protests.
By 'Liberalism' I mean a type of politics that
> essentially accepts the rule of capital whilst trying to maintain some
> cosmetic freedoms (in terms of individual morality, freedom of speech, civil
> rights, etc.) for the individual.
As I said, this doesn't correspond to Italy. Ian, Croce once said that
the task of the historian is to figure our what Socrates meant by "wise."
But Liberalism requires the primacy of the
> former, I believe, and will easily jettison the latter when it becomes
> necessary in order to protect the former.
Naturally Italy did it all wrong and didn't follow your formula.
>>Well, what is hard for you was second nature for Italians. Croce was one
>>of the people most responsible for introducing Hegel and Marx to Italy.
>
>
> But Croce was an anti-fascist?
Yes. And he didn't shut up the whole time. People said Mussolini let
him write and talk to show how fair Fascism was.
>
> Well, there's plenty of evidence of former communists turning towards the
> far right, so this doesn't surprise me. One of the worst recent examples of
> this is to be found in the decline of the group 'Socialism ou Barbarie' in
> France (worth referencing in the context of the Chomsky-Faurisson affair).
> But I do believe the two positions to be incompatible simultaneously.
No, you missed the point. They didn't turn right. They were Communists
WHILE they were Fascists and they were toward the far left. Fascism was
a mass party, an umbrella party, it made no distinctions between right
and left, it didn't have anything to do with any of that. See, you just
won't stop thinking that Fascism was fascist. Reification! Bad!
>
>>You keep defining "Fascist" (Italian) as though it were in some way
>>equivalent to "fascist" (Germany or Adorno). It's not.
>
>
> No, certainly, but don't you think there are some links, not least in terms
> of the cult of power and strength and the leader?
In fact, Hitler consciously tried to copy Mussolini in this. But what
was Mussolini modeling himself on, if not a few thousands years of
Italian paintings and ancient sculpture? Mussolini by trade was a
journalist, he promoted himself. So did Napoleon. So did all those
Roman generals of yore, and Alexander, ad nauseam. Why privilege Adorno?
>
> I mean that the Party didn't act against the interests of capital.
Well, it did of course do a lot to regulate capital. And Mussolini's
insistence on maintaining the lira at an artificially high value (out of
vanity) had crushing effects on Italian industry. So one would have to
say that it is very likely that once again he screwed up and didn't
follow your formula of how a fascist is supposed to behave.
>>As for empire, that was a heritage of the powers that had ruled Italy
>>since 1860 -- a whole succession of imperial wars (inspired by the example
>>of England and France, whom Italians wanted to be equal to),
>
>
> I was referring to the conquest of Ethiopia/Abyssinia. Of course this was
> chickenfeed compared to the British and French empires.
You call it chickenfeed and ask in the same breath why Brits don't spend
more time studying Italy? It wasn't chickfeed; it was deep shit. That
was the problem. By the time Hitler raised the curtain on ww2, the
Italian military was totally exhausted by Ethiopia and Spain. Italy had
a history of colonial involvement in that area; the greatest blot on
Italian history was a massacre their troops suffered there in the 1890s.
The unification of Italy in 1860 came as a climax of efforts to
involve Italians in big-power politics; and so the process went on. A
great country deserved an empire in the 1860s, 70s, etc. Glory was
mandatory, not an option. No doubt Ethiopia was Mussolini's big
mistake. It's what ended what I called the utopian phase of Fascism, I
think. But yes, he was motivated by envy of Britain and France and by
Italians being looked down on. He went into Greece for the same reason;
he wanted to show Hitler that Italians were as good as Germans.
>
> This is the aspect that particularly interests me, though - don't you think
> those doctrines of war and glory, whether espoused by Futurists or others,
> played a significant part in the type of collective consciousness that
> sustained Mussolini's rule?
No doubt. It's also what got Italy into ww1. But one can argue that
(a) collective consciousness was less important in Italy than mandarin
consciousness: the masses simply did not play a role anywhere comparable
to their numbers; much of Italy was third-world-ish; the literate class
was tiny; for the most part the Communists and Fascists and Catholics
and Liberals and republcans and monarchists went to the same schools,
drank at the same bars, wrote for newspapers sold at the same kiosks,
maybe used the same whores. And (b) that most of these mandarins
opposed Mussolini's wars -- and it was this long opposition that led to
his removal in 1943.
Some say Mussolini gagged on his own self-generated publicity, and had
to go to war to save face - another case of labels ruling us.
tag gallagher
Ian Pace wrote:
>>No, we can't, unless you tell what it was that went on in both countries
>>that constitutes this currently undefined ism.
>
>
> OK, you want to maintain a more specific definition of 'fascism' referring
> in particular to Mussolini's Italy. That's fine and probably useful, I was
> using perhaps a more common generic use of the term.
Yes. My point is that you hang yourself by believing in labels. Fascism
wasn't fascist. It wasn't a variation of the same thing. It was
something different.
> As I said, it is a matter of degree. If one uses 'fascist' to refer to the
> types of society in Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy collectively (whilst
> taking account of their differences),
That doesn't make much sense once you start looking at "the types" of
society in the two counties.
>
>>in which case the term still wouldn't be too clear. Did I misunderstand
>>you, or did you not agree that there was far more similarity between Nazi
>>Germany and Stalinist Russia than between either of them and Fascist
>>Italy?
>
>
> No, I don't agree with that. Stalinist Russia was a different type of
> society entirely. The differences have much to do with the degree of active
> (specifically, that not engendered primarily by fear) consent from below,
At the moment, the differences aren't clear to me. An awful lot of
Germans and Russians died (and killed) when told to, which to me
indicates an awful lot of active consent. Both Stalin and Hitler wanted
to mobilize the masses and impose a monolithic culture. Italian Fascism
absolutely opposed such things (until the mid 30s).
Ian Pace
>
>
> Ian Pace wrote:
>
>> In the particular context of Adorno's use of the terms, to which I was
>> referring using a certain shorthand, the issue at stake is the
>> possibilities for the individual subject to be allowed freedom,
>> expression, self-determination in the face of the objective conditions
>> that are provided by capitalist society. Now that should be reasonably
>> clear - I would have thought that most people can see how individuals'
>> freedom to act is constrained by external factors (most obviously the
>> need to make enough money to eat, maybe provide for a family, keep a roof
>> over one's head, etc.).
>
> Indeed. But such is the universal human condition, and as such we are all
> of us subjected to fascism, no?
This was not about fascism, it was about the dichotomy between the
individual subject and objective social conditions. But the degree of
unfreedom that the individual subject encounters is by no means 'universal'
and takes different forms. One might point to the relative degrees of fear
of homelessness in, say, America or communist Yugoslavia.
> The question unaddressed here is in what way the fascism existing today
> in, say, Sweden can be identified with the fascism exiting in German in
> 1943. As previously pointed out, anything can be connected to anything.
See above. This is very basic stuff
>
>
> Adorno looks more deeply into this, especially in the context of
>> culture, to examine the degree to which the artist is able to convey
>> subjective expression in their work in the face of the demands that the
>> culture industry places upon them - particularly in the form of demanding
>> that the artist work with familiar tropes without mediation to such an
>> extent as would get in the way of maximum immediacy and transparency.
>> This would have ruled Bach out of the equation, I believe (and that's the
>> side of Bach that Adorno explores in 'Bach Defended Against his
>> Devotees', pointing out (as other Bach scholars, including Lawrence
>> Dreyfus, have pointed out in different ways since) that Bach doesn't
>> simply inhabit genres and fulfil the expectations that such genres
>> provide, but actually works against convention in quite radical ways).
>
> I have found in film criticism that this observation occurs INVARIABLY
> when the critic has absolutely nothing else to say on the artist's behalf.
> Surely originality and authenticity
The latter is not a word I use often.
> are not to be found by "working" "against" convention (even in quite
> radical ways), because to do so is merely another way of being
> conventional.
That depends how it's done. In post-modern times, indeed using an ironic
relationship to genre has become something of a cliche. But Bach's
relationship to genre is much more intricate than that.
