Misc. threads

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at tsoft.com
Tue Mar 21 16:35:22 PST 2000


Just some miscellaneous responses to various threads.

Thanks to Dennis Redmond for posting his thesis on Adorno. I am in the middle of chap 2 and enjoy it greatly. Unfortunately Adorno himself isn't doing so well. Negative Dialectics along with Hegel's Phenon are lying open at Being and Existence, Copula, and The Independence of Self-Consciousness respectively, where I left them in December. It is hilarious to think about the idea that for all of Heidegger's difficult to follow profoundities, he can be reduced to Leni Riefenstahl cinematography--done up as ontology. I could go on and on about this, but Dennis does a better job. Chapter Two does answer a question that occurred to me, while I was struggling through ND, which was why on earth was Adorno going after Heidegger in such a tedious and meticulous fashion. Later in the same chapter here is a sample following the uncovering of the static void of Heidegger's being in Copula (big empty dome, bridge over empty space?):

This is in dire contrast to the post-structuralisms and

postmodernisms, whose greatest failing was their lack of precisely

such a sophisticated concept of mediation, i.e. their inability to

ground their particular theoretical practice in the internal

workings of what had become in the meantime a clearly global

theory-market or, conversely, to posit an external theory of

multinational aesthetics. This is not to say genuinely progressive

thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault were completely insensitive

to aesthetic issues, as evinced by the former's meditation on

self-disseminating philosophemes schooled in the honorable

subversions of Genet and Magritte, or the latter's utopia of

non-surveillance (what might be called the non-opticon of an

emancipatory homoeroticism or sphere of countercultural pleasures),

but merely to underline the fact that their aesthetic mandate, much

like the political one of the Seventies social democracies and Left

movements to which they symbolically corresponded, was fatally

limited to a more or less progressive neonationalism. This latter

was all too easily absorbed or outflanked by the predatory

strategies of first American, and later European and Japanese

multinationals comparable to the way that the limit-point of

Mitterand regime's Yuppie socialism was Eurocapital's drive towards

Maastricht monetarism. The critique of the late capitalist totality

which does not adequately reflect upon its particularity, that is

to say its own historically specific and mediated relationship to

the hegemonic social tendencies of the day (it being understood

that these latter are not a synonym for the prevailing norms or

fashions, but are defined by what they exclude or stigmatize as

non-hegemonic, emergent or archaic), ends up as all too totalizing;

