Was Theodore Adorno a Scnook or a Good Guy?
spino...@my-dejanews.com
Address given at The College of Complexes, Chicago, IL, 4-10-1999
Edward G. Nilges: Copyright 1999
Under and over and behind the back of the founder and janitor of the College
of Complexes, Slim Brundage, a speaker gave a talk long ago, “was Karl Marx a
schnook or a good guy?” Here I will ask this question of Theodore “don’t call
me Ted” Wiesengrund Adorno, that strange and rather ponderous
German/Catholic/Jewish figure of the margins who has since his death in 1970
inspired a miniature Adorno industry in the universities.
Was Teddy Adorno a schnook or a good guy?
Adorno has made to my knowledge only three entrances into the American pop
and pop-literary consciousness: in all of these he is a schnook. Max von
Sydow plays an Adorno-like persona in Woody Allen’s movie Hannah and Her
Sisters. The “underground” cartoonist Robert Crumb (whose vernacular views on
pop music resemble those of Adorno) shows an Adorno-like figure in an episode
of his cartoon “Lenore Goldberg and her Girl Commandos.” Crumb (perhaps
unconsciously) recounts an episode that actually happened in Frankfurt in the
1960s in which some lefties tried to embrace Adorno during a lecture.
Finally, an Adorno-like character appears in Saul Bellow’s collection of
stories Him with his Foot in his Mouth: a rather arrogant mittelEuropische
intellectual who can’t stand the movie MASH, and unfeelingly forces his
Chicago girlfriend to take an unsafe ride in a private plane.
But…let’s look at the word schnook in Adorno’s way. When I read the title of
the old Marx talk, I had not heard the midcentury Yiddish-derived word
schnook for some time: my late mother used to use this word: she was from the
lower West side of New York. Adorno was ponderously dismissive of the slang
and the argot of the underclasses despite his sympathy with the downtrodden:
in this way he was a schnook. In his book Minima Moralia he asks the reader
not to get fooled by Bertolt Brecht’s celebration of the cant of the
gangsters and the touts at the dog track. Adorno writes “to play off workers
dialects against the written language is reactionary” in a direct response to
Brecht. This is interesting, for Brecht has had much more influence than
Adorno on the American left. Despite feminist critiques, which did criticise
the use of sexist argot, it is still an article of faith among American
lefties and especially in Chicago that non-oppressive language has a certain
brutality, and is neither complex nor especially grammatical.
This simple view may have its truth, but it neglects that brutality in
language is also oppressive, and we have to go further. Language that
appears brutal may not, within a community, indicate brutal intentions. In
the city we are often short with each other, and I have my friend Eric Brandt
to remind me how close friends in the city may play the dozens with each
other. Also, argots, whether in Chicago, or in the suburbs of Paris, are
evolving languages with their own rules. Adorno misses the idea that an
argot may have internal laws… just as Adorno’s essay on jazz oversimplifies
the difference between Heartbreak Hotel and Ornette Coleman.
A schnook is a schlemiel or what Gentiles started calling a “nerd” in the
late 1950s. “Language is reality?” Perhaps. I believe that the necessity
of the word corresponded to a new type of urban personality in the 1930s. In
the 19th century one was a member of the bourgeoisie, the upper crust or the
workers. But the possibility of the schnook. the schlemiel or the nerd
implies the possibility for the petty bourgeois and the worker to make
choices within the range permitted by economic reality. Many poor men in the
1930s nonetheless became mensch, and many others made choices that coded them
in the eyes of their betters as schlemiels.
Within the shtetl or the countryside of Ireland it was simply impossible to
make choices that would code one as a schlemiel, at least to the extent that
a word came into being. One simply struggled within such a narrow range of
opportunity that “choices” did not exist. Men were men, the women were glad
of it and the sheep were nervous.
The words schnook, schlemiel and nerd all attempt to cast personality
characteristics which one does not like within oneself onto an Other. These
rather childish moves have in recent years been elevated to serious
philosophical tropes owing to the willed immaturity of baby boomer academics.
Thus, a popular book on ethics, Everyday Ethics, by Joshua Halberstam tells us
that there are categories of moral acts that are praiseworthy (but not
required) and these are the province of the saint, coded in Halberstam as a
praiseworthy (but irritating) personality, and that there are categories that
are stinky but not evil (like failure to tip) and the specialty of the
schlemiel.
This is close to the Roman Catholic casuistry of mortal and venial sin, and
there are a number of difficulties in Halberstam’s breezy account. The
greatest moral teachers have called us to perfection and at the same time
forgiven our worst crimes.
In Washington, DC, in 1981, a plane went into the Potomac because its wings
were not adequately de-iced in a winter storm. A man, later awarded a medal
by the President, dove into the Potomac and rescued several people from the
freezing water. On Halberstam’s account this man was a saint, a different
order of being from you and me. However, the reality was that he was an
ordinary person who decided he was physically able to go swimming in
midwinter (a not impossible feat, speaking from personal experience) and
given the distress of the surviving passengers, there seemed to him no good
reason not to.
An alternative account to Halberstam (closer to Kant) would simply say that
the man was following the dictates of the categorical imperative. If we
simply stood idly by as people died, as indeed we did during the war in
Bosnia, we should not look to be saved when our time comes. Of course, this
selfish reasoning is flawed, and the more important question is whether a
world in which the connection between people was lost would form a coherent
world in which we could reason (like Kant or Halberstam) about ethics at all.
I flatter myself that the above is Adorno-like writing. It jumps around in
what Adorno might (but probably would not) consider atonal fashion. Adorno
was a supporter of the now unpopular twelve-tone system of composition in
which no tonality achieved dominance and Adorno tried, consciously, to
imitate this in writing. As such he did not feel constrained by everday
canonical “relevance” (the prohibition against the introduction of topics
which the reader feels not relevant) although he would deny that he felt
unconstrained by coherence, not confused with communication but instead
operation according to internal laws.
Today we understand by coherent writing and speaking as “reader response”:
the adequate understanding of the text by the listener or the reader. This
view has the merit that it is empirically verifiable. But even on its own
empirical and scientific terms it does not address the possibility of
incomprehension.
As a teacher of computer topics I find that much of what passes for “business
communications” neglects the primary responsibility of communications which is
quite simply to tell the truth. Adorno was a structuralist and not a post-
structuralist because he assumed without too much investigation or theory that
the world has a structure (what he would call the truth of the whole.)
However, much business communication in the post-modern world, vastly more
corporate dominated than Adorno’s world, is spin control.
Now, it is possible to do spin control without hiding the truth: indeed,
Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity is a critique of the idea that it is possible
to communicate “authentically” without spin, an idea popular among the
Existentialist left of his later years. The Jargon of Authenticity used as an
example the small class of well-off German farmers who obtained special tax
treatment by casting themselves, using unconsciously Heideggerian and
existentialist language, as “more” authentic than office workers in German
cities.
Adorno consistently objected to the popular way of speaking of “rootedness”
and “connection” which has a benign face and a dark side. His writings on
“roots” give us a way, for example, of talking about the current crisis in
the former Yugoslavia. Serbian public opinion has been marshaled around the
story of the Serb’s defeat in 1389 in Kosovo at the “Field of the Blackbirds”
and this is intended to silence dialog about more current issues and needs in
Serbia. The problem with this Jargon of Authenticity is that if the fact
that Kosovo Polje is a “holy place” to the Serbs then the claims of groups
pushed out by the Serb’s ancestors at the beginning of the Dark Ages of the
West, the Ostrogoths, have even more fundamental merit…if the rule is, the
older the claim, the more merit it has. Note that this is essentially a
negative critique of positive claims which have had tragic effects, and it is
not a call for giving Serb lands back to the aboriginal inhabitants of SE
Europe, who were, it seems, Celts. It is instead a snappy answer to
dialogues with Serbian supporters, which often are structured around
romantic, even operatic claims which make a rhetorical appeal to the
listener’s feelings of lacking roots.
This notion that passion can be disassembled into a mere Jargon of
Authenticity shows indirectly that spin control and public relations are not
intrinsically wrong and evil, and that their use does not invalidate a claim.
However, both the Jargon and the spin have a responsibility to the truth.
Adorno was unconsciously dedicated to the idea that truth, obtained by
operation according to internal laws, was prior to spin. .In today’s terms
this can be a schnooky view because it seems at least to privilege speakers
who have decided to set the agenda. Adorno reminds us that we are so deluged
with spin that a speaker who combines spin with a prior responsibility to the
truth can disturb the hell out of us, in somewhat the say modern music bugs
people.
To diverge from dominant paradigms is nowadays to be coded as a nerd or as a
schnook.
There is a story about three men, an Englishman, a Frenchman and a German,
each of whom decided to study the camel. The Englishman went to Arabia and
returned, tanned and interesting, after many years living among the Bedouin.
The Frenchman visited the Jardine des Plantes for a few hours and chatted
with the zookeeper. The German locked himself in his study for eight years,
and wrote a ponderous book “The Idea of the Camel as Derived from a General
Theory of the Ego.” (The American, I’d add, shot the camel and the Russian
got drunk and wrote A Nasty Story about a Camel: now that I have offended as
many people as possible I shall continue.)
Adorno was closest to the German although his ethnicity was not what we
consider “German.” His biography displays the independence of culture from
ethnicity and his writings are a protest against marginalization of a culture
based on ethnic criteria, which were to him cognitive failures.
In Adorno, we get instead a figure like that portrayed by Emil Jannings in
the film The Blue Angel: the pre-War (pre-World War I) Herr Professor of the
German village. The Blue Angel, about the downfall of a village professor at
the hands of a circus singer played by Marlene Dietrich, draws upon scorn for
the professoriat in particular and the intellectual in general and at least
on the surface has us poke fun at the professor’s bumbling admiration of the
lovely Lorelei.
This is however a static image. Both Adorno and his near-contemporary, the
film critic Siegfried Kracauer, wrote about how images tend to freeze our
apprehension of social reality precisely because of their static quality. The
popular way of ending a Hollywood movie is the freeze-frame, which tells the
Hollywood story “and they lived happily ever after.” A closer reading of The
Blue Angel and another film in which Emil Jannings starred (The Last Command)
shows that the detail of the pattern is movement and the static image conceals
while it pretends to reveal.
Lorelei, in The Blue Angel, is initially impressed with the Professor’s
defense of her and at the end some viewers may be sympathetic at the
professor, transformed into a clown by the capitalist running the show…in a
conscious or unconscious rendering of the position of the intellectual in
universities and institutions: Adorno describes intellectuals as “the
subordinate half of the dominant class.”
In The Last Command, Jannings plays a Russian general who is captured by
revolutionaries and escapes to Hollywood to play a Russian general. During
his capture, he falls in love with the revolution (personified by a beautiful
revolutionary) but at the end is a defeated man. Again, while no one
viewer’s opinion of a film, not even Jon Rosenbaum’s, is final, some viewers
may be sympathetic with the Jannings persona at the end.
In fine, Adorno is a dead, white North European male whose time has done come
and gone but who realized this himself: this is a man who has written that
philosophy’s moment is the time when it has outdated itself and has written
that it is the philosopher’s job to lose arguments. However, he is one of
stunning intellectual honesty for one main reason. This was not so much the
acknowledgement of suffering, as its negative acknowledgement.
A positive acknowledgement of suffering turns all to ready into an affirmative
search for a redress which turns into revenge. One has only to listen to
Shostakovich for this. In a ponderous, but principled, fashion, Adorno simply
acknowledges suffering and does not hold out the possibility of putting
suffering under erasure.
Now, there has been much suffering in the 20th century and things like
corporate downsizing certainly ranks low in any rational or humane arrangement
of suffering. However, a negative acknowledgement of suffering does not use
league tables or score cards. This is because when one has suffered, the only
reason for desire to arrange one’s experience in a league table is to
affirmatively erase the experience…to get the first place in line.
That is: the postmodern attitude of “don’t worry be happy” would piss Adorno
off. He managed to reject designs for a new order and league tables for one
consistent and principled reason. This was because both moves turned an
essentially negative and critical Enlightenment spirit into a depthless
positivism he considered neo-barbaric.
This post-Enlightenment spirit finds its expression in the computer, at one
and the same time a fulfillment of an enlightenment promise and its negation.
Note the language here, considered irresponsible by Positivism. This is to
say that something is “at one and the same time” black and white.
This is a caricature of dialectical reasoning, which higher education in the
USA tries (in a principled fashion) to eradicate. I cannot responsibly
describe dialectical reasoning because its “meta” language is itself
dialectical and I cannot settle the claims of the one versus the other.
Broadly speaking, dialectical reasoning takes time and phenomena as givens,
and not abstract categories. Dialectical reasoning appreciates that a
statement and its negation can be simultaneously true.
Nondialectical reasoning freezes the world into a collection of facts, and
these facts tend to silently assume a crowd of other facts for their very
meaning: this was a problem that the early Wittgenstein tried, and failed, to
resolve. Nondialectical reasoning, as seen from the works of contemporary
philosopher Martha Nussbaum, can be liberatory because it tends to equalize
concepts (like the claims of the state versus that of the person) that in
some dialectical systems are incommensurable. Nondialectical reasoning, on
the other hand, can also be racist, sexist and classist. For example, a
“fact” could be Columbus’ discovery of America in 1492: a “fact” can be one
of Rush Limbaugh’s lies. At Princeton University, while stuying “the
philosophy of the behavioral sciences” under Gil Harman I learned that to
some cognitive scientists, a “fact” could be a lie printed in the newspaper
under certain controlled circumstances: while Gil Harman was a great teacher
and a very nice person I found this possibility to have Dark Age potential.
However, I have worked for almost 30 years as a software developer.
Dialectical reasoning is useless in my job, indeed pernicious. When a
computer programmer writes a program, she uses Aristotle’s logic, in which
things are affirmatively True or False.
What struck me, however, was how badly this reasoning failed at the threshold
of the computer room. What was “practical” in developing software turned out
to be wildly impractical in even something so humble as getting people to use
the software properly.
The Aristotelean world of the computer assumes, and rightfully so, that the
things represented are true or false. What is missed is that the very
process of representation is not Aristotelean in that it assumes all sorts of
unexamined facts, and this is quite simply a violation of the very rules of
the game.
For example, take a parking ticket. Before Chicago’s massive computerization
of tickets, all sorts of games could be played, from paying off the cop to
paying off the judge. This discriminated massively against people without the
clout of the ruling establishment, and therefore computerizing parking tickets
was on balance progressive.
But it did not address the actual decision to issue the ticket and that
decision remains in the sphere of racial and class inequity. Indeed, it
makes the problem worse if anyone assumes that because the violation is in a
computer it has been accurately recorded. This is what Adorno describes as
the assumption that social tasks are complete, and this illusion is
reinforced by the sado-masochistic precision of technology.
The Year 2000 problem should show us that despite all the gear (what
Heidegger would call the standing reserve) and despite its real value,
Wittgenstein was right when he said “the problems of life remain completely
untouched.” Wittgenstein meant the problems of life as seen by Count Tolstoy,
a popular figure among post-Romantic European youth of his era. But I think
that Count Tolstoy would admit that “the problems of life” are not restricted
to one’s own psychology, and also include systematic deprivation of the
necessities of life.
Even inside something so humble as a computer program, the problem of life in
the simple correspondence of representation with reality is completely
untouched. Indeed, the fact that the technology has no longer to do with
physical reality implies that it multiplies, in geometric fashion, meta-
informational problems, including multiple copies of data base files which
contain different information, multiple copies of programs which have
different and unintended behaviors, and the constant necessity of training
users in these differences.
This increase in complexity often, at the level of the implementers of
technology (who as workers have their own interests in less work and more
pay), results an almost Tolstoyan, but inappropriate, rage for simplicity.
To them, complex (even if true) accounts of a situation on the job inspire,
structurally, the same rage as does atonality in music in concertgoers (and a
Bourdieu would tell us that they two populations are drawn from the same
mittelBourgeois class.)
Offense is given by the complex and the academic in applied computer science
and music, and the relief of a graphical user interface like Microsoft’s
Windows (which was a joke in Silicon Valley for many years) is structurally
the same fast relief provided by Phillip Glass’s music.
It is true that incompetent composers in universities used atonality in order
to fulfill their particular demands of publish or perish and it is true that
charlatans in the early days of computer science used verbosity to conceal and
not reveal. However, a close application of Adorno reminds us that the
initial, Schoenbergian, situation can still apply (although bad money drives
out good, some kopeks may remain.) The hyper-sophistication of “we won’t be
fooled again” can cause the fraud to change his tune, and I again flatter
myself that this almost peasant and Germanic deviousness is again an Adornian
trope.
What is wrong is simple regression, and unfortunately a number of
developments have encouraged regression and caused smart people to fall prey
to regression. The perceived need of corporations to “downsize” and to become
“lean, and mean” was regression. At any time during the 1980s, a job could
have been declared a human right, conditional only on meeting the good-faith
requirements of the job to the best of one’s ability. Instead, precisely at
the moment when (especially on the West coast of the US) new legal doctrines
of job rights were being developed, the 19th century doctrine of “employment
at will” was revived, and what “employment at will” means is that the job is
an arms-length contract revocable for a good reason, a bad reason, or no
reason at all.
This was justified in terms of economic growth and it is true that
quantitatively there are many jobs. Unfortunately, the very empirical,
Aristotelean mechanisms of knowledge manufacture equate these positions with
each other. When we are told to look at the classified ads or the Internet
for the large number of open jobs, we are systematically blinded to the fact
that want ads are texts, and there is no reason to think that there is a
simple and one to one correspondence between want ads and actual available
positions. Even if there were, the existence of many real jobs does not mean,
given the limited length of the working day, that I can support a family on
one, or many jobs.
These are obvious facts and they are, I believe, what Adorno was talking about
when he addressed “the conquest of the thing represented by its
representation.” Adorno’s thought in particular, despite its apparent gaseous
and diffuse quality, has a rigor, like the iron core of Saturn. In the “hard”
sciences, which present themselves as models of intellectual rigor and even
morality in the works of Sir Karl Popper, there are oftentimes straight
confusions between representation and the thing represented, and a complete
failure to self-apply.
Examples abound.
To confuse the sado-masochistic precision of a computer screen with reality
is coded by the media as being rigorous, scientific and with it, but if the
correspondence does not actually obtain (if, say, the person across the
counter has health insurance but the data base is wrong) this pose is the
opposite of what it is coded to be.
Also, computer software development is coded as a rigorous process but anyone
with six months of experience knows that in the pressure of daily development,
rigor is uniformly sacrificed. Not some, but most, computer programs are
logical horrors, and the Year 2000 problem is only one tip of one iceberg.
Many mathematicians resist thoroughgoing self-application, and prefer to
consider systems of mathematics in a way known as “formalist” or “Hilbertian”
in the math racket: this approach is strongly typed and gives no reason for
the mathematician to ever fancy that his calculus has anything to do with the
reality of the use, and the misuse of mathematics. Self-application becomes
“the philosophy of mathematics”, a field thoroughly scorned by the working
mathematician, often a quite anti-intellectual fellow: Saul Bellow tells us
the True Story of a U of C mathematician who told Bellow that he did not like
to go to the library and restricted his reading to journals in his field.
In short, reading Adorno gives a way other than the Brechtian move of simply
drinking oneself to death to critique the enlightened “end of history” on its
own terms: to hold it to its very own protocol statements. It may not get you
out of parking tickets, but it does rebuild critical intellects twelve ways.
It may not get you a job, but it may help to avoid getting sent to the same
interviewer by two different recruiters. It gives an alternative to the
subordinate voice, a language, that has to be accepted by hegemonic discourse
because it underlies hegemonic discourse. It does not ask for special
treatment because one is a Herr Doctor or dead white male: Adorno took a real
job at the Princeton Radio Research project and worked hard for his Depression
paycheck, only to get pushed out because in his intellectual honesty, he felt
that the breezy “empiricism” of its management was actually a theoretical
agenda set by David Sarnoff’s RCA.
The alienation of the knowledge worker (of which Adorno was an early example)
is a reality, although it is not strictly speaking possible to act in the
mindless fashion that alienation requires in a job with any knowledge
component. The cartoon Dilbert illustrates “real contradictions” in the
workplace that result from this alienation. What’s happening in Dilbert: the
company has a genuine need for intellectuals, but social relations also have
to stay the same. The flat and nondialectical choice is to decide between
two horns of the apparent dilemma and become either a slavishly obedient cube
worker or an entrepreneural “alternative” wild kind of guy.
The problem is that if one chooses to be obedient, one’s very obedience will
be used against one, as in the example of the programmer whose skills and
loyalty result only in a layoff in midlife. At the same time, genuine
entrepreneurship and wild man-ism is genuinely threatening to the fortunes of
the “cyberbarons”: recently, a Texas programmer was sued for selling software
he’d developed in his kitchen on his own computer because at the time he was
working a day job, and had signed away his right to develop any software on
his own time.
Now the common response is to either “naturalize” the situation by saying
“’twas ever thus, watchoo goin do”, or to treat the material situation as
completely external to a more important inner authenticity. Both responses
have some merit. But an Adornian response would be to put one’s foot down
and say, no, real contradictions make me crazy. Real contradictions break
families up. Real contradictions are schizophregenic (generative of
schizophrenia.)
Reading Adorno requires a working-class ability to see the reality behind the
ponderous style: a management reader would be puzzled, for example, by the
fact that Adorno was horrified by American tests for elevator operators. A
working class person sees immediately that Adorno was horrified because these
tests weeded out the most intelligent applicants.
Adorno’s critique, as an essentially negative critique, returns to Christian
and Jewish religious roots since Adorno was convinced that a description of
post-revolutionary society was not only difficult: its impossibility was a
principle. He had the Christian notion of redemption but combined with the
iconoclastic spirit of Judaism in which imaging of redemption profanes
redemption. Ultimately, my Adorno would agree that if you meet the Buddha on
the road, kill him. Our century has been one of the image of redemption,
most notably the Marxist imago. The reality is the prohibition of the
wearing of certain hats in factories in Grozny by factory managers terrified
for their own jobs, mutating fifty years later to “relaxed” dress codes in
which all that is permitted is commanded, and if some middle-aged white guy
shows up in a suit, we call security.
Mike Moore, author of “Downsize This!”, calls for working class people to
show up one day a year dressed nice, in a suit or in professional business
attire, in order to (dialectically) assert their dignity, and a friend,
Kanthan Pillay, who grew up in South Africa tells me that his father was a
South Indian musician who was able only to drive a truck in Durban, owing to
apartheid: Kanthan’s father wore a suit every day to go to work. Ultimately,
the appeal of Adorno is that of the combination of mittelBourgeois dignity
and identification with suffering, that acknowledges its own and others with
condign measure.
Passion is popular but its vicious results can be seen on the Jerry Springer
show. Barbara Ehrenreich gets all nostalgic about the Bakhtinian “carnival”
of the demonstration but fails to see how one such Bakhtinian carnival was
the “lynching bee” of the South in which actual existing white working people
relieved their frustrations by hanging black men.
Ultimately there is a dignity in Adorno found also at the end of the violin
concerto of Alban Berg, and this dignity is the negative acknowledgement of
suffering: “Finale: the only philosophy that can be responsibly practiced in
the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would
present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.” Here Adorno does not
look the sun, redemption, in its face, mindful as he is of the fact, simple on
its face, that if the system is the problem the solution is necessarily
external: instead, he looks at all things in the light of the rising sun.
Adorno writes elsewhere that morality is not sexual repression by any means:
it is instead found in such simple statements as there should be no
concentration camps. That is: the standpoint of redemption clears up the
matter of concentration camps, whether today, or in WWII. It silences
chatter about whether they do exist or whether they do not exist, chatter
that devolves into deep and self-contradictory nonsense as it questions
procedures of knowledge production that such chatter depends upon for its
existence. It silences questions internal to the system, such as “he hit me
first” or “he took my ball”, questions that are actually part of the
mechanics of the system. But I realize that as I write these words I
manufacture static images of things internal to the system: even dawn can be
profaned. What we cannot speak of thereupon we must be silent, and I said to
my soul shuddup, and are there any questions.
