Re: Ernst Bloch on Jazz, Kitsch and Colportage (Corrected for omitte

[simon smith <clov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In article <068601be9b3c$e2670d20$34b05c18@isp-heaslip-
hm1.tampabay.rr.com>, Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx> writes
<snip>

>>" Man is to be soiled and his brain emptied"
>
>How thoroughly Aryan, the Germans Hitler and Rosenberg could not have said
>it better.  And this is just how they all think: you must go out of your
>mind to come to your senses, wild abandon, giving into impulse is
>anti-intellectual, rejecting one's brains.  This says everything,
>everything.  The keys to the kingdom are jingling in your asshole.  Whereas
>there has never been one black person on this planet, anywhere at any time,
>who has equated the body with mindlessness and surrender of intellect.
>
>"My body is intelligent."  -- Josephine Baker
>

I know little about Bloch, but from a reading of Adorno it is very clear
that a distinction must be made between 'intellect' and thought. In the
'Dialectic of Enlightenment' intellect is understood as having developed
as a tool of self-preservation, and as the imposition of the self-
preservative ego on the world. Intellect loses sight of the object and
becomes paranoia. (See for example page 193). The final form of
intellectual paranoia appears in fascism... 'They see the body as a
moving mechanism, with joints as its components and flesh to cushion the
skeleton' (p235, from section titled 'The Importance of the Body'.)
*Thought*, on the other hand, is the attempt to apprehend the world, to
let the object speak for itself. The dream of critical thought is of a
world of non-intentionality.

The critique of Jazz, the jitterbug, is just that it facilitates the
reduction of body to a machine, just as it simulates its liberation.
This is jazz as I have heard it. According to Adorno 'the wild antics of
the first jazz bands from the South, New Orleans above all, and those
from Chicago, have been toned down with the growth of commercialization
and the audience...' It is quite possible that Adorno never saw the
wild, abandoned black dances which it has been said were still going in
his time. If so, he is at fault. But he *was* centrally concerned with
'mass' culture, and what the role jazz music played in that culture.

I really don't see that your intellectual boxing match approach does
anything to help understanding of this subject.
--
simon