Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2009

In the details

January 31, 2004 at 11:49 pm | In yulelogStories | 8 Comments

Theodor Adorno is notorious for using deliberately difficult syntax, for building sentences that resemble roadblocks instead of road maps. I don’t always like this strategy, but I like the goal, if it’s to estrange the perceiving subject from well-worn paths, from comfort, from swallowing “truths” without having to chew over a single morsel. And while it’s true that German can be the kind of chunky language you could choke on anyway, translations haven’t always done him justice, either. Max Horkheimer, his senior collaborator at the Frankfurt School, far less of a snob and esthete than Adorno and much more forthcoming in his willingness to communicate ideas, probably helped to make their joint book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, an accessible read. It’s a page-turner in the original (really!), but the English translation is terrible, successfully making its subject boring while whacking nearly all the surprisingly manageable and stimulating complexity right out of it.

It’s too bad that Adorno’s method can make people feel stupid, then perhaps resentful, and possibly even angry once they’ve knocked themselves out trying to understand what he was talking about, only to discover that he doesn’t really offer a universal answer key to some cosmic test. I feel stupid a lot of the time, too, and I don’t even need to read Adorno to feel that way as the feeling is increasingly ubiquitous. The real world makes me feel stupid, real history makes me feel stupid. I don’t understand atrocity or evil or real misogyny or misanthropy: I have no big things to say about these big things. But if I don’t have some tools for bearing the weight of the world, I’ll either ignore the world (and probably inflate myself), or I’ll mistake the world for me and believe that we’re identical and in beautiful harmony, or I’ll fall through the cracks of a world splitting apart and lose myself in insanity. And strange as it may seem, Adorno’s difficult language made me slow down my stupidity just a little bit and turned my myopic sight to things I would otherwise surely have missed. Details, for example: Adorno paid attention to details, to how the world is contained in them, which was something I didn’t notice at first. It’s quite hard to notice details. It’s the one really good thing I got out of studying art history: attention to detail.

In 1950, the city of Darmstadt hosted a symposium on “The Image of Man in Our Time” (Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit), which featured the art historians Franz Roh and Hans Sedlmayr. Roh defended modern art; he argued that regardless of how ugly or unpleasant the average B