Melissa Macero. "Editors' Note." Mediations Volume 35, Nos. 1-2 https://mediationsjournal.org/articles/ed-note-35-1-2

Editors' Note

Melissa Macero
This issue opens up current discussions around the relationship between subjectivity, experience, and art, especially through the lens of Brazil. The articles and reviews contained here interrogate the role of art in the solidification of political subjectivity, as well as how political subjectivity impacts both the creation and reception of art. We begin with Bruna Della Torre’s “Culture Industry, Subjectivity and Domination: Adorno and the Radio Project,” which traces the development of Adorno’s concept of the “culture industry” through his early works on music. The article examines four of the essays that resulted from Adorno’s time on the Radio Project and articulates how each essay is a building block in his theory. Della Torre especially draws attention to how the culture industry as we understand it is about more than a standardization that undermines the autonomy of art and instead is a “transformation of the very way art is experienced.” Rather than experience music as a coherent whole, radio and other popular music sources promote “atomized” or “quotation” listening, in which what matters is the audience’s ability to recognize familiar moments of the music. This scholarly pre-history to The Dialectic of Enlightenment asks us to reexamine the relationship between technology and art in our current moment.

Moving from the experience of art to how art creates an experience of self, Fabio Akcelrud Durão analyzes two works by Carolina de Jesus and argues that her diaries exemplify how the lived experience of extreme poverty limits the ability of a construction of the self. “Locating the Self: Imputing and Resisting Identity in the Diaries of Carolina de Jesus,” then, examines the distinct form of the diary, as opposed to an autobiography or biography, and how it leads itself to the creation of a “subjectivity not centered on the self.” This self-less subjectivity, Durão argues, is a true representation of the horrible living conditions of the favela.

The second part of this issue is a dossier of three reviews of recently released Brazilian scholarship. The first, “Até Então (Until Then),” by Tavid Mulder, reviews Dar corpo ao impossível: O sentido da dialética de Theodor Adorno by Vladimir Safatle. Mulder reads Safatle’s work as a “Hegelian challenge to the normative orientation of much recent Hegel scholarship.” This challenge comes in the form of Adorno’s negative dialectic and how Brazil’s own dialectical position between” backwardness and modernization” opens up its possibilities. In the second, “Paulo Arantes and the Order of Time: Temporal Determinants of a Global Order,” Silvia L. López examines Paulo Arantes’s O novo tempo do mundo: e outros estudos sobre a era da emergência. López highlights the urgency of Arantes’s account of the fate of political discourse by expanding his reading of Reinhart Koselleck’s Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and Pathogenesis of Modern Society. The third review, “Anyway...” by Nicholas Brown, looks at two texts by Roberto Schwarz, Seja como for: Entrevistas, retratos e documentos and Rainha Lira: Peça teatral. The former is a collection of interviews and other nonfiction documents, while the latter is a play; by taking these texts together, Brown identifies the influence and importance of both Schwarz’s scholarly and creative work to our understanding of the politics of Brazil, global capitalism, and art.

The issue concludes with two book reviews: Romy Rajan reviews Insurgent Imaginations: World Literature and the Periphery by Auritro Majumder and Brent Ryan Bellamy reviews Phillip E. Wegner’s Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia for Dark Times.

— Melissa Macero, for the Mediations Editorial Board