I wonder what,
I wish it would go,
I really hate it,
When I'm feeling so.

I see others around me,
having lots of fun,
I wonder when this feeling I have
will just be done!

I guess I should fight it,
I should not give in.
I guess it's ok,
I'M gonna WIN!i"

Believe in Yourself!
Doraz

"A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. "It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.

This same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather,
"Which wolf will win?"

The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."

I'm reading John Rawls's Political Liberalism, in part because it's at least somewhat related to a course I'm teaching, and partly to get at the issue Lucretia raised some time ago: how to deal with those who demand respect for claims you, in fact, don't respect.

And I will talk about this, but first, I have to say how much I dislike reading philosophers on politics. Contemporary philosophers, I mean: those who have to nail down every last damned point before they can even begin their argument. (Nevermind that in the process of the nailing they are, in fact, shaping the argument. Some acknowledge this, some don't.) It's not that I don't appreciate the work, or that I don't think it's not, on some levels, necessary. But it sure ain't sufficient, and to a non-philosopher like me, it's tiresome.

I know, I know: as a political theorist I should bow my head in before the clearly superior philosophy, and I should be ashamed---ashamed!---to admit my boredom with the perspecuity of the philosophical presentation. But I don't and I'm not.

This isn't a slam on philosophy generally. I took up John Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics awhile ago (along with some other stuff), as well as the work of Gianni Vattimo, and I'd really like more time to get back to their stuff. Their work on the theology of the event and weak theology, in particular, is fascinating. And I'd like to read more Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel and more names than I can conjure on this Sunday evening.

But not about politics. It's not that philosophers or economists or psychologists can't or shouldn't discuss politics---I'm a big believer in cross-contamination---but however acute they are in their analyses, I'm unwilling to yield the field to them. Yeah, there's a bit of boundary patrolling going on, but there's also something to be said about studying politics as a subject unto itself, and not merely as an adjunct to another subject. In short, I think boundary crossing works best when there are, in fact, boundaries.

Politics is largely a mess. Philosophy, arguably, is about cleaning up messes. Good for them, but I prefer the mess.

There is wisdom here.  A golden arch that beckons towards the silvery well of insight, perhaps a promise to quench this thirst, to elucidate the grand mystery.  What holds even more fascination, however, is the sky above.  Drenched in fluidic velvet and scattered in gashing flame and milky patterns...amidst it all there is a blackness that rivals an abyss.  It is not the absence, not the void, however, but rather the conglomerate of the elements of beyond.  Concentrated and vast, it pours into a creamy mist of the infinite.

Everything and all.  From the finest grain of sand to the vast mysteries of the universe, it is here.  If you choose to embrace it.

K

I recently came across this TV interview with cultural studies superstar Slavoj Zizek. From the looks of it, Nitebeat is or was a late night talk show. They must have been hard up for guests that night, because the host clearly has no idea what to make of Zizek. Yet the world's greatest Slovenian philosopher rises to the challenge, and gives a funny, entertaining and insightful interview. What he says about tolerance, in particular, I found thought-provoking.

Bonus trivia for acquaintances of the Sans Everything blogging team: Zizek has the same hand gestures as one us. Can you guess who it is?

For those who can't get enough, there is also a hilarious Q & A with Zizek at The Guardian.

Hat tip: Prologus.

"The labels "ancient" and "modern" and the contrast between their ways in art and literature...fired up two factions that divided the world of letters...The moderns won out in the end, carried on by a cultural tide rather than by literary arguments...quick minds pointed out that superior work, greater wisdom--in a word, progress--takes places in all things.

This conclusion was far-reaching. With progress admitted, it follows that man and society are perfectible; and if this is possible, schemes for changing the world should be attended to. By the next century programs of reform began to flow in an endless stream. The western mind had turned from backward-looking to future-making. And when the re-orientation became general, society was kept in paradoxical discomfort: cheerful because working to improve life, and suffering guilty SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS because present conditions are so bad. Also endless war between the bold and the cautious, who ended up forming political parties undervarious names, ultimately shortened to the Left and the Right. These in turn are split into factions by the diversity of hopeful plans, though the ancients and the moderns, who are always with us, now seem to agree that the Christian view of the world as irremediably evil is not absolute. Progress is possible, an admission that points to an ever-wider SECULARISM."

