8 September 2011
A reply to Luke Manzarpour's review of Adorno for Revolutionaries, published in Studies in Social and Political Thought #19, Summer 2011
A reply to Luke Manzarpour's review of Adorno for Revolutionaries, published in Studies in Social and Political Thought #19, Summer 2011
Of course Negative Dialectics begins by disputing the closure of discussion Stalin made of “the point however is to change it”. Marx actually meant that philosophy - love of truth - must become an active force in the world or betray its principles, not that philosophy should be discarded for pragmatic action. But thought in Marx and Adorno is not 'contemplation'; it is active and vital, and in grasping the true ligatures of the world’s bootcamp itinevitably trips up routine and outrages public opinion. That is the meaning of negative dialectics, and why Adorno’s work (no less than Finnegans Wake) is a DEFENCE of Marx and Lenin, not a postmodernist Selbstmorder. You can only believe Adorno implodes Marxism if you thought the Soviet system was actually-existing socialism, which I know you don’t. In my talk at Marxism ’95 I was telling comrades that they needed to think, that they couldn’t leave the thinking to the central committee professionals. The sad thing was that I was unaware that Andy Wilson was arguing the same thing in a different key (I stupidly judged his argument by reading his book of theory, not by his political actions), thus postponing our current breakthrough for sixteen years.
You say that “for Adorno, contemplation is action”, but that’s not the case. His readers become singed monkeys dancing to a tune whistled by reality. His every phrase barks at passivity and raises the temperature: 'contemplation' implies disassociation and phlegm, Adorno is all fire. You say, “this is the frustration of the music journalist; ever discussing but never making music”. No, at AMM we know discussion of music is its completion and the musicians’ refusal of that discussion (“too intellectual”, etc.) makes them stupid. Late Lunch With Out To Lunch (my Resonance radio show… did you know that the interview with you about Mastaneh Shah-Shuja’s Zones of Proletarian Development is one of the most popular on archive.org?) is music, but music forced from its protective shell of quality assurance and made into a correctly provocative audio.
Lookup 'Adorno, Leninist' in the index of Adorno for Revolutionaries and you will be provided with irrefutable proof of Adorno’s Leninism. You allow party hacks to define Lenin, which is like sticking a squid in a polyethylene bag and calling it plastic. My inability to escape the law of value IS the domination of the concept, and this is mediated to me by my employer. If Adorno has imploded Marxism, what is this capitalist world we’re all still locked in? And I can’t accept that I am like the students who “wait expectantly to see which side the lecturer takes”. My whole polemic has been to refuse the SWP’s gratitude for whatever scraps the culture industry serves us (Peter Gabriel’s world music, Brain Eno’s opposition to war etc). Instead, we should grab what stimulates us whatever the artist he say (Frank Zappa being perhaps the ultimate challenge to the identity-needs of a socialist). I wish to foment the independent creativity and confidence of the cadre, not provide a list of 'progressive' Hollywood films. For the laughing Marxist, Arnold Schwarzenegger is worth a thousand Robert DeNiros.
You like the way I make Adorno stand up and shout (I’m not 'limp' like John Holloway, thanks) but “It is not made clear why Watson’s personal preferences happen to correspond to a radical progressive social impulse.” You call for a “dialectical reading of all proclivities” but that wouldn’t be dialectics, it would be a sentimental presumption of Semen Froth-like proportions! I believe the forceful presentation of a point of view is what kick starts discussion: the canons I fire off into the unwitting silence are there to provoke replies, not to list the allowable. Genuine dialectics does not finish in a book (History and Class Consciousness) but results in discussion, friendship and collective action.You complain that I don’t cover Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga, but to make efforts in that direction would be howlingly false. I’ll catch up with all that when Iris is sixteen: I can’t comment on products not aimed at my needs, I don’t need someone onstage fighting for my right to party, I want to sit athome with a glass of whisky and a Hank Williams record. On the other hand, I await your next posting on Lily Allen with impatience. Well, you didn’t like my reply to Gordon Finlayson, but we at AMM thought the laughometer peaked on those pages! I think you’re right about Roni Size’s bass as kitsch, though, I was really trying a bit too hard there.