> The fact of the matter is that every crucifixion and nativity scene
> screams out against Adorno's half-assed idiocy that an artist is
> (fascistically!) stunted by existing tropes! He'd have to condemn a
> thousand years of ancient Greek theater as well.
What was he condemning? That essay certainly isn't 'half-assed idiocy', nor
does Adorno use the term 'fascist' in it. As far as the use of existing
tropes is concerned, Adorno in no sense condemns composers for engaging with
those (in fact, somewhere in 'Introduction to the Sociology of Music', in
defence of Brahms, he suggests that it's near-impossible for a composer to
stand outside of the developed tradition they inherit, and probably the most
productive thing a composer can do is to develop to the maximum within that
sort of inheritance - but Adorno's view of development is dialectical rather
than organic). What he is sharply critical of is work that uses such tropes
in an unmediated manner - that is the 'passive art' he speaks of. The essay
on Bach (which I would recommend you read, it's not very long) was a
gauntlet thrown down against prevailing conceptions of Bach that were
frequently expressed at the time of the bicentenary of his death, which was
when the essay was written. Specifically as a composer that's somehow
'outside time', expressing 'eternal values' and the like - Adorno's retort
is to argue the case for Bach as a historical composer, one who was
dialectically engaged with the conventions of his time. And he goes into
some (maybe not enough, but some) musical detail on this subject.
You're confusing the inhabitation of existing tropes with an unmediated
relationship with them. In no sense would Adorno condemn crucifixion or
nativity scenes because they work within conventional genre - but he would
be critical if they didn't add to those, develop the possibilities of the
genre, further.
>
>
>> As I implied above, "subjectivity" in this context is about the free and
>> unfettered expression of the individual subject.
>
> Not to be found on this earth, outside the penultimate episode of
> Rossellini's Francesco giullare di Dio.
Adorno would agree with you there - conditions of freedom for the individual
subject (at least to a large degree) have not yet been attained.
>
>> "Reified objectivity"
> The essential point is that this state of affairs
>> shouldn't be seen as something which need necessarily exist for time
>> immemorial.
>
> Like in Anglo-American academia.
>
> Critical examination
>> of existing conditions and the bases from which they have emerged, is one
>> way of illuminating how things could be otherwise.
>
> But as soon as you start "reifying" terms like "fascism" or "liberal," you
> screw yourself.
No, both of those are ongoing and changing concepts, though there is some
kernel of definition in either case which make the terms useable (as with
all language). To reify a term like fascism might be to associate it solely
with what went on in Italy or Germany (either or both), without considering
how elements of the same continue to exist and develop in other post-war
societies, and take on different forms.
Ian
Ian Pace
<david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1136346244.4...@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
>
> Mr. Pace fails to confront head on the single point that I made in
> criticizing his posts and the quotation from Adorno found in them.
> Failing to confine himself to the single reason for which I criticized
> his ideas and Adorno's, he fails to refute my point.
Try having a read of my previous reply - you'll find I reply to most of the
points you make. You claim it's unintelligible - I think what you're really
saying is that you are unable to understand it. As I said before (and you
take exception to below), many other people do find it intelligible, and
have engaged with it in various ways. Adorno's work is difficult, and does
use abstract concepts a great deal - but that's common for German
philosophers.
>
> To keep the argument manageable, I discussed the use of half a dozen
> terms found in a total of four sentences.
Once again, have a look at my reply, discussing those terms.
> (I also alluded to Ian's use
> of the ill defined concept of "fascism."
It's a term I've known you use a fair number of times (I can find examples
if you like - I recall you pointing out that fascism is alive and well in
the US today) - maybe you could give us your definition?
> My argument precisely
> parallels the argument Mr. Gallagher has presented in the case of this
> key concept, which Mr. Pace has used in the title of this sub-thread. )
> Rather than focusing on my objections, Mr. Pace responds with a vast
> tapestry of tangential arguments rather than satisfactorily addressing
> the single issue I raised, as is his usual practice.
Perhaps you can clarify what the 'single point' is that you are making in
your long rants?
>
> To be fair, in at least one case--Ian's use of the concept of
> "reified objectivity"--Ian does indeed explain, not what the concept of
> "reified objectivity" means, but what he had in mind when he
> resorted to this terminology. Here is Ian's response to my claim
> that the concept of "reified objectivity" as used in a previous post of
> Ian's was unintelligible:
>
> "I would have thought that most people can see how individuals' freedom
> to act is constrained by external factors (most obviously the need to
> make enough money to eat, maybe provide for a family, keep a roof over
> one's head, etc.)."
>
> Of course, anybody can see this. What I can't see is how anybody
> could be expected to grasp that this is what Ian meant by resorting to
> the concept of "reified objectivity."
If you were more familiar with well-established uses of the subject-object
dichotomy in Germanic thought, it wouldn't be difficult for you to
comprehend. And the concept of reification isn't that complex either. The
issue is more about how these ideas don't correspond with your world-view, I
reckon.
>
> As Mr. Gallagher points out, Ian's additional glosses on the concept
> of "fascism" similarly fail to nail down this idealist concept well
> enough to facilitate meaningful discussion of the ill defined concept.
> Mr. Gallagher is evidently well equipped to discuss the nature of
> various regimes in some detail. The use of the ill defined idealist
> concept "fascism" serves, not to clarify the terms of the debate,
> but to obscure them.
I might respect what you wrote more if you didn't continually hide behind
other posters. I have made it clear how in Adorno's case 'fascism' seems to
refer to the culture and society of Nazi Germany as its starting point,
which in Adorno's view was underpinned by his conception of the
'authoritarian personality', which is detailed elsewhere in this thread.
>
> Near the end of his post, Ian accuses me of contempt for characterizing
> the four sentences I discussed as "fashionable nonsense," a term I
> borrowed from the title of Sokal's book. I didn't refer to the usages
> and concepts I discussed as "fashionable nonsense" to express contempt.
You speak throughout your posts with contemptuous dismissal of work which I
don't believe you've read in any detail.
> I pointed out that the usages and concepts I discussed were
> fashionable nonsense in precisely the sense that the usages addressed
> by Mr. Sokal are fashionable nonsense.
For a start, you don't seem to appreciate any difference between the
traditions of French post-structuralism and German critical theory - they
are *extremely* different (and those involved in either tradition are often
sharply at cross-purposes). You give no evidence, other than your rants, of
how the concepts at stake are 'fashionable nonsense'. 'Reification', to give
one example of which I give a definition, certainly isn't - if you like I
can dig up some key quotes by Lukacs on the subject from his first essays on
it which I sent in a private e-mail to someone a little while back.
I reckon there's more than a little arrogance in dismissing as nonsense
things you simply don't understand yourself. Sokal is referring to
particular examples, and you're simply extrapolating that to cover anything
that's working on a rather more abstract level and connected to leftist
intellectual traditions. Commonplace Anglo-American anti-intellectualism,
nothing more than that.
> Ian, like Adorno, makes use of
> high falutin' idealist concepts in so obscure a way that, at bottom,
> they are literally unintelligible.
Thus spake David Gable on a whole philosophical tradition. This is extremely
arrogant.
> No reasonable person could be
> expected to extrapolate from the usage or concept "reified objectivity"
> the notion that people are constrained somehow to earn a living in
> capitalist societies.
Are you capable of reasoning rather than ranting? If you could actually
follow the train of reasoning, you would see that "reified objectivity" is a
shorthand for an abstraction of the objective conditions that precede the
subject and constrain their actions, and which have come to be seen as set
in stone, reified, unchangeable. Needing to earn a living in order to
survive is merely one of the most obvious examples of how the subject is
constrained. That shouldn't be too hard to see; there are many much more
intricate examples of how reified objective conditions constrain not just
the subject in their actions, but also in their perceptions of what is
possible. That is what Adorno deals with throughout his work, not least in
the context of culture. When orchestras are always demanding 'accessible'
music when embarking upon commissions, and refusing commissions to those who
don't fulfil that criteria in an obvious way, then one can speak of
constrains upon the subjective will of the composer if they are to be
performed. Adorno would point out that this, in its particular manifestation
and degree, is the product of a particular set of circumstances rather than
an inevitable condition.
