Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (American Crossroads)

This book is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture - Adorno's finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno's thoughts on culture.

“For those inclined to dismiss Adorno’s take on America as the uncomprehending condescension of a mandarin elitist, David Jenemann’s splendid new book will come as a rude awakening. Exploiting a wealth of new sources, he persuasively shows the depth of Adorno’s engagement with the culture industry and the complexity of his reaction to it.” —Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley

The German philosopher and cultural critic Theodor W. Adorno was one of the towering intellectual figures of the twentieth century, and between 1938 and 1953 he lived in exile in the United States. In the first in-depth account of this period of Adorno’s life, David Jenemann examines Adorno’s confrontation with the burgeoning American “culture industry” and casts new light on Adorno’s writings about the mass media. Contrary to the widely held belief—even among his defenders—that Adorno was disconnected from America and disdained its culture, Jenemann reveals that Adorno was an active and engaged participant in cultural and intellectual life during these years.

From the time he first arrived in New York in 1938 to work for the Princeton Radio Research Project, exploring the impact of radio on American society and the maturing marketing strategies of the national radio networks, Adorno was dedicated to understanding the technological and social influence of popular art in the United States. Adorno carried these interests with him to Hollywood, where he and Max Horkheimer attempted to make a film for their Studies in Prejudice Project and where he befriended Thomas Mann and helped him craft his famous novel Doctor Faustus. Shuttling between insightful readings of Adorno’s theories and a rich body of archival materials—including unpublished writings and FBI files—Jenemann paints a portrait of Adorno’s years in New York and Los Angeles and tells the cultural history of an America coming to grips with its rapidly evolving mass culture.

Adorno in America eloquently and persuasively argues for a more complicated, more intimate relationship between Adorno and American society than has ever been previously acknowledged. What emerges is not only an image of an intellectual in exile, but ultimately a rediscovery of Adorno as a potent defender of a vital and intelligent democracy.

David Jenemann is assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont.

An exalting portrait of Adorno as a defender of intellectual democracy.......2007-07-08

In the decades since his death, Adorno's thinking has lost none of its capacity to unsettle the settled, and has proved hugely influential in social and cultural thought. To most people, the entertainment provided by television, radio, film, newspapers, astrology charts and CD players seem harmless enough. For Adorno, however, the culture industry that produces them is ultimately toxic in its effect on the social process.
Here, Robert Witkin unpacks Adorno's notoriously difficult critique of popular culture in an engaging and accessible style, looking first at the development of the overarching theories of authority, commodification and negative dialectics within which Adorno's work needs to be seen. This book is an essential guide for understanding one of the key thinkers of our time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies (Cultural Spaces)

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Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies (Cultural Spaces)
Shane Gunster
Manufacturer: University of Toronto Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Building on the work of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Capitalizing on Culture presents an innovative, accessible, and timely exploration of critical theory in a cultural landscape dominated by capital. Despite the increasing prevalence of commodification as a dominant factor in the production, promotion, and consumption of most forms of mass culture, many in the cultural studies field have failed to engage systematically either with culture as commodity or with critical theory. Shane Gunster corrects that oversight, providing attentive readings of Adorno and Benjamin's work in order to generate a complex, non-reductive theory of human experience that attends to the opportunities and dangers arising from the confluence of culture and economics.

Gunster juxtaposes Benjamin's thoughts on memory, experience, and capitalism with Adorno's critique of mass culture and modern aesthetics to illuminate the key position that the commodity form plays in each thinker's work and to invigorate the dialectical complexity their writings acquire when considered together. This blending of perspectives is subsequently used to ground a theoretical interrogation of the comparative failure of cultural studies to engage substantively with the effect of commodification upon cultural practices. As a result, Capitalizing on Culture offers a fresh examination of critical theory that will be valuable to scholars studying the intersection of culture and capitalism.