Continuity and Discontinuity in Aronowitz’s Critiques of Sociology, Science, and Marxism: for “Stanley Aronowitz and the Labors of Theory”

Continuity and Discontinuity in Aronowitz’s Critiques of Sociology, Science, and Marxism.**
B.Ricardo Brown, PhD
Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies
Pratt Institute

Prepared for

“Stanley Aronowitz and the Labors of Theory”

April 13 and 14, 2017
Center for the Study of Culture, Technology, and Work
Department of Sociology

The Graduate Center, City University of New York

There are many approaches to Aronowitz’s critique of Marx and Marxism.  I want to highlight how the critique of Marxism runs alongside Aronowitz’s critiques of science in general, and more specifically, of the aspirations of both Sociology and Marxism to become the sciences of life. 

Of course, from the start the relationship between sociology and Marxism has been hostile.  Marx wrote that “as a party man I have a thoroughly hostile attitude towards Comte’s philosophy, while as a scientific man I have a very poor opinion of it” (London June 12, 1871).  Engels wrote to none other than Ferdinand Tonnies regarding the new science of sociology:

In this system there are three characteristic elements: 1) a series of brilliant thoughts, which however are nearly always spoiled to some extent because they are incompetently set forth likewise; 2) a narrow, philistine way of thinking sharply contrasting with that brilliant mind; 3) a hierarchically organised religious constitution... but divested of all mysticism and turned into something extremely sober... [a] Catholicism without Christianity  (Engels to Tonnies January 24, 1895).

And Karl Korsch, whom Aronowitz praised for having recognized that Marx’s contribution “consisted in his discovery that nothing in society was immutable” 
Even Korsch, who argued for Marxism as “the science of socialism”, even he was careful to distinguish sociology from Marxism:

What is the relationship between Marxism and modern sociological teaching? ….we shall not find any affinity or link between it and Marxism. Marx and Engels, with all their keen desire to extend and enhance the knowledge of society, paid no attention to either the name or contents of that ostensibly new approach to the social studies.…

The science of socialism as formulated by Marx, owed nothing to this “sociology” of the 19th and 20th centuries.... bourgeois social thought has been a reaction against the theory and thus also against the practice of modern socialism. Up to the present day “sociologists” have endeavoured to submit another way of answering the embarrassing questions first raised by the rising proletarian movement. [This is] the essential unity of the manifold theoretical and practical tendencies which during the last hundred years have found their expression under the common denomination of Sociology. 
Karl Korsch. Karl Marx. (1938) https://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1938/karl-marx/ch01.htm

Neither sociology nor Marxism successfully became the sciences of society that they worked to become.  Even at their most positivist extremes, they remain at the level of scientific ideologies.

These failures to secure a science of social life expose the problems that scientific ideologies pose to our understanding of science and truth, and therefore in Aronowitz handling demands the critique of Marxism itself. 

These are not abstract problems, because Aronowitz is after all a materialist.  It is a concern that runs through Aronowitz’s work:  the problem of continuity and discontinuity, for isn’t science – even scientific Marxism – shaped by its histories of error;  and doesn’t truth – even the truth of revolutionary transformation – always appear as continuous through the past, present, and future? 

It is here that Aronowitz’s somewhat overlooked engagement with Michel Foucault’s work provides an avenue for us to discuss matters of continuity and discontinuity in the histories of the Marxist movements/parties and the genealogies of Marxist theory.  In fact, Aronowitz’s encounter with Foucault has profound ramifications for our understanding of these histories and genealogies in relation to any critical theory derived from Marx. 

Moreover, in Aronowitz’s work, the problem of continuity and discontinuity sheds light on how to approach the deeply related yet often opposing formations of sociology and marxism as sciences of life. 

We can find this concern with continuity and discontinuity when we look again at works such as the Crisis in Historical Materialism, Science as Power, and Dead Artist/Live Theories.

I’ll begin with

1] The Crisis in Historical Materialism

In the chapter “History and Disruption” Aronowitz asks the question: “Can we speak of a unitary science or is the object of our knowledge constituted by structures/discourses that are fundamentally discontinuous? (301)”

For the most part I will leave aside Aronowitz’s discussion of the conjunctures of Benjamin and Foucault,  In this early encounter with Foucault on the question of the science and Marxism, Aronowitz makes two points that are particularly relevant to our discussion today: 

First, Aronowitz notes that Foucault pays close attention to that which is excluded, marginalized, and displaced by the relations of power/knowledge.  It is in this attention to exclusion that Foucault’s work seems to “parallel Thomas Kuhn’s notion that normal science excluded counter-paradigms until forced to account for them” (317).  And by “Normal science” here Aronowitz means the discipline or theoretical consensus that “excludes all possible sciences [so as to] make itself a monopoly of power and knowledge” (317). 

[Just as an aside:  One might play a little game when reading Aronowitz of substituting “marxism” or “the Parties” for Science (or vis-a-versa) and it becomes clear that what holds for one often holds for the other. Indeed one can not deny that the marxist parties sought to exclude other possible knowledges or to at the very least subsume them to the revolutionary sciences.  Moreover, Aronowitz has always maintained that the specific knowledges of certain classes are also excluded, marginalized, and displaced.] 

A second important point that Aronowitz makes regarding Foucault’s work is that Foucault consistently lays bare the ideological assumptions lurking within concepts such as continuity, coherence progress, and revolution. 
Aronowitz emphasizes that this notion of discontinuity moves us to something more than just the criticism of an author:  “here we are not just talking about Foucault.  We are talking about the enunciation of a principle” that should guide the practical activity of Critical Theory.

In other words, Marxist theory must be seen as Critical Theory and cultural critique, rather than as a science of social life.
Aronowitz writes that:

“It is a question of the status of literature, law, and science.  [Foucault and Benjamin insist that we see] culture as a material practice rather than as [a mere] representation of underlying social forces” (319)

or to put it another way, we should understand scientific ideologies through their modes of deploying continuity, discontinuity, power, and class.  At the same time, we must always remain skeptical of the utopianism that stands behind the desire for a science of social life.

As he writes in Science as Power: “The desire to transform politics and economics into sciences, rather than keep them as arts, is nearly universal” (300).

And if we turn to
2]  Science as Power

We find recognizable continuities within Aronowitz’s critique of Marxism, particularly in the chapter “The Science of Sociology and the Sociology of Science” which begins by deploying Foucault’s “concept of episteme as a way of seeing that is specific to a historical period, but that is, at the same time, discontinuous in time and space.... [The place of science in the social formation] is constantly renegotiated with the other power centers, and degree of its 'freedom’ is always understood in context. Marxism does not flourish (or wane) in some mythic pristine form.  Marxism adapts itself to other paradigms and adopts them as a condition of its own legitimacy within the academy.  Far from constituting an alternative to 'bourgeois’ theory, in the context of the academy, Marxism easily adapts” to being “a variety of [naive scientism]” (300).