Put that in your evening coffee.

comedy..........108
humor............ 123
life................. 132
mental health......... 7
you tube/video..... 10
trave............... 9
politics............ 7
movie reviews.... 10
jokes.............68

Believe in Yourself. Anything is possible as long as you are alive. It really is not as bad as it seems. Look for the humor in life. It's there, believe me!

and were giving each other the silent treatment.

Suddenly, the man realized that the next day, he would need his wife to wake him

at 5:0 0 AM for an early morning business flight.

Not wanting to be the first to break the silence (and LOSE), he wrote on a piece of paper,
'Please wake me at 5:00 AM.' He left it where he knew she would find it.

The next morning, the man woke up, only to discover it was 9:00 AM and he had missed his flight Furious, he was about to go and see why his wife hadn't wakened him,
when he noticed a piece of paper by the bed.

The paper said, 'It is 5:00 AM. Wake up.'

Men are not equipped for these kinds of contests.

Love is...a tickle in the ear

For the past two years I've run something in SL. Be it a sim, a business (my own as well as UnReal - A building company that rivaled Electric Sheep), a tribe.. well you get the picture. I'm used to being in charge. I know where my niche is, I know what I'm good at. I'm damn good at delegating, and I'm pretty good at diplomacy when I want to be. I know what it takes to run a good business, and I know what it takes to run a good sim.

That's my stumbling block, right there. After you've reached that point, can you go back? Can you just settle for Ms. Nobody?

For me, it's not even about being "in charge" it's about being needed. I *need* to be needed. It's the main reason I'm an awful slave. I need to know that someone else is dependent upon me for something. In the midst of all the chaos yesterday at the grand opening, I felt at home. I felt like I was in place. I gave suggestions, and when things fell apart, I rallied it together with a few choice words and subtle suggestions.

Now that it's over, and I'm back in the same old spot - I'm miserable. I don't know how to fix it. I feel like I'm gasping for breath miles under the ocean. I'll keep sticking it out, but the loneliness a person feels when they're forced to be unnecessary is weighing on me.

Politics

Philosophy

Science - will usually be a summary and a link to an article.

...and the newest Lyrics. Which will contain original song lyrics.

“To me it’s so simple that life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise in rebellion, to refuse to taper yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge and then you are going to live your life on a tight rope.”  -Philippe Petit

Earlier this week I watched Man On Wire, an excellent documentary about a French performer who ran a wire between the towers of the World Trade Centre and walked between the two in 1974. It's one of the more inspiring films I've seen, encouraging people to take life by the balls and really live. 

It sparks a couple of interesting questions though. What really makes us feel alive? Obviously answers are going to be pretty personal, but it strikes me that people go through life so fast that we never stop and ask themselves this question. In my old job I met countless students who were at university studying generic degrees as a default life path, aimlessly 'studying' english, history, geography, only to graduate and find work in middle management for a multinational bank or insurance company or something equally dull.

This isn't to say that these folk aren't simply working to fund a driving passion, but sadly in most cases, I doubt it.

I'm not saying there aren't people impassioned by these subjects - I have a great friend who is enraptured by English Lit - but, i fear that multitudes are living a life they never dreamed.

What do we dream? If we slowed down enough to ask, what would we find actually drives us?

What makes you really feel alive?

With their stony silence in the midst of Russia’s brutal attack against the Republic of Georgia, the organizations that spearhead the contemporary “peace” movement have spoken volumes about the true nature of their core motives. They are united, above all else, by their unwavering conviction that a racist, imperialist United States is the chief wellspring of evil on earth—guilty of unspeakable and unrivaled atrocities, past and present, foreign and domestic.

