Speaking of Beethoven, have I afflicted this list with this long quote from Fred Jameson's Marxism and Form on Adorno and Beethoven?
Doug -------
Yes, you have, sometime last fall or at the end of summer. Or maybe I am confusing it with other thoughts following JB's Psychic Lives of Power. In any event, I've been slowly slogging my way through Hegel--very slowly. It is hard going, especially if you are trying to do a double read, reading to understand and reading to place in some other meta-narrative like that of Jameson.
Its one thing to read Jameson and agree or disagree. It is another to re-capitulate the journey and determine its accuracy, its missed turns, and over looked similitudes.
Yoshie posted something on Walter Benjamin and the mid-century arcades as proto shopping malls. This reminded me of re-looking at Baudelaire v. Victor Hugo and Poe v. Melville as some kind of parallel reaction to the rising commercialism of the mid-nineteenth century--sort of the follow through or aftermath of Beethoven and Hegel, Goya and David, of the heroic age of the bourgeois and its trivialization as merely business and industry. And the sequel to mid-century as a totalizing alienation and isolation with the impressionists. I am sure it is hard see impressionist painting as a last refuge, an art of exile, but that's what I think it was, in its scale, its subject matter, in the compositional means it employed and in the constricted and restricted and increasing abstract scope of its mental palette--so to speak--an art of reduced means.
Well, whatever. But the other direction of these thoughts leads into the nostalgia thread on the 60s and the idea that the music, drugs, and sex were merely the frenzied expression of a failed revolt, just as the aftermath was a kind of social and cultural narcosis. There is a similar arch from frenzied failure to sleep between the failures of 1848 and 1871 which can be traced through the letters of Gustave Flaubert, particularly those between him and Georges Sand. Walter Benjamin's uncompleted study of commercial architecture might shed more light on that.
Probably at some point Adorno was retracing some of these historical threads with Mann when they collaborated on Doctor Faustus. But re-capitulating that sequence or retracing that journey has to wait awhile. I would have to deal with Negative Dialectics and only got as far as the first chapter, that is barely into Ontological Need. It begins with the connection (which Justin denied) between Hegel and Heidegger.
Somewhere along the way is the basic idea that there is a fundamental connection between the forms of cultural expression and the dynamics of their socio-economic embedding. Just calling that connection ideology hardly illucidates it much less gives to it a philosophical form worthy of anything but rhetoric.
At this point in history, the most pressing cultural issues all revolve around re-establishing some form of collective and individual identity in a cultural world completely devoid of the possibility. The effort is a kind of reaction to the amorphous homogeneity of mass scales of production in which even the death of millions has no perceptible impact on a scale of billions of lives.
The movements of cultural, historical and individual identities share a fundamental impulse of some sort that connect them with both Hegel and Heidegger in their respective projects to re-establish a universal metaphysics when that was already impossible to do either in 1820 or 1920. The intermediate form of this impulse is nationalism, that is intermediate between an individual conceptual effort and a larger scaled historical or socio-economic process. These ideas are obviously Hegelian in origin, and culminate in the idea that state is spirit fallen into history. But that is Hegel's expression of his own responses to the processes and events he was embedded in--in other words we don't have to believe it. And yet, there is something to it, not as a philosophical truth, but as a cultural phenomenon, a kind of reflection, a kind of cultural mirror of fidelity to events lived--like a painting or poem.
Well that ought to be suitably vague.
Chuck Grimes