An untraceable book
An important work by Theodor Adorno is back available to the Italian reader, in an expanded version of the original and rethought in a contemporary key. It had already been published in Italy by the publisher Sugarco back in 1974, an edition today, unfortunately, untraceable. We are talking about Theodor Adorno, Keyword. Critical models.
The 1974 edition, translated by Mariuccia Agrati, also contained an extensive introductory essay by Tito Perlini. The essay, of a philosophical nature, has not been reproduced in the current edition due to a significant expansion of the keywords of the Sugarco edition which has the same content as the German one. The original edition entitled Stichworth. Kritische Modelle it was published in 1969 by the Suhrkamp publisher in Frankfurt. The new edition contains 5 keywords more than the 1969 edition: they are animal, culture, anti-Semitism, nihilism e Freudian. These are new keywords with a strong topical value.
As Perlini writes the Tags they constitute the last work completed by Adorno who, however, did not have time to see the printed book. These were texts written on the occasion of different circumstances such as conferences, meetings, commemorations, lessons, radio interventions, etc. They are all linked to the critical reflection of the late Adorno. Some are purely philosophical and present a certain complexity that requires the reader to be familiar with the Frankfurt thinker. In fact, they resume the themes dealt with in Negative dialectic (1966), which is one of Adorno's last philosophical, let's say systematic, works.
Commitment and detachment
The cover of the goWare edition of 2009 in the series "Little great classics". Contains Adorno's interventions on the following keywords: America, Animal, Anti-Semitism, Culture, Education, Philosophy, Freudian, Teacher, Past, Personality, Progress, Reason and Revelation, Subject, German, Leisure, Theory and Practice.
Other contributions, on the other hand, have a popular and even autobiographical imprint. They are interesting because they begin to form a kind of intellectual biography of the German thinker. Gloss on personality, Taboo on the teaching profession, Scientific experiences in America, Free time, What is German?, Education after Auschwitz, Progress are contributions linked to reflections on post-war societies. They also reflect Adorno's reflection as an intellectual deeply marked by the experience of fascism and war both as a German Jew and as a refugee in the United States. If on the one hand there is a very strong civil commitment, on the other there is a detachment from action of a political nature.
The intervention on Teoria e Prassi is a sort of response to the youth protests of the second half of the XNUMXs, from which Adorno distanced himself. It is also a sort of defense of his vision against the criticism of his more militant pupils, in particular Hans Jürgen Krahl, who reproached the master for referring to praxis. The postponement of practice which is also the title of an important book by Marzio Vacatello on Adorno. According to Krahl, and with justification, Adorno with his "trauma" for the drift of the bourgeois individual "never really came out of his isolation of the period of exile remaining an emigrant to the last".
And perhaps this very lighthouse, devoid of moorings, in which he was locked up, provided Adorno with the ability to throw a beam of illuminating light on the dialectic that permeates modern societies without falling into the illusion of some easy way out.
The exercise of criticism and the escape from illusions
Adorno with pupil Hans-Jürge Kral in 1969 at which time Adorno's pupil led the occupation of the Institute. The master opposed this initiative to such an extent that he called the police. Within a year, both would be gone. The young Kral suffered a car accident in February 1970 and Adorno suffered a heart attack while on vacation in August 1969.
Adorno's major intention, in the last glimpse of his life, was to fight any form of intellectual courtesanity ready to put itself at the service of the last illusion cultivated by his own era. Sixty-eight was also circumscribed within this illusory framework.
Failure to critically approach changes in society that may even appear messianic — such as cyberspace could be today — deprives thought of any ability to clarify the reality that surrounds it. It deprives him of the ability to grasp his profound dialectic. Dialectic, this is perhaps the key word from which all mature Adorno thought originates starting from the fundamental work of 1949 with Horkheimer, The dialectic of the Enlightenment.
For example, the keyword "Progress" in its abnormal fetishization (even in politics) receives fierce criticism from Adorno, because that specific form of progress is destined to turn into regression and from regression into catastrophe. This is because the concept of progress is highly dialectical. It frees but also enslaves at the same time. The story of Facebook fully proves the thesis of the Frankfurt thinker right. And it also demonstrates the validity of his method for capturing glimpses of the truth of the reality of the third millennium.
Beyond a philosophical dictionary
Adorno's keywords are not potential entries in a philosophical dictionary that the Frankfurt thinker could never have compiled given the unsystematic nature of his thinking. They are rather the knots of a spiritual autobiography, where he does not give up drawing fully on his own subjective experience which he reviews with a critical spirit and also with candor.
This happens above all in the essay on America which concludes with notes of appreciation for a culture completely different from his own. A culture that draws from a philosophical source that can only be the same as a philosopher trained in the school of Kant and Hegel. But Adorno's critical approach, towards his own constellation of ideas, is something fundamental to his own thought and a great lever for understanding what is different from himself.
Even the reflections on personality are of a great modernity in their full valorisation of the Kantian notion of autonomy of the person in the relationship between self and other which prevents one of the two from overpowering the other.
In "Reason and Revelation" Adorno notes the progressive disintegration of the concept of secularization which is reversed in a return of the religious. However, this return increasingly assumes the features of an obscurantist and regressive spiritualism. Thus a link with mechanized reason is developed which ends up canceling any difference between reason and revelation. A very current reflection.