For a professed Adornoite, there is a deep current of identity-thinking in your thoughts about music that you should examine. It’s almost as if you’re embarrassed to be reading someone who’s got uncool tracks on his iPod or something. Spit it out, son, I need to know the worst. You resent the fact that I say I’d sell Socialist Worker with someone with the 'wrong' taste in music, but you underestimate my scepticism about professed 'tastes' in music. They are usually choices from an array of musics listened to in private – socially unreal. The process of being anti-capitalist in public creates such interesting tensions, interactions and novelties in human relations, you can’t throw it all away just because someone’s arrived from a different musical place than yourself. Now, if I took someone to see Alan Wilkinson and Paul Hession and they didn’t like it, it’d be another matter. That would be a blocked-Id crying for analysis. The AMM is not concerned that people consume the right product, in fact we’re anti-consumption; we’re for realising that musical judgement only becomes substantive when viewed from the position of its producer - the working class. From the productive point of view - of attaining the possible peaks of musical spasm and ecstasy and waking up from the dullness of culture as pre-prepared knowledge - there is no 'genre' or 'choice', as Iancu Dumitrescxu’s recent work with StephenO’Malley of Sunn O))) proves.
“The conviction is there without the courage, something that may be remedied if the invalidity of an absolute harmony between Watson's proclivities and his politics is resolved.” I’m afraid this is hard for me to understand: how precisely do I 'resolve' an 'invalidity', Sir? Do you perhaps mean 'accepted' by 'resolved'? Well, we all try and justify ourselves; but the acceptance of an eternal divide between our proclivities and our politics would mean admitting Original Sin, changing our imprint’s name to Prokant and, finally, giving up trying to express ourselves at all. Not where we wants to go, mate.
Lovely plug at the end though. I’ve spent a stimulating half hour writing this in your imaginary company, Luke, and I’m impatient for you to come round with those Justin Timberlake records. I’ll play you Barry White, man.
PS Hmmm, I missed footnote three, a distinct counterpoint to the rest of your argument (which has me dissing contemplation/theory in favour of action). Here you point out that I find politics in music’s form (“how good is the bass line?”) rather than the content (“do I agree with what they’re saying?”). However, you go on to say, evincing a somewhat manipulative attitude towards the mass whose bad commercial tastes you wish to redeem: “a Rage Against the Machine are of more practical use in psyching up protestors facing violent police and/or right-wing thugs than a John Zorn”. I’m tempted by an late-Adornian riposte - “to judge culture using the pragmatic barbarism of existing society is to surrender culture to the barbarians” - but we don’t need such epigrammatic evasions. In order to win people to a deep anti-capitalism, people who will persist in opposing the authorities - rather than the selfish and impatient anarchism which is merely the baby mewl of those not yet engaged in capitalist exploitation - one requires an understanding of the commodity system which throws up such false answers as Rage Against the Machine and John Zorn. Besides, to 'psych up' forces against the police we need “here we go” choruses and Chris Knight’s samba band and someone with a ghetto blaster, not the literary delusions of one brand of commodity pop: at the London ANL Carnival in 1977 Tom Robinson sounded better than the Clash because his carnivalesque, unguarded beat worked better in the open air than the Clash’s cellar-bar rush (even though on record Robinson is John Betjeman to the Clash’s Dylan Thomas). And you’re right, because his form fits his message and he’s not afraid of politics and Marxism, Eugene Chadbourne is hugely significant, a true Aufhebung of the false oppositions which divide aesthetics and politics among the benighted. Maybe I didn’t talkabout Chadbourne in Adorno for Revolutionaries (the AMM does not publish consumer guides!), but I preface Honesty Is Explosive! (my music writings collected by W.C. Bamberger) by citing Eugene Chadbourne - and jazz saxophonist David Murray - as the only musicians I believe in today.
