Re: [microsound] Re: privilege, boundaries and class

["tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@xxxxxxxxx>]

> so while taking Adorno to task for his dismissal of Jazz is not
> privileged or bourgeois, dismissing Adorno on the grounds that music
> can be separated from the political-economic forces that shape it is.

Yah, bingo.

One must wrestle with Adorno. For those soundbiting the "Adorno couldn't
dance" comment, it was a subtle hint --


"At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a
cousin of Sasha [Alexander Berkman], a young boy, took me aside. With a
grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he
whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not
with such reckless abandon, anyway. It was undignified for one who was on
the way to become a force in the anarchist movement. My frivolity would only
hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind
his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my
face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for
anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should
demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not
expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a
cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to
self-expression, everyboy's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism
meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world--prisons,
persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own
comrades I would live my beautiful ideal."


 Emma Goldman, _Living My Life_, New York: Knopf, 1934, p. 56.

If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution
If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution
If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution


[np.. Adorno:
    http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/fpm/texte/adorno.htm   ]

"[37] Individuals of the rhythmically obedient type are mainly found among
the youth--the so-called radio generation. They are most susceptible to a
process of masochistic adjustment to authoritarian collectivism. The type is
not restricted to any one political attitude. The adjustment to
anthropophagous collectivism is found as often among left-wing political
groups as among right-wing groups. Indeed, both overlap: repression and
crowd mindedness overtake the followers of both trends. The psychologies
tend to meet despite the surface distinctions in political attitudes."

"39] This obedient type is the rhythmical type, the word "rhythmical" being
used in its everyday sense. Any musical experience of this type is based
upon the underlying, unabating time unit of the music--its "beat." To play
rhythmically means, to these people, to play in such a way that even if
pseudo-individualizations--counter-accents and other
"differentiations"-occur, the relation to the ground meter is preserved. To
be musical means to them to be capable of following given rhythmical
patterns without being disturbed by "individualizing" aberrations, and to
fit even the syncopations into the basic time units. This is the way in
which their response to music immediately expresses their desire to obey.
However, as the standardized meter of dance music and of marching suggests
the coordinated battalions of a mechanical collectivity, obedience to this
rhythm by overcoming the responding individuals leads them to conceive of
themselves as agglutinized with the untold millions of the meek who must be
similarly overcome. Thus do the obedient inherit the earth."



--> .. if I had to choose between Goldman and Adorno, I'm down twirling with
Goldman (I bet she could really shake it), while Adorno rants in the corner,
or sits in concert at some oldskool new music audience/performer deal, in a
chair, listening for the individual moment of revolution .. meanwhile, the
dancers revolve and r/evolve .. Adorno's critique, here stripped down not to
jazz but to the essence of its aesthetics, is quite simple: it equates
rhythm with authoritarianism, to the "obedient type."

I.e., any culture with rhythm is thus authoritarian-collective and obedient.
It is a particular "type."

I.e., all pan-African cultures are obviously simply obedient at their
essence, to extend the argument. But so are gypsies. So are the rites of
carnival, the ball, the masquerade, the drunken dance, the jive, swing, the
jig.. it looks like every culture is an "obedient type." This either loses
the meaning of "type" or this "type" is applied with a criteria that would
have to be discerned. Whoever they are, "They are most susceptible to a
process of masochistic adjustment to authoritarian collectivism."

Possible redux: for Adorno, rhythm is plain wrong: it leads to everyone
acting in the same way, just like how everyone dances all in the same way,
right?

    --> Or, so we should obey Adorno, right?
    Afterall, he keeps repeating it.

Possible thesis: it seems to me that, if we wanted to push it, Adorno's
writing is the more authoritarian of the two -- like poor Alex whispering in
Emma's ear as he sees her give way to Nietzschean abandon, Dionysus .. a
hint of insecurity in that which moves collectively, without the great
intellectual individual demarcating right from wrong in the cultural
superstructure..?

Dance, at least in its European sphere of meaning, is also masochistic, and
masochism for Adorno is a negative value (contra Deleuze, Foucault, etc.,
who were all very interested in masochism as a way to delimit the body and
to reconfigure control). We would need to spend some time on masochism here,
Sacher-Masoch.. could Adorno not give up his impenetrable fortress of purity
for a minute to give his feet a spin?

Possible investigation: for Adorno, the only type of freedom is
"individualization" -- an odd thing for a Marxist, but perhaps not -- one
would have to spend some time picking apart how Adorno understands the
Marxist concept of individuation and individuality as distinct from the
capitalist pressure to "be your own person" (as a consumer--pick your iPod
colour) to the individualist or atomist view of society (in capitalist
economics -- the "rational agent" in ethics).

Redux: the issue with Adorno isn't the "Jazz he was critiquing at the time"
as an aberrance of "real Jazz from North America" but rather that he
condemns rhythm over and over again. Possible thesis: Adorno as somewhat
blind to the necessity of rhythm and those other kinds of rhythms to be
found in life -- for what is revolution but a rhythm that turns around and
around?

Of course we understand why -- the torchlit Nazi gatherings, the repetition
of military marches and chants -- but to equate this with dance, with
festival, with carnival, with ritual and movement, is to not only negate the
difference between the two but also to mistake the one for the many, the
particular for the general, the actual for the virtual, the act for the law.
It abstracts from Nazi use of ritual to condemn all ritual. It misrecognises
collective obedience to collective embodiment _of collectivity_. To what
directions, tendencies, means or ends collectivity is spun is not the
essence of collectivity-itself.

Possible thesis: that abstracting type leads to negation. Consider similar
authoritarian arguments found in Nazi condemnation of racial types. For
Adorno, there are "obedient types;" for the Nazis, there are "racial types"
(who also are usually characterized as "obedient"). Possible thesis: the
language of Adorno (which would have to be read in German), considered here
in its implications, but also the way in which Adorno sets up "types" and
the structure of his argument concerning rhythm and types in the movement of
abstraction (is this a negative dialectical method? what are the
implications of this method?).

Drifting thoughts // Adorno is at his best when he critiques the economic
systems and structures that, in his view, are the machinations of culture.
His cutting tone and slicing critique are some kind of relief at the turn of
the 21C... However, when he attempts to turn aesthetics to ethical critique,
he is not so much generalizing as condemning an essential aspect of
existence: the rhythm of repetition that, one comes to realise, touches our
world .. the sun up, the sun down .. we dance, we drink, we sleep, we make
love .. Adorno's lack of understanding of rhythm-- no, scratch that -- that
he can't FEEL rhythm worries the shit out of me .. how did Adorno make love
without rhythm? How did he dance in bed? How did he see the sun everyday?
How did he write sans the rhythm, the very ritual, the discipline and
masochism required to write over and over again?  Hell .. I wouldn't want to
be part of any alternative political arrangement where I couldn't dance and
swing .. and spin .. the authoritarian USSR shut down discos ... in a
relentless and violent fashion .. as did our "democracies" contra rave
culture, etc. -- any movement of collective gathering threatens any
hegemonic theory of power -- this is perhaps too naïve -- we need to read
Graham St. John..

Repeat, over and over.


tV


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