When Adorno was cancelled

Jamal

In April 1969 the philosopher Theodor Adorno was giving the first lecture of a course on dialectics at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, when he was interrupted.

Two students went up to the platform and demanded that he perform an act of self-criticism to atone for previous actions they deemed to be in conflict with the socialist students’ movement. At the same time, there were shouts of “Down with the informer!” and someone wrote on the blackboard, “If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease”.

In response, Adorno proposed that the students take five minutes to decide if they wanted the lecture to continue, but at that point he was surrounded by three female students who threw flower petals over his head and exposed their breasts in front of him, performing an “erotic pantomime” (as described in Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography).

Adorno had had enough, so he grabbed his things and escaped.

Seven weeks later he resumed the lectures, but they were again disrupted, and he decided to cancel them. In the summer he took a break in Switzerland, where he died of a heart attack, aged 65.

The episode has obvious parallels with what’s been going on in American universities over the past few years, where woke activism has led to the cancellation of academics whose opinions are not in line with orthodox identity politics.

So what makes it particularly interesting and ironic is that Adorno and the Frankfurt School are often identified by the right as the original woke ideologists, the ones responsible for the spread of “Cultural Marxism.” Adorno was one of a group of thinkers who had, from the 1930s, attempted to bring Marxism up-to-date in response to the complete failure of the project of socialist revolution and the evils of Nazism. On his return to Germany after the war he became something of a hero for the Left, and with the resurgence of left-wing activism in the 1960s, students looked to him for support.

For a year leading up to the incident there had been a large student protest movement in Germany, as there was in France and the US at the same time. Adorno had been partly supportive but also highly critical, accusing the students of “pseudo-activity”—aimless, destructive, and irrational activism divorced from a theoretical analysis of society—and agreeing with Jürgen Habermas’s warning at the time of “left-wing fascism”. It’s curious that this term is now being used by the American right.

One of the actions of Adorno’s that turned the student movement against him was his calling the police in 1968 to prevent striking students from carrying out their threat to trash seminar rooms at the Institute. This action has since been portrayed by some on the Left as a betrayal, but I think it’s clear that Adorno was not acting out of thoughtless bourgeois propriety, instinctive sympathy with the state, or cowardice: he had at the time carefully tried to work out a principled position to take in the conflict, reflecting his partial support of the students but also his condemnation of their tactics.

There is a lot more to this story than I’ve given here, but I’ll just end with a fascinating comment from a letter Adorno wrote to Herbert Marcuse a couple of weeks later:

You object to Jürgen’s expression ‘left fascism’, calling it a contradictio in adjecto. But you are a dialectician, aren’t you? As if such contradictions did not exist—might not a movement, by the force of its immanent antinomies, transform itself into its opposite? I do not doubt for a moment that the student movement in its current form is heading towards that technocratization of the university that it claims it wants to prevent, indeed quite directly. And it also seems to me just as un-questionable that modes of behaviour such as those that I had to witness, and whose description I will spare both you and me, really display something of that thoughtless violence that once belonged to fascism. — Adorno, letter to Herbert Marcuse, May 5 1969

What is particularly fascinating and at first glance puzzling about this is that he identifies the wild, empty, and irrational pseudo-activity of the students with the increasing “technocratization of the university”. What could he have meant?

unenlightened

I'm not familiar with Adorno, but going by this crib-sheet, he seems a bit unenlightened.

Adorno’s moral philosophy is similarly concerned with the effects of ‘enlightenment’ upon both the prospects of individuals leading a ‘morally good life’ and philosophers’ ability to identify what such a life may consist of. Adorno argues that the instrumentalization of reason has fundamentally undermined both. He argues that social life in modern societies no longer coheres around a set of widely espoused moral truths and that modern societies lack a moral basis. What has replaced morality as the integrating ‘cement’ of social life are instrumental reasoning and the exposure of everyone to the capitalist market. According to Adorno, modern, capitalist societies are fundamentally nihilistic, in character; opportunities for leading a morally good life and even philosophically identifying and defending the requisite conditions of a morally good life have been abandoned to instrumental reasoning and capitalism.

https://iep.utm.edu/adorno/#:~:text=Adorno%20argues%20that%20the%20instrumentalization,societies%20lack%20a%20moral%20basis.