Here, the views of Aronowitz and Henri Lefebrve converge in asserting the utter failure of both Marxism and Sociology to achieve the status of sciences.  They are “scientific ideologies” because, while they enjoy a certain appearance of – and will to be  – sciences (192), they can never achieve the same status and refinement that sciences such as physics enjoy.  To quote Lefebvre:

Towards the end of the 19th century, scientific knowledge began to address the city. Urban sociology, understood as a scientific discipline, was inaugurated in Germany by, among others, Max Weber. But this science of the city has not kept its promises. It brought forth what we today term ‘urbanism’ (l’urbanisme), which amounts to extremely rigid guidelines for architectural design and extremely vague information for the authorities and bureaucrats. Despite a few meritorious efforts, urbanism has not attained the status of a theory (pensée) of the city. What is worse, it has gradually shrunk to become a kind of gospel for technocrats.
How and why have so many investigations and evaluations failed to produce a living and livable City? It is easy to blame capitalism and the pursuit of profitability and social control. [But] This response seems all the more inadequate since the socialist world has encountered the same difficulties and the same failures in that domain. 
Henri Lefebrve. 1989/2014.  “Dissolving city, planetary metamorphosis”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2014, volume 32, pages 203–205.  Originally published as: “Quand la ville se perd dans une métamorphose planétaire”, in Le Monde diplomatique May 1989; republished in Manière de voir 114, Le Monde diplomatique, December 2010/January 2011, pages 20–23.

Although Sociology failed to become a science of society, it does continue to serve valuable functions within the apparatus of power.  And so it’s place amongst the other legitimate scientific ideologies is fairly secure.

On the other hand, Marxism of course does not enjoy such a secure position either inside or outside of academia.

In fact, the very notion of Marxism as a positive science of society, which is where sociology and marxism have often intersected to create that monstrosity known as “Marxist Sociology” languishes withing the confines of the discipline.  And who really ever speaks any more of a “science of Marxism” or “Marxist science”?

So the critique of science that we find in Aronowitz’s work is always bond up with his critiques of sociology and Marxism.  They fold into each other.  And these critiques are again taken up in his essays in Dead Artists/Live Theories,  where Marx’s work is presented as inviting a manner of cultural critique that can not be fully closed off by the structures of power and knowledge.

3]  Dead Artist/Live Theories

Now the essay “Tensions of Critical Theory” begins with an attempt to recover Foucault from his many fans:

“Foucault’s work has been shamelessly appropriated by his universalizing disciples who, nudged by academic environments, are prone to overtheorization.... It was, after all, in consideration of the dangers entailed by such a use of science that schools of social inquiry, including Marxism as well as positivist social science, bid us [to] return to the concrete” (130).   

Dispensing with this academic appropriation of Foucault, Aronowitz returns again with certain modifications, elaborations, and most of all, critically, to Foucault’s notion of the episteme, which Aronowitz takes to mean

“A way of seeing reality that not only forms a specific perception of the social world as well as ordinary objects, but also becomes a way of activity and inscribes itself in institutions such as law and education”

This

“notion of episteme requires not only an examination of ideological stances, it demands an attempt to recover and name [the activities that] resist representation in terms of ideological or scientific [systems of classification].”

Once again, that which is excluded, marginalized, and displaced by scientific ideologies also mark the space of resistance to the conventions of science.  To locate these sites of resistance requires an interrogation of “practical activity” (p.68) and for Aronowitz, history becomes an “interrogation that refuses to privilege political and economic events or perceptions over expressive forms” (68)

So we find that “practical activity” and the “expressive forms” of everyday life mark the limits of the sciences of life even as it is dominated by them.

“Practical activity... leaves a trace that is discontinuous with... scientific [classifications]”, ideological formations, and systems of knowledge. 
 
And “practical activity” and its expressive forms are located of that singular object of study that both Marxism and sociology have tried to reduce or fix as an object of scientific knowledge: class.

Now this is where Aronowitz supplies something more than a modified definition Foucault’s episteme, he alerts us to class as a fundamental silence in Foucault’s work, whereas for Aronowitz class supplies the foundation for any notion of history and continuity.  It  is not that Foucault is alone in his silence.  And Marx himself, we remember, had his own difficulties with the concept of class, as the final section of Capital III demonstrates when it famously breaks off just as we are finally about to be given the definition of class.

What continuity that concretely exists is supplied by class, culture, everyday life and its repetitions.  This point returns us to Marx by highlighting the discontinuities so as to open up Marxist theory to critique.  The history of Marxism itself becomes nothing less than “a theory of discontinuity as well as continuity” of science (68). 

In How Class Works, Aronowitz elaborates on this in the section titled “The Ideology of Endings” where he rejects the notion that “class and class struggle are relics of a bygone era” (210).

“History is made when – through self-constitution – the subordinate classes succeed in changing the mode of life in significant ways.  That these changes rarely involve transformations in the ownership of productive property does not disqualify them from being historic.  Moreover, rulers make history when they are able to abrogate previous gains made by insurgent social formations and return to some previous time.  In this sense Nietzsche’s comment that nothing disappears but, instead, returns to bite us is entirely vindicated by current events.  The form of the return is never identical to its previous incarnation, but it is recognizable as the past.... For the making of history is a creative act, but one constrained in part by conditions already in existence.  Because change is self-generated by social formations, it is always different in many respects, always new” (211).

Marxism thus becomes not an abstract science of abstracted life, as Aronowitz  notes regarding the vitalism behind Althuseer’s separation of science and ideology.  Instead Aronowitz offers a critique of life alienated from living: i. e., a materialist critique of everyday life that is not chained to a dogmatic moralism, or to the orthodoxy of past or future parties and political formations. 
There is no epistemological break in Aronowitz’s work.  Where we find discontinuities, they serve to mark the continuities of culture, the struggles of classes, and the domination of nature. 

Critique is never closed off.  This provides the continuity in Aronowitz’s contributions to Cultural Studies, labor, class, sociology and the other sciences of life, but especially to Marxism and Critical Theory.  The continuity that flows through them is less historical than it is cultural, that is, the continuity that allows us to trace these histories/genealogies is –  at its core –  the “practical activity” of social classes. The notion of historical continuity always appears in Aronowitz’s works as the concrete social relations of class formation. 

So how should we understand the relationship over time of science to Marxism, or rather, the various sciences to the various Marxisms?

This is the Unanswered Question of Marxist Theory.  Just as Charles Ives put the question of continuity and discontinuity to music, Aronowitz puts the question to Marxism and to the sciences of life and society.  And just as with Ives, the question is never answered, though the responses grow louder and more chaotic as they become more insistent.

As he states at the conclusion of “Tensions of Critical Theory”:
“I am persuaded that these debates [on the place of science and the relationship of Marxism to the sciences] will not end; a final solution will not be found.
And it should not be, for the very reason that the [social function of the various scientific and/or sociological Marxisms ] as with science in general, “is constantly renegotiated with the other power centers, and degree of its 'freedom’ is always understood in context” (300).

