Adorno, Craft, and the American Countryside
I’ve been posting on two fronts of late – about highways and automobiles and sprawl and such things, and, on the other hand, I’ve been continuing to make my case that Adorno is a highly relevant and readable philosopher, no matter what you’ve heard. My latest post followed Adorno to America, and what is included below is still in that spirit.
Here’s another aphorism (see the first one I posted) from Minima Moralia (Adorno) that bridges both fronts. Adorno is complaining here about America, even though, as one of my recent posts demonstrates, Adorno did also have a soft spot for America.
I like very much what he has to say about American roads, landscape, and the countryside (that it’s as if no hand has traced its fingers through their hair), and I like that his way of saying it (because he emphasizes hand-craftedness as a source of tenderness and affection that he sees missing in modern life) also serves as a nod to the craft community that is to be counted among Drinking Upstream’s most rapidly growing community of readers.
Paysage. [French: countryside] – What is missing in the American landscape is not so much the absence of historical memories, as the romantic illusion has it, as the fact that no hand has left a trace in it. This relates not merely to the absence of farm-fields, the stubbly and often tiny scrub-like forests, but above all the streets. These are always immediately blasted out of the landscape, and the more successful their smoothness and breadth, the more relationless and violent their shimmering path stands in contrast to its all too wild, overgrown environs. They bear no imprint [Ausdruck: expression, imprint]. Because they know no traces of shoes or wheels, no gentle footpaths along their edge as a transition to the vegetation, no side-paths into the valley below, they lack that which is mild, softened, rounded in things, on which hands or their immediate tools have worked. It is as if no-one had combed the landscape’s hair. It is disconsolate and inconsolable. This corresponds to the manner of its perception. For what the hurrying eye has merely viewed from the car cannot be retained, and the latter sinks as tracklessly, as the traces on such fade away.
Thanks Shane. This excerpt takes me back to my traveling days – from a bike trip London to Land’s end, to hitchhiking from Oslo to Florence, to driving across the U.S. and down through wild west Mexico in the 70’s. My twenties seemed like they were spent watching roads pass under wheels and this brings them back. And thanks for the maker’s link.