Re: ADORNO & JAZZ: JAUSS CONTRA ADORNO [12]

[Gelder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

 It's this animosity, this unbridled destructiveness, this lust to
maim and destroy what he does not understand that shines through in
Dumain's posts. In a face-to-face discussion group crude insults
would be met with immediate censure - as someone put it, he'd get
his nose punched. Since this is a list and that is not possible I can
see no alternative but a discussion about the implementation of of
rules of netiquette, and a request to the list owner to enforce them,
i.e. by unsubscribing persistant offenders.

Ad hominem insults of the kind which have been traded here are not
compatible, as I see it, with a discussion of the topic of this list.
Dennis Redmond is right to suggest that the following views have
nothing to to with the Frankfurt School, and everything with the
views of Joseph Goebbels:

> On Wed, 19 May 1999, Ralph Dumain wrote:
>
> > morbid little troll who can't do any better than wallow in the death throes
> > of European culture, such as the wretched, malodorous productions of
> > Shoenberg and Beckett, a culture that deserves to die, a culture that
> > deserves to be exterminated if it will not leave us of its own free will.
>
> "Die Ausrottung und Vernichtung der entarteten Kunst" is the exact term, I
> believe.


The analysis of the mentality from which the Nazi party drew its
sustenance - and which the theorists of the Frankfurt School saw as a
threat to democracy which would survive the military defeat of
Germany - was a constant theme from the thirties onwards. *The
Authoritarian Personality* - the most wellknown of the studies
carried out by this group during their time of exile in the USA - was
a reminder that the social psychology of fascism was by no means
restricted to Europe, that the common north American attitude 'it
can't happen to us' was mistaken. I realize that for
English-speakers, (i.e. those not raised in the post-Kantian
'historicisation' of logical categories) the connection which the
Frankfurt School posits between social psychology on the one hand
(Freud, psychoanalysis) and the mass media on the other
('Kulturindustrie'-chapter from the *Dialectic of Enlightenment*) is
a puzzling and unfamiliar one. I know of no issue which comes closer
to what it is that makes out the contemporary significance of these
theorists.

If an invective-free forum could be created for the discussion of
these issues, it seems to me that it would be worth doing, and I'd
be prepared to do my part. But as long as the tone here is
set by the Neanderthals, count me out.
-------------------------------------------
Dr. Frederik van Gelder
Institut fuer Sozialforschung
Frankfurt University
Senckenberganlage 26
60325 Frankfurt am Main

Gelder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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