Littleton: it's Adorno's fault

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Sep 28 04:37:04 PDT 1999


Hi Jim:
>Is this Adorno, or Reimut Reiche, Yoshie?

That's Curtiss filling out gaps in the quoted passage from _Critical Models_ with what Adorno was doing with Freud and Marx in the post-WW2 period. Since I don't have the book at hand, I go by his judgment.


>I'm a little resistant to your argument because it seems to absolutise a
>homosex position as the ideal point from which all else must be judged.

I'm not saying that at all. While (for me) it's good that Adorno moved on from his pre-war thinking on homosex, I think that a mix of Marx and Freud offered by the Frankfurt School (whether homophobic or homophile) is not compelling.


>Granted that the legend of gay fascism was absurd, is it not conceivable
>that 'non-genital sexuality' could be integrated into capitalism; and
>even that the heterosexual family, as a site that resists regulation,
>could be increasingly out of step with the capitalist norm?

I almost expected you to say that. Hence my anticipation of the Heartfield Thought in my post before this one (and I'm pleased to note that you didn't go so far as to approximate what I feared you might come up with -- phew!). Anyway, was the heterosexual family ever _in reality_ committed to 'genital sexuality,' though?


>>One may refute such musings
>>with all kinds of empirical evidence to the contrary, but fundamentally
>>they can survive empirical challenges with their formalism intact. That's
>>the poverty of left-Hegelian dialectic that I mentioned earlier. In other
>>words, it is an otherworldly dialectic that refuses to be anchored in
>>history.
>
>Perhaps you could explain this last point. I am not sure why Hegel gets
>such a battering from you.

For instance, left-Hegelians take hold of the existing categories of oppositions (homo/hetero, norm/deviance, whatever) and mentally give them a thesis-antithesis movement (while old school left-Hegelians see progress & seek a new synthesis, new-school left-Hegelians reify this oscillation between opposites as a permanent feature of a social text). They seldom ever give empirical support to this dialectical movement of categories mentally conjured up in abstraction. Hence my comment on its otherworldliness. BTW, a left-Hegelian dialectic becomes even more otherworldly when it gets mixed up with Freud, Lacan, or other psychoanalytic thoughts, because psychoanalysis itself resists empirical corroborations and refutations. This is not to say that this habit of thought is never useful; it seems eminently useful and not infrequently productively employed in analyses of _modern_ cultural products (such as novels and cinema).

Now, two questions for the list:

(1) What does a historical materialist analysis of sex, gender, 'sexuality,' etc. look like -- an analysis that is committed to (or fully caught up in) neither empiricism nor left-Hegelianism nor psychoanalysis?

(2) What is a proper mode of employment of dialectical thought in historical materialism? (Neither Diamat nor left-Hegelianism, I hope)

Yoshie



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