On being unashamedly bourgeois - Owen Hatherley in LRB:

“Adorno’s aesthetics are extreme. ‘He is an easy man to caricature,’ Watson writes, ‘because he believed in exaggeration as a means of telling the truth.’ But he was no misanthrope. A melancholic, certainly, but also a utopian socialist whose work is motivated above all by a horror of suffering – of the working classes, of European Jews, of animals – and an unending if faint hope that it could one day be ended. He is frequently, and rightly, upbraided for his wildly ignorant essays on jazz, but these are by no means all there is to know about his views on the culture industry. He was a defender of ‘high art’ or, as he preferred, of the avant-garde, with certain figures – Beckett, Kafka, Schoenberg – appearing again and again as touchstones, and he was cautionary in response to his friend Walter Benjamin’s views on the utopian potential to be found in cinema, radio and advertising. In a letter he wrote to Benjamin in August 1936, Adorno defines his own position as being where the extremes of art – the very lowest, the very highest – touch, but not where they meet in the middle. ‘Both bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change,’ and ‘both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.’ The adversary was the work that stood in between, the tasteful, the middlebrow: Adorno would ‘naturally never and nowhere’ endorse ‘the middle term between Schoenberg and the American film’. The fact remains, though, that Adorno’s work includes thousands of pages on the ‘high’ part of that dipole, and very little on the ‘low’.”

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“Adorno’s commitment to being without a ‘model’ – a Leitbild – is rooted in one of his most appealing dislikes, for the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. ‘In keeping with the still widespread ontological trend’, Adorno writes in his introduction, he could choose to ‘waffle something more or less veiled about eternal artistic values’, but prefers instead to stress the messy, the unfinished and the fragmentary. He yokes the language of Heidegger and the existentialists to the economy: ‘the word “values”, which has become fashionable since Nietzsche to refer to insubstantial norms that are divorced from humans’, was, he asserts, ‘not by chance taken from the sphere of objects par excellence, namely that of economic exchange’. Instead, the ‘small aesthetics’ in Without Model will defend ‘the zone that conformism seeks to proscribe as experimental’, which for Adorno, as ever, ‘is the last refuge of the possibility of aesthetic truth’.”

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“Similarly, in ‘From Sils Maria’, written in 1957, Adorno wanders around the Engadin valley in Switzerland, gazes at the night sky in search of Sputnik, wobbling among the planets and stars, and makes such remarks as ‘when Piz da la Margna’ – one of the area’s most striking mountains – ‘wears her light shawl of mist, playful yet reserved, she is a lady who one can be sure would never travel to St Moritz to go shopping.’ He is unashamedly bourgeois in Paris too.”

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“Adorno was opposed to biography by and large because he believed that a chronicle of the banal facts of a life made an artist’s work banal in turn. And it’s true that Adorno is seldom so boring as when he is telling you about his holidays.”

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“Against various kinds of futurism, he asserts that ‘forgetting is inhumane, because it means forgetting the accumulated suffering.’ This insight recurs in ‘Functionalism Today’, a lecture on modern architecture, which Adorno admits is not his specialism. Adorno’s aesthetics, especially after 1945, focused on a notion of ‘autonomous’ art, outside political commitment and outside the capitalist market, obeying its own rules, aggressive, dissonant, fragmentary, dedicated to speaking the unspeakable no matter how unpalatable it might be. This autonomy is invariably to some degree illusory – there is always a client, or sometimes, as in the Federal Republic, a government stipend – but in the case of architecture it is impossible, especially for public buildings and the urban reconstruction of the postwar era. For Adorno’s version of modernism, this presents a problem. ‘Because architecture is not exclusively autonomous, but at once purpose-bound, it cannot simply negate humans as they are, even though, being autonomous, it must do so.’ He admires Le Corbusier and, especially, Adolf Loos, but is made uncomfortable by the possibility that the astringency of their work might make people suffer when they don’t deserve to (unlike, for instance, concert or theatre audiences, who are fair game).”

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“Another rare example of Adorno’s often stated but seldom demonstrated sympathy with unadulterated ‘low’ culture comes in ‘Chaplin Times Two’, a salute to the actor-director that recalls some of the passages on clowns and clowning that enliven Aesthetic Theory. Adorno doesn’t praise Chaplin, as was common at the time, as someone who ‘elevated’ slapstick into ‘high art’. He politely passes over the later ‘serious’ films, the ones without the Tramp character, arguing that ‘interpretations’ of Chaplin are ‘all the more unfair to him the more they elevate him’. He finds an aggression in Chaplin’s work, and the manner in which he gently but ruthlessly mocks and emulates the gestures of others. The real Chaplin, Adorno argues, ‘is not a victim but rather seeks victims, pounces on them, tears them apart’; he is ‘a Bengal tiger as a vegetarian’. He ends his sketch with the spectacular flex of recalling the occasion when he himself had the privilege of being imitated by Chaplin. At a party in Los Angeles, Adorno was introduced to an actor who had lost his hand in the war. In his embarrassment, as he moved to shake the actor’s metal claw, his ‘expression of horror’ changed ‘into an obliging grimace that must have been far more terrible’. Chaplin, who was there, immediately spotted his discomfort and replayed the entire scene in mime.”

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‘In its middlebrow pomposity, its massively expensive technological flash, and its aspirations to profundity, Kubrick’s film represented everything Adorno most hated.’

Read the article here.

The anecdote about Adorno and Chaplin is enticing, and of course all great slapstick and even the not so great slapstick, it’s all about aggression.
Just take a look at The Marx Brothers, Keaton, Tati is the least aggressive comedian from that era, but he is French. He is absent, he is there and not there at the same time, that’s his aggression.
The viciousness of Chaplin must be clear to anybody who has ever bothered to watch a Chaplin, but that’s what makes him such a great artist.

And ‘Minima moralia’ is a great read, and fun as well, if you have moved beyond bourgeois optimism, that is.

I wrote about it, read it here only in Dutch.

That Adorno was unashamedly bourgeois is part of his charm. Sometimes at least.

A last footnote: Kubrick should be judged on hist best work, for example “Paths of Glory”.