Dumain on Adorno

[Harry Zorn <zorngrund@xxxxxx>]

Well I can just imagine Dumain getting quite excited seeing people responding to his enlightening  "fine-tuned examination" (as he himself puts it) of Adorno and Bloch. It's great to see that he's elevated the discussion with insightful and helpful ideas such as:

"OOOh, jazz must be bad because it's popular"

and

"The fact is, Adorno, Bloch, and the rest did not understand shit about New World cultures and arbitrarily misconstrued them. For them, Europe was all that existed."

and

"European culture was moribund and deserved to die."

His reply to one person's contribution definitely clarifies the problem at hand:

"This quote says nothing at all, serves no other function here than as an incantation from the great Frankfurt master. This sort of behavior leads me to believe that the academic knowledge industry is even more banal than the so-called culture industry."

Nothing could be more banal than the platitudinal, rhetorical and half-baked rubbish Mr Dumain has dumped on this list. Nonetheless, I am quite happy to give him the satisfaction of him seeing yet another response to his textual-hysteria, but only one. I couldn't resist this one time. It's not every day we have a bone fide nut case on the list. I'm all for a laugh, but it would be nice is he could make his jokes a little more obvious or are we supposed to take him seriously? At this present stage he appears to me as someone either root'n for something akin to a bar-room ruckus or completely insane. To    thoughtfully reply to his rhetoric would be a complete waist of time. I know that in advance! He did not reply to my original post, and what he wrote indicates to me that he either did not read what I wrote or intentionally set it aside in order to allow himself to make his unfortunate remarks on the cheap.

Try this for logic:

"Now instead of making sweeping statements about the culture industry in all times and places, more fine-tuned examination would be helpful."

And this is Dumain's attempt at some "fine-tuned examination" a kind of non-sweeping contribution:

"the culture industry has completely corrupted and destroyed black culture in way that was impossible during segregation."

Clever stuff!

How about this as an alternative to the list's "pathetic intellectual mediocrity"!

"I would suggest that Bloch and Adorno got America wrong. To put it bluntly, they got Black America all wrong."

Hmm, here we come to appreciate a new form of analysis which combines "fine-tuned examination" with "blunt" statements. A kind of fine-tuning with blunt instruments. Forget Adonro and Bloch, I'm root'n for Dumainianism! Life will become so easy for me and all those square Europeans if we all embrace the Dumainian approach to free-style garble.

Dumain does have a point to make, but relies on others to rescue him from appearing completely farcical. This cheap stunt however reveals itself for what it really is: an attempt to gain credibility without the effort. He writes:

"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..."

I trust that among the authors of these articles the name Dumain does not appear on his special list. "Methodological critique, not condemnation..." doesn't appear to correspond to the Dumainian principle of argumentation.


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