-----Original Message----- From: Paul Henry Rosenberg <rad at gte.net>
>It's not difficult
>theory, but clarifying history that is most moving, motivating AND
>informing.
leaving aside the by-now ritualised denunciation of 'difficult theory', often mystifyingly abbreviated to 'theory', and even more mystifyingly, the exemption of those theorists and writers who are difficult yet nonetheless are deemed on 'our side', in the canon.....
Yoshie already wrote of the need for a history of 'the losers' (in Benjaminian terms, to make the dead speak in a language other than that of the victors).
Paul wants history that is clarifying and moving and informing. sure. but this is - dare I say - more difficult than it sounds. Yoshie asked some time back whether or not butler might be thought of as mourning marx's death. aren't we all; or perhaps I should say, the only appropriate stance today is to go through a mourning that would allow us to critique and remember.
there is something hideous about those marxisms which refuse to allow for grieving, or the holding of a wake, drunken or otherwise. they insist, still, on calling up history as a set of souvenirs. Benjamin on souvenirs: "The souvenir is the secularized relic. ... The souvenir is the counterpart of so-called 'experience'. It marks the increased estrangement that consists in drawing up an inventory of one's intimate possessions." against this, Benjamin counseled a remembrance of history, not as celebration, but as 'saving' for a grief beyond restitution and beyond conciliation.
and, whilst I'm on a German thing:
"The forbiddance issued by Hegel's and marx's dialectical theories against depicting utopia smells the betrayal of utopia. Decadence is the nerve centre at which the dialectic of progress becomes ... bodily appropriated by consciousness. Whoever inveighs against decadence inevitably sides with the standpoint of sexual taboos, the violation of which makes up the antinomian ritual of decadence. In the insistence upon these taboos for the benefit of the unity o the nature-dominating I drones the voice of the deceived, unreflective progress. But, progress can therefore be convicted of its own irrationality because it always magically transmutes the means it employs into the ends it isolates. Of course, the counter-position of decadence remains abstract, and this helped bring the curse of ridiculousness upon it. It mistakes the particularity of happiness upon which it necessarily becomes bent for immediate utopia, for realised humankind, while itself being disfigured by unfreedom, privilege and class mastery; it admits to these, yet also glorifies them. The unleashed erotic disposition of its wishful thinking would also be perpetual slavery, like in Wilde's 'Salome'." (Adorno, 'Progress', in Smith (ed) *Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics and History*, Chicago UP, 1989, p. 92)
angela