Adorno autonomously

["L Spencer" <L.SPENCER@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Few of us are in any position today to endorse whole-heartedly the
positions adopted by Adorno on the relationship between high art and
popular culture. On the one hand we have most of us grown up familiar
with aspects of popular culture (including for some of us,
non-European cultures) which were clearly strange, alien
even threatening to Adorno. On the other hand, there are very few us
us as "cultured" as Adorno.

Despite the many art books I own with their vivid illustrations, despite my frequent visits to London's
national gallery and my enjoyment of novels now and then, my having
written a fair amount of poetry, I do not claim for one minute to
have internalised Western culture and its aesthetic traditions in the
way that Adorno had. To paraphrase something Adorno said of Proust (Minima Moralia) -
Adorno spares me the indignity of ever thinking myself cleverer than he.

But what is strange is that those of Adorno's present-day "disciples"
who want to make his pronouncements sacrosanct and who wish to hold
to every aspect of his aesthetic judgements are so often - perhaps
always - individuals with very little aesthetic feeling of their own.

Adorno was a great musicologist. But his musical writings are taken
as Holy Writ only by the tone deaf. And across other areas of intellectual
pursuit on stumbles again and again on the same kind of dependency - utterly defeating Adorno's
ideal of autonomy and maturity (Mundigkeit).

In Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory" a place is held open for idiosyncracy
- and for that scintilla of reality that resists all theorising or
conceptualising.

Lloyd Spencer