Was he wrong about anything or was he right about everything?

Was he wrong about anything or was he right about everything?

Attached: Adorno.jpg (200x245, 8K)

Wrong about the mechanism, absolutely right about the output. Virillo is more on the money when it comes to that and I've been kicking around how these two relate in respect to modern entertainment production and the consumerization of professional tools.

McLuhan is the missing link. Virilio consistently understates his debt to MM. As for the common ground between Adorno & McLuhan - Judith Stamps' "Unthinking Modernity", powerhouse, goes into this in detail

I would point to the thought of McLuhan in terms of the consumerization of professional tools, but I once again see Virilio to be the actual framework in which modern production follows. The only grand experiment still occurring within modern music and entertainment production is that of the logistic, and workflow has become the defacto sense that style once inhabited. Homogenization is not necessarily that of the iron cage variation that McLuhan suggests inversely of Weber, but that of the desire to create a fluid logistic chain between sign and consumer.

His views on music aside, it seems that after his deep criticisms of every aspect of modern culture and the tendency of capitalism to sublimate everything into self-serving power structures from which no escape is possible, Adorno then cannot help but resort to utopianism and say 'we can have paradise on earth, i just dont know how'. If he were really honest with himself, he'd become a conservative, since that is what his philosophy of hopelessness eventually leads to.

Do you then perceive a decentralisation of cultural production - through, as you say, the consumerisation of professional tools, which I understand to mean the opening of accessibility of advanced computerised means of video/audio/3dcg production outside of major centralised concerns - which produces nevertheless a homogenisation of output without the need for monopolised, integrated control i.e. hollywood/big media etc?

Yes, for these reasons as followed: if we are to assert my previous claim that Virilio's concept of the dromos in congress with McLuhan's simplification of labor and one's participation in it, and how the former implicitly gives substance to why McLuhan's proposed phenomenon forms in the first place-- it gives rise to the thought that the tools are being consumerized in the sense that, the very language of creativity is being simplified to a point in which the products of Adorno's culture industry produce themselves. If I am to make a facile (but only for the sake of valuing your time) comparison, it is simply Minecraft without the mods. Such tools have come clearly about, e.g. Splice (in the case of music) in which the consumer chooses not to consume a curation, but become the composer themselves. It has effectively atomized the subject as both consumer and curator all while still only being given a set milieu or terrain of choices to make. The culture industry has taken on a new form, rather that which it has always been, but a peddler of aspirations within this system and now (at the risk of waxing poetic), bequeathed you the tools in their infinite graciousness to let you become the next rockstar.

Didn't copy over from notepad:

This is Virilio at work, the dromos at it's finest. The most efficient logistic is that which has the shortest distance to travel and can move the fastest-- and having the sign to consumer route be nothing more than his very own desire.

But at the end of the day, my point is that Adorno was half right, Virilio and by extension, McLuhan was right. The culture industry operates on that which has the least opportunity cost and financial cost.

So - if I may try to rearticulate your position to confirm if I understand it (my background is in History, so I have been accustomed to approach Virilio in a very different way) - the monolithic edifice of the Kulturindustrie seen in the mid-20th century is in post-modernity exploded into countless shards, which, like the mirror-shard caught in one's eye in the fairytale of the Snow Queen, are introjected: the distance from culture industry to consuming subject is shrunk so as to fall /within the subject itself/ - as it were in adherence to a logic of general acceleration: the Kulturindustrie has exploded and come to settle inside the subject because the massive edifice of the mid-century is not FAST enough to keep the consumer adequately supplied - and all this happens under the guise of a liberation: we are /freed/, it is claimed, by the techniques of creativity that are made available to us, freed to create the kinds of works WE want - yet what is obfuscated is that these techniques of creativity constitute a creativity in terms of the shuffling and re-shuffling of pre-established elements, a /combinatoric/ creativity, an introjected regime of cultural production operating according to tacit but fixed rules. Your example of a video game, minecraft, seems apt: the selling point of many 'open world' video games is precisely this 'freedom' to 'make your own fun' but it is a freedom which is only operative within really very tightly defined rules. The techniques of creativity are, in precisely the Heideggerian sense, en-framing.

Yet wouldn't you agree this is a partial view of the situation? I completely agree with you in the regard above but the massive media monopolies, hollywood etc, all /still exist/ and to degrees function as they did...or would you say that their very functioning - for instance, the way in which a new Star Wars or capeshit is 'enjoyed' by the masses - is now thoroughly permeated and structured by this distributed form of cultural production: i.e. fandom culture, the production of fan-works, fan content?

this is what I come to Yea Forums for.
Thanks for unthinking modernity, never come across that.

