Filed under: Adorno, Benjamin, Freud, Nietzsche, Sedgwick, Soviet Union, fascism, feminism, gay rights, heteronormativity, homosexuality, philosophy, queer, sexuality
I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, and have decided that maybe it was time to really articulate my thoughts on why I really, really hate Adorno’s work. It had something to do with his posturing toward homosexuality, and something to do with what I sensed as a certain kind of awful elitism. It is also connected with the alarming number of gay Adorno fanboy apologists I’ve run into over the last while. So I went to the library and picked up Minima Moralia, which I hadn’t actually read before (and still haven’t gotten far into).The opening line of the dedication reads :
The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter’s conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life.
An astute student or, I guess, professor maybe, who wrote all over the library’s copy of this book (I actually often enjoy what other people write in books) had written, in pencil, above the word ‘melancholy’, gay. And of course, yes: In this first sentence of a dedication, Adorno takes a stance toward Nietzsche. His “melancholy science” (die traurige Wissenschaft) is in direct opposition to Nietzsche’s gay science (die fröliche Wissenschaft). Of course Adorno isn’t articulating a simple opposition here – both Adorno and Nietzsche are engaged in similar projects, “the teaching of the good life”. Rather, for Adorno, something fundamental about the world had changed since Nietzsche: Fascism had reared its artificially beblondened head.
Rather than focus directly on fascism here, though, I’d like to spend some time articulating that astute student’s one-word note: gay. As Kauffmann notes in his introduction to The Gay Science, it is “no accident that the homosexuals as well as Nietzsche opted for ‘gay’ rather than ‘cheerful’” because it “has overtones of a light-hearted defiance of convention; it suggests Nietzsche’s ‘immoralism’ and his ‘revaluation of values.’” Gay, then, I think forms one axis of a possible analysis of Adorno’s work, which lays out vertically as an opposition between Nietzsche’s joyful, light-hearted revaluation of all values and Adorno’s “melancholy science”, and horizontally as an opposition between homosexuality in its Western, twentieth-century guise with its light-hearted defiance of conventions, on the one hand, and heterosexuality and the status quo on the other.
Adorno is – the astute student was correct – gay. Where Nietzsche took to delight, Adorno took to despair. Where Nietzsche undermined, Adorno reinforced. One of the things that bugs me about Adorno, which I think this introductory sentence makes clear, is that Adorno is not aiming at a Nietzschean revaluation of all values, not even the values of those systems that he claimed so ardently to oppose. His melancholy science is one for the perpetuation of a system of values – which could be defined in several ways (Adorno’s own, fascist, bourgeois, anti-working-class, racist, homophobic) – that already exist in the world. Where Nietzsche looked (or at least claimed to look) forward, Adorno looked back.
Though it certainly isn’t clear that Adorno looked to the golden past with an eye toward a return – he didn’t seem to think such a return was possible – it was nevertheless in the past that “technical virtuosity, at least, was demanded of singing stars”, that melody had not come “to mean eight-beat symmetrical treble melody”, that there was at least a difference in terms of reaction to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and a bikini. The past, on Adorno’s analysis, was one in which fetishism had not yet come to dominate the musical (and, indeed, cultural) scene.
It is at the site of the fetish where Adorno most strongly attempts to rhetorically establish links between homosexuality, or sexual deviance more generally, and fascism. Musical fascism, one can only surmise given Adorno’s peculiar language, becomes embodied as the homosexual rapist. As the first part of a key to Adorno’s aggressively homophobic rhetorical construction here, I will turn to Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility”, a work which Adorno openly stated radically influenced his “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”. Benjamin, late in the essay, announces that “The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.” This apparatus (camera or phallus?), which artificially reproduces a process that has at least come to be natural to humankind, now (re)produces reality, substituting “a space consciously explored by man” with “an unconsciously penetrated space”, opening up “a different nature”, the process of which can, apparently, only mimic that “violation of the masses” at the hand of the Führer.