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own
Puss in Boots
[...[
>Adorno misses the idea that an
>argot may have internal laws… just as Adorno’s essay on jazz oversimplifies
>the difference between Heartbreak Hotel and Ornette Coleman.
[...]
Adorno wrote several essays on jazz -- if there's one that
compares Elvis and Ornette, even simplistically, I'd be
interested to know about it. Maybe you mean that he would have
oversimplified the comparison if it had occurred to him.
>A schnook is a schlemiel or what Gentiles started calling a “nerd” in the
>late 1950s. “Language is reality?” Perhaps. I believe that the necessity
>of the word corresponded to a new type of urban personality in the 1930s. In
>the 19th century one was a member of the bourgeoisie, the upper crust or the
>workers. But the possibility of the schnook. the schlemiel or the nerd
>implies the possibility for the petty bourgeois and the worker to make
>choices within the range permitted by economic reality. Many poor men in the
>1930s nonetheless became mensch, and many others made choices that coded them
>in the eyes of their betters as schlemiels.
A shnook is distinct from a shlemiel -- good thing for you
since only "shnook" has a recent-enough vintage to fit the
theory you've cooked up. "Shlemiel" is an old Yiddish word. I
dunno how old, but old. "Shnook" is 20th c.
> Within the shtetl or the countryside of Ireland it was simply impossible to
> make choices that would code one as a schlemiel, at least to the extent that
> a word came into being. One simply struggled within such a narrow range of
> opportunity that “choices” did not exist.
[...]
Um, no. "Shlemiel" goes back at least to the shtetl -- I
don't see why it wouldn't fit the Irish countryside, but it
was definitely used in the shtetlach. Not that I know Yiddish
-- I just think you should.
>What is wrong is simple regression, and unfortunately a number of
>developments have encouraged regression and caused smart people to fall prey
>to regression. The perceived need of corporations to “downsize” and to become
>“lean, and mean” was regression.
No, it's progress, as any half-bright Marxist would agree
-- including Adorno. This is what capitalism does best:
improving the methods of production, thus reducing -- at least
potentially -- the burden of work.
The sticking point -- as Adorno _does_ observe -- is that
the bourgeoisie don't lighten it. They refuse the
possibility both for themselves and for their workers, leaving
life manacled to work.
>At any time during the 1980s, a job could
>have been declared a human right, conditional only on meeting the good-faith
>requirements of the job to the best of one’s ability. Instead, precisely at
>the moment when (especially on the West coast of the US) new legal doctrines
>of job rights were being developed, the 19th century doctrine of “employment
>at will” was revived, and what “employment at will” means is that the job is
>an arms-length contract revocable for a good reason, a bad reason, or no
>reason at all.
[...]
If you're gonna argue for the human right to wage-slavery,
fine -- but leave Adorno's name out of it, and don't go
saying it's a progressive stance. You're a galley slave upset
because the latest triremes don't require so many rowers.
Adorno would've been amused, if he'd been capable of amusement.
-- Moggin
spino...@my-dejanews.com
mog...@mindspring.com (Puss in Boots) wrote:
> spino...@my-dejanews.com ( Edward G. Nilges):
>
> [...[
>
> >argot may have internal laws… just as Adorno’s essay on jazz oversimplifies
> >the difference between Heartbreak Hotel and Ornette Coleman.
>
>
> Adorno wrote several essays on jazz -- if there's one that
> compares Elvis and Ornette, even simplistically, I'd be
> interested to know about it. Maybe you mean that he would have
> oversimplified the comparison if it had occurred to him.
I mean that Teddy would have foreshortened, and oversimplified, the
comparision, had it been presented to him.
"U\ber Jazz" was published in 1938, twenty years before Elvis, and by the time
of Elvis Adorno had returned to Germany. Because Adorno decided in the late
1930s that jazz was commodified and regressed, he appears to have simply
refused to listen to Elvis or Ornette, and to see the difference, or to see
that Heartbreak Hotel would be a great work had Elvis and his sidemen been
given more time.
>
> >A schnook is a schlemiel or what Gentiles started calling a “nerd” in the
> >late 1950s. “Language is reality?” Perhaps. I believe that the necessity
> >of the word corresponded to a new type of urban personality in the 1930s. In
> >the 19th century one was a member of the bourgeoisie, the upper crust or the
> >workers. But the possibility of the schnook. the schlemiel or the nerd
> >implies the possibility for the petty bourgeois and the worker to make
> >choices within the range permitted by economic reality. Many poor men in the
> >1930s nonetheless became mensch, and many others made choices that coded them
> >in the eyes of their betters as schlemiels.
>
> A shnook is distinct from a shlemiel -- good thing for you
> since only "shnook" has a recent-enough vintage to fit the
> theory you've cooked up. "Shlemiel" is an old Yiddish word. I
> dunno how old, but old. "Shnook" is 20th c.
I'd be interested to know HOW old "schlemiel" is: it has a distinct
twentieth- century ring. The ontological question is whether there were
schlemiels at all in, say, the 18th century. I do not believe there were.
Prior to 1789, aristocrats were the only people able to make full choices and
they were thugs OR paladin/ritters/knights (good guys), not schlemiels or
mensch.
It is possible that Danton (the French revolutionary put to death despite his
crowd appeal) was a mensch and Robespierre was a schlemiel, but the
categories fit only approximately. The terror of death has a tendency to
deconstruct schnookiness/schlemielness: men return from modern war OUTSIDE of
Halberstam's taxonomy, and revert after wartime experience to the
aristocratic taxonomy of ritter/paladin versus mere thug. There are no
schlemiels in foxholes because, at least in my analysis, foxholes present
actual moral chocies, as opposed to the trivial moral choices presented to
Halberstam's Yuppie readerships. Cf. the movie Reservoir Dogs, and notice
how the schlemiel who refuses from ideology to tip the waitstaff evolves into
something far worse than a schlemiel.
>
> > Within the shtetl or the countryside of Ireland it was simply impossible to
> > make choices that would code one as a schlemiel, at least to the extent that
> > a word came into being. One simply struggled within such a narrow range of
> > opportunity that “choices” did not exist.
>
> [...]
>
> Um, no. "Shlemiel" goes back at least to the shtetl -- I
> don't see why it wouldn't fit the Irish countryside, but it
> was definitely used in the shtetlach. Not that I know Yiddish
> -- I just think you should.
>
Schlemiel may go back to the 20th century shtetl but not to the 19th.
> >What is wrong is simple regression, and unfortunately a number of
> >developments have encouraged regression and caused smart people to fall prey
> >to regression. The perceived need of corporations to “downsize” and to become
> >“lean, and mean” was regression.
>
> No, it's progress, as any half-bright Marxist would agree
> -- including Adorno. This is what capitalism does best:
> improving the methods of production, thus reducing -- at least
> potentially -- the burden of work.
While technological advancements do indeed reduce the burden, social
regression causes the advancements to dialectically reverse themselves and
become sources of OVERWORK: cf. Juliet Schor's book The Overworked American.
For example, progressive computer scientists know that "information wants to
be free", and the "open source" revolutions around Linux and Beos make
production source code free. But regressive social arrangements are
reproduced in the idea that certain people, notably Bill Gates, deserve large
financial rewards, and this causes the more regressive Windows operating
system to be adopted by "practical" people whose "practicality" consists in
other-direction (David Reisman's drive to "get along with others"). Since in
part the design of Windows is influenced by Microsoft's financial needs,
there is a tendency to relabel facilities without changing the underlying
technoilogy: a technical example would be Access versus SQL Server, or Active
X versus OLE. This causes unnecessary work.
I agree completely that on the technical plane, it is capitalism and
capitalism alone that reduces the burden of work. However, the technical
plane does not exhaust the range of decisions made around actual jobs.
>
> The sticking point -- as Adorno _does_ observe -- is that
> the bourgeoisie don't lighten it. They refuse the
> possibility both for themselves and for their workers, leaving
> life manacled to work.
Yes, absolutely.
>
> >At any time during the 1980s, a job could
> >have been declared a human right, conditional only on meeting the good-faith
> >requirements of the job to the best of one’s ability. Instead, precisely at
> >the moment when (especially on the West coast of the US) new legal doctrines
> >of job rights were being developed, the 19th century doctrine of “employment
> >at will” was revived, and what “employment at will” means is that the job is
> >an arms-length contract revocable for a good reason, a bad reason, or no
> >reason at all.
>
> [...]
>
> If you're gonna argue for the human right to wage-slavery,
> fine -- but leave Adorno's name out of it, and don't go
> saying it's a progressive stance. You're a galley slave upset
> because the latest triremes don't require so many rowers.
> Adorno would've been amused, if he'd been capable of amusement.
>
Uh, Adorno was influenced by Hegel, and Hegel would define humanity in part
by labor, in the struggle of the Slave with the recalcitrant world. A
simple- minded hope for a future free of work is under the covers a desire
that all people shall be Hegelian Masters, and what this means is an end to
personal self-development. By calling for an end to work you are in my view
calling for an opportunity for everyone to share the personal corruption and
decadence seen over time in the upper crust.
These extreme and fashionable but impotent calls for an end to wage slavery
neatly ignore the possibility of a third way. Real grown ups are scarce these
days, but real grown ups in the 19th century got the 8 hour day because people
need to work but not all the time.
> -- Moggin
Puss in Boots
>>>Adorno misses the idea that an
>>>argot may have internal laws… just as Adorno’s essay on jazz oversimplifies
>>>the difference between Heartbreak Hotel and Ornette Coleman.
mog...@mindspring.com (Puss in Boots):
>> Adorno wrote several essays on jazz -- if there's one that
>> compares Elvis and Ornette, even simplistically, I'd be
>> interested to know about it. Maybe you mean that he would have
>> oversimplified the comparison if it had occurred to him.
Ed:
>I mean that Teddy would have foreshortened, and oversimplified, the
>comparision, had it been presented to him.
>"U\ber Jazz" was published in 1938, twenty years before Elvis, and by the time
>of Elvis Adorno had returned to Germany. Because Adorno decided in the late
>1930s that jazz was commodified and regressed, he appears to have simply
>refused to listen to Elvis or Ornette, and to see the difference, or to see
>that Heartbreak Hotel would be a great work had Elvis and his sidemen been
>given more time.
Elvis is just a cracker on a postage stamp. Still, he did
some good songs, and "Heartbreak Hotel" is one of them. I'm
curious: how would you improve it? I have the same impression
of Adorno you do: he just wasn't listening. His essays on
jazz make some good points about the culture industry, but they
don't say anything about the music they're pretending to
discuss.
Ed:
>>>A schnook is a schlemiel or what Gentiles started calling a “nerd” in the
>>>late 1950s. “Language is reality?” Perhaps. I believe that the necessity
>>>of the word corresponded to a new type of urban personality in the 1930s.
>>>In the 19th century one was a member of the bourgeoisie, the upper crust or
>>>the workers. But the possibility of the schnook. the schlemiel or the nerd
>>>implies the possibility for the petty bourgeois and the worker to make
>>>choices within the range permitted by economic reality. Many poor men in
>>>the 1930s nonetheless became mensch, and many others made choices that
>>>coded themin the eyes of their betters as schlemiels.
Moggin:
>> A shnook is distinct from a shlemiel -- good thing for you
>> since only "shnook" has a recent-enough vintage to fit the
>> theory you've cooked up. "Shlemiel" is an old Yiddish word. I
>> dunno how old, but old. "Shnook" is 20th c.
Ed:
>I'd be interested to know HOW old "schlemiel" is: it has a distinct
>twentieth- century ring. The ontological question is whether there were
>schlemiels at all in, say, the 18th century. I do not believe there were.
>Prior to 1789, aristocrats were the only people able to make full choices and
>they were thugs OR paladin/ritters/knights (good guys), not schlemiels or
>mensch.
I'm not hearing that tintinnabulation, and I don't get
the historical argument. Seems to me you can have shlemiels at
any time or place. And what's it got to do with choices?
Nobody chooses to be a shlemiel: like genius, it's thrust upon
you.
>It is possible that Danton (the French revolutionary put to death despite his
>crowd appeal) was a mensch and Robespierre was a schlemiel, but the
>categories fit only approximately. The terror of death has a tendency to
>deconstruct schnookiness/schlemielness: men return from modern war OUTSIDE of
>Halberstam's taxonomy, and revert after wartime experience to the
>aristocratic taxonomy of ritter/paladin versus mere thug. There are no
>schlemiels in foxholes because, at least in my analysis, foxholes present
>actual moral chocies, as opposed to the trivial moral choices presented to
>Halberstam's Yuppie readerships. Cf. the movie Reservoir Dogs, and notice
>how the schlemiel who refuses from ideology to tip the waitstaff evolves into
>something far worse than a schlemiel.
Good movie, but I don't remember it well enough to go into.
No shlemiels in foxholes makes as little sense to me as no
shlemiels before 1789; ditto for your emphasis on moral choices.
Do you know "shlemiel" and "mensch" aren't antonyms? It's
possible you meant to say "shmuck." A shmuck _is_ the
opposite of a mensch, and if you're talking about shmucks, then
I can why you'd be pushing the moral angle.
On the other hand, "no shmucks in foxholes, "no shmucks in
the shtetl," and "no shmucks before 1789" would still be
ridiculous. Shmucks have been around throughout history. From
the dawn of creation, I've argued before.
Ed:
>>>Within the shtetl or the countryside of Ireland it was simply impossible to
>>>make choices that would code one as a schlemiel, at least to the extent that
>>>a word came into being. One simply struggled within such a narrow range of
>>>opportunity that “choices” did not exist.
Moggin:
>> Um, no. "Shlemiel" goes back at least to the shtetl -- I
>> don't see why it wouldn't fit the Irish countryside, but it
>> was definitely used in the shtetlach. Not that I know Yiddish
>> -- I just think you should.
Ed:
>Schlemiel may go back to the 20th century shtetl but not to the 19th.
Sure does. Yiddish is hundreds of years old, and
"shlemiel" isn't a recent coinage -- that's why I suggested you
use "shnook" instead.
Ed:
>>>What is wrong is simple regression, and unfortunately a number of
>>>developments have encouraged regression and caused smart people to fall prey
>>>to regression. The perceived need of corporations to “downsize” and to become
>>>“lean, and mean” was regression.
Moggin:
>> No, it's progress, as any half-bright Marxist would agree
>> -- including Adorno. This is what capitalism does best:
>> improving the methods of production, thus reducing -- at least
>> potentially -- the burden of work.
Ed:
>While technological advancements do indeed reduce the burden, social
>regression causes the advancements to dialectically reverse themselves and
>become sources of OVERWORK: cf. Juliet Schor's book The Overworked American.
Well of course -- that's why I said _potentially_, and why
I went on to point out that in practice the burden isn't
lightened. You don't have to bring in dialectical reversals to
understand that. Eliminating jobs is progress. It means --
at least in theory -- that more people can work less. But that
progress is erased when a person who loses a job has to
search out other work.
[...]
Moggin:
>>
>> The sticking point -- as Adorno _does_ observe -- is that
>> the bourgeoisie don't lighten it. They refuse the
>> possibility both for themselves and for their workers, leaving
>> life manacled to work.
Ed:
>Yes, absolutely.
Great. So then downsizing isn't regressive -- eliminating
jobs is all to the good. The problem is that it leaves
workers without an income in a society where even food, clothes
and shelter all cost dough.
Ed:
>>>At any time during the 1980s, a job could
>>>have been declared a human right condition, only on meeting the good-faith
>>>requirements of the job to the best of one’s ability. Instead, precisely at
>>>the moment when (especially on the West coast of the US) new legal doctrines
>>>of job rights were being developed, the 19th century doctrine of “employment
>>>at will” was revived, and what “employment at will” means is that the job is
>>>an arms-length contract revocable for a good reason, a bad reason, or no
>>>reason at all.
Moggin:
>> If you're gonna argue for the human right to wage-slavery,
>> fine -- but leave Adorno's name out of it, and don't go
>> saying it's a progressive stance. You're a galley slave upset
>> because the latest triremes don't require so many rowers.
>> Adorno would've been amused, if he'd been capable of amusement.
Ed:
>Uh, Adorno was influenced by Hegel, and Hegel would define humanity in part
>by labor, in the struggle of the Slave with the recalcitrant world.
Of course Adorno was influenced by Hegel -- but he doesn't
follow Hegel on every point. Besides, we're talking about
life under capitalism: not the definition of humanity. Adorno
is always careful to distinguish the two, even if you're
inclined to conflate them; he and Horkheimer also criticize the
domination of nature.
>A simple- minded hope for a future free of work is under the covers a desire
>that all people shall be Hegelian Masters, and what this means is an end to
>personal self-development. By calling for an end to work you are in my view
>calling for an opportunity for everyone to share the personal corruption and
>decadence seen over time in the upper crust.
I'll take one Mad Ludwig over any ten working-class heroes
spouting human-development rhetoric and offering moral
homilies as a substitute for reason -- luckily, you're the only
one I've met.
Not that it matters -- your re-statement of the Protestant
work ethic is beside the point. In the hypothetical future
we're discussing, you would be free to work as much as you felt
necessary to defend against your corrupt nature.
>These extreme and fashionable but impotent calls for an end to wage slavery
>neatly ignore the possibility of a third way.
Extreme, yes -- in this political climate, any proposition
of meaningful change is extremism. Too bad that scares you
off. Fashionable, you're kidding. Potent, of course not. But
then the powerless are "the negative embodiment within the
negativity of this culture of everything which promises,
however feebly, to break the dictatorship of culture and put an
end to the horror of pre-history." They represent "the only
hope that fate and power will not have the last word." (Adorno,
"Spengler After the Decline," _Prisms_ 72.)
>Real grown ups are scarce these
>days, but real grown ups in the 19th century got the 8 hour day because
>people need to work but not all the time.
People have no need to be compelled to work. They do have
a need for freedom -- or some of them do. A minority, I'm
thinking. Most are like you. Adorno would claim that's merely
an historical contingency -- the nature of things in a time
when workers stop their ears to freedom's siren-song, while the
the bourgeoisie give a listen only after making sure that
they're safely tied to the mast. But then our Teddy was famous
for his optimism.
-- Moggin
Gerry Quinn
>While technological advancements do indeed reduce the burden, social
>regression causes the advancements to dialectically reverse themselves and
>become sources of OVERWORK: cf. Juliet Schor's book The Overworked American.
>
>For example, progressive computer scientists know that "information wants to
>be free", and the "open source" revolutions around Linux and Beos make
>production source code free. But regressive social arrangements are
>reproduced in the idea that certain people, notably Bill Gates, deserve large
>financial rewards, and this causes the more regressive Windows operating
>system to be adopted by "practical" people whose "practicality" consists in
>other-direction (David Reisman's drive to "get along with others"). Since in
>part the design of Windows is influenced by Microsoft's financial needs,
>there is a tendency to relabel facilities without changing the underlying
>technoilogy: a technical example would be Access versus SQL Server, or Active
>X versus OLE. This causes unnecessary work.
>
I have to jump in here to point out that Windows is more useful and indeed
cheaper to the average computer user than Linux. Open source software is
written by programmers for programmers, and the tedious business of
creating easy-to use interfaces, installers etc. tends to be ignored. To want
to do that stuff, you need to get paid.
- Gerry Quinn
spino...@my-dejanews.com
The bellhop's tears keep fallin'
The desk clerks' dressed in black
They been so long on lonely street
They ain't never coming back
"Heartbreak Hotel" is disproportionate to its theme which is being on "Lonely
Street" for a LONG time. It's disproportionate because the song is
physically so short. Heartbreak Hotel, if it is indeed as it starts out to
be a cry of pain against a society which uses loneliness (of youth and the
aged especially) in a disciplinary fashion, needs then to redress the
silencing by riffing out and howling for a while.
But instead it stops short as a consequence NOT of any of its internal demands
but as a marketing and (45 rpm) format decision.
This may seem absurd and this may seem an unfashionable "analysis." I don't
care. What passes for fashionable thinking includes refusal to analyse art
out of a misguided notion that one gets it or one doesn't...actually the
mystification of the commodity as applied to art.
>
> Extreme, yes -- in this political climate, any proposition
> of meaningful change is extremism. Too bad that scares you
> off. Fashionable, you're kidding. Potent, of course not. But
> then the powerless are "the negative embodiment within the
> negativity of this culture of everything which promises,
> however feebly, to break the dictatorship of culture and put an
> end to the horror of pre-history." They represent "the only
> hope that fate and power will not have the last word." (Adorno,
> "Spengler After the Decline," _Prisms_ 72.)
It appears that you use the superficial New (now actually old) left reading of
Adorno which confuses him with Brecht and with Marcuse.
You do not appear to understand how the very atonality of Adorno's thought and
its use of the constellation shows how New-Old Left thinkers naturalized
constructed categories such as work versus leisure.
Work is a term that makes sense only in contrast to leisure. A society free
of work does not therefore make sense because it implies an helot class by
definition nonexistent.
This superficial mode of thinking produces such monstrosities as the American
mall with its celebration of free consumption that is staffed by people forced
on pain of loss of homes to come into work on Sunday morning.
The only remaining zone of the New old left with any social sense, the
feminist wing, has pointed out that the reproduction of society implies some
sort of work at the very least in the form of child care.
spino...@my-dejanews.com
ger...@indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn) wrote:
> In article <7f2pso$pbi$1...@nnrp1.dejanews.com>, spino...@my-dejanews.com
wrote:
>
> >regression causes the advancements to dialectically reverse themselves and
> >become sources of OVERWORK: cf. Juliet Schor's book The Overworked American.
> >
> >For example, progressive computer scientists know that "information wants to
> >be free", and the "open source" revolutions around Linux and Beos make
> >production source code free. But regressive social arrangements are
> >reproduced in the idea that certain people, notably Bill Gates, deserve large
> >financial rewards, and this causes the more regressive Windows operating
> >system to be adopted by "practical" people whose "practicality" consists in
> >other-direction (David Reisman's drive to "get along with others"). Since in
> >part the design of Windows is influenced by Microsoft's financial needs,
> >there is a tendency to relabel facilities without changing the underlying
> >technoilogy: a technical example would be Access versus SQL Server, or Active
> >X versus OLE. This causes unnecessary work.
> >
>
> cheaper to the average computer user than Linux. Open source software is
> written by programmers for programmers, and the tedious business of
> creating easy-to use interfaces, installers etc. tends to be ignored. To
want
> to do that stuff, you need to get paid.
This response has a structure which is frequently encountered in debates of
the relative merits of various forms of art and technology.
Strcuturally, the response usually starts with a Fanfare for the Common Man.
It starts by assuming, in a strong fashion, the existence of a reified
"ordinary end user who just wants to get a job done" or "average museum or
concert goer."
The pseudo-democratic character of this move masks a real elitism for the
structural move assumes that statistically the average case or the median
case or the modal case is the deciding case in a political sense. The very
fact that mathematically THREE methods (average, mean and mode) can be used
to determine the case MEANS that the case does not self-decide by a neutral
method that is above politics.
In the case of computer use, the Fanfare for the Common Man starts with an
initial and an elitist falsification. It assumes that the ordinary user JUST
wants to get a job DONE.
For example, my boss at Princeton University (a very nice lady who as my boss
in particular was characterized by an almost saint-like patience) used a
variant of this Fanfare for the Common Man. She said: "Ed, you must remember
the sort of user we often have here, a humanities graduate student who is
upset because the printer won't print her dissertation."