The “peace” for which these groups agitate generally requires the U.S. and its close ally, Israel, to refrain from defending themselves against enemies sworn to their destruction—all in the venerated name of “peace,” of course. By contrast, these champions of “nonviolence” rarely have a word to say about the military pursuits, however unjustified or heavy-handed, of America’s (and Israel’s) adversaries. This assertion is entirely demonstrable if we examine how some of the leading “anti-war” organizations in the U.S. reacted to America’s post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan (in 2001) and Iraq (in 2003), and then compare those reactions to the non-response to Moscow’s current offensive.

After 9/11, Global Exchange, headed by the pro-Castro radical Medea Benjamin, advised Americans to examine introspectively “the root causes of resentment against the United States in the Arab world—from our dependence on Middle Eastern oil to our biased policy towards Israel.” And after the subsequent U.S. incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq, Global Exchange impugned the Bush administration for having “responded to the violent attack of 9/11 with the notion of perpetual war … [which] led to the killing and maiming of thousands of civilians.” “We must insist that governments stop taking innocent lives in the name of seeking justice for the loss of other innocent lives,” said Benjamin.

And what has been Global Exchange’s reaction to Russia’s invasion of Georgia? Unbroken silence. Since the launching of that attack on August 8th, Medea Benjamin’s group has issued only one press release—a promotion for an August 13th event titled “We Want More from Our S’mores.” “Fans of this summery [chocolate] treat will unite in support of Fair Trade Certified farmers,” said the release, “while condoning the persistent problems of chronic poverty in cocoa-growing communities …”

In other words, while thousands of Georgians lay dead, and tens of thousands more have fled their Russian attackers, Global Exchange is talking about chocolate. Interesting.

United For Peace & Justice (UFPJ), led by another pro-Castro socialist, Leslie Cagan, has similarly opposed America’s every military measure since its founding in 2002. Some of its anti-war rallies in 2002 and 2003 drew hundreds of thousands of participants. But today, while Russia’s proverbial boot is poised upon Georgia’s proverbial throat, Cagan and her cohorts are focused entirely on urging their supporters to make plans to gather at the sites of the Democratic and Republican national conventions (in Denver and St. Paul, respectively), to “send a strong and clear message to party candidates: the war and occupation of Iraq must end now!”

Moreover, while chastising the United States for continuing “to rely on the threatened first use of nuclear weapons as the cornerstone of its national security policy,” UFPJ has had nothing whatsoever to say about Russia’s recent threat to use nuclear weapons against Poland as punishment for that country’s missile-defense accord with the U.S.

Code Pink for Peace, headed by Jodie Evans (a great admirer of Hugo Chavez) and the aforementioned Medea Benjamin, in 2003 sponsored a delegation of fifteen American women who traveled to Baghdad to publicly denounce a greedy America’s “war for oil.” In conjunction with Global Exchange and United for Peace & Justice, Code Pink in 2004 helped establish Iraq Occupation Watch, whose objective was to thin out U.S. forces in Iraq by persuading soldiers to seek discharges and be sent home as conscientious objectors.

In stark contrast to these unambiguously anti-American measures, Code Pink has buttoned its lip about the Russian invasion of Georgia. Rather, its chief concern currently is for the U.S. to engage in “diplomacy with Iran” — the same Iran that has pledged its divine commitment to wiping both America and Israel off the face of the earth. A military strike against Ahmadinejad’s nuclear program would be unacceptable, says Jodie Evans’ group, because “Americans will not stand for ongoing war, occupation, and killing.”

The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) excoriated the Bush administration after 9/11 for “embracing militarism and unilateral preemptive military strikes to answer threats to U.S. interests”; for “undermin[ing] the foundations of international law, arms reduction treaties, and diplomacy in the post-World War II era”; for refusing to allow America’s “military supremacy to be challenged, as it was during the Cold War”; and for creating “an atmosphere of threats and intimidation that encourages other countries to pursue military solutions.”

