Experience and Nature (1925)

 

Trying to to track down Adorno's passage about Art in the future going by a different name, or Art as we knew it being irrelevant, as the kids say today. Yet in all this pulling of books from shelves, the invariable second pile of Do-I-Need-This? books. Do I need Dewey's Experience and Nature? Not if I was weaned on the Frankfurt School, right? But in flipping through Experience I see a pragmatist with dialectical tendencies ("... all art is a process of making the world a different place in which to live, and involves a phase of protest and of compensatory response," 272), though I guess the difference here is at the level of function ("compensatory," like the Marshall Plan compensated those who, as Wallerstein says, lost the war to control the world economy, but remained integral to it), while the Marxist-trained Adorno was more attentive to conflict: that which can never be compensated for (Auschwitz); the hurt that is mined and from which new forms -- ghostly or otherwise -- emerge.

There is a spectre haunting the internet -- the spectre of grief. But is that it, or is grief blinding us from the underlying conditions that bring it into being? Is there anyone out there grieving the loss of modernism? How about democracy? Or is grief now reified into a condition in which its source is independent of (or irrelevant to?) those who have (empathetically) taken it on, adorned themselves in it, as one would a fashionable coat?

Grief is the ghost we make of our injuries, our losses. The ghost we walk with, talk with, the mask on our face, the sanitizer stinging our hangnails -- Hemingway's never worn baby shoes. (Simone Weil soaked in it.) Nietzsche and Foucault talk about the Enlightenment's end-stage as one of malaise, and this is something grief "inspires". Baudelaire notes this too; it's all over Paris Spleen (1869). What is the road out of grief that does't insist on our retention of that which returns us to our loss, as registered as disabling pain? (Is that not Weil's dilemma?) When was the last time you heard someone say, No pain, no gain. Or this one: Suck it up. These are fighting words by today's standards. Everyone I hear from is miserable.