The role of thought
It is precisely on the relationship between subject and object that Adorno's densest reflection in direct connection with the Negative dialectic. Primacy belongs to the object and the subject depends on the object in the formation of his own identity. The subject must leave room for what is other to him. A conviction that brings him into direct collision with both metaphysics, positivism and irrationalism. The reality that tends to dissolve in the abstraction of the subject is the matrix of the false which extends its dominion in the contemporary social framework with an energy that seems to derive from an inescapable fatality. This seemingly invincible fatality is false in itself.
It gives rise to a self-propagation of deception. For this reason thought has an absolute obligation to detach itself from a present towards which it has the task of revealing and liberating from the false. Reflection on one's own time must be radical and hard. Two conditions which are the guarantee of the honesty of the thought itself. Another fundamental warning from Adorno's thought to the people of the third millennium.
Perlini writes in his introduction to the 1974 edition:
In the courage of outdatedness lies the very dignity of thought. The thinker who adheres to this commitment is very similar to that Freigeist (free spirit) that Nietzsche, a lover of a paradoxical anti-Enlightenment Enlightenment, opposes to the subjugated spirit, bound to its own blind obedience.
A free spirit which however must not fall into self-satisfaction, nor into the intoxication of one's own isolation, nor into the narcissism to which Kierkegaard's thought was exposed, even if - as Perlini writes - the Danish thinker remains the "secret model by Adorno.
The culture industry and leisure
Alex Ross in a long article in "The New Yorker" entitled "The Party Poopers" ("The Naysayer") writes that Adorno and Benjamin have created one of the richest and most stimulating conservation of art in the technological age.
In this new edition of Adorno's keywords, revisited in a contemporary key, the essay on the cultural industry has also been included. Written together with Horkheimer in the late forties is included in Enlightenment dialectic. This is one of the major contributions to understanding the role of culture in market economies and its capacity to become a component of social control and of the cognitive warfare between different social systems.
It was Hollywood, according to the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, who eradicated communism and today it is precisely soft power that is one of the means used by the Chinese government to create world hegemony. Furthermore, the founding mechanisms of the cultural industry tend to reproduce themselves amplified and exaggerated in cyberspace. So much so that some contemporary scholars have begun to talk about the end of the subject's free will. With the cultural industry, technology which is its main vehicle, it is subjected to a design of social control and hegemony.
Therefore the value of a work of art is determined by the market, not by its essence, determining a degraded social function. Exchange value has replaced aesthetic value. Cultural production therefore moves towards a homologation subservient to the tastes of consumers who are also homologated.
The totally pessimistic vision of Adorno and Horkheimer perhaps does not fully consider the dialectical aspect of the culture industry which was instead glimpsed by Walter Benjamin. Photography, cinema, publishing and discography can be a lever for the democratization of culture. The latter is undoubtedly a progressive process, but studded with immense complexities. Furthermore, the totally passive role attributed by two Frankfurters to the recipients of the cultural industry is a highly debatable thesis.
In any case, the analysis of the cultural industry and of the concept of free time, as a mere parenthesis of work and not as a subjective space, constitute a substance that must be continually relied on to illuminate the windows that overlook our times.
The Internet confirms the theses of Adorno e Horkheimer?
Virtual space seems to be the most indisputable confirmation of Adorno and Horkheimer's statement according to which the culture industry allows “the freedom to choose what is always the same”. Culture appears more monolithic than ever, with a few titanic corporations — Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon — tending to decide what's relevant and what's not based on users' tastes. In the end, the Internet has made the world of culture narrower and more coercive, even as the cultural offer has grown dramatically. Something happened that looks like the Horkheimer skyscraper.
Search engines do not reward diversity, rather they penalize it. On websites, everyone reads the same stories. Technology tends to create the dictatorship of “Like” or “If you like this, you might like this too”. We are undoubtedly in the infancy of all this and something could - and certainly will - change even with the growth of the public
But technology companies, thanks to big data, tend to control not only the commercial behavior of their customers, but also those of a political, social and cultural nature. So it will be a very complicated process.
Perhaps that of the Frankfurters is too drastic an analysis and even a little pathetic in the regret of classical bourgeois culture which was otherwise selective. Benjamin, unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, was instead convinced that messages of dissent can emanate from the heart of the culture industry.
It was something he saw in action in cinema, photography and music. Through Chaplin's films, for example, criticism of the capitalist model could reach the public. The cultural industry itself, through its own anonymous mechanisms, can give a voice to oppressed or marginalized groups. A voice that otherwise would be lost as has happened over the centuries. We are faced with a contradictory and chaotic mix of authentic and artificial.
Perhaps the cultural evolution of late capitalist societies can be understood precisely in a dialectical way as a synthesis of homogenization and authenticity, of catastrophe and progress, poles that also tend to intertwine.
And in this regard, Benjamin's phrase according to which there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism is exactly right.
Even today, the Frankfurt theorists present a critical model for thinking about current events in a different way. Something that even Steve Jobs was convinced of.
Now we also have the keywords of this model.