If you look for AFSC’s comments about the Soviet invasion of Georgia, however, you’ll come up empty. But perhaps you’ll find comfort in discovering that this “peace” organization continues to exhort Americans “to write to their congressional representatives” and demand that they “defund the war in Iraq.” The top story on AFSC’s website today applauds the California Legislature’s recent adoption of a resolution (co-sponsored by AFSC) aimed at preventing health professionals from engaging in coercive interrogations of detainees at Guantánamo and other U.S. military prisons. “The resolution calls attention to the intolerable dilemma that torture presents when those who are supposed to be the healers in our society are involved in the abuse of prisoners,” said AFSC regional director Eisha Mason.

International ANSWER, controlled by Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center and the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party, organized massive protests against the looming U.S. attack on Iraq in 2002 and early 2003; some of those events drew more than a half-million attendees. The threat of war was first and foremost on ANSWER’S mind.

And today, with Russian tanks rumbling over the Georgian landscape, ANSWER’s focus remains steadfastly, and exclusively, fixed on America’s alleged transgressions. The predominant slogans on its website are these: (a) “U.S. Out of Iraq & Afghanistan Now!”; (b) “Stop Threatening Iran!”; (c) “Full Rights for All Immigrants! Stop Raids & Deportations!”; (d) “Money for Jobs, Health Care & Education—Not War!”

Peace Action, whose Executive Director Kevin Martin has condemned America’s “shameful status as arms merchant to the world,” had lots to say when the U.S. was contemplating retaliation for the 9/11 attacks. Seven days after the fall of the World Trade Center, Peace Action Board member Rania Masri wrote that any U.S. military action against Iraq would be unjustified because during the 1991 Gulf War, American troops had “massacre[d]” more than 200,000 Iraqis. “And the massacre continues,” said Masri. “… Every day, approximately 150 Iraqi children under the age of five die due to the effects of sanctions.” Less than three weeks later—on October 7, 2001—Peace Action issued this statement vis a vis America’s military retaliation against Afghanistan:

“We urge the president … instead to seek an end to terrorism through international legal cooperation. Treating the heinous acts of September 11 as an act of war, and waging war in response, will only escalate the violence and loss of life. The … perpetrators of the crimes should be brought to justice through the international legal system.… Terrorism will only be defeated by a long-term commitment to building democracy, respect for human rights, and economic and social development in impoverished areas of the world.”

Today Peace Action is soundless regarding Russia’s incursion into Georgia. The organization’s only audible message consists of its ever-so-familiar mantras: (a) the U.S. must lead other nations by example toward “nuclear abolition”; (b) Americans must “tell Bush to stop beating the war drums”; and (c) the “unjust” war in Iraq must be brought swiftly to a close.

Sojourners, a Washington, DC-based Christian evangelical ministry, published a March 2003 article declaring that a U.S. war against Iraq “would be unjust and immoral”; “would dishonor our nation, disregard morality, and violate international law”; and would represent “a drive for cheap oil and for increased control over the oil-producing world.” “We urge all U.S. military personnel,” said Sojourners, “… to refuse to participate in this immoral war.”

Yet Sojourners has been mute as regards the current Soviet bombing campaigns in Georgia. The organization’s focus instead is on the notion that America has corrupted its own “national soul” by engaging in “torture” against captured terrorists in recent years.

Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) issued a post-9/11 statement that read, in part: “[O]ur country has to address the reasons behind the violence that has now come to our shores.… As long as U.S. foreign policy continues to be based on corporate exploitation and military domination, we will continue to make more enemies in the poor, underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.”

What, you may wonder, does this same organization say about the current Russian offensive in Georgia? Not a thing. Instead it is actively promoting an upcoming “seminar on organizing for justice for Vietnamese and U.S. Agent Orange victims” who were harmed in Southeast Asia three to four decades ago. Says VVAW:

“As the U.S. backs out of Iraq—somehow, but not nearly soon enough—there will be an opening for the U.S. government to redeem its self image by doing something real for Vietnam. Now it's up to the U.S. people! Our ability to win this struggle is part of healing the wounds of war with Vietnam and also assuring that current and future victims of U.S. chemical warfare receive the justice and compensation they deserve!”

