Beating Down The Cultural Morass With A Stick

"His love of people as they are stems from his hatred of what they might be."

The quote above belongs to Theodor Adorno and comes from his work Minima Moralia, a curious and almost poetic collection of written fragments confronting the idea of publics and privates, post-Enlightenment aesthetics, and the living of a "good" life when life itself has been made into a sort of profit and product.

To give you an idea of where Adorno is coming from, it's helpful to consider the words of a professor of mine: that Adorno doesn't hate the Enlightenment, not really; he just thinks it never went quite far enough. This book - and indeed most of Adorno's works - are an effort to take the Enlightenment farther than it ever wanted to go. Minima Moralia itself was written by Adorno as a gift to his friend Max Horkheimer (what a birthday gift, eh?) and is, in tone and delivery, intimate and affectionate - the conversings of a friend to a friend. There's a certain amount of gentle understanding, an amiable relationship with the reader, that comes through in the text. Moreover, the setup of the text itself - in a collection of fragments, some related only indirectly, and all full of cultural allusions that may or may not be explicit - might appeal to the reader who needs his or her philosophy in bite-sized, more digestible chunks.

As a writer, I found some of Adorno's riffs on language and writing particularly amusing, especially his response to writing that is considered "trite" or "banal." Writers turn their noses up at such writing, he claims, because something shameful within us is drawn to what we despise therein. We loathe it, because we recognize ourselves in it. Similarly, a declaration of "how lovely!" about a given work becomes an excuse "for an existence outrageously unlovely." Adorno spends a great deal of time in this work sketching out the Otherness of a world we have drawn into existence - through our writing, our speaking, and our economic state. In essence, Minima Moralia is a funhouse mirror of the current life we live.

There's also a certain poignancy to this text - Adorno's use of the emigrant as an example of the alienated man, person-as-product, stems partially from his own experiences as a Jew who fled from Hitler's fascist regime. His constant references to mutilation, splintering and brokenness bespeak a personal pain as well as the horror that no one, in the current cultural morass, can determine his own life.

I found this easily the most digestible and interesting of Adorno's works, and the personal tones made it easier for me to have a stake in the social philosophies he tries to advance. The snippets are worth reading on their own and interpreted individually, but as a whole, too, this book offers some startling assessments of what our lives really are, how inescapable our circumstances remain, and the contexts that determine our very existence.

Oh, and it is easy to understand, with a little effort. I was hysterically amused by the book's back cover, which offered the following reviews:

"A primary intellectual document of this age." - Sunday Times
"The best thoughts of a noble and invigorating mind." - Observer

Which is shorthand for, "uh....I totally didn't read that. But a smart guy wrote it, so, uh, kudos!"

I knew there was a reason I never became a journalist.

Next I'm diving into Alice in Wonderland, which seems to be a fitting antidote to the twisted innocence I managed to lose via Adorno here. Although Alice in a Ph.D. seminar is highly likely to become an eros/thanatos melange of darkness, homoerotica, and sadism.

Huzzah for grad school: turning your favorite books into annals of lust, darkness and shattered innocence since ancient Greece.

- b -