> Nobody can have the kind of meaningful
> discussion Mr. Gallagher would be capable of without a better
> definition of the vast and elastic concept of "fascism."
So what's your definition?
>
> In the end, Ian makes an appeal to authority, claiming that
> "intelligent people" have read and benefited from reading this kind of
> stuff.
Indeed they have - do you think every one of them has simply been
hoodwinked? Everyone who's read Adorno and found it of interest to engage
with (which would include, for example, Thomas Mann) is merely being conned,
because the work is meaningless and unintelligible? And only you can see the
light in this respect?
> I may not be very intelligent, but I have no interest in wading
> through page after page of turgid prose discussing ill defined idealist
> concepts.
So you think the whole tradition of German idealism can be completely
written off? I think you'll find an awful lot of pretty turgid prose there -
try reading Kant or Hegel or Heidegger. Those who read Adorno in German
sometimes say he actually had a gift for rhetorical flourish, just that
that's lost in most of the English translation. Let me give just a couple of
examples from what's generally regarded as one of the better translations,
that of Minima Moralia, a work some of which is written in the form of
aphorisms:
'It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing
himself cleverer than the author.'
(Theodor Adorno - 'Minima Moralia' (1944-47), translated Edmund Jephcott
(London, 1974), p. 49)
'We can tell whether we are happy by the sound of the wind. It warns the
unhappy man of the fragility of his house, hounding him from shallow sleep
and violent dreams. to the happy man it is the song of his protectedness:
its furious howling concedes that it has power over him no longer.'
(ibid, p. 49)
'In early childhood I saw the first snow-shovellers in thin shabby clothes.
Asking about them, I was told they were men without work who were given this
job so that they could earn their bread. Then they get what they deserve,
having to shovel snow, I cried out in rage, bursting uncontrollably into
tears.'
(ibid, p. 190)
'Perhaps a film that strictly and in all respects satisfied the code of the
Hays Office might turn out a great work of art, but not in a world in which
there is a Hays Office.'
(ibid, p. 191)
'Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without provoking
strength.'
(ibid, p. 192)
'Kafka, though an avid reader of Kierkegaard, is connected with
existentialist philosophy only to the extent that one speaks of
down-and-outs as 'annihilated existences'.'
(ibid, p. 223)
> Nor do I see how it could help me to understand
> "fascist" or "capitalist" societies.
I wonder how interested you are in understanding such societies at all?
> On the evidence of this
> thread, Ian and Adorno want to use language as it is used in symbolist
> poetry, all the while presuming that it will be intelligible in the
> same way that everyday conversational language or a mathematical proof
> is intelligible. It isn't.
Maybe not for you, but that's your loss.
>
> I do understand that there are disciplines that make use of a
> specialized vocabulary. My problem with Ian and Adorno is not that
> they resort to such a vocabulary, but that they fail to subject their
> vocabulary to sufficiently explicit definition. Much of their
> vocabulary would crumble into dust if it were subjected to this
> process.
>
One would have thought that certain concepts that have a long history
wouldn't have to be spelt out every time they are used. Maybe you require
that, though.
Ian
wielhoban
david...@aol.com schrieb:
> Mr. Pace fails to confront head on the single point that I made in
> criticizing his posts and the quotation from Adorno found in them.
> Failing to confine himself to the single reason for which I criticized
> his ideas and Adorno's, he fails to refute my point.
Let's be reasonable, David - I would say that you did not refute any of
the points he (or Adorno) made in the first place. You seem to have a
knee-jerk aversion to Adorno, something I can understand, but that's no
substitute for first-hand knowledge of his work. And I really don't
understand how you can insist that it's all unintelligible, that what
he says about subject, object and reification is gobbledigook; surely
the principle is very clear, and is only untenable if one measures it
by the standards of natural or technological sciences, which I can't
imagine you would really want to. It's no surprise that "Fashionable
Nonsense" was written by a physicist! Even if Lacan or Guattari got
into mistaken and pretentious waters with their interdisciplinary
blunders, that doesn't disprove the validity of their thought, only
that they were careless or arrogant in trying to appropriate material
from other fields (something which artists do all the time). Philosophy
or psychology aren't the same as physics or mathematics! Besides which,
there's little "fashionable" about Adorno, least of all in the
English-speaking world. On the contrary: it's much more fashionable in
the English-speaking world to be an Adorno-bashing anti-intellectual.
WH
Ian Pace
>
>
>> As I said in the short reply, I'm specifically referring to Nazi Germany
>> here. Your point about how studies of fascism are overly concentrated in
>> Germany and not enough on fascist Italy is an important one, certainly.
>> One might compare the amount of scholarly work on either, the ratio is
>> disproportionately weighted in terms of the former. I'd suggest that
>> there's also a vast amount yet to be investigated about the society,
>> culture, and relations between different strata in Stalin's Russia and
>> other communist regimes, imperial Britain, France, Belgium, in the US,
>> etc.
>
> Yes, I agree. But we need to decide what we're talking about, what we're
> investigating. Just labelling things fascist doesn't get us anywhere.
> (An alternate myth about the Garden of Paradise is that we fell not when
> Adam bit the apple but when Eve started naming things.) When I set out
> trying to read up on Italian Fascism, I found book after book that told me
> Fascism was bad bad bad and Mussolini was barf, with a zillion examples of
> bad barf. The books didn't tell me anything about why his regime lasted
> twenty years with so little opposition. And the most obvious conclusion I
> drew from this is that almost everytime I read a word about Mussolini or
> (Italian) Fascism, I find the writer has been drugged by the word
> "fascism" just the same way so much rhetoric in Bush's America is drugged
> by a word like "democracy," and that people accept these labels as the
> definitive answers to all questions. I don't feel Adorno's work has shown
> me why Hitler, for example, was so loved and exerised so much charm;
> instead he just keeps protesting.
Well, that's not the focus of Adorno's work - one can find illuminating
writing by others on that subject. Adorno didn't see National Socialism so
markedly in terms of the Fuhrer (though he certainly wouldn't deny that was
a potent factor), the focus of his work is more on the type of wider social
forces and personality traits that make people succumb to that form of
fascism. No-one can cover every aspects of this phenomenon.
>
>
>
>>>Sure, corporations in the US "discipline" employees horribly, and the
>>>employees for the most part accept it unquestioningly. Sure, big
>>>business makes "fascism" (whatever it is) possible, but it makes many
>>>other things possible as well, and almost every other segment of society
>>>also make "fascism" possible. Is this news? Is this telling us
>>>anything?
>>
>>
>> No, but in this context I was speaking of crucial events in the context
>> of the Nazis.
>
> But on what basis do you decide which events are crucial? Do you mean
> crucial to your thesis? Is your thesis, then, dictating your selection of
> events?
>
It's not 'my' thesis, it's that of a number of historians, suggesting that
big business played a crucial role in enabling the Nazis to come to power.
All history involves making judgements on the relative significance of
various factors in forming a chain of causation. I've read a certain amount
of the stuff in question, on the basis of that I do think that the role of
big business was a crucial factor (though not by any means the only or even
the primary factor).
>> Simply that a lot more work has been done on it, as I said above.
>> Obviously Adorno was from Germany himself, and was half-Jewish, so these
>> issues had a particular immediacy for him. You're absolutely right to say
>> fascist Italy should be looked at more often - the lack of quite such
>> direct intentionality in the Holocaust (which isn't to excuse Mussolini's
>> regime from anti-semitism and complicity in the Holocaust itself )
>> perhaps makes people think that Italian fascism isn't quite as pressing a
>> concern?
>
> I think it's simply cultural specialization. People who spend their lives
> learning German and reading German philosophers are unlikely to give
> comparable attention even to French things, let alone Italian. Also, Croce
> is out of style in academia, especially in Italy (but he's coming back).
> It is odd, however, that our self-designated left so totally ignores
> Croce's historicism as the root of all the postmodernist jingle-jangle, or
> that the political people ignore that it was the Italian Communist Party
> that set the tune for Eurocommunism during most of the decades following
> ww2.