The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom has consistently condemned America’s military presence in Iraq, asserting that “this illegal war” has destabilized “the entire Middle East region” and destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, “politically and physically.” “The Bush administration created the so-called ‘War on Terrorism’ to instill fear as the premise for U.S. foreign policy,” said WILPF. “Basic human rights are being curtailed in the U.S. and abroad to propagate this lie.”

But as regards the Russian invasion of Georgia, WILPF, like its aforementioned comrades in the “peace” movement, has elected to swallow its tongue. Focusing instead on events that took place more than six decades ago, the WILPF website currently features “Hiroshima and Nagasaki Days” — a lamentation over the atom bombs that America dropped on Japan to end World War II in August 1945.

This, then, is the modern “peace” movement. Its members are bound to one another by their common hatred of America more than by any shared commitment to “peace.” Their overriding objective is to relentlessly demean and discredit the United States for its every failing—real and imagined, ancient and current. This tactic is intended for one overriding purpose: to gradually, incrementally demoralize the American people, and to convince them that their society is so loathsome as to be utterly unworthy of defending with any vigor. Meanwhile, as Russian forces overrun a tiny neighboring nation that is friendly to America, the so-called champions of “peace” refrain from whispering even a syllable in protest.

The melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy, but which, since the latter's conversion into method, has lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life.

An astute student or, I guess, professor maybe, who wrote all over the library's copy of this book (I actually often enjoy what other people write in books) had written, in pencil, above the word 'melancholy', gay. And of course, yes: In this first sentence of a dedication, Adorno opposes himself to Nietzsche. His "melancholy science" (die traurige Wissenschaft) is in direct opposition to Nietzsche's gay science (die fröliche Wissenschaft). Of course Adorno isn't articulating a simple opposition here - both Adorno and Nietzsche are engaged in similar projects: "the teaching of the good life". Rather, for Adorno, something fundamental about the world had changed: Fascism had reared its artificially beblondened head.

Rather than focus directly on fascism here, though, I'd like to spend some time articulating that astute student's one-word note: gay. As Kauffmann notes in his introduction to The Gay Science, it is "no accident that the homosexuals as well as Nietzsche opted for 'gay' rather than 'cheerful'" because it "has overtones of a light-hearted defiance of convention; it suggests Nietzsche's 'immoralism' and his 'revaluation of values.'" Gay, then, I think forms one axis of a possible analysis of Adorno's work, which lays out vertically as an opposition between Nietzsche's joyful, light-hearted revaluation of all values and Adorno's "melancholy science", and horizontally as an opposition between homosexuality, and its light-hearted defiance of conventions, on the one hand, and heterosexuality and the status quo on the other.

Adorno is - the astute student was correct - gay.  Where Nietzsche took to delight, Adorno took to despair.  Where Nietzsche undermined, Adorno reinforced.  One of the things that bugs me about Adorno, which I think this introductory sentence makes clear, is that Adorno is not aiming at a Nietzschean revaluation of all values, not even the values of those systems that he claimed so ardently to oppose.  His melancholy science is one for the perpetuation of a system of values - which could be defined in several ways (Adorno's own, fascist, bourgeois, anti-working-class, racist, homophobic) - that already exist in the world.  Where Nietzsche looked (or at least claimed to look) forward, Adorno looked back.

Though it certainly isn't clear that Adorno looked to the golden past with an eye toward a return - he didn't seem to think such a return was possible - it was nevertheless in the past that "technical virtuosity, at least, was demanded of singing stars", that melody had not come "to mean eight-beat symmetrical treble melody", that there was at least a difference in terms of reaction to Beethoven's Seventh's Symphony and a bikini.  The past, on Adorno's analysis, was one in which fetishism had not yet come to dominate the musical (and, indeed, cultural) scene.

