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Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic

Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic Attributed to Petrus Christus. Annunciation, ca. 1450. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic BERNHARD SIEGERT TRANSLATED BY JOHN DURHAM PETERS 1. Cultural Techniques We have forgotten how “to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly.” In his American exile Theodor W. Adorno diagnosed the decline of an elementary cultural technique [Kulturtechnik], something he felt to be nothing less than a prelude to fascism. One has to slam car doors and refrigerator doors, Adorno noted, while other doors snap shut on their own. Doors cease to be cultural media that preserve a “core of experience” and instead change into machines that demand movements in which Adorno, in all seriousness, saw “already the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist abuses” at work.1 One can make of this what one will, but Adorno, in understanding the disappearance of the door-handle as of epochal import, must doubtless count as a philosopher of culture who had already confronted the fundamental significance of cultural techniques in the 1940s. Adorno places gesture and mechanism, human and inhuman actors into a relation in which both sides gain “agency”2 and in which even the inhuman actor has the power http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Grey Room MIT Press

Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic

Grey Room , Volume Spring 2012 (47) – Apr 1, 2012

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Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2012 by Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
ISSN
1526-3819
eISSN
1536-0105
DOI
10.1162/GREY_a_00067
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Attributed to Petrus Christus. Annunciation, ca. 1450. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic BERNHARD SIEGERT TRANSLATED BY JOHN DURHAM PETERS 1. Cultural Techniques We have forgotten how “to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly.” In his American exile Theodor W. Adorno diagnosed the decline of an elementary cultural technique [Kulturtechnik], something he felt to be nothing less than a prelude to fascism. One has to slam car doors and refrigerator doors, Adorno noted, while other doors snap shut on their own. Doors cease to be cultural media that preserve a “core of experience” and instead change into machines that demand movements in which Adorno, in all seriousness, saw “already the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist abuses” at work.1 One can make of this what one will, but Adorno, in understanding the disappearance of the door-handle as of epochal import, must doubtless count as a philosopher of culture who had already confronted the fundamental significance of cultural techniques in the 1940s. Adorno places gesture and mechanism, human and inhuman actors into a relation in which both sides gain “agency”2 and in which even the inhuman actor has the power

Journal

Grey RoomMIT Press

Published: Apr 1, 2012

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