[**]  Before beginning this talk I added a few remarks about how I came to be a student of Stanley’s at the Grad Center. This is a slightly edited and expanded version:

In some respects I encountered Stanley long before I read or knew him.  As a undergraduate at Simon’s Rock, my sociology professor was Jim Monsonis.  Jim was in the SDS with Stanley.  Jim had in fact once been the national treasurer for the SDS.  My freshman year he gave the Intro. Sociology class Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capitalism for its first reading.  When I first heard Stanley speak at the American Sociological Association, he was speaking in part about the lessons to be drawn from Braverman....

At that time, I was more interested in being an Ecologist than in being a Sociologist.  By those twists of fate I got a fellowship to study Geography at Syracuse University.  While I was there I undertook a study involving Emerson’s philosophy of Nature and specifically how to observe nature, the social and natural transformations of the 18th and 19th century New England landscape, and the luminist-style paintings of that landscape.  My adviser, the one “Marxist” in the department, objected to my MA thesis on the grounds that no where had I denounced Emerson for being a bourgeois philosopher.  I said that that was both the most obvious and the least interesting thing about Emerson.  Upon that, he told me that I was “an armchair Marxist” (which was, if you can believe it, a pretty big insult back in the day) and I replied that he was a “Stalinist” and soon after moved to New York City to work as a legal reference librarian, giving little thought to ever going back to grad school.

But while I was at Syracuse I picked up a copy of the Crisis in Historical Materialism and was immediately taken with its mix of Critical Theory and what would later be known as Cultural Studies that came together to form a critique of Marxism itself.  Nancy was encouraging me to consider returning to grad school for Sociology and I realized that Stanley was only a few blocks away at the Graduate Center.  I sat in on a couple of classes and then dove back in.  With Patricia Clough coming to the Grad Center soon after, it was obviously the right decision.

Now, a couple of years after I started at the Grad Center I was talking to Jim Monsonis and only then learned that he and Stanley knew each other.  But there is something more that is directly relevant to my talk today.  When I was a senior at Simon’s Rock, I took the Social Science seminar with Jim.  The final essay question (15-20 pages!) was on the question “Is Marxism a science, a branch or the social sciences, or not a science at all?”

After thinking about it for a long time,I told Jim that I had no way to answer the question, as all of them could be either true or false depending on how one understood science.  Jim gave me a grade even though I never finished the paper... and I have always told him that I still owe him an answer.  And now, it is with these remarks on Stanley’s work that I, in fact, return to the question that Jim posed and whose answer, as you will see, Stanley leaves open.... unanswerable.... at least within the social relations of capital.....

Originally titled: A Foucauldian with a sense of class?  Continuity and Discontinuity in Aronowitz’s Critiques of Sociology, Science, and Marxism.

Lathe Biosas. Epicurus

Description for new course: Sociology of Music/Sound/Noise

Description for new course: 
Sociology of Music/Sound/Noise (SS.490)
(Final syllabus to be come soon)

Brian Eno: 77 Million Paintings

Spring 2017
SS.490 Sociology of Music/Sound/Noise

B. Ricardo Brown, Ph.D.
Professor of Social Science and Cultural Studies
Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies
Pratt Institute

Office: Dekalb 419 Hours: 12:30-2pm Tues/Weds
Phone: 1.718.636.3533
Email: BBROW993@Pratt.edu

Description
SS.490 Sociology of Music/Sound/Noise
This course examines how we understand everyday life through our experience of music, sound, and noise. Because the field of the sociology of music is as broad as the world of sound, we will focus on the production and meaning of just a few of the many styles of music around the world. We will use these musical studies to then delve into the use and construction of soundscapes and auditory environments. Finally, the course will study the social and environmental effects of noise, as well as the use of noise in music since John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhuasen. The course will require a good deal of listening to perhaps unfamiliar music and musical genres which will be accompanied by readings that together will provide students with a foundation in the sociological study of – and active critical listening to – music, sound, and noise. Students will also provide examples of music/sound/noise that we will listen to in each class.

***You do not need to be able to read music or play an instrument for this course.***

Emeka Ogboh’s Experimental Videos and Soundscapes of Lagos

Readings will include interviews and essays as well as critical texts. They will be drawn from a variety of sources, a sample includes:

Alex Ross. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century.
Jacques Attali. Noise: the Political Economy of Music.
Leonard Bernstein. The Unanswered Question (lectures and performances).
Sun Ra. Lectures at Berkeley.
Ronald M. Radano. New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique.
David Byrne. How Music Works.
Steve Reich. Writings on Music.
Brian Eno. Visual Music and Oblique Strategies.
John Cage. Silence.
Theodor Adorno. Selections from Essays on Music and Sound Figures.
NYC.gov Noise Regulations.
US Environmental Protection Agency. Noise Pollution.
Bernie Krause. Voices of the Wild: Animal Songs, Human Din, and the Call to Save Natural Soundscapes. 

Herbert Marcuse on The Frankfurt School (video): An Interview with Brian Macgee.

Herbert Marcuse on The Frankfurt School, parts I-V.
Bryan Macgee talks with Herbert Marcuse about his work, his relation to the student movements, and the legacy of the Frankfurt School.

Part I
http://youtu.be/2pzfy2izu44


Part II
 http://youtu.be/AO65LwhnMNI


Part III
http://youtu.be/REP7HLI4Rpk

Part IV
http://youtu.be/-mtaUXdL-jg

http://youtu.be/Mn0PW-CVmxk Part V

Theodor Adorno on the time Charlie Chaplin imitated him "at a villa in Malibu"

"....surely I am one of the few intellectuals to whom this happened and to be able to account for it when it happened."

From
The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996) 57-61
Chaplin Times Two
Theodor W. Adorno Translated by John MacKay

"Perhaps I may justify my speaking about him by recounting a certain privilege which I was granted, entirely without having earned it. He once imitated me, and surely I am one of the few intellectuals to whom this happened and to be able to account for it when it happened. Together with many others we were invited to a villa in Malibu, on the coast outside of Los Angeles. While Chaplin stood next to me, one of the guests was taking his leave early. Unlike Chaplin, I extended my hand to him a bit absent-mindedly, and, almost instantly, started violently back. The man was one of the lead actors* from The Best Years of Our Lives, a film famous shortly after the war; he lost a hand during the war, and in its place bore practicable claws made of iron. When I shook his right hand and felt it return the pressure, I was extremely startled, but sensed immediately that I could not reveal my shock to the injured man at any price. In a split second I transformed my frightened expression into an obliging grimace that must have been far ghastlier. The actor had hardly moved away when Chaplin was already playing the scene back. All the laughter he brings about is so near to cruelty; solely in such proximity to cruelty does it find its  legitimation and its element of the salvational. Let my remembrance of this event and my thanks be my congratulations to him on his 75th birthday."

*The actor described here was Harold Russell (b.1914 in Nova Scotia), who in fact lost both his hands as a soldier during World War II. Acclaimed for his performance as one of the three returning veterans in William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Russell became the only actor ever to win two Oscars for the same role: one for Best Supporting Actor, the other a special Oscar given "for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans." Russell made history again in 1992, as he became the first Oscar recipient to sell one of his awards, which he did in order to raise money to help cover his wife's medical expenses.

