GRGR(16): Adorno on Reverential Silence

[Paul Mackin]

On Mon, 20 Dec 1999, Peter Petto wrote:

> As I was reading the recent issue of Lingua Franca, a quote from Theodor 
> Adorno brought our recent discussion of meaningful silences to mind:
> 
> >"In America, I was liberated from a certain naive belief in culture," he 
> >confessed shortly before his death in 1969. In Europe, he had simply taken 
> >for granted "the fundamental importance of the mind -- 'Geist.' ... The 
> >fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where 
> >no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed."
> 
> It made me wonder what TRP would say about the fundamental importance of 
> the mind, wonder what he is saying about it in GR, and wonder whether this 
> American/European distinction is valid.
> 

P's books are loaded (overloaded) with intellectual formulations
though his attitudes toward them is anything but reverential.  Actually it
is necessarily both reverential and irreverential at the same time, isn't
it?

As to Adorno, the "mind" is a very flexible instrument. Anyone looked at a 
University catalog lately? However it's easy to see what A was getting
at--noticed in America. By the late sixties things traditionally
called "intellectual" were well on the wane.

An American of a certain age might have experienced it more as change
WITHIN Western culture than as differences BETWEEN its various regional
offices. For example, in the forties and fifties people of my
acquaintance considering themseleves bright tended to know a
fair amount about 19th century European music, art, and literature and
went to the concert hall or art  gallery to pay homage to it. They
reserved less serious Jazz and pop music for partying and dancing to.
This is only one small example of the change and possibly not a
terrifically important one though I tend to be particularly conscious of
it.  In the fifties people still talked like the characters in Gaddis's
The Recognitions. I know there are some g-list people here.


			P.