So a movement of resistance to the dehumanising tendencies of 'the establishment', as arbitrary rules about hairstyle, sex, venal politics the Bomb, The Vietnam war the cold war, the prison of consumerism and suburbia, etc, could not sustain itself, and dissolved into the same greedy and unprincipled mess that it had set itself against.

Adorno argued that a large part of what was so morally wrong with complex, capitalist societies consisted in the extent to which, despite their professed individualist ideology, these societies actually frustrated and thwarted individuals’ exercise of autonomy. Adorno argued, along with other intellectuals of that period, that capitalist society was a mass, consumer society, within which individuals were categorized, subsumed, and governed by highly restrictive social, economic and, political structures that had little interest in specific individuals. For Adorno, the majority of peoples’ lives were lead within mass, collective entities and structures, from school to the workplace and beyond. Being a true individual, in the broadly Nietzschean sense of that term, was considered to be nigh on impossible under these conditions.

Rejecting the great god Mammon, the hippies became mere thieves, no different from their forebears. As the poet put it at around the time—

Well, six white horses that you did promise
Were finally delivered down to the penitentiary
But to live outside the law, you must be honest
I know you always say that you agree
Alright, so where are you tonight, Sweet Marie? — Absolutely Sweet Marie

180 Proof

What is particularly fascinating and at first glance puzzling about this is that he identifies the wild, empty, and irrational pseudo-activity of the students with the increasing “technocratization of the university”. What could he have meant? — Jamal

Perhaps Adorno interpreted the anarchic protests of the student movement as agitating for 'universities to be administered by student groups (councils) at the expense of bourgeois, ivory tower, tenured scholars'.

Jamal

I'm not familiar with Adorno, but going by this crib-sheet, he seems a bit unenlightened. — unenlightened

Yes, although I feel duty-bound to forestall the common misinterpretation that Adorno was simply anti-Enlightenment. As he saw it, what he was doing was trying to intensify its own self-criticism from within, because an Enlightenment that is not self-critical is no Enlightenment at all—and you end up with Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now.

So a movement of resistance to the dehumanising tendencies of 'the establishment', as arbitrary rules about hairstyle, sex, venal politics the Bomb, The Vietnam war the cold war, the prison of consumerism and suburbia, etc, could not sustain itself, and dissolved into the same greedy and unprincipled mess that it had set itself against. — unenlightened

Rejecting the great god Mammon, the hippies became mere thieves, no different from their forebears — unenlightened

And this sort of thing suggested to Adorno that revolutionary action was actually impossible, that there was, at least at the time, no break in the wall of the status quo that could allow any progress to better ways of life. This was his main difference with Marcuse, and it meant that he was more likely to support the freedoms of liberal democracy than the far left protesters who seemed to just want to destroy it all.

Perhaps Adorno interpreted the anarchic protests of the student movement as agitating for 'universities to be administered by student groups (councils) at the expense of bourgeois, ivory tower, tenured scholars'. — 180 Proof

Although you’ve put it cynically, I agree. He did treasure the independence of the bourgeois scholar and the liberal tradition in education, against which he saw a bureaucratization in the student organizations, despite the anarchy of their activism, that merely reflected the “administered society” that he’d been complaining about for decades.

Metaphysician Undercover

The existence of dialectics in general, i.e. the fact that dialectics is a valid philosophical tool and it is actively taught and employed, indicates that philosophers have not been capable of identifying what constitutes a "morally good life'. Dialectics is the manifestation of a lack of morals. The dialectician therefore, has no principles to criticize the morals of anyone, other than one's own lack of morals which has manifested as the dialectician's practise of dialectics.