Theodor Adorno: "...the most compelling of the motivations which induced me to take up sociology."

 

"Since we are concerned here with an "Introduction to Sociology", I am reminded at this point -- and this is only seemingly a digression, Ladies and Gentlemen -- of one of the motifs which, at least for me, has been decisive in attracting me to sociology and inducing me to practice the discipline.  It is the need not to operate with ready-made, thought-out concepts in isolation, but to confront the concepts with that from which they arise, from which norms also arise, and in which the relationship of norm to reality is located -- which is, precisely, the interplay of social forces.  I believe that this need to escape from mere conceptuality -- what I would call detached, self-sufficient conceptuality, as it is found in the systems of theoretical physics and, with far less legitimacy, in jurisprudence -- by reflecting on society, is the simplest and perhaps the most compelling of the motivations which induced me to take up sociology."

Theodor Adorno. Introduction to Sociology. "Lecture XIV, July 2, 1968."

[Update October 12, 2019]

Music: Alban Berg's Lulu: History, Performances, and Theodor Adorno's commentary

Selected versions of Alban Berg's opera Lulu, with comments by Berg's student, Theodor Adorno.

Selected performances (videos below):
Lyric Opera of Chicago, 2008.
Paris Opera, 24 February, 1979.
Zurich Opera, c.2012.
Royal Opera, 2009.

Theodor Adorno on Berg's Lulu:

The opera Lulu is one of those works that reveals the extent of its quality the longer and more deeply one immerses oneself in it.  Berg's original concept of development itself underwent development.  No longer is the process one of moving from one sonority to another, from one phrase to the next, as was appropriate for the held breath, the intensified moment of Expressionism, but rather one of unfolding over long stretches.... During a lesson Berg once praised a chamber work because it development section took on real momentum.  This praise, whether deserved or not, can be interpreted as the expression of a compositional interest that dominated all others in the mature Berg and in Lulu came into its own.  - Adorno. Alban Berg (1968:125).

In Lulu the self - from whose point of view events are seen, from whose perspective the music is heard - steps visibly onto the stage; Berg intimates as much with one of those quotations he loved to smuggle in, the way a medieval master included his self-portrait as a minor figure in a religious painting.  Truly a corporeal-incorporeal suitor: united in Alwa's rondo themes is the exuberance of Schumannesque youth and Baudelairian fascination with fatal beauty.  What became known as the first movement of the Lulu Suite, the enraptured praise of the loved one, glows in an ecstasy words can not equal; as if the music wanted to become one of those fairy-tale gowns Wedekind envisaged for Lulu.  This music, as a radiant, multi-hued jewel for the beloved body, seeks to restore human dignity to a banished, heretical yearning.  Every bar of music intends salvation for the banished, for the symbol of sexual being, for a soul that in the hereafter rubs the sleep from its eyes, to quote from the most irresistible bars of the opera.  In using and setting these words Berg paid his respects to the sixty-year-old [Karl] Krause, author of Sittlichkeit und Kriminalitat.  Berg's Lulu music thanks him in the name of that utopia which at heart motivates Kraus's critique of the bourgeois taboos that degrade love.  Berg's music strikes a nerve where civilized man does not joke, and precisely this point becomes for him a refuge of the humane.
- Adorno.  Alban Berg (1968:7).

"The twelve-tone chord at the moment of Lulu's death in Berg's opera produces an effect very much like that of a motion picture."
- Adorno and Eisler. Composing for the Films (1947:.24).  

Lyric Opera's film interlude.
Composed in 1927, Alban Berg’s Lulu was the first opera to include
specific directions for a FILM to be projected as a part of the  staging.
In this 2008 Lyric Opera of Chicago production digital video was used
to carefully emulate period film and advance the narrative."

Lulu from John Boesche on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/37872547

Lulu: Marlis Petersen

Stage Director: Paul Curran

Lulu with Marlis Petersen and Sir Andrew Davis November 10, 2008 

http://lyricoperamedia.s3.amazonaws.com/_media/Lulu_Podcast.mp3

“Lulu” at the Lyric. Review.

http://www.operawarhorses.com/2008/11/27/lulu-at-the-lyric-november-19-2008/

Berg’s Lulu at Lyric Opera of Chicago. Review.

http://www.operatoday.com/content/2008/12/bergs_lulu_at_l.php
 

Alban Berg died of a blood infection before he could complete Lulu.  The first two acts were complete, but the third act was not, though in the opinion of many, including Adorno, the work was all but complete.  Though the narrative's concerning the motivations vary, Berg's widow asked both Schoenberg and Webern to complete the work and both refused.  Adorno believed that Schoenberg's refusal had more to do with jealousy, as Berg's masterpiece surpassed Schoenberg's own achievements.  Webern, Adorno thought, was moving in his own direction and it differed enough from Berg's that Webern did not want to risk compromising either vision.   [--- Berg died at the time of Webern's working on three of his important works: Op. 24, Concerto for Nine Instruments [Glenn Gould] (1934), Op. 27, Variations for Piano (1936) and the Op. 28, String Quartet (1937–38) ---]  The work of both composers, along with Schoenberg's, were complemented by the fascist ban on degenerate music and art.  Without the participation of Schoenberg in particular, Helene Berg refused to allow the work to be completed and thus only a two act version with excerpts from Act III (known as the Lulu Suite [performed by Kathleen Battle, 1981]) was performed. 

Adorno pleaded with Helene Berg to allow the work to be completed "while there were still students" like himself and others close to Berg who would have first hand knowledge of Berg's methods and vision for the work.  In it's two act form, Adorno wrote, the work would be forever obscure and rarely if ever performed.  Adorno's efforts were unsuccessful and he died in 1969 having, like Berg, never heard the completed work.

After the war, Adorno wrote to Helene Berg:

Today I am now also writing to you for a particular reason, one that seems to me the most important for both of us: the orchestration of the missing parts of Lulu.  I know that Schoenberg refused to do it.  Webern was also against it when I last saw him in England (probably 1936) and I have been told that you are not generally in favor of the plan.
If I now strive to change your mind with all due seriousness and responsibility, you must believe that I am guided by nothing other than concern for the work an for Alban's intentions.  I myself, to clarify the matter in advance, neither wish nor am I able to take on the task.

As far as Schoenberg's rejection is concerned, first of all, I am convinced that his motives - despite the one serious argument he advances - are not of the purest sort.  We often spoke of his jealousy, you, Alban and I; I had occasion to observe it in its basest manifestations, and I have no reservations about claiming that the thought of cutting off Alban's deciding work from posterity through his refusal is a tempting one to him.  And in conversation with Webern, I also encountered a form of coldness that was able only with some effort to mask itself as respect before the fate one must accept.  He said, with his air of native cunning, that a work such as Schubert's B minor Symphony is also incomplete, yet lives.  But this is sophistic analogy.  There is a fundamental difference between a symphonic work and an opera.  Anyone with even the slightest understanding of theatre, which is by its very nature dependent on an audience, knows that an unfinished opera, outside of memorial or festival performances, could not live.

