Adorno’s damaged life
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
Subheading: 'Seventy years after its publication, Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia is a warning against resurgent fascism'
What I remember from it -- and the pieces of his book "Negative Dialectics" that I think it shares some content with -- is a deep and profound critique of Martin Heidegger, German pre-war existentialism, Romanticism, holism philosophy which left themselves open to impregnation by fascism. In Germany in the the 20s and 30s right wing authoritarianism freely absorbed adherents of the equivalent of today's "wellness" and "natural health" movements, who became allies in their opposition to modernism, communism, and the chaos of democracy. Heidegger himself was beguiled by the mystical quasi-spiritual language of the fatherland and blood and soil. Adorno saw this as it was happening and was disgusted.
So there are definitely parallels with today that are worth paying close attention to.
Facism is exactly the same except instead of the health of the body it is about the health of the state.
Obviously vaccine opposition is one of the penultimate forms of this.
First of all, lumping "modernism, communism, and [...] democracy" together in opposition to "right wing authoritarianism" makes little sense. Fascism had strong modernist currents (hence V2s, autobahnen, and Rube-Goldberg deathcamps (the Khmer Rouge didn't need all that)). And both it and Communism are illiberal and undemocratic in practice.
Second, the minute you translate these things outside "the West", the script flips 180. "Wellness", "natural health", and the rejection of "modernity" become "indigenous knowledge" (say, "ayurveda") and "anticolonialist".
I just don't think these free-associational patterns are terribly useful, because they don't actually work.
edit: India's anticolonialism is revanchist at this point, the British have been gone for a long time; Indians own India, and ayurveda is literally part of state religion. The BJP was openly patterned after European fascist movements.
Or -- another example, because I don't want to pick on India. "We" now tend to view China as a Han-supremacist ethnostate (I think?), despite the Communist trappings. Nevertheless, at a point not long in the past, French students were carrying Mao's "Little Red Book".
North Korean "communism" is supposedly like this too -- very ethno-nationalist in character -- if you believe the analysis in The Impossible State.
Somewhat likewise, Soviet Internationalism turned into Soviet Imperialism and Russian Nationalism. Somehow now it's Putinism and the Orthodox Church is involved.
So then you move to other "leftist" and "indigenous" movements in South America, and, sure, there might be some red stars, but it seems to me that the force actually binding people together is ethnic nationalism. This is especially true for "indigenous" tribal identities. It's hard to get more "blood and soil" than their rhetoric. Hell, "#LandBack" is literal revanchism.
And every country that "fought (Ottoman) imperialism" in the Balkans, under the banner of "self-determination" (pop-quiz: What is the collective "self"?) did so using nationalism, which, half the time, quickly turned on local minorities.
So I am deeply skeptical of claims, by anyone, to be "on the left", or, even more than that, an "anti-imperialist". I think it's just a temporary and contingent thing, representing instantaneous balances of power, not fundamental principles. I am much more comfortable with liberal universalism.
Even the Nazis themselves marketed themselves as anti-imperialists to the left. Lots of people fell for it. People as smart as the ones in Robert Oppenheimer's social circles. "Yeah, we don't like the Nazis, but we'll use them to break the back of the British!"
So when, say, well-meaning white people go "Yeah! Africa for Africans!" I go: "Wait a minute. I mean, I get it. But have you really thought about this principle?" I think they cheer because, subliminally, they think the place isn't worth going to; they don't feel they're losing anything. They are also unaware that this means "expropriation without compensation" from a large class of South-Asians.
So I'm saying that a lot of this ethnic, "blood and soil" stuff seems to exist quite happily on what Westerners currently consider "the left". And then it grows, and then it gets powerful, and then later, retroactively, they go, "oh, I guess that was bad (== right)".
There's a blindness to this that I get tired of.
So to finally get back to my point, not only is there modernism on the right; there's anti-modernism, and even (barely-concealed) ethnic nationalism, on the left.
And then I worry about these centrifugal forces.
