> class ethnic enclaves in which, surprise, most of them grew up. But like
> with Lasch and Adorno, they rarely talk about what they like, and spend
> almost all of their time criticizing what they hate -- which, like with
> those two guys, is almost everything. What really made people hate Telos
> is their irrepressible desire to skewer identity politics.
Um, I beg to differ -- not about Telos, which seems to have gone to the dogs -- but about Adorno. Lousy translations plus a lack of airtime for Central European culture (almost no film, but lots of music) have yielded this impression that Adorno was the original Mr. Cranky. Nicht so, Freundchen. Adorno has lots and lots of good things to say about radical modern art, bourgeois art from the 19th century, and even Hegel and Kant. He's critical, but always takes the time to follow the critique back to a specific historical moment. There's also this deeply historical register in German culture, or a resistance through mourning-what-never-was, which has deep affinities, interestingly enough, to the Talmudic tradition; Germany, too, was a national culture in search of a nation-state for centuries (Goethe once said, Germans were the Jews of Europe). Adorno's mourning is a messianic act.
That said, I would agree that Telos pretty much sucks. I probably shouldn't be catty about this... oh, what the hell, the story is, I had a little run-in, in my salad days as an undergrad student journalist, with a certain professor who was close with the Telos gang, and let's just say that, yes, we're talking about what Marx satirized as "critical criticism", i.e. a bunch of mostly white male ressentiment-filled types all pissed off because their students won't date them anymore.
-- Dennis