Adorno puts it more clearly: “Totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together.” Gorky had already stated it yet more clearly in 1934:
In the land where the proletariat governs courageously and successfully, homosexuality, with its corrupting effect on the young, is considered a social crime punishable under the law. By contrast, in the “cultivated land” of the great philosophers, scholars and musicians, it is practiced freely and with impunity. There is already a sarcastic saying: “Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear.”
Marxism, in this mode of analysis, acts as the cure for both homosexuality and for fascism. For Gorky, this was no doubt due to a presumed direct relationship between the means of production and the superstructural effect of sexual expression. For Adorno, the mysterious relationship between fascism and homosexuality expressed the structure of much, if not all, of contemporary society. Despite his near-continual analyses of this or that phenomenon as homosexual/fascist, Adorno never quite gets to analyzing this relationship (he would later, possibly having developed a more sympathetic eye toward gay men and women, analyze this relationship in terms of repressed homosexuality (and, as the old chestnut goes, necessarily homophobia) and tendencies toward fascism, but as far as I can tell this is a turn for Adorno, something new). Benjamin, though, is fairly more explicit: In a discussion of Futurism, he suggests that “[i]f the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. … Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over citites; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.” There is, here, a “natural utilization” for “productive forces” (and, I suggest, Benjamin was saying that this was true for all (re)productive forces) which, could be, in unnatural circumstances, pressed “for an unnatural utilization”. The words “human stream”, “bed of trenches”, “seeds”, “bombs” underline the stakes here: This is a life or death struggle. Not simply a struggle against the forces of death, but a choice between life – the “human stream” or “seeds” (that is, semen) – or death, first in the form of an unnatural destination for the “human stream”, and second as an unnatural replacement of that “seed” being “dropped” with “bombs”.
This theme, first mobilized around the cluster of homosexuality and fascism and, now, the military, and second around the axis of life/death is repeated in Adorno’s Minima Morlia, in the section titled “Tough Baby”. The argument developed here, one I myself saw repeated many times while in high school, takes the form “I’m not the fag, you are!” Adorno, apparently upset that intellectuals – and he seemed to value intellectuals as the only possible saviors for humankind – were viewed as effeminate, analyzes the cigarette-smoking, whisky-drinking “tough guy” image in terms of a presumed masochism and hidden homosexuality (like fascism and homosexuality, intimately and mysteriously connected). Adorno, the intellectual, is gay. It is, rather, the masochistic tough guy who is “revealed” to have homosexual impulses. Adorno, the anti-Nietzsche, is also gay. It is, here, the “tough guy” who attempts a nearly Nietzschean mastery of the body, of which Adorno is maybe (or likely) jealous.
Here is the cluster Adorno has, with the help of Benjamin, developed so far: homosexuality, fascism, masculinity (to which Adorno opposed a “true” – his – masculinity), the military, war, death. It is with the fetish (which, as with Adorno’s brand of theory itself, is both Freudian and Marxist, both sexual and economic) that pop culture, and with it all culture, gets thrown in the mix. In “On the Fetish-Character in Music”, Adorno introduces a cast of characters: the “radio ham”, who “is shy and inhibited, perhaps has no luck with girls”, “‘occupies’ himself with music in the quiet of his bedroom” and “insert[s] himself, with his private equipment, into the public mechanism”; the “listening expert” who, like a secret masturbator, “must practice the piano for hours in secret” “in nimble subordination to what the instrument demands of him”, in “agreement with everything dominant”, and “produc[ing] no resistance” to the demands of authority; and, finally, the jitterbugg(er)er, the “infantile listener” (the influence of Freudian theory of homosexuality, that homosexuality is the result of a failure to develop properly, is a clear mark here) whose “ecstasy”, which “takes possession of its object”, “is without content”, who imitate “the gestures of the sensual”, “copy[ing] the stages of sexual excitement only to make fun of them”. The imitation here, of “true” (heterosexual) sensuality, maps both onto “false” (homosexual) imitations of sensuality and the false imitations of sensuality produced via the jitterbug. The result is the production of “the masses”, almost always in Adorno accompanied by the adjective “passive”, who, as mentioned earlier, according to Benjamin, await their “violation” at the hands of the Führer.