God knows that I honour the idea of the fragment [e.g., Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment was subtitled Philosophical Fragments], but in an art form whose aesthetic substance cannot be  separated from a certain drastic materiality, a fragmentary reproduction would be an impossibility, even if it survived the worldly demands of the theatrical world.  And I would stake my life on the fact that Alban would have approved of my intention....

And if Webern claimed in the end that the composition was not really complete, but in some sections only sketched in the principle parts, then I refuse to believe this before I have seen, nay: studied it with my own eyes.  Berg told me unequivocally of the compositions completion; in a letter to me.... One should not believe anything to the contrary.

Now, I am all too aware of the incredible difficulty, arduousness and responsibility of such a task.  No one person can carry it out.  The orchestration of Lulu is only possible collectively....

My Paris friend Rene Leibowitz... a musician of the highest order... versed in the style... bound to the cause by the most passionate love.  He has gathered around him a group of musicians fanatically devoted to Alban.

It could finally be argued that there is plenty of time yet for such a matter, and that one could see to it one day, much, much later, when Alban has 'become entirely historical' (itself a ghastly notion).  I also consider this argument false.  There is never enough time for the things that matter.  The world we live in has taken on the tempo of catastrophe; it would be naive to simply trust its course - it can all fall to ruin.  And, to speak of more concrete matters:  the tradition of our music lies in the hands of very few people, among whom Leibowitz is the most important.  If it is interrupted, the instrumentation of Lulu will no longer be possible, as no one will understand the sense and language of such an instrumentation any more.  But if those few people still directly familiar with it succeed in completing the instrumentation, then this can itself save the tradition.  The extreme importance of which calls for no further words.
-- Theodor Adorno to Helene Berg
November 23, 1949 238-241
Lonitz, Henri, ed. (Wieland Hoban, trans.). 2005.  Theodor Adorno and Alban Berg.: Correspondence 1925-1935. Cambridge: Polity Press.

In his Dream Notes, Adorno’s final entry before his death was a dream about Lulu. 

 

Baden-Baden,11 April 1969
I was walking across a street in a very large town in the middle of the night, perhaps the Kurfürstendamm. Above the entrance to a cabaret the word LULU was written in large letters. I thought it must refer to a possibly shortened version of the opera and went in. I then noticed that there was nothing but a somewhat charmless, down-at-the-heel striptease dancer, who was trying after a fashion to represent Lulu through her dancing. Repelled, I left the place and woke up with a feeling of shock (Adorno. Dream Notes, p.77). 

As the editors of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory wrote: 

 

Its fragmentariness is the intrusion of death into a work before it had entirely realized its law of form. Essential to Adorno's philosophy as a whole is that no meaning be extracted from the ravages of death that would permit collusion with them. Two biographical fragments of comparable rank held eminent importance for Adorno: Right up to the end of his life he refused to acquiesce that Benjamin' s Arcades Project was beyond saving or that the instrumentation of Berg's Lulu had to remain incomplete. As little as an edition of Aesthetic Theory can disguise the fragmentary character of the work, or should even attempt to do so, it is just as impossible to be reconciled with it. There is no acquiescing in something that is incomplete merely because of contingency, and yet true fidelity, which Adorno himself practiced incomparably, prohibits that hands be laid on the fragmentary to complete it” (Editors afterword, Aesthetic Theory, p. 362).

In 1976 Helene Berg died and almost immediately the work on a new completed version of the opera was begun by Friedrich Cerha -- Rene Leibowitz having died in 1972, a fact that sadly testifies to Adorno's obvious urgency in his letter.  Cerha was known for his interpretations of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. Conducted by Pierre Boulez, one the students of Rene Leibowitz referred to by Adorno, the Berg/Cerha Three Act version premiered on February 24, 1979  with Teresa Stratas as Lulu and the stage production by Patrice Chéreau.

  

Lulu
Theatre National de l'Opera de Paris, February 24, 1979
Pierre Boulez: Musical Director
Lulu: Teresa Strata
Stage Direction: Patrice Chereau

Lulu
Chorus and Orchestra of the Zurich Opera House
Direttore: Franz Welser-Möst

Lulu: Laura Aikin
Countess Geschwitz: Cornelia Kallisch
Medical Specialist: Peter Keller
Painter: Steve Davislim
Dr. Schön: Alfred Muff
Alwa: Peter Straka
Schigolch: Guido Götzen
Schoolboy: Andrea Bönig
Dresser: Katharina Peetz
Animal Trainer/Acrobat: Rolf Haunstein
Prince/Manservant: Martin Zysset
Theatre Director: Werner Gröschel
Child: Lynn Lange

Alban Berg Lulu Salzburg festival act1 1

Alban Berg Lulu Salzburg festival act2

Alban Berg Lulu Salzburg festival act3

LECTURE NOTES on Adorno, Berg, and Lulu, c. 2020/21

*

“...Lulu embodies all of the raging contradictions of Central European culture on the eve of the Hitler Catastrophe” (Ross 225).

What are we to think of the character of Lulu?

What are we to think of the objectification: only the Beggar and the Countess call her by her real name. Lulu, Act 2: c. 38:00 mins.

Berg’s (Adorno’s and Petersen’s) sympathetic reading: “She is a victim of what men desire of her” Petersen says. They destroy themselves notes Jarman, too. How different Peterson’s interpretation [Introduction] is from the guy that follows, who “interpreting the music” actually says that she is a femme fatale. A view which Adorno and Patersen reject.

Double and Triple roles of the performers (and in the music, too) respectable men become slavers and murders, or perhaps what they were all along? The hypocrisy of bourgeois morality. Reversals, such as in the Film Music interlude.

*

The opera as a marker of the coming catastrophe:

“...Lulu embodies all of the raging contradictions of Central European culture on the eve of the Hitler Catastrophe” (Ross 225).

Tragedy or Farce? (“Sordid and absurd” according to Jarman p.91-92 and p.93).

What it seems to mean for Adorno: His letters to Helene Berg and his final dream.

As a form of popular culture?

Ross: Lulu contains a jazz band, vaudeville, and light opera. It also has sections without music and it features a film between Acts 1 and 2. All the things we have seen Adorno disliked!

The Domination of Nature and the Domination of women.

Original titles of the Wedikind plays were Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box.

The domination of nature and the domination of women go hand in hand not because women are somehow closer to Nature, but because they are socially constructed as such. The drive to dominate each is an essential aspect of Enlightenment rationality, technological/scientific advances, and control of populations and resources. Given that Critical Theory equates the domination of Nature with the Domination of women, one could also see the character and demise of Lulu as a personification of this process of domination. Lulu was “the Earth spirit” in a non-metaphysical sense:

“Absolute Isolation and the consumer world, irreconcilably breaking apart, are correlates…. Opposed to this is Lulu, around who everything turns. She represents repressed nature, its incommensurability with civilization, both the sin therein and retribution for it. But Berg would not have been a true artist if he had copied the eternally bourgeois-sanctioned antithesis: nature/anti-nature. In fact it is not Lulu who is the self out of whose perspective the music comes, but rather Alwa, who loves her…. The imago of Lulu draws its shining arc over the abyss, only to disappear into it.” Adorno, Alban Berg, p.130.

