Re: Adorno and Marcuse on the Student Movement

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 28 Nov 1999, Michael Pugliese wrote:

> absent any of us actually having been there of course, couldn't Theodor
> handled this better?

We're all children of our time. Adorno was a product of 1920's Weimar
culture, and his personal experience of Fascism was getting booted out of
the university system, so I'm not surprised he reacted so defensively to a
perceived threat to the Institute (you have to understand, German culture
is very crowded, and built upon the use of space: they take physical
intrusion much more seriously there). I do think it's symptomatic of a
certain kind of Leftism, though, that these rhetorical gestures seem to
count for far more than what Adorno wrote and thought about. Jameson, in
his "Late Marxism", gently parodied this view, mentioning the "undying
shame" of the calling-of-the-cops incident.

-- Dennis