It is at the site of the fetish where Adorno most strongly attempts to rhetorically establish links between homosexuality, or sexual deviance more generally, and fascism.  Musical fascism, one can only surmise given Adorno's peculiar language, becomes embodied as the homosexual rapist.  As the first part of a key to Adorn's aggressively homophobic rhetorical construction here, I will turn to Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility", a work which Adorno openly stated radically influenced his "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening".  Benjamin, late in the essay, announces that "The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values."  This apparatus (camera or phallus?), which artificially reproduces a process that has at least come to be natural to humankind, now (re)produces reality, substituting "a space consciously explored by man" with "an unconsciously penetrated space", opening up "a different nature", the process of which can, apparently, only mimic that "violation of the masses" at the hand of the Führer.

Adorno puts it more clearly: "Totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together."  Gorky had already stated it yet more clearly in 1934:

In the land where the proletariat governs courageously and successfully, homosexuality, with its corrupting effect on the young, is considered a social crime punishable under the law.  By contrast, in the “cultivated land” of the great philosophers, scholars and musicians, it is practiced freely and with impunity.  There is already a sarcastic saying: “Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear.”

Marxism, in this mode of analysis, acts as the cure for both homosexuality and for fascism.  For Gorky, this was due to a presumed direct relationship between the means of production and the superstructural effect of sexual expression.  For Adorno, the mysterious relationship between fascism and homosexuality expressed the structure of much, if not all, of contemporary society.  Despite his near-continual analyses of this or that phenomenon as homosexual/fascist, Adorno never quite gets to analyzing this relationship, however (he would later, possibly having developed a more sympathetic eye toward gay men and women, analyze this relationship in terms of repressed homosexuality (and, as the old chestnut goes, necessarily homophobia) and tendencies toward fascism, but as far as I can tell this is a turn for Adorno, something new).  Benjamin, though, is fairly more explicit: In a discussion of Futurism, he suggests that "[i]f the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. ... Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over citites; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way."  There is, here, a "natural utilization" for "productive forces" (and, I suggest, Benjamin was suggesting this was true for all (re)productive forces) which, could be, in unnatural circumstances, pressed "for an unnatural utilization".  The words "human stream", "bed of trenches", "seeds", "bombs" underline the stakes here: This is a life or death struggle.  Not simply a struggle against the forces of death, but a choice between life - the "human stream" or "seeds" (that is, semen) - or death, first in the form of an unnatural destination for the "human stream", and second as an unnatural replacement of that "seed" being "dropped" with "bombs".

This theme, first mobilized around the cluster of homosexuality and fascism and, now, the military, and second around the axis of life/death is repeated in Adorno's Minima Morlia, in the section titled "Tough Baby".  The argument developed here, one I myself saw repeated many times while in high school, takes the form "I'm not the fag, you are!"  Adorno, apparently upset that intellectuals - and he seemed to value intellectuals as the only possible saviors for humankind - were viewed as effeminate, analyzes the cigarette-smoking, whisky-drinking "tough guy" image in terms of a presumed masochism and hidden homosexuality (like fascism and homosexuality, intimately and mysteriously connected).  Adorno, the intellectual, is gay.  It is, rather, the masochistic tough guy who is "revealed" to have homosexual impulses.  Adorno, the anti-Nietzsche, is also gay.  It is, here, the "tough guy" who attempts a nearly Nietzschean mastery of the body, of which Adorno is maybe (or likely) jealous.

Here is the cluster Adorno has, with the help of Benjamin, developed so far: homosexuality, fascism, masculinity (to which Adorno opposed a "true" - his - masculinity), the military, war, death.  It is with the fetish (which, as with Adorno's brand of theory itself, is both Freudian and Marxist, both sexual and economic) that pop culture, and with it all culture, gets thrown in the mix.  In "On the Fetish-Character in Music", Adorno introduces a cast of characters: the "radio ham", who "is shy and inhibited, perhaps has no luck with girls", "'occupies' himself with music in the quiet of his bedroom" and "insert[s] himself, with his private equipment, into the public mechanism"; the "listening expert" who, like a secret masturbator, "must practice the piano for hours in secret" "in nimble subordination to what the instrument demands of him", in "agreement with everything dominant", and "produc[ing] no resistance" to the demands of authority; and, finally, the jitterbugg(er)er, the "infantile listener" (the influence of Freudian theory of homosexuality, that homosexuality is the result of a failure to develop properly, is a clear mark here) whose "ecstasy", which "takes possession of its object", "is without content", who imitate "the gestures of the sensual", "copy[ing] the stages of sexual excitement only to make fun of them".  The imitation here, of "true" (heterosexual) sensuality, maps both onto "false" (homosexual) imitations of sensuality and the false imitations of sensuality produced via the jitterbug.  The result is the production of "the masses", almost always in Adorno accompanied by the adjective "passive", who, as mentioned earlier, according to Benjamin, await their "violation" at the hands of the Führer.

