> ***** He-men are thus, in their own constitution, what film-plots usually
> present them to be, masochists. At the root of their sadism is a lie, and
> only as liars do they truly become sadists, agents of repression. This
> lie, however, is nothing other than repressed homosexuality presenting
> itself as the only approved form of heterosexuality. In the end the tough
> guys are the truly effeminate ones.... (46) *****
>
> Adorno's writing, alas, does not express what we wish to find there. As I
> mentioned earlier, that is in part because he did not possess the
> analytical distinciton between homosexuality and ('repressed eros' in)
> homosociality.
So we're going to condemn a thinker of the Forties because they didn't have access to the flourishing micropolitics of the Seventies? No, "Minima Moralia" is not Stonewall, and Adorno's take on gay culture is as dated as his take on popular music or advertising or jazz; he clearly didn't have any direct experience of what the gay community was all about, but he had the decency to refuse to ratify the revolting mainstream view, that being gay was a disease or something. That doesn't make his theory totally false, it just means we need to historicize such, acknowledge the weaknesses and blindnesses but also the moments of genuine progress. Adorno is the ONLY thinker of note in the Forties to even raise micropolitical issues (female and gay identity, environmentalism, etc.) in a compelling way, relating these to the inner dynamic of capital, showing that the oppression of identities is fundamental to how the System works. That's an astonishing, amazing achievement, in the midst of the hideous violence of WW II and the Ice Age of the early Cold War; folks like Sedgewick represent the next stage of what Adorno started, the deepening and furthering of micropolitical dialectics.
It's not that I'm being picky here, it's just that, oh Lord, the global Left is in sad-assed shape these days, and we desperately need theoretical instruments capable of standing up to the might of the total system. Adorno has them, and we gotta learn how they work, reverse-engineer those puppies, and dig like Linux-powered moles for the future, because if we don't, ain't gonna be no future at all.
-- Dennis