Teddie and Me

I've always had a troubled relationship with Mr. Adorno, beginning with my first exposure to his essay "On Jazz." I felt very defensive on the first reading: how could he be writing about a music that I have spent so much of my time practicing and performing in such dismissive terms? And his analysis was simply wrong, based upon a 1930s conception of race and popular music. I was willing to grant that he had a point with regard to his descriptions of the big band era, especially the bands that I found insipid like Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Bing Crosby, etc. Indeed, he does refer to these groups specifically in the essay, but not to some of the individuals and groups that have been retroactively trumpeted as "pioneers," such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, etc. who did not produce formulaic 3'30" tracks. But that is not the point, Teddie told me later, the problem is rhythm that forces yourself to tap your foot to the time, the "tyranny of the beat" that eventually leads to fascist conceptions of the world and homogenizes you. Not so, I said, innovative jazz musicians have always played around with the groove. That's part of the excitement of performing and listening. Not to be mollified, he informed me that this is a false sense of individuality: you think you're resisting, but the fact of the matter is, no matter how much you have convinced yourself otherwise, you still tap to the same beat as everyone else in the room. This is the danger.

This back and forth between Teddie and I has continued for many years, and I've given him more credit than I ever imagined that I would. In re-reading the "Culture Industry" essay this time around, along with some biographical information, I have a lot more sympathy for his position. And I'm no longer absolutely convinced that he's just an art snob: deep down I think that he tries in this essay to find some sort of relief from the monotony of mass culture and that on a certain level, he does understand the plight of the worker (despite his relatively privileged background). Art should be available to the masses, we all should have the leisure to experience it. But I'm still not convinced by his argument that pleasure is necessarily bad despite--or perhaps because of--his neo-Kantian approach to aesthetics. In fact, I think that he's simply denying the pleasure he feels in the experience of art, trying to rationalize as a qualitatively higher experience. But I'm not so sure that's the case.

I'm curious to continue to explore the idea that the Culture Industry cannot be completely transcended, not unlike culture more generally. Althusser's conception of the inescapability of "ideology" comes to mind when thinking of this, and further back, Whorf's "Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language." And further back, Descartes' Discourse on Method, and on. There are all sorts of problems with the culture concept and its articulation with a liberal conception of freedom. But this too large of an issue to explore at the moment.