willow: "i have gotten better since adorno but i still lapse sometimes (link)"

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willow @dreary.dev

i have gotten better since adorno but i still lapse sometimes (link)

willowMay 26, 2025

footnote 2 is my favorite dreary.dev/blog/reply-t...

adorno, critical models: interventions and catchwords, pg. 305-306

NINTH QUESTION: It was said that even exaggeration is a means for teaching and education. Could you explain this a bit more?

PROF. ADORNO: I would like to try to forestall a misunderstanding. I would not be able to accept the responsibility for recommending exaggeration in education. On the contrary, where consciousness is so sensitive, as in these places, if someone says, say, that six million Jews were killed and not five million, then the five million wouldn’t be believed either. With this I only wanted to say, in consideration of the by no means optimistic overall picture that I gave, that I perhaps exaggerated and this exaggeration seems to me to be a necessary medium for socialtheoretical and philosophical presentation, because the moderate, normal surface existence in general conceals such potentials and because in the face of neutral, average everydayness to indicate the threat lying below it at first blush always has the character of exaggeration. I would urgently warn against exaggeration in pedagogical work, for instance. On the contrary, I would say the less the idea of propaganda here even arises, the more stringently one holds to the facts—which God knows speak for themselves, or against themselves—the better. If you will recall from the war, which I of course did not experience in Germany, the authority the BBC, the English radio, enjoyed precisely because it did not make propaganda but because one knew that it was telling the truth, then I think this expressed something very central to our problem.

June 5, 2025 at 10:06 AM