On the face of it this is very democratic and it is rude to diverge from it in
any way...even sexist in actual cases. Nonetheless, it places AT THE CENTER a
personality type constructed by essentially wrong social forces in the form of
the tenure system and the systematic exploitation of graduate students. It
substitutes institutional needs (for the need to produce dissertations on
command is institutional) for personal needs.
To merely cater to the false consciousness of this personality type is to feed
an authoritarianism that often infects the personality itself.
Windows' ease of use is a mystification. It SEEMS easier to use but it is
NOT easier to use even if "getting my job done" is indeed the employee's only
motivation (and it is not: for the idea that it is ignores the possibility
that "working less for more money" may be a more heartfelt motivation.)
For example: generations of TV watching cause people to code the visual,
especially the attractive and the colorful, as easier to work with and
therefore people are presented with essentially unsorted lists of files: the
fact that the list is a list of images is supposed to make it easier to find a
file. This is nonsense. The text telephone book is actually easier to search
using a common sense form of binary search.
Making a person aware of the actual RULES of binary search in the form of
training that person to write a binary search program (even in Visual Basic,
that tool of Satan :-)) is in some small way liberatory for it teaches a man
to fish. But note that the people who sound The Fanfare for the Common Man
often also tell the person who has struggled to code a program for binary
search, "oh, that's nice, but we done got data bases and dey do dat for you
and you don't need to do dat ennymore." That is: supporters of closed source
consciously or unconsciously replicate ideological training in the form of
management-speak: "buy don't make." "Buy don't make" is deeply informed by
further ideology in the form of the economic "truth" of "the law of
comparative advantage" such that every group, variously defined, should
specialise in ONE form of production. This "law" is nonsense and it
manufactures the degradation of the Third World: details on application.
The overuse of glitzy images in Windows actually gets in the way of effective
and especially correct task accomplishment. Adorno, thirty years prior to
modern day computation, addressed what he called "the triumph of
representation over what is represented" and describes how statistical
abstractions (like the famous pinhead men of statistical imaging) are used as
substitute for thought.
Whereas a refreshing feature of the early days of computation (the now-distant
era of the People's Computer Company of Menlo Park, etc) was how the new media
forced focus on issues in a new way. For example, text-based political games
written in old-style Basic for Dec pdp-8s actualy allowed people to make
decisions in a political sense and seriously explore their consequences.
Whereas today the very use of images in political simulations allows the
designers of the images to set the agenda at a deep level. One contemporary
political game, SimCity, encapsulates by this means the white suburbanite's
vision of what an effective city is like (one that denies welfare to inner
city people and allows companies tax breaks in order to foster "growth"
defined as jobs for white suburbanites.) SimCity does this by using sound
bites and images familiar to white suburbanites: for example, heavy traffic
causes a half- second sound of a traffic helicopter reporting heavy road use.
This half second sound kills, without discussion and without argument, the
very idea of a person without a car who is therefore more concerned with
whether the subway is operating.
Groups of the handicapped have pointed out that the increasingly three-d and
colorful nature of the GUI in Windows 98 has effectively excluded differently
abled people in favor of a statistical abstraction, "the ordinary computer
user." At Baxter-Travenol in the 1970s, a blind programmer started work and
a simple change to the printer on the bad old mainframe (coded as evil and
regressive) enabled him to function effectively. There is no way such a
person would be able to function at the same level in Windows 98.
Open source at least allows deep and radical changes to the presumptions of
the computer system. The very idea that it is some sort of evil plot
fostered by programmers is at odds with the notion (often held,
paradoxically, by the opponents of open source) that programming is a low
level skill: on the face of it, at least, programming is EITHER difficult to
master arcana held by a priesthood OR it is something we all can do.
>
> - Gerry Quinn
Josh Soffer
"This response has a structure which is frequently encountered in
debates of the relative merits of various forms of art and technology.
Strcuturally, the response usually starts with a Fanfare for the Common
Man. It starts by assuming, in a strong fashion, the existence of a
reified "ordinary end user who just wants to get a job done" or "average
museum or concert goer."
The pseudo-democratic character of this move masks a real elitism for
the structural move assumes that statistically the average case or the
median case or the modal case is the deciding case in a political sense.
The very fact that mathematically THREE methods (average, mean and mode)
can be used to determine the case MEANS that the case does not
self-decide...."
What I find most notable in a political analysis of culture of the sort
you apply is that it depends on a form of conditioning notion, that
ideology is shaped, formed, dictated by structures of commodification.
What this does not seem to make room for is the fact that
economic-corporate structures depend on a set of languages, or what
Lyotard would call regimes of phrases, which are only a few among a vast
repertoire of culutral languages. Corporate interests cannot control
what they do not understand, anymore than poetic or scientific forms of
discourse can simply impose themselves on and condition corporate modes
of discourse. The so-called hegemonic power interests of the economic
elite only appear that way when we have failed to examine more closely
the basis of this power. To do so would be to recognize that no singular
discourse core exists, that it is split into an infinity of
sub-languages. Within any so-called dominant culture there would be a
million sub-cultures with their own regimes of phrases. That is, with a
multiplicity of worldviews that only from a distance appears to us as a
unified hegemony of ideology.
I'm curious as to your attitude toward thinkers like Deleuze, Foucault
and Lyotard. While in my view they have retained a remnant critical
theoretic 'power' notions, I see them as having achieved a
poststructuralist vantage more sophisticated than that of Adorno. How do
you see their relation to his work?
-------------------------------------------------------
Josh Soffer: http://www.inergy.com/joshsoffer/welcome.html
Josh Soffer
"This response has a structure which is frequently encountered in
debates of the relative merits of various forms of art and technology.
Strcuturally, the response usually starts with a Fanfare for the Common
Man. It starts by assuming, in a strong fashion, the existence of a
reified "ordinary end user who just wants to get a job done" or "average
museum or concert goer."
The pseudo-democratic character of this move masks a real elitism for
the structural move assumes that statistically the average case or the
median case or the modal case is the deciding case in a political sense.
The very fact that mathematically THREE methods (average, mean and mode)
can be used to determine the case MEANS that the case does not
Puss in Boots
[...]
>It appears that you use the superficial New (now actually old) left reading
>of Adorno which confuses him with Brecht and with Marcuse.
I don't think I'm confused about Adorno at all. But since
you feel differently, show me where I'm confused and then
straighten me out -- alternatively, go back to my last post and
take up the discussion where you dropped it. Right now the
misunderstanding seems to be yours.
>You do not appear to understand how the very atonality of Adorno's thought
>and its use of the constellation shows how New-Old Left thinkers naturalized
>constructed categories such as work versus leisure.
See above. And you meant denaturalized, or I hope you did.
>Work is a term that makes sense only in contrast to leisure. A society free
>of work does not therefore make sense because it implies an helot class by
>definition nonexistent.
By definition of what? Doesn't matter. We're not talking
about "a society free of work" -- we're talking about a
society where the _necessity_ of work is removed, or reduced to
a minimum. That doesn't eliminate work: it makes work a
choice rather than a necessity.
>This superficial mode of thinking produces such monstrosities as the American
>mall with its celebration of free consumption that is staffed by people forced
>on pain of loss of homes to come into work on Sunday morning.
Not at all. You're the one who thinks people should be
compelled to work lest they succumb to "personal corruption and
decadence." I'm the one saying to hell with that. It's a
clash of values: the Protestant work ethic vs freedom. But we
may be able to find common ground. You object that some
people are "forced on pain of loss of homes to come into work
on Sunday morning." Just apply that thought to the rest of the
week.
> The only remaining zone of the New old left with any social sense, the
> feminist wing, has pointed out that the reproduction of society implies some
> sort of work at the very least in the form of child care.
Good example. The fight for reproductive freedom has been
a central part of feminism. What it comes down to is the
right to _not_ reproduce and the ability to make reproduction a
choice. On your thinking, that's "personal corruption and
decadence." You would opt for a "third way" that permits women
to stop reproducing after a reasonable number of kids, just
like you're willing to let workers go home after they've put in
the required eight hours.
-- Moggin
spino...@my-dejanews.com
>
> [...]
>
> >It appears that you use the superficial New (now actually old) left reading
> >of Adorno which confuses him with Brecht and with Marcuse.
>
> I don't think I'm confused about Adorno at all. But since
> you feel differently, show me where I'm confused and then
> straighten me out -- alternatively, go back to my last post and
> take up the discussion where you dropped it. Right now the
> misunderstanding seems to be yours.
Adorno, within his wordy style, appears to me to have more structure than
Fromm, Brecht or Marcuse. I may be mistaken on Fromm, Brecht or Marcuse owing
to lack of familiarity, but Adorno seems to do a better job of preserving a
memory of culture versus a flat call for replacement of old culture by
something new.
Adorno cannot therefore provide an ideology to calls for a future free of
work la la la. Instead he deconstructs the very contrast between work and
leisure by pointing out in Minima Moralia that the intellectual and the
artist does not deal with a construction of work versus leisure.
>
> >You do not appear to understand how the very atonality of Adorno's thought
> >and its use of the constellation shows how New-Old Left thinkers naturalized
> >constructed categories such as work versus leisure.
>
> See above. And you meant denaturalized, or I hope you did.
Sorry to disappoint you but the new old left retained the naturalized
categories and therefore their future was nonsense on simultaneously the
cognitive and the ethical plane (one of my interests is "deep" nonsense, which
is my term of art for nonsense that is simultaneously unethical and self-
contradictory: Adorno's guiding text here is "intelligence is a moral
category.")
By naturalizing work and leisure, the new old left wanted a future free of
"work" understood as bourgeois. However, bourgeois leisure subsumes, but
does not exhaust, the reproduction of the world, an activity with value if
the world has value. At least SOME white-collar labor is needed to
coordinate physical labor. The labor theory of value therefore IMPLIES that
the new old left vision, of a future freed of work, IMPLIES exploitation, and
this is one of the points made by feminists. La la la sitting around and
drinking beer, which was on the ground "leisure" since the categories were
not denaturalized, becomes the exploitation of Mama who must see to the
reproduction of the kids.
>
> >Work is a term that makes sense only in contrast to leisure. A society free
> >of work does not therefore make sense because it implies an helot class by
> >definition nonexistent.
>
> By definition of what? Doesn't matter. We're not talking
> about "a society free of work" -- we're talking about a
> society where the _necessity_ of work is removed, or reduced to
> a minimum. That doesn't eliminate work: it makes work a
> choice rather than a necessity.
By definition, however, work contains an element of compulsion. Work as free
choice is self-contradictory and does not get done. Work is called work
because work sucks, and part of the reason work sucks is that it presents
itself as part of Hegel's recalcitrant world, materialised in the alarm clock.
What I am saying, as inspired by Adorno as opposed to Brecht (who according at
least to Paul Johnson caused a lot of personal damage owing precisely to the
self-contradictory nature of his thought), is that it is true that work versus
leisure has to be re-thought, but a reversal simply reproduces the real misery
of the bourgeois understanding of work (as seen in the mall on Sunday morning,
with its dialectic of fatassed Baby Boomers effectively exploiting Generation
Xers who must report to suck jobs at 8 AM.)
Perhaps I am misguided. Perhaps I have a prole understanding of leisure such
that my real vision of leisure is sitting in a goddamn bar lighting Winstons
and sucking Budweiser. This is, however, I now see to be exploitation of the
bartender (if only because he has to suck my side stream smoke.) Perhaps YOU
have some high clawss idea of leisure that does not exploit. You must let us
in on this form of leisure.
My vision is closer I think to Marx in which man would be a herder of goats
in the morning, a farmer in the afternoon, and a literary critic in the
evening. In all of these activities, man would be working in a sense that
would preserve the memory of exploitation but he would be exploited, not by
Goats Inc., Agrisuck Inc., or Literary Criticism Is Us, but BYT THE STRUCTURE
OF THE TASK.
The goats would present real issues such as baby goats. The farm would
present real issues such as where is the manure. The criticism would present
a third set of issues such as why does this novel blow and suck. These
issues would be defined NEITHER by the solipsism of the man himself, NOR by a
task master. They would instead be implicit in the nature of goat hood,
argiculture, and criticism.
Adorno never "got with the program" of the bourgeois which is to DENY, in the
face of reality, that there are any issues not dissolvable using the cash
nexus. The bourgeois in the typical picture looks at the abstract painting in
the museum and says Mon Dieu mon cing-foot high keed could do zat. The
bourgeois thinks instead that Norman Rockwell worked hard to make an isomorph
of reality.
The reality is quite the reverse. Anyone who has actually engaged in
painting knows it is HARDER, by an order of magnitude, to do abstract work
than it is to do "realist" work...once the technical tricks of the latter
have been mastered (and at least since the "camera obscura" of the 17th
century these tricks have been readily available through the cash nexus.)
Anyone who has studied dance knows that it is HARDER to invent an abstract
dance than either to engage in mimesis (as in "me is a snowflake now") or
reproduce unconscious motivation.
And in reality the New England of Rockwell was a total fantasy EVEN in the
1950s.
Adorno thought, silly man, that musical composition is actually HARD, not
because it must please the concertgoer with tastes debased by labor in the
counting house but because it was the following of freely chosen (but
nonetheless determinate) rules.
>
> >This superficial mode of thinking produces such monstrosities as the American
> >mall with its celebration of free consumption that is staffed by people
forced
> >on pain of loss of homes to come into work on Sunday morning.
>
> Not at all. You're the one who thinks people should be
> compelled to work lest they succumb to "personal corruption and
> decadence." I'm the one saying to hell with that. It's a
> clash of values: the Protestant work ethic vs freedom. But we
> may be able to find common ground. You object that some
> people are "forced on pain of loss of homes to come into work
> on Sunday morning." Just apply that thought to the rest of the
> week.
>
My vision is of a society in which work is a temporary contract, and implicit
in this notion is my promise to appear on the job site at such and such a
time. As Derrida reminds us, implicit in a promise is a LACK of free will. I
may promise on Monday to get my ass to the job site on Tuesday at 6 AM but
when I wake up on Tuesday I may emit a great hollow groan at the thought of
my immediate peril of having to haul ass. My freedom has dialectically
changed into its opposite.
Note that your vision is one of the superficial cafe, but MINE has, I flatter
myself, that uniqueness which is a sign of truth: for my vision combines
intellectuality of a peculiar nature with proletarian knowledge such as my
grandfather could deliver from the grave: "work sucks." The fact that reading
Derrida CONFIRMS that work, AT ONE AND THE SAME TIME sucks and is necessary
confirms both the suck nature of work and the truth of Derrida.
This is caricatured as "The Protestant Ethic." African Americans invented
hard work in the 17th century without having to be Protestants, for African
Americans built the infrastructure of Colonial America WITHOUT the rewards
that flowed, surprise surprise, to Protestant northern Europeans. Irish
Americans learned how to work in America WITHOUT pulling the long faces that
their Protestant brethern thought necessary: for us Irishmen developed the
very idea of work hard and play hard. It is rather arrogant to characterise
"hard work" as necessarily either capitalist or Protestant. People have
worked hard since the dawn of time. It may be said instead that capitalism
and Protestantism invented, not hard work, but instead working hard at
bullshit tasks, like stock jobbing. But that wouldn't be very nice.
> > The only remaining zone of the New old left with any social sense, the
> > feminist wing, has pointed out that the reproduction of society implies some
> > sort of work at the very least in the form of child care.
>
> Good example. The fight for reproductive freedom has been
> a central part of feminism. What it comes down to is the
> right to _not_ reproduce and the ability to make reproduction a
> choice. On your thinking, that's "personal corruption and
> decadence." You would opt for a "third way" that permits women
> to stop reproducing after a reasonable number of kids, just
> like you're willing to let workers go home after they've put in
> the required eight hours.
While I support reproductive freedom at a deep level (both the freedom NOT to
parent, and the freedom to parent into a world safe for children and other
living things, in which welfare and work are available), nonetheless it is
simple minded to treat child rearing as a choice. The brutal truth is that
they don't call them rug rats for nothing and children can present demands
that DESTROY sensitive people (like me.) Nonetheless one reproduces their
precious little asses on a daily basis, not because one has CHOSEN but
because, as Derrida writes, responsibility to others is a categories that
precedes our rights.
Responsibility to others precedes our precious rights because a world in which
there was no responsibility to others would be one in which there were no
rights. Anything else is deep nonsense in my term of art.
Nicholas Montserrat wrote "we have no rights, only responsibilities" and
although this is strictly untrue it is a snappy answer to these simple-minded
calls for mah rights (to have kids and not support them, to drive 90 MPH,
etcetera) which we hear all the time in America. Fortunately, ordinary people
in America don't need to read Derrida to have the common sense and decency to
know that while they have inalienable rights they also have responsibility to
others. It's us goddamn intellectuals that are at risk.
Puss in Boots
>>>It appears that you use the superficial New (now actually old) left reading
>>>of Adorno which confuses him with Brecht and with Marcuse.
mog...@mindspring.com (Puss in Boots):
>> I don't think I'm confused about Adorno at all. But since
>> you feel differently, show me where I'm confused and then
>> straighten me out -- alternatively, go back to my last post and
>> take up the discussion where you dropped it. Right now the
>> misunderstanding seems to be yours.
Ed:
>Adorno, within his wordy style, appears to me to have more structure than
>Fromm, Brecht or Marcuse. I may be mistaken on Fromm, Brecht or Marcuse owing
>to lack of familiarity, but Adorno seems to do a better job of preserving a
>memory of culture versus a flat call for replacement of old culture by
>something new.
You've got a habit of projecting yourself onto Adorno. He
doesn't share your views on work (you won't find him saying
it's necessary to ward off "personal corruption and decadence")
and he isn't wordy. I guess it might seem that way,
especially if you were just glancing at the pages: he has that
German fear of the tab key which results in page-long
paragraphs. And some of his books are fairly thick, especially
the late ones. But most of the time he writes in neatly
composed aphorisms, like Nietzsche. You're the one who runs on
at the mouth.
>Adorno cannot therefore provide an ideology to calls for a future free of
>work la la la.
Of course he could. Not that he does, exactly: "a future
free of work la la la" is a caricature. One that you can't
seem to do without. But "preserving a memory of culture" is no
obstacle to calling for "something new."
For both Adorno and Marcuse, the hoped-for new world would
be a fulfillment of what they wanted most to preserve.
Although it would be more accurate to say that what they valued
most in culture were the moments that preserved a memory of
the world yet to come; the ones that made a space for the world
that isn't within the limits of the one that is.
>Instead he deconstructs the very contrast between work and
>leisure by pointing out in Minima Moralia that the intellectual and the
>artist does not deal with a construction of work versus leisure.
You seem to have forgotten what we're talking about -- let
me remind you. You called eliminating jobs "regressive."
You also suggested that a job was or ought to be a "human right."
Ordinarily I'd have ignored that kind of nonsense, but you
stuck Adorno's name on it, and he had some very different ideas.
As I said, any half-bright Marxist would know that getting
rid of jobs is _progress_. Improving the methods of
production means more work can get done by less people. Result:
more people can do less work. A step out of the realm of
necessity and toward the realm of freedom.
Unfortunately, bourgeois society refuses to take that step.
It could use the massive improvements in productivity to
erase poverty and lighten the burden of work for everyone. But
that hasn't been the case: even the 40-hour workweek came
only with a fight. Life remains chained to work, and "leftists"
argue for a human right to more of the same.
I'm just repeating what I said before, since you erased it
without a cogent reply. I finished by saying, "You're a
galley slave upset because the latest triremes don't require so
many rowers. Adorno would've been amused, if he'd been
capable of amusement." You called me simple-minded and claimed
that people need to work. I answered:
People have no need to be compelled to work. They do have
a need for freedom -- or some of them do. A minority, I'm
thinking. Most are like you. Adorno would claim that's merely
an historical contingency -- the nature of things in a time
when workers stop their ears to freedom's siren-song, while the
the bourgeoisie give a listen only after making sure that
they're safely tied to the mast. But then our Teddy was famous
for his optimism.
You still haven't replied, except to insist that I'm
misunderstanding Adorno. But I'm working right from _Dialectic
of Enlightenment_. We're in the middle of ch 1:
[Ddysseus] knows only two possible ways to escape. One of
them he prescribes for his men. He plugs their ears with
wax, and they must row with all their strength. Whoever
would survive must not hear the temptation of that which
is unrepeatable, and he is able to survive only by being
unable to hear it. Society has always made provision for
that. The laborers must be fresh and concentrate as they
look ahead, and must ignore whatever lies to the side.
They must doggedly sublimate in additional effort the
drive that impels toward diversion. And so they become
practical. --The other possibility Odysseus, the
seigneur who allows the others to labor for themselves,
reserves to himself. He listens, but while bound
impotently to the mast; the greater the temptation the
more he has his bonds tightened -- just as later the
burghers would deny themselves happiness all the more
doggedly as it grew closer to them with the growth of
their own power. What Odysseus hears is without
consequence for him; he is able only to nod his head as a
sign to be set free from his bonds; but it is too late;
his men, who do not listen, know only the song's danger
but nothing of its beauty, and leave him at the mast in
order to save him and themselves. They reproduce the
oppressor's life together with their own, and the
oppressor is no longer able to escape his social role.
The bonds with which he has irremediably tied himself to
practice, also keep the Sirens away from practice: their
temptation is neutralized and becomes a mere object of
contemplation -- becomes art. The prisoner is present at
a concert, an inactive eavesdropper like later
concertgoers, and his spirited call for liberation fades
like applause. ...
_Dialectic of Enlightenment_ 34
Ed:
>>>You do not appear to understand how the very atonality of Adorno's thought
>>>and its use of the constellation shows how New-Old Left thinkers naturalized
>>>constructed categories such as work versus leisure.
Moggin:
>> See above. And you meant denaturalized, or I hope you did.
Ed:
>Sorry to disappoint you but the new old left retained the naturalized
>categories and therefore their future was nonsense on simultaneously the
>cognitive and the ethical plane (one of my interests is "deep" nonsense, which
>is my term of art for nonsense that is simultaneously unethical and self-
>contradictory: Adorno's guiding text here is "intelligence is a moral
>category.")
Adorno was explicitly sympathetic with the New Left, up to
and definitely not including the moment it tried to borrow
some of his office space. That's when he called the cops. But
before then he said, "It is only in the recent past that
traces of a counter-tendency have begun to appear, among a
whole variety of groups of young people: resistance to blind
conformism, freedom to chose one's goals rationally, disgust at
the existence of a world of cheating, and an idea, an
awareness of the possibility of change." He was uncertain what
the effects would be, but clearly he approved the spirit.
According to Rolf Wiggershaus, Adorno's receptive attitude
to the New Left matched with an idea he was developing at
around the same time (this is 1968), namely that "class confict
had become latent and was being displaced toward the margins
of society." (_The Frankfurt School_ 627 -- the quote above is
on 628; primary sources are "Late Capitalism or Industrial
Society?" and "Notes on Social Conflict Today," an article that
Adorno wrote with Ursula Jaerisch.)
>By naturalizing work and leisure, the new old left wanted a future free of
>"work" understood as bourgeois. However, bourgeois leisure subsumes, but
>does not exhaust, the reproduction of the world, an activity with value if
>the world has value. At least SOME white-collar labor is needed to
>coordinate physical labor. The labor theory of value therefore IMPLIES that
>the new old left vision, of a future freed of work, IMPLIES exploitation, and
>this is one of the points made by feminists. La la la sitting around and
>drinking beer, which was on the ground "leisure" since the categories were
>not denaturalized, becomes the exploitation of Mama who must see to the
>reproduction of the kids.
It's annoying when you repeat mistakes that I've corrected.
One more time: we're not discussing "a future free of work"
but a future where the necessity of work is removed, or reduced
to a miminum. In positive terms, we're talking -- or I am --
about freedom. That doesn't imply exploitation, but rather the
end of exploitation, especially in the forms of slavery and
wage-slavery. Nobody "must see to the reproduction of the kids"
since no one is required to procreate: it's optional.