Well, I think the specialisation in question has a lot to do with the fact
that Germany, more than any other European nation, went through a great deal
of soul-searching in the post-war period (Italy and Austria got off very
lightly in this respect).
>
> By the way, it's often argued that Mussolini made the single greatest
> contribution to defeating Hitler, because his screwed-up invasion of
> Greece fatally delayed Hitler's invasion of Russia.
>
>>
>> I'm not saying that above paragraph does characterise "fascist" behaviour
>> at all. Also, I do believe that an acceptance of the necessity of
>> collective discipline towards the furtherance of socialist ends is not at
>> all the same as the authoritarian personality (in the former case, it is
>> a means to an end, in the latter, it is an end in itself).
>
> I grasp what you're saying, and agree, but in pratice means and ends
> become indistinguishable often.
I think it depends.
>>
>> What I'm saying is that Liberalism will inevitably become authoritarian
>> when the going gets tough.
>
> It didn't during the huge factory strikes in Italy in 1920 (?). Giolitti
> simply folded his hands and let things take their course while industry
> screamed protests.
>
> By 'Liberalism' I mean a type of politics that
>> essentially accepts the rule of capital whilst trying to maintain some
>> cosmetic freedoms (in terms of individual morality, freedom of speech,
>> civil rights, etc.) for the individual.
>
> As I said, this doesn't correspond to Italy. Ian, Croce once said that
> the task of the historian is to figure our what Socrates meant by "wise."
>
I wasn't speaking of Italy, I was speaking of Liberalism in general.
>
> But Liberalism requires the primacy of the
>> former, I believe, and will easily jettison the latter when it becomes
>> necessary in order to protect the former.
>
> Naturally Italy did it all wrong and didn't follow your formula.
If we can call fascist Italy 'liberal'. Maybe it does fit my above
definition. But fascist Italy definitely did jettison the latter qualities
when under threat (for a variety of factors much to do with the alliance
with Germany - but some could argue that this had to do economic interests,
if not specifically those of private capital).
>
>>>Well, what is hard for you was second nature for Italians. Croce was one
>>>of the people most responsible for introducing Hegel and Marx to Italy.
>>
>> But Croce was an anti-fascist?
>
> Yes. And he didn't shut up the whole time. People said Mussolini let him
> write and talk to show how fair Fascism was.
That doesn't mean Croce was allying fascism and Marxism.
>>
>> Well, there's plenty of evidence of former communists turning towards the
>> far right, so this doesn't surprise me. One of the worst recent examples
>> of this is to be found in the decline of the group 'Socialism ou
>> Barbarie' in France (worth referencing in the context of the
>> Chomsky-Faurisson affair). But I do believe the two positions to be
>> incompatible simultaneously.
>
> No, you missed the point. They didn't turn right. They were Communists
> WHILE they were Fascists and they were toward the far left.
No, I don't accept that at all, especially in the context of 'Socialism ou
Barbarie', which I do know a certaint amount about. Centered around the
Parisian bookshop 'La Vielle Taupe' it was a motley crew of Bordigists
(followers of the ultra-left tradition of Amadeo Bordiga, who I'm sure you
know - he was denounced by Lenin in 'Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile
Disorder), Situationists (the key thinker here is Guy Debord) and some
others. One of the fundamental beliefs of the Bordigists was that
distinctions between Western capitalism, fascism as experienced in the 1920s
and 1930s, and Stalinism (as in Stalin's Russia and most other communist
regimes) are merely cosmetic. They resented greatly the moral capital made
by the Western allies from defeating fascism, feeling the former to be
little better than the latter. A key text here was Bordiga's 'Auschwitz or
the Great Alibi', suggesting that the spectre of Auschwitz had become a
propagandistic tool for the West, and diverted attention away from the
injustice and suffering under capitalism. Now, in no sense was Bordiga
denying the reality and horror of Auschwitz (even though I do find his views
extreme), but this lesson was lost on some of his French followers, in
particular Pierre Guillaume and Serge Thion. They became so obsessed with
this that it led them in the direction of Holocaust denial and alliance with
the leading denier Robert Faurisson. After the bookshop was reformed in the
late 1970s, this was the new direction that Guillaume and Thion took, to the
consternation of former comrades and allies. Guillaume would later picket
all sorts of events, handing out pamphlets with hideous Holocaust-denying
propaganda. I suppose I do associate Holocaust denial with the 'far right',
so that's why I'm tracing such a trajectory on these individuals' parts. In
what sense would you call them 'fascists' in their earlier days?
> Fascism was a mass party, an umbrella party, it made no distinctions
> between right and left, it didn't have anything to do with any of that.
> See, you just won't stop thinking that Fascism was fascist. Reification!
> Bad!
>
Well, if you think Fascism isn't 'fascist', then you must have some
definition of what it does mean to be 'fascist' - I asked you a few posts
ago what that is, and I'd still like to know.
>
>>
>>>You keep defining "Fascist" (Italian) as though it were in some way
>>>equivalent to "fascist" (Germany or Adorno). It's not.
>>
>>
>> No, certainly, but don't you think there are some links, not least in
>> terms of the cult of power and strength and the leader?
>
> In fact, Hitler consciously tried to copy Mussolini in this. But what was
> Mussolini modeling himself on, if not a few thousands years of Italian
> paintings and ancient sculpture? Mussolini by trade was a journalist, he
> promoted himself. So did Napoleon. So did all those Roman generals of
> yore, and Alexander, ad nauseam. Why privilege Adorno?
>
What's that got to do with 'privileging Adorno'?
>
>>
>> I mean that the Party didn't act against the interests of capital.
>
> Well, it did of course do a lot to regulate capital. And Mussolini's
> insistence on maintaining the lira at an artificially high value (out of
> vanity) had crushing effects on Italian industry. So one would have to
> say that it is very likely that once again he screwed up and didn't follow
> your formula of how a fascist is supposed to behave.
Which one can put down to simple incompetence at managing capitalism.
>
>>>As for empire, that was a heritage of the powers that had ruled Italy
>>>since 1860 -- a whole succession of imperial wars (inspired by the
>>>example of England and France, whom Italians wanted to be equal to),
>>
>>
>> I was referring to the conquest of Ethiopia/Abyssinia. Of course this was
>> chickenfeed compared to the British and French empires.
>
> You call it chickenfeed and ask in the same breath why Brits don't spend
> more time studying Italy? It wasn't chickfeed; it was deep shit.
What I mean is that Italy's imperial possessions were tiny in comparison to
those held by Britain and France - I wouldn't have thought that was a very
controversial assertion.
> That was the problem. By the time Hitler raised the curtain on ww2, the
> Italian military was totally exhausted by Ethiopia and Spain. Italy had a
> history of colonial involvement in that area; the greatest blot on Italian
> history was a massacre their troops suffered there in the 1890s. The
> unification of Italy in 1860 came as a climax of efforts to involve
> Italians in big-power politics; and so the process went on. A great
> country deserved an empire in the 1860s, 70s, etc. Glory was mandatory,
> not an option. No doubt Ethiopia was Mussolini's big mistake. It's what
> ended what I called the utopian phase of Fascism, I think. But yes, he
> was motivated by envy of Britain and France and by Italians being looked
> down on. He went into Greece for the same reason; he wanted to show
> Hitler that Italians were as good as Germans.
I don't disagree with any of the above, though don't see how it negates the
fact that Ethiopia (and Libya) did not constitute an empire on the scale of
the British or French ones.
>
>>
>> This is the aspect that particularly interests me, though - don't you
>> think those doctrines of war and glory, whether espoused by Futurists or
>> others, played a significant part in the type of collective consciousness
>> that sustained Mussolini's rule?
>
> No doubt. It's also what got Italy into ww1. But one can argue that (a)
> collective consciousness was less important in Italy than mandarin
> consciousness: the masses simply did not play a role anywhere comparable
> to their numbers;
That still requires collective acquiescence if the masses are not to rise up
against the regime.
> much of Italy was third-world-ish; the literate class was tiny; for the
> most part the Communists and Fascists and Catholics and Liberals and
> republcans and monarchists went to the same schools, drank at the same
> bars, wrote for newspapers sold at the same kiosks, maybe used the same
> whores.
