my friend and I have been having a back-and-forth email conversation between us and the philosophy department head trying to convince him that Radiohead does not totally fall under Adorno’s criticisms of popular music in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. It’s hilarious, actually, cause he says they do but my friend and I keep saying, “have you listened to Kid A? Have you listened to ____?” and so we’re trying to sum up Radiohead’s career in an email. It’s kind of a shitshow, but it’s also hilarious. I’m going to send him some Godspeed You! Black Emperor and say HA EVALUATE THIS! I love being a musical elitist. I’m such an asshole.
In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, re-arranges, ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. In it he inevitably produces, as his family once did, refuse and lumber. But now he lacks a store-room, and it is hard in any case to part from left-overs. So he pushes them along in front of him, in danger finally of filling his pages with them. The demand that one harden oneself against self-pity implies the technical necessity to counter any slackening of intellectual tension with the utmost alertness, and to eliminate anything that has begun to encrust the work or to drift along idly, which may at an earlier stage have served, as gossip, to generate the warm atmosphere conducive to growth, but is now left behind, flat and stale. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
“
| — |
Theodor W. Adorno - Minima Moralia, Reflections on a Damaged Life (51 Memento) (via writinghomes)
|
(via tom moody)
“A fashion model with tens of thousands of tumblr followrs and an Atlantic article last year brought this uber-kitschy style to a large Web audience, giving the lie to claims by Ryder Ripps, Brad Troemel and others that democratic “liking” has anything to do with art. People also “like” Thomas Kincaid and McDonald’s hamburgers, we’re told. […]
A famous essay from the ’70s by Laura Mulvey explained how the masculine gaze drives moviemaking: the story is about a man and some dilemma he solves, the woman is there to give his plight added sympathy, but the problem is, when the camera fixates on her, the action stops dead and we just want to stare at her.
Laura Mulvey, from “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 1975 [PDF]
The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative.
This problem was solved, Mulvey suggests, by having the woman be a dancer or showgirl so you’re supposed to be staring at her. Or to make a “buddy film” where another man provides the sympathy factor.
Hair GIFs reverse the problem described by Mulvey but don’t do much in the way of anti-objectifying. Instead of a gaze magnet (icon) interrupting the flow of cinema we have a cinematic element disrupting the icon. The result isn’t so much subversive as unintentionally comedic.”
Tom Moody - Hair GIFs and the Male Gaze
medienkompetenz, nr. 85
Es ist die Geste des Lösens. Die Spannung der Gesichtsmuskulatur gibt nach, jene Spannung, welche das Antlitz, indem sie es in Aktion auf die Umwelt richtet, von dieser zugleich absperrt.
“
| — |
Theodor W. Adorno - Philosophie der Neuen Musik, S. 122
on faciality, zur gesichtsphilosophie, nr. 299
und weiter: “Musik und Weinen öffnen die Lippen und geben den angehaltenen Menschen los. Die Sentimentalität der unteren Musik erinnert in verzerrter Gestalt, was die obere Musik in der wahren am Rande des Wahnsinns gerade eben zu entwerfen vermag: Versöhnung. Der Mensch, der sich verströmen läßt im Weinen und einer Musik, die in nichts mehr ihm gleich ist, läßt zugleich den Strom dessen in sich zurückfluten, was nicht er selber ist und was hinter dem Damm der Dingwelt gestaut war. Als Weinender wie als Singender geht er in die entfremdete Wirklichkeit ein. […] In der Potentialität der letzten Phase der Musik meldet sich ein Wechsel ihres Standorts an. Sie ist nicht länger Aussage und Abbild eines Inwendigen, sondern ein Verhalten zur Realität, die sie erkennt, indem sie nicht länger im Bilde sie schlichtet. Damit verändert sich bei äußerster Isolierung ihr gesellschaftlicher Charakter.”
a translation:
“It is the gesture of release. The tension of the facial muscles, the tension which both directs the face into action on the environment and seals it off from that environment, is released. Music and tears open the lips and set the arrested human being free. The sentimentality of inferior music recalls in its caricature what superior music is truly capable of shaping at the boundary of frenzy: reconciliation.* One who lets himself go in tears, or in a form of music no longer resembling him in any way, at the same time lets the stream of everything he himself is not, everything which had been dammed up behind the wall of the objective world, flow back through him. As one who weeps, or one who sings, he goes forth into alienated reality […] The potentiality of the most recent phase of music indicates a change in position. It is no longer the statement and image of an inner factor, but rather an attitude towards reality, perceived by music, but no longer glossed over in the images. In the extreme isolation resulting therefrom, the social character of music changes.” Adorno - Philosophy of modern music, 2003, p. 129 (the book was also translated as Philosophy of new music, from where i stiched in the sentence marked with *, that i couldn’t find from the first version.)
