Aaron Asphar

This song by Ex Models is absolute negation of the social, and a polemical social critique by way of imageless sound, even before what are in any case scant lyrics.It is a critical aesthetic just like Adorno‘s philosophy was, and for me the wordless musical aspect in Adorno’s philosophy is expressed in precisely the same way – as relentless, negative, insistent criticisms of the social… Read the rest of this entry »

The artwork of Steve Kenny (click here or at the end for his website) is just fascinating for me: endlessly suggestive, full of philosophic intensity.  These paintings articulate a particularly bourgeois, deeply cultured and historicized relation with the social, and a psyche within struggling for integrity: not the psychosocial dynamics that typifies the experience of myself or my immediates, who have tended to slip without knowing it into settled forms of self-dissociation or dislocation, but for these reasons such paintings are invaluable critical-philosophical experience for us increasingly dissociative late moderns… Read the rest of this entry »

My brother is a schizophrenic/prophet/Christian (delete as inappropriate) and he’s written a huge amount over the year – prophetic/autobiographical writing, and tonnes of analysis of Greek renaissance art, all completely random as he’d never studied these things and we had not spoken about art. I received from him not too long ago an account, in the language of God, dreams, visions and so forth, of his psychosocial development, and it fascinating for me for the powerful and profound correlations with what I was studying and thinking – particularly his insight into the aesthetic, and the phisosophical structure of his dreams/visions etc… Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve looked at negativity in philosophy, lit and some art, and just 1 music video by huggy bear. Music I see as dionysian or imageless philosophy or poetry: and the No Wave genre of the late seventies gives us a kind of phenomenology of this ‘creative nothing’, to use Edward Stirner’s term. Philosphy seeks to establish itself socially or discursively, and this is unavoidable if it wants to actualise itself: art has the freedom to be radically autistic or refusalist. In this one we see a primordial radicalism magmarizing the social ossification of image/memory/history and realizes through this something asocial, a-historical, just as any philosphy or poem does the same by magmarizing language. The band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (1976-80) include Lydia Lunch, writer and promiscuous artist/witer/musician whose enver stopped being radical; also the amazing James Chance of James Chance and the Contoritions. Adorno talked of the impossibility of art after Aushwitz, the idea that art should hurt, that art is the voice of historical suffering, that art is an uncommited crime, bringing chaos into order, and he had a personal humane commitment to insistently negative critique; this is the most Adornian music video I have come across. Adorno said all art wants to destroy all others, hence we see Debords artistic-philosophic situationism where his first book had a sandpaper sleave. To my mind there is very little you could put directly after this one without it looking painfully vaccuous. It gives you the radical unreducible…

Image by bunky's pickle via Flickr

Related Articles

• “You are African: you are black”. Chaos, Blackness + the Unconscious in the psyche of Helene Cixous (aaronasphar.wordpress.com)
• Queer negativity (Lee Edelman essay) + queercore situationist music (Huggy Bear video) (aaronasphar.wordpress.com)
• “Text: my body – shot through with streams of song” – Helene Cixous + her negative dialectic (aaronasphar.wordpress.com)
• Psyche, language + the body: Helene Cixous on imagination/emancipation (aaronasphar.wordpress.com)
• In clarifying Adorno’s dialectical method, Nicholsen and Shapiro offers insight we can all draw from (aaronasphar.wordpress.com)
• The existential history of alienation in relation to material social production (ossification) (aaronasphar.wordpress.com)

I repost this with a fascinating theoretical contribution I came across from Herbert Marcuse‘ The Aesthetic Dimensions which I will post on shortly and hopefully have a full text. Rather than try and improve on his theoretical articulation, I cite it in full and invite you to think it through these paintings and Celan’s poem, thinking this negativity as the concretion, “polemic self-revelation” (Adorno), of the non-life it confronts, and traumatically, tirelessly recapitulates in the emotional-poetics. For me it is the voice of soma: for Marcus the artistic sublation preserves it as our unconscious, felt  emotional-historical memory. When he says art, I am thinking art, but fundamentally what stands behind art, what engenders it’s form and content which become indissoluble, what engenders the cohesiveness, the poetic, which is the body… Read the rest of this entry »

Theodor Adorno: his music played by Sech Kurze Orchesterstucke (1929).

My brother Dylan, a schizophrenic, was playing a Metalica song when I went over to his house yesturday, and he said to me: “this is prophetic, listen” and immediately I apprehended what he was saying. It was something I was close to with my work but he’s understood this for years. I remember laughing at him when he said “I was showing Iron Maiden to my mental health support worker…” and I interrupted “didn’t need to convince them you were mad then did you”, and he replied, indignantly, “no, I was showing them the prophecy in it”. I take it back Dyl. Anyway, given the historical context in Germany, this song composed probably in Frankfurt sometime before WW1  begs to be regarded as philosophical prophecy. The work is intensely jarring, right from the word go, for me it registers the experience of the body in early 20th C, something we find throughout the philosophical and aesthetic culture of Germany, as noted in various posts. For those who haven’t seen, it is interesting to think of in relation what I called the most Adornian music video I’ve seen, by Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (see here or at the end), a view that hasn’t altered on seeing this… Read the rest of this entry »

These quotes roughly capture Adorno and Horkheimer’s take on the development of Western self-alienation, from the undifferentiated world of ancient magic to the reified, emotionally dissolute subject of late modernity. All quotes are from Adorno and Horkheimer’s joint work Dialectic of Enlightenment
(click here or at the end for full text). Read the rest of this entry »

.d.e.a.t.h. .o.f. .t.h.e. .c.r.i.t.i.c.

This is something that I have struggled with as a bad conscience, something to be constantly self-critical about, so I’ll criticise someone else. Read the rest of this entry »

At the heart of all praxis is a drive to humanize the social. Fromm’s was a sublime praxis in an inhuman world (links to free full texts are at the end)…

*

If other people do not understand our behaviour—so what? Their request that we must only do what they understand is an attempt to dictate to us. If this is being “asocial” or “irrational” in their eyes, so be it. Mostly they resent our freedom and our courage to be ourselves. We owe nobody an explanation or an accounting, as long as our acts do not hurt or infringe on them. How many lives have been ruined by this need to “explain,” which usually implies that the explanation be “understood,” i.e. approved. Let your deeds be judged, and from your deeds, your real intentions, but know that a free person owes an explanation only to himself—to his reason and his conscience—and to the few who may have a justified claim for explanation.

*

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.

*

Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with – the love of life.

*

The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.

*

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

*

Reason flows from the blending of rational thought and feeling. If the two functions are torn apart, thinking deteriorates into schizoid intellectual activity and feeling deteriorates into neurotic life-damaging passions. Read the rest of this entry »

All quotes from Theodor Adorno’s Prisms, available on free PDF here or at the end

*

“To accept culture as a whole is to deprive it of the ferment which is its very truth – negation.”

*

“The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own.”

*

“Today, ideology means society as appearance.”

* Read the rest of this entry »