Jamal

↪Metaphysician Undercover

I’m not sure I want to encourage you here MU, but what the hell: you’re going to have to unpack that.

Metaphysician Undercover

↪Jamal

I'll try to unpack it succinctly, and leave it here as a sideline opinion, for reference, so as not to derail the thread.

What is common to both principal forms of dialectics, Platonic and Hegelian, is a base in the wanting of (therefore lack of) moral direction. It's very obvious in Platonic dialectics, as Plato demonstrates that no true meaning for important moral terms like "just", "good" and "virtue" in general, can be determined. It's less obvious in Hegelian dialectics because Hegel generalizes dialectics, transforming the process to be applicable to all forms of logic, which Plato actually did in his later work after applying the method to terms like "knowledge".

So in Hegel's dialectics, we have the thesis (good), antithesis (bad), and the sublation of the two. What is shown is that there is no true correct or incorrect, just an endless process of sublation, as this procedure repeats itself. Therefore, when related to morality, the concept which supports this dialectical structure, is the idea that there is no true moral "good", as good is opposed to bad, and there is just the continuing process whereby the two opposing extremes negate each other.

Since morality deals with what is good, and the Hegelian dialectician sacrifices the value of "good" to its opposite, "bad" through the process of sublation, we can infer that the dialectician has no principles to criticize the moral direction of another; i.e. no principles to say that one person's claimed good is "better" than the opposing person's claimed good.

Jamal

↪Metaphysician Undercover

Thanks, that’s interesting, and interestingly wrong I think. However, I’m not sure how to tackle it directly. I might think about it and return to it some other time.

Metaphysician Undercover

↪Jamal

I think it comes down to a question of what the dialectician is supposed to do (as in the sense of ought), within the discipline of dialectics (if we can even call it a discipline). By saying that I am wrong you imply that something else is right. But won't these two actually negate each other, in sublation, to some further idea? How would we describe this further idea which it appears like the dialectician is supposed to strive for? We cannot say that this further idea is the "right". or "correct" idea, because that sort of term has already been used up in the process of negating my idea as "wrong", or "incorrect".

Jamal

↪Metaphysician Undercover

Well, there is truth in Hegelian dialectics, and it comes when the sublation of contradictions allows one to the see whole, and not just the parts—and from there to see the parts again as they relate to the whole, that is, more truthfully. But I’m a beginner with Hegel and might not say any more about this. Feel free to respond but I might not take it any further myself.

Metaphysician Undercover

↪Jamal

It appears like you desire to replace terms like "good", "correct", and "right", which appear to clearly have an opposing term, with a term like "truth", which if we dissociate it from "false", might not have an opposing term. Then we could say that the dialectician seeks truth. But this would completely divorce dialectics from moral philosophy, if moral philosophy is still held as dealing with good and its opposition bad, leaving it irrelevant in this field.

An opinion that I have, which you might take note of in relation to this issue, is that Christian theology, following Platonic dialectics, attempted to remove "good" from the category of terms which have an opposing term, by associating it with existence in general and assigning incoherence to any proposed opposition, "non-existence". This way of relating to "good", such that there is no true opposing term, no true bad or evil, is basic to fundamental Christian tenets like love thy neighbour, confession, and forgiveness, which encourage us to judge the actions of others as directed toward a misunderstood good, rather than as bad.

L'éléphant

What is particularly fascinating and at first glance puzzling about this is that he identifies the wild, empty, and irrational pseudo-activity of the students with the increasing “technocratization of the university”. What could he have meant? — Jamal

The intelligentsia and technocrats butted heads. Adorno, Habermas, Mancuse are part of the intelligentsia. The intellectuals were supposed to be the analysts of what's going on in politics and society. 'The government should be a representation by the common people, not a rule by the elites, etc.'

Note that it implies they reject the scientific, objective truth as offered by the experts -- engineers, scientists, etc. -- the technocrats.

Just my 2 cents.