This and the fact that it is told through a new form of popular culture are certainly key ideas. (Pabst. 1929. Pandora’s Box starring Louise Brooks. Youtube).

Perhaps mention the Lou Reed/Robert Wilson/Metallica collaborations based off the plays and decidedly not from Berg’s opera. The misogynist is restored by returning to Wedikind.

*

Adorno (Sociologist, Philosopher, Composer, associated with “The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory”)

Music is not expressive of something outside of structures of social relations, which are relations of authority. If music expresses anything, it is that it, along with taste, style, fashion, and popular culture, the everyday experience of the mechanisms of domination and authority that run through contemporary social relations.

Adorno: Proposes that the critical social analysis of music is place to work out these questions about social theory, domination, consumerism/culture. He gives this rationale in his only recently published essay “The Problem of a New Type of Human Being”:

The fact that music is still unexplored territory… means that one finds far fewer rigid views here than in other fields, and that there are far fewer obstacles in the form of cliches to impede the posing of questions…. Music is especially qualified [as ‘an especially good point of entry’] to do this because it shares fundamental characteristics with language and, like language, is clearly dominated by monopolistic centres, while, at the same time, [unlike language] it is not directly connected to the world of objects. At the same time, however, the influence of this object-world is palpable in all elements of musical language and its reception. Music truly is, to cite Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, ‘the world once again’, but a model that one can use to study the defining characteristics of reality without having to discuss directly the content of that reality. (The Current of Music)

 

Adorno: Music as we know it is not “Natural” or expressive of “Nature”

However, although it does connect Humans to natural aspects of themselves, it does so only to exploit those natural/biological aspects of ourselves or to provide our minds and bodies with relaxation/recreation/reproduction so as to return to work the next day.

Music can not be expressive of Nature because that Nature no longer exists. For Adorno, Nature has been transformed and appropriated by humans.

You may know the phrase: “Like Second Nature” and Adorno takes that seriously.

“Nature” is now really “Second Nature, indistinguishable and unimaginable apart from its domination by human social production. Any aspects of ourselves that are “Natural”, the very aspects that Bernstein appeals to, are no less dominated than the Nature we still think of as “Out There”.

If Music expresses a relation to Nature, it is in fact expressing our relation to this Second Nature that is characterized by Authority and Domination, and not Freedom and choice.

Marx’s “vast accumulation of commodities” is the other image of this Second Nature, and Adorno draws heavily on Marx’s Fetish of Commodities to argue that music is no less commodified, and there for no more expressive, than any other consumer good produced by “The Culture Industry”.

Adorno on Music and Popular Protest: https://archive.org/details/RicBrownTheordorAdornoonPopularMusicandProtest

Therefore the idea that music expresses something other than social relations, that some music is “Authentic” and others not, is absurd.

Authenticity is a means by which conformity is regulated and imposed from within and without.

One hears echos of this view in John Schaffer’s remarks on WNYC and his show New Sounds:

“Marginalization of the arts, with the big depressing news we’re facing, is the exact opposite of what this culture needs.... When what we listen to is all based on algorithms, you’re fed things that will already fit your taste”

*

The domination and intensification of consumer society (the Culture Industry) until it pervades every aspect of life means for Adorno even Schoenberg’s atonality could not escape the process of commodification. It even becomes, as “a degraded form of pure dissonance,” the norm in horror film soundtracks:

“The modern motion picture... requires musical means that do not represent a stylized picture of pain, but rather its tonal record. This particular dimension of the new musical resources was made apparent by Stravinsky in his Sacre du Prentemps” (Adorno and Eisler Composing for the Films, pgs. 24-25).

Here Bernstein and Adorno converge: Stravinsky’s nod to popular music, especially Jazz, was understandable, but Stravinsky embraced this relationship to the Culture industry, he did not try to resist it as Adorno thinks Schoenberg did… at least until his later works when “Schoenberg wanted to be heard” by a wider public, such Kurt Weil, Hans Eisler, and of course, Stravinsky himself commanded.

They also converge in another important way: they both believe that music is expressive of social life, but here they diverge immediately.

If Bernstein is right about Ives – that he was asking a question about not only the direction of music, but also of a civilization on the brink of a catastrophic World War – then it holds equally true that Stravinsky’s Sacre expresses the coming crisis, with its industrialization of killing that only civilized people, and certainly not “primitives” can dream of.

Adorno on Stravinsky, especially La Sacre du printemps “Le Sacre du printemps… makes the subject of the work a human sacrifice, that of the principal dancer – a sacrifice which the music not so much interprets as ritualistically accompanies. (“On Jazz” from Essays on Music, p.289)

Sacre consists of rigid and “convulsive blows and shocks” that reproduce the machines and technocratic domination that we can see in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis:

“His percussive effects are no less than assassination attempts, echoes of archaic war drums, blows of the sort that sacrificial victims and slaves have to endure” (Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait, 1962-63).

“….the anti-humanistic sacrifice to the collective – sacrifice without tragedy, made not in the name of a renewed image of man, but only in the blind affirmation of a situation recognized by the victim. This insight can find expression either through self-mockery or through self-annihilation…. Speaking of the prehistoric youthful generation of Sacre, Cocteau stated in somewhat condescending but well-intentioned tones of enlightenment: ‘These credulous men imagine that the sacrifice of a young girl, chosen above all others, is absolutely essential to the rebirth of Spring’” (Adorno. The Philosophy of Modern Music, p.145-146).

So for Adorno Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps) and its primitivism show, like the paintings of Emil Nolde, that this naive primitivism is not so naive and harmless as might pretend it to be, nor is it a threat to the bourgeois social order. Like Nolde’s paintings, Stravinsky presents Nature in terms of the primitive and the savage. For Adorno, it does not express the Freedom or the so-called “Back-to-Nature” ideology that it claims. Adorno argues that this is not “nature” but really the expression of a “Second Nature” with the pleasures and desires, brutality and domination, that Sade’s Justine and Blake’s “Dark Satanic Mills” announced.

Stravinsky, therefore, has more in common with Emile Nolde than he does with Schoenberg. Not all expressionism is the same. Nolde was a member of the Nazi Party from its first days and remained a committed Nazi until the end. His work was still banned because its’ primitivism and expressionism was, the authorities said, degenerate.

