Adorno's Noise

A collection of experimental, poetic, and conceptual essays, Adorno’s Noise takes a stunning plunge into a kaleidoscopic world of globalization, female sexuality, the place of art and artist, and the looming power of the state. Phrases from Theodor Adorno’s aphoristic philosophical text, Minima Moralia, serve as catalysts for an explosion of thought and language that quickly breaks Adorno’s orbit.

“This work by Carla Harryman, startlingly astute, once again proves how necessary an encounter with her writing has become for us today. Her grasp of theoretical and poetic exigencies is unbypassable, and she moves lightly, lifting the prose poem into the amplitude of a new articulation.”
—AVITAL RONELL

“Adorno’s ‘noise’ may be nothing more than the consonance of late modern capital talking to itself, but Carla Harryman listens to Adorno listening, and what she hears is a very different sort of dissonance, something Adorno himself may have been deaf to. Listening for a noise that can’t be heard, Harryman attends to the disruption of signal the aesthetic artifact called a corpse at the limit of Adorno’s magisterial eloquence, where thought steps over the body. Atonally faithful to his negativity the afterglow of torment passing through figures of speech while refusing the authority of a masterful dialectic, Harryman makes our unthought horizon “normality is death” audible, presencing a body that can’t be redeemed by aesthetics the bosy wants tobe art and fails at it. From Gender the Status of Dogs to works by Sun Ra, Anais Nin, Robert Smithson, and Kenzaburo Oe, this radically asynthetic writing moves thru polyphonic configuration of word, image and concept. Synthesia? Emotional truth? The intersection between abstraction and narration? Practicing a militant ethic of non-mastery as every one of its sentences sounds like a sensory organ in the process of becoming its own theoretician. Adorno’s Noise reinvents the “essay as form,” but it doesn’t stop short of reinventing thinking.”
—ROB HALPERN

Links & Reviews

• Carla Harryman. Keynote Performance: “What is Thinking? Or a Taste that Hates Itself.”dOCUMENTA (13), June 18–September 4, 2012.

• Kit Robinson. “Review of Carla Harryman’s Adorno’s Noise.” Rain Taxi. 2013.

• Pat Clifford. “Adorno’s Noise. Carla Harryman, Review.” Kaurab Online. 2008.

• Jonathan Wegner. “Adorno’s Noise. Carla Harryman, Review.” Make Literary Magazine. February 2009.

• Jill Darling. “The Content of Essay Form: On Reading Carla Harryman’s Adorno’s Noise.” How2 Journal, ASU. Volume 3, Number 3. 2010.

• Patrick F. Durgin. “Matches, in Our Time.” School of Art Institute of Chicago. 2008.