Jamal

The intelligentsia and technocrats butted heads. Adorno, Habermas, Mancuse are part of the intelligentsia. The intellectuals were supposed to be the analysts of what's going on in politics and society. 'The government should be a representation by the common people, not a rule by the elites, etc.' — L'éléphant

Right, and not only that: Adorno had been criticizing technocracy for decades. But the puzzling thing is that he saw the chaos of the student activism as contributing to that technocracy.

Note that it implies they reject the scientific, objective truth as offered by the experts -- engineers, scientists, etc. -- the technocrats. — L'éléphant

You can reject rule by engineers and bureaucrats and the instrumentality of knowledge without rejecting the knowledge gained under those conditions. Certainly, Adorno, Habermas, and Marcuse did not reject the scientific and objective truth offered by experts.

Jamal

What could he have meant? — Jamal

According to Alexander Stern in the Hedgehog Review, the answer lies in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where enlightenment and myth, reason and unreason, are bound together in complex and paradoxical ways. The irrational and basically aimless activism of the students was the flipside of the administered society. In assuming that rejecting the administered society implied a rejection of rationality itself, they tacitly acknowledged the administered society’s instrumental reason as identitical with reason as such—forgetting what was vitally important to Adorno, which is that we can be rational without treating people as means and as cogs in a machine.

The result was the uncompromising and unthinking movement Adorno was subjected to. The movement was characterized by all-or-nothing thinking, conspiracy theory, and a refusal to reason about ends, which is mistakenly seen as the logic of the enemy. “Every calculated realization of interests,” Habermas writes, “whether of preserving or changing the system, is ridiculed.”

These student movements tended, therefore, to be escapist. In the communes and cults of the 1960s and 1970s and the “occupations” and “autonomous zones” of more recent times, we see a familiar desire to create another world outside the grip of administration. These exaggerated rejections of the system ensured their failure by depriving themselves of the resources of rationality and argument necessary for reform. They also played into the hands of reaction, which took the childish, cultish chaos as an opportunity to reassert control.

As many theorists have recognized, these movements were frequently absorbed by popular and professional culture and provide, often by way of the media, a simulacrum of the transgression that remains comfortably within—and even actively encouraged by—the confines of the existing political, educational, and economic institutions. Any contradictions or harshness are eased by new intermediaries like self-help and self-actualization culture and human resources departments, which form an ideology that absorbs rebellious tendencies and bridges the gap between the personal and the managerial. In the end, the energy of 1968 was used to reproduce the system.

What we’ve witnessed of late is a tightening of this union between the bureaucratic logic of institutions and the pseudo-liberatory logic of affluent students and young people. This is the endpoint of the affinity between technocracy and the student movement that Adorno recognized in 1969. It helps explain why the current movement tends to accept, echo, and appeal to the general logic of the administrative power structure, rather than genuinely criticizing or resisting it. As Adorno put it, “The prominent personalities of protest are virtuosos in rule of order and formal procedures. The sworn enemies of the institutions particularly like to demand the institutionalization of one thing or another.”

With the exception of the police, made conspicuous by their excessive violence, administration is not a target of the current movement, even symbolically. This self-described “left” is much more likely to act in lockstep with this structure, turning its ire on relatively powerless individuals instead. — Alexander Stern

This is complex. I get that students unknowingly ceded ground to bureaucratization while believing they were against it, but what I’m not quite clear on is how that is related to the actual embrace of bureaucratic politics that Stern describes towards the end of this passage.

fdrake

This is complex. I get that students unknowingly ceded ground to bureaucratization while believing they were against it, but what I’m not quite clear on is how that is related to the actual embrace of bureaucratic politics that Stern describes towards the end of this passage. — Jamal

I have some idea of the link between the unstructured activity of 1968 students and the tendency toward bureaucratisation. Just a speculation though.

Both the students and what they were fighting against were part of the same societal structure. Namely the tendency toward bureaucratisation. That tendency needed to be challenged and undermined. The first way of challenging it would be to change or disrupt the formative rules of that tendency within and about the institutions which exemplified them. The second way of challenging it would be to reject those rules and attempt to live life apart from those rules.

