Taste registers historical experience because the individual is itself a historical product

Evidence

Taste is the most accurate seismograph of historical experience. Unlike almost all other faculties, it is even able to register its own behaviour. Reacting against itself, it recognizes its own lack of taste. Artists who repel or shock, spokesmen of unbridled cruelty, are governed, in their idiosyncrasy, by taste; the cultivation of a fine sensibility, the domain of nervous neo-romantics, is as patently coarse and unfeeling, even to its protagonists, as is Rilke’s line: ‘For poverty’s a great glow from within. …’ The delicate shudder, the pathos of being different, are now no more than stock masks in the cult of oppression. … The individual is so thoroughly historical that he is able, with the fine filigree of his late bourgeois organization, to rebel against the fine filigree of late bourgeois organization. … Even the rejection of mimesis, the deepest concern of the new matter-of-factness in art, is mimetic. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 167

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The reversal structure — ‘the rejection of mimesis is mimetic’ — is a dialectical move at full intensity, dense enough to sit with.
• DEFINE: Adorno’s ‘seismograph’ figure defines what taste actually does: registers history through the aesthetic nerve, and can register its own falseness.
• XREF: connects to: History shapes diet and taste, not the reverse; Omnivore taste flattens the past into an accessory and prevents new culture from emerging — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 387; A single food’s taste can evoke an entire civilization’s history — David, Elizabeth, Book of Mediterranean Food, 625 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• A single food’s taste can evoke an entire civilization’s history #corroborates (0.90) — David, Elizabeth, Book of Mediterranean Food, 625
• Senses themselves have a history and differ across lifeworlds. #corroborates (0.90)
• History shapes diet and taste, not the reverse #contradicts (0.85)
• Tastes encode a whole choice of being rather than sexual or physiological facts #expands (0.85)
• Omnivore taste flattens the past into an accessory and prevents new culture from emerging #contradicts (0.80) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 387
• Experience arrives pre-charged with meaning rather than as raw sense data #corroborates (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 490