Assuming for a minute that I’m right here, that Adorno’s analysis is motivated by a peculiar homophobia, a fear of the Führer-rapist’s sodomizing authority, so what? Why care? Other than the fun of queering texts, why bother?
- Adorno in particular continues to be wildly influential in cultural theory.
- The presumed connection between homosexuality and fascism, despite fascist atrocities against gay people, gay men particularly, continues to this day. McCarthy, during a period where Soviet communism was presumably nearly identical with fascism in the United States, made this connection both openly and clearly when he said, “If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you’ve got to be a Communist or a cocksucker.” This certainly isn’t new to Adorno (Adorno wasn’t an original thinker, I think, though he was a brilliant synthesizer), and certainly not peculiar to Adorno. Indeed, it is most readily found in fairly recent feminist theory, as Eve Sedgwick points out in her book Tendencies.
- To me at least, it is disturbing that, despite his openly antagonistic stance toward homosexuality (don’t forget, “Totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together.”), Adorno’s theory remains fairly popular among gay men. While this is understandable – anyone who grew up gay in the high schools of the 1990s would likely sympathize with Adorno’s outsider position with respect to contemporary culture, as well as have an affinity with his fantasy of the tough-guy-as-closet-homosexual – it is also deeply disturbing.
I finally saw the new Transformers a few days ago. I don’t have much to say about it, other than a couple quick points, and to note that it was really bad (the hetero love story was more intrusive than I had feared, and far worse). Here’s the points:
1. Did it strike anyone else as weird how often human families were portrayed or explicitly mentioned in a film purportedly about robots? The opening scene features the military hero (I don’t even care enough about the film to look up his, or the actor’s, name) talking to his wife and newborn daughter. The acquisition of Bumblebee is portrayed as a family-style coming of age story. During the communications blackout, the secretary of defense frustratedly asks, “you mean I can’t even contact my family?” If I cared more about this film I’d be arguing that the Decepticons were presented more as a threat to The Family than as a threat to humanity (except, perhaps, insofar as the film may not have actually made a distinction between the two). I’m almost surprised the Decepticons weren’t portrayed as effeminate queers obsessed with anal sex in public airport restrooms.
2. Was anyone else disturbed by the fact that the first time we meet the Decepticons (note: The big, bad, scary, evil, destructive Decepticons) it takes place in Afghanistan, as a confrontation between our wonderful military and the aforementioned big, bad, scary, evil, destructive Decepticons (who, maybe, hate freedom), that the surviving military forces were led to a promised phone by an Afganistani child, that in general our military presence there was all but cherished?
3. I was a little disturbed by the ways in which anyone slightly suggestive of politics or bureaucracy was portrayed as a bumbling, self-absorbed fool and the only worthwhile characters were either high school students or members of the US military…
Filed under: Oregon, ethics, family, gay marriage, gay rights, gender, heteronormativity, homosexuality, legislation, same sex marriage, sexuality, transgender
Concerned Oregonians seem to be, well, concerned (warning: Obnoxiously enough, their concerns are only expressed on a pdf, not in the web’s standard html format…) about Oregon’s Senate Bill 2, which creates protections against discrimination based on a person’s sexuality. They claim that “[t]his legislation creates a new “protected class” of persons to be protected from discrimination, defines this new category, authorizes enforcement of its provisions through various state agencies and courts; adds other provisions regarding real estate transactions, religious institutions, schools; and prevents dress codes under most circumstances.”
