The general premise of Adorno/Horkheimer's attack on Enlightenment thinking is actually quite fascinating, and in some ways very convincing.
The ostensibly logic-driven desire to reduce the universe first to identical constituent elements (molecules, dollars, subjects), and then, since they're identical, to further reduce the universe to just one thing (The Molecule, The Dollar, The Subject) as a way of achieving ultimate (and illusory) objectivity IS conceptual fascism. But, as you say, denouncing jazz is just too much. The irony is that jazz is one of the few examples of an art form in the 20th century that is championed by so many different identifiable social groups.
The intellectuals love it for its complexity, its self-reflexivity, and its tendency to blow the hell out of old, tired musical forms. The popular audience loves it for the sheer, untheorized pleasure of it, the beat, the melody, the fact that you can dance to it and possibly get lucky as a result of dancing to it well enough. Those who concern themselves with race, specifically in the US, raise it up as an example of the American Black community offering something to the world that is unlike anything we'd ever seen before.
Everybody likes jazz, and I suspect that's what A&H don't like. They seem to think that anything that has achieved popularity has to have done so only at the behest of the culture industry, and therefore it must be a part of the capitalist ideology. The conclusion, which is utterly anathema to how I understand communism, seems to be to cut the populace, anyone without money or intellectual authority, out of the production, consumption, and circulation of art. How in the world did that happen in the midst of an ostensibly Marxist book? Very weird.
Posted by orion at July 10, 2006 3:07 PM