Ed:
>>>Work is a term that makes sense only in contrast to leisure. A society
>>>free of work does not therefore make sense because it implies an helot
>>>class by definition nonexistent.
Moggin:
>> By definition of what? Doesn't matter. We're not talking
>> about "a society free of work" -- we're talking about a
>> society where the _necessity_ of work is removed, or reduced to
>> a minimum. That doesn't eliminate work: it makes work a
>> choice rather than a necessity.
Ed:
>By definition, however, work contains an element of compulsion. Work as free
>choice is self-contradictory and does not get done. Work is called work
>because work sucks, and part of the reason work sucks is that it presents
>itself as part of Hegel's recalcitrant world, materialised in the alarm clock.
Not so: the definition of work doesn't require it to have
"an element of compulsion." I checked the dictionary -- no
such necessity. You may be compelled to work or you might work
by choice: either is possible. And no, work doesn't
necessarily suck. It often does, of course, but then sometimes
it doesn't. Depends who you are, what you're doing, etc.
[...]
>Adorno never "got with the program" of the bourgeois which is to DENY, in the
>face of reality, that there are any issues not dissolvable using the cash
>nexus. The bourgeois in the typical picture looks at the abstract painting in
>the museum and says Mon Dieu mon cing-foot high keed could do zat. The
>bourgeois thinks instead that Norman Rockwell worked hard to make an isomorph
>of reality.
You're behind the times -- nowadays the bourgeosie line up
by the thousands to admire abstract art. The Pollock
retrospective was just the latest example -- it's been going on
for decades.
[...]
>>>This superficial mode of thinking produces such monstrosities as the
>> American>mall with its celebration of free consumption that is staffed by
>>>people forced on pain of loss of homes to come into work on Sunday morning.
Moggin:
>> Not at all. You're the one who thinks people should be
>> compelled to work lest they succumb to "personal corruption and
>> decadence." I'm the one saying to hell with that. It's a
>> clash of values: the Protestant work ethic vs freedom. But we
>> may be able to find common ground. You object that some
>> people are "forced on pain of loss of homes to come into work
>> on Sunday morning." Just apply that thought to the rest of the
>> week.
Ed:
>My vision is of a society in which work is a temporary contract, and implicit
>in this notion is my promise to appear on the job site at such and such a
>time. As Derrida reminds us, implicit in a promise is a LACK of free will. I
>may promise on Monday to get my ass to the job site on Tuesday at 6 AM but
>when I wake up on Tuesday I may emit a great hollow groan at the thought of
>my immediate peril of having to haul ass. My freedom has dialectically
>changed into its opposite.
>Note that your vision is one of the superficial cafe, but MINE has, I flatter
>myself, that uniqueness which is a sign of truth: for my vision combines
>intellectuality of a peculiar nature with proletarian knowledge such as my
>grandfather could deliver from the grave: "work sucks." The fact that reading
>Derrida CONFIRMS that work, AT ONE AND THE SAME TIME sucks and is necessary
>confirms both the suck nature of work and the truth of Derrida.
Yep, you flatter yourself -- this time explicitly, usually
by implication, and rarely with good cause. Your "vision"
isn't the least unique -- as you present it here, it's merely a
libertarian view. You're welcome to it.
> This is caricatured as "The Protestant Ethic."
Hardly. You argue against freedom and in favor of work on
grounds that a good dose of work is necessary to prevent
"personal corruption and decadence" -- granted, that does sound
cartoonish, but I didn't make you a comical figure. You did
that without much help from me. I just quoted you and supplied
the relevant caption.
>African Americans invented
>hard work in the 17th century without having to be Protestants, for African
>Americans built the infrastructure of Colonial America WITHOUT the rewards
>that flowed, surprise surprise, to Protestant northern Europeans. Irish
>Americans learned how to work in America WITHOUT pulling the long faces that
>their Protestant brethern thought necessary: for us Irishmen developed the
>very idea of work hard and play hard. It is rather arrogant to characterise
>"hard work" as necessarily either capitalist or Protestant. People have
>worked hard since the dawn of time. It may be said instead that capitalism
>and Protestantism invented, not hard work, but instead working hard at
>bullshit tasks, like stock jobbing. But that wouldn't be very nice.
How could "people have worked hard since the dawn of time"
when "African Americans invented hard work in the 17th
century"? You aren't suggesting that the world was created in
the 1600's, are you? Oh, nevermind. You could have saved
your breath: I didn't "characterise 'hard work' as necessarily
either capitalist or Protestant." Read again.
Ed:
>>>The only remaining zone of the New old left with any social sense, the
>>>feminist wing, has pointed out that the reproduction of society implies
>>>some sort of work at the very least in the form of child care.
Moggin:
>> Good example. The fight for reproductive freedom has been
>> a central part of feminism. What it comes down to is the
>> right to _not_ reproduce and the ability to make reproduction a
>> choice. On your thinking, that's "personal corruption and
>> decadence." You would opt for a "third way" that permits women
>> to stop reproducing after a reasonable number of kids, just
>> like you're willing to let workers go home after they've put in
>> the required eight hours.
Ed:
>While I support reproductive freedom at a deep level (both the freedom NOT to
>parent, and the freedom to parent into a world safe for children and other
>living things, in which welfare and work are available), nonetheless it is
>simple minded to treat child rearing as a choice. The brutal truth is that
>they don't call them rug rats for nothing and children can present demands
>that DESTROY sensitive people (like me.) Nonetheless one reproduces their
>precious little asses on a daily basis, not because one has CHOSEN but
>because, as Derrida writes, responsibility to others is a categories that
>precedes our rights.
Um, no. You're not required to have children; not unless
you're Catholic, anyhow. It's a choice. You can decide to
procreate or not -- babbling about Derrida doesn't change that.
[...]
>Nicholas Montserrat wrote "we have no rights, only responsibilities" and
>although this is strictly untrue it is a snappy answer to these simple-minded
>calls for mah rights (to have kids and not support them, to drive 90 MPH,
>etcetera) which we hear all the time in America. Fortunately, ordinary people
>in America don't need to read Derrida to have the common sense and decency to
>know that while they have inalienable rights they also have responsibility to
>others. It's us goddamn intellectuals that are at risk.
Here in the U.S. we don't constantly hear about the right
to drive 90 MPH -- we hardly ever hear about it at all.
That's a shame. The interstates are engineered for high speed
driving, but trying it can put you behind bars. Same on
local roads. We live in an administered society where the law
of the land is, "Slow Down!"
Having kids and not supporting them also isn't claimed as
a right -- it's just standard procedure. The unquestioned
consensus, in the U.S. and elsewhere, is that one has children
and then puts them on the labor market when they reach the
age of majority, give or take a few years. It's barbaric, but
as Adorno knew, these are barbarous times.
-- Moggin
spino...@my-dejanews.com
>
> >>>It appears that you use the superficial New (now actually old) left reading
> >>>of Adorno which confuses him with Brecht and with Marcuse.
>
> mog...@mindspring.com (Puss in Boots):
>
> >> I don't think I'm confused about Adorno at all. But since
> >> you feel differently, show me where I'm confused and then
> >> straighten me out -- alternatively, go back to my last post and
> >> take up the discussion where you dropped it. Right now the
> >> misunderstanding seems to be yours.
>
> Ed:
>
> >Adorno, within his wordy style, appears to me to have more structure than
> >Fromm, Brecht or Marcuse. I may be mistaken on Fromm, Brecht or Marcuse
owing
> >to lack of familiarity, but Adorno seems to do a better job of preserving a
> >memory of culture versus a flat call for replacement of old culture by
> >something new.
>
> You've got a habit of projecting yourself onto Adorno. He
Possibly: it may be, however, that there is a habit of superficial reading
that merely scans for "magic words" and for attitudes struck. Your
superficial reading of Adorno may have convinced you that he's one with
Brecht, Fromm and Marcuse. I hope to show the "iron core" of Adorno and that
this thinker is a gas giant unlike the others.
> doesn't share your views on work (you won't find him saying
> it's necessary to ward off "personal corruption and decadence")
From the passage "Little Hans" (Minima Moralia, Adorno 1974), Adorno writes:
"The intellectual, particularly when philosophically inclined,
is cut off from practical life: revulsion from it has driven
him to concern himself with so-called things of the mind. But
material practice is not only the pre-condition of his existence,
it is basic to the world which he criticises in his work. If he
knows nothing of this basis, he shoots into thin air."
Although a superficial search of Adorno for keywords does not locate the
syntax "personal corruption and decadence", fundamental to the above passage
is a moral/cognitive (but nonbourgeois) demand upon the intellectual to
realize two things:
* Material existence as reproduced by work is a physical precondition
of his intellectual life
* The intellectual is decadent/corrupted in "shooting off into thin
air" when uninformed about material reality
The demand, here, to connect to a material basis is AT ONE AND THE SAME TIME
moral and cognitive ("intelligence is a moral category.") Adorno was careful
not to use keywords that would confuse the reader into believing he was
making moral homilies but he did not share the simple-minded amorality that
passes for a vernacular Left ethics (that was Brecht.) Adorno was closer to
Leon Trotsky (Trotsky/Delaney 1971) in that he felt that bourgeois morality
was an empty calculus under which self-interest operated.
My thesis is that Adorno's biography (cf. Wiggershaus 1995) is relevant to his
thought and mistaken readings of Adorno conflate him with Brecht (as I believe
you do) because of lack of sensitivity to the Adorno bio. It appears that
Brecht, despite his professed sympathy for the workers was himself on balance
an exploiter, especially of women, whereas it appears from the Adorno bio that
as opposed to being a bum, the guy got a real job at the Princeton Radio
Research project and later when the Frankfurt institute was reestablished in
the 1950s in Germany.
The facts are not in dispute: what I find interesting and unnoticed by
academic commentators is how this biography affects the thought, especially
in Minima Moralia.
The passage in Minima Moralia that shows that Adorno deconstructed the work-
leisure binarism is also revealing.
"Few things separate the mode of life befitting an intellectual
from that of the bourgeois than the fact that the former acknowledges
no alternative between work and recreation."
Focusing first on the language, note the use of words like befitting, as
translated. The original German and the translation APPEAR to use a slightly
out of date phrasing which appears over and over in Adorno, and this is to use
language which COMBINES cognitive and ethical judgements. Since my German is
so weak I welcome either refutation or support on this issue.
Contemporary language divides words into words expressing pure logical
implications and pure logical relations, versus words expressing emotional
connections. Thus we do not say that a mode of life befits a role in life.
We say (when in the pure logic mode) that a mode of life is a consequence of
a role of life and specifically in America we try to advance FINANCIAL
reasons for the connection.
"I drive a Lexus because I yam a lawyer and I make enuf money and it is a
rice rocket known to be reliable." Not "I drive a lexus because its somber
dignity befits my station in life." Fortunately, the widespread knowledge
that driving a car, in and of itself, damages the environment irreversibly
has drained ownership of an expensive car of the moral and social dignity
which is possessed for bourgeois in Adorno's 1940s.
"I send money to the Albanians because I am sorry for their plight."
Suspending the (obvious) judgement on the morality of owning a car versus the
Yugoslavian situation, the point is that the language of "befit", precisely
like the music of Beethoven, has departed the speech of the bourgeois
themselves because it is necessary (given obvious facts including the fact
that the NorteAmerican life-style is destroying the planet) to sharply
separate one's moral language from one's cognitive language...lest one be
brought to account. There is no "befits", and no combination of moral and
cognitive and English words like "condign" (to be performed with dignity)
have fallen out of the language...although it is simple minded to say, for
example, that the Jerry Springer show FORGETS condign, for the very fights
are an Hegelian attempt to reassert the material basis of dignity. There are
instead "feelings" and cash.
> and he isn't wordy.
I guess it might seem that way,
> especially if you were just glancing at the pages: he has that
> German fear of the tab key which results in page-long
> paragraphs. And some of his books are fairly thick, especially
> the late ones. But most of the time he writes in neatly
> composed aphorisms, like Nietzsche. You're the one who runs on
> at the mouth.
It was obvious in my original passage that Adorno is wordy in relation to
debased contemporary standards which owing to something that Adorno named as
an "industrial bottleneck" of the information era (the necessity of
downsizing speech so that, literally, the stupidest person at the meeting
gets it), demand of "clear" speech that it be "short" rather than adequate to
the intent of the speaker. Again, you receive contemporary categories which
Adorno tried to undermine as givens: work ugh leisure yay, and wordy boo and
terse yay.
Adorno simply did not say me hate work and me like leisure, he undermined the
boundary in the passage I quoted. Nor was he a fan of terse speech at all
costs and like Mozart in Amadeus would claim to be writing, not "too many
notes", but instead just enuf.
A number of translators and editors of Adorno including that of a recent
translation of Aesthetic Theory (Hullot Kentor 1997) have expressed
exasperation with our boy's style, not because they judged it bad or good on
some nonexistent absolute scale but because in material reality (notably with
respect to computer representations, which slyly place a cash value on each
word that did not exist in Adorno's era) Adorno presented them, or their
dogsbodies, with practical problems.
Without being lured in neobrutal style into a defense of unnecessary prolixity
(which is your unconscious goal given that you reason with received
categories), I will state the obvious, and that is that paragraph breaks, and
frequent ones, are a part of the current, received canon of writing.
>
> >Adorno cannot therefore provide an ideology to calls for a future free of
> >work la la la.
>
> Of course he could. Not that he does, exactly: "a future
> free of work la la la" is a caricature. One that you can't
> seem to do without. But "preserving a memory of culture" is no
> obstacle to calling for "something new."
>
Of course, we agree on the goal in large measure. You want a future free of
bourgeois work, with its surplus repression (as in, for example, the old-
fashioned dress code, and time restrictions that have nothing to do with the
task content) and so do I. But I indicate that prior to bourgeois work there
existed the reproduction of existence.
> For both Adorno and Marcuse, the hoped-for new world would
> be a fulfillment of what they wanted most to preserve.
> Although it would be more accurate to say that what they valued
> most in culture were the moments that preserved a memory of
> the world yet to come; the ones that made a space for the world
> that isn't within the limits of the one that is.
>
Sounds fine.
We need to address this claim that I yam one of the elect but most people's
thinking is determined by social conditions. This, a text that underlies the
thinking of the AngloAmerican left, is one of the reasons for its lack of
effectiveness. Actually, in the passage I quoted on the material basis of
intellectual work, Adorno criticised the facile assumption of the leftist
college professors that their tenure does not blind them to social reality or
their exploitation (seen clearly at Harvard and Yale, and in the resistance of
"liberal" faculty to graduate student unionization) of weaker players.
Determination of vernacular thought is presented as an either-or proposition
because of AngloAmerican academic indoctrination into binary thinking. The
possibility is that determination is both partial and empirical. The
possibility is also that the media, controlled as it is by private interests,
amplifies and distorts signals in private thoughts.
Actual accounts of actual people with actual jobs, including an out of print
Penguin book, collectively written in the 1970s by the editors of, if memory
serves, the New Left Review, and Studs Terkels' book Working show that
ordinary folks want NEITHER a world free of work in the sense that an
invisible helot class maintains the computers (which is what we're going
towards) NOR more of the same commodified "jobs." Early Yugoslavia was, it
appears, a socialist demiparadise precisely because ordinary kids had the
opportunity to get rousted out of bed at an ungodly hour to build dams.
Automation of boring tasks is basically a goal I support, but one reason I
support it is that it PRODUCES the need for software and hardware
maintenance, another task. However, simple-minded calls for freedom from
work that do not deconstruct the work-leisure binarism produce an invisible
helot class, such as will not be attending the milleniusm
celebrations...because they will be fixing the Y2K bug. Anti-work can also
be the failure to recognize the worker.
What ordinary people DON'T want is old-fashioned "welfare" with its scorn for
and suspicion of the poor. Malcolm X, in his autobiography, makes it clear
that he found even the (more generous than today) provisions demeaning and
insulting because they were linked with systematic abuse of the recipients by
a white welfare bureaucracy, and part of his attraction, early in life, to
the Nation of Islam was in the dignity and self-help of its members. But
this does not imply at all that Malcolm wanted today's system, for the racist
abuse continues (one has to apply to get an application to apply) but the
amounts paid are pitifully small and disappearing.
Superficial readings of Adorno, in which the intellectual is convinced that he
sees and the poor deluded canaille do not, play into a neoconservative
backlash. Unlike Brecht, Adorno did not go around TELLING people that he had
insight and they did not (which is, it should be noted, a typical male-to-
female transmission). He simply had the goddamn insight.
Wiggershaus, no fan of Adorno, relates nonetheless that the TYPISTS at the
Princeton Radio Research project found his work interesting and sympathetic
because the TYPISTS were also information workers as opposed to anti-work
administrators.
>
> It's annoying when you repeat mistakes that I've corrected.
> One more time: we're not discussing "a future free of work"
> but a future where the necessity of work is removed, or reduced
> to a miminum. In positive terms, we're talking -- or I am --
> about freedom. That doesn't imply exploitation, but rather the
> end of exploitation, especially in the forms of slavery and
> wage-slavery. Nobody "must see to the reproduction of the kids"
> since no one is required to procreate: it's optional.
Both Barbara Ehrenreich and Andrea Nye (feminist scholar) point out that
these calls for an end to work ignore the undone social tasks. At the end of
the former's book Fear of Falling she does not criticise the middle class so
much as being work obsessed as structuring work so that it wastes time on
tasks that benefit the few when so much remains undone. The highways are
fixed but the elevated trains fall into disrepair. Andrea Nye points out
that the increasingly degraded environment will demand more, and not less,
work.
Your claim seems to be that there is something called work and it is
unnecessarily made necessary by bourgeois society. I claim instead that there
is (1) the necessary reproduction of society and (2) surplus repression.
>
>
> Not so: the definition of work doesn't require it to have
> "an element of compulsion." I checked the dictionary -- no
> such necessity. You may be compelled to work or you might work
> by choice: either is possible. And no, work doesn't
> necessarily suck. It often does, of course, but then sometimes
> it doesn't. Depends who you are, what you're doing, etc.
Visits to the dictionary don’t settle arguments because the dictionary merely
reports usage, and if you agree that bourgeois society infects our thinking
about work then the dictionary definition does not represent the nature of the
case.
“Work sucks” as a text can have radically different meanings. It can mean
that the boss is nice but the task is boring: it can mean that the boss is a
tyrant but the tasks are interesting: it can mean both. And of course it
goes much deeper than that. The task can simultaneously suck and be
interesting. A boring task that if messed up causes a lot of problems is
interesting in the sense of the Chinese curse: “may you live in interesting
times.”
>
> [...]
>
> >Adorno never "got with the program" of the bourgeois which is to DENY, in the
> >face of reality, that there are any issues not dissolvable using the cash
> >nexus. The bourgeois in the typical picture looks at the abstract painting
in
> >the museum and says Mon Dieu mon cing-foot high keed could do zat. The
> >bourgeois thinks instead that Norman Rockwell worked hard to make an isomorph
> >of reality.
>
> You're behind the times -- nowadays the bourgeosie line up
> by the thousands to admire abstract art. The Pollock
> retrospective was just the latest example -- it's been going on
> for decades.
While recently mass taste has arrogated Modernist moves, it does so for
economic reasons and in its own way. First of all, Modernismus can be more
easily faked and therefore Modernist moves are often used to save money in
films and other arts. Secondly, authoritarianism usually infects false
Modernismus.
People flock to Pollock because of the high cash value of his paintings: the
museums have through corporate sponsoship been able to generate attendance on
the part of people who suffer from a combination of attraction to art (for
some of their admiration is genuine, and elicited by the quality of the work)
and attraction to the Yuppie life-style. Whereas better artists (Lee Krasner
in opposition to her husband Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein in opposition
to Andy Warhol) are ignored. Note, finally, that in the two terms I have
suggested, the successful artists Pollock and Warhol present a significantly
more authoritarian face to the audience. Lee Krasner’s affirmative paintings
are not the loud and authoritarian statements of her quondam husband:
Lichtenstein plays with the history of art in a manner that is anti-
authoritarian, whereas Warhol set up an authoritarian Factory that used
terror and drugs to motivate the actual producers of his overrated Brillo
boxes.
>
> [...]
>
> Yep, you flatter yourself -- this time explicitly, usually
> by implication, and rarely with good cause. Your "vision"
> isn't the least unique -- as you present it here, it's merely a
> libertarian view. You're welcome to it.
That’s just nonsense, because there WOULD be compulsion in my set up of the
work system. If you make a commitment you have to keep it.
>
>
> Um, no. You're not required to have children; not unless
> you're Catholic, anyhow. It's a choice. You can decide to
> procreate or not -- babbling about Derrida doesn't change that.
William F. Buckley writes that “anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the
liberal”, and he is right. Nothing in Catholic teachings require people to
have children, and in contemporary American society, the pressure to form
normal families comes from the Protestant religious right. One aspect of this
is the persecution of Catholic priests on trumped-up charges of nonexistent
child abuse, recently in the case of a failed attempt on the reputation of
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin in Chicago.
This sally replicates an anti-Catholic slur such that it implies that
Catholics are slobs with too many kids. This slur effectively started the
persecution of Albanians in Kosovo in the 1980s since it repeats the
biological lie that a community is out to get your community by overwhelming
it with rug rats.
Catholic doctrine teaches that people are perfectly free to refrain from
having kids, by being celibate, by being in Josephit marriages, or by joining
holy orders. This facile liberal slap at the Catholics has been too long
popular in universities.
>
> Here in the U.S. we don't constantly hear about the right
> to drive 90 MPH -- we hardly ever hear about it at all.
> That's a shame. The interstates are engineered for high speed
> driving, but trying it can put you behind bars. Same on
> local roads. We live in an administered society where the law
> of the land is, "Slow Down!"
Anybody who drives to work knows that this is nonsense. One feature of the
administered world is its use of contradiction to ensure that people (who can
be so readily criminalized by contradictory laws and expectations) are quiet
about social conditions.
Therefore there are really TWO sets of rules, which contradict, and do so for
a reason. One is that one must keep up with traffic, and traffic usually
goes faster than the speed limit. The other is that one must drive at or
below the speed limit. The second, contradictory rule, is increasingly
enforced as corporations "create jobs" by getting tax abatements, and local
communities become speed traps in order to balance the books.
The interstates were NOT designed for high speed driving. The adminiistered
world of the 1950s designed the system for ease of internal communication in
the event of an invasion, AND as part of the disciplined mobilisation of
everyday life. The deliberate destruction of public transit (especially in
the case of the Los Angeles streetcar system) caused many people to buy cars
and to, on a level of false consciousness, see only the potential "freedom"
of no longer having to adhere to a time table.
The phenomenological reality is that only technically were the highways
designed for high-speed driving. In a very real sense, the highways were
designed for men to put out orange drums, and I am not trying to be funny:
for it is an illusion to think of the highway as pure technology. It is part
of an interstate system which has an interest in preserving its budget and
which is not under market discipline. It is very possible that (given the
unmet needs of public transit) highways are over-maintained for the
high-speed driver. Whereas a few rough spots do not hurt the 55mph driver,
the modal driver (a "normalised deviant" to use a concept of Diane Vaughn)
supports continual overmaintenance through the political process. This
dialectically reverses an illusory freedom into the shackles of the traffic
jam and is met with unacknowledged (and therefore uncontrolled) rage.
Giles Peaker
wrote:
I'm sorry, but this counts as a worthwhile comment? Brecht is bad because he
leeched off others, Adorno is good because he had a proper job? Please. For
all of Brecht's personal faults, he did espouse a model of production (and
reception) which was based on a critical collective construction of meaning.
