Fwd: [microsound] essay on TWiki site

[Bill Ashline <ashline@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 09:08:58 -0800 (PST), jeff gburek
<tsazmaniac@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> i wonder, bill, if this is the problem with those who
> read their adorno and write with it in mind, rather
> than write/work against it as much as they write/work
> against the dominating culture (can we speak of
> counter-culture heroism, a kind of follow the leader
> dynamic even if attentions are best yet not idiotic
> enough?---the tendency to conflate all dominant
> culture with the nazist, when the conditions we live
> in are quite different.

yeah, sure, Jeff.  One must always caution against such forms of
heroism.  But Adorno wasn't attempting to conflate all forms of
dominant culture with Nazism.  he was trying to critique the mode of
thought that Nazism triumphed and even if our conditions are much more
different than Nazism today, the mode of thought which was Adorno's
target certainly hasn't gone away.

My reason for chiming in here wasn't that Adorno's work lacked
problems.  it's that there's no texture in any discussion about him on
a music list.  Everyone cites all the cliches, the facile reductions,
the cheap shots.  it gets annoying to read such garbage when a person
like Adorno is far more worthy of a serious undertaking than anyone
posting on this board, myself included.  If a single person on an
email list could accomplish in an entire lifetime what Adorno managed
to do in a single year, it would be remarkable, especially today.
Sometimes you have to earn your spurs to criticize.  On some of these
posts people wear their lack of homework with pathetic pride.  Adorno
and Horkheimer close the Dialectic of Enlightenment with a brief essay
on the genesis of stupidity, which is probably apropos in this
context:  "Stupidity is a scar.  It can stem from one of many
activities--physical or mental--or from all.  Every partial stupidity
of a man denotes a spot where the play of stirring muscles was
thwarted instead of encouraged."


--
"Artists tear percepts out of their perceptions, in the same way that
Impressionist painters twist our perception of light by showing us
their impression of it with colour instead of line, creating a percept
called Impressionism.  Deleuze states that this creates a completely
new habit of thought, one that twists our nerves and creates "a crack
in the skull" (Parnet  1996). "

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