Littleton: it's Adorno's fault

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at tsoft.com
Mon Sep 27 23:14:31 PDT 1999


Look, why do you think that Adorno was capable of coming up with his outrageous statement that "totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together"? If he had been mindful of facts as to what fascism actually did to homosexuals, he might have noticed that Nazis were radically and fundamentally anti-homo, as some other leftists of his time did. It is true that his homophobia might have prevented him from taking note of empirical evidence sticking in his face and found 'facts' to fit his 'theory' in any case, but that's not an argument against empirical investigations -- that's an argument against homophobia.

Yoshie -------------

I'll take a stab at this. I am in the process of wading through Adrono and Horkheimer at the moment. The immediate book in front of me is Jameson's Marxism and Form and I am just about finished with its opening essay on Adorno.

In Jameson's view, what Adorno was doing was turning the dialectic back on itself, as a second level or order of philosophical analysis. I haven't gotten through enough of Adorno's Negative Dialectics to know if this accurate or not. Let's assume it is. In that case, then I would interpret the comment you quote that homosexuality and totalitarian society belong together in this way. The creation of the idea of homosexuality derives from both the institutionalization (the death freeze of bureaucracy) of social relations, and the implicit authoritarian nature of such institutionalizations. Therefore, homosexuality belongs to, is a product of a totalizing socio-historical process that also institutionalizes all social relations--produces a totalitarian society. Without such an institutionalization or the absolutism that characterizes such constructions, then what we call and possibly perceive as homosexuality would not exist.

I interpret this to mean that the entire complex of acts, relations and desires which may be distributed about the psyche and society in any sort of way, has been brought together under the socializing process of institutionalization of all relations, brought into focus as or simply rendered in legalistic terms as homosexuality.

Considering that Adorno was Thomas Mann's collaborator or at least acquaintance during the writing of Dr. Faustus, and Mann was not in the least homophobic--since many of his works are at some level an exploration of homosexuality--it is a little hard to believe Adorno was an outright queer bashing asshole--even at a theoretical level.

Horkheimer's long essay on 'Authority and the Family' develops a related point about the institutionalization of the family as a patriarchy--that is as a social construction that derives from historical conditions and has little to do with nature, per se.

These are loose observations and do not directly confront your charge, but I suspect you might be wrong about Adorno. Either that or I really don't understand your critique.

If I extend out these thoughts, then Adorno does pose a critique of the broad spectrum of activities that fall under the category of identity politics (even if we need to erase this term). The critique amounts to saying that these actions, insights, say schools of thought need to examine their own constructions as products of the social processes that have brought them into existance. And in doing so, it should be considered a likely possibility that they are products of the very processes they would most wish to erase or change.

Chuck Grimes



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