To break the attunements of being

I can’t help but see an affinity between the ‘logic of disintegration’ of Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy – a logic which he recognised in the atonality of his teacher, Alban Berg’s music, with its tendency towards particularisation and disintegration – and the ‘intermittent rhythm’ of the music of Don Van Vliet/Captain Beefheart, its dissonance contrived to disrupt the hypnotic banality of what Beefheart called ‘that momma heartbeat, that bom, bom, bom’, so similar to the phenomenological ‘attunements of being’ that Adorno sought to shatter. The sky speckled with stars, the sombre ground interspersed with particles of light, is an obvious analogical field for attempting to ‘unlock the constellation’, a form of speculative thinking which Adorno derived from Walter Benjamin’s famous proposition in his Trauerspiel (1928), that ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. One can therefore form a constellation between Adorno’s micrological thinking, focused on fragmentary particulars – figuratively-speaking, from the perspective of the Lurianic kabbalah, sparks of the scattered cosmic body of Adam Kadmon: ‘Damadam to infinities!’ (Finnegans Wake page 18, line 30) – and Beefheart’s application of a convulsive logic that stutters ‘in speckled, speckled speculation’ (Van Vliet 1969) enacted in his Trauermarsch (funeral march) for bourgeois musical sensibilities, Trout Mask Replica, released on June 16th, 1969, coinciding with Bloomsday, the day James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses. takes place in 1904.

A drawing by astronomer and council communist, Anton Pannekoek, depicting a section of the northern Milky Way, from Die nördliche Milchstrasse (1920).

Returning the Gaze

Construing ‘the lazily eye’ (FW 293.11) formed by the ‘ALP diagram’ on page 293 of Finnegans Wake as a thought-image to invert an attribute of Guy Debord’s central conceptual device, the Spectacle, which ‘concentrates all gazing and all consciousness’ (Debord 1983: Para.3):

“In part, a secularisation of ‘the eye of the world, whereby the Absolute sees Its own works’ (Bakhtiar 1976: 11), it is characterised by Debord as the projection of human powers into a transcendent realm, which takes on the form of the Spectacle (Russell 2021: 76), the social organisation of appearances in modern capitalist society. Implicit in such an inversion is the aspiration to reverse the perspective of the very structural totality the Spectacle is intended to define – as one interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s messianism puts it, the ‘radical destruction of the world of images’ consists in their dialectical reversal (Desideri 2016: 186). Although the thought-image at the core of Finnegans Wake is not identical with the ‘Eye of God’ or Debord’s Spectacle, it can still constellate thinking around these and other themes and draw attention to the Old Testament ban on making images of God, ‘the prohibition on the image’ (bilderverbot) as it has been employed by Adorno and Max Horkheimer as the ‘awareness that the world is appearance’ and therefore does not represent the ultimate reality (Jopp and Martins 2018: 679). This hidden element of the critique of Benjamin and Adorno, what Horkheimer called a ‘Judaism undercover’ (Bielik-Robson 2019a: xi), gives their ideas a critical and methodological force indispensable for disintegrating the pantheistic unity of a more-than-allegorical spectacular totality, derived from a kabbalistic cosmic drama with its own implicit critique of pleromatic orderings of society, of which Debord’s Spectacle describes but one.”

More here – Skatterlings of a Stone: Finnegans Wake and the Moment of Philosophical Critique in Megalithic Archaeology