The first way attempts to disrupt and change the formation principles of bureaucratic power by engaging critically with them, the second way rejects the possibility for a change on those terms. On their terms. In positing the tendency toward bureaucratic power as exterior to the movement, it reified the tendency toward bureaucratic power's current form in the eyes of those who ought be dismantling it. In that regard, the rejection of that tendency became a means of granting it an autonomous development.

Maybe a clear way of seeing that - would the student politics of May 68 facilitate calm, long term entryist strategies? Does it allow prefigurative politics towards institutions in general? Perhaps not. If not, then this construes such strategies as unable to act "from the inside" of those institutions/tendencies/practices without becoming a part of them. That could be construed as making immanent critique impossible, theoretically, and thus leaving the contested social forms in order.

On the other side of this dyad, institutions would be able to internalise that "separate spirit of rebellion" (scarequotes) as a means of exteriorising criticism within themselves. Ways to operate better are demarcated

*

(in the sense of drawing a boundary, but also in the sense of the allocation of responsibility in psychology)

from the processes of the institution to the extent they receive a procedural representation that counts as better operation. IE the HR saying "you don't end up doing the thing, you end up doing the form", and simultaneously caring employers allowing you free subscriptions to meditation apps but also requiring you to work 50% overtime uncompensated. What goes without a procedural representation, in an institution, becomes unarticulable. That's a tendency toward bureaucratisation.

Refusing to challenge this on its own terms left its own terms in place.

Now if you want to do something about it, political movements are in the position of exteriority to institutions. Except insofar as their politics is represented procedurally (in a comfortable manner for institutions and bureaucratised living). Positing the institution as exterior means, now, we've got to petition it for anything to be done. Rather than disrupt it from without and from within.

If you reject "from without and from within" as a methodology - as bureaucratic hullabaloo stinking of institution - then all you've got left is petitioning the masters your old comrades rejected and left in place.

Count Timothy von Icarus

↪Jamal

Sounds a lot like the student protest movements of the mid-2010s. I was taking some classes at UNC around that time, and I recall reading the list of student demands from that period. There were some good ones, or at least policies that would have been beneficial if scaled back a significantly, but the whole thing had a farcical air because of how far it went. I recall the university was going to somehow provide food and healthcare for non-students across the region. I don't recall if there were any details about implementing this, but it runs into the immediate problem of Chapel Hill being extremely wealthy and expensive so the people who would stand to benefit from the changes don't live anywhere near it.

Not to mention there was an existing, if still quite inadequate, set of programs already run by the government to address just these issues that were properly run by non-profits, and state/local government, not a university (and which dwarfed the university budget because healthcare is expensive). Like, if you want to feed people in Durham, shouldn't Durham's government get to manage it, not a university that was going to now be managed by students? It almost flipped into a sort of unintentional reverse elite rule. I can just imagine the reactions of people in rural Alamance county on being told that essential services will now be run through an agency overseen by an undergraduate council.

Jamal

↪fdrake

That’s great stuff and makes a lot of sense.

It occurs to me that there are more mundane reasons too, though they probably emerge out of the processes that you and Adorno identified. In 1968, the administrative society was a conscious target for the left. This century, not so much—people like David Graeber being an exception, I suppose.

Jamal

↪Count Timothy von Icarus

It’s tempting then to say that it didn’t really matter to them if it was implemented. I mentioned the basic aimlessness of the protests in 1968-69; but having aims and plans that are impractical, useless, or redundant is hardly different.

Hanover

In response, Adorno proposed that the students take five minutes to decide if they wanted the lecture to continue, but at that point he was surrounded by three female students who threw flower petals over his head and exposed their breasts in front of him, performing an “erotic pantomime” (as described in Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography).

Adorno had had enough, so he grabbed his things and escaped.

