This may be a bit late, but I just wanted to make a few comments to various folks. ========== Hi Yoshie:
You wrote:
>
> ...but I've come to think that starting with Freud tends to lead
> us along an unnecessary detour. For instance, the passage from _Critical
> Models_ makes perfect sense without our efforts to locate Adorno's
> psychoanalytic-Marxist musings on the "integration of genital sexuality
> into capitalism," etc. One can say 'true' to such musings, one can say
> 'false' to them, one can refuse to make sense of them, one can get
> entertained by them -- any response would do, it seems. In other words,
> they are empty of historical content.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say Adorno's Marx _cum_ Freud account is empty of historical content -- unless you mean that Freud's psychological categories are (allegedly) ahistorical and therefore suspect. Adorno wasn't insensitive to that point: elsewhere in the essay (at work, don't have the book handy), Adorno takes the position that Freud's version of the mind and its drives is correct, but that his assigning normal, healthy status to the genital drives while consigning the partial drives to the realm of pathology was ideological, i.e., the status of particular types of social arrangements, notably the traditional family, had to be defended against even the possibility of something else. I suppose a more through-going (historical?) probe would go on to interrogate the notions of genital/partial drive (and I have to confess I feel slightly embarrassed even typing those phrases), but Adorno stopped his investigations at that point.
I think Adorno's negative dialectic is an historical, materialist one -- but it also puts concepts through an immanent critique. But (again!) since one often has to rummage through Adorno's _oeuvre_ to get an accurate understanding of his position, this can be hard to difficult to see, and *that*, I think, is really the terrible problem with his work. It *is* useful -- but *hard to use*.
"A good pot with a bad handle is a bad pot"? Maybe...
========== Hi Ken (whose posts I've managed to lose):
I'm glad you pointed out Adorno's adversarial relation to Heidegger. I often wonder how much the "jargon of authenticity" continues to infect left politics -- it's eerie to realize that an ideology that helped enable a reactionary, genocidal regime seems to have found a second wind among people who are (or think they are) anything but. But the problem with the ideology of authenticity and commitment isn't its genesis, but its use, for it only seems to enable an ethos and practice of obedience and self-sacrifice. Now, if you want willing cannon-fodder this is terrific, but it seems the left needs the very opposite for the protracted struggle we're now in: individuals who are able to cooperate within loose structures and whose instinct for self-preservation will keep them around long enough so they can become reservoirs of tactical and strategic experience.
I don't see eye-to-eye with you on Adorno's relation to science, though (and my apologies if I misunderstand your position, but I'm working from memories of your posts): I think the target of his attacks on "science" isn't science as such, but the pretensions of certain trends in the social sciences to the objectivity of the hard sciences. There's a passage in "Subject and Object" in _Critical Models_ that led me to think Adorno was a hard realist in a way perhaps few analytic philosophers are (the book isn't handy, sorry). The ambiguities in our knowledge of social and mental processes have to be faced, and neither aping the physical sciences nor denigrating them while raising the sociology of knowledge to an absolute will help that.
========== Hi Dennis:
You wrote:
> It's not that I'm being picky here, it's just that, oh Lord, the global
> Left is in sad-assed shape these days, and we desperately need theoretical
> instruments capable of standing up to the might of the total system.
> Adorno has them, and we gotta learn how they work, reverse-engineer those
> puppies, and dig like Linux-powered moles for the future, because if we
> don't, ain't gonna be no future at all.
I know Ashton's translation of the _ND_ is supposed to be awful, but one of my favorite Adorno quips comes from it: "An idea whose time has come has no time to waste." I think that's true of Adorno today, because I gather that so much of what people felt was gloomy or unreasonable in his thought when his works first appeared has come to pass. But aside from helping to (gulp!) _identify_ these processes as they emerge, I'm not certain what applications Adorno's thought has. You've mentioned you work as an organizer -- do you find applications of Adorno's thought in that work?
-- Curtiss