Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

Why Is Adorno So Repulsive?

Something very striking happens during Jay Bernstein’s presentation in seminar 5 of the 2010 Stone Summer Theory Institute. Several participants react to Bernstein ’s invocation of Theodor Adorno much as Harry Potter might respond to a dementor—that revolting, wraithlike creature who sucks all the happiness and vitality out of its victims. Or at least that’s how I read the following protests, each addressed to Bernstein: Elise Goldstein: Well, I can’t feel alive in the face of rationality as you do. Joana Cunha Leal: The pleasure you describe in relation to art, Jay, seems very far from Adorno’s negativity. And even: Sven Spieker: Adorno didn’t know much about the experience of falling in love. Is this what Adorno has become—the Grinch Who Stole Pleasure? A creepy old guy with bad breath who leans over just when you’re shaking with laughter to remind you that “fun is a medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe” and, just in case you haven’t wiped the smile off your face yet, that “[i]n wrong society laughter is a sickness infecting happiness and drawing it into society’s worthless totality.”1 Why would anyone want to be stuck in Adorno’s gloomy closet, trying to remain world-historically hopeful about that tiny little ray of light making its way in from under the door, when they could be hitching a polymorphously perverse ride on one of Deleuze and Guattari’s thousand plateaus, from which infinite lines of flight radiate out toward the horizon?2 But Adorno sticks in my craw. He will not go down easily. He’s that fragment of bone on which I keep choking. Joana Cunha Leal adds the familiar longing to know how to oppose: “If only we could know what resistance looks like.” And it occurs to me that Adorno why is adorno so repulsive? William mazzarella 1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 112. 2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Assessments 191 3. Walter Benjamin, “Hashish in Marseilles,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, edited by Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 678. 4. Dialectic of Enlightenment, 101. 5. Lisa Yun Lee, “Interrogating Philosophy: The Bared Breasts Incident,” in Dialectics of the Body: Corporeality in the Philosophy of T. W. Adorno (New York: Routledge, 2005), 49–76. 6. For a detailed illustration of this dynamic at work, see my critical reading of Hardt and Negri’s category of the multitude vis-à-vis crowd theory in William Mazzarella, “The Myth of the Multitude,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 4 (2010): 697–727. was at his weakest when he was most implacably opposed. Opposed to what we now call popular culture. To Disney cartoons. To the syncopation of jazz, which Adorno dismissed as pseudo-individuality. His close friend Walter Benjamin , who by upbringing had similar scruples, nevertheless allowed himself, when stoned in Marseilles, “to mark the beat with my foot.”3 Adorno steadfastly refused to groove. He fixated instead on the “superior” smile of the jazz cat that gets rapped on the knuckles for “involuntarily” funking up a bit of Beethoven.4 Let’s face it: Adorno’s insistence that art produced for the market, made as a commodity from the very beginning, is inherently incapable of doing uncanny, unexpected, and rather beautiful things was never very convincing. Crudely stretched across the entire cultural field, the wholesale dismissal of mass culture has rightly been ridiculed and dismissed by every generation of critics since those female students flashed their breasts at stuffy old Adorno in the spring of 1969 and sent him stomping out of the lecture hall for the very last time.5 But having driven a stake through the Grinch’s tiny heart, the new generation of populists unwittingly imported and reproduced his central mistake. They scurried off to find canny acts of subversion in every last nook and cranny of “everyday life.” And in the very act of resisting all those totalizing Adornian constructs—“the culture industry,” “the administered society,” and so on—the new cadre of kitchen-sink redeemers gave these constructs a coherence and an authority precisely as something to be opposed that even Adorno at his most paranoid could not have imagined. At least they found out what resistance looks like. In seminar...