Stupider and Worse: The Cultural Politics of Stupidity

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), p.25. 2 ‘Adoring Adorno: Larson Powell and Thomas Baumeister, Reply by Thomas Baumeister’ New York Review of Books, 13 February 2003. < http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/feb/13/adoring-adorno/> 3 Douglas Kellner,‘T.W. Adorno and the Dialectics of Mass Culture’, < http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/> 4 For a good overview of this material that also serves as a defense of jazz, see: Michael J. Thompson, ‘Th. W. Adorno Defended against His Critics, and Admirers: A Defense of the Critique of Jazz’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 41.1 (2010), pp.37-49. 5 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1951), p.43. 6 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p.214. 7 Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1981), p.33. (On this aspect of Adorno's thought, see: Robert Hullot-Kentor, ‘Right Listening and a New Type of Human Being’, in Things Beyond Resemblance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp.193-209.) 8 On Adorno's ‘physiognomics’ see David Jenemann ‘Flying Solo: The Charms of the Radio Body’, Broadcasting Modernism, ed. Michael Coyle, Debra Rae Cohen, Jane Lewty (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), pp.89-106. Further, Adorno's position on the subject as both autonomous and caught up within the network of social forces has been gaining traction in contemporary legal scholarship: Adorno's position shares some of the concerns of recent criminal law theory, which has begun to reject the temptation to ‘locate culpability in the hearts and minds and capacities of individual defendants,’ emphasising instead that ‘the very notion that an individual exists at all depends upon a social world of relations.’ Reflecting the sentiments of critical theory, [V.F.] Nourse argues: ‘It is not enough, any longer, to imagine culpability either in the image of a lonely cunning self or a cruel deterministic world’ (Craig Reeves, ‘“Exploding the Limits of Law”: Judgment and Freedom in Arendt and Adorno’, Res Publica: a Journal of Moral, Legal and Social Philosophy, 15.2 (2009), pp.137-164.) 10 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Notes on Philosophical Thinking,’ in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia, 1998), p.132. 14 The term ‘retarded,’ which Adorno uses to describe the regression in listening in response to popular music, was only ‘officially’ barred as a designation in favor of ‘intellectually disabled’ when Barack Obama signed ‘Rosa's Law,’ in October 2010. 15 Lewis Anthony Dexter, ‘On the Politics and Sociology of Stupidity in Our Society’, Social Problems, 9.3 (1962), p.221. 16 Lewis Anthony Dexter, ‘On the Politics and Sociology of Stupidity in Our Society’, p.223. 17 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (San Diego, Harcourt, 1978), p.13. 18 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’, < http://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm> 19 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p.25. 20 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p.26. 21 David Brooks, ‘The Mother of all No-Brainers’, The New York Times, 4 July 2011, < http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/opinion/05brooks.html?_r = 0> 22 See, for example, David Jenemann, ‘Strangling the Malcontents: Critical Theory and Pseudo-Conservatism Today’, Constelaciones. Revista de Teoría Crítica, 3 (2011), pp.227-233; Martin Jay, ‘Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe’, Salmagundi Magazine, 169-189 (2010-11), < http://cms.skidmore.edu/salmagundi/backissues/168–169/martin-jay-frankfurt-school-as-scapegoat.cfm>; Andrew J. Perrin, Steven J. Tepper, Neal Caren, and Sally Morris, ‘Cultures of the Tea Party’, Conference Presentation, American Sociological Association, Las Vegas, August, 2011, < http://perrin.socsci.unc.edu/> 9/22/11. 23 Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Norton, 1950), p.675. 24 Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, p.663. 25 Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, p. 667. 26 See David Jenemann, Adorno in America, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 27 Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, p.662. 28 Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp.184-185. 29 Richard Hoffstadter, ‘The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt’, The American Scholar (1954), < http://theamericanscholar.org/the-pseudo-conservative-revolt/>. 31 Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, in Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), p.160. 32 Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Consideration’, p.163. 33 Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Consideration’, p.166. 34 Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Consideration’, p.185. 35 Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Consideration’, pp.187-188. 36 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p.148. 39 Horkheimer and Adorno, p.174. 40 Henry James, The Sacred Fount (New York: Scribner's, 1901), p.214. I am indebted to my friend and colleague Andrew Knighton's insight that James' novel crystallizes Adorno's critique of rationalism in modernity transforming into its opposite. 41 Henry James, The Sacred Fount, p.318. 42 Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Consideration’, p.188. 43 Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Consideration’, p.164. 44 Horheimer and Adorno, p.174. 45 Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1991), p.85. 46 On this point see Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) and David Thompson, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood (New York: Knopf, 2005). 47 Viktor Shklovsky, Literature and Cinematography, trans. by Irina Masinovsky (Champaign: Dalkey Archive, 2008), p.24. 48 Viktor Shklovsky, Literature and Cinematography, p.54. 49 Caleb Crain, ‘Twilight of the Books: What Will Life be Like if People Stop Reading?’, The New Yorker, 24 December 2007, < http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain> 50 Caleb Crain, ‘Twilight of the Books’. 51 Caleb Crain, ‘Twilight of the Books’.