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Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno
... He came to this difficult question because of his work in teacher education: When World War II ended, Adorno, who was in exile in the United States, returned to Germany. His chief means of employment upon return was in a teachers' college where he was assigned the charge of examining secondary teachers on the topic of philosophy (Hohendahl, 1995). Adorno (1998) noticed that whereas the candidates could give adequate answers, they also admitted that philosophy meant nothing to them. ...
There is little agreement in teacher education as to what counts as knowledge and how individuals come to be affected by ideas, people, and events in their world. Whereas teacher education seems to debate questions about the adequacy of its structures, it has forgotten its place in the world and its obligations to world making. However, teacher education has not yet grappled with a theory of knowledge that can analyze social fractures, profound social violence, decisions of disregard, and how from such devastations, psychological significance can be made. Returning to an earlier history and drawing upon philosophers who were also concerned with the relation between teacher education and social reparation, this article advocates for a view of teacher education that can tolerate existential and ontological difficulties, psychical complexities, and learning from history.
Authoritarianism is no longer imposed largely through military repression; it now takes place by undermining the public imagination and using culture and its various apparatuses to weaken civic literacy and the public institutions fundamental to civic culture. This article argues that in the 21st century democracy has become fragile. Under the onslaught of what I call disimagination machines, education in its most repressive educational and cultural forms has shaped a mass consciousness that is susceptible to lies, conspiracy theories, and the anti-democratic values and social relations endemic to right-wing populist movements and emerging demagogues. The article argues that the United States is undergoing an unprecedented crisis of political culture and form of depoliticization that are more dangerous than the damaging public policies that emerged in the United States since the rise of neoliberal capitalism in the 1970s. Equally alarming is the fact that the crisis of neoliberal capitalism has not been matched by a crisis of ideas, even as the United States has increasingly been organized on fascist principles for the last few decades. The article concludes by arguing that culture follows politics and that we live in an age when education has to be come central to any strategy for engaging politics in the age of emerging authoritarianism.
What is the contemporary significance of the modern antifoundationalist story of progress? By offering a critique of foundationalism and representationalism, pragmatists like John Dewey and Richard Rorty elucidate the far-reaching implications of this question. This article argues that Jacques Rancière’s critique of traditional philosophy and of Louis Althusser’s version of Marxism can be regarded as an important part of the antifoundationalist story of progress. Furthermore, it highlights suggestive affinities (and some differences) between Rorty’s postmetaphysical scenario of a poeticised culture and Rancière’s notion of the aesthetic regime of art. This article seeks to prepare the ground for a comparison between Rancière’s topographical and horizontal critique and Rorty’s pragmatist humanism as nominalist historicism.
This article opens a dialogue between geohumanities and poetry—or, more broadly, creative writing—around the subject matters of violence and wounding. It considers what kinds of “poetry” might be usefully enrolled by the geoliterary critic, or even authored by the geographer-poet, in response to such subject matters. Difficult questions abound about what it means to author, hear, and read poetry that is engaged and enraged by instances of violence, trauma, and victimhood. One horizon for these questions is Adorno’s ([1966] 1973) claim that “there can be no more poetry after Auschwitz,” and more particularly his elaboration and partial retreat from this claim in Negative Dialectics. Here, wary of attempts “at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims’ fate” (Adorno [1966] 1973, 361), he nonetheless concluded that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man to scream; hence it may be wrong to say that after Auschwitz you can no longer write poems” (363). This article explores Adorno’s position, chiefly pursuing his arguments about the need for poetry—and indeed philosophy—that strives not for “purity” but precisely to be “soiled” and “spoiled,” never comforting, always disconcerting, never idealistically “transcendent,” always materialistically “micrological.” Including reference to a short story by Borges and critique of poetry by the geographer Wreford Watson, the argument is further advanced by attending to Adorno’s claims about another poet, Heine, sometimes regarded as a particularly “geographical” poet. The article concludes with final notes on possible implications for recasting work on wounded geographies as a species of applied micrology.
This chapter explores a fundamental alternative philosophy of the subject. Drawing inspiration from Adorno’s critical theory and from Fromm’s social psychology, Smith offers a contemporary, cross-disciplinary study of the subject, including the individual’s relation with society and social development. What emerges is a deeply insightful approach to understanding social interaction, developmental psychology and the problem of ego colonization. Enriching arguments laid out in early chapters, Smith employs a methodologically innovative conception of the development of the subject: from its (de)formation and early childhood development to more practical issues such as compassion fatigue, deficits of reason and empathy. Smith shows how negative social conditions foster emotionally overwhelmed individuals—a deeply repressed, closed, traumatized subject. This chapter also covers other important practical issues, such as the problem of economic coercion, pathological reproduction, cycles of domination and violence, and the everyday effects of “needless suffering” on the psyche.
