> just exactly how such turns are made possible. How does a society
> construct its subjects? (Whip and shame bearing Moms?--hi Kelley) The
> answer is through its arts. These are both the expression of its
Partly, but the majority share of this construction is sheer historical necessity: one must learn, go to school, work, etc. Art is a response to this situation, it's the attempt by the subject to grapple with its historical situation.
> It is simply the revolt of the disaffected bourgeois
> against itself. After all none of the cultural giants of the era where
> anything other than bourgeois to the core.
But the core of the bourgeoisie -- and of capitalism generally -- is precisely the proletariat. Marx talked about how the great bourgeois revolutions were the historically necessary foreshadowing of fuller, more authentic revolutions to come, and the same is true for the various cultural revolutions of capital -- including the one we're living through right now, the multinational one.
> I probably don't go along with Adorno's musical distinctions between
> say Stravinsky and Schoenberg either, since the former wasn't any less
> a radical assault, (although louder) on the bourgeois taste of the era
> than the latter.
But a conservativizing, restorationist assault, which preserved all the basic categories of 19th century tonality while pretending to rebel against such; the musical equivalent of Celine or Wyndham Lewis in the novel, or Riefenstahl in film. As such, something new does get said, but ultimately the reactionary forces retain the upper hand here; Schoenberg, for all his problems, at least moves in the direction of freedom by expressing genuine social contradictions of his work. It's actually something you can hear in the works involved: the acoustic richness and extraordinary scope of Schoenberg's mature works, versus the paltriness of Stravinsky's neoclassical phase.
-- Dennis