Seven weeks later he resumed the lectures, but they were again disrupted, and he decided to cancel them. In the summer he took a break in Switzerland, where he died of a heart attack, aged 65. — Jamal

I'd have fired him for leaving his job based upon the vote of a random group of students after five minutes of deliberations and not returning for seven weeks. His subsequent cancellation of classes based upon a disruption was tantamount to a resignation.

He wasn't cancelled. He responded to childish hostility childlishly.

I know this doesn't address many of the things in your posts, but that's really what I saw, far more than some forced or even principled departure.

The episode has obvious parallels with what’s been going on in American universities over the past few years, where woke activism has led to the cancellation of academics whose opinions are not in line with orthodox identity politics. — Jamal

If you could make a case that he was being denied promotions or faced termination based upon his beliefs and not his academic accomplishments, then I'd think you'd have a parallel, but if you only have obnoxious and provocative objectors to his speech, then that seems fair game.

“If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease”. — Jamal

The irony is that a capitalist would have rolled his eyes at these competitors and just kept on teaching, barely paying attention to the silly distraction. A paycheck needed to be earned.

Jamal

↪Hanover

Assuming you’re serious, you’ve jumped to a lot of silly conclusions there. Total misinterpretation of the events. However…

If you could make a case that he was being denied promotions or faced termination based upon his beliefs and not his academic accomplishments, then I'd think you'd have a parallel, but if you only have obnoxious and provocative objectors to his speech, then that seems fair game. — Hanover

This is a good point. Maybe I’ll come back to it and try to salvage my point somehow.

Hanover

Assuming you’re serious, you’ve jumped to a lot of silly conclusions there. Total misinterpretation of the events. However… — Jamal

I do expect there was much more to the story than what you presented, so I will defer to additional facts I was unaware of that that might alter my position, but what you indicated to be the abuse he suffered inclujded being declared a capitalist on the chalkboard, having flower petals thrown over his head, and having been exposed to female breasts.

I was, admittedly, confused by your use of the term "escaped" in this sentence:

Adorno had had enough, so he grabbed his things and escaped. — Jamal

It suggested something more had to be done than simply getting pissed off and leaving.

I read Adorno as tempermental more than I read him as being subjected to abuse or cancellation. The episodes he was subjected to seemed consistent with the tempermental acadmic environment and likely survivable.

What you see in the US is both sides of this issue: Those academics not felt to be woke enough being canceled (https://nypost.com/2023/02/28/new-survey-reveals-college-professors-fear-of-being-canceled/) and those academics felt too woke being canceled. (https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/desantis-backed-new-college-of-florida-board-denies-tenure-for-5-professors/3022762/).

Jamal

Maybe I didn’t describe the incident very well or put it in its proper context. It was a disruption that prevented him from lecturing, the students were abusive and confrontational, he had withstood or been involved in protests and disruptions for a year already, he didn’t leave the Institute for seven weeks but merely postponed that particular course, a course that he had created himself and decided to do of his own volition after discussing it with his pal Horkheimer, the director of the Institute.

What you see in the US is both sides of this issue: Those academics not felt to be woke enough being canceled … and those academics felt too woke being canceled — Hanover

In presenting these in such a balanced way you obscure the fact that they’re not balanced. The first is a nationwide phenomenon and the second is due to the eccentricities of Ron DeSantis and his conservative board of trustees at a tiny and atypical university.

Still, you were right to question my parallel so as I say I’ll probably respond once I’ve done some thinking. I suspect the differences you point out will be enlightening.

Ciceronianus

What is particularly fascinating and at first glance puzzling about this is that he identifies the wild, empty, and irrational pseudo-activity of the students with the increasing “technocratization of the university”. What could he have meant? — Jamal

I'm unfamiliar with him, but I suspect this is another example of the technophobia we see in some philosophers. Just a guess, really. I also guess that academics sometimes think, mistakenly, that their students are more than privileged, self-important brats indulging themselves in various ways while they can do so in a more or less safe environment, one in which they're unaccountable for the most part. Just guessing, as I say.