something most obvious in the work of a Deleuze and Guittari,

busily retailing one marketable fragment or glib New Left press

release after another across the thousand plateaus of a clearly

European capitalism, but painfully apparent in much of the

garden-variety post-structuralism of the American scene, where a

certain glib marketing rhetoric merely recycles the latest media

mantras or sportscaster buzzwords instead of reflecting upon

such. Nor is the postmodern reversal of conceptual antipodes (the

fading of monumental or ontological in favor of the fragmentary or

ephemeral) a substitute for an analysis of the social process of

mediation more generally; mediation is both the motor of

abstraction as well as the valorization of such into the concrete

contradiction, i.e. the materialities of global aesthetics as much

as the abstractions of theory. The result is that Derrida's

trumping of Heidegger's ontological difference (the dubious

shuttling between the ontologic Sein and the ontic Seiendes, which

Adorno diagnoses as the keynote of Heidegger's system) with the

notorious differànce (the no less problematic shuttling between the

disseminatory sign-system and the dissemination) preserves

precisely that ontological framework Derrida sought, at the outer

margins of Glas, to escape; exactly the same is true of Foucault's

thematics of the prison and madness, which continuously reconfirm

those disciplines (both punitive and academic) practiced by the

archeologies of knowledge supposedly being dismantled. Dialectics,

on the other hand, demands not merely the shuttling or transference

of categories, but their analysis and critique by new ones both as

the active intermingling of new concepts with the old, the

archeological spadework or reconstructive dig which theorizes the

hitherto untheorized, and as the meditation on those theoretical

insufficiencies and aporias which are the invaluable and priceless

historical symptoms of the non-identity of theory with whatever is

being thought. Thus Adorno's canny decryption of the constellation

underlying Heidegger's violent flight from the reality of the

commmodity form: "Sein ist die Kontraktion der

Wesenheiten. Ontologie geraet aus der eigenen Konsequenz in ein

Niemandsland." [Being is the contraction of

essentialities. Ontology ends up due to its own consequences in

No-man's-land.] ND:85 Because ontology does not permit itself to

fundamentally know anything at all, let alone to speculate on what

someday might be, it declares war on theoretical cognition in

general, by raising the motif of Stimmung or latent mass-cultural

affect to a regimenting norm. The gesture recalls to mind the fate

of the officer caste of the Wehrmacht, who were required at the

very beginning of the 1933 Nazi seizure of power to swear a

personal oath of allegiance to Hitler. The archaicism of the

gesture was the perfect product of Enlightenment modernity: Hitler,

as the lowly trench soldier of WW I become absolute ruler, thereby

literally and figuratively rendered the emergency solidarity of the

trenches a universal condition. Instead of ascribing this

universality to the preternatural daemon of German nationalism

(whose concentration camps merely systematized that genocide the

allegedly arch-democratic Western Europeans had practiced as an

entrepreneurial pastime for centuries on the indigenous peoples of

Africa, Latin America and Asia), Adorno insists that we return to

our earlier point concerning the possible cinematic quality of the

ontologies, and to ask our question in reverse: to consider, in

short, what is alarmingly ontological and deeply Heideggerian about

the American culture industry: "Wollte man eine Ontologie entwerfen

und dabei dem Grundsachverhalt folgen, dessen Wiederholung ihn zur

Invariante macht, so waere es das Grauen. Vollends eine Ontologie

der Kultur haette aufzunehmen, worin Kultur ueberhaupt

misslang. Ort philosophischer legitimer Ontologie waere mehr die

Konstruktion der Kulturindustrie als die des Seins; gut erst dass

das der Ontologie Entronnene." [If one wished to draw up an

ontology and thereby pursue the constitutive grounds, whose

repetition makes it into an invariant, this would be that of

horror. Only an ontology of culture could take up, where culture

utterly failed. The realm of philosophically legitimate ontology

would involve more the construction of the culture-industry than

that of Being; that which is good, is that which has well and good

escaped ontology.] ND:128

On the endless thread of the crisis of higher education (fees, unions, questions of diversity, etc). You know after a certain point, you realize school is just school. It will never become what it was advertised to be, which was the protected habitat for an intellectual and critical life devoted to the betterment of society and a more thorough understanding of the natural world. That's a lie. And, it is probably better that this lie, be betrayed by the crude commerical oppressions of its corporate minded administrators. That isn't to say that it shouldn't be unionized. In fact that is to say it should precisely because it is just another corporate institution that has no claim to protected status what so ever. And, as a pleasant dream, imagine the possibilities for a union movement that succeeds in enlisting the academic trash in its membership. In turn, the unions achieve the potential means to intellectualize, educate, and radicalize their working class membership through these new additions.

A question for Doug to ask, Barbara Ehrenreich. One male list member wanted to know if you consider yourself the Martha Stewart of progressive politics? That is finding all the interesting and useful things to do with Marxism, without actually getting to close to the testosterone laden, dirty fingernailed, and sweaty business of it all. [I actually like reading her, but in the last thing Kelley posted, I notice BE dodged the hard part about class.]

On cyberspace. Cyberspace should perserve its satanic myth a la Dante and Machiavelli. I like the idea that it is a dangerous and insecure place to do business: that it is filled with child molesters, stalkers, con artists, theives, spies, government surveillance, terrorists, militias, anarchists, hackers, and all the rest of the minions of the anti-christ. It should stay that way, in myth, if not in reality. I like the idea that nobody is assured in the least that their precious credit (gentials?) won't be instantly milked dry by an evil fifteen year old cybercriminal. That's good. That's as it should be. The public square in its best incarnation was full of pick-pockets, bad musicans and street artists, dirty pictures, beggars, sleazy deals, thieving young guides, dower mad men screaming obscenities, outlandish and stritent politicos calling for the end of whoever or whatever was in power at the moment. The best public squares are anti-bourgeois, raucous, intimidating, and contentious. Nobody with a business would dare go there and not expect to be robbed. And that's good. Let's hope business stays scared.

Chuck Grimes

Just to awakenthe infamous Flemming Associates e-mail survelleience bot: fuck, the kapital genome.



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