|
It might be said of past [emancipatory] historical enterprises that the time was not yet ripe for them. Present talk of inadequate conditions is a cover for the tolerance of oppression. For the revolutionary, conditions have always been ripe. What in retrospect appears as a preliminary state or a premature situation was once for a revolutionary a last chance for change. A revolutionary is with the desperate people for whom everything is on the line, not with those who have time. The invocation of a scheme of social states which demonstrates post festum the impotence of a past era was at the time an inversion of theory and politically bankrupt. Part of the meaning of theory is the time at which it is developed. The theory of the growth of the means of production, of the sequence of the various modes of production, and of the task of the proletariat is neither a historical painting to be gazed upon nor a scientific formula for calculating future events…If truth is perceived as property, it becomes its opposite and hence subject to relativism which draws its critical elements from the same ideal of certainty as absolute philosophy. Critical theory is of a different kind. It rejects the kind of knowledge that one can bank on. It confronts history with that possibility which is always concretely visible within it.
“
| — |
hazeofcapitalism: Max Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State”
geschichte und zeit, nr. 48
|
auch lustig: die Kritische Theorie ein „Giftfraß“ sei, „der die inneren Organe und das Gehirn des deutschen Volkskörpers angreifen sollte.
A large dog stands beside the highway. If he walks trustfully onto it he will be run over. His peaceful expression indicated that normally he is better looked after- a pet which no one harms. But do the sons of the upper bourgeoisie, whom no one harms, have peaceful expressions on their faces? They have not been worse looked after than the dog, which is now run over.
Kritik ist also, ganz im Gegensatz zur heutigen Auffassung ihres Wesens, in ihrer zentralen Absicht nicht Beurteilung, sondern einerseits Vollendung, Ergänzung, Systematisierung des Werkes, andrerseits seine Auflösung im Absoluten…
Das erste Prinzip, eine klare Folgerung aus dem Dargelegten, besagt daß die Beurteilung eines Werkes niemals eine explizite, sondern stets eine im Faktum seiner romantischen Kritik (d.h. seiner Reflexion) impliziert sein muß. Denn der Wert des Werkes hängt einzig und allein davon ab, ob es immanente Kritik überhaupt möglich macht oder nicht…Die bloße Kritisierbarkeit eines Werkes stellt das positive Werturteil über dasselbe dar; und dieses Urteil kann nicht durch eine gesonderte Untersuchung, vielmehr allein durch das Faktum der Kritik selbst gefällt werden, weil es gar keinen anderen Maßstab, kein Kriterium für das Vorhandensein einer Reflexion gibt, als die Möglichkeit ihrer fruchtbaren Entfaltung, die Kritik heißt.
“
| — |
W. Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, Frankfurt am Main, 1973, S. 72-73 [via universalestate](via walter-benjamin-bluemchen)
der Wert des Werkes hängt einzig und allein davon ab, ob es immanente Kritik überhaupt möglich macht oder nicht
on art history / zur kunstwissenschaft, nr. 273
|
But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.
“
| — |
Marx, Letter from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (via quotemarx)
geschichte und zeit, nr. 38
|
![(via tom moody)
“A fashion model with tens of thousands of tumblr followrs and an Atlantic article last year brought this uber-kitschy style to a large Web audience, giving the lie to claims by Ryder Ripps, Brad Troemel and others that democratic “liking” has anything to do with art. People also “like” Thomas Kincaid and McDonald’s hamburgers, we’re told. […]
A famous essay from the ’70s by Laura Mulvey explained how the masculine gaze drives moviemaking: the story is about a man and some dilemma he solves, the woman is there to give his plight added sympathy, but the problem is, when the camera fixates on her, the action stops dead and we just want to stare at her.
Laura Mulvey, from “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 1975 [PDF]
The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative.
This problem was solved, Mulvey suggests, by having the woman be a dancer or showgirl so you’re supposed to be staring at her. Or to make a “buddy film” where another man provides the sympathy factor.
Hair GIFs reverse the problem described by Mulvey but don’t do much in the way of anti-objectifying. Instead of a gaze magnet (icon) interrupting the flow of cinema we have a cinematic element disrupting the icon. The result isn’t so much subversive as unintentionally comedic.”
Tom Moody - Hair GIFs and the Male Gaze
medienkompetenz, nr. 85](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m11my7DkVu1qa0a0eo1_500.gif)