(The alienation effect, for instance? Remember that?). Adorno, meanwhile,
hated the Princeton project precisely because it asked him to become a
processor of statistics. It is one of of his models for the 'damaged life'
of Minima Moralia. Incidentally, Walter Benjamin never had a 'proper job'.
Is he a 'bum' (sorry, but this has a very different meaning in Britain).
>
> The facts are not in dispute: what I find interesting and unnoticed by
> academic commentators is how this biography affects the thought, especially
> in Minima Moralia.
>
> The passage in Minima Moralia that shows that Adorno deconstructed the work-
> leisure binarism is also revealing.
>
> "Few things separate the mode of life befitting an intellectual
> from that of the bourgeois than the fact that the former acknowledges
> no alternative between work and recreation."
>
> Focusing first on the language, note the use of words like befitting, as
> translated. The original German and the translation APPEAR to use a slightly
> out of date phrasing which appears over and over in Adorno, and this is to use
> language which COMBINES cognitive and ethical judgements. Since my German is
> so weak I welcome either refutation or support on this issue.
>
Exactly, within a totalised capitalist society, leisure is no different to
work, in its structure and in its reduction of subjectivity to repetition of
an already established order. Both are equally damaged. Moggin is not, at
least as far as I can tell, arguing for leisure, but freedom - this is a
very different thing. Removal of necessity is vital to freedom, a
fundamental point in Marx. In late capital, leisure is as compulsory as
work.
> Contemporary language divides words into words expressing pure logical
> implications and pure logical relations, versus words expressing emotional
> connections. Thus we do not say that a mode of life befits a role in life.
> We say (when in the pure logic mode) that a mode of life is a consequence of
> a role of life and specifically in America we try to advance FINANCIAL
> reasons for the connection.
>
> "I drive a Lexus because I yam a lawyer and I make enuf money and it is a
> rice rocket known to be reliable." Not "I drive a lexus because its somber
> dignity befits my station in life." Fortunately, the widespread knowledge
> that driving a car, in and of itself, damages the environment irreversibly
> has drained ownership of an expensive car of the moral and social dignity
> which is possessed for bourgeois in Adorno's 1940s.
And the effects of this knowledge are noticable where? Swarms of lawyers on
bicycles?
> "I send money to the Albanians because I am sorry for their plight."
> Suspending the (obvious) judgement on the morality of owning a car versus the
> Yugoslavian situation, the point is that the language of "befit", precisely
> like the music of Beethoven, has departed the speech of the bourgeois
> themselves because it is necessary (given obvious facts including the fact
> that the NorteAmerican life-style is destroying the planet) to sharply
> separate one's moral language from one's cognitive language...lest one be
> brought to account. There is no "befits", and no combination of moral and
> cognitive and English words like "condign" (to be performed with dignity)
> have fallen out of the language...although it is simple minded to say, for
> example, that the Jerry Springer show FORGETS condign, for the very fights
> are an Hegelian attempt to reassert the material basis of dignity. There are
> instead "feelings" and cash.
But Adorno points this out, in Minima Moralia and elsewhere. Sentiment is
not morality. Sentiment is the accompaniment of exchange. (As, one might
add, is self improvement through work. Work is not the same as labour, or
even production).
>> and he isn't wordy.
> I guess it might seem that way,
>> especially if you were just glancing at the pages: he has that
>> German fear of the tab key which results in page-long
>> paragraphs. And some of his books are fairly thick, especially
>> the late ones. But most of the time he writes in neatly
>> composed aphorisms, like Nietzsche. You're the one who runs on
>> at the mouth.
>
> It was obvious in my original passage that Adorno is wordy in relation to
> debased contemporary standards which owing to something that Adorno named as
> an "industrial bottleneck" of the information era (the necessity of
> downsizing speech so that, literally, the stupidest person at the meeting
> gets it), demand of "clear" speech that it be "short" rather than adequate to
> the intent of the speaker. Again, you receive contemporary categories which
> Adorno tried to undermine as givens: work ugh leisure yay, and wordy boo and
> terse yay.
This was not what Moggin said. You used wordy, and it is a culturally a term
of disparagement - wind over content. if you just meant that Adorno has a
close attention to style and a very precise sense of the value of using
certain terms, why not say so?
> Adorno simply did not say me hate work and me like leisure, he undermined the
> boundary in the passage I quoted. Nor was he a fan of terse speech at all
> costs and like Mozart in Amadeus would claim to be writing, not "too many
> notes", but instead just enuf.
He undermined the boundary to point out that neither were free. You were the
one equated freedom from necessity as leisure, not Moggin, not Marx and
certainly not Adorno.
> A number of translators and editors of Adorno including that of a recent
> translation of Aesthetic Theory (Hullot Kentor 1997) have expressed
> exasperation with our boy's style, not because they judged it bad or good on
> some nonexistent absolute scale but because in material reality (notably with
> respect to computer representations, which slyly place a cash value on each
> word that did not exist in Adorno's era) Adorno presented them, or their
> dogsbodies, with practical problems.
This is entirely true and well said.
> Without being lured in neobrutal style into a defense of unnecessary prolixity
> (which is your unconscious goal given that you reason with received
> categories), I will state the obvious, and that is that paragraph breaks, and
> frequent ones, are a part of the current, received canon of writing.
And so? See The Essay as Form, or On Foreign Words, both in Notes to
Literature.
>>
>> >Adorno cannot therefore provide an ideology to calls for a future free of
>> >work la la la.
>>
>> Of course he could. Not that he does, exactly: "a future
>> free of work la la la" is a caricature. One that you can't
>> seem to do without. But "preserving a memory of culture" is no
>> obstacle to calling for "something new."
>>
> Of course, we agree on the goal in large measure. You want a future free of
> bourgeois work, with its surplus repression (as in, for example, the old-
> fashioned dress code, and time restrictions that have nothing to do with the
> task content) and so do I. But I indicate that prior to bourgeois work there
> existed the reproduction of existence.
Of course it did, and it does for the capitalist epoch, and always will, but
the point would be that the possiblity currently exists for the the
'reproduction of material existence' to no longer form a major determinant
on possible forms of life. See the Communist Manifesto (1848!) A simple
question, why aren't all production lines automated, given that they could
be?
Hear Hear, yet Adorno also insists on the vital status of thought - albeit
thought which must somehow register its own failures and contradictions. He
would not, I think, wholly object to Brecht's line - the palace of culture
is built on foundations of dogshit - but the idea of something better than
dogshit is still, potentially, there, and still has to be thought. Some
places within capitalism, like art and (he said without conviction) perhaps
academia offer, for socio-historical reasons, places where that thought
might happen. But it is not thought freed of its own situation.
> Determination of vernacular thought is presented as an either-or proposition
> because of AngloAmerican academic indoctrination into binary thinking. The
> possibility is that determination is both partial and empirical. The
> possibility is also that the media, controlled as it is by private interests,
> amplifies and distorts signals in private thoughts.
>
> Actual accounts of actual people with actual jobs, including an out of print
> Penguin book, collectively written in the 1970s by the editors of, if memory
> serves, the New Left Review, and Studs Terkels' book Working show that
> ordinary folks want NEITHER a world free of work in the sense that an
> invisible helot class maintains the computers (which is what we're going
> towards) NOR more of the same commodified "jobs." Early Yugoslavia was, it
> appears, a socialist demiparadise precisely because ordinary kids had the
> opportunity to get rousted out of bed at an ungodly hour to build dams.
Marx's point, and it is quite simple, despite your refusal to see it, is
that this is should be a matter of choice, of self determination - if one
wants to undertake such a form of labour, fine. The problem is that it is
not, currently, 'morally constructive', but the reverse. It does not aid the
relation of self and other, but instead 'the condemned man comes to love his
cell'.
> Automation of boring tasks is basically a goal I support, but one reason I
> support it is that it PRODUCES the need for software and hardware
> maintenance, another task. However, simple-minded calls for freedom from
> work that do not deconstruct the work-leisure binarism produce an invisible
> helot class, such as will not be attending the milleniusm
> celebrations...because they will be fixing the Y2K bug. Anti-work can also
> be the failure to recognize the worker.
For the binarism, see above, This is your construction. not Moggin's and not
Adorno's.
> What ordinary people DON'T want is old-fashioned "welfare" with its scorn for
> and suspicion of the poor. Malcolm X, in his autobiography, makes it clear
> that he found even the (more generous than today) provisions demeaning and
> insulting because they were linked with systematic abuse of the recipients by
> a white welfare bureaucracy, and part of his attraction, early in life, to
> the Nation of Islam was in the dignity and self-help of its members. But
> this does not imply at all that Malcolm wanted today's system, for the racist
> abuse continues (one has to apply to get an application to apply) but the
> amounts paid are pitifully small and disappearing.
>
> Superficial readings of Adorno, in which the intellectual is convinced that he
> sees and the poor deluded canaille do not, play into a neoconservative
> backlash. Unlike Brecht, Adorno did not go around TELLING people that he had
> insight and they did not (which is, it should be noted, a typical male-to-
> female transmission). He simply had the goddamn insight.
This is rubbish. Adorno was very careful to note,and integrate into his work
the particular social conditions that enabled him to work in the way that he
did. See also Benjamin on the necessity of bourgeois Berlin (West West
Berlin) for his production. Adorno is under no illusions about the
contradictions and impossibilities of his own position, but also under no
illusion that his work is enabled by that situation. (Dialectics, remember).
> Wiggershaus, no fan of Adorno, relates nonetheless that the TYPISTS at the
> Princeton Radio Research project found his work interesting and sympathetic
> because the TYPISTS were also information workers as opposed to anti-work
> administrators.
>>
>> It's annoying when you repeat mistakes that I've corrected.
>> One more time: we're not discussing "a future free of work"
>> but a future where the necessity of work is removed, or reduced
>> to a miminum. In positive terms, we're talking -- or I am --
>> about freedom. That doesn't imply exploitation, but rather the
>> end of exploitation, especially in the forms of slavery and
>> wage-slavery. Nobody "must see to the reproduction of the kids"
>> since no one is required to procreate: it's optional.
>
> Both Barbara Ehrenreich and Andrea Nye (feminist scholar) point out that
> these calls for an end to work ignore the undone social tasks. At the end of
> the former's book Fear of Falling she does not criticise the middle class so
> much as being work obsessed as structuring work so that it wastes time on
> tasks that benefit the few when so much remains undone. The highways are
> fixed but the elevated trains fall into disrepair. Andrea Nye points out
> that the increasingly degraded environment will demand more, and not less,
> work.
See above on the distinction between work and labour.
> Your claim seems to be that there is something called work and it is
> unnecessarily made necessary by bourgeois society. I claim instead that there
> is (1) the necessary reproduction of society and (2) surplus repression.
No. Read Marx. labour might be, more or less, necessary, but not the
existing forms of work.
>>
>>
>> Not so: the definition of work doesn't require it to have
>> "an element of compulsion." I checked the dictionary -- no
>> such necessity. You may be compelled to work or you might work
>> by choice: either is possible. And no, work doesn't
>> necessarily suck. It often does, of course, but then sometimes
>> it doesn't. Depends who you are, what you're doing, etc.
>
> Visits to the dictionary don’t settle arguments because the dictionary merely
> reports usage, and if you agree that bourgeois society infects our thinking
> about work then the dictionary definition does not represent the nature of the
> case.
>
> “Work sucks” as a text can have radically different meanings. It can mean
> that the boss is nice but the task is boring: it can mean that the boss is a
> tyrant but the tasks are interesting: it can mean both. And of course it
> goes much deeper than that. The task can simultaneously suck and be
> interesting. A boring task that if messed up causes a lot of problems is
> interesting in the sense of the Chinese curse: “may you live in interesting
> times.”
No, you were right in the first place, work sucks. Alienated labour anyone?
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> >Adorno never "got with the program" of the bourgeois which is to DENY, in
the
>> >face of reality, that there are any issues not dissolvable using the cash
>> >nexus. The bourgeois in the typical picture looks at the abstract painting
> in
>> >the museum and says Mon Dieu mon cing-foot high keed could do zat. The
>> >bourgeois thinks instead that Norman Rockwell worked hard to make an
isomorph
>> >of reality.
>>
>> You're behind the times -- nowadays the bourgeosie line up
>> by the thousands to admire abstract art. The Pollock
>> retrospective was just the latest example -- it's been going on
>> for decades.
>
> While recently mass taste has arrogated Modernist moves, it does so for
> economic reasons and in its own way. First of all, Modernismus can be more
> easily faked and therefore Modernist moves are often used to save money in
> films and other arts. Secondly, authoritarianism usually infects false
> Modernismus.
Far too simple. Modernism has a complex relation with 'mass culture' (torn
halves as Adorno puts it) and, as Tafuri and others have argued, serves as
an R and D department for capital. Surrealism as a case in point - a
fractured and desirng subjectivity suits capital. 'Today's dissonance is
tomorrow's harmony'. But there are a mesh of problems about this. (And I
dispute the easily faked - show me a convincing fake Mondrian or Pollock, or
Joyce, or Beckett).
> People flock to Pollock because of the high cash value of his paintings: the
> museums have through corporate sponsoship been able to generate attendance on
> the part of people who suffer from a combination of attraction to art (for
> some of their admiration is genuine, and elicited by the quality of the work)
> and attraction to the Yuppie life-style. Whereas better artists (Lee Krasner
> in opposition to her husband Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein in opposition
> to Andy Warhol) are ignored. Note, finally, that in the two terms I have
> suggested, the successful artists Pollock and Warhol present a significantly
> more authoritarian face to the audience. Lee Krasner’s affirmative paintings
> are not the loud and authoritarian statements of her quondam husband:
> Lichtenstein plays with the history of art in a manner that is anti-
> authoritarian, whereas Warhol set up an authoritarian Factory that used
> terror and drugs to motivate the actual producers of his overrated Brillo
> boxes.
Krasner -v- Pollock is an arguable judgement, as is Rauschenberg -v_ Warhol.
On what criterea? Adorno would see the arguing for the value of works as an
important critical act. On request, I could produce counter readings to
yours. How is Pollock (at least of the 1948-50 drips) authoritarian?
Rauschenberg, arguably, turns the avant-garde techniques of the 1920s, aimed
at the the institution of art and having the fusion of art and life
practices as their goal, into art, and museum art at that. At least some of
your judgements here seem to me to be devoid of an historical sense,and that
is hardly Adornian.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> Yep, you flatter yourself -- this time explicitly, usually
>> by implication, and rarely with good cause. Your "vision"
>> isn't the least unique -- as you present it here, it's merely a
>> libertarian view. You're welcome to it.
>
> That’s just nonsense, because there WOULD be compulsion in my set up of the
> work system. If you make a commitment you have to keep it.
But you present work as if it was a choice. That is libertarian.
>>
>>
>> Um, no. You're not required to have children; not unless
>> you're Catholic, anyhow. It's a choice. You can decide to
>> procreate or not -- babbling about Derrida doesn't change that.
>
> William F. Buckley writes that “anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the
> liberal”, and he is right. Nothing in Catholic teachings require people to
> have children, and in contemporary American society, the pressure to form
> normal families comes from the Protestant religious right. One aspect of this
> is the persecution of Catholic priests on trumped-up charges of nonexistent
> child abuse, recently in the case of a failed attempt on the reputation of
> Cardinal Joseph Bernardin in Chicago.
>
> This sally replicates an anti-Catholic slur such that it implies that
> Catholics are slobs with too many kids. This slur effectively started the
> persecution of Albanians in Kosovo in the 1980s since it repeats the
> biological lie that a community is out to get your community by overwhelming
> it with rug rats.
>
> Catholic doctrine teaches that people are perfectly free to refrain from
> having kids, by being celibate, by being in Josephit marriages, or by joining
> holy orders. This facile liberal slap at the Catholics has been too long
> popular in universities.
So this arbitary regulation of human social relations is OK with you?
>>
>> Here in the U.S. we don't constantly hear about the right
>> to drive 90 MPH -- we hardly ever hear about it at all.
>> That's a shame. The interstates are engineered for high speed
>> driving, but trying it can put you behind bars. Same on
>> local roads. We live in an administered society where the law
>> of the land is, "Slow Down!"
>
> Anybody who drives to work knows that this is nonsense. One feature of the
> administered world is its use of contradiction to ensure that people (who can
> be so readily criminalized by contradictory laws and expectations) are quiet
> about social conditions.
>
> Therefore there are really TWO sets of rules, which contradict, and do so for
> a reason. One is that one must keep up with traffic, and traffic usually
> goes faster than the speed limit. The other is that one must drive at or
> below the speed limit. The second, contradictory rule, is increasingly
> enforced as corporations "create jobs" by getting tax abatements, and local
> communities become speed traps in order to balance the books.
But the Adornian point would be the regulation, not necessarily by law, but
by the internalised operation of a 'moral' norm - see Minima Moralia on
Christmas presents.
> The interstates were NOT designed for high speed driving. The adminiistered
> world of the 1950s designed the system for ease of internal communication in
> the event of an invasion, AND as part of the disciplined mobilisation of
> everyday life. The deliberate destruction of public transit (especially in
> the case of the Los Angeles streetcar system) caused many people to buy cars
> and to, on a level of false consciousness, see only the potential "freedom"
> of no longer having to adhere to a time table.
Whilst actually still having to adhere to one, indeed having to buy cars
just in order to meet the timetable. Yes.
> The phenomenological reality is that only technically were the highways
> designed for high-speed driving. In a very real sense, the highways were
> designed for men to put out orange drums, and I am not trying to be funny:
> for it is an illusion to think of the highway as pure technology. It is part
> of an interstate system which has an interest in preserving its budget and
> which is not under market discipline. It is very possible that (given the
> unmet needs of public transit) highways are over-maintained for the
> high-speed driver. Whereas a few rough spots do not hurt the 55mph driver,
> the modal driver (a "normalised deviant" to use a concept of Diane Vaughn)
> supports continual overmaintenance through the political process. This
> dialectically reverses an illusory freedom into the shackles of the traffic
> jam and is met with unacknowledged (and therefore uncontrolled) rage.
Sounds like both work and leisure to me.
yours
Giles
Josh Soffer
treatment of Adorno which transforms his aesthetic-political thinking
into a polemic against monetary self-interest. What impresses me about
Adorno is the subtlety and acuteness of his psychological understanding
of the underpinnings of economic conformity. It is his reading of Hegel
through Freud's notion of libido which allowed him, and each of the
critical theoreticians in thier own way(Habermas, Marcuse, Horkheimer,
etc.) to move beyond the metaphysical-materialist simplifications of
Marx. Marcuse, for example, noted that libido rebels against conformity
in any form, even if that conformity is to conditions of economic bliss
and freedom from work. The 'job' of libido is incessant work, but work
as the pleasure of play, transcendence.
Marcuse thought that Freud's dilemna, the opposition between the reality
principle, reflected by economic and cultural contraints, and libidinal
energies bent on the pleasure of impulsively subverting those external
contraints, could be resolved in a future of work as creative and
playful. While Adorno has revealed the dependence of this sort of model
on a kind of conformity to imposed social norms itself, has his
position really dramatically departed from Marcuse's , at least in terms
of the transcendent aim of libido ? For Adorno, at least the Adorno of
'Aesthetic Theory' , it is instrumental reason, means-end analysis,
empirical logic, which are the culprits, not becuase they are
deliberately bent on greedy wealth accumulation, but because any way of
thinking which reifies its object as a scheme, a plan, a formula, cannot
but repress its Other.
Technological projects, such as highway systems, then , would be
inherently oppressive because they represent semiotic systems, that
is, forms of ideology, which imprison imagination in a repetition of
sameness, the sameness of a pre-determined end. A negative dialectics
only has its object in front of it at the moment that it is transcending
that object, and as such defines the basis of thought as an aesthetic
experience. I see his mode of analysis as operating as a higher level
of abstraction, and a more rigorous basis of understanding, than that
which would focus on material structures of production per se as the
source of social conformity. His brilliance is in his unique synthesis
of dialectical materialism, Nietzschean anti-metaphysics and libinal
economy, resulting in a method that redefines materialism as discourse.
Ed, do you share my sense that Adorno's central contribution is as
aesthetic -psychological theory?
Giles Peaker
<G.Pe...@derby.ac.uk> wrote:
>> People flock to Pollock because of the high cash value of his paintings: the
>> museums have through corporate sponsoship been able to generate attendance on
>> the part of people who suffer from a combination of attraction to art (for
>> some of their admiration is genuine, and elicited by the quality of the work)
>> and attraction to the Yuppie life-style. Whereas better artists (Lee Krasner
>> in opposition to her husband Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein in opposition
>> to Andy Warhol) are ignored. Note, finally, that in the two terms I have
>> suggested, the successful artists Pollock and Warhol present a significantly
>> more authoritarian face to the audience. Lee Krasner’s affirmative paintings
>> are not the loud and authoritarian statements of her quondam husband:
>> Lichtenstein plays with the history of art in a manner that is anti-
>> authoritarian, whereas Warhol set up an authoritarian Factory that used
>> terror and drugs to motivate the actual producers of his overrated Brillo
>> boxes.
>
> Krasner -v- Pollock is an arguable judgement, as is Rauschenberg -v_ Warhol.
> On what criterea? Adorno would see the arguing for the value of works as an
> important critical act. On request, I could produce counter readings to
> yours. How is Pollock (at least of the 1948-50 drips) authoritarian?
> Rauschenberg, arguably, turns the avant-garde techniques of the 1920s, aimed
> at the the institution of art and having the fusion of art and life
> practices as their goal, into art, and museum art at that. At least some of
> your judgements here seem to me to be devoid of an historical sense,and that
> is hardly Adornian.
Oops. Quick correction. I was still in a conversation I had earlier today.
So Lichenstein -v- Warhol. My point might still stand, but are you arguning
that Lichenstain's production was less alienated than Warhol's, or is this
another version of the Brecht argument, Lichenstein had the decency to make
his own work? If so, then this is just wrong, at least about the early parts
of Warhol's production, and certainly things like the disaster series, or
the Jackies or the Marilyns or the Soup cans. In any case, each might be
said to be deliberately removing any sense that the image was 'theirs' and
choosing an extant formal order. Does it matter who made the works?
apologies
Giles
Puss in Boots
>>>Adorno, within his wordy style, appears to me to have more structure than
>>>Fromm, Brecht or Marcuse. I may be mistaken on Fromm, Brecht or Marcuse
>>>owing to lack of familiarity, but Adorno seems to do a better job of
>>>preserving a memory of culture versus a flat call for replacement of old
>>>culture by something new.
mog...@mindspring.com (Puss in Boots):
>> You've got a habit of projecting yourself onto Adorno. He
>> doesn't share your views on work (you won't find him saying
>> it's necessary to ward off "personal corruption and decadence")
>> and he isn't wordy.
Ed [re projection]:
>Possibly: it may be, however, that there is a habit of superficial reading
>that merely scans for "magic words" and for attitudes struck. Your
>superficial reading of Adorno may have convinced you that he's one with
>Brecht, Fromm and Marcuse. I hope to show the "iron core" of Adorno and that
>this thinker is a gas giant unlike the others.
Attitude is very important. Yours is quite different from
Adorno's. But either you haven't read closely enough to
realize that, or else you find it necessary to project your own
feelings onto him. Or both.
>From the passage "Little Hans" (Minima Moralia, Adorno 1974), Adorno writes:
> "The intellectual, particularly when philosophically inclined,
> is cut off from practical life: revulsion from it has driven
> him to concern himself with so-called things of the mind. But
> material practice is not only the pre-condition of his existence,
> it is basic to the world which he criticises in his work. If he
> knows nothing of this basis, he shoots into thin air."
Well and good -- also irrelevant. Reminding intellectuals
that that they live in a material world is different from
insisting on work as a moral imperative and positing corruption
and decadence as the alternative.
