Friday, June 29, 2012

the fragments of a dialectic enlightenment :Adorno & Horkheimer as PUNK DIYers ...

If one of your dear, dear friends gave you as a christmas present, late in December, over 300 pages of turgid prose, written in fragmentary style, and mimeographed to ensure ultra low quality readability and then stuck it all between two dull brown covers, you might be forgiven if you waited until January before you began a token,polite, skim through it.

That would be January....... 1945.

1945 ! : post-hegemony's annus mirabilis.

And what a way to usher in the postmodern era but with a punk-DIY un-book, as principle author Adorno reminded his co-conspiractor, Horkheimer on the latter's 50th birthday.

Adorno felt that hardcover,professionally printed books brought in the Modernist era - so why not a humble mimeograph to do the honors for the new age ?

So 500 years of Modernity laid low in an instance by a ZINE, for crikes sake !

Well, that and a little help from Modernity itself, during that most modernist of wars : WWII ....


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