And some Communists (including Gramsci) became political prisoners.
> And (b) that most of these mandarins opposed Mussolini's wars -- and it
> was this long opposition that led to his removal in 1943.
Just as some Prussian aristocrats (most notably Claus von Stauffenberg) who
had earlier welcomed the Nazis to power, either opposed or came to be
disillusioned with Hitler's wars. They were not successful in removing
Hitler from power, though.
>
> Some say Mussolini gagged on his own self-generated publicity, and had to
> go to war to save face - another case of labels ruling us.
Very possibly, yes.
Ian
Ian Pace
>
>
> Ian Pace wrote:
>
>>>No, we can't, unless you tell what it was that went on in both countries
>>>that constitutes this currently undefined ism.
>>
>>
>> OK, you want to maintain a more specific definition of 'fascism'
>> referring in particular to Mussolini's Italy. That's fine and probably
>> useful, I was using perhaps a more common generic use of the term.
>
> Yes. My point is that you hang yourself by believing in labels. Fascism
> wasn't fascist. It wasn't a variation of the same thing. It was something
> different.
So what is 'fascist' by your definition?
>
>
>> As I said, it is a matter of degree. If one uses 'fascist' to refer to
>> the types of society in Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy collectively
>> (whilst taking account of their differences),
>
> That doesn't make much sense once you start looking at "the types" of
> society in the two counties.
>
>>
>>>in which case the term still wouldn't be too clear. Did I misunderstand
>>>you, or did you not agree that there was far more similarity between Nazi
>>>Germany and Stalinist Russia than between either of them and Fascist
>>>Italy?
>>
>>
>> No, I don't agree with that. Stalinist Russia was a different type of
>> society entirely. The differences have much to do with the degree of
>> active (specifically, that not engendered primarily by fear) consent from
>> below,
>
> At the moment, the differences aren't clear to me. An awful lot of
> Germans and Russians died (and killed) when told to, which to me indicates
> an awful lot of active consent.
When the integrity of their country was at stake, many Russians did so, but
I don't know of much suggestion that this was a reflection of any deeper
support for Stalin beforehand. Stalin's Russia in the 1930s was run by
terror that affected all levels of society, in a way that's quite different
from the contemporary societies in Germany and Italy.
> Both Stalin and Hitler wanted to mobilize the masses and impose a
> monolithic culture.
Stalin only succeeded in doing so when his country was invaded.
> Italian Fascism absolutely opposed such things (until the mid 30s).
So the whole cult of the leader in Mussolini's Italy had nothing to do with
mobilising the masses?
As you will point out, Mussolini's regime was not dictated by terrorising
most ordinary people, at least not until its later days. Nor was Hitler's as
far as 'ordinary Germans' (not Communists, Social Democrats, Jews, gypsies,
homosexuals, the disabled - which of course constitutes a lot of people but
certainly not a majority) were concerned. Stalin's Russia was a totalitarian
and terroristic regime run by fear practically from its inception. And this
could affect practically all members of that society.
Ian
Ian Pace
>>
> Yes, I agree. But we need to decide what we're talking about, what we're
> investigating. Just labelling things fascist doesn't get us anywhere.
> (An alternate myth about the Garden of Paradise is that we fell not when
> Adam bit the apple but when Eve started naming things.) When I set out
> trying to read up on Italian Fascism, I found book after book that told me
> Fascism was bad bad bad and Mussolini was barf, with a zillion examples of
> bad barf. The books didn't tell me anything about why his regime lasted
> twenty years with so little opposition.
That is an important point, which I think relates to the extent to which
many writers and historians too obviously applied the 'totalitarian' model
to Mussolini's Italy (and to Hitler's Germany for a while, though that sort
of thinking seems to less prominent now). The very question of how such
regimes are able to maintain levels of consent - to the extent that
large-scale opposition such as might present a serious threat to the regime
is unlikely - is one of the issues that Adorno and the Frankfurters were
dealing with (in the context of Nazi Germany, not Fascist Italy) at the same
time as others were stuck with the 'totalitarian' model. That's where I
think a sharp distinction has to be made with Stalin's Russia, where the
lack of concentrated opposition surely had much to do with fear and terror
on the part of many citizens (and that was perhaps true in a lot of post-war
Eastern Europe as well).
Ian
Steven de Mena
"Ian Pace" <i...@ianpace.com> wrote in message
news:d1Suf.59189$Cj5....@newsfe6-win.ntli.net...
Added "OT: "
Steve
tag gallagher
Ian Pace wrote:
>>>In the particular context of Adorno's use of the terms, to which I was
>>>referring using a certain shorthand, the issue at stake is the
>>>possibilities for the individual subject to be allowed freedom,
>>>expression, self-determination in the face of the objective conditions
>>>that are provided by capitalist society. Now that should be reasonably
>>>clear - I would have thought that most people can see how individuals'
>>>freedom to act is constrained by external factors (most obviously the
>>>need to make enough money to eat, maybe provide for a family, keep a roof
>>>over one's head, etc.).
>>
>>Indeed. But such is the universal human condition, and as such we are all
>>of us subjected to fascism, no?
>
>
> This was not about fascism, it was about the dichotomy between the
> individual subject and objective social conditions. But the degree of
> unfreedom that the individual subject encounters is by no means 'universal'
> and takes different forms. One might point to the relative degrees of fear
> of homelessness in, say, America or communist Yugoslavia.
Well, now you say the first paragraph isn't about fascism, but your
first sentence says it is about fascism.
Have you ever been homeless in America or in communist Yugoslavia?
>>The question unaddressed here is in what way the fascism existing today
>>in, say, Sweden can be identified with the fascism exiting in German in
>>1943. As previously pointed out, anything can be connected to anything.
>
>
> See above. This is very basic stuff.
Too basic to be clear, I guess.
You said you can't define fascism but that whether fascism is or isn't
fascism is a matter of degree ...
>>Adorno looks more deeply into this, especially in the context of
>>
>>>culture, to examine the degree to which the artist is able to convey
>>>subjective expression in their work in the face of the demands that the
>>>culture industry places upon them - particularly in the form of demanding
>>>that the artist work with familiar tropes without mediation to such an
>>>extent as would get in the way of maximum immediacy and transparency.
>>>This would have ruled Bach out of the equation, I believe (and that's the
>>>side of Bach that Adorno explores in 'Bach Defended Against his
>>>Devotees', pointing out (as other Bach scholars, including Lawrence
>>>Dreyfus, have pointed out in different ways since) that Bach doesn't
>>>simply inhabit genres and fulfil the expectations that such genres
>>>provide, but actually works against convention in quite radical ways).
>>
>>I have found in film criticism that this observation occurs INVARIABLY
>>when the critic has absolutely nothing else to say on the artist's behalf.
>>Surely originality and authenticity
>
>
> The latter is not a word I use often.
>
>
>>are not to be found by "working" "against" convention (even in quite
>>radical ways), because to do so is merely another way of being
>>conventional.
>
>
> That depends how it's done. In post-modern times, indeed using an ironic
> relationship to genre has become something of a cliche. But Bach's
> relationship to genre is much more intricate than that.
Adorno is the one who simplified it to "working against." That's what I
objected to. Now you're also rejecting Adorno, which I'm glad to see.
>>The fact of the matter is that every crucifixion and nativity scene
>>screams out against Adorno's half-assed idiocy that an artist is
>>(fascistically!) stunted by existing tropes! He'd have to condemn a
>>thousand years of ancient Greek theater as well.
>
>
> What was he condemning? That essay certainly isn't 'half-assed idiocy', nor
> does Adorno use the term 'fascist' in it.
You brought it up within the context of fascism. (I'm trying to stick to
the point.) In context, it read as though tropes oppress artists, and
you had previously suggested that all things constraining freedom
partake of fascism (in varying degrees).
As far as the use of existing
> tropes is concerned, Adorno in no sense condemns composers for engaging with
> those (in fact, somewhere in 'Introduction to the Sociology of Music', in
> defence of Brahms, he suggests that it's near-impossible for a composer to
> stand outside of the developed tradition they inherit, and probably the most
> productive thing a composer can do is to develop to the maximum within that
> sort of inheritance - but Adorno's view of development is dialectical rather
> than organic).