>Although a superficial search of Adorno for keywords does not locate the
>syntax "personal corruption and decadence", fundamental to the above passage
>is a moral/cognitive (but nonbourgeois) demand upon the intellectual to
>realize two things:
> * Material existence as reproduced by work is a physical precondition
> of his intellectual life
> * The intellectual is decadent/corrupted in "shooting off into thin
> air" when uninformed about material reality
Um, no -- decadence and corruption aren't even part of the
passage, still less "fundamental" to it. Adorno has no
trouble making his point without invoking either one. Shooting
in the air isn't decadent or corrupt -- it's merely futile.
And while you see decadence as the consequence of idleness, the
intellectual here isn't idle -- he's working. Adorno is
criticizing the _products_ of his work, not complaining about a
lack of it.
>The demand, here, to connect to a material basis is AT ONE AND THE SAME TIME
>moral and cognitive ("intelligence is a moral category.") Adorno was careful
>not to use keywords that would confuse the reader into believing he was
>making moral homilies but he did not share the simple-minded amorality that
>passes for a vernacular Left ethics (that was Brecht.) Adorno was closer to
>Leon Trotsky (Trotsky/Delaney 1971) in that he felt that bourgeois morality
>was an empty calculus under which self-interest operated.
>My thesis is that Adorno's biography (cf. Wiggershaus 1995) is relevant to his
>thought and mistaken readings of Adorno conflate him with Brecht (as I believe
>you do) because of lack of sensitivity to the Adorno bio. It appears that
>Brecht, despite his professed sympathy for the workers was himself on balance
>an exploiter, especially of women, whereas it appears from the Adorno bio that
>as opposed to being a bum, the guy got a real job at the Princeton Radio
>Research project and later when the Frankfurt institute was reestablished in
>the 1950s in Germany.
Lord you go on -- and nothing to the point. Adorno simply
doesn't see work as a necessity to stave off "personal
corruption and decadence" -- you don't find those words because
that's not his thinking. It's yours alone. Adorno doesn't
share your attachment to the Protestant work-ethic: he doesn't
see work as inherently virtuous or the only alternative to
corruption. He also doesn't argue that eliminating unnecessary
labor is regressive. Of course you're free to take those
positions -- but you'll have to do it without Adorno to lean on.
Incidentally, the post-war Institute was financed by gov't.
grants and corporate largesse: it leeched off society. So
yes, Adorno was a bum. I guess you have something against bums.
Too bad. Try humming a few bars of "King of the Road."
If that doesn't work, you can always look at him as a paid
employee of the West German state. That makes sense in view
of his response to the student movement of the late 60's.
Intellectually he was highly approving. But when several dozen
students appeared at the Institute building looking for
somewhere to meet, he was quick to up a phone and call the cops.
[...]
>"I drive a Lexus because I yam a lawyer and I make enuf money and it is a
>rice rocket known to be reliable." Not "I drive a lexus because its somber
>dignity befits my station in life." Fortunately, the widespread knowledge
>that driving a car, in and of itself, damages the environment irreversibly
>has drained ownership of an expensive car of the moral and social dignity
>which is possessed for bourgeois in Adorno's 1940s.
Agreed about Lexus, basically, but there's a whole line-up
of the things. The flagship model is a big sedan --
essentially a Japanese Mercedes -- that fits your reading. But
take the coupe: it replaces "somber dignity" with "sporty
elegance." A different statement. The SUV says something else
again.
I don't know much about what cars meant in the 40's, but I
can tell you that they count for plenty today. You're
hugely overestimating the effect of environmentalism on the way
people think about them. True, they don't confer "moral and
social dignity" (not most of them, anyhow); they deliver social
_status_.
The most popular things on the road -- in the U.S., I mean
-- are SUVs. As a group they pollute more and use more gas
than cars -- and they're high-priced. But they're selling like
hotcakes here.
[...]
Moggin:
>> Adorno isn't wordy. I guess it might seem that way,
>> especially if you were just glancing at the pages: he has that
>> German fear of the tab key which results in page-long
>> paragraphs. And some of his books are fairly thick, especially
>> the late ones. But most of the time he writes in neatly
>> composed aphorisms, like Nietzsche. You're the one who runs on
>> at the mouth.
Ed:
>It was obvious in my original passage that Adorno is wordy in relation to
>debased contemporary standards which owing to something that Adorno named as
>an "industrial bottleneck" of the information era (the necessity of
>downsizing speech so that, literally, the stupidest person at the meeting
>gets it), demand of "clear" speech that it be "short" rather than adequate to
>the intent of the speaker.
You said "Adorno, within his wordy style, appears to me to
have more structure than Fromm, Brecht or Marcuse." That's
all: nothing about "debased contemporary standards." And as I
said, he isn't wordy. You might think he was from the thick
spines of his late books -- glancing at his ink-blackened pages
could give you the same idea. But read him and it's plain
that he doesn't usually run on. Those thick books are composed
of short aphorisms, like Nietzsche's.
>Again, you receive contemporary categories which
>Adorno tried to undermine as givens: work ugh leisure yay, and wordy boo and
>terse yay.
You read me as badly as you read Adorno. I haven't said a
word about leisure -- not one. You're the guy who keeps
bringing it up. Every time you mention it I explain that's not
what I'm talking about -- but you keep repeating the same
mistake. Apparently it's a necessity to you. For the nth time:
my point is about work. So is yours: you that claim people
have a need to work, you want to keep them on the job 8 hours a
day, you say that's necessary to avoid personal corruption,
and so on; you also contend, bizarrely, that Adorno thinks like
you.
He doesn't, of course -- A doesn't have your attachment to
the work-ethic or to preserving unrequired labor. Even
leaving Adorno aside, there's nothing to your claims. It's not
regressive to eliminate unnecessary jobs -- that's progress.
The ideal would be to remove the necessity of work, or at least
reduce it to a minimum. You could still spend your entire
life working, if you chose -- but it would be a _choice_, not a
necessity.
In short, the issue is freedom versus necessity: not work
versus leisure.
My thought about Adorno's wordiness is that he isn't wordy.
"Wordy" already has negative connotations -- but I'm not
making a judgement. Just the observation that Adorno's writing
isn't usually like that.
>Adorno simply did not say me hate work and me like leisure, he undermined the
>boundary in the passage I quoted. Nor was he a fan of terse speech at all
>costs and like Mozart in Amadeus would claim to be writing, not "too many
>notes", but instead just enuf.
Strawmen, both of them. As a note, the passage you quoted
doesn't undermine any boundaries, or try to, and it doesn't
talk about leisure: it criticizes the _work_ of a certain type
of intellectual. One much like Adorno.
>Without being lured in neobrutal style into a defense of unnecessary
>prolixity (which is your unconscious goal given that you reason with
>received categories), I will state the obvious, and that is that paragraph
>breaks, and frequent ones, are a part of the current, received canon of
>writing.
Not a bad part, at that.
[...]
Moggin:
>> For both Adorno and Marcuse, the hoped-for new world would
>> be a fulfillment of what they wanted most to preserve.
>> Although it would be more accurate to say that what they valued
>> most in culture were the moments that preserved a memory of
>> the world yet to come; the ones that made a space for the world
>> that isn't within the limits of the one that is.
Ed:
> Sounds fine.
Glad you liked it.
Ed:
>>>Instead he deconstructs the very contrast between work and
>>>leisure by pointing out in Minima Moralia that the intellectual and the
>>>artist does not deal with a construction of work versus leisure.
Moggin:
>> You seem to have forgotten what we're talking about -- let
>> me remind you. You called eliminating jobs "regressive."
>> You also suggested that a job was or ought to be a "human right."
>> Ordinarily I'd have ignored that kind of nonsense, but you
>> stuck Adorno's name on it, and he had some very different ideas.
>> As I said, any half-bright Marxist would know that getting
>> rid of jobs is _progress_. Improving the methods of
>> production means more work can get done by less people. Result:
>> more people can do less work. A step out of the realm of
>> necessity and toward the realm of freedom.
>> Unfortunately, bourgeois society refuses to take that step.
>> It could use the massive improvements in productivity to
>> erase poverty and lighten the burden of work for everyone. But
>> that hasn't been the case: even the 40-hour workweek came
>> only with a fight. Life remains chained to work, and "leftists"
>> argue for a human right to more of the same.
>> I'm just repeating what I said before, since you erased it
>> without a cogent reply. I finished by saying, "You're a
>> galley slave upset because the latest triremes don't require so
>> many rowers. Adorno would've been amused, if he'd been
>> capable of amusement." You called me simple-minded and claimed
>> that people need to work. I answered:
>> People have no need to be compelled to work. They do have
>> a need for freedom -- or some of them do. A minority, I'm
I see you deleted the passage without a reply. or even an
indication. Guess you'd rather pretend it doesn't exist. I
can see why: Adorno does a great job of making my point. Not
that you replied to me, either: you gave a lengthy but
irrelevant speech that started like so:
>We need to address this claim that I yam one of the elect but most people's
>thinking is determined by social conditions.
I never made that claim. I might, if you ask nicely, but
I haven't. You stated that "people need to work." Not
merely that some work has to get done, but that people possess
a need to do it. Often that's true. Many people have a
desire to work and feel useful. But like I said, people don't
share a need to be _compelled_ to work.
I added that people have a need for freedom -- but then I
realized that's not always the case. Some do, but most are
like you: they prefer the weight of compulsion. Adorno talks
about them in _The Authoritarian Personality_. He _does_
make an implicit claim to know better than they do, but at the
moment I'm just noting a conflict in values.
>This, a text that underlies the
>thinking of the AngloAmerican left, is one of the reasons for its lack of
>effectiveness. Actually, in the passage I quoted on the material basis of
>intellectual work, Adorno criticised the facile assumption of the leftist
>college professors that their tenure does not blind them to social reality or
>their exploitation (seen clearly at Harvard and Yale, and in the resistance of
>"liberal" faculty to graduate student unionization) of weaker players.
The story on leftist academics is: critical theory w/out
critical practice. (I'm stealing that line, but I forget
from where.) That applies to both the professors and the grad
students, although in fairness, a grad student is in a
terribly weak position. Tenured professors have got no excuse.
[...]
Moggin:
>> It's annoying when you repeat mistakes that I've corrected.
>> One more time: we're not discussing "a future free of work"
>> but a future where the necessity of work is removed, or reduced
>> to a miminum. In positive terms, we're talking -- or I am --
>> about freedom. That doesn't imply exploitation, but rather the
>> end of exploitation, especially in the forms of slavery and
>> wage-slavery. Nobody "must see to the reproduction of the kids"
>> since no one is required to procreate: it's optional.
Ed:
>Both Barbara Ehrenreich and Andrea Nye (feminist scholar) point out that
>these calls for an end to work ignore the undone social tasks.
You haven't pointed out anything I'm ignoring. Once again,
I'm not talking about "a future free of work" but one where
the _necessity_ of work is removed, or reduced to a mininum. I
hate to keep repeating, but that simple thought keeps on
eluding you. Or maybe _you're_ continually eluding _it_. That
seems more likely.
You did suggest that I was overlooking child care, but you
were wrong: since you're not required to have kids, you're
not required to care for them. If you don't procreate then you
won't have spend time caring for your children. And if you
decide to have kids, that's your choice. "Reproductive freedom"
mean anything to you, Mr. Feminist?
Maybe not. You believe that the 8-hour day is enough of a
concession, and you want to refuse workers more freedom on
grounds it would corrupt them. Carry that over to reproductive
issues and it means women shouldn't be required to have an
unreasonable number of children -- two or three would be enough
to fill their quota.
>At the end of
>the former's book Fear of Falling she does not criticise the middle class so
>much as being work obsessed as structuring work so that it wastes time on
>tasks that benefit the few when so much remains undone. The highways are
>fixed but the elevated trains fall into disrepair. Andrea Nye points out
>that the increasingly degraded environment will demand more, and not less,
>work.
And what's it been degraded by? Work, of course. And I'm
pretty sure more people use the highways than ride the L.
Fixing highways benefits "the many" rather than "the few." But
forget about all that. Let's assume Nye is right -- all the
more reason to remove unnecessary work and reduce the necessary
labor to a minimum.
>Your claim seems to be that there is something called work and it is
>unnecessarily made necessary by bourgeois society. I claim instead that
>there is (1) the necessary reproduction of society and (2) surplus
>repression.
You claim all sorts of shit. For example, you say work is
necessary to avoid personal corruption and decadence. You
object to letting people work less than 8 hours a day. You say
Adorno shares your views. Etc., etc.
Now you're trying to seem a little more reasonable. Kinda
late: it's already obvious where you're coming from. But
I'll play along. "The necessary reproduction of society" isn't
necessary. You may think that it's desirable to reproduce
society. And maybe it is. But it's an option, not a necessity.
Yes, you can distinguish between the work needed to have a
functioning society and "surplus repression" -- but once
you've done that, you've adopted my point of view. Like I keep
saying, the ideal is to remove the necessity of work or to
reduce it to a minimum. Eliminating "surplus repression" would
come to the same thing.
Moggin:
>>>> ... We're not talking
>>>> about "a society free of work" -- we're talking about a
>>>> society where the _necessity_ of work is removed, or reduced to
>>>> a minimum. That doesn't eliminate work: it makes work a
>>>> choice rather than a necessity.
Ed:
>>>By definition, however, work contains an element of compulsion. Work as free
>>>choice is self-contradictory and does not get done. Work is called work
>>>because work sucks, and part of the reason work sucks is that it presents
>>>itself as part of Hegel's recalcitrant world, materialised in the alarm
> clock.
Moggin:
>> Not so: the definition of work doesn't require it to have
>> "an element of compulsion." I checked the dictionary -- no
>> such necessity. You may be compelled to work or you might work
>> by choice: either is possible. And no, work doesn't
>> necessarily suck. It often does, of course, but then sometimes
>> it doesn't. Depends who you are, what you're doing, etc.
Ed:
>Visits to the dictionary don’t settle arguments because the dictionary merely
>reports usage, and if you agree that bourgeois society infects our thinking
>about work then the dictionary definition does not represent the nature of the
>case.
I didn't say that the dictionary settled things -- but you
made a claim about the definition of "work." You said that
"By definition...work contains an element of compulsion." That
isn't the case. Work _can_ be compelled, of course, and it
often is. But that's not required by its definition -- you may
work because you're compelled to or you may work by choice.
Ditto for "work sucks." It frequently does -- but sometimes it
doesn't. Depends what you're doing and so on.
[...]
Ed:
>>>Adorno never "got with the program" of the bourgeois which is to DENY, in
>>>the face of reality, that there are any issues not dissolvable using the
>>>cash nexus. The bourgeois in the typical picture looks at the abstract
>>>painting in the museum and says Mon Dieu mon cing-foot high keed could
do
>>>zat. The bourgeois thinks instead that Norman Rockwell worked hard to make
>>>an isomorph of reality.
Moggin:
>> You're behind the times -- nowadays the bourgeosie line up
>> by the thousands to admire abstract art. The Pollock
>> retrospective was just the latest example -- it's been going on
>> for decades.
Ed:
>While recently mass taste has arrogated Modernist moves, it does so for
>economic reasons and in its own way. First of all, Modernismus can be more
>easily faked and therefore Modernist moves are often used to save money in
>films and other arts. Secondly, authoritarianism usually infects false
>Modernismus.
>People flock to Pollock because of the high cash value of his paintings: the
>museums have through corporate sponsoship been able to generate attendance on
>the part of people who suffer from a combination of attraction to art (for
>some of their admiration is genuine, and elicited by the quality of the work)
>and attraction to the Yuppie life-style. Whereas better artists (Lee Krasner
>in opposition to her husband Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein in opposition
>to Andy Warhol) are ignored. Note, finally, that in the two terms I have
>suggested, the successful artists Pollock and Warhol present a significantly
>more authoritarian face to the audience. Lee Krasner’s affirmative paintings
>are not the loud and authoritarian statements of her quondam husband:
>Lichtenstein plays with the history of art in a manner that is anti-
>authoritarian, whereas Warhol set up an authoritarian Factory that used
>terror and drugs to motivate the actual producers of his overrated Brillo
>boxes.
"Mea culpa" would've sufficed.
Ed:
>>>My vision is of a society in which work is a temporary contract, and implicit
>>>in this notion is my promise to appear on the job site at such and such a
>>>time. As Derrida reminds us, implicit in a promise is a LACK of free will. I
>>>may promise on Monday to get my ass to the job site on Tuesday at 6 AM but
>>>when I wake up on Tuesday I may emit a great hollow groan at the thought of
>>>my immediate peril of having to haul ass. My freedom has dialectically
>>>changed into its opposite.
>>
>>>Note that your vision is one of the superficial cafe, but MINE has, I flatter
>>>myself, that uniqueness which is a sign of truth: for my vision combines
>>>intellectuality of a peculiar nature with proletarian knowledge such as my
>>>grandfather could deliver from the grave: "work sucks." The fact that
> reading
>>>Derrida CONFIRMS that work, AT ONE AND THE SAME TIME sucks and is necessary
>>>confirms both the suck nature of work and the truth of Derrida.
Moggin:
>> Yep, you flatter yourself -- this time explicitly, usually
>> by implication, and rarely with good cause. Your "vision"
>> isn't the least unique -- as you present it here, it's merely a
>> libertarian view. You're welcome to it.
Ed:
>That’s just nonsense, because there WOULD be compulsion in my set up of the
>work system. If you make a commitment you have to keep it.
In your system you even have to keep committments that you
didn't make. Agreed "libertarian" is a bad name --
libertarians are marching under a false flag. But "libertarian"
is the one they use. And like I said, you're not taking a
unique view -- right now you're not offering anything more than
a libertarian perspective.
It didn't look like that at first. For a minute there you
were objecting that people are "forced on pain of loss of
homes to come into work on Sunday morning." Unfortunately, you
couldn't generalize from Sundays to the rest of the week.
Then again, I may be guilty of misunderstanding you -- could be
you were just defending blue laws.
Ed:
>>>While I support reproductive freedom at a deep level (both the freedom NOT to
>>>parent, and the freedom to parent into a world safe for children and other
>>>living things, in which welfare and work are available), nonetheless it is
>>>simple minded to treat child rearing as a choice. The brutal truth is that
>>>they don't call them rug rats for nothing and children can present demands
>>>that DESTROY sensitive people (like me.) Nonetheless one reproduces their
>>>precious little asses on a daily basis, not because one has CHOSEN but
>>>because, as Derrida writes, responsibility to others is a categories that
>>>precedes our rights.
Moggin:
>> Um, no. You're not required to have children; not unless
>> you're Catholic, anyhow. It's a choice. You can decide to
>> procreate or not -- babbling about Derrida doesn't change that.
Ed:
>William F. Buckley writes that “anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the
>liberal”, and he is right. Nothing in Catholic teachings require people to
>have children, and in contemporary American society, the pressure to form
>normal families comes from the Protestant religious right.
[Etc., etc.]
O.k., great -- that removes the exception. You're not
required to have kids, period. That means you're not required
to care for them. Simple.
Ed:
>>>Nicholas Montserrat wrote "we have no rights, only responsibilities" and
>>>although this is strictly untrue it is a snappy answer to these
>>>simple-minded calls for mah rights (to have kids and not support them, to
>>>drive 90 MPH,etcetera) which we hear all the time in America. Fortunately,
>>>ordinary people in America don't need to read Derrida to have the common
>>>sense and decency to know that while they have inalienable rights they also
>>>have responsibility to others. It's us goddamn intellectuals that are
at >>>risk.
Moggin:
>> Here in the U.S. we don't constantly hear about the right
>> to drive 90 MPH -- we hardly ever hear about it at all.
>> That's a shame. The interstates are engineered for high speed
>> driving, but trying it can put you behind bars. Same on
>> local roads. We live in an administered society where the law
>> of the land is, "Slow Down!"
Ed:
>Anybody who drives to work knows that this is nonsense.
Nope: that's how it is. A rush hour traffic-jam can make
it a moot point. And I've heard that Montana lets you go
speeding along. But you're wrong to say there's a call for the
right to drive 90 MPH. (I wish there was, but there isn't.)
And in most places, getting caught at it will get you in fairly
big trouble.
>One feature of the
>administered world is its use of contradiction to ensure that people (who can
>be so readily criminalized by contradictory laws and expectations) are quiet
>about social conditions.
>Therefore there are really TWO sets of rules, which contradict, and do so for
>a reason. One is that one must keep up with traffic, and traffic usually
>goes faster than the speed limit. The other is that one must drive at or
>below the speed limit. The second, contradictory rule, is increasingly
>enforced as corporations "create jobs" by getting tax abatements, and local
>communities become speed traps in order to balance the books.
You're almost-kinda-partly right. There isn't any rule on
keeping up with traffic. Well, there is: it says if you
_aren't_ keeping up, drive in the right-hand lane, so you don't
block everyone else. That's not obeyed or enforced.
But there is a game. The speed limits are set way too low
-- artificially so. Towns and states spend big on police
cruisers and radar guns and turn speeding tickets into "revenue
enhancement" -- an easy way to fill up the state and local
coffers.
> The interstates were NOT designed for high speed driving.
They were engineered for high-speed travel -- you're about
to admit it by saying, "Only technically were the highways
designed for high-speed driving." Right. As I said, they were
engineered for high-speed driving. Glad we agree.
>The adminiistered
>world of the 1950s designed the system for ease of internal communication in
>the event of an invasion, AND as part of the disciplined mobilisation of
>everyday life. The deliberate destruction of public transit (especially in
>the case of the Los Angeles streetcar system) caused many people to buy cars
>and to, on a level of false consciousness, see only the potential "freedom"
>of no longer having to adhere to a time table.
That's not just potential. It's an actual freedom, albeit
a small one.
> The phenomenological reality is that only technically were the highways
> designed for high-speed driving.
Technically, yeah. That's how they were built. And so my
point: you can drive on them way fast. Only you can't,
because the cops don't allow it. We live in society that makes
"Walk, don't run!" into a rule of law and enforces it with
armed men.
>In a very real sense, the highways were
>designed for men to put out orange drums, and I am not trying to be funny:
>for it is an illusion to think of the highway as pure technology. It is part
>of an interstate system which has an interest in preserving its budget and
>which is not under market discipline. It is very possible that (given the
>unmet needs of public transit) highways are over-maintained for the
>high-speed driver. Whereas a few rough spots do not hurt the 55mph driver,
>the modal driver (a "normalised deviant" to use a concept of Diane Vaughn)
>supports continual overmaintenance through the political process. This
>dialectically reverses an illusory freedom into the shackles of the traffic
>jam and is met with unacknowledged (and therefore uncontrolled) rage.
55 MPH is plenty fast enough for a bad road to blow a tire
or damage your suspension -- jacking your speed to 70 or 80
won't make the harm any worse. There _is_ a bundle of money in
highway construction -- in some states the highway budget is
the local version of the federal defense budget, and it has the
same purpose -- corporate welfare. How much goes into
highway repair is another question. I don't know, but I have a
feeling it's alot less.
Puss in Boots
[...]
> ... Within a totalised capitalist society, leisure is no different to
>work, in its structure and in its reduction of subjectivity to repetition of
>an already established order. Both are equally damaged. Moggin is not, at
>least as far as I can tell, arguing for leisure, but freedom - this is a
>very different thing. Removal of necessity is vital to freedom, a
>fundamental point in Marx. In late capital, leisure is as compulsory as
>work.
Yes, yes, yes. Exactly. Thanks. But I think it's pretty
easy to opt out of leisure, especially compared to work.
[...]
Ed:
>>Of course, we agree on the goal in large measure. You want a future free of
>>bourgeois work, with its surplus repression (as in, for example, the old-
>>fashioned dress code, and time restrictions that have nothing to do with the
>>task content) and so do I. But I indicate that prior to bourgeois work there
>>existed the reproduction of existence.
