What was his problem?

What was his problem?

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Explain further.

He was a momma's boy

Another user but basically for Adorno, fascism was the result of the ongoing degeneracy of western civilisation, starting with the greek myth. With critical theory he wanted to propose an open-ended system that can avoid falling into barbery.

Then like twenty years later a bunch of americans with a high-school reading level that concluded that he just hates MURICA and MUH MERICAN VALUES and came up with "cultural marxism"

To add, for him the start of the degeneracy was the Odyssey, because in the pre-cvilized world, mankind was just another object along with nature and dominated by the elementary powers. In the Odyssey, Odysseus tricked all the old elementary powers (Mana) through human cleverness and the human as a subject was born, a subject that has an obsession with enslaving the object (nature). Adorno sees this as the basis for capitalism and all the evil of modernity.

Short and shoddy explanation, it's all in the Dialectics of Enlightment.

Sounds pretty cray.

I guess it is but i think it is also one of the most powerful critiques of modernity that I have read. It's not just >muh capitalism but goes further, critiquing the idea of the enlightment itself.

Didn't he also think jazz was degenerate and wanted to move back to classical music?

In a way, yes, he thought the speed of Jazz was a reproduction of the modern factory environment and basically music for stupid mongloids.

Adorno was of course a bitter fuck and that comes through in his texts about music since he was kind of a failed musician. They're a bit ridiculous reading them today but you can just ignore them and read his other stuff just fine.

Didn't he only know pop jazz?

Where did the meme about him and the Frankfurt School being behind trannies and other cultural marxism stuff come from?

far right-wingers are extreme anti-intellectuals

In Search of Wagner is pretty good though, extremely in depth and will provide you with interesting theories and ideas about music in general, even though I don't agree with him in many of his observations on Wagner.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Lind

Apparently it only originated in the late 1990s, not at the time when critical theory had it's big moment, but long after it stopped being a big thing in mainstream intellectual circles, which just shows how retarded these conspiracies actually are.

Not sure, was there even a thing such as "pop jazz" in the 1930s and 40s? In any case, I think his criticism of jazz is hard to understand now since we live in the age of Vaporwave and jazz is incredibly ordinary in comparison. But if you compare jazz with what came before it, it becomes a lot more radical and maybe even scary (as it somewhat was to Adorno)

Haven't read it, I'll give it a shot maybe.

Basically. He seems to have fixated on what jazz was in Germany in the 20s and early 30s, which was apparently even more insipid imitations of American light jazz.

Overrated hack.
His review of Spengler was honestly embarrassing for anyone who has actually read the book.

>lol, I didn't really read the book, otherwise I wouldn't say Spengler's wrong because we have TV, but a cursory reading gave me the impression his analysis seems like astrology to me hahhaha, even though his predictions came true and my bullshit philosophy still has to show actual results

He knew that being a reactionary was the true answer.

Americans, being the rootless scum they are(mostly because of capitalism) imported the Frankfurt School in their universities in a very bad way. Then they became even more rootless and fused critical theory with their soft-capitalism.

His observations on Jazz seem limited to and applicable mostly to swing. I think he would have appreciated the virtuosity of hard bop, or the dialogic nature of some free jazz. I love both Àdorno and jazz. I think Àdorno, despite the focus on Dialectic of Enlightenment, was one of the most complete and versatile intellectuals of the 20th century. Indeed, I think his only competition in this regard is Bourdieu and some STEM folks such as Von Neumann, Turing, Tesla, and Einstein.

His critiques of music were not primarily genre-based. Remember that he was as vitiolic with light classical like Toscanini as he was with swing.

He was a German Marxist of Jewish stock who yet enjoyed and participated in the bourgeois high culture of his country. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do with his life, and was able to feel very culturally superior in doing so.

Then, an anti-semitic fascist took control of Germany, which obliged him to leave his country.

If you can actually leave politics aside for a moment, just consider that someone, Person A, who leads a very comfy life, suddenly has his country taken over by the embodiment of everything that Person A hates: Person H. And person H hates your ilk just as much as you hate him. Much more than being a demagogue, Person H is hell-bent on killing you and everyone like you, and Person H is largely successful in this project, with the broad support of your countrymen.

Now you have some idea of what Adorno's fucking problem was. The contemporary liberal tears in response to Trump's win pale in comparison to Adorno's deeply personal butthurt at the successes of the Third Reich, which again it must be said can be empathized with once one is willing to leave politics aside a moment and just run the thought experiment.

Also he was wrong about jazz. Cultural chauvinism of Adorno's flavor and Marxism lead to a certain cognitive dissonance, shared to a lesser (less conscious) extent by today's champagne socialist iPhone toting new leftists.

>Person A, who leads a very comfy life, suddenly has his country taken over

Adorno was butthurt long before 1933. He and the circle around him never doubted that Hitler would take other, they had already made emigration plans before 1993.

I mean of course, he was triggered by the Nazis but more than anything he had a very deep-seating disgust for how western civilization had degenerated. I've only read the german version and i'm not sure if it comes through the same way in a translation, but there really is this deep seating disgust for modernity seething through every sentences in the dialectic of enlightment. and they wrote that book before they even knew about auschwitz.

he buld

However of course, The Authoritarian Personality (et al) was meant by its creators as a sort of therapy, to make some sense of the world post-holocaust.

>implying the Holocaust happened

Wait so he wanted to destroy the west and the people get mad when you accuse him of exactly that?

the absolute irony of people on reddit quoting Nietzsche to discredit him

...

How the fuck did you manage to read that he wants to destroy the west out of that? He wanted to SAVE the accomplishments of the western enlightment (it literally says this on my copy of the dialectic of enlightment) by reforming it to something that isn't inherently self-destructive.

This is literally the same thought process that fucking reactionaries have - they see modernity as a self-destructive process - of course the difference being that they don't want to move to a new form of society but rather return to an old one. Of course hacks like that William S. Lind guys didn't see the parellels.

Where does one start with Adorno?

>Adorno was of course a bitter fuck
His composer-husbando Schönberg was disgusted by him because he bullied Stravinsky so much (Schönberg himself made a diss piece against Stravinsky's neoclassicist turn).

He died pretty early and abruptly for an intellectual, so his main works are just the dialectic of enlightment and the negative dialetics. So start with the dialectic of enlightment. It definitely helps to read an introduction to critical theory/frankfurt school to get a feel for all the context but I don't know what's a good introduction in english.

>He unironically defends and/or justifies Jazz

This is how we weed out the plebs, boys.

>but I don't know what's a good introduction in english.
The Dialectical Imagination

>successes of the Third Reich

its disappearance and the fleeing of intellectuals and scientists to America?

Poor Benjy is still better.

what about gypsy jazz?

But surely building houses, ships to sail the sea, and farming, mining etc. are all already examples of humanity subjecting nature, and existed long before the Odyssey?

LET MY LOVE ADORN YOU

Yes, but mankind still felt subjected to and helpless towards the raw elementary powers in the end. It's not really a materialistic concept (Adorno and Horkheimer reject the classic Marxist historic materialism in that book) but more of a cultural one regarding the change from the legends of the "primal age" in which the elementary powers are mysterious, unreachable and unbeatable and the birth of the myth in which humanity first makes the elementary powers clearly reachable and eventually defeats them through an act of self-sacrifice (note how Odysseus always has to make some kind of sacrifice to defeat the trials), which dooms the whole enlightment from the start.

Honestly the whole myth of Odysseus thing read like an exercise in pontification rather than a genuine analysis.

Best Theory: Adorno wrote all of the Beatles' songs