Ben Watson: More Adorno, Why Poodle Play

Why gribble? 'Cos grabble and gabble constitute a libel on the truth which is an industrially-produced poison demanding a warning label. So more Adorno, ladies and gentlemen, ladles and ladles of it. The reason that I talk like this is all because of you. When they broke the truth content off the language form, they killed a whispered word in your ear you badly need. Maos rebel against it. Gnosis sniff at it. Eras have been deprived of it. Eyes peek it. Ach, roll these plumbeous cerebrosities on your tongue, why doncha, mite.

In the 1930s, fleeing the Nazis, Adorno popped up in Oxford, supposedly to join the department of philosophy. Despite his excellent English, no-one could understand a word he said. The propositional logic which dominated Oxford philosophy at the time - the realism R.G. Collingwood described as "building card-houses out of a pack of lies"¹ - found a thinker steeped in Kant, Hegel and Marx - and music - utterly unintelligible. In response, Adorno wrote ten theses on the language of the philosopher.² These lay out what's wrong with philosophy which hands over truth content to positive science, and also explain why, back in 1979, I proposed that philosophy could only proceed once it had faced Dada and Commodification - in other words, started to use Frank Zappa - a method I dubbed Poodle Play.

Adorno says that the notion that you can separate the form from the content of knowledge is idealism. Because idealism has no idea of history, it thinks words are arbitrary designators of things and can be changed at will. But, on the contrary:

Words are never merely signs of what is thought under them, but rather history erupts into words, establishing their truth-character. [pp. 35-36]

In Marxist fashion, Adorno posits society at a particular stage of development as the necessary precondition for any thinking individual, any "subject".

The language of philosophy is materially prefigured. [p. 36]

People who insist on the "communicability" of philosophical discourse, don't want philosophy, they want repetition of justifications for the status quo. Nonsense is Rebellion!3

Capitalist reality is outstripping our concepts, so fold fragments of reality into our discourse. 

Today the philosopher confronts disintegrated language. The ruins of words are his material, to which history binds him; his freedom is solely the possibility of their configuration according to the force of truth in them. [p. 37]

Truth is not some petty "choice" on the part of the philosopher, picking his or her way through the lexicon of "do"s and "don't"s, it's a historical necessity. Sean Bonney and Out To Lunch don't "choose" to be angry or disgusted when they write poems, that's how the stuff comes out. And we finally get to what Adorno means by "art", which is not value-whipped-up-for-the-market, but voicing aesthetic critique, paying heed to our so-far-unvoiced feelings about things. Only this attention can lead towards a convergence between an honest appraisal of our existence - subjective experience - and science. As Bob Dobbs and I say, "Screw Zappa!" I didn't invent Poodle Play as a fanzine, but as a means of waking up philosophical enquiry from its nineteenth century slumbers and recognising developments in the modern world - but on the subjective side, since to merely enumerate the "objective" achievements of the modern world (aeroplanes, the Internet, cuts etc) would be to obliterate my own place in it, and consign myself to the sorry arbitrariness and tittering nihilism of Simon Jarvis's The Unconditional.

Out To Lunch 5:31pm 21-iv-2011
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1. R.G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, London: Clarendon Press, 1939, p. 52.
2. Theodor Adorno, "Thesen über die Sprache des Philosophen", Gesammelte Schriften, Vol 1 (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 366-71; translated by Samir Gandesha and Michael K. Palamarek in ed Donald A. Burke et al, Adorno and the Need in Thinking, Toronto: UTP, 2007, pp. 35-40. 
3.  John Taylor, Aqua-Musae: or, Cacafogo, Cacadaemon, Captain George Wither Wrung in the Withers, Oxford, 1644.