> The counter-culture was the
> prison-break from this particular form of mass-culture, but Adorno died
> before he had a chance to reflect seriously on this.
Adorno loathed the counter culture with a ferocity that makes Telos' hatred of identity politics look positively open-minded. He thought they were the second coming of the Nazis -- the corrupt spawn of mass culture whose misguided attempts at liberation would destroy everything worth perserving and metastasize everything evil. But what else could one expect from people whose subjectivity had rotted out? Naturally the 68'ers returned the favor and boycotted his classes and stood up and shouted No, You're the Nazi. Somehow I don't think living another 10 years would have changed his mind.
> You're asking for an Adorno who is really a Fredric Jameson
God forbid. I just want you to admit that he was a world class crankcase and a snob who thought liberation could only be gained by the very very few through their understanding of very difficult works of art.
> I could reel off a list of
> the nice things Adorno says about mass culture, ranging from <snip>
> to the musical analysis of Alban Berg (whose work is soaked in
> populism).
Let's take Berg, for example, since you mention it. I like his stuff, I agree he's great. But you can only say he's soaked in populism -- never mind that he's an example of mass culture (!) -- if you're snootier than Hilton Kramer squared. (That's TA I'm talking about, of course, not you.) Now atonal music is something that everyone agrees TA knew a thing or two about. He thought it had liberatory potential. But who did he think this liberatory potential was available to? About 0.1% of the population. In his first essay to The Sociology of Music (which, unlike some others, is a perfectly servicable translation), Adorno discusses the 5 types of musical listener. They are:
1. The Expert 2. The Good Listener 3. The Culture Consumer
and well, it's downhill from there. Except it turns out that good listeners don't exist anymore -- they all but vanished at the end of the 19th century, corruption and cretinization, don't you know. So that leaves the experts -- which, he admits, is pretty much restricted to professional musicians like himself, and damned few of those. ("For example, if a man has his first encounter with the second movement of Webern's Trio for Strings and can name the formal components of that dissolved architectonically unsupported piece, such a man would qualify as an expert.")
So there you have it. In an art form that he has devoted more passion to praising than any other, and which he knows more about than any other, he thinks that 99% of the people that listen to it are unable to get the liberatory potential from it. And this is in an art form that is only listened to by a minority of the population to start with. And this from a man who thinks that in this degraded age liberatory potential is *only* to be found in great art, properly understood.
If that's not a world class grump, and an elitist's elitist, I don't know what is.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com