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Gradual familiarization

A time to mention, quite a time to live. We see, we illustrate, we experience, we relate, we leave it for later when we should probably jot a few things down first.

Via The Paris Review, Theodor Adorno speaking about the effects of televised music – From an interview in Der Spiegel (February 26, 1968).

SPIEGEL

The culinary element seems to us to be especially prominent in music broadcasts. A candlelit Karajan and Menuhin concert framed by the plush furnishings of a Viennese salon; Bach passions and cantatas in the obvious setting, a baroque church. As the distinguished vocal soloist is singing his part …

ADORNO

The listeners make furiously sorrowful faces …

SPIEGEL

… And the camera fondles lovably chubby-cheeked putti and Madonnas. Is this acceptable?

ADORNO

It’s horrible, the worst sort of commercialization of art. Here the mass media—which precisely because they are technical media are duty-bound to forgo everything unseemly and gratuitous—are conforming to the abominable convention of showcasing lady harpsichordists with snail-shell braids over their ears who brainlessly and ineptly execute Mozart on jangly candlelit ancient keyboards. I think it’s more than high time for purging the mass media of all this illusional kitsch and of the whole Salzburg phantasmagoria that’s forever haunting it. … It engenders an absolutely inadmissible image, above all because here an illusional element also supervenes; it’s as if one were present at some sort of shrine where a unique ritualistic event were being enacted in the hic et nunc—a notion that is completely incommensurable with the mass reproduction that causes this same event to be seen in millions of places on millions of television screens. … One can never shake the feeling that such things must be regarded as grudgingly doled-out servings of schmaltz within the politics of programming, wherein the so-called desires of the public, which I have absolutely no inclination to gainsay, are oftentimes employed as an ideological excuse for feeding the public mendacious rubbish and kitsch. I would also include in this kitsch the kitschified production styles applied to the presentation of so-called—I might have almost said rightly so-called—classic cultural artifacts.

SPIEGEL

Take for example Brahms’s German Requiem on the second channel. The images concurrently broadcast with it were of trees, forests, lakes, fields, monuments, and cemeteries.

ADORNO

The acme of wanton stupidity.

SPIEGEL

Professor Adorno, a pedagogical argument is also always trotted out in connection with this. According to this argument, televised music gives consumers a preliminary introduction to the work and thereby stimulates them to attend concerts or opera performances in person. What do you think of this kind of musical therapy?

ADORNO

It’s wrong. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a pedagogical path to the essential that starts out by getting people to concentrate on the inessential. This sort of attention that fixates on the inessential actually indurates; it becomes habitual and thereby interferes with one’s experience of the essential. I don’t believe that when it comes to art there can ever be any processes of gradual familiarization that gradually lead from what’s wrong to what’s right. Artistic experience always consists in qualitative leaps and never in that murky sort of process.

Image: Robert Rauschenberg Canto XIV: Circle Seven, Round 3, The Violent Against God, Nature, and Art, from the series Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno1 959-60

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Just in Time

is an inventory strategy implemented to improve the return on investment by reducing in-process inventory and associated costs. In order to achieve JIT [status] the process must have signals of what is going on elsewhere in the process.

This means that the process is often driven by a series of signals […] that tell production processes when to make the next part. [These] are usually ‘tickets’ but can be simple visual signals, such as the presence or absence of a part on a shelf. When implemented correctly, JIT can lead to dramatic improvements in a manufacturing organization’s return on investment, quality, and efficiency. Some have suggested that “Just on Time” would be a more appropriate name since it emphasizes that production should create items that arrive when needed and neither earlier nor later.

Semantics of ‘on’ vs. ‘in’ aside, what do these kinds of signals tell us? I alluded previously to complexity theory and the principle of indirect effects as constituent elements of systems ecology; one of the questions we need to reckon with in the ‘what’s next’ phase of our mourning is, how do we begin to untangle some of the many ways in which the American way of life and self-worth is connected to scams and schemes? A dangerous loss of legitimacy is waiting right around the corner for yet another cheek to be turned when a perp-walk might be warranted.

For a proper idea on the state of the reckoning, we can probably zoom past the savvy of green ads for a little while. Just sample/monitor the holiday editorials in your local paper and see what you come up with. Are they typical paeans to the year that was? Or are there little hints and allegations that actual people have had enough? Are people starting to ask questions with uncomfortable answers?