The bill (also a pdf, but that’s standard for the publication of bills and proposed bills) defines sexual orientation, the basis of the new “protected class”, as “an individual’s actual or perceived heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality or gender identity, regardless of whether the individual’s gender identity, appearance, expression or behavior differs from that traditionally associated with the individual’s sex at birth.” Now, this is a particularly broad “protected class” to claim, as Vision Action America has apparently done in a mass email, that “[i]f we [conservative Christians] fail to submit sufficient signatures, both this bill [Oregon House Bill 2007 (again, a pdf), which grants civil unions to same-sex couples with all the rights, privileges, and benefits granted by marriage, which, by the way, I also oppose, though on a technicality] and a bill to grant special rights, privileges and protections to homosexuals, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendereds and the gender confused, will become law on January 1, 2008.” Note, also, that they fail to mention that the bill in question also protects heterosexuals from denial of jobs or housing, etc.
Concerned Oregonians takes particular issue with the bill’s use of the word ‘perceived’. Now, when I read the bill, I took it to mean that if some straight guy is denied a job because an employer thinks that he is gay, he is just as protected as someone who is actually gay, which seems a reasonable enough clause. Concerned Oregonians reads this in the opposite way, assuming that ‘perceived’ refers to an individual’s own perceptions of his or her own sexuality or gender, and issues the following warning: “There is no provision that there must be any continuity to this stated ‘perceived sexual orientation’ is; that is it may change as often as a person wishes or states it to.” They later claim that this will lead to an absurd case where “a witness in court, under oath denies he is a man capable of rape because on that day, he perceives himself to be female”. Ignoring for a second their backward interpretation of the word ‘perceived’ here, their flat-out denial of the possibility of a woman committing rape is alarming.
I used to subscribe to similar, though more liberally-oriented “action alerts”. I stopped in part because of tactics like this, which I know are used by conservative groups and suspect are also used by liberal groups (I haven’t seriously looked into the claims of liberal action groups mostly because, admittedly, I agree with their goals even if not perhaps their methods), tactics which either include outright lies or subtle manipulations of speeches, legislation, etc. Tactics such as Vision Action America’s exclusion of the bill’s explicit mention of heterosexuality or Concerned Oregonians’ twisting of the word ‘perceived’. These tactics always rely on mobilizing a particular group based on their prejudices and ignorance, on the hope that no one will actually bother to read the bill or speech in question. My advice to anyone who does receive this sort of email, whether you’re conservative or liberal: Read the bill before you decide. It may not be as bad as you think.
The film 40 Days and 40 Nights culminates in a rape scene. The protagonist, Matt Sullivan (Josh Hartnett), having gone nearly 40 days without masturbating or having sex, is tied to his bed in the hope that he can make it through the final, difficult hours. His ex-girlfriend enters, mounts him, and as he deliriously mutters “no!”, has sex with him. Two quick points: First, for most people, this doesn’t seem to register as rape, despite the fact that if the characters’ genders were reversed its classification as such would be unarguable. Second, the scene was intended to be, and for most people seems to be, funny. Having failed in his goal, Matt then is forced to apologize to his current girlfriend, for getting raped.
To backtrack, Matt’s goal is, effectively, to temporarily remove himself from the heteronormative order, to step back from our society’s near-compulsory, near-constant obsession with heterosexual sex. And this is continually reinforced in the film, with references to his upsetting the “natural” balance of power, with his friends’, coworkers’, and even his brother’s (who is a priest) constant attempts to reintegrate him into the sexual order. And just at the point where he has nearly reached his goal, he is raped, forced to apologize for it, and immediately reintegrated into society as a fully-fledged, though now perhaps monogamous, heterosexual.
The only interesting thing about this film is the reversal of gender roles, which effectively translate what would be a drama about rape and our society’s treatment of women into a romantic comedy about a man who finds himself and a new girlfriend. What is curious, and a little scary, is the ease with which this translation was achieved.
