{"id":1511,"date":"2020-05-06T10:51:32","date_gmt":"2020-05-06T15:51:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1511"},"modified":"2020-05-09T07:47:50","modified_gmt":"2020-05-09T12:47:50","slug":"immanuel-kants-manifesto-for-dad-rock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/immanuel-kants-manifesto-for-dad-rock\/","title":{"rendered":"Immanuel Kant’s Manifesto for Dad Rock"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u20221.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If there is one point that should be reasonably clear to anyone who has read \u201cThe Culture Industry,\u201d it is that Adorno and Horkheimer do not reject popular culture. That essay, it\u2019s true, gives us reasons to question any number of things that we typically hold dear: free time (for being unfree time, nearly as programmed as the work from which it nominally releases us), laughter (for being the consolation prize you get for not having a life worth living), style (for funneling all social and historical content into a pre-arranged matrix or inflexible scheme of aesthetic quirks and twitches; for holding out the promise of artistic individualism\u2014the personal signature in literature or music\u2014and then transposing this into its opposite, the iterative, unresponsive art-machine). Most of us remember \u201cThe Culture Industry\u201d as anti-pop\u2019s cahier de dol\u00e9ance<\/em>, its encyclopedia of anathema, the night in which all b\u00eates sont noires<\/em>. But alongside the essay\u2019s admittedly austere bill of grievances, it is easy enough to compile a second list, an inventory of things that Adorno and Horkheimer say they like and suggest we might admire: Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Greta Garbo, the circus, old cartoons, Felix the Cat (maybe), Gertie the Dinosaur (perhaps), Betty Boop (for sure, because they name her). Just to be clear: \u201cThe Culture Industry,\u201d Exhibit A in any case against critical theory\u2019s Left elitism, is also the essay in which Adorno attacks Mozart while praising \u201cstunt films,\u201d which we might more idiomatically translate as \u201cJackie Chan.\u201d One can thus cite authentically Adornian precedence for an attitude that distrusts classical music and celebrates kung fu movies, and this will be hard to believe only if you prefer a critical theory shorn of its dialectics, stripped of the contradictory judgments that thought renders upon contradictory material\u2014only, that is, if you prefer the Adorno of joke Twitter feeds and scowling author photos: bald, moon-faced, a Central European frown emoji inexplicably mad at his own piano. One suspects that readers have generally refused to take seriously the essay\u2019s central category. For the culture industry <\/em>is neither an epithet nor a gratuitously Marxist synonym for popular culture<\/em>, but rather a different concept, distorted every time we paraphrase it in that other, more comfortable idiom, as a calumny upon pop culture or pop. There is plenty of evidence, in the essay itself, that Adorno and Horkheimer were drawing distinctions between forms of popular culture, and not just pitting the Glenn Miller Orchestra against Alban Berg.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

Such, then, is one way of taking the measure of Nicholas Brown\u2019s Autonomy<\/em>.[2]<\/a> This is one of those books that you might have thought no-one could write anymore: four chapters that mean to restate the old, left-wing case for art, unapologetically named as such, as the artwork<\/em>\u2014and not as text<\/em> or culture<\/em> or cultural production<\/em>\u2014the idea being that art represents the survival of independent human activity under conditions hostile to such a thing. No longer homogenized under those master terms, art can again take as its rival entertainment<\/em>, a word whose German equivalent derives from the verb unterhalten<\/em>, which even English speakers can tell means \u201cto hold under,\u201d as though movies and TV shows existed to keep us down, as though R&B were a ducking or a swirlie. That the English word borrows the same roots from the French only confirms the point: entre <\/em>+ tenir<\/em>, to keep amidst or hold in position. Entertain <\/em>used to mean \u201cto hire, as a servant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Autonomy <\/em>is also the book in which a next-generation American Marxist out-Mandarins Adorno, who, after all, begins his essay by insisting that the cultural conservatives are wrong. There has been no decline of standards, no cultural anarchy let loose by the weakening of the churches and the vanishing of the old, agrarian societies, hence no permissive culture in which anything goes. Just the contrary: Magazines and radio and Hollywood form a system with its own rigidly enforced standards, a highly regulated domain in which almost nothing goes. Adorno\u2019s way of saying this is that there is no \u201ccultural chaos.\u201d[3]<\/a> But Nicholas Brown prefers the chaos thesis, endorsing the position that Adorno has preemptively rejected as both reactionary and implausible: \u201cThe culture industry,\u201d Brown writes, couching in Frankfurtese his not-at-all Adornian point, is \u201cthe confusion in which everything worth saving is lost\u201d (135).<\/p>\n