It is admittedly difficult to imagine that there is something one can learn from the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács in a postmetaphysical and nominalistic age. At the centre of this essay is the following question: How to resuscitate a metaphysical thinker in postmetaphysical times? The essay shows that Lukács can play a crucial role in the attempt to theorise what Fredric Jameson has termed a ‘new realism’. Elucidating the Lukácsian understanding of the dialectics of form and totality, it is argued that precisely because of his redemptive notion of form and his metaphysical framework, Lukács might eventually turn out to be useful for the endeavour to artistically represent and conceptually grasp our present.
Adorno's extended conception of 'culture industry' renders the usual criticism of his views as 'elitist' meaningless. The same expansion creates, however, logical strains and contradictions in his analysis of the character and function of the culture industry: a strain in its 'psychosocial' and 'status compulsion' interpretation. In his late work Adorno attempts to solve this contradiction, but at a heavy price, by creating a conceptual barrier between pleasure and happiness.
Documenta 11, the international platform of contemporary art and ideas, was held in Kassel, Germany in 2002. Following its aim to “activate the space of public art as a site for the reconciliation of current political conflicts,” the curators designated “Truth and Reconciliation” as one of the platform themes. This essay evaluates Documenta’s success at staging this theme, and addresses the criticism that the curators’ emphasis on public discourse diminished the aesthetic effects of the art shown. It elaborates a comparison between two works: Eyal Sivan’s film about Adolf Eichmann, The Specialist (1996–1999), which featured in the 2002 exhibition, and Peter Weiss’ earlier play The Investigation (1964), which dramatizes the Auschwitz Trials held in Frankfurt from 1963–1965. Drawing from Theodor W. Adorno’s writings both on the Documenta projects of the 1950s and 1960s and on the aesthetics of the documentary, this essay demonstrates that the contemporary art exhibited in Documenta 11 does not advance any critical strategies beyond those that emerged in Weiss’s drama. The Investigation offers an aesthetics of negativity that The Specialist does not match.
Purpose
– The aim of this paper is explore consequences of ambivalence and ambiguity on self‐concept, decision‐making, and quality of interrelationships between management and employees in one for‐profit organisation.
Design/methodology/approach
– Data were re‐read to reveal that organisational members were constantly engaged in the process of changing their perceptions of “who” and “what” were “good” and “bad” in reaction to environmental change impacts.
Findings
– The paper finds that philosophically, “splitting” is an age‐old form of decision‐making; psychodynamically, “splitting” is not necessarily a signal to a pathology but instead is merely an initiator of ambiguity and ambivalence that leverages change; from a change management perspective, “splitting” can reinforce polarisation that can impede the desire to engage in continual change; and predictions and perceptions of change consequences underscore both the quality and quantity of “splitting” in regard to polarisation. “Splitting” is an integral defense and offense change mechanism that occurs in all decision‐making, so practical implications are that its affects on self and other concepts need to be understood. To establish equalising and non‐polarised interrelationships between “employer” and “worker” and to negate the line between management and employee, exercises in recognition of mutual causation such as servant leadership practises can be introduced.
Originality/value
– Unparalleled synthesis of seemingly divergent theoretical and practical studies, this paper is a valuable ontological and epistemological tool for ongoing investigation into complexity theory, including self and other organisation.
Drawing upon Theodor Adorno's famous essay, 'Education After Auschwitz, 'this article examines the question of how education should be engaged in light of the abuse and torture by American soldiers and personnel that took place at Abu Ghraib prison. The essay attempts to understand not only how the photographs of abuse and torture signalled a particular form of public pedagogy, but also how pedagogy itself becomes central to understanding the changing political, ideological, and economic conditions that made the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib possible and what the latter implies for how we understand both cultural politics and the growing authoritarian nature of American society.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt struggled to defend the possibility of judgment against the obvious problems encountered in attempts to offer
legally valid and morally meaningful judgments of those who had committed crimes in morally bankrupt communities. Following
Norrie, this article argues that Arendt’s conclusions in Eichmann are equivocal and incoherent. Exploring her perspectival
theory of judgment, the article suggests that Arendt remains trapped within certain Kantian assumptions in her philosophy
of history, and as such sees the question of freedom in a binary way. The article argues that Adorno’s philosophy of freedom
provides the resources to diagnose and overcome Arendt’s shortcomings. Adorno’s position provides a way of embracing the antinomical
character of judgment, by emphasising the need for elements of reason and nature in the phenomenon of freedom. In Adorno’s
lights, judgment becomes an attempt to express a ‘spirit of solidarity’ with the tragic status of the potentially free but
actually unfree subject of modernity.
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