Dialectical Zach Zack Loeffler

in Feb 1947, Marcuse writes 33 Theses on the libertarian communist anti-program for postwar critical theory, which Horkheimer will use as a foundation for his own marginal reflections on class, revolution, & freedom for 2+ years. Translated for the 1st time here (🔗⬇️)

Can I add screenshotted by Adam Tooze to my CV?

Finally getting around to reading Adorno's lectures Volume 2: Social Theory and Politics and the end of the lecture on The Relationship Between Individual and Society is fucking great

2)Adorno is often criticized for his heterodox thinking about praxis, but the way he squared off against the Rockefeller foundation tells a more complicated story than the one we usually tell. Jameson makes a similar point.

two preliminary thoughts from my first deep dive into the radio research project: 1) Adorno’s theory of the culture industry is clearly a response to seeing first hand how capital, the state, and academia ‬came together to develop administrative techniques for influencing the public musically.

From 1939 lecture Adorno gave at the Rockefeller-funded Princeton radio Research Project explaining his approach wouldn't be like the usual ones where “the guiding interest…is basically one of...how to manipulate the masses” but “a social critique of radio” based on the following axioms:

Adorno:“Dialectical thought is not merely intellectualist in character, since it is precisely thought’s attempt to recognize its limitations by recourse to the matter [die Sache] itself. How does thought succeed w/in its own thought-determinations in doing justice to the matter?”

Thanks Crane!

My article on the antinomy of encore-loving and -hating is an attempt at a music-oriented critical theory inspired by Adorno. It’s been in the works for a long time + is the closest I’ve come to saying something. Thanks to @crittheoryworkgrp.bsky.social for notes. online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article-...

check out Zach’s ( @thezachloeffler.bsky.social ) new piece—a critical theory of the encore on the model of Adorno’s writings on music! a lot of us (myself included) talk the Adorno talk but Zach walks the walk! one of my favorite pieces of writing in years

online.ucpress.edu/ncm/article/...

I’m on the executive committee of the NTT union, and even I don’t have much info. Meetings with AAUP and other groups are just being organized now. Lots of people out of town obviously.

I haven’t talked to any faculty in music, but I’m not sure anyone knows exactly what’s going on. I am worried that music could be “consolidated” with the other “arts” depts. I really have no idea. First thing I thought of yesterday when I learned about all this.

Not entirely sure what’s happening at Chicago yet, but it’s happening fast and largely in secret—I’ve heard the provost has ordered the dean to consolidate depts in the humanities div with fewer than 15 TT faculty. Could be the end of some very important depts and PhD programs.

have to admit though that my favorite of Horkheimer’s critical recoveries of Nietzsche is from Dämmerung (1934), “Nietzsche & the Proletariat”!

To combat “indoctrination,” everyone has to take a year-long seminar called how positivism became philosophy by negating philosophy:the problem of truth amid the irreconcilability of universal+ particular and the incoherence of an objectively binding factuality unmediated by subjectivity

Heat Map | The Brooklyn Rail Late on the night of June 14, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass sent out a triumphant post on X that summed up the volatile situation in the city, at least from her vantage point.

Disturbing stuff. Great piece by @profitratedown.bsky.social

The One-Man Plague | The Brooklyn Rail The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the decisions made across the world to shut down normal economic and social life to contain its spread were real enough. But the idea that the global recession...

“It’s one thing to propose that ‘another world is possible,’ but it actually seems impossible even to curb police violence, much less reconfigure the whole apparatus of production and distribution. And yet this is what must be done.”

Mattick on point as always

brooklynrail.org/2025/07/fiel...

Art and Abolition: A Proposal - Journal #155 Dominique Routhier on “art” as a fictional bourgeois category that arises from capitalist relations of production.

"Against vexingly persistent elitist and transhistorical conceptions of art as existing outside the material conditions of its production, Routhier offers a 'categorical' critique of art."

- I have a new essay out, read it here:

www.e-flux.com/journal/155/...

Lectures: The Aftermath of National Socialism (March 1945) Lectures by Horkheimer, Adorno, Pollock, and Löwenthal.

my transcriptions of the ISR’s full 1945 lecture series “The Aftermath of National Socialism,” with lectures by Horkheimer (reconstructed from handwritten notes), Adorno, Pollock, & Löwenthal. (Afaik only the Adorno one has been published before.) Enjoy!
open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

The problem of LLMs really does revitalize those lines by Adorno, often said to be longer relevant, where he sketches the antinomy that only the isolated composer who refuses all delusive necessities “would perhaps be granted something more than mirroring the helplessly solitary”

unfreedom of ex-ante command planning, the question is how to cultivate a now-withered “sense of form” (Formgefühl) that by eschewing every imposed architecture and following the needs of the divergent individual elements can realize the second-order synthesis they call for in their difference

Aaron Benanav, Beyond Capitalism—1, NLR 153, May–June 2025 In the first instalment of a major contribution to the reconceptualization of a post-capitalist social order, Aaron Benanav marshals insights from a long century of socialist thought and practice—Cabe...

“decision-making must be understood as a process of composition”—this is really clarifying for me how Adorno’s account of the crisis of musical form is a musical theory of communism. Faced w/ the impasse of the irrational unfreedom of the ex-post social validation of the market + the technocratic

Aaron Benanav, Beyond Capitalism—1, NLR 153, May–June 2025 In the first instalment of a major contribution to the reconceptualization of a post-capitalist social order, Aaron Benanav marshals insights from a long century of socialist thought and practice—Cabe...

What could a world after capitalism look like? This two-part article in the
@NewLeftReview
is the result of five years of research. I’ll be turning it into a book later this year, so I’d love to hear your comments and critiques. newleftreview.org/issues/ii153...

exuberant interior that is no factum but a problem, given as a prayer into the hands of our God-summoning philosophy and of truth.”

One can hear the revolutionary decade in Bloch:“For we are mighty;only the unjust exist through their God,but the just—God exists through them,+ into their hands is given the consecration of the Name,the very appointment of God,who moves and stirs in us,the presensed gateway,darkest question, >

I’m trying to clarify something for myself and so am reading for the fourth time or something, and it’s still like swimming through gelatin. I’ve been doing no more than 35 pages a day, and I feel like I’m living in a weird dream state.

"Even radical art is a lie insofar as it fails to create the possible to which it gives rise as semblance. Artworks draw credit from a praxis that has yet to begin and no one knows whether anything backs their letters of credit." Teddie

Yep—we don’t start until end of September, so that’s the trade off

Papers returned, grades submitted. What a year.