Jamal

I'm unfamiliar with him, but I suspect this is another example of the technophobia we see in some philosophers. Just a guess, really. — Ciceronianus

I have a feeling you might interpret him more charitably when I tell you he really hated Heidegger, philosophy and all. Adorno’s attitude to technology is probably more complex than Heidegger’s, in that it is more ambivalent (i.e., dialectical). His primary targets in this area were instrumental reason, bureaucratic thinking, and science and technology that considers only means, not ends. This is a critique of modernity from within, in a spirit of self-critical enlightenment, rather than an instinctive conservatism or a reactionary attitude. Any Heideggerians reading this may be tempted to pounce on me at this point, and that’s fair, since I haven’t studied the guy’s work.

I also guess that academics sometimes think, mistakenly, that their students are more than privileged, self-important brats indulging themselves in various ways while they can do so in a more or less safe environment, one in which they're unaccountable for the most part. Just guessing, as I say. — Ciceronianus

Maybe, but the German student movement at the time was more than just that, even if—as Adorno says somewhere—it was partly that. There was police violence and an attempted assassination from the state, terrorism from the students (the Red Army Faction came out of it). It had a specific character and happened for specific reasons, rather than just students doing their thing.

Ciceronianus

I have a feeling you might interpret him more charitably when I tell you he really hated Heidegger, philosophy and all. — Jamal

A remarkably perceptive fellow, then, after all.

His primary targets in this area were instrumental reason, bureaucratic thinking, and science and technology that considers only means, not ends. This is a critique of modernity from within, in a spirit of self-critical enlightenment, rather than an instinctive conservatism or a reactionary attitude. — Jamal

That's a far more interesting perspective, I must say.

Maybe, but the German student movement at the time was more than just that, even if—as Adorno says somewhere—it was partly that. There was police violence and an attempted assassination from the state, terrorism from the students (the Red Army Faction came out of it). It had a specific character and happened for specific reasons, rather than just students doing their thing. — Jamal

I may be thinking too much of the American experience of the 1960s. Our student rebels of that time are probably all Republicans, now. Some are probably even lawyers, God help them.

Hanover

presenting these in such a balanced way you obscure the fact that they’re not balanced. The first is a nationwide phenomenon and the second is due to the eccentricities of Ron DeSantis and his conservative board of trustees at a tiny and atypical university. — Jamal

The offensive element (Element O) of wokeness isn't just that some find discrimination under every nook and cranny, but it's generically the imposition of a debatable belief system upon others and the expectation that others must adhere to that standard in order to be ethical.

That is, I am not woke because I have a heightened concern for transsexuals, but I am if I condemn you for not.

So, to be balanced, I must condemn Element O in all its forms, both liberal and conservative. You claim my DeSantis example is not a good example of conservative Element O, which may or may not be true, but that's just an example of a weak example, but not of me being unbalanced (obvious joke here, so just move on).

So what does American Conservativism consist of?

I vomit forth this:

"American conservatives tend to support Christian values,[5] moral absolutism,[6] traditional family values,[7] and American exceptionalism,[8] while opposing abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and transgender rights.[9] They tend to favor economic liberalism and neoliberalism,[10][11] and are generally pro-business and pro-capitalism,[12][13] while opposing communism and labor unions.[14][15][16] They often advocate for a strong national defense, gun rights, capital punishment, and a defense of Western culture from perceived threats posed by both communism[17] and moral relativism.[18] 21st-century American conservatives tend to question epidemiology, climate science, and evolution more frequently than moderates or liberals.[19][20][21]"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_in_the_United_States

Any conservative organization that enforces these sorts of beliefs upon others and ostracizes the opposition is the moral equivalent of the woke. Such would be balanced in their Element O composition.

And there you have it

Jamal

↪Hanover

That’s all very praiseworthy and agreeable. But…

So, to be balanced, I must condemn Element O in all its forms, both liberal and conservative — Hanover

I would say to be balanced you must not present them as if they are equally pernicious and dominant when they are not.

