The mastery-of-nature ideal sat between orthodox Marxists and Benjamin’s controlled mastery.
Evidence
The idea of complete mastery of nature moved ambiguously between the orthodox Marxist conception of a releasing of productive forces and the concept drafted by Benjamin in the final aphorism of One-Way Street, a controlled mastery of nature. The application of this concept to the new music made it possible for Adorno to make the practice of composition serve as the vanguard, prosecutor, agent or representative of social practice, just as he wished, and to pursue a musical theory which presented itself as Marxist, although it did not attempt to analyse any concrete sociological mediations between music and society. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 367
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Adorno’s new-music theory borrowed Benjamin’s controlled nature-mastery, not orthodox Marxism. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 367; The political philosophy of mastery emerged from secularized divine-creation assumptions; Nature is the object of reason as liberation, not only domination — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 826 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- The political philosophy of mastery emerged from secularized divine-creation assumptions
#expands(0.82) - Nature is the object of reason as liberation, not only domination
#qualifies(0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 826 - Enlightenment reason is fundamentally a project of self-preservation through mastery of nature
#expands(0.70)