Similarly, readers are usually surprised to find Adorno writing in defense of \u201cmindlessness.\u201d His hunch is that Kantian aesthetics might find its niche among the lowest art forms and not, as we more commonly expect, among the most elevated. Sometimes I encounter an object and find it beautiful, and in that moment of wonderment, my attitude towards the object is adjusted. I stop trying to discern what the thing is for or how to use it. Where a moment ago, I was still scanning its instruction manual, I am now glad for the thing just so. Perhaps I am even moved to disenroll the beautiful thing from the inventory of useful objects, or find myself doting on it even having ascertained that it\u2019s not good for much. But then sometimes this purposiveness without a purpose is going to strike me not as beautiful, but as stupid, and Adorno\u2019s point is that the stupid can do the work of the beautiful, that the beaux arts <\/em>are If anything outmatched by the imbecile kind. The activities that we do for their own sake, for the idiot joy of our own capacities, are the ones that our pragmatic selves are likely to dismiss as dopey: someone you know can pay two recorders at once with her nose; a guy you once met could burp louder than a riding mower; you\u2019ve heard about people who can vomit at will and recreationally. Kantian Zweckm\u00e4\u00dfigkeit ohne Zweck <\/em>enters the vernacular every time we mutter \u201cThat was pointless.\u201d It is in this spirit that Adorno sticks up for \u201centertainment free of all restraint,\u201d \u201cpure entertainment,\u201d \u201cstubbornly purposeless expertise,\u201d and \u201cmindless artistry.\u201d His claim, in fact, is that the culture industry is hostile to such \u201cmeaninglessness,\u201d that Hollywood is \u201cmaking meaninglessness disappear.\u201d[4]<\/a> It might be enough here to recall the difficulties that the major studios have in making comedies that are funny all the way through, preferring as they do to recruit their clowns from improv clubs and sketch shows, to promote them to the rank of movie star, and then to impound them in the regularities of the well-made plot, complete with third-act twists and character arcs, gracelessly telegraphed in the film\u2019s final twenty-five minutes, to make up for all the time squandered on jokes, and tending to position the buffo\u2019s comic persona as a pathology to be cured, scripting a return to normalcy whose hallmark is a neutralized mirthlessness. Hollywood\u2019s comic plots model the supersession of comedy and not its vindication.<\/p>\n

But Nicholas Brown is not on the side of meaninglessness. \u201cIn commercial culture,\u201d he writes, \u201cthere are no works to critique and no meanings to be found\u201d\u2014and he does not mean this as praise (10). In Autonomy<\/em>, there is no liberating nonsense, but only the English professor\u2019s compulsion to discern meaning, his impatience with any art for which one could not readily devise an essay prompt. Whatever independence the book\u2019s title is offering us, it is not the freedom to stop making sense. It feels bracing, in fact, to read a book so willing to discard the institutionalized anti-elitism of cultural studies and 200-level seminars offering to \u201cintroduce\u201d 20-year-olds to horror movies. When Brown rolls his eyes over Avatar <\/em>because of some dumb thing its director once said in an interview, or when he calls off a wholly promising reading of True Detective <\/em>by announcing that it is \u201cnothing more than an entertainment,\u201d we need to see him as turning his back on the aging pseudo-Gramscians of the contemporary academy, all those populists without a movement, the media-studies scholars who imagine themselves as part of a Cultural Front that no-one else can see, a two-term alliance consisting entirely of Beyonc\u00e9 fans and themselves; the shopping-mall Maoists of the 1990s who couldn\u2019t tell the difference between aller au peuple<\/em> and aller au cinema <\/em>(71). Adorno, of course, was concerned that the desires and tastes of ordinary audiences could be manipulated or even in some sense produced. \u201cThe Culture Industry\u201d prompts in its readers the still Kantian project to figure out which of the many pleasures they experience are authentically their own. Which are the pleasures that will survive your reflection upon them, and which are the ones that you might reject for having made you more object-like, for having come to you as mere stimulation or conditioning? The autonomy that Adorno is trying to imagine is therefore ours, in opposition to a mass media that muscles in to tell us what we want before we have had a chance to consider what else there is to want or how a person might want differently, to work out not just different objects of desire, but different modes of desiring and of seeking satisfaction. Brown, by contrast, complains repeatedly that artists more than ever have to make things that people like. The autonomy that he is after is thus not our autonomy from an insinuating system but the artist\u2019s autonomy from us. It is no longer surprising for a tenured literature professor to disclose, in writing, that he\u2019s been listening to early Bruno Mars records. The unusual bit comes when Brown says he doesn\u2019t think they\u2019re any good (24).<\/p>\n

[PART TWO IS HERE<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> See Adorno and Horkheimer\u2019s \u201cCulture Industry,\u201d in The Dialectic of Enlightenment <\/em>(1944\/1947), translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 94 \u2013 136. On free time, p. 104; on laughter, p. 112; on style, pp. 100ff; Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, p. 109; Greta Garbo, p. 106; the circus, p. 114; Betty Boop, p. 106.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Nicholas Brown, Autonomy <\/em>(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); subsequent citations will be given by page number in parentheses.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Adorno and Horkheimer, p. 94.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Ibid., p. 114.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u20221. If there is one point that should be reasonably clear to anyone who has read \u201cThe Culture Industry,\u201d it is that Adorno and Horkheimer do not reject popular culture. That essay, it\u2019s true, gives us reasons to question any … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4033],"tags":[4036,24266,24267],"class_list":["post-1511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-critical-theory-and-philosophy","tag-adorno","tag-art","tag-kant"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1511"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1530,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1511\/revisions\/1530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}