Re: Ernst Bloch on Jazz

["Ralph Dumain" <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

I see that the wagons are already being circled to stave off serious
consideration of the implications of Spencer's highlighting of a very
important issue regarding Bloch and Adorno, only highlighting the
childishness and intellectual incapacity of the respondents.

In the case of Bloch, one's initial reaction ought be staggering.  Correct
me if I'm misinformed, but according to Timothy Brennan's new book on
cosmopolitanism, Bloch composed (at least part of) THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE
hiding in a hotel room in New York from American society, reflecting on the
seeds of hope in the cultural past, concurrent with a refusal to look for
same in his surrounding environment.  This is staggering.  While I can
understand how difficult it is to adapt to radically different cultural
circumstances, such anecdotes as these only suggest to me that European
culture was moribund and deserved to die.

It is difficult to review history, i.e. going backwards, and to place
oneself in the position of those who were moving forward in it while we look
backward.  From an American perspective, at least one stemming from the
post-World War II era, it is almost unimaginable what it was like to be a
European from a certain time period, as the world--the conceptual and
cultural as well as the political and technological world--has changed so
drastically,  that those of us coming from a different experience just take
a whole different set of presuppositions for granted.   What we assume about
music, art, poetry, dance, dress, and all forms of cultural expression is
rather different, as we have more cultural experience to draw upon, theirs
plus ours.  We can be most charitable towards people like Bloch and Adorno
precisely when we recognize the historical limitations of their place and
time, as they struggled with the decisive crisis of European culture,
chafing at its boundaries while unable to take a step beyond.

There is something much more productive we can do besides criticizing these
folks for their provinciality.  Pace  Gelder and other respondents, there is
a whole body of literature on Adorno's misunderstanding of jazz which is
based on methodological critiques, not condemnation of Adorno.  I don't have
my sources at hand, so I can't cite them.  I think one of the best of them
appeared in TELOS, but there are several others.  For example, Adorno is
seen by one critic as making incorrect judgments with good intentions,
rather than being guided by racist assumptions.  Adorno's missteps regarding
jazz have provided an entry point for many into an analysis of Adorno's
fundamental methodological weaknesses in aesthetics, so it is not at all a
matter of trashing Adorno for one misguided prejudice.

Yet the responses here have been defensive in the most arbitrary and puerile
fashion, based on generalized dogmatic statements.  For example, whatever
you think of middle-class whites dancing the jitterbug--and what do you
really know about them--let's remember that the jitterbug is a black art
form, and it is the black foundations of American culture that Bloch and
Adorno were completely incapable of understanding, and that no one here is
willing even to acknowledge.

Now instead of making sweeping statements about the culture industry in all
times and places, more fine-tuned examination would be helpful.  I would
suggest that Bloch and Adorno got America wrong.  To put it bluntly, they
got Black America all wrong.  I would suggest that only _now_ does Adorno's
framework fully come into its own with respect to American culture, because
(a) American culture is now entering its own terminal crisis, whereas it was
just coming into its own in the 1940s, (b) the culture industry has
completely corrupted and destroyed black culture in way that was impossible
during segregation.  If ever cultural creativity, autonomy, and freedom were
illusions, it is now.

-----Original Message-----
From: Gelder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <Gelder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: frankfurt-school@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<frankfurt-school@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Monday, May 03, 1999 4:26 AM
Subject: Re: Ernst Bloch on Jazz


I seem to remember a Lloyd Spencer whose reactions to the 'Frankfurt
School' went a bit deeper than all this school-marmish 'I was
startled' and 'I was staggered' ... 'how unedifying' stuff. Whether
or not Lloyd did the Soweto jive or not, there was a time when he
knew that the concept 'culture industry' was coined to come to terms
with some uncomfortable parallels between the Nazi attack on the
intellectuals in the Weimer Republic, and what the mass media are
doing to the world today. Including in South Africa, for that matter.
Put in that context, Bloch and Adorno are not all that ridiculous -
more like reminders of a time when intellectuals did not pander to
populist esthetics.