> Adorno's essay on Freudian theory and fascism to the authoritarian
> personality, in most instances their critique has to do with the
> parallel between fascism and liberalist culture, without addressing
> serious the idea of a Stalinist cultural logic (I'm intrigued by the
Identity, not parallel: fascism *is* a variety of capitalism, though not all capitalisms are reducible to 1930s Fascism. Here's Adorno in "Negative Dialectics" buzzing both sides of the Berlin Wall, and coming to some conclusions which are way ahead of 99% of the theory of 2001:
"Whoever pleads for the preservation of a radically culpable and shabby culture turns into its accomplice, while those who renounce culture altogether immediately promote the barbarism, which culture reveals itself to be. Not even silence can break out of the circle; it merely rationalizes one's own subjective incapacity with the state of objective truth and debases this once more into a lie. If the Eastern states have, in spite of their twaddle to the contrary, abolished culture and transformed it as a pure means of domination into junk, this is what that culture, which moans about this, only deserves, and to what for its part, in the name of the democratic right of human beings to what already resembles them, it zealously tends. It is only that the administrative barbarism of the functionaries over there [in the East], by praising itself as culture and proclaiming its bad state of affairs as a precious and sacred legacy, convicts its reality, the infrastructure, to be as barbaric for its part as the superstructure they demolish, by taking it under control. In the West, it is at least permitted to say so." (ND:365)
Extraordinary passage; not just the mainstream culture, but the refusal to cognize that culture is equally barbaric; Stalinism/Brezhnevism has merged into NATO technocracy; the East is West and the West is East; and radical theory has to cognize this, to figure out how and why May 1968 = Prague Spring = Tet Offensive. All very relevant to building a global resistance (but then, maybe this is why Adorno is so little read, and so badly misunderstood, these days).
-- Dennis