Giles:
>Of course it did, and it does for the capitalist epoch, and always will, but
>the point would be that the possiblity currently exists for the the
>'reproduction of material existence' to no longer form a major determinant
>on possible forms of life. See the Communist Manifesto (1848!) A simple
>question, why aren't all production lines automated, given that they could
>be?
It's just astonishing how well the Manifesto still applies.
Although a Marxist might not feel the same way.
[...]
>Modernism has a complex relation with 'mass culture' (torn
>halves as Adorno puts it) and, as Tafuri and others have argued, serves as
>an R and D department for capital. Surrealism as a case in point - a
>fractured and desirng subjectivity suits capital. 'Today's dissonance is
>tomorrow's harmony'. But there are a mesh of problems about this. (And I
>dispute the easily faked - show me a convincing fake Mondrian or Pollock, or
>Joyce, or Beckett).
Paul Auster's _The Music of Chance_ is a very unconvincing
version of _Watt_.
Welcome back, Giles -- it's great to have you around again.
-- Moggin
Giles Peaker
joshs...@webtv.net (Josh Soffer) wrote:
I think you perhaps overstate the congruence. I can't quite see that Adorno
accepts a 'transcendent aim' at all. You seem to turn this into an
opposition between transcendent libidinous play and the repressive orderings
of 'instrumental reason' or identity thinking. But the Dialectic of
Enlightenment indicates the necessary moment of 'freedom' at work in the
establishment of identity thinking itself. It is anti-mythic, even as it
suborns the subject (and world) to a new myth - dominated by its own
domination. Odysseus marks this point. The job then, is to take the moment
of freedom in enlightenment thought seriously, not undialectically abandon
it in favour of libidinal play. As Adorno points out with regard to Hegel,
it is only rationality which has the capacity to encounter its own limits.
Whilst on the Freudian, what of Thanatos? Or what of the authoritarian
personality?
> Technological projects, such as highway systems, then , would be
> inherently oppressive because they represent semiotic systems, that
> is, forms of ideology, which imprison imagination in a repetition of
> sameness, the sameness of a pre-determined end.
Umm, would it not be a pre-determined form or structure that is the problem,
not the end? One can preach revolution, but if the means of preaching takes
the form of the commodity, for instance, then the end is irrelevant, one is
simply confirming what is.
>A negative dialectics
> only has its object in front of it at the moment that it is transcending
> that object, and as such defines the basis of thought as an aesthetic
> experience.
I don't quite follow this. Could you explain further? Surely the moment you
describe is the recognition, in thought, that the object transcends it, that
thought is not (yet) adequate to its object? How can thought transcend its
object? There is the reverse moment, I suppose, the recognition that the
object doesn't (yet) live up to its concept, but I still don't see quite how
this is thought transcending its object. Adorno gives one definition of
determinate negation in this way:
"Only the critical idea that unleashes the force stored up in its own object
is fruitful; fruitful both for the object, by helping it to come into its
own, and against it, reminding it that it is not yet itself." Adorno: Hegel,
Three Studies
Nor do I quite see it as an aesthetic experience per se, as it is a
reflective moment. Art, Adorno suggests, needs philosophy, the aesthetic
experience needs its critical understanding, in order to attain artistic
truth content.
>I see his mode of analysis as operating as a higher level
> of abstraction, and a more rigorous basis of understanding, than that
> which would focus on material structures of production per se as the
> source of social conformity. His brilliance is in his unique synthesis
> of dialectical materialism, Nietzschean anti-metaphysics and libinal
> economy, resulting in a method that redefines materialism as discourse.
Yes, but he never forgets the material structures of production either. In
fact they are vital to his thinking on aesthetics, for example. If, as
Adorno follows Lukacs, the structure of exchange is at the core of
reification, then the material structures of production are very much to the
fore. (He never abandons Marx for Weber, however much Weber he takes on).
> Ed, do you share my sense that Adorno's central contribution is as
> aesthetic -psychological theory?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> Josh Soffer: http://www.inergy.com/joshsoffer/welcome.html
Yours
Giles
Giles Peaker
>>Giles
>> ... Within a totalised capitalist society, leisure is no different to
>>work, in its structure and in its reduction of subjectivity to repetition of
>>an already established order. Both are equally damaged. Moggin is not, at
>>least as far as I can tell, arguing for leisure, but freedom - this is a
>>very different thing. Removal of necessity is vital to freedom, a
>>fundamental point in Marx. In late capital, leisure is as compulsory as
>>work.
>
> Yes, yes, yes. Exactly. Thanks. But I think it's pretty
> easy to opt out of leisure, especially compared to work.
>
Unless one is Ed, it seems. Apparently, if it isn't work, it must be
leisure.
> Ed:
>
>>>Of course, we agree on the goal in large measure. You want a future free of
>>>bourgeois work, with its surplus repression (as in, for example, the old-
>>>fashioned dress code, and time restrictions that have nothing to do with the
>>>task content) and so do I. But I indicate that prior to bourgeois work there
>>>existed the reproduction of existence.
>
> Giles:
>
>>Of course it did, and it does for the capitalist epoch, and always will, but
>>the point would be that the possiblity currently exists for the the
>>'reproduction of material existence' to no longer form a major determinant
>>on possible forms of life. See the Communist Manifesto (1848!) A simple
>>question, why aren't all production lines automated, given that they could
>>be?
>
> It's just astonishing how well the Manifesto still applies.
> Although a Marxist might not feel the same way.
[Scratches head and asks in honest bewilderment] Why not?
[...]
>
> Welcome back, Giles -- it's great to have you around again.
>
> -- Moggin
Why thank you kindly.
Giles
spino...@my-dejanews.com
> leeched off others, Adorno is good because he had a proper job? Please. For
> all of Brecht's personal faults, he did espouse a model of production (and
> reception) which was based on a critical collective construction of meaning.
> (The alienation effect, for instance? Remember that?). Adorno, meanwhile,
> hated the Princeton project precisely because it asked him to become a
> processor of statistics. It is one of of his models for the 'damaged life'
> of Minima Moralia. Incidentally, Walter Benjamin never had a 'proper job'.
> Is he a 'bum' (sorry, but this has a very different meaning in Britain).
Nonetheless, Adorno did not base his dislike of the Princeton job because of
its inconvenience, he disliked it because of disagreement with its ground
rules. The empirical agenda as set, Adorno felt, would not achieve even its
own stated ends of truth because of the presumptions that were unexplored
using theory. To illustrate my point, I shall tell A Nasty Story.
It appears that Karl Lazarsfeld, the director of the project, was enamoured
of a sort of slack-jawed, drool-streaked empiricism, popular nowadays.
Although it is impossible to do empirical research without theory, this is
precisely the demand, used to foreclose inconvenient lines of research and to
allow an unstated agenda to be set by the sponors…in the case of the
Princeton project, David Sarnoff’s RCA.
Adorno subsumed and did not simply abandon the bourgeois demand of being
serious and committed to the truth of the job. The very "hard numbers" of the
statistics, he felt, were at best reflections of false consciousness and
debased taste.
Here is my Nasty Story: one of my first programming tasks, years and years
ago, was to debug a “faculty evaluation” program written by a former manager
of the small computer center of the university where I’d gone to school. I’d
arrived on the scene shortly after the upheavals of the 1960s, which had
shaken the campus to its core.
A demand the students had made, for student evaluation of faculty, has an
interesting history both before and after my task. For it had started in
Beijing in 1966: during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese students of a type
known in China as “Elder Brother” had loudly demanded that they have a say,
and more than a say, in managing their teachers.
The Chinese “Elder Brother” appears to be a testosterone-fueled dominant
character who has China’s own version of an Oedipal crisis, in which he takes
the part of little sister and little brother against an unfeeling Confucian
patriarch. At best, he is an engine of compassion: but the dark side is that
he, unknowingly, is struggling to replace the patriarch. His demands in 1966
were therefore dialectically liberatory and contained within them oppressive
potential, for his struggle was used by Mao to ensure Mao’s dominance while
destroying midlevel Chinese institutions that could have ameliorated
conditions of life.
The Elder Brothers of China demanded, and obtained, student evaluation of
faculty. This was picked up by the French (uh oh!) and became a demand at
the Sorbonne and other French universities in 1967. From France it came to
America.
The interesting development was that the meme, student evaluation of
professors, is now an established feature of the American corporation, and its
need for disciplinary computer training, which simultaneously imparts
information on how to use computers and the “right attitude” which
acknowledges, unconditionally, the superior wisdom of the corporation (and its
MIS department), in order to avoid time-wasting struggles. Student evluation
has almost completely overcome “learning outcomes” theory in the corporation,
the silly idea that part of measurement of teaching productivity shall be the
student’s mastery: instead, the students, with a variety of motivations, are
expected to produce reified numbers and these numbers can be used to “measure”
faculty.
I found in 1971 that the programmer of the student evaluations had simply
neglected to provide for INVALID responses and that many students, alert to
the preconditions of the study, were so alienated even at the distant date
that they had carefully punched “BITE ME” as shaped letters on the “punched
cards” used for the study. I advised the Dean of Faculty to not use the
program as the numbers produced were completely without meaning.
My Nasty Story illustrates something I read in the Adorno bio as a commitment
to work’s preconditions that precedes what Moggins, in a flat and two-
dimensional style, interprets as “The Protestant Ethic.” In many jobs, the
job is unlike philosophy in that discussion of its preconditions is
emphatically NOT considered part of the job: the employee who sits around and
tries to think about work, whether or not she is thinking of better ways, is
emphatically considered to be slacking off.
But note that this is a product of alienation, and that a thoroughgoing
application of it as rule lowers productivity. Employees are most productive
when encouraged to combine the conditions and preconditions of work, and
although it is unremarked by academic commentators on Adorno (unfamiliar as
they are, owing to the tenure system, with work per se), note that Adorno was
physically subject to alienation at the Radio project.
I was able, in 1971, to get away with questioning the preconditions of the
computer work because at that distant date, computerisation in and of itself
was not the magic bullet it is assumed to be now, and at that distant date and
at a labor-oriented university, I was not automatically assumed to be engaging
in backtalk and slacking off. It appears that Adorno merely assumed that
“theory” was part of the job if the job had to do with truth, whereas
Lazarsfeld was more au fait with American labor discipline, and its higher
degree of separation of tasks.
Moggins consistently interprets my views as “the Protestant ethic.” This
wrongly maps a three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional space, because
Adorno’s commitment to truth underlay, but was not exhausted by, the
Protestant ethic.
It is clear from Wiggershaus (who did not have any special admiration for
Adorno) and from Martin Jay’s book that Adorno walked into the Princeton
Radio Research position with a commitment to truth that is unfamiliar to
academics who work in industry today. Most academics who work in industry
today expect a situation of mutual exploitation, and this expectation
produces the very conditions in which the private concern exploits the
academic, and the academic produces the results desired by the private
concern.
Karl Lazarsfeld was clearly this sort of academic and when Adorno would not
get with the program, Lazarsfeld condemned him in a memo for a variety of
elementary logical mistakes, such as failure to consider alternatives to his
views. Of course, Adorno had been doing so all along (on his own time, on
the trips to and from Newark, and even before being engaged) and had rejected
views which Adorno had decided were not credible – such as the very idea that
people in Depression New Jersey had the aristocratic leisure to be able to
appreciate classical music out of the box. Of course, Lazarsfeld did not
want Adorno to exhaust the alternatives because in other communications he
condemned Adorno’s density of words (in actuality Adorno’s density of IDEAS –
see below.) Lazarsfeld presented Adorno with an impossible demand: be snappy,
and consider ridiculous alternatives. The whole situation smacks of Dilbert.
> This was not what Moggin said. You used wordy, and it is a culturally a term
> of disparagement - wind over content. if you just meant that Adorno has a
> close attention to style and a very precise sense of the value of using
> certain terms, why not say so?
Because our culture's rejection of what is called "wordiness" has become a
rejection of ideas in addition to words. Adorno IS wordy but it has been
decided even by his mavens that “excessive” words are always a sure indicator
of badness of ideas. This is owing to the overinfluence of Brecht, who
preferred formulations like “culture is dogshit.” This is simple but also
flat and one-dimensional because it ignores how the workers produced the
dogshit culture. For example, it classes grand opera with the dogshit but
fails to see how grand opera confronts, from Fidelio to La Wally, patriarchal
authority. Whereas in “Surabaya Johnny”, the authority has to be unquestioned
precisely because it acknowledges no foundation which can be questioned:
thanks to Brecht, it was Politically Correct from about 1930 to about 1980 to
abuse women from no higher position than superior physical strength.
>
> He undermined the boundary to point out that neither were free. You were the
> one equated freedom from necessity as leisure, not Moggin, not Marx and
> certainly not Adorno.
You're both it appears confused by the fact that language is a two-dimensional
screen on which we project three-dimensional realities.
It is true that Adorno would agree with concepts including Lawrence Friedman's
"discplined mobilisation of everyday life" as exhibited at Disney world and
Adorno would agree with Aldous Huxley's question as to why, in a place of
amusement, nobody seems amused. This seems truer in America and Britain, less
true in the Romance language speaking countries: it seems that the French get
une bang even out of Eurodisney, and Carnival time in Venice is Katy-bar-the-
door, whereas "holiday camps" in Britain (at least as described by Paul
Theroux) and Disney in America are grim spectacles of the bourgeois getting
their goddamn money's worth.
The very infection of leisure by work seems to have informed much of his
thinking on leisure (cf. Adorno's In Search of Wagner for how the cares of
the bourgeois affected listening) but I think's it simple-minded to conclude
that therefore we must (1) cleanse the term leisure of worklike constraints
and (2) eliminate "work." That's because although Adorno did not like the
infection of leisure by work issues related to scarcity, his passage on the
intellectual that I quoted in a previous post ALLOWS for an infection of the
one term by the other. The difference between the infection of leisure by
work at the holiday camp and the fact that the violinist's practice is both
leisure and hard work is that the recalcitrance of the violin is dictated by
nothing other than the medium itself. The key concept is alienation:
somebody else decides that the Disney-goer does not have the chits necessary
for the ride whereas the violinist's struggle is dictated by his
non-alienated decisions.
Some neoconservative critics have talked about "elitism" in which guys like
Adorno make the call for others that the holiday camp is a place of amusement
where nobody is being amused. They don't see how alienation plays its role.
This factor, however, is becoming almost invisible as more and more zones of
culture are alienated, so much so that people, including and at times
especialy academics and intellectuals, search for opportunities to be
alienated: an example from music would be extreme "original instruments"
wherein the artist subjects himself to the fantasy that he can recreate
Beethoven as Beethoven originally "sounded." People alienated even by
high-level jobs, with their other-directed search for ways to offload blame
and reuse credit search, I think, for alienation in listening and one way is
to search for anhedonic opportunities.
Moggin prides himself on what seem flat readings of a thinker whose thought
appears to me very complex, because at this late date, much education and
indoctrination confuses the map with the territory: it becomes the mark of
the superior mind to confuse the map with the territory in the administered
world. It would seem that Adorno, had he lived now, would like “original
instruments” because Adorno thought that a radio symphony was debased because
it was the image of a live performance. However, the key concept for Adorno
was not recreation of live performances of the 1820s, it was recreation of
nonalienated scenes.
The contrast is between formalism, and the dictation of internal stucture in
the round.
> Of course it did, and it does for the capitalist epoch, and always will, but
> the point would be that the possiblity currently exists for the the
> 'reproduction of material existence' to no longer form a major determinant
> on possible forms of life. See the Communist Manifesto (1848!) A simple
> question, why aren't all production lines automated, given that they could
> be?
The answer to this question lies in the domain of theory and not in
technology.
The science-fiction vision of the totally automated world imagines that there
are things like “tasks” which can be reified, and therefore automated. It
neglects the fact that interfaces between tasks produce new tasks at a
potentially nondenumerable rate. It falsely imagines that tasks exist outside
of social relations.
For example, selected for its simpleminded clarity, the Jetsons preserve the
family structure and mobilisation of every day life of a mid-century American
group. Their necessary tasks as automated therefore are an isomorph of
midcentury American life. This of course ignores the necessary way in which
technical advance changes social structures.
For example, the Jetsons seem to need a “maid” because upper middle class
families in America up until the 1960s showed status by hiring African
American domestics: therefore the Jetsons have a robot “maid.”
Unfortunately for his followers, Marx’s work predated work in the foundation
of mathematics and as such Marx failed to see the concept of
nondenumerability which was constructed by George Cantor after Marx for pure
mathematical reasons. Simple-minded Left thinking such as is fostered in the
universities regard this as bourgeois science and therefore untrustworthy: it
ignores the very idea, found in the primary texts of the left itself and in
Adorno, that it is the bourgeois that produce the only worthwhile science on
tap, whereas the working class, because of its very oppression, produces
astrology and conspiracy theories.
Thus to Marx, had he thought about the matter, “use values” and “exchange
values” could be enumerated. However, use values and exchange values are
constructed by language which has at least the capability to construct
nondenumerable lists of same: this was capitalism’s genius: for example, as we
run out of coal we CHANGE the need statement from coal to energy. If we
exhaust energy resources we find that we can reduce the need for energy.
Therefore, at this late date, it simply boggles the mind to think that “all
production lines could be automated.” They cannot, because their very
definition has to be produced by human thought-labor and human physical
labor. If we could define our needs then production lines could be
established to meet those needs but we are in constant turmoil about these
very needs.
A “totally automated society” is self-contradictory, because the automation
zone, by definition, has an interface with humanity. Ultimately, humanism is
far more than a set of pieties about humanity: it is instead the humanism of
Jon Schell’s books on the actual consequences of a nuclear war in which the
elimination of the human term (his image “a republic of insects and grass”)
produces a situation both logically and psychologically untenable. The
cognitive and the ethical merge. A vision of a society of Eloi without any
human Morlocks (to use the forgotten terminology of the mid-century science
populariser H. G. Wells) is just silly, both cognitively and ethically: and
the fact that Mr. Wells saw fit to illustrate (in his book The Time Machine)
the necessity of a debased working class (the Morlocks) means that the
scienctifiction popularisers of our own day have descended beneath his level.
Edward G. Nilges
spino...@my-dejanews.com
joshs...@webtv.net (Josh Soffer) wrote:
> Maybe I'm misreading, but I detect a heavy-handedness in Ed Nilges'
Test reply. Please ignore. Thank you. Stop reading.
spino...@my-dejanews.com
joshs...@webtv.net (Josh Soffer) wrote:
> Maybe I'm misreading, but I detect a heavy-handedness in Ed Nilges'
> into a polemic against monetary self-interest. What impresses me about
> Adorno is the subtlety and acuteness of his psychological understanding
> of the underpinnings of economic conformity. It is his reading of Hegel
> through Freud's notion of libido which allowed him, and each of the
> critical theoreticians in thier own way(Habermas, Marcuse, Horkheimer,
> etc.) to move beyond the metaphysical-materialist simplifications of
> Marx. Marcuse, for example, noted that libido rebels against conformity
> in any form, even if that conformity is to conditions of economic bliss
> and freedom from work. The 'job' of libido is incessant work, but work
> as the pleasure of play, transcendence.
>
> Marcuse thought that Freud's dilemna, the opposition between the reality
> principle, reflected by economic and cultural contraints, and libidinal
> energies bent on the pleasure of impulsively subverting those external
> contraints, could be resolved in a future of work as creative and
> playful. While Adorno has revealed the dependence of this sort of model
> on a kind of conformity to imposed social norms itself, has his
> position really dramatically departed from Marcuse's , at least in terms
> of the transcendent aim of libido ? For Adorno, at least the Adorno of
> 'Aesthetic Theory' , it is instrumental reason, means-end analysis,
> empirical logic, which are the culprits, not becuase they are
> deliberately bent on greedy wealth accumulation, but because any way of
> thinking which reifies its object as a scheme, a plan, a formula, cannot
> but repress its Other.
>
Why not both? Ultimately, the Princeton Radio Research project was based on
Sarnoff's financial goals and this infected its methodology. It is brutal to
call this greed and since Gordon Gecko it has not been fashionable to condemn
greed, but ultimately people with real jobs know that the game is maximizing
the profit of the institution.
Again: we separate moral discourse from intellectual discourse, but
"intelligence is a moral category."
> Technological projects, such as highway systems, then , would be
> inherently oppressive because they represent semiotic systems, that
> is, forms of ideology, which imprison imagination in a repetition of
> sameness, the sameness of a pre-determined end. A negative dialectics
> only has its object in front of it at the moment that it is transcending
> that object, and as such defines the basis of thought as an aesthetic
> experience. I see his mode of analysis as operating as a higher level
> of abstraction, and a more rigorous basis of understanding, than that
> which would focus on material structures of production per se as the
> source of social conformity. His brilliance is in his unique synthesis
> of dialectical materialism, Nietzschean anti-metaphysics and libinal
> economy, resulting in a method that redefines materialism as discourse.
Nietzche is a fashionable thinker, but he deludes people into believing that
the anti-metaphysical stance is somehow the superior stance, and that anti-
metaphysics is not part of metaphysics.
>
> Ed, do you share my sense that Adorno's central contribution is as
> aesthetic -psychological theory?
>
Not if you mean that ontology does not undergird the aesthetics. Look, I
think different thinkers, like the fable of the blind men and the elephant,
start at different places. In England and America they tend to start with
science and mathematics, but on the Continent, they started with politics,
literature, or even (in the case of Adorno) with music.
The fable of the blind men and the elephant is of course somewhat misleading,
for the relation of the thinker to the object of thought is not the same as
the relation of physical beings. The fable of the Platonic Cave is, first
and foremost, an image or mathematical model. Plato was attempting to make a
universal point that would apply, even to the structures of thought developed
by the inhabitants of the cave, so the model itself is problematic.
But in the fable, the person who's escaped returns to tell the other
trogdolytes what he has "seen" in the sense that he or she discourses about
things not under his or her control that are "out there." Readings and
misreadings of Plato conclude with the fable of the world of "forms."
But the point of the story could be methodological. The enlightened
trogdolyte is either manic-depressive, OR babbling about an aspect of reality
uncaptured in the daily grub in the cave for mushrooms. If not merely nuts,
the enlightened trogdolyte has subjected his discourse to exacting
self-critique, the model for which is physical existence (I cannot walk this
way because there is a tree in the way.)
Reification (and its sister, university departmentalization) is preciesly
wanting to pigeon-hole Adorno into aesthetic-psychological theory as opposed
to ontology. I suggest that Adorno, if he is anything, is in an extreme
nominalist tradition which AT ONE AND THE SAME TIME critiques our names for
ontological entities as mere names, but does so on the basis of regard for
the intractibility of the material.
This nominalist tradition, found also in Spinoza, is the evil, demonic twin
of the Platonist tradition. That's because it calls the positive term to
account, but on the terms of the positive term's OWN criteria.
Jacques Derrida writes that he is always on the verge of reading Plato. Of
course, he's read Plato in the sense of reading we ordinarily use. He's
sounded out the words and associated them in his mind with images and other
texts. What Derrida MEANS, I think, is the founding problem of philosophy and
that is its extreme incorporation of method with ontology.
In the ordinary sciences, we waste time if we excessively question methodology
but this is not true in philosophy. Philosophy (and I believe Adorno points
this out) is precisely where there are no rules about not being able to
question any step. One question we could ask about Plato's fable of the Cave
is precisely what is going on in the mind, not only of the unenlightened
trogdolytes, but in the mind of the enlightened one.
spino...@my-dejanews.com
> that that they live in a material world is different from
> insisting on work as a moral imperative and positing corruption
> and decadence as the alternative.
Since your metalanguage is also your language, the two-dimensionality of both
causes you to consistently rephrase three-dimensional, rounded statements as
two-dimensional straw men. I didn't say that work was a "moral imperative."
