A Note on a Tag in Adorno

De gustibus est disputandum

This Latin tag (from Adorno’s Minima Moralia), which means “it is necessary to argue about taste” is counterposed to the saw de gustibus non disputandum (“there is no arguing about taste”) is key to understanding his much more turgid Aesthetic Theory.

That is, based on Kant, Adorno notes that despite the fact that it’s bad manners to disrespect another’s taste in art as people will say when they sigh, and repeat the grave saw, this is precisely what art works “want”: truth content. They ASSERT that “this is worth your time, baby”, but in a way for which there are so many multiple and conflicting metrics as to make this claim disputable without being decidable.

Now, there may be works of art beyond reproach, and note that in the vastly more important zone of ethics, Adorno identifies a class of ethical statements he and many other people thought sans reproche even in a godless and de-spiritualized world, statements that, far from needing a religious ground, themselves are the ground of religion: my son wrote an excellent paper at uni in which he pointed out that Abraham’s “angel”, that told Abraham not to slay Isaac, was Abraham’s pre-Abrahamite, pre-religious ethical instinct which needs no ground.

One statement that Adorno identified as being beyond question was “there should be no concentration camps”. Bingo, perfect pitch, something more than an axiom, something that’s a mathematical proof without being an argument at all: if we understand perfectly that a concentration camp is a place in which even your death is without meaning (not the British proto-camp or approximation of the Boer War except insofar as that experiment shared elements) the Nazi camps, and, to the extent they followed the model, Serbian camps of the 1990s, and, to the extent it followed the model set by the Nazis as dark exemplars, Abu Ghraib.

Likewise, we might say something in art theory like “if anything does not suck, Raphael’s mature style, late Beethoven, Tolstoy’s Karenina, Coltrane, do not suck”. And even if we get a lot of back-talk, we want to say it, and Coltrane’s music says it. It says, listen to this, man!

Listen! to what I mean. The Youtube video, which is part of a live recording of A Love Supreme made in 1965 as replayed on an analogue system, will open in a different window and you can come back here if I’m not totally boring you yet.

Coltrane has truth content that Glenn Miller lacks because the more you know about Jazz production the more you can educate yourself about why this really doesn’t suck. Adorno’s world-historical brain fart (On Jazz), an essay in which he was completely wrong about Jazz, only illustrates this: to Adorno and many other Europeans of his time, blacks were invisible, so despite the fact that Teddie was in fact deeply familiar with white pop of the 1930s and 1940s, he seems never have to educated himself about African American music! This is more than a Homeric nod, but it doesn’t make Adorno’s theories worthless.

Part of the truth content of music, about which we can indeed dispute and which can be empirically brought to bear, is the unexpected response. I was playing an obscure piece (the Sweelinck fantasia) performed by Glenn Gould at a government school in a poor district in Hong Kong. The cleaning lady, who spoke no English, asked me through a student to write down the name of the piece and the performer since she’d thought it beautiful.

This was like an incident that happened in Glenn Gould’s lifetime. While he hated performing for classical audiences because of their cultured barbarism, their expectation of a “culinary” experience which treats art as a “fine meal”, their secret hope of seeing the performer shamed, their Sacre du Printemps as it were, he would at times invite ordinary people, strangers, to listen to him rehearse.

This is replayed in the film 32 Variations on Glenn Gould. He invites a German chambermaid into his hotel room not to harass her like that French guy a couple of weeks ago but to listen to him practise the Goldberg Variations, and she responds to the music.

Which means as a matter of truth that he didn’t suck, right?

In fact, when we sigh, and agree not to argue about taste, this is the point at which engineered entertainment destroys high culture. Mass media knows how to manipulate us and it does. Whereas to force oneself back to the experience of Adorno’s child who is listening to a string quartet in the next room with utter fascination we have to be “pretentious”.

We have to attend to the boring bits and in my direct experience this is painful. This is because of another thing my fat pal said: we owe Beethoven far more than he owes us: culture as opposed to entertainment is NOT focused on the “customer”, it is not our servant.

At the same time, an essential point in Aesthetic Theory is that the truthiness (if you will), the truth-content, of the assertion of ANY work of art that “this is worth your time, babe” will never be established once and for all by descriptions, let us say, of sonata form followed by a demonstration of how Beethoven mastered, and then went beyond.

Big deal: this is no more an argument for abandoning the dispute than undecidability in math or physics is an argument for not majoring in math or physics. In fact, something like real aesthetic beauty may have appeared, for the first time, in math with Godel’s Proof and in physics with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

Kant’s category of the Sublime is precisely what would be called, today, the uncanny WTF factor. It’s why the Gypsy dancer La Malena said that Bach had “duende” and not Gluck.

We know WHY Saving Private Ryan was a cool movie: all those dirty Germans got killed and that homo with the typewriter learned what real men are like. But The Thin Red Line, Terence Malick’s film released in the same summer about the regular (US) army at Guadalcanal, was “uncanny”. It was only marginally better made in the tech sense. Its duende was precisely how it frustrated the viewer’s expectations: guys are heading to the beach, viewer thinks, OK, Japs gonna open up, Japs don’t, WTF.

