>>> Dennis R Redmond <dredmond at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU>
Pas du tout. Adorno is just asking, over and over again, what exactly *is* this progress which the total system keeps trying to sell us. The total system damages everyone, including you and me; none of us are what we could be, in a liberated society ("Human beings are, without exception, not yet themselves" -- Adorno in Negative Dialectics). Adorno's take on aesthetics can be roughly paraphrased as follows: we spend most of our time gunning for market share, fighting for scraps of the social surplus, hacking and slashing our way through the mediatic jungles of information capitalism, doing violence to others, ourselves and our history. Great works of art somehow manage to index these contradictions, drawing out unforeseen resistances to this state of affairs; they take the most ordinary materials, and tweak them ever so slightly -- but this tinest of tweaks is also a messianic transformation, which somehow changes everything. Surely this is the profoundest and most accurate intuition of the social revolution we so badly need: a revolution which has to begin with what exists, the damaged and distorted reality around us, but which doesn't abolish real things or people (or liquidate such as unprofitable, or herd them into gulags, or sacrifice them for shareholder value) but *completes* them, stopping the socialized slaughter we call global corporate competition and healing the wounds we blindly inflict on ourselves.
Teddy was on to something here, even if he didn't know zip about jazz or film.
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Charles: This sounds good; it doesn't contradict some of my experience. However, is there any evidence that a political practice has been based on this theory and produced results, somekind of preliminary radical change ? What great works of art have recently caused some people to move toward effectively changing the world ? I ask this hopefully.
Charles Brown