Assuming for a minute that I'm right here, that Adorno's analysis is motivated by a peculiar homophobia, a fear of the Führer-rapist's sodomizing authority, so what?  Why care?  Other than the fun of queering texts, why bother?

1. Adorno in particular continues to be wildly influential in cultural theory.
2. The presumed connection between homosexuality and fascism, despite fascist atrocities against gay people, gay men particularly, continues to this day.  McCarthy, during a period where Soviet communism was presumably nearly identical with fascism in the United States, made this connection both openly and clearly when he said, "If you want to be against McCarthy, boys, you've got to be a Communist or a cocksucker."  This certainly isn't new to Adorno (Adorno wasn't an original thinker, I think, though he was a brilliant synthesizer), and certainly not peculiar to Adorno.  Indeed, it is most readily found in fairly recent feminist theory, as Eve Sedgwick points out in her book Tendencies.
3. To me at least, it is disturbing that, despite his openly antagonistic stance toward homosexuality (don't forget, "Totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together."), Adorno's theory remains fairly popular among gay men.  While this is understandable - anyone who grew up gay in the high schools of the 1990s would likely sympathize with Adorno's outsider position with respect to contemporary culture, as well as have an affinity with his fantasy of the tough-guy-as-closet-homosexual - it is also deeply disturbing.

So these are my study objects because nothing is more efficient than to study what is already there. There are so many colour combinations in natural petals that you could study them a lifetime and you won't get them all.

Since 3 years now I am literally collecting colours - yes collecting - in form of blooms and blossoms with my camera. I am presenting a few on my photography site on my official website but I have also a blog that is entirely dedicated to the photography of blooms and blossoms. These are photographs of flowers in their natural habitat, not "dressed up" in a studio because in my opinion only the living plant can show its full beauty and intensity of its colours. As soon as a flower is cut it starts to die. I never buy cut flowers but only living ones in a pot. I know this is quite excentric but I feel like this.

I am really proud of my collection so far - and I plan to continue as long as ever possible. My plan is to have the largest private local blooms and blossoms collection on the internet. All those photos I have collected so far are from Munich and area, nothing exotic but only from gardens in the nearer and further neighbourhood. This alone may be an amazing fact. I don't think people in general are aware of what can be found in their direct environment. Most people don't have and don't take the time for such explorations. But I decided to do this and it gives me a lot of satisfaction in any respect because it is a beautiful task.

I also think that this is a pleasant endeavour to potentially increase awareness for the environment because if I imagine the consequeneces of pollution and plastering the cities and what would happen if we continue to use our natural resources as we do right now - then we would have a very sad place to live on if that would be possible at all.

So please check out my blog Blooms and Blossoms and look at those treasures and think about what you have got in your neighbourhood and whether it could become a little paradise as well, you might have never thought of. You don't need big places to plant a few flowers. And you can grow them anywhere where is some light. Even in the darkest backyards - imagine what they could become with some green and some blooming plants. People would love it and smile. The psychological effect is not to be underestimated. There have been studies in New York where forgotten parks have been revived again and where flowers have been planted in areas with a highly problematic neighbourhood. The effect was amazing. People started to care not only for their environment, but crimerates decreased dramatically.

Look at those colours and think about whether they could become the harvest of your brushstrokes because your inspiration is going wild !!

And now tell me that you don't understand what I am talking about  :P :P ...