That's because it's non-Western ethnic blood-and-soil stuff. Marxism was a critique of economic capitalism; the Frankfurt School pivoted that to a critique of Western civilization as a whole, as a social complex based on domination which secured capitalism against revolutionary overthrow by means of a form of psychic domination -- domination of consciousness. This is the puzzle that Gramsci considered and started to solve: why hasn't Western civilization gotten with the program and chosen communism over the chains of capitalism? And if your entire civilization is standing in the way of that revolution, then hey hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.
See, the intelligentsia have already chosen Marxian socialism as the successor to the liberal democratic system. It's like X11 vs. Wayland. Whether what exists works for your use case doesn't matter: the people who Really Know A Lot About This Sort Of Thing have chosen the clearly superior option, and you should too. Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse, and Horkheimer were all addressing the problem of: why hasn't everybody chosen the clearly superior option? And the answer they arrived at is that Western civilization is fundamentally, thoroughly oppressive, and it brainwashes people and keeps then from realizing that there's a path to freedom through socialism and that's where nationalism in a Western context comes from, giving rise to fascism.
But the Africans and indigenous South Americans, all those peoples that Western Civ oppresses because it's in its nature to oppress, those are fine. There is no need to worry about tribalism, nationalism, or hostility to outsiders from those groups because they don't have the domination and rationalization impulse that Westerners do. Which is why the "stolen land" myth persists. It's partially true, but it's not the whole story. Native Americans were not peaceniks, and the land occupied by a tribe was, likely as not, conquered by that tribe's ancestors from a displaced or now-unknown other tribe.
But in the mythos of the new left, Westerners are uniquely prone to want to conquer and colonize, so that pre-Western-contact history needs to be, and often is, elided.
Marcuse was booed at the Free University of Berlin in 1968.
From the article
> Although he sustained a seldom-stated bond with Marxism he was not primarily interested in political economy, nor did he have any real talent for the topic. Instead he was drawn to the inspection of lived experience in all of its exquisite detail.
I'm not sure what "intelligentsia" means in your phrasing but your assertion does not apply to Adorno. His writing is generally skeptical of anything that is systematizing or totalizing. Reality has depth and is complex. Systems elide much of that depth and complexity, replacing it with shallowness and false simplicity. What I wrote is a limited summary, for sure, but more accurate than implying endorsement of a particular ideology.
Marxism did not supply people with more freedom than capitalism. Capitalism is an expression of human greed and a method how we can deal with it constructively. Marxism just denies negative but human traits. There still is room for criticism on capitalism, plenty of it, there are excesses that are not excusable. But people that prefer the totalitarian model of society to liberal democracies should never be called intellectuals. Maybe intellectuals with a death wish, but I guess those are an exception.
I'm not talking about "our" views. I'm talking about the BJP's conscious formulation. It's not an accusation, it's how they self described.
Just stay there instead of doing a grievance rodeo. I find the jazz playing in this comment far more confusing than Adorno. You seem to think what you're saying applies to everything, so it shouldn't be too difficult to apply it to one thing. I'm personally interested in why your first example would be a religious-nationalist party, intentionally patterned on European fascism, speaking a language constructed intentionally to remove "Persian" influence, which seems on the verge of doing ethnic cleansing.
As for their links to the Nazis and Fascists, thank you for enlightening me. I had assumed that it was simply the Nazis who had borrowed symbols from India, but no, it does seem that the relationship went both ways:
https://www.ibtimes.com/hindu-nationalists-historical-links-...
I do see, however, that after these facts, my argument that they can pass as "left" becomes weaker. Yet I still do think they can pass as such in many circles, because this history is not so widely popularized, among other reasons.
I wonder about your reference to Hindi as a "constructed language" however. I didn't think it was. What are you referring to?
> [The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] were speaking a language constructed intentionally to remove "Persian" influence, which seems on the verge of doing ethnic cleansing
and I was confused, writing
> I wonder about your reference to Hindi as a "constructed language" however. I didn't think it was. What are you referring to?
not just because I think of Hindi as an organic language, but because what you're saying seems exactly backwards.