I don't think I've seen these terms polarized before. I'd have thought
that what was organic could also be dialectical.
What he is sharply critical of is work that uses such tropes
> in an unmediated manner - that is the 'passive art' he speaks of. The essay
> on Bach (which I would recommend you read, it's not very long) was a
> gauntlet thrown down against prevailing conceptions of Bach that were
> frequently expressed at the time of the bicentenary of his death, which was
> when the essay was written. Specifically as a composer that's somehow
> 'outside time', expressing 'eternal values' and the like - Adorno's retort
> is to argue the case for Bach as a historical composer, one who was
> dialectically engaged with the conventions of his time. And he goes into
> some (maybe not enough, but some) musical detail on this subject.
I'm not sure what is really meant here by dialectical. One of the
problems for someone like me is the vagueness of vocabulary in Adorno
and his ilk. I assume you and Adorno are ignoring that all human
aperception is dialectical and are being rather more catty than that. I
assume you mean that Bach didn't dumbly imitate the fashionable trends
around him. The question then comes as to whether he "worked against"
fashion (which to me means he was simply a copycat with no integrity of
his own) or whether he was more his own person (a word you won't use:
authentic).
You constantly depict Adorno as going up the mountain, communing with
verities, and descending to tell us, in deliberately obfuscated prose,
that some days the sky is blue. Do you really think that before Adorno
no one knew that Bach wrote original music within a heavy tradition?
To whom was this a revelation?
>
> You're confusing the inhabitation of existing tropes with an unmediated
> relationship with them. In no sense would Adorno condemn crucifixion or
> nativity scenes because they work within conventional genre - but he would
> be critical if they didn't add to those, develop the possibilities of the
> genre, further.
Again you're being catty: "unmediated."
Ian, I confess, two things get my blood up: one is the critical cop-out
of saying someone works against convention; the other is the notion of
"the possibilities of the genre." "Genre" does not exist. It's a
pseudo concept without definition, an arbitrary set agreed on by no one.
I am astonished that you would think that possibilities "inhabit" a genre.
>
> Adorno would agree with you there - conditions of freedom for the individual
> subject (at least to a large degree) have not yet been attained.
So does it advance freedom to regard everything opposing (totally
unfettered) freedom as "fascist"? Actual human freedom, as you know,
requires fetters to be free, even if one is the only person on earth.
>
> No, both of those are ongoing and changing concepts, though there is some
> kernel of definition in either case which make the terms useable (as with
> all language). To reify a term like fascism might be to associate it solely
> with what went on in Italy or Germany (either or both), without considering
> how elements of the same continue to exist and develop in other post-war
> societies, and take on different forms.
But it seems to me that this is what you have been doing: applying a
crude Adornoian definition of fascism to Italy, for example, in the
faith that somehow a "kernel" of objectivity exists in the term itself,
whereas in fact it's totally arbitrary and conventional and false.
This, I submit, is reification.
wielhoban
>"Genre" does not exist.
How interesting - that contradicts just about every thinker on the arts
I've ever encountered.
WH
Richard Schultz
: Added "OT: "
Why do you think that failing to put "OT" in the subject line is a greater
breach of netiquette than quoting 40 lines of text to add one new one?
-----
Richard Schultz sch...@mail.biu.ac.il
Department of Chemistry, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
Opinions expressed are mine alone, and not those of Bar-Ilan University
-----
"Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad."
tag gallagher
As I said at the outset, this is tautological. The question is what is
meant by "fascism." Adorno replies: the forces and traits that make one
succumb to fascism.
Honestly, I'm not trying to make trouble for you, but this is not clear.
And it gets muddied first by Adorno defining it in terms of his
half-baked half-truths about America, then secondly when you reify the
word fascism and claim there is a kernel of objectivity in it, and then
insist that, therefore, Italian Fascism must partake of it.
> It's not 'my' thesis, it's that of a number of historians, suggesting that
> big business played a crucial role in enabling the Nazis to come to power.
> All history involves making judgements on the relative significance of
> various factors in forming a chain of causation. I've read a certain amount
> of the stuff in question, on the basis of that I do think that the role of
> big business was a crucial factor (though not by any means the only or even
> the primary factor).
Question #1 is whether the historians' agenda led them to place blame on
big business or whether some less prejudiced research led to this blame.
In the case of Italy, for example, it was accepted wisdom for years to
blame Fascism on big business,because the left emerged after the war
with much virtue and appeal. But eventually research showed this blame
was misplaced.
Question #2 is that you, Ian, inferred, following your reified kernel of
"fascism," that since big business was to blame in Germany, therefore
the same must have occurred in Italy, because Italy was also "fascist."
> I wasn't speaking of Italy, I was speaking of Liberalism in general.
Well, here we are again, just where we started. You reify "fascism" in
general and then expect individual cases to conform. Now you've picked
a definition of "Liberalism" off a tree, have reified it as objective
truth, and now insist that Italian Liberalism must have partaken in this
"general" truth.
Do you see why I say you put too much faith into labels?
>>Naturally Italy did it all wrong and didn't follow your formula.
>
>
> If we can call fascist Italy 'liberal'. Maybe it does fit my above
> definition. But fascist Italy definitely did jettison the latter qualities
> when under threat (for a variety of factors much to do with the alliance
> with Germany - but some could argue that this had to do economic interests,
> if not specifically those of private capital).
Once again, you are arguing within theory, not within actual cases. You
start out assuming that realities DO somehow conform to theory.
Ian, we're not going to get anywhere. You keep using the word "fascist"
in your sense, and I keep telling you that Italian Fascism was
different, and you keep trying to homogenize Fascism and fascism. It
can't be done. Italian Fascism was not an ideological program; it was
simply a mechanism of power. Or, if you like, it's ideology was that
all Italians are Fascists and if you want to hold a job, you join the
Party. So it was a farce. So there was no problem, except for a small
handful of people who stood on principle, on being a Fascist no matter
what political or humanist beliefs you held. Right after ww2 there were
millions of Communists in Italy. Where do you think they came from?
They were all there all along, as Fascists. In point of fact, some of
them, like the young guys writing for "Cinema," held Fascist Party cards
because they were told to do so by the (underground) Communist group
they belonged to, to "infiltrate." But there was no need of such cloak
and dagger. Their light during the war and postwar was not Bordiga, it
was Gramsci, then Togliatti, whose program was to transform Italian
culture by becoming part of it.
>
>
>>Fascism was a mass party, an umbrella party, it made no distinctions
>>between right and left, it didn't have anything to do with any of that.
>>See, you just won't stop thinking that Fascism was fascist. Reification!
>>Bad!
>>
>
> Well, if you think Fascism isn't 'fascist', then you must have some
> definition of what it does mean to be 'fascist' - I asked you a few posts
> ago what that is, and I'd still like to know.
It's not what I think. I was trying to show you that your and Adorno's
term "fascist" does not reply -- in many many many "crucial" respects --
to (Italian) "Fascism."
I offered you a definition of "fascist." I said we all know what is
meant by calling someone "a fascist pig." It means a self-righteous bully.
But by now, and thanks partly to Adorno, "fascism" has become a kind of
synonym for "evil." And I don't think we are any closer in 2006 to
saying what evil is in ways that help us recognize it when it comes
decked out in new clothes (like Bush) and different buzzwords (like
democracy).
And I think we shall never get anywhere if we insist on distorting the
past by insisting that knowing the word "fascism" tells us all sorts of
truths about Italian Fascism, when, in fact, it conceals everything we
need to know.
>>Well, it did of course do a lot to regulate capital. And Mussolini's
>>insistence on maintaining the lira at an artificially high value (out of
>>vanity) had crushing effects on Italian industry. So one would have to
>>say that it is very likely that once again he screwed up and didn't follow
>>your formula of how a fascist is supposed to behave.
>
>
> Which one can put down to simple incompetence at managing capitalism.