There is a significant contrast to be drawn between Stravinsky's Sacre and Berg’s Lulu. Stravinsky naturalizes the violence and terror of the present by connecting it to a mythological/ritualistic past, whereas Berg’s Lulu makes it clear that the violence and objectification found in the work of art are those found in the production of everyday life. Lulu describes social life without naturalizing it. Even if we were to look at the past, the murder of Iphigenia at Aulis is not an annual ritual sacrificed to bring the cycle of seasons, but because Agamemnon, her father, recently killed a deer in Artemis’ sacred grove and she sends the winds to prevent the Greek fleet from embarking for the war at Troy. Unlike the murders in the Sacre, when Agamemnon returns to Mycenae from Troy, he is almost immediately killed by Clytemnestra in revenge for the sacrifice of Iphigenia. There is no eternal return of Spring and ritual sacrifice and libations (see also the story of the “King of the Wood” in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.6095/page/n19 ). In fact, the future holds is only ruin for the houses of Atreus. In the midst of their great success at Troy, Mycenaean Greece was obvious to its own impending social and economic collapse. Likewise, the Roman Empire – much like the British Empire at the end of WWI – did not fall in a day.

To discuss Sacre and Lulu would take at least another 20 pages or so, but if you find these notes helpful, I can try to add a discussion of Lulu to them at some point before the end of the semester.

I will let Adorno have the last word on what he sees as the contrast to be drawn between the two:

To intellectual reflection, to taste that considers itself able to judge the matter from above, Stravinsky’s Renard may well seem a more suitable treatment of Wedekind's Lulu than does Berg’s music. The musician knows, however, how far superior Berg's work is to Stravinsky’s and in its favor it willingly sacrifices the sovereignty of the aesthetic standpoint; artistic experience is born out of just such conflicts…. (Adorno. Aesthetic Theory, p. 269).

Sensual satisfaction, punished at various times by an ascetic authoritarianism, has historically become directly antagonistic to art; mellifluous sounds, harmonious colors, and suaveness have become kitsch and trademarks of the culture industry. The sensual appeal of art continues to be legitimate only when, as in Berg’s Lulu or in the work of Andre Masson, it is the bearer or a function of the content rather than an end in itself (Adorno. Aesthetic Theory, p. 276).

To intellectual reflection, to taste that considers itself able to judge the matter from above, Stravinsky’s Renard may well seem a more suitable treatment of Wedekind’s Lulu than does Berg’s music. The musician knows, however, how far superior Berg’s work is to Stravinsky’s and in its favor it willingly sacrifices the sovereignty of the aesthetic standpoint; artistic experience is born out of just such conflicts (Adorno. Aesthetic Theory 269).

Sensual satisfaction, punished at various times by an ascetic authoritarianism, has historically become directly antagonistic to art; mellifluous sounds, harmonious colors, and suaveness have become kitsch and trademarks of the culture industry. The sensual appeal of art continues to be legitimate only when, as in Berg's Lulu or in the work of Andre Masson, it is the bearer or a function of the content rather than an end in itself. One of the difficulties of new art is how to combine the desideratum of internal coherence, which always imports a certain degree of evident polish into the work, with opposition to the culinary element. Sometimes the work requires the culinary, while paradoxically the sensorium balks at it (Adorno. Aesthetic Theory, 276).

Update October 12, 2019.  November 27, 2023

 

Adorno on "immanent analysis" and Empirical Research

"...immanent analysis:  analysis, that is, of the internal consistency or inconsistency of the opinion itself, and of its relationship to its object, not the abstract opposition of the opinion to something postulated as objectively valid.  It is not a question of dismissing the opinion with a Platonic disdain, but of deducing its untruth from the truth -- the social structure that undergirds it -- and finally from the untruth inherent in the latter.  On the other hand, the cross-section of attitudes represents, not an approximation of the truth, but a cross section of social illusion.  Participating in this is that ens realissimum [lit. “the most real being”] of unreflecting social research -- the respondents, the subjects.  Their own being, their existence as subjects, depends on the objectivity, the mechanisms that they obey and which constitute the conceptual framework in which they are to be situated.  This latter, however, can only be determined by discovering in the facts themselves the tendency that points beyond them.  That is the function of philosophy in empirical social research.  If it fails to fulfill it or allows it to be suppressed, so that mere facts are reproduced, such a reproduction immediately falsifies the facts and creates out of them an ideology."

Theodor Adorno

Sociology and Empirical Research (1957)

Theodor Adorno on Theory and Practice.

Theodor Adorno, Self-portrait.

Theodor Adorno on Theory and Practice.
From Problems of Moral Philosophy.  Stanford University Press, 1995: 4-5. [Lectures: May 7, 1963 - July 23, 1963.]

"Ladies and Gentlemen, I urge you therefore to exercise a certain patience with respect to the relations between theory and practice.  Such a request may be justified because in a situation like the present - one about which I do not entertain the slightest illusion, and nor would I wish to encourage any illusion in you - whether it will be possible ever again to achieve a valid for of practice may well depend on not demanding that every idea should immediately produce its own legitimizing document explaining its own practical use.
The situation may well demand instead that we resist the call of practicality with all our might in order ruthlessly to follow through an idea and its logical implications so as to see where it may lead.  I would even say that this ruthlessness, the power of resistance that is inherent in the idea itself and that prevents it from letting itself be directly manipulated for any instrumental purposes whatsoever, this theoretical ruthlessness contains - if you will allow this paradox -- a practical element within it.  Today, practice - and I do not hesitate to express this in an extreme way - has made great inroads into theory, in other words, into the realm of new thought in which right behavior can be reformulated.  This idea is not as prardoxical and irritating as it may sound, for in the final analysis thinking is itself a form of behavior.  In its origins thinking is no more than a form in which we have attempted to master our environment and come to terms with it - testing reality is the name given by analytical psychology to the function of the ego and of thought - and it is perfectly possible that in certain situations practice will be referred back to theory far more frequently than at other times and in other situations.  At any rate, it does no harm to air this question.
It is no accident that the celebrated unity of theory and practice implied by Marxian theory and then developed above all by Lenin should have finally degenerated in [Stalinist] dialectical materialism to a kind of blind dogma whose sole function is to eliminate theoretical thinking altogether.  This provides an object lesson in the transformation of practicism into irrationalism, and hence, too, for the transformation of the practicism into a repressive and oppressive practice.  That alone might well be a sufficient reason to give us pause and not be in such haste to rely on the famous unity of theory and practice in the beleif that it is guaranteed and that it holds good for every time and place.  For otherwise you will find yourself in the position of what Americans call a joiner, that is to say a man who always has to join it, who has to have a cause for which he can fight.  Such a person is driven by his sheer enthusiasm for the idea that something or other must be done and some movement has to be joined about which he is deluded enough to believe that it will bring him a kind of hostility towards mind that necessarily negates a genuine unity of theory and practice."

‘...keeping alive the critical analysis of the social world was and remains an important program’: Stanley Aronowitz and Cultural Studies

  
B. Ricardo Brown
Associate Professor of Cultural Studies
Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies
Pratt Institute

Honoring and Engaging Aronowitz: Remaking the Knowledge Factory
Left Forum
Pace University
New York City
March 18 – 20, 2011

http://www.leftforum.org/


Honoring and Engaging Aronowitz: Rethinking Labor and the Labor Movement
E326, O. Panel Session 7—Sunday 3:00 p.m. – 4:50 p.m.
Dr. B. Ricardo Brown—Pratt Institute
Dr. Michelle Fine—CUNY Graduate Center
Michael Menser—Brooklyn College/CUNY
Mike Fabricant–Hunter/CUNY Graduate Center, PSC-CUNY
Panel Abstract: This panel will engage the work of Stanley Aronowitz with respect to social and political movements and the current crisis in higher education. Particular focus will be on the idea of the university as a knowledge factory and the role of students, faculty, communities, and movements to not only combat privatization and defunding but to make the university a place where learning and research serve the public, cultivate solidarity, and make 21st century education democratic, inclusive, combative, and liberatory.

