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July 28, 2004
Trevor,
okay your post gives me some idea of what you understand Adorno's claim about culture after Auschwitz to be. I found it very useful.
I had interpreted the claim narrowly: as "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric"; or that it was how philosophy, theory, and literature could properly respond to the holocaust.
You set me right. I'm happy to stick with the broader culture claim. It makes more sense to me.
That claim holds that:
"...all culture that re-established itself untransformed after Auschwitz was garbage. It was only a short syllogism from there to the conclusion that they were, well, you work it out. According to Adorno it is their culture, that of the academics and the theologians that led to Auschwitz."
That makes Adorno very relevant to contemporary Australia.
My question was: 'what does that paragraph mean for us in Australia today'?
You say that that you interpret Adorno's thesis to mean:
"Auschwitz stands for administratively-organised mass murder, torture, humiliation, degradation. Instead of being hot-blooded it is cold-blooded and disinterestedly calculated. With Auschwitz, mass murder became a job for public servants, even if the guys found it a bit hard to go home to the wife and kiddies after a full-on day of butchering their fellow human beings – the things you have to do for a living."
Fine, no problems.
That account can, and should be, related to the destruction of the aboriginal people in Australia by the white settlers in the 19th century when they dispossessed the indigenous people of their land under the guise of the legal fiction of terra nullius.
What puzzles me is how, and where, your paragraph differs from Heidegger's thesis about the technological mode of being. I sketched this here and particularly here, where Heidegger connects up concentration camps and agribusiness.The death camps agribusiness, and the destruction of our ecology is organized with the efficiency of a factory.
Does this not indicate that Adorno and Heidegger had much in common in their diagnosis of the destructiveness of late modernity than you are willling to grant? It strikes me that you play off the differences and ignore the similarities. I do appreciate that you think that Heidegger is not worth wasting time on but there was a number of German voices on the right and left addressing the destructiveness of modernity.
Most of them trace their way back to Nietzsche, nihilism and the revaluation of values and work within Hegel's historical account of the development of reason sketched in the groundbreaking Phenomenology of Spirit.
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