It nonetheless disproves your insistence that reality must conform to
your definitions of key terms.
>>much of Italy was third-world-ish; the literate class was tiny; for the
>>most part the Communists and Fascists and Catholics and Liberals and
>>republcans and monarchists went to the same schools, drank at the same
>>bars, wrote for newspapers sold at the same kiosks, maybe used the same
>>whores.
>
>
> And some Communists (including Gramsci) became political prisoners.
Yes. But few, and not for being Communists. And even Gramsci was
eventually released. (I don't really know, but I think it was a hell of
a lot easier to read about and discuss Communism under Mussolini's
regime than under Roosevelt's and Truman's.)
Tag
Bob Harper
Pace:
>>>Well, there's plenty of evidence of former communists turning towards the
>>>far right, so this doesn't surprise me. One of the worst recent examples
>>>of this is to be found in the decline of the group 'Socialism ou
>>>Barbarie' in France (worth referencing in the context of the
>>>Chomsky-Faurisson affair). But I do believe the two positions to be
>>>incompatible simultaneously.
>>No, you missed the point. They didn't turn right. They were Communists
>>WHILE they were Fascists and they were toward the far left.
>
While most of this discussion has been, for me, impossibly turgid and
obscure, this passage has at least the value of (relative) clarity. It
does, however, lead me to ask a question:
Other than their Holocaust denial, what 'far right (sic)' positions did
Messrs. Guillaume and Thion advocate? Did they become advocates of
economic liberalism and free markets? Given what you have said about
them, it seems clear to me that we have here once again a demonstration
that the far left and the far right are not oppostie ends of a spectrum,
but rather contiguous points on a circle, the opposite pole of which is
ordered liberty.
Bob Harper
Ian Pace
>
>
> Ian Pace wrote:
>
>>>>In the particular context of Adorno's use of the terms, to which I was
>>>>referring using a certain shorthand, the issue at stake is the
>>>>possibilities for the individual subject to be allowed freedom,
>>>>expression, self-determination in the face of the objective conditions
>>>>that are provided by capitalist society. Now that should be reasonably
>>>>clear - I would have thought that most people can see how individuals'
>>>>freedom to act is constrained by external factors (most obviously the
>>>>need to make enough money to eat, maybe provide for a family, keep a
>>>>roof over one's head, etc.).
>>>
>>>Indeed. But such is the universal human condition, and as such we are
>>>all of us subjected to fascism, no?
>>
>>
>> This was not about fascism, it was about the dichotomy between the
>> individual subject and objective social conditions. But the degree of
>> unfreedom that the individual subject encounters is by no means
>> 'universal' and takes different forms. One might point to the relative
>> degrees of fear of homelessness in, say, America or communist Yugoslavia.
>
> Well, now you say the first paragraph isn't about fascism, but your first
> sentence says it is about fascism.
No, I was referring to the subject/object dichotomy in the first paragraph.
>
> Have you ever been homeless in America or in communist Yugoslavia?
>
No, and I wouldn't like to. I have heard a certain amount about communist
Yugoslavia from those who lived there, though.
>
>>>The question unaddressed here is in what way the fascism existing today
>>>in, say, Sweden can be identified with the fascism exiting in German in
>>>1943. As previously pointed out, anything can be connected to anything.
>>
>>
>> See above. This is very basic stuff.
>
> Too basic to be clear, I guess.
> You said you can't define fascism but that whether fascism is or isn't
> fascism is a matter of degree ...
That was your quote about Sweden and Germany, not mine.
No, I'm not. Working against genre and within genre are not mutually
incompatible, but simple post-modern irony pales in comparison to the type
of relationship that Adorno is identifying in Bach.
>
>>>The fact of the matter is that every crucifixion and nativity scene
>>>screams out against Adorno's half-assed idiocy that an artist is
>>>(fascistically!) stunted by existing tropes! He'd have to condemn a
>>>thousand years of ancient Greek theater as well.
>>
>>
>> What was he condemning? That essay certainly isn't 'half-assed idiocy',
>> nor does Adorno use the term 'fascist' in it.
>
> You brought it up within the context of fascism. (I'm trying to stick to
> the point.) In context, it read as though tropes oppress artists, and you
> had previously suggested that all things constraining freedom partake of
> fascism (in varying degrees).
The comments on Bach were not specifically about fascism, they were a
response to David's seeming inability to grasp the subject-object dichotomy
and how it might be manifest in artistic creation.
>
>
> As far as the use of existing
>> tropes is concerned, Adorno in no sense condemns composers for engaging
>> with those (in fact, somewhere in 'Introduction to the Sociology of
>> Music', in defence of Brahms, he suggests that it's near-impossible for a
>> composer to stand outside of the developed tradition they inherit, and
>> probably the most productive thing a composer can do is to develop to the
>> maximum within that sort of inheritance - but Adorno's view of
>> development is dialectical rather than organic).
>
> I don't think I've seen these terms polarized before. I'd have thought
> that what was organic could also be dialectical.
It depends on your concept of the 'organic', I suppose. Let me suggest that
Adorno's view of tradition is far from being smooth and continuous (or else
he wouldn't have been able to find it in him to see positive things about
John Cage, say).
>
> What he is sharply critical of is work that uses such tropes
>> in an unmediated manner - that is the 'passive art' he speaks of. The
>> essay on Bach (which I would recommend you read, it's not very long) was
>> a gauntlet thrown down against prevailing conceptions of Bach that were
>> frequently expressed at the time of the bicentenary of his death, which
>> was when the essay was written. Specifically as a composer that's somehow
>> 'outside time', expressing 'eternal values' and the like - Adorno's
>> retort is to argue the case for Bach as a historical composer, one who
>> was dialectically engaged with the conventions of his time. And he goes
>> into some (maybe not enough, but some) musical detail on this subject.
>
> I'm not sure what is really meant here by dialectical. One of the
> problems for someone like me is the vagueness of vocabulary in Adorno and
> his ilk.
'Dialectical' is a simple term made prominent in German idealist thought by
Hegel, and familiar to all those even a little versed in that tradition.
> I assume you and Adorno are ignoring that all human aperception is
> dialectical and are being rather more catty than that.
Who's ignoring that (except perhaps for David Gable)?
> I assume you mean that Bach didn't dumbly imitate the fashionable trends
> around him. The question then comes as to whether he "worked against"
> fashion (which to me means he was simply a copycat with no integrity of
> his own) or whether he was more his own person (a word you won't use:
> authentic).
No, I won't use the word 'authentic'. Working against *genre* is not at all
the same as working against *fashion*. What Bach did, according to Adorno,
is actually develop the inner workings of his pieces in such a way that is
at cross-purposes with the historical expectations provided by the genre.
>
> You constantly depict Adorno as going up the mountain, communing with
> verities, and descending to tell us, in deliberately obfuscated prose,
> that some days the sky is blue. Do you really think that before Adorno no
> one knew that Bach wrote original music within a heavy tradition?
>
> To whom was this a revelation?
>
Well, Adorno's essay was and is controversial. At heart he didn't accept the
'outside time' view of Bach, which was then prevalent. I'm sure you've come
across that sort of kitschy talk plenty of times in the context of
discussion of Bach's music. In place of the 'timeless genius', Adorno
substituted a view of Bach as a historical figure in every sense.
>>
>> You're confusing the inhabitation of existing tropes with an unmediated
>> relationship with them. In no sense would Adorno condemn crucifixion or
>> nativity scenes because they work within conventional genre - but he
>> would be critical if they didn't add to those, develop the possibilities
>> of the genre, further.
>
> Again you're being catty: "unmediated."
What's wrong with that term? I've heard plenty of 'unmediated' music in my
time (there's an awful lot of it written by cynical careerist composers) -
one cliche after another.
> Ian, I confess, two things get my blood up: one is the critical cop-out of
> saying someone works against convention; the other is the notion of "the
> possibilities of the genre." "Genre" does not exist. It's a pseudo
> concept without definition, an arbitrary set agreed on by no one.
I think that it wouldn't be that hard to see generic conventions - for
example the happy ending in a Hollywood movie. And one can see generic
conventions and expectations in musical forms as well, especially in terms
of the relationship between the large-scale formal processes and the more
detailed inner development of the small-scale material.