Now, I’m not saying they’re not, and I (hope I) don’t want to downplay conservative Element O, but which form of Element O one is most concerned about depends on, among obvious other things, where one lives, works, etc. If we’re talking about universities then I would expect left woke politics to be more of a problem. Or, if we’re talking about universities in Massachusetts rather than in Florida.

The left Element O is more interesting to me because it concerns the problems of left politics, whereas the conservative version is just conservatism doing what it does, and my opposition to the imposition of the conservative belief system is just obvious, easy, and boring. Woke politics, by which I mean left Element O, is a more complex, difficult, and profound phenomenon, I think.

But actually yes, basically I agree. In looking at wokeness recently I’ve realized that I need to cover right-wing identity politics, because although identity politics is the politics primarily or originally of progressive neoliberalism, it’s a wider phenomenon now.

Hanover

Woke politics, by which I mean left Element O, is a more complex, difficult, and profound phenomenon, I think. — Jamal

Perhaps the bias arises from the idea that the left is supposed to be open-minded, but it's not, whereas the right is supposed to be close-minded, so who cares when it is?

But that is a leftist idea from the outset. The right has always thought themselves the leaders of liberty and the left oppressive.

To argue that printing books is less a form of social control than is burning books, probably just means your comrades own a printing press and not a match.

Is wokeness not just the left's wake up call that the left doesn't stand for open-mindedness and perhaps never did?

Jamal

↪Hanover

I don’t want to do battle over who is more open-minded, left or right. The question is too abstract and ahistorical. Sometimes it’s the left, sometimes the right.

Certainly I wish the left were able to reclaim the cause of freedom back from the clutches of the right, because if the left is not about freedom it’s dead and worthless. Same for open-mindedness I guess.

L'éléphant

But the puzzling thing is that he saw the chaos of the student activism as contributing to that technocracy. — Jamal

"The experts", as technocrats were referred to, were seen as the ones that could save the government and society from degradation. But the way they were conceived to govern was not through representation by the general public, instead they themselves would set the agenda, the planning of the government, and make decision for the good of the nation. The student activism exhibited sentiments that repeated around the world -- they were anti-war and anti-exploitation of the people. They were also pro-technocrats.

Please peruse the architectural, scientific, and the arts movements at the time.

Jamal

The episode has obvious parallels with what’s been going on in American universities over the past few years, where woke activism has led to the cancellation of academics whose opinions are not in line with orthodox identity politics. — Jamal

If you could make a case that he was being denied promotions or faced termination based upon his beliefs and not his academic accomplishments, then I'd think you'd have a parallel, but if you only have obnoxious and provocative objectors to his speech, then that seems fair game. — Hanover

I said I’d come back to it, and here I am.

As you might have predicted, my response is: sure, they’re different in some ways, but there are important similarities.

I was wrong above when I said that Horkheimer was the director of the Institute—he had already stepped down. It turns out that Adorno himself was the director at the time. So as well as being the intellectual star attraction, he was the boss. This put him in a different position to the present-day academics who are in fear of dismissal and so on. The challenge he faced was more direct.

But it was the same kind of challenge, namely that of radical students who tried to enforce the party line on a member of the academic staff, to prevent him from lecturing if he didn’t show support (and express regret for his previous unsupportive actions), and to stage direct action against the institution if it didn’t comply with their demands.

Either way it can fairly be called cancellation. That said, I’m not totally committed to the idea that he was cancelled—it doesn’t matter what we call it, but there’s certainly a parallel there.

EDIT: By the way, I'm not really interested in evoking sympathy for Adorno by portraying him as a victim, even though he was pretty shaken up by the whole thing. He was a powerful intellectual who was used to being listened to, and he was doing all right (except when he died a few months later, which was definitely a low point for him). I'm interested in the politics more than the personalities, although the latter give it some colour and drama.

When Adorno was cancelled

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Categories