“Marge everything is corrupted by capital. Have you ever sat down and read this thing? Technically the way we close a car door is fascist.”
I think people maybe don’t understand that this isn’t an exaggeration – it is literally something Adorno says in this book.
“RETVRN TO TRADITION. Things were so much better in the olden days. I am very antifascist.”
I know people are going to make fun, and this deserves it, but when you carry your groceries home walking on the shoulder of a road with a 40 mph speed limit, occasionally cutting into a muddy ditch because that part of the road has no shoulder, that stuff about the car causing people to subordinate themselves to the logic of machines in ways which encourage sudden, violent action and discourage slowness or contemplation…
I dunno, after the third time someone almost hits you in a parking lot because they were looking for other cars instead of literally directly in front of where they were going, well, you might think there’s maybe something to all this.
Also I was talking to a friend who had lived without a car for years and was now getting back into driving more often, and he said something like,
“The hardest thing is re-learning to make split decisions again, like when you’re driving you can’t just stop and think, it’s much better and safer to just make the wrong decision quickly then it is to slow down and not be able to decide, and it’s taking a while to relearn that mindset”
So like…
PS - Fascism uses the idea of the past for propaganda purposes but is a generally modern doctrine and in practice is often incredibly frustrated by and violently hostile to the messiness of the past.
I mean, I genuinely don’t know, are there a lot of right-wing fascists in Italy who think the unification was a mistake and want to return to the time before Italian nationalism?
One of the earliest and most intellectually interesting Fascists, the futurist leader Marinetti, lionized the automobile as a way of inculcating fascism on basically exactly the same grounds Adorno is doing here, the only real difference is that Marinetti thought that fascism was a good thing.
Doctrines which long for a return to the past can be non- or even anti-fascist, precisely because Fascism is so modern, but by the same token Fascism sells a lot better so not many people actually commit to those alternative ways of lionizing the past.
Just today, as I was walking home, I saw an older man in the middle of the street who had gotten stranded trying to maneuver a handcart and way too many bags. He had jaywalked into the middle of the street and couldn’t gather up all of his possesions in such a way that he could move when the light turned green.
I had to restrain myself from rushing out into the street to help him on the grounds that I might well get run over by one of the oncoming cars; there are two shrines to people who were run over crossing the street within walking distance of where we were.
Traffic simply maneuvered around him; drivers were probably feeling that if they stopped for him, they’d get rear-ended so people in the lane he was standing in just swerved into the other lane a little bit.
Once there was a break in traffic I ran over and helped him get his stuff to the sidewalk.
How else to describe this process but as one of pure functionality, which does not tolerate freedom of conduct? The car will move down the street; to interrupt that motion is to put your life at risk, so the people surrounding this old man find themselves at least unwilling, and quite likely actually unable to stop and help him reach a safer island.
Basically I have never had a more Hannibal.jpg reaction to anything on Tumblr than I have to that page of Adorno.
(Image descriptions: the top photo is digital pencils of actor Martin Clunes’s face on a featureless four legged animal-like body. The bottom photo is the same but inked, with more details to make it eerily rendered, like a collarbone and joint creases on the animal body.)