It sometimes seems your stated goal (p. 20, n. 5) of finding what is living and what is dead in Adorno (a practice Adorno himself found impudent, arrogant and loathsome in interpreters of Hegel - p.1 Hegel: Three Studies) consists in finding what is orthodox Leninist and discarding everything else. Well, I would say that Adorno is very much alive in critiques of Lenin's Taylorism and the fetishisation of the working class, for two instances. Similarly Adorno is alive in his understanding of the part of technology in taking society ever further from revolution while Lenin's disastrous idea that technique is the harbinger of scientific socialism should be laid to rest.
ReplyDeleteAs irrefutable proof of Adorno's Leninism you direct me to p. 21 of AfR where you quote Adorno drawing an analogy between his conception of genuinely rational music and a rationally organised society. Such a vision hardly sees Adorno as out-and-out Leninist. Adorno reaches to an understanding of domination that seems to me far more historically sensitive and highlights the dangers of a lurking barbarism in even the most radical of politics, something especially important in light of the almost immediate regression of every single experiment in socialism to date (unless you think that these failures had nothing to do with any inherent failings of the original revolutionaries, which maybe you do).
I don't think Adorno implodes Marxism but I'm interested in his critiques of Marx/the vanguard/Lenin/class analysis/labour, explicit and otherwise. Marx, Adorno perceived, wanted to turn the world into a "giant workhouse", while Adorno fancied that "the true society will grow tired of development and out of freedom leave possibilities unused," a distinction of immense importance to conceptualising opposition to capitalism now. Further, Marx found a prototype of the communist citizen in the proletariat, with their camaraderie and "work hardened bodies", while Adorno held the workers "in fact enjoy no advantage over their bourgeois counterparts apart from their interest in the revolution, and otherwise bear all the marks of mutilation of the typical bourgeois character." Is there not something of interest in these obvious examples of profound divergence? There are certainly numerous moments of convergence with Marx and Lenin in Adorno's thought but these don't extend to him being a Marxist-Leninist. Why insist on it? If you are going to discard everything critical of or simply out-of-synch with that tradition (including pretty much everything Adorno wrote in the 1960s) why not simply say there are bits of Adorno that you think can be utilised in the service of orthodox vanguard politics? He seems to be worth nothing more to you than that, which is where you converge with Holloway and anarcho appropriations of Adorno in having a preexisting political programme and instrumentally fitting him into it while discarding everything that doesn't go as dead.
ReplyDeleteI don't have an issue with you selling the paper with someone whose music you don't like, but I do resent you doing so when you declare him to be your enemy in your manifesto. I find such moments deflate your uncompromising punk-Situationist stance.
ReplyDeleteNor do look down on your taste in music. On the contrary Ben I defer to your infinitely wider knowledge of what's on in the world of radical music. But if you want to take the Reichian line of the revolutionary thrust of the sexual/sensual impulse (the claim to be solely concerned with analysis of the musician as working-class producer is disingenuous from someone so thoroughly concerned also with the libidinal responses of the listener-consumer) then allow it to extend to the dirty little feelings of someone listening to pop pap and getting exactly the same twitch as you get from Dumitrescu. This is hardly to say every artwork is equal and I recognise the distinction between revolutionary and reactionary art and between true and false responses, but a project such as yours which insists on the significance of universal orgone energy is lacking if it can only accommodate that of its author. I don't see this distinction and connection between true and false worked out in AfR and so the convergence between your proclivities and your politics comes across as merely a justification of yourself, your own personal ideology. Surely nothing is beyond dialectical reflection, crap music included. I don't see how recognising the truth (collectivity, individuality, pleasure, passion etc) held in false form in the cultural product would be Frith-like market celebration. Pitching the powers of the administrative world against itself - going through as way out - seems to me to be consistent with Adorno's immanent critique. Isn't that what Adorno found in emphatic art - it delivered what the culture industry only promised by taking those promises to their logical conclusions?