If Unthinking Modernity grabs you I also highly recommend "Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant" by Arthur Kroker. Harold Innis is one of the most underrated intellectuals of the 20th century, and it was a great loss that he died as young as he did

He was a jew about everything

Any good criticisms of Adorno? I like him quite a lot, but like said, i cant help but feel like he dug himself in a hole that he cannot get out of.

Im looking for both left wing and right wing critiques.

He was only a half-jew, although the Frankfurt school in general was very Jewish. Still, Adorno deserves to be read, since he offers a very thorough and ferocious criticism of culture under capitalism, even though he (as most of the Frankfurt School) offers almost no way out of it, and he begs the question whether such an escape is even possible.

I understand that Virilio may be obtuse in this sense when I explain it, but if it's of any use to you to perhaps see how I came to this position is that-- the sense of 'war' as Virilio writes, is best translated to the authentic circles and pockets of culture that live in the nooks and crannies of life. The nasty kids in Slidell who drink codeine all day and make half-commital rap songs with their friends-- or for a more apropos and perhaps better vignette of this effect-- that of the 20-nothing burnouts playing grunge music in the northwest in the early 90's. The 'evolution' found in popularized music is much like that of the mechanization of war as well, perfecting the production process of the music (Instead of four twenty year old boys, just get one to make the hip new bops. The optimizations go on and on as I could explain into great depths being a recording engineer myself)-- I hope you're getting my drift at this point. The logistic for perception for the past ought-many years has been through 'alternative' press and the like, it too engaging in it's own reformation process as it begins to coalesce and crystalize in the system that is now the internet. I should once again, punctuate this explanation with the disclaimer that my initial apercu of Virilio was that he was the answer to Adorno's 'plot hole' that lives in his outline of the culture industry.

As for seeing why this may be partial, I can understand why you say this is the case: however, I believe that the massive media monopolies will exist in a sense that they will merely own, much in the same way Monsanto owns the seeds to their plants, the properties that allow fandom culture to come about. However, with this being said, and in congress with the further consumerization of professional level toolsets, you will find their output to become nothing more than advertisements for the blocks that you will be playing with. The end-goal of the culture industry is that of any normal business. Reduce time and resource costs.

But otherwise, you said it all too better than me, beautifully written user. Thank you for translating my halfway schizophrenic and disparate connections with people I read in high school debate.

That user is full of shit, Adorno died without any giving any practical account of his philosphy, and that was by design from the beginning of his career. You can read more about it in his interview for Der Spiegel.
Basically, he was always and only interested in philosophical theory, and he thought that a good theorist should only concern himself with theory. Regardless, in Frankfurt he was working with tons of other people who were willing to develop practical philosophies, so he did not really feel the need to do so by himself.
To put it bluntly, criticizing Adorno for his theoretical approach is as dumb as dismissing Aristotle's Metaphysics only because it doesn't tell us anything about government forms.

Also his theories on music have been memeified, mostly due to his comments on jazz. So just to dispel that myth too, Adorno made that comment after having listened to white German jazz bands playing party music in the '20s. Adorno seems to have never listend to any of th masterpieces that are nowadays associated with the genre. Also those comments have literally nothing to do with his "Philosphy of Modern Music", which deals with Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Read also his essay on Bach if you want to read a Theodor Adorno who seems to be sympathetic to Art (and Beauty).

Are you familiar with Deleuze & Guattari? I am spitballing here but - your framing of cultural pockets within 'nooks and crannies' of life seems to correlate quite well to the concept of the 'nomad' put forward in A Thousand Plateaus - they talk a lot about 'nomadic' art, culture, science, etc as opposed to the striated, stratified art/culture of the State - I regret that I can't explain it better, but it seems almost as if your description of the perfecting of the production process of music, its optimisation, as a kind of 'capture' by a certain regime of technicity, a technical enframing, a capture (cognate to the capture of nomadic warmachines by the sedentary State apparatus) of the creative energies which previously coalesced in these kind of 'nomad' creativities i.e. pacific northwest grunge garage bands. Perhaps D&G can provide a more apt register for articulating your thoughts here?

Technically he is not Jewish, since his mother was a German Protestant. Also his father was a Protestant convert, which mean that Adorno did not get a traditional jewish education either. I'm not even sure he knew the language.

and how do those 'masterpieces' live up to adorno's demands on music?

