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July 27, 2004
Gary,
We seem to be back on some plain of agreement, which is good. I must however respond to your remark about the possible irrelevance of Adorno’s remark for contemporary Australia that after Auschwitz any element of culture that doesn’t transform itself is garbage. In my view, no remark was made in 20th century philosophy that is more relevant to Australia at the present than this claim. I’ll try to explain why.
For Adorno, Auschwitz isn’t just a particular place and what went on there during the early 1940s. It is just that for some reason that place obtained a particular notoriety. The word ‘Auschwitz’ also stands for all the other death camps, and for the concentration camps and the forced labour camps, and the immigration detention centres - the list is not endless but long. The word ‘Auschwitz’ also stands for the atomic bomb and the bombing of Japanese cities, and by extension the bombing of German cities, particularly but not only Dresden.
For Adorno, 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. It breaks my heart even to talk about this. My eyes are welling with tears. I’m not just being nostalgic. I’m weeping for the present and the future.
I lost my job a few years ago as a part of substantially the same practice that expressed itself in Auschwitz. I’d love to say that I was sacked for my political activities or my views but the truth is that my personal qualities were irrelevant. Arguably, I was the only scholar in the department but who gave a shit? From 28 to 7 - that was the sum. The rest of it was ideological baggage. Deleuze is right: it’s a matter of changing the territory. When that becomes an administrative concern then Auschwitz inevitably follows. This, in my view, is what Adorno was arguing.
It’s a moot point whether Adorno’s ideas are irrelevant to the present in Australia or anywhere else. At the conference there were two Waynes. They were an identity of opposites – there was something similar about them anyway. When I gave my little provocation, in the ensuing discussion both the Waynes felt that Adorno’s – and by extension my – ideas were old-fashioned and too simplistic for ‘the way we live now’, to borrow a line from Trollope.
Okay, I can think of two very different writers who think exactly the opposite – Dorothy Green and Frederick Jameson. They both think that Adorno’s claims are truer now than when he uttered them. I’m inclined to agree.
As far as being simplistic goes, as I have been saying, I’m a nominalist and so William of Ockham is one of my saints: thou shalt not multiply entities beyond necessity. We don’t need some fancy story to explain the present – it is imperialism. The idea of a world economy is an imperialist idea – the international guarantee for capital.
At the conference, more than one person tried to dissuade me from an interest in Adorno. Here are some of the things I heard: he was not a very nice person, he was an academic, he had a high squeaky voice, etc – the ad hominem type responses that everybody loves regardless of any logical consequences. In Germany Adorno has apparently attracted a cult rather like the Heidegger cult he discusses in The Jargon Of Authenticity. Related, there was a worry about his language. In short, there was a worry about everything except his main point: that everyone who is still playing the same old political game or academic game or religious game, or any other game, is just a fascist. You don’t have to get hot-blooded and want to murder. Just wait. You’ll do it in your own cold-blooded way, and then you’ll go home to the wife and kiddies.
Giordano Bruno was tried for everything except the one thing that really offended. The guys who tortured Bruno for seven years before burning him alive didn’t really give a rats about relativity theory but they sure as hell didn’t like him writing a book on the activities of the Catholic Church in Europe with a title that is something like ‘The Beast Unchained’. Even then the cardinals didn’t get too hot under the collar. There was a job to be done and Bruno had to fry.
It is the same with Adorno. No one wants to say where they stand on the question of all untransformed post-Auschwitz culture being garbage. They don’t want to face the accusation that the system of reason in which we take such pride produced Auschwitz out of itself, that it is the inevitable outcome of positive reason – I’d prefer to call it utilitarian reason. And here I agree with Bataille: it is all about delayed gratification, and it is the consequences of this that lead to evil.
You should watch that you are not coming down on the side of the two Waynes. They are not dissatisfied with the way we live now, or that is how they seem to me. That is what their words are saying to me anyway. I hope that I am wrong. To all those who think positively about present administrative arrangements I can only say this: as Freire said, the oppressor can never be a participant in ending the oppression. I can play academic games with you, I say to such people, but thereafter we must part company.
I’m a feminist and I found confirmation of my feminist beliefs in Adorno as well. According to his view, the radical feminism of the 1970s is wrong. Women should not become more like men. Men should become more like women. This is my reading of Benjamin’s famous Kafka remark when asked whether there was any hope. He said there was an infinite amount of hope but not for us. There’s no hope for those who think like the men but there is infinite hope for those who don’t. There you are – my feminism in a nutshell.
You are right that in acting in the way I did at the conference I made myself into a kind of Nietzschean figure, but I am a kind of Nietzschean figure. This is not to say I have half a brain or anything like that but simply that’s the kind of life I lead. I don’t even particularly like this kind of life if you must know but while the world is at it is this is what I must do. I’m not even strong. If someone came along and said come and do this with me I think I would be off in a flash. But until that day here I am.
One last point on Medlin: Brian Medlin was for me a kindred spirit of a particular kind. I shared his torture. As the Buddhists are supposed to say, first we make our demons and then we fight them, and I think Medlin and I made the same demons. He was a singular individual who couldn’t remain within the university and that’s all there is to it. I agree with his sentiments if not the analytic philosophy and Australian materialism within which he tried to substantiate these sentiments.
A post-script because I forgot to mention it: I agree that this stuff is too Europhile, particularly Adorno’s views on music. I could go on about this at length but I won’t. The point is, we become particularly Australian in our thinking by not particularly worrying about Australia in our thoughts. We must attend to the philosophical problem as it manifests itself now by making use of the relevant resources of the philosophical tradition. The truth is that the system of enlightened reason that now expresses itself in a worldwide administrative approach is European. The world is Europe in one sense. Fascism and Europeanism are one. We are all Europeans; we are all fascists. But as long as I wait for my personal messiah to take me out of this, to get me out of this bloody little room where I am writing these words, as long as I have this longing I’m never going to be satisfied with this fascist world. I’m not just talking about me. I’m talking about almost everyone.
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You can definitely speak for me, Trevor. Adorno's request that the most important goal in education is for Auschwitz to never happen agains stands as it is. The more fascinating point I find, is that having to justify such a request is outrageous, especially in light of the monstrous events that occurred. I think the same holds true for the notion of cultural garbage. The claim about poetry being barbaric after Auschwitz is not an attack against lyricism per se, but against cultural expression that aids our ignorance of the possibility of a repeated Auschwitz. It's against expression which doesn't account for an historically acting reason, which has brought about this barbarism in the midst of a more or less "gesittete menschen". In that sens, cultural production for and by bored bourgeois subjects is barbaric - having to defend this, in my view, is iniquitous.
The fact that Auschwitz happened less than a century ago, in contrast with a contemporary world shaped by public corporatism and the international shifting of monstrous capital, sends shivers down my spine on a daily basis. It's similar to the nausea that befalls me, when I see an ad for a Picasso exhibition at the Guggenheim, sponsored by Philipp Morris with a subtitle such as "the spirit of innovation".
In that sense, I do believe Adorno is more actual than ever, "a message in a bottle" as the german debate keeps putting it. To use another Freire structure: the slave doesn't want to be free, he wants to be a master. In the same way, I feel that we haven't freed ourselves as much as we've assumed the oppressor role.
Beside yet more Adorno jargon, I would like to thank you once again for the great exposure you offer on this website. It's rather fascinating to watch.