Adorno, Microsoft, and the Caliphate

Adorno hated jazz. In fact, his bitter curmudgeonry can sometimes astonish even those most familiar with the Frankfurt School intellectuals' disillusion with all things modern and Western. On some level this is part of another trend that has been addressed by many here at Jewcy, myself not excluded–the bizarre and unfortunate ideological alliances between the anti-modern, anti-Western and anti-rational forces of global jihad and the radical left. But as with nearly any big brain, Adorno wasn't all bullshit and no beef. His analysis of the evolution of social relations with respect to technology was far better than his ideas about a proper response (something lots of Marxists inherited from Marx).

In one essay, Adorno made the fairly simple observation that mechanisms of technology impact individual psychologies. Lever-pulling, button pushing, etc.–think of the Simpsons episode where Homer angrily searches his TV remote control for the button that will answer the phone, and you've got the picture. But Russell Berman explores an even more frightening development. As relations are abstracted by IMs, emails, and instantaneous capital transfer, distances are eliminated and according to Adorno, estrangement is paradoxically increased. This estrangement prompts not only the desire to take refuge in simplistic readings of texts and social relationships; it also prompts a fascination with technology that coincides rather unfortunately with the collapse of the abstracted, estranged individual's capacity for love:

The other Berman Eustonista writes:

Our public discourse on terrorism tends to take the religious or political pronouncements of the terrorists as full and adequate accounts. Adorno suggests that there is also a psychological dimension, or rather, psychoanalytic because it stands in relation to larger cultural-civilizational developments. What are the particular personality deficiencies of the terrorists and how are they related to their own as well as to larger societal fetishizations?

The point is not to "pathologize" the terrorists, but to understand their pursuit of violence as related on a deep level to their apparent fascination with technology.

I'm not quite sure why Berman doesn't consider this fascination pathological. I have little problem saying that the retreat from the social made possible by new technologies falls under the category of pathology, even in its more tame western manifestations. Who hasn't at one time or another felt an Adorno-ish surge of anger that made you want to smack the cell phone out of somebody's hand in the bar and break every one of their texting fingers knuckle by keypad dexterous knuckle? And who hasn't been distracted from the thought by the sound of their own phone blaring its overpriced ringtone–a rendition of some hip song in all it's MIDI-rendered non-glory that's as obnoxious to everyone else as it is cute and ironic to you. "I should take this," you say and peck away at your own text pad with a wondrous gaze proportional to the awesomeness (read: current fetish value) of your phone.

Adorno would likely say this over-connectedness inevitably breeds disconnectedness. From the looks of things, he may appear to be correct. But it takes an ahistorical Marxist to say the word 'inevitably' with a straight face. Resisting the post-everything world's abstraction isn't a matter of rejecting technology, but a matter of remembering, in the jazz-hater's words, that it is "an extension of human dexterity." Contrary to jihadist designs, it is "the epitome of the means of self-preservation of the human species." And with that in mind, I bring you (Buddy Rich drum roll, please)..the Microsoft Surface!