Filed under: Morrowind, Oblivion, Ultima, heteronormativity, homosexuality, prostitution, video games
I’m also annoyed when video game creators feel that it is necessary to compel players to enter into heterosexual relationships in the game. I haven’t played the game the blogger linked to above is reviewing, but I’ve played plenty where this is the case. Two fairly recent entries to the list include the extensively moddable Morrowind and Oblivion, both of which only include, as optional quests, those which establish heterosexual relationships, a couple of which allow your character to play matchmaker. The first mod made for Morrowind which allows the character to enter into relationships with NPCs (and the number of social mods for this game is really surprisingly high, given that it is not an online game) included only heterosexual relationships (though the author was, at least at some point, planning on adding support for homosexual relationships – this has taken long enough that another modder modded the original mod toward this end), even though that actually takes more work on the programmer’s part, since he or she has to base an NPC’s response on the PC’s gender, rather than ignoring it entirely (though a more interesting solution would include programming preferences into individual NPCs).
What’s weird is that this is a fairly recent phenomenon. The first game I played in which I was aware of having to choose a PC’s gender was one of the later entries in the Ultima series, and the only in-game relationships possible were with prostitutes, both male and female, and the programmers specifically added support, evidenced by different responses based on a PC’s gender relative to that of the prostitute, for homosexual relationships, and this was back in 1990! It seems to me strange that, as tolerance for homosexuality has increased, video game makers have seen fit to write code which enforces compulsory heterosexuality rather than simply leave all options open or, like their predecessors, add code which supports in-game homosexual relationships, which is the easier route code-wise.
I thought I hated Kant before. But now I’ve picked up a copy of The Metaphysics of Morals (which, by the way, has all these weird numbers all over it – there are page numbers, section numbers, paragraphish numbers – it’s very weird). Now I hate Kant more. Here’s why:
1. OMG WTF with the Awake magazine-like titles? “In a State of Nature Something External Can Actually Be Mine or Yours but Only Provisionally”? Really?
2. Stupid questions: “What is money?”, “What is a book?” (the answer literally opens with “A book is a writing…” and is quickly followed with another JW-ish title: “Unauthorized Publishing of Books Is Forbidden as a Matter of Right”. Kant should so work for the RIAA)
3. “Section III: On Rights to Persons Akin to Rights to Things”, which details all the ways, despite Kant’s dictum that a person should never be treated as a thing, that we can treat persons like things. I knew I would love this section once he started talking about sex, which is at the very beginning: “Sexual union is the reciprocal use that one human being makes of the sexual organs and capacities of another. This is either a natural use (by which procreation of a being of the same kind is possible) or an unnatural use, and unnatural use takes place either with a person of the same sex or with an animal of a nonhuman species.”
Filed under: Hitchcock, authenticity, film, heteronormativity, romantic comedies, sexuality
In films, there’s such a thing as spatial causation. Maybe ’spatial transference’ is a better term. Regardless, the ’spatial’ part stays, and is really just a metaphor anyway. Here’s how it works.
In a film, in a sense, there is a sort of secondary ’space’ whose ‘geography’ is made up of certain types of culturally important characteristics, placed, according to a film’s, and culture’s, logic, more or less close to one-another. So, instead of Canada butting up against the United States, you might have the unwed mother adjacent to the serial killer or something. These pseudo-spatial ‘locations’ can be read from the film through subtle causations, transferences of meaning, and odd shadings that just don’t make sense unless something is rubbing off onto something in an adjacent location.
Here’s my example, riffed off a reading I did a while back of North by Northwest (1959). The film’s spaces are divided primarily into the authentic, which is where every recoupable character ends up by the end of the film, and the inauthentic, which is where nearly every character starts out. Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), the film’s love interest, begins the film as a spy, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) begins as a dashing bachelor, and Phillip Vandamm (James Mason) and Leonard (Martin Landau) are the villains, involved in some sort of never-quite-explained espionage and, I argue, a sexual relationship. What I want to argue is that Leonard, Vandamm, Thornhill, and Kendall all begin much closer to one-another than is let on.
One scene in the film is the key to my argument: When Vandamm and Thornhill first meet there is a series of cuts which show Vandamm, more or less, checking Thornhill out and Thornhill becoming more and more uncomfortable. Having seen exactly this look a few times in my life, its something I’m quickly led to read as a sexual advance, and one involving recognition at that. Vandamm’s recognition of Thornhill here as someone to some degree like himself opens up the map of this film’s normative territory, and it is aggressively sexual.
