Re: Celan and Adorno, Art and Auschwitz (WAS Re: Paul Celan - music on . . .)

Ian asks whether I think that certain of Adorno's writings "speak a
great deal about the struggle to come to terms with a decimated Europe
in which history, tradition, culture seemed unapproachable in the older
ways?" The short answer is "No, I don't." I don't like the
form (rhetoric, style) of Adorno's "dialectic" or its content.

First of all, I don't believe that history, culture, and tradition
necessarily became unapproachable "in the older ways" because of
World War II, at least not in the sense that Adorno believed they did
(or believed that he believed they did when he was writing). Adorno
uses great big fat undefined concepts like history, culture, and
tradition, embedding these grandiose German idealist concepts in a
German idealist rhetoric and discussing them using that rhetoric. No
modest concrete particulars are allowed. The whole discussion takes
place at an impossibly high rhetorical altitude. I find it largely
meaningless. (The short clause from your post that I've quoted above
seems to mean something until you attempt to pull it apart and find out
what in the real world it is that you're actually talking about. You
and Adorno are the last of the German Romantics, the ultimate
starry-eyed idealizers. You long nostalgically for the days when the
poeticized rhetoric of German idealist Marxism legislated the future of
mankind.)

Let me mention one other little morsel of Adornoan rhetoric, his
hyperbolic claim that there can be "no art after Auschwitz."
Human beings are capable of the most monstrous things. There has been
murder after murder, war after war, holocaust after holocaust.
That's the sad history of the human race. Or part of it. But today
there are grass and flowers growing in Hiroshima, people living,
working, and consuming culture there. They don't spend every waking
hour contemplating the bomb or writing German idealist philosophy.

I could appreciate Adorno's remark if it had been the despairing
remark of a man who had witnessed the horrors of the Second World War
first hand, seen what the Nazis had done. But he was doing more than
despairing. He was a kind of cultural imperialist. He wanted to seize
control of the fate of all future European art on the authority of his
despair (his German idealist despair), define for once and for all what
was "authentic," what "inauthentic," co-opt all future European
culture for his German idealist philosophy including the theory that
there can be no art after Auschwitz. In Adorno's view, only a
certain heavy ponderous form of despairing German idealist modernism
could or would or should be left standing. The ultra-conservative
Brahmsian neoclassicism of Schoenberg's serial music was good.
Stravinsky's light French ballet music was an affront to German
idealism.

But what if your taste runs to something less ponderous, heavy, and
Germanic than Schoenberg's most turgid serial music? What if it runs
to the fresh and glinting poetry of that former Resistance fighter Rene
Char, for example? Or to Matisse or Monet or jazz? (I know that you
think Boulez's later more accessible music is--and I use the word that
you've applied to it--"capitalist." I think the word can't have the
least intelligible applicability here.)

-david gable

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Effects of Magic
    ... Sure that's not the writing? ... that's one way to build a setting; make up a culture ... Like, I wanted a proper evil overlord, which means he is around ... wanted an Earth with magic all along, thus the _history_ had to be a ...
    (rec.arts.sf.composition)
  • Re: Celan and Adorno, Art and Auschwitz (WAS Re: Paul Celan - music on . . .)
    ... > in which history, tradition, culture seemed unapproachable in the older ... at least not in the sense that Adorno believed they did ... that type of grandiose Germanic idealism and its totalising tendencies. ... > Or to Matisse or Monet or jazz? ...
    (rec.music.classical.recordings)
  • Re: Would anyone be able to help review my writing?
    ... The good news, as I see it, is that you are getting control of paragraph ... told you, but English writing that uses simple, short Germanic-based ... Difference between countries has become less evident, ... A more serious problem ought to be overly involved by culture of other ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: Would anyone be able to help review my writing?
    ... The good news, as I see it, is that you are getting control of paragraph ... told you, but English writing that uses simple, short Germanic-based ... Difference between countries has become less evident, ... A more serious problem ought to be overly involved by culture of other ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: 15% of Filipinos functionally illiterate
    ... I'm not talking about great writers. ... Not just English. ... It is not the story but the writing, the characters, which reach out to people who don't speak the language or understand the social forms embodied. ... But some languages and some cultures have produced those who reach across time and culture to establish their greatness. ...
    (soc.culture.filipino)