And then, on the third viewing, I realized something. As the safe viewer I am barbaric to want to see a representation of men who could have been my father getting fired upon: the men are like, whew, I shall live, and isn’t this world, this island, beautiful.

The point of a war movie worth our time would be “reconstructing the emotional life of our ancestors”. Peter Weir did this in Gallipoli and Jean Renoir in The Big Illusion, as did Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory. Spielberg, while a sub-genius, did not. Instead, he feels himself so inadequate at not being part of his father’s generation that his characters are ultimately inhuman: early in the film, the Yuppie wife chides the Dad for taking pictures of his own father at the Allied gravesite as if to draw a boundary between him and his father…something a wife really has no authority to do, or, more precisely: Spielberg adds the feminine response to say that the men of WWII were more than human…when of course they were not.

I cannot capture duende but I can weave a circle of words around it which might be boring as hell but might also be a useful lesson in how to watch a film. Stop expecting entertainment all the time. I have to be in a dialogue (in somewhat the manner of old philosophy as last seen in Berkeley, or ethics as last seen in 18th century dialogues between a Dudley Do Right and a common lecher) with my own Studs Lonigan, my own Slats Grobnick, my own “heavy bear” in the poem of that name (Google it), for this is the damaged existence constructed by “entertainment”.

The Spielberg wife, in Private Ryan, does call me to account. She knows that there’s a point where it might be disrespectful to photograph (or make a movie of) the solemn. But: the problem in Spielberg is that he cannot think beyond an American theme wherein women are now burdened with having to be superegos. Spielberg creates a domestic drama in the middle of a war picture. I seriously wish he’d grow up, in part because I’d like to play John Rabe for his planned movie about Nanking.

After the 1940s, Adorno and his wife Gretel didn’t go to the movies because he hated their increasingly slick audience manipulation. They did like animal and nature programs on TV.

Godard might get a Prize? No way!

The Zionists are going rigid and drumming their heels and turning blue over the possibility of Jean-luc Godard, he who makes all those films which they saw when coked up in the Seventies and can’t remember, winning a Prize.

Godard was right on Schindler’s List: had that movie’s images of Auschwitz been made by a non-Jew it would have been banned. But the whole point of art, to me, is universality: see the poem below this post.

Tribalism in art is the idea that you can’t make art that tells the tribe’s story unless you’re a member. This is a popular meme, applied even in the borderline case (like that of my marriage) where the tribe or Other you have re-presented has a meaningful relation with you or (in the case of the Palestinians) your friends.

Part of the victimization system is the Victimizer’s lie: that there is really no intimate relation between the Victimizer and the Victim.

My former wife was my Victim when, long ago, I was abusive. Based on this, she now is Victimizer in that she wishes to erase the six years of our marriage from her memory; it appears that she no longer uses the email which I used to communicate with her, primarily about the kids, up to 2005, and this email is now sending me junk about Viagra (!) since it’s been colonized by a spambot.

I need a meaningful relationship with my grown children, if only to have a place in addition to Facebook to tell what Borges calls “the true story of your own death”. But having been raised by my former wife, the kids follow her lead, and if she ignores my existence so do they. This makes me the Victim, as if (as is logically possible) the Allies had, in 1946, allowed the Jews to return to Germany legally enabled to be a master race, and this had gotten out of hand, resulting in a Holocaust of Germans at the hands of vengeful (Old Testament) Jews in 1975.

“Who is the slayer? Who is the victim? Speak.” – Sophocles

It is different for me to write about a former spouse than it would for me to write, say, about a Hollywood star with whom I’ve never had a relationship.

But what does Godard have to do with Israel’s victims, the Palestinians? Well, plenty, because their victimization set perhaps the first post-Holocaust precedent that a person or people may still be selected for brutalization, their cries ignored, their claims disregarded, and this makes life difficult and dangerous for all of us…except for the Jews, whose lives remain endangered and made difficult by anti-Semitism but not by post-Holocaust neo-bullying: today’s pattern of finding friendless groups (Palestinians, older heterosexual divorced men, Catholic priests who happen not to be child molestors) and kicking the shit out of them pour encourager and as a safety valve for one’s free-floating rage.

“Thou shalt not cathect”. Post-holocaust Judaism has regressed into a Law that cannot be obeyed unless you’re Jewish, making it impossible for anyone, including Jews, to follow the Kantian imperative (to act so that your action can be recommended as a universal moral law). Zionists are asking me to support the IDF’s sending an SMS (“hey, we’re going to bomb your neighborhood) and then bombing the ‘hood as “humanity and justice” which is tragedy and farce, and asks me, in fact, not to be an autonomous moral being.

To sympathize with a people with unattractive characteristics (their Islamic beliefs as so little understood by Westerners) purely because they have been treated unfairly-unjustly is not tribal enough for many Jewish thought leaders who would like us to economize on altruism. It is considered a cheap fashion statement like one of those very cool motorbikes you see many Parisiennes use to scoot around Paris.

