tagged with power
In defense of truth:
Things have come to pass where lying sounds like truth, truth like lying. Each statement, each piece of news, each thought has been pre-formed by the centres of the culture industry. … The extreme case of Germany is instructive of the general mechanism. When the National Socialists began to torture, they not only terrorized people inside and outside Germany, but were they more secure from exposure the more wildly the horror increased. The implausibility of their actions made it easy to disbelieve what nobody, for the sake of precious peace, wanted to believe, while at the same time capitulating to it. Adorno, Minima Moralia (108)
And:
The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power, a process that truth itself cannot escape if it is not to be annihilated by power, not only suppresses truth as in earlier despotic orders, but has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false, which the hirelings of logic were in any case diligently working to abolish. So Hitler, of whom no-one can say whether he died or escaped, survives. Ibid. (109)
I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about the timeliness of this post. I will say that it’s taking me an inordinate amount of time to get through Minima Moralia, not because it’s difficult (which it is) but because it’s so utterly damning. I keep pausing to survey the territory around me, somewhat surprised to find I’m still standing amid the ruins.
On violence:
People thinking in the forms of free, detached, disinterested appraisal were unable to accommodate within those forms the experience of violence which in reality annuls such thinking. The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us. Adorno, Minima Moralia (57)
I’m reminded of one of the final passages in Imre Kertész’s Fateless.1 The narrator has returned home after a year in the camps (first Auschwitz, then Buchenwald). Around the dinner table, he becomes frustrated with the talk, which seems to compress the events (the stars, the ghetto, the camps, the liberation) into one great, unimaginable happening. When he addresses this with them, they ask what he means:
I answered, “Nothing in particular. Only saying that it all ‘came to pass’ isn’t entirely accurate,” because we did it step by step. It was only now that everything looked so finished, unalterable, final, so incredibly fast, and so terribly hazy, so that it seems to have simply come to pass – only now, retroactively, as we look at it backward. Of course, if we had known our fates ahead of time, then, indeed, all we could have done was to keep track of the passing of time. A silly kiss, then, is just as inevitable, for instance, as a day without activity at the customhouse or at the gas chamber. But whether we look forward or backward we are in either case moving, I said. Because, in fact, twenty minutes is in principle a rather long stretch of time. Each minute started, lasted, and then ended before the next one started up again. Kertész, Fateless (187)
Kertész’s response to powerlessness is to recognize that there’s nothing special about such a state: it’s the ordinary course of life, and so neither crippling nor enabling.
- Later translations have revised the title of this book to Fatelessness. ↩