See also:

Honoring and Engaging Aronowitz: Rethinking Labor and the Labor movement
L. Panel Session 5—Sunday 10:00 a.m. – 11:50 a.m., LHN
Ed Ott—Murphy Institute for Worker Education
Michael Pelias—Long Island University
Penny Lewis—Murphy Institute for Worker Education
Phil Nicholson—Nassau Community College
William DiFazio—St. Johns University, Situations Collective
Panel Abstract: An engagement and critical dialogue with the work of Stanley Aronowitz on the "labor question" and the failure of institutionalized labor today.

‘...keeping alive the critical analysis of the social world was and remains an important program’: Stanley Aronowitz and Cultural Studies

I came to CUNY to work with Stanley. I had dropped out of graduate school at Syracuse University --- a brief but inevitably important exploration of Cultural and Historical Geography. While working as a law librarian, I read Stanley’s Crisis in Historical Materialism and was immediately taken by both his range of knowledge and his critical approach to knowledge and everyday life. So As others have said, I too led a rather strange life at CUNY, where I would work the reference desk until 4:15 and then leave to walk the 10 minutes to the old Grad Center on 42nd Street. So within 15 minutes, I would go from the very belly of the Beast and into Stanley’s classroom. The contrast could not be greater, of course, both intellectually and ethically.

To speak on Stanley and Cultural Studies. Well, I’ll not speak about his many books and essays on the subject, nor about his acknowledged place in the reception of Cultural Studies in the Americas. I think this is well known to us all and would take a lecture series more than a short talk! And as a member of a unionized faculty and of the grievance committee, I know his influence extends into other areas of higher education as well, but I’ll leave that for others to discuss. At Pratt, we are one big union in a small sense, with FT, PT and a special category for tenured adjuncts all under the same contract.

While I was a Graduate Student at CUNY, the name of the Center for Cultural Studies was changed to the Center for Culture, Technology and Work. At the time I did not think that this was a very good idea. Cultural Studies was just consolidating its position within the academy, after all. What was really happening was that it had become a career path as well.

In fact, a reading of Stanley’s Roll Over Beethoven will make this transformation quite clear. It is, by the way, simply the best historical genealogy of Cultural Studies ever done, especially the first few chapters.

In his teaching, Stanley pointed many of us towards a way of thinking about Cultural Studies that is firmly rooted in Critical Theory and the critique of everyday life. This version of Cultural Studies, as he says of the genealogy of Cultural Studies in his Roll over Beethoven, at its best, Cultural Studies sought to “transcend the boundaries of formal academic sites” to be “not anti-disciplinary [or ‘interdisciplinary’] but transdsciplinary” in our approach to the “authority of knowledge.”

But the name change alerts us to two things about Cultural Studies that Stanley taught his students.
1] Cultural Studies transgressed disciplinary boundaries. But also that because it had no disciplinary boundaries to defend, and it was rather defenseless and easily overwhelmed and colonized by the more established, though crisis ridden, academic fields.

2] The second insight that Stanley gave us was that the Critique of Cultural Studies is not just an external one, but that it demands a self-critique as well. So, it was not that Stanley did not supply a definition of Cultural Studies, but that all such efforts can be contested. Certainly our work at Pratt did not contain enough self-criticism. Our efforts opened the work to administrative imperatives and concerns, and thus we undermined our own work.

Suddenly “everyone does Cultural Studies” became a mantra. It was a phrase especially useful to those who preferred to ignore the political commitments of Cultural Studies in favor of its potential as a part of the cultural industry, with niche markets in the various traditional disciplines that embraced the idea that “everyone does Cultural Studies”. Cultural Studies was not undefined, but came to be defined in ways that suited the needs of the marketplace.

Two examples: The bookstore and the Program at Pratt

[Expand as an aside:
Cultural Studies Develops a Market: Book stores in the 1990s, the realists as well as the creation of a market for CS. No longer marketing books as Sociology, Anthropology, or Literary Theory and Comp. Lit, but as Cultural Studies.]

It was at this same time that we established the Program in Cultural Studies at Pratt.
And after three years, purely for reasons of marketing, the name of the program was changed to Critical and Visual Studies. Apparently at the time, according to Admissions, College students knew about CS, but not High Schoolers.

Pratt’s program, which ironically I helped create and have recently begun to again direct, is a Microcosm of the American reception or construction of Cultural Studies, and a good example of the reasons why many have walked away from the contest over its meaning, since its meaning is now restricted to its deployment by various traditional fields. I notice that Stanley rarely uses the phrase in his writings over the past decade, just as I have noticed that many of his students no longer embrace the term, either.

What has drawn us away from Cultural Studies are the very interests that once drew us to it:  an encounter with Materialism, the legacy of Marx, and the Critical Theory of society and everyday life.

Cultural Studies had as much to do with an approach to the material as it did to any group of theories.
In many ways, our near abandonment of the term Cultural Studies to the markets expresses how we have to constantly reorient our approaches to our studies, teaching, and everyday lives.

As he wrote in Left Turn:
After “...the abandonment of the concrete utopia... keeping alive the critical analysis of the social world was and remains an important program.” (Left Turn: 53)

So, the name change at CUNY was a Sign that I missed. A reminder that Critique is self-referential-- something not all of us appreciated at the time. We might have read Stanley a little closer when he wrote the “most profound stake in the crisis of cultural authority... is the authority of knowledge. Who has the right to determine criteria of validity? Who may speak truth to power? What is the responsibility of intellectuals with respect to their own knowledge?” (Roll Over Beethoven: 9) Once we had the right and authority, we assumed that it was in the hands of “good people.”

Thus, the Critique that we speak of is self-referential both intellectually and in terms of our self: it is about how one lives in and responds to what Horkheimer called the “vicissitudes of everyday life” This is, after all what education is about, developing the means to understand the relations of our many selves to the world.

From where I now sit amid the workings of the Knowledge Factory
Stanley’s intervention as a teacher and major figure in Cultural Studies are, broadly speaking:

A. That knowledge belongs to everyone but is denied to most and so we must constantly find way to subvert the authorities of knowledge and in so doing subvert the authority of the dominant ideologies.

B. That a new educational intervention is better than trying to defend the boundaries of an old one, even one that once held such promise.

C. And finally, understanding our teaching as a critical political intervention is something we got from Aronowitz, and further that our studies and work should express critical interventions on multiple levels. We critique the present because it is what we know while we accumulate knowledge for those who might have a different future.

Thanks, Stanley!