Vandamm recognizes Thornhill as “like himself” because they both occupy the space of the sexually inauthentic (where the sexually authentic is a space in which only the heterosexual married couple can reside), and it is this recognition (note, the film is all about recognitions and misrecognitions) that sets in motion the rest of the film. What Vandamm recognizes is the geography of the space of inauthenticity in the film and both his and Thornhill’s positions in it.
So here’s the map: Vandamm and Leonard, gay men, are at the center of the field of inauthenticity, and they live their lives entirely within its space. Kendall, for her abuse of her sexuality for espionage, is also well within its space. And Thornhill, due both to his playboy lifestyle and his uncomfortably Freudian relationship with his mother occupies its periphery. He can move about in the space of the authentic, but as soon as he is mistaken for a spy, which can only occur because he is already so close to the space of the inauthentic, he is forced into that other, darker space. And everything in the film happens because of this arrangement.
One caveat, though: Never trust Hitchcock. This film is funny, and one of the reasons I suspect its humor works is because it plays on then-existing cultural beliefs in a way that makes them look ridiculous.
It has happened again. A group of people planned a gay rights-related march in Russia, and it turned violent. Orthodox clergy, neo-fascists, and old women turned out on the streets, protected by OMON officers, to keep Russia safe from the new blue menace. These four groups are starting to look like Russia’s sex police, on the scene at any outbreak of gayness.
This blog rightly links politics and sex, violence and foreign pressures, but undoubtedly in the wrong way, arguing that the foreign pressures on Russia to clean up its act regarding gay people represent foreign profit interests (though I’m sure those interests will be served, I doubt the organizers were their pawns, willing or not). The coincidental timing of a group of people raising a legitimate issue with Russia’s government does not a grand conspiracy make. And it is not the fault of that group of people that Russia’s officials and police so shamefully acted, physically assaulting those they couldn’t silence, and effectively maintaining an invisible, extralegal, police force by allowing the assaulters to go free. It is these actions, not those of the gay paraders, that will look bad at the G8 summit, and the Russian administration has only itself to blame if these events tarnish their already tarnished reputations.
If any political maneuvering is going on here, I’d look to the unusual configuration of counter-protesters for a clue. Which one of these things is not like the other: babushki, neo-fascists, OMON officers, or the Orthodox clergy? Which group is driven into poverty by the policies of the Russian government, forced to sell their possessions on the street for food money? And which three groups seem to be in line with the policies of the Russian government? Who here, once again, is being blinded to their real suffering and asked to sacrifice themselves, and for what? So that a few gay people stay off Moscow’s streets?
Transformers: The Movie was the best movie Orson Welles ever did. I’m totally serious. Aside from the inclusion of Weird Al in the soundtrack, the music is great – just overdramatic enough. Optimus Prime’s (Peter Cullen) death scene gets me weepy every time. Unicron (Orson Welles) is powerfully creepy in his raw, unstoppable, natural-forceishness. Almost everything about the movie is perfect, from the weirdly religious elements to the surprising sense of cultural relativity to, finally, the lack of any easy good/evil distinctions.
Transformers also looks pretty damn rad, though I’m prepared to be pissed that it looks like some retarded heterosexual coming-of-age love story was tossed in for funsies. I’m so sick of this story: Boy meets girl, they fall in love, girl makes boy a man (but sometimes without having sex), whatever that means, and then, having overcome some horrible obstacle they live happily ever after, close movie with a kiss scene. I’m so sick of it that typing this out almost makes me want to puke. And its not just that every movie is like, “EVERYONE IS STRAIGHT AND WHITE AND FAIRLY RICH BUT NOT TOO RICH AND…”, which is annoying enough. It is that this element in every film is exactly like every other film. There is, really, no variation. And that is bad art, and that is obnoxious. So I’m hoping either this is overblown in the previews or the movie is good enough to overlook the obnoxious plotline that is in every other movie. Because it has a lot to live up to.