If anything, I'd have thought (if you had BJP sympathies) that you might levy that sort of charge against the Tamil/Dravidian parties who resisted the imposition of Hindi education and official language by the Hindu nationalists: "Oh you Tamils with your exclusionary ethnostate!" It'd be a bit much, but somebody could say it.
Because, let's strip euphemisms: "Persian" here means "Iranian", which is another spelling of "Aryan", i.e., the barely-prehistorical conquerors of the northern part of the subcontinent, who, very indirectly and with some strain, we might call the predecessors of today's Delhi-centered BJP. (For anyone else reading.)
(If you really wanted to troll you could call them "foreign imperialists" and talk about kicking them out of India. That'd be absurd -- a bit like saying blonde Russians are really Swedes, going back to the Kievian Rus, and pointing to (blonde) Soviet Man as remaining chauvinism -- but if you wanted to turn "indigenous" politics and "decolonization" against them, you could do it. It'd be one way to make a point.)
If there were a nationalist movement that would want an "Aryan-free ethnostate", it would be something like extreme Tamil nationalists, intent on bringing back Kumari Kandam from the depths, like some Nazis wanted Thule.
Or are you talking not about the BJP's efforts to push Hindi, but their (more marginal) efforts to resurrect Sanskrit within the "Bharat", e.g.,
https://www.siasat.com/sanskrit-unifies-bharat-promote-it-rs...
? That would be more like other nationalistic language projects, like Gaelic and Hebrew. But even that is firmly within the Proto-Indo-European language family, so "Aryan". And their main goal remained "Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan" anyway, not Sanskrit.
Thus, I remain confused. Maybe that was your true intention. If so, you've succeeded.
You deliver a great example how the anticolonialism is indeed revanchist in case for India. For good reason one might think. Same can be true for occultist currents.
Similarly superstition and fantasy can also be. Still, you need to look at the motivation. Homeopathy is different from painting yourself with some old nordic runes because of nationalistic ambitions. A generalization here is wrong.
It obviously also wasn't a stable coalition, as it included outright internal murderous purges and later after military defeat an almost total disintegration.
Similar things can be said about fascism in Italy, or Francoism in Spain. What united them was virulent anti-communism and nationalism.
Those movements are not the source of fascism and I don't think existentialism and romanticism leaves one particularly open to it. Modernism was established when WW2 broke out which probably ended it. I doubt that any philosophy is vulnerable to it because then it would not resurface. Fascism and communism as well judged capitalism. Maybe that is easier to admit than being responsible for it ourselves.
I do believe however that there are fascist tendencies in those that quickly diagnose it in others just because it is something abhorrent. That Adorno suspected it everywhere would be understandable, except that he did no such thing even with the pessimism he often espoused.
Find another strawman, maybe.
1. critical theory is about the study of what makes suffering persist in modern life
2. much of the critical theory works of the twentieth century are about the rise of fascism as well as the reality of the failure of Marxism.
You'd do well to pinpoint the origins of your opinion -- someone fleeced you.
Furthermore, the failure of Marxism and the rise of fascism are considered to be the same phenomenon. That is why, per Marcuse, only leftists deserved to speak freely: allowing other opinions to the table would only hasten the rise of the next Hitler.
Marcuse was a victim of fascism and sadly his wounds remained and influenced his texts.
It was very reactionary to nationalism. Adorno and consorts writings are often reactionary too, but they were real victims of fascism. They tried very hard to find an explanation for the reasons of the prosecution and sometimes got carried away. In this context most works are well worth a read.
It might even be beneficial to know the works to not conflate their position with those of people that call for more content and opinion control. These people are not innocent, they happily condemn others and have a totalitarian world view. It is just much more difficult to oppose them because they can point to Nazi and declare themselves as opposition.
HN should implement per-sentence votes. The first sentence here is just a reference to Adorno's influence as part of the Frankfurt School.
The second sentence is low-effort speculation.
I need to be able to highlight the 2nd sentence and click the downvote button for it.