> I am astonished that you would think that possibilities "inhabit" a
> genre.
>
Why is that so astonishing? Don't you think that any Mass setting, say,
inhabits a genre?
>
>>
>> Adorno would agree with you there - conditions of freedom for the
>> individual subject (at least to a large degree) have not yet been
>> attained.
>
> So does it advance freedom to regard everything opposing (totally
> unfettered) freedom as "fascist"?
Once again, you're dealing only with extremes, so much so as to make the
argument ludicrous. No, maybe we can't conceive of an *absolute* freedom for
the individual subject, any more than we can conceive of absolutely pure
water, say. But one can speak of palpable distinctions in terms of the
freedom afforded the subject, and the extent to which little subjective
expression is possible for the ordinary citizen (i.e. the one who has to
work to survive, as opposed to the capitalist who lives of the proceeds of
their property and capital) under capitalism. And yes, like Adorno I believe
there could be a major shift in the possibilities for free expression of the
subject in a post-capitalist society.
> Actual human freedom, as you know, requires fetters to be free, even if
> one is the only person on earth.
>
Please expand on that hopelessly generalised comment.
>>
>> No, both of those are ongoing and changing concepts, though there is some
>> kernel of definition in either case which make the terms useable (as with
>> all language). To reify a term like fascism might be to associate it
>> solely with what went on in Italy or Germany (either or both), without
>> considering how elements of the same continue to exist and develop in
>> other post-war societies, and take on different forms.
>
> But it seems to me that this is what you have been doing: applying a crude
> Adornoian definition of fascism to Italy,
No, you were the one who was always bringing up Italy in this context.
> for example, in the faith that somehow a "kernel" of objectivity exists in
> the term itself, whereas in fact it's totally arbitrary and conventional
> and false. This, I submit, is reification.
That is not reification at all - reification would turn the concept into a
fixed and unchanging category, as well as asserting that it's an inevitable
fact of life. I'm submitting on the other hand that it's a fluid category
but which has some core of meaning, like any concept.
Ian
Simon Roberts
david...@aol.com says...
>Many--although I hasten to add, not all--Americans are allergic to the
>species of idealist philosophy characteristic of Heidegger, Adorno, the
>Frankfurt school, and many other 20th-century European philosophers, in
>short, to what is sometimes referred to as "continental philosophy."
Indeed not all. I've been out of touch with academia for more than a decade,
but 15 years or so ago the sort of philosophising you find distasteful and
meaningless was popular even in law schools (I was once in a seminar with the
innocent-looking title "legal interpretation" which was taught by someone who
could have been invented by the folk who created the postmodern generator).
>I'm one of those Americans. At the same time, I've always wondered if
>my allergy was the function of some cultural barrier. In short, I've
>wondered whether the problem was on my end. But when I start to
>examine the writings of any of these philosophers, I find the same
>problem. I find long dense dissertations on cosmic concepts like
>"truth" or "alienation" although it's never clear to me what, exactly,
>is meant by these terms in context. Then, when we move into the
>political arena and start talking about how to change the world, I find
>terms like "capitalism" and "fascism" being used without ever being
>subjected to adequate definition. These terms remain at the cosmic
>level of idealist concepts. Their meaning is never sufficiently nailed
>down that they could have any practical application. Again, see Mr.
>Gallagher's discussion of the term "fascism" with Ian.
There may well be a cultural divide here, a language barrier of sorts. I
studied philosophy at Oxford at the tail end (?) of the period in which British
(or at least Oxford) philosophy seemed primarily concerned with what one might
call problem-solving-through-definition-of-ordinary-language (Gilbert Ryle,
Richard Hare, JL Austin, et al.). "Continental" philosophy was treated with a
form of disdain, and the suspicion that it consisted of little more than
commonplace, simple ideas presented in the all-but-impenetrable fancy-dress of
obscure-sounding jargon was not discouraged. If that's the context in which you
learn philosophy, it's easy enough to find the "continental" alternative
incomprehensible (or a complete fraud).
Simon
Ian Pace
<david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1136397541....@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> Ian,
>
> You are unable to grasp my quite clear discussion of the level at
> which--of the sense in which--your cosmic concepts are in fact
> meaningless, the sense in which they're nothing more than empty and
> rather bad poetry.
'My' 'cosmic concepts' are actually concepts which have a long history in a
certain intellectual tradition. I don't find the fact that you are unable to
understand them particularly worth engaging with, no.
> You similarly fail to grasp Mr. Gallagher's
> continued criticisms of your use of the term "fascism."
Perhaps both you and he can offer our own definition of the term, then? Or
of any of the many terms you bandy about so often (such as 'old-fashioned
phrasing', for example)?
>
> There is nothing more idiotic than using great big fancy abstract
> concepts like "reified objectivity" as a label for the necessity of
> human beings to feed themselves and find a way to keep a roof over
> their heads. Before you can use a concept like "reified objectivity"
> intelligibly, there has to have been a very well developed discussion,
> first of what you mean by "objectivity" (or rather, in your case, "an
> objectivity") and then of what you mean by "a reified objectivity."
Now I really am thinking you are stupid. Those concepts have been explained
earlier in the thread. And I would have expected someone like you to have
understood their meaning in advance - maybe that was asking too much
>
>>One would have thought that certain concepts that have a long history
>>wouldn't have to be spelt out every time they are used.
>
> If you find yourself talking to somebody unfamiliar with the vocabulary
> that you're using, wouldn't it make sense to stop and take the trouble
> to define your terms?
This is so tedious - can I tell you once again that reification is the
process by which a concept becomes an object? Are you really not capable of
grasping that? And have you really led such a sheltered and narrow
intellectual life that you've never come across the concept before, and made
any effort to find out what it means?
> Of course, that isn't really the problem. The
> problem is that you exhibit a certain German idealist cast of mind, and
> you don't feel the need to spell out the meaning of your abstract
> concepts any more than Adorno did.
One likes to think that it's not always necessary to spell every term out as
if for students.
> You like to hear yourself use fancy
> terms like "reified objectivity" when they are in fact meaningless as
> you use them.
They're not meaningless at all, just your rather narrow mind can't cope with
them.
>
> You were given the opportunity to spell out the meanings of half a
> dozen such concepts when I picked them out of your posts in this
> thread.
Then have a look at the thread to find those definitions. Or you could
otherwise look them up for yourself.
> Similarly, Mr. Gallagher has given you the opportunity to
> nail down the meaning of the concept, "fascism." You're unwilling or
> unable to do so.
See above - you're being very repetitive here and singularly failing to
address any of the points at issue. What is your definition of the term
(which you use)?
>You dance around the issue, which is the vagueness of
> the concept as you and Adorno use it. You excuse Adorno for failing to
> nail down what the concept "fascism" meant to him, but you nevertheless
> continue to apply this vague concept to other countries without
> explaining what you mean by it. You fail to see how utterly damning
> the objections raised by Mr. Gallagher actually are.
Once again you hide behind another poster - are you really that weak-minded?
I have said repeatedly that "fascism" for Adorno took its definition from
the type of society to be found in Nazi Germany. Do I really need to spell
that out more times?
>
> I once read a piece by Richard Rorty (which I'd love to get my hands on
> again, if anybody else has seen it) in which he said something like the
> following: "Look. You can't use the term 'capitalism' to mean both a
> particular economic system on the one hand and the monstrous unspoken
> evil that's responsible for everything wrong with the culture on the
> other."
>
Rorty is a rather eccentric combination of old-style pragmatist and new
post-modernist, and not a thinker I set any great store by from what I've
read. You would find he's one of the worst offenders in terms of the total
relativism that you elsewhere deplore. But in terms of that specific point,
no-one I know of defines the 'monstrous unspoken evil that's responsible for
everything wrong with the culture' as the simple noun 'capitalism', which
does indeed refer to a particular economic system. The latter of Rorty's
terms refers to the particular consequences, in terms of culture, that are
believed to result primarily from that economic system. Is that clear enough
for you?
Ian