I've been reading a bunch of Theodor Adorno lately: Minima Moralia and Aesthetic Theory. Early on in my education, I repudiated Adorno utterly: as soon as I read him condemning jazz music (for Christ's sake) as mere debased commodity and symptom of the emptiness of the era etc, I didn't figure there could be anything right after that. Well, I had a point, and the dude is unbelievably problematic. No one has ever made more elaborate use of the Marxist notion of false consciousness: anything any of us have thought in our whole lives is more or less a mechanical recapitulation of commodity capitalism. This leaves Adorno's own point of view as an achievement that is impossible on its own terms: only I, the great Adorno, am exempt from the conditions under which we all think. On the other hand, I've come to see why people read him. The extreme alienation and cynicism, the unbelievable negativity, yield a place from which you can see a lot; of course, I maybe have my own version, though it ain't "post-Marxist" etc. If Ambrose Bierce was a commie... And actually, there has never been a more interesting application of the dialectical method: the insights are constantly imploding; he's constantly reversing even his own ideology to produce incomparable insights. He's particularly excellent on art and the arts in modernity: their separation from the culture as a whole, their debt to it, the devotion of their makers to subjectivity and the perfection of the object, and their simultaneous implication in the circulation of commodities, media, mechanical reproduction. I'm so never going to be a follower of Adorno, but I'm also getting a lot out of the texts.