Hmm. Well, last March I took the side, at work, of a Malaysian-British gentleman whom the putative manager of English department seemed to have disliked in a motiveless and narcissistic way. My reward at a company where I knew damned well that solidarity was a threat to management was to be terminated with one hour’s notice. I am now humping around Hong Kong to interesting and poorer neighborhoods as a temp teacher, and just got my first call from a collections department…I won’t make my Visa payment until 20 Nov. Yippee, here we go again: I’ve been there before, so hopefully I can survive better.

Solidarity is a luxury good today, and we’re expected to do without it below a certain level; only the super gazillionaire like Bill Gates is thought to have the luxury to finally get around to eleemosynary detour and frolic.

But the paradox of advice in a fuck-you, devil take the hindmost society is that the advice itself becomes a competitive move in the game. I was told in the 1970s to loosen up and go out with the guys in the office for a drink and not work so hard, because I was making the guys in the office look bad, and the function of drinking-groups remains the search for and eradication of the member who thinks she’s special, whether she jumps to her death from Princeton’s chapel or is filmed having an orgasm for Internet posting. Therefore we need not respect the injunction not to take a stand since the advice is intended to destroy us.

To be anti-Israel based on Israel’s dismal track record has always had real consequences for celebrities, who undergo stress owing to death threats and the paparazzi (who brought Diana down), and who retain consulting firms to try to ensure their security.

And as Zionism continues to regress from what it was under Herzl to the infantile rage of a David Horowitz, one cannot help but notice how these shitstorms are triggered by the concept of the “prize”.

When we were kids, if a kid had a birthday party, we all had Mom buy some cheap junky but cool toy at Woolworth’s for the birthday girl or boy, and went to the party. What we got was Betty Crocker cake, never chocolate alas, usually white on white: mothers of the 1950s had a racist horror of their children being chocolate smeared.

But I noticed in the early 1980s that my younger son’s taking offence at his elder brother’s receiving any kind of special recognition (even his goddamn birthday) was pandered to by my former wife. If my elder son got a present, my younger son had to get a present, and I was working in far-away California, unable to put the boot in. Had I done so, probably, I would have been dismissed in this matriarchal system, which is why I left in the first place.

I have learned from Mamas on Lamma Island that this pot-latch is now spinning out of control. Tai Tais and wealthy Gweipos (Euro-Mamas) both expect, when they bring their children to birthday parties, not only a present for their child. They expect a fancy and expensive “gift bag” and, for the Gweipos, no end of expensive booze.

The birthday boy or girl if at all unpopular is often openly bullied at these parties. The message is that no-one is special except a Big Other.

Likewise, modern Zionists are enraged by the idea of a pro-Palestinian winning a prize. Part of their regression is (so clearly in the trajectory of David Horowitz) a complete lack of inner balance or a super-ego, and this creates an unfillable need for external affirmation…that is seen to be a feature of the psychology of the ancient world.

The “anger of Achilles” is infantile for it is primarily about what other heroes will think of him. You distinguished yourself in the ancient world and as recently as the Napoleonic wars, since life expectancy was low, by Fame constituted solely in the recognition of your mates: there was no such thing as second place or “knowing in your heart that you are right”: Napoleon knew this at Marengo.

Paradoxically, a “Jewish” thinker (Spinoza) pioneered the very idea of inner-directedness and autonomy and Ecclessiastes reminds us when praising famous men that men can be great but unknown. The idea of justice, its link to fairness, and then the idea that the autonomous person might take a stand for tax collectors, slaves, ho-bags and Palestinians, all originated in the seedbed of Torah.

But alongside is the complete lack of justice-as-fairness also seen in Torah: the punishment of Onan and Ham, and God’s smug response to Job, a book somewhat reminiscent of Mao’s “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom”: Job is encouraged to speak up and then bitch-slapped.

The whole point for the Godard haters is that Israel won the Six Day War by guile and trickery as well as force and that after this, we must never give a prize to an anti-zionist lest the collective wrath of online Zionism unleash millions of emails. Justice, to be Justice, must be unjust in the sense that it must feel like injustice to its targets. The Palestinians must find a way to hew wood and draw water on Shabboz happily for the Jews and their girls must learn to dance nude in clubs, or else.

Godard needs to learn how to make fun and entertaining films like Schindler’s List about fun and entertaining company managers who do their darnedest to save the Jews. I mean, come on. I can’t stand his films myself, because I have little time for movies except when exhausted and when you’re exhausted you want to watch something like Idiocracy, Dodgeball, The Hangover or Schindler’s List. That is because you are too tired to laugh or cry, and the machinery of the film does it for you. You’re on life support, being fed intraveiniously.

Godard-watching is more like cracking a book. It is unlikely that Israeli “settlers” pop Godard into the DVD. Running around shooting innocent children is hard work and takes a toll.

If Godard gets a Prize, the Zionists will have one of those shit fits in which their body goes rigid, like rich kids in Hong Kong who are almost bigger than their Indonesian helpers.

Or something. I need to finish Zizek’s latest book, In Defense of Lost Causes, for sometimes I think he’s too facile and his ease of jumping around infects my style. I need to get over Zizek.

Robert Longo, “Barbara”, lithograph 1998 (saved as GIF and then as JPEG by EGN to remove colour information for best display on a variety of monitors, and to enhance the grain of this image)