If a student from your class MEDIA THEORY & CRITICISM tells you that she is "tripping on Adorno", that's what we call a good day at the office. Although one suspects that Adorno would be deeply suspicious of the instrumental use of the office metaphor, and rightly so. But tripping on Adorno is a clever phrase that we might wish we had thought of ourselves, since we get excited about Adorno's ideas precisely because we sometimes trip over them. To get high on philosophy is not unusual but it is interesting to think about why this might be. You are taken out of yourself, shown something you maybe have never seen before, you have to rethink the way you see the whole world -- & how you listen to it, in Adorno's case. And some trips, if truth be told, do leave you changed in some way, forever. If you had the very good fortune to study with Professor Nicholas Garnham at what is now the University of Westminster (it used to be the Polytechnic of Central London, a better moniker, in my view, but never mind) and heard him deliver no less than four memorable lectures on the Frankfurt School, then you'd be tripping, too.Adorno was of course a composer & pianist, as well as a critic, teacher & philosopher. If you search for Adorno at iTunes you will find access to a FREE podcast by the Adorno Ensemble, featuring things such as a lecture on Schoenberg plus performances of his work. If you've listened to a lot of punk, art-rock, hip-hop & electronica, this music is not nearly as difficult to listen to as some would have you believe. Students of Adorno should definitely check this out. Adorno's work is available on CD here. For more comprehensive collections of his beautiful music you should go to something called a Record Store.
Several recent books have given us cause to re-think the cartoon version of Adorno as a grumpy Marxian elitist, a straw man for the populists of cult studs. Richard Leppert's superb collection of Adorno's Essays On Music has the benefit of excellent & very helpful commentaries. Alex Thomson's Adorno: A Guide For The Perplexed is somewhat perplexing, but that's a good thing -- and he also re-emphasizes the importance of the Kantian foundation in Adorno's work. And most recently there is David Jenemann's book Adorno In America, another fine contribution to the continuing business of trying to understand a thinker who never stopped thinking and who refused to allow us to veg out, because he always was -- in his own way -- tripping us up, and turning us on.
7 comments:
i'm tempted to call it a good day at the office for me if any professor's student was trippin' on adorno. good work.
about five years ago, ken wark, one of the leading theorists of digital games and culture, said, "i think we dismissed adorno too fast." i think he was right.
oh, and i'm trippin on your blog design: everytime i visit, the blog has changed. cool.
Thanks David. As you know, there's nothing much to do in the department these days, so I thought I might as well play around with this. Your colleague Ken Wark was right -- Adorno's work has often been much too quickly caricatured & then stomped all over, thoughtlessly.
I'm looking for midterm hints and don't see any. Do I get extra credit for looking up Adorno on iTunes?
:-)
in leaving your office, i ran into a friend who asked me: "Girl what is wrong with you" and i said I said "i am tripping out on Marxism and Quantum physics. I just talked to my Prof about Buddhism, Autism and Marxism." To this she replied " Girl what drugs are you on? You gotta stop hitting the pipe!" I never though i could get so high on academics, its a pleasant yet frustrating surprise. I do feel a certain isolation in being fascinated about such topics, most people i talk to, i guess think i am crazy and on drugs. But trust me...its their loss, because i feel like doors of knowledge opening up before me. Anyway, its good to read your blog....and now i must back to the real world....
If only one could award credit on a test for enthusiasm & for bringing a smiley face to a tired prof's brain. Extra credit for a free download. I wonder if that do that in Chico. Oh dear, that wasn't fair. Sorry. On a more serious note, there is something fundamentally wrong, surely, about testing people, instrumentally, on Adorno. I'll see what I can do there. And most important is the really serious lesson here, which is that the study of how societies represent themselves to themselves does of course involve a quantum leap in one's thinking, and must take us into social theory & philosophy, well beyond the parameters of a narrow so-called media studies agenda whose restrictions would have Adorno spinning, not tripping, in his grave.
Correction, I wonder if *they* do that. In Chico. Sorry again. And may I say, excuse moi, but *this* is the real world. Tis the everyday world of common sense that is illusory!
All this tripping on Adorno talk reminds me of a class I took in El Salvador in the Spring called Sociology of Public Communication. We read Wittgenstein, Bourdieau, Derrida, Hall, and a bunch of other people whose names aren't coming to me at the moment. It was all about language games and systems of power (he was teaching us Marxism without telling us, I think) and how there is no such thing as universal truth. To top it all off, it was in Spanish, as if things weren't confusing enough. That was trippy.
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