I'm familiar with his ideas on classical music, mainly because he relates them to the history of this tradition. I genuinely do not know how would he approach jazz after the '70s, since it seems to be a musical tradition completely detatched from every Adorno's musical reference.
I'm not sure his philosophy of music accounted for people like Coltrane, Mingus and Coleman (to mention 3 extremely famous and celebrated jazz composers), but it certainly could account for figures as diverse as Stravinsky and Schoenberg, since he saw them both as members of the classical western tradition (he could relate them both to Beethoven for example, which would be a ridicolous thing to do when talking about jazz composers).
I guess it could be interesting for Adorno scholars to extend his theory music up to contemporary music (desu it has probably been done to death in the last 50 years, but I haven't checked yet).

Not that user but if you want an accessible intro to Adorno's thought on the arts in general - which covers these kinds of questions about jazz - I recommend Geoff Boucher's "Adorno Reframed". Libgen has it

I cannot say I have much memory of D&G, unfortunately. However, I should have explained an interesting notion that came about when you said:

>I completely agree with you in the regard above but the massive media monopolies, hollywood etc, all /still exist/ and to degrees function as they did...or would you say that their very functioning - for instance, the way in which a new Star Wars or capeshit is 'enjoyed' by the masses - is now thoroughly permeated and structured by this distributed form of cultural production: i.e. fandom culture, the production of fan-works, fan content?

In that the system now acts as these nooks and crannies as well-- I should bring to you such examples as the cooption of trap music by modern producers due to the expediency of it's production. At the risk of deviating from the insight you brought forward, I want to explain as to why Adorno is incorrect. It is not that the culture industry seeks to create that which perpetuates itself and all things attached to it, but rather it is a happy coincidence simply built upon the expediencies of production and the aggregation of these diminishing returns in which to advertise and bring forward these pieces of culture. You cannot listen to something you haven't been shown. Apple operates on this very motion, 20% in R&D and 80% in marketing.

Aside-- it begs me to wonder, what will the apparatus do without the nomads? In what will they take from? Is this what hauntology seeks to explore?

I would say it's more what hauntology takes as a premise: that cultural production in general /has/ stagnated (possibly through a dearth or diminuation in the 'nomad' creativities which the Kulturindustrie apparatus captures) lending itself to the 'eternal return of the same', the endless rehashing, remixing, remaking. Though I'll confess I don't really understand a lot of what goes under the name of hauntology - cynically I am tempted to peg it as one of these Zero Books cargo cults with no real substance behind it but my lingering respect for Fisher - and ultimately Benjamin where a lot of this comes from - holds me back

It's hard for me to take Zero Books seriously considering the gonzo marketing strategy Doug has taken to. The dude has a family to feed and that's fair enough.

As for Mark Fisher, I recently listened to a lecture he gave on music and it's seeming stagnation. It was well thought out, but it still makes me wonder why hasn't the issue of build-your-own-songs been brought up at this point? It seems as if it's a rather alarming turn in how entertainment will be produced in the future. What also intrigues me, as the years go on and I continue to work in music, the people who I find being young and about it are dwindling. It seems as if the phenomenon of creative circles is beginning to dry up, at least in the US.

As for hauntology, I think there is some merit to the idea of exploring the whole, 'futures that could have been' as it does serve to function much in the sense of something like Kuhn's paradigm shifts, though on a smaller scale. The only value I can see occuring from the exploration of hauntology is from that of medium to large sized circles, though. I would argue the movement is occuring already in music as many people have sought to return to explore what has been rather than evoke-- which is an interesting turn of thought. While the premise may seem paper-thin, I think that there is a delineation between that of >endless rehashing, remixing, remaking
as much of the art that is produced in personal circles takes on the individual human attributes of those there and is in turn, a new terrain all it's own. I believe that some people will simply choose to just not play the glass bead game anymore and begin to explore those temporalities that hadn't yet been explored to their own satisfaction-- though the premise still remains translucent as it could merely be called a new level of atomization rather than a conscious choice of community.

>Yeah bro it's totally by design that i never propose any alternatives to this shitty world
>through criticism alone can we bring down capitalism

Attached: 70 years.png (512x512, 614K)

which book by Paul Virilio should I read?

>>through criticism alone can we bring down capitalism
who are you quoting

I read Speed and Politics to come to the obtuse conclusions that I did with it.

>that I did with it.

?

The entire conversation spanning this thread. I apologize for the ambiguity.

Pure War - his interview with Sylvere Lotringer - covers a lot of ground and works as a pretty good general introduction to what he's all about. Beyond that I think you can get a lot of the secondary literature - there are some really smart guys who work on Virilio and can get his ideas across in a more accessible form - James Der Derian, John Armitage, and William Scheuerman are names to watch out for.

Where do I start with this nig

Either with his lectures (Problems of Moral Philosophy, History and Freedom, Introduction to Dialectics) or his essay collections (Notes to Literature, Prisms, The Stars Down to Earth)