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.