Using the Kantian notion of the convergence of the intellectual and the
ethical (which is not the reduction of one to the other), I said that the
personal corruption was simultaneously, and for Adorno, an intellectual
corruption...which caused thought that did not meet his standards to fail to
achieve its own stated ends.
Empiricism shares with Continental rationalism a committment to truth, and the
Continental claim is that empiricism even fails at truth, narrowly defined,
because of excessive committment to pure empiricism.
If you don't "get" this, there's realy no point in further discussion since
you don't understand Adorno, and quoting excessive sections of the Odysseus
story, to which I have paper access and which I've read, are not going to
change this.
You've also failed to follow Adorno's own personal example of discourse
ethics. As part of his committment to internal structure there is a
refreshing lack of personal attacks in Adorno: instead of calling Brecht a
bum, Adorno writes loftily, and refreshingly, that to play worker's dialects
against the written language is reactionary, and goes on to show why this is
so, without mentioning Brecht.
One aspect of worker's dialects, with its use of brutal rhetoric, is what is
now called the flame war and since unlike Adorno I am a real worker, I'm
always game for one, if need be. But the flame war would not advance the
cause of criticising media, and people are losing their lives in Kosovo in
part as a consequence of the brutality of worker's dialects.
Puss in Boots
>> It's just astonishing how well the Manifesto still applies.
>> Although a Marxist might not feel the same way.
Giles:
> [Scratches head and asks in honest bewilderment] Why not?
A Marxist would agree it still applies -- but I figure she
wouldn't be astonished.
-- Moggin
Giles Peaker
now the lightbulb goes on, thanks.
Giles
Giles Peaker
wrote:
>[Edward]
>>[Giles]
>> I'm sorry, but this counts as a worthwhile comment? Brecht is bad because he
>> leeched off others, Adorno is good because he had a proper job? Please. For
>> all of Brecht's personal faults, he did espouse a model of production (and
>> reception) which was based on a critical collective construction of meaning.
>> (The alienation effect, for instance? Remember that?). Adorno, meanwhile,
>> hated the Princeton project precisely because it asked him to become a
>> processor of statistics. It is one of of his models for the 'damaged life'
>> of Minima Moralia. Incidentally, Walter Benjamin never had a 'proper job'.
>> Is he a 'bum' (sorry, but this has a very different meaning in Britain).
>
> Nonetheless, Adorno did not base his dislike of the Princeton job because of
> its inconvenience,
I don't think that I even possibly implied that this was the case.
Inconvenience hardly justifies the soubriquet 'a damaged life'.
> he disliked it because of disagreement with its ground
> rules. The empirical agenda as set, Adorno felt, would not achieve even its
> own stated ends of truth because of the presumptions that were unexplored
> using theory. To illustrate my point, I shall tell A Nasty Story.
>
> It appears that Karl Lazarsfeld, the director of the project, was enamoured
> of a sort of slack-jawed, drool-streaked empiricism, popular nowadays.
> Although it is impossible to do empirical research without theory, this is
> precisely the demand, used to foreclose inconvenient lines of research and to
> allow an unstated agenda to be set by the sponors…in the case of the
> Princeton project, David Sarnoff’s RCA.
>
> Adorno subsumed and did not simply abandon the bourgeois demand of being
> serious and committed to the truth of the job. The very "hard numbers" of the
> statistics, he felt, were at best reflections of false consciousness and
> debased taste.
[Nasty Story snipped because you have just said what it means, and in any
case, once was enough]
Granted that Adorno was deeply suspicious and highly critical of empiricism,
but was that the only reason he disliked the job? Let's see. If you'll
pardon a lengthy quote, here some of the first passage of Minima Moralia. (I
am making the assumption that this refers to his experience at Princeton,
although not perhaps fully autobiographical, but you seemed to accept such a
reference above):
"The son of well-to-do parents who, whether from talent or weakness, engages
in a so-called intellectual profession, as an artist or scholar, will have a
particularly difficult time with those bearing the distasteful title of
colleagues. It is not merely that his independence is envied, the
seriousness of his intentions mistrusted, and that he is suspected of being
a secret envoy of the established powers. Such suspicions, though betraying
a deep-seated resentment, would usually prove well-founded. But the real
resistances lie elsewhere. The occupation with things of the mind has by now
itself become 'practical', a business with strict division of labour,
departments and restricted entry. The man of independent means who chooses
it out of repugnance of the ignominy of earning money will not be disposed
to acknowledge the fact. For this he is punished. He is not a
'professional', is ranked in the competitive hierarchy as a dilettante no
matter how well he knows his subject, and must, if he wants to make a
career, show himself even more resolutely blinkered than the most inveterate
specialist. The urge to suspend the division of labour which, within certain
limits, his economic situation enables him to satisfy, is thought
particularly disreputable.[...] The departmentalisation of mind is a means
of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract. It
performs this task all the more reliably since anyone who repudiates the
division of labour - if only by taking pleasure in his work - makes himself
vulnerable by its standards in ways inseperable from elements of his
superiority. Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they
cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out
because they do not want to play the game."
The problem then is not (only) that what he was asked to do was wrong, but
the whole structure of social relations which constituted the job; a
structure which made it impossible for any prospect of an alternative to
exist. And the division of labour - something which you had not hitherto
raised in your account of work (but see below) - is central to the problem.
How does one avoid the division of labour and still have a job? Umm, one
can't. Even the independently wealthy person, who has no need to work for a
living, can only achieve freedom from the division of labour 'within certain
limits', meaning that they haven't achieved freedom, only a partial respite.
The rest of us have no choice.
> My Nasty Story illustrates something I read in the Adorno bio as a commitment
> to work’s preconditions that precedes what Moggins, in a flat and two-
> dimensional style, interprets as “The Protestant Ethic.” In many jobs, the
> job is unlike philosophy in that discussion of its preconditions is
> emphatically NOT considered part of the job: the employee who sits around and
> tries to think about work, whether or not she is thinking of better ways, is
> emphatically considered to be slacking off.
Now this does sound a little like Adorno in the passage I just cited (apart
from the accusation about Moggin to whom I'll leave it). Mind you, Adorno
wouldn't have excepted philosophy either. Still, lets see where this goes...
> But note that this is a product of alienation,
So far so good, except that we don't yet know how alienation arises...
> and that a thoroughgoing
> application of it as rule lowers productivity.
Not, I think, the experience of capital in the last couple of centuries.
Develop the division of labour, strip even the artisan of any sense of
connection to the value of their product in the market place via the
structure of commodity production and, well I never, productivity goes
throught the roof.
> Employees are most productive
> when encouraged to combine the conditions and preconditions of work, and
> although it is unremarked by academic commentators on Adorno (unfamiliar as
> they are, owing to the tenure system, with work per se), note that Adorno was
> physically subject to alienation at the Radio project.
And we still don't know how alienation arises, but apparently getting
employees to think about what they are doing overcomes it. Here something
goes badly wrong and we have entered the realms of management speak. It
seems that overcoming alienation increases surplus value, because the happy
workers (sorry, employees - a term that speaks volumes) are more productive,
but one presumes, don't actually have to paid any more. Just in case anyone
thinks that Adorno might have been more 'productive' had Princeton allowed
him to 'combine the conditions and preconditions of work', a little more
Minima Moralia:
"All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and participation
merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity".
> I was able, in 1971, to get away with questioning the preconditions of the
> computer work because at that distant date, computerisation in and of itself
> was not the magic bullet it is assumed to be now, and at that distant date and
> at a labor-oriented university, I was not automatically assumed to be engaging
> in backtalk and slacking off. It appears that Adorno merely assumed that
> “theory” was part of the job if the job had to do with truth, whereas
> Lazarsfeld was more au fait with American labor discipline, and its higher
> degree of separation of tasks.
And it had nothing to do with US immigration laws? Or financial need?
> Moggins consistently interprets my views as “the Protestant ethic.” This
> wrongly maps a three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional space, because
> Adorno’s commitment to truth underlay, but was not exhausted by, the
> Protestant ethic.
The only connection I can think of between Adorno and the 'Protestant ethic'
was via Weber, and Adorno took the concept of social rationalisation from
Weber - rationalisation being the problem. I see no 'underlay'.
> It is clear from Wiggershaus (who did not have any special admiration for
> Adorno) and from Martin Jay’s book that Adorno walked into the Princeton
> Radio Research position with a commitment to truth that is unfamiliar to
> academics who work in industry today. Most academics who work in industry
> today expect a situation of mutual exploitation, and this expectation
> produces the very conditions in which the private concern exploits the
> academic, and the academic produces the results desired by the private
> concern.
Just a small point, but Adorno was not working in industry. he was working
in an academic research project (funded by industry, yes, but it is not
quite the same thing, or at least wasn't then).
> Karl Lazarsfeld was clearly this sort of academic and when Adorno would not
> get with the program, Lazarsfeld condemned him in a memo for a variety of
> elementary logical mistakes, such as failure to consider alternatives to his
> views.
What of the possibility that Lazarfeld was, simplly, a throughgoing
empiricist? Believe me, they exist. You seem to assume that he must have
been consciously self-deluding rather than 'damaged'.
> Of course, Adorno had been doing so all along (on his own time, on
> the trips to and from Newark, and even before being engaged) and had rejected
> views which Adorno had decided were not credible – such as the very idea that
> people in Depression New Jersey had the aristocratic leisure to be able to
> appreciate classical music out of the box. Of course, Lazarsfeld did not
> want Adorno to exhaust the alternatives because in other communications he
> condemned Adorno’s density of words (in actuality Adorno’s density of IDEAS –
> see below.) Lazarsfeld presented Adorno with an impossible demand: be snappy,
> and consider ridiculous alternatives. The whole situation smacks of Dilbert.
>
>> This was not what Moggin said. You used wordy, and it is a culturally a term
>> of disparagement - wind over content. if you just meant that Adorno has a
>> close attention to style and a very precise sense of the value of using
>> certain terms, why not say so?
>
> Because our culture's rejection of what is called "wordiness" has become a
> rejection of ideas in addition to words.
I think that is what I implied. 'The value of using certain terms'?
> Adorno IS wordy
No he isn't. Even by your own statement, he uses 'just enuf' words. This is
not wordy. No 'surplus', no mere verbiage, no inflation of ideas, so not
wordy. The term has never been descriptive, but always a term of
disparagement.
> but it has been
> decided even by his mavens that “excessive” words are always a sure indicator
> of badness of ideas. This is owing to the overinfluence of Brecht, who
> preferred formulations like “culture is dogshit.”
No he didn't. I said that he said 'the palace of culture is built on
foundations of dogshit'. Don't misquote me quoting Brecht. If you object to
this then you must also object to Benjamin's comment that there is no
element of culture which is not also a record of barbarism, a comment
endorsed by Adorno.
> This is simple but also
> flat and one-dimensional because it ignores how the workers produced the
> dogshit culture. For example, it classes grand opera with the dogshit but
> fails to see how grand opera confronts, from Fidelio to La Wally, patriarchal
> authority. Whereas in “Surabaya Johnny”, the authority has to be unquestioned
> precisely because it acknowledges no foundation which can be questioned:
> thanks to Brecht, it was Politically Correct from about 1930 to about 1980 to
> abuse women from no higher position than superior physical strength.
I'm sorry but I can't see the sense here. Brecht had a very clear idea who
built the palace of culture and under what conditions (foundations of
dogshit). Grand Opera is made by workers (and at times connected with them -
Verdi's song of the Hebrew Slaves as an 19th century Italian proletarian
anthem, for instance) but the time of Fidelio to La Wally in terms of their
production is hardly their full history. The bourgeois were, after, a
revolutionary class for a brief while (or to Guy Debord, so far the only
revolutionary class), but hardly any longer. By the way, 'Surabaya Johnny'
is one song from a show called 'Happy Days', not a whole opera. So,
considering the whole work, which is most guilty in your book, Brecht's
libretto or Weill's music?. I notice you didn't respond to my comments on
Brecht above. Your slur on Brecht is telling. After all, in the 1930s works
Brecht's aim was not to 'tell people' anything, but to present them with
situations which revealed both complicity and the consquences of that
complicity - as something that the audience would have to deduce from the
situation, and come to their own conclusions. I begin to see why you
wouldn't like this.
>> He undermined the boundary to point out that neither were free. You were the
>> one equated freedom from necessity as leisure, not Moggin, not Marx and
>> certainly not Adorno.
>
> You're both it appears confused by the fact that language is a two-dimensional
> screen on which we project three-dimensional realities.
>
> It is true that Adorno would agree with concepts including Lawrence Friedman's
> "discplined mobilisation of everyday life" as exhibited at Disney world and
> Adorno would agree with Aldous Huxley's question as to why, in a place of
> amusement, nobody seems amused. This seems truer in America and Britain, less
> true in the Romance language speaking countries: it seems that the French get
> une bang even out of Eurodisney,
Except they don't. French resistance to Eurodisney has been notable,
particularly compared to other parts of Europe. Even internally - after a
strike (Disney's first since the great 'Dumbo as blackleg film' 30s strike)
which was notable because Disney had banned unions, Eurodisney is now
unionised. It is also the only Disneyworld to serve alcohol. The French
still aren't going in any great numbers. (OK so they prefer to go to Parc
Asterix, but still).
>and Carnival time in Venice is Katy-bar-the-
> door,
Mainly US tourists, certainly hardly any 'natives' except paid extras.
> whereas "holiday camps" in Britain (at least as described by Paul
> Theroux) and Disney in America are grim spectacles of the bourgeois getting
> their goddamn money's worth.
The bourgeois? In holiday camps in Britain? My, you really do have trouble
with class identification. First you want to make 'employees' more
productive, and now you place the bourgeois in industrialised entertainment.
> The very infection of leisure by work seems to have informed much of his
> thinking on leisure (cf. Adorno's In Search of Wagner for how the cares of
> the bourgeois affected listening)
I know, that is (nearly) what I said. Except that I did not suggest that
leisure was something that had somehow become infected. Leisure does not
predate industrialised work. (Not labouring does, of course, but leisure, as
Adorno points out in the works on the culture industry, and also borrowing
from Kracauer, is industrialised 'not labouring'). You have accused both
Moggin and myself of foolishly holding to bourgeois categories where (as far
as I can tell) neither of us were. But you are the one who constantly
identifies 'not working' as leisure, even while you claim that you go along
with Adorno's 'undermining' of it.
> but I think's it simple-minded to conclude
> that therefore we must (1) cleanse the term leisure of worklike constraints
> and (2) eliminate "work."
That is not what I said, and not what Adorno says. Again, as apparently I
must repeat, the problem is necessity (whether 'natural', which can be
overcome, or as imposed by capital).
> That's because although Adorno did not like the
> infection of leisure by work issues related to scarcity, his passage on the
> intellectual that I quoted in a previous post ALLOWS for an infection of the
> one term by the other.
First, it has nothing to do with scarcity in Adorno, indeed quite the
reverse. Adorno starts from a point of 'unnecessary' consumption. Crises of
capital do not come through scarcity, but 'overproduction'. Secondly, the
point is not that one term 'infects' the other, but that the two come into
being through the same structure. The division of labour, the commodity form
and accompanying rationalisation of the world. It is only a rationalised
world that could consider 'not working' as leisure.
> The difference between the infection of leisure by
> work at the holiday camp and the fact that the violinist's practice is both
> leisure and hard work is that the recalcitrance of the violin is dictated by
> nothing other than the medium itself. The key concept is alienation:
> somebody else decides that the Disney-goer does not have the chits necessary
> for the ride whereas the violinist's struggle is dictated by his
> non-alienated decisions.
Where did the violinist come from? There is no conceivable way that the
orchestral violinist's situation is unalienated (or, for that matter, the
soloist's) for Adorno. What surprises me is that you claim that this has
some congruence with Adorno. Not only did Adorno mount a critique of the
conditions of production and reception of the symphony orchestra (past and
present), but he has next to no interest in 'performance'. See, for
instance, the various essays in Quasi una Fantasia, or Philosophy of Modern
Music. What is significant about a musical work is in its structure, not in
its performance.
> Some neoconservative critics have talked about "elitism" in which guys like
> Adorno make the call for others that the holiday camp is a place of amusement
> where nobody is being amused. They don't see how alienation plays its role.
I'll sort of go along with this, except that there is no possible way in
which Adorno is a 'guy' (other than simple biology).
> This factor, however, is becoming almost invisible as more and more zones of
> culture are alienated, so much so that people, including and at times
> especialy academics and intellectuals, search for opportunities to be
> alienated: an example from music would be extreme "original instruments"
> wherein the artist subjects himself to the fantasy that he can recreate
> Beethoven as Beethoven originally "sounded." People alienated even by
> high-level jobs, with their other-directed search for ways to offload blame
> and reuse credit search, I think, for alienation in listening and one way is
> to search for anhedonic opportunities.
'Even' by high level jobs? I don't think that you really got the point of
the passage from the Dialectic of Enlightenment that Moggin quoted.
> Moggin prides himself on what seem flat readings of a thinker whose thought
> appears to me very complex, because at this late date, much education and
> indoctrination confuses the map with the territory: it becomes the mark of
> the superior mind to confuse the map with the territory in the administered
> world. It would seem that Adorno, had he lived now, would like “original
> instruments” because Adorno thought that a radio symphony was debased because
> it was the image of a live performance. However, the key concept for Adorno
> was not recreation of live performances of the 1820s, it was recreation of
> nonalienated scenes.
No it wasn't. The 'key concept' is that art can enact, and therefore reveal
to a critical interpretation, the condition of alienation. Otherwise, why
would Adorno insist that what is important about art is that it fails to
fulfill its promise. It promises the unalienated, but can only do so by
failing to deliver it. I begin to wonder if Moggin was right - have you
actually read Adorno rather than filtered him through your own
preoccupations?
> The contrast is between formalism, and the dictation of internal stucture in
> the round.
This needs clarification, otherwise you just sound like a bad director faced
with Shakespeare.
>
>> Of course it did, and it does for the capitalist epoch, and always will, but
>> the point would be that the possiblity currently exists for the the
>> 'reproduction of material existence' to no longer form a major determinant
>> on possible forms of life. See the Communist Manifesto (1848!) A simple
>> question, why aren't all production lines automated, given that they could
>> be?
>
> The answer to this question lies in the domain of theory and not in
> technology.
Is that not what I asked? I know that it is practically possible.
> The science-fiction vision of the totally automated world imagines that there
> are things like “tasks” which can be reified, and therefore automated. It
> neglects the fact that interfaces between tasks produce new tasks at a
> potentially nondenumerable rate. It falsely imagines that tasks exist outside
> of social relations.
Tasks ARE social relations.
> For example, selected for its simpleminded clarity, the Jetsons preserve the
> family structure and mobilisation of every day life of a mid-century American
> group. Their necessary tasks as automated therefore are an isomorph of
> midcentury American life. This of course ignores the necessary way in which
> technical advance changes social structures.
No. If this were true, then all production lines would be automated.
Unfortunately, social relations shape technical advance. A small but simple
example, why was the female pill developed some 30 years before the (still
experimental) male pill? Or, again, why haven't all production lines been
automated? (Hint: It might have something to do with surplus value).
> For example, the Jetsons seem to need a “maid” because upper middle class
> families in America up until the 1960s showed status by hiring African
> American domestics: therefore the Jetsons have a robot “maid.”
>
> Unfortunately for his followers, Marx’s work predated work in the foundation
> of mathematics and as such Marx failed to see the concept of
> nondenumerability which was constructed by George Cantor after Marx for pure
> mathematical reasons. Simple-minded Left thinking such as is fostered in the
> universities regard this as bourgeois science and therefore untrustworthy: it
> ignores the very idea, found in the primary texts of the left itself and in
> Adorno, that it is the bourgeois that produce the only worthwhile science on
> tap, whereas the working class, because of its very oppression, produces
> astrology and conspiracy theories.
Where in Adorno is this claim about bourgeois science stated? I'm serious,
give me a reference. Until then, I claim the right to be very, very
doubtful. Adorno's work on astrology is, if I remember right, not class
specific at all. In fact quite the reverse, as he argues that it is
bourgeois rationality that has reintroduced fatum.
> Thus to Marx, had he thought about the matter, “use values” and “exchange
> values” could be enumerated. However, use values and exchange values are
> constructed by language which has at least the capability to construct
> nondenumerable lists of same: this was capitalism’s genius: for example, as we
> run out of coal we CHANGE the need statement from coal to energy. If we
> exhaust energy resources we find that we can reduce the need for energy.
Marx did think about it. Use value cannot, by definition, be enumerated.
Exchange value is nothing but enumeration. This is a fundamental
contradiction. Go on, overcome it, enummerate a use value.
> Therefore, at this late date, it simply boggles the mind to think that “all
> production lines could be automated.” They cannot, because their very
> definition has to be produced by human thought-labor and human physical
> labor. If we could define our needs then production lines could be
> established to meet those needs but we are in constant turmoil about these
> very needs.
It is a matter of human social relations. It is a matter of ends rather than
means, That is all I asked. You can't face it because you cannot see humans
merrily defining their needs. Or rather you can - they need to go to work.
> A “totally automated society” is self-contradictory, because the automation
> zone, by definition, has an interface with humanity.
Yes. But automation can remove exactly the necessity for the labour to
reproduce material existence that you have been banging on about. Sure the
machines would need tending. Perhaps that prospective future generation
could take turns, but they sure as hell wouldn't be stuck in the vision of
Komosol dam repairs that make up your vision of the sociaist utopia. I have
no vision of that utopia, for two reasons. One, because as Adorno says,
thought cannot separate itself, even by a hairsbreadth, from what is (for
reasons why see the Minima Moralia quote), second because, assuming humanity
ever makes it, what they do is up to them. Freedom, remember. That is why
Marx calls our current state human prehistory.
> Ultimately, humanism is
> far more than a set of pieties about humanity: it is instead the humanism of
> Jon Schell’s books on the actual consequences of a nuclear war in which the
> elimination of the human term (his image “a republic of insects and grass”)
> produces a situation both logically and psychologically untenable. The
> cognitive and the ethical merge. A vision of a society of Eloi without any
> human Morlocks (to use the forgotten terminology of the mid-century science
> populariser H. G. Wells) is just silly, both cognitively and ethically: and
> the fact that Mr. Wells saw fit to illustrate (in his book The Time Machine)
> the necessity of a debased working class (the Morlocks) means that the
> scienctifiction popularisers of our own day have descended beneath his level.
You just don't get it. You don't get Marx, nor do you get Adorno. These
references are telling. Have you read Adorno's critique of Huxley in Prisms?
has it not occured to you that H.G. Wells work was a critique of the
division of labour - the Eloi were made by this division just as much as the
Morlocks - in terms of the *late* 19th century, Wells was a social democrat,
let us not forget. he wished to see workers reach an accomodation with
capitalists. For a different 19th century vision, try News from Nowhere,
William Morris. But I was forgetting, you don't see the reduction of
necessary labour as a good thing. Try starting again from the division of
labour (a clue, alienation is not just the result of non-inclusive
management, nor of not having a suggestion box).
You also managed to cut some of my comments. I'll put them back here, in the
hope that you might address them.
> >Moggin is not, at least as far as I can tell, arguing for leisure, but
>>freedom - this is a very different thing. Removal of necessity is vital to
>>freedom, a fundamental point in Marx.
or a point which you quoted but did not address:
>> Of course it did, and it does for the capitalist epoch, and always will, but
>> the point would be that the possibility currently exists for the
>> 'reproduction of material existence' to no longer form a major determinant
>> on possible forms of life. See the Communist Manifesto (1848!)
As far as I can tell, these are the central points in this debate. Responses
welcome.
Also, as side issues, after you had written:
>>> People flock to Pollock because of the high cash value of his paintings: the
>>> museums have through corporate sponsoship been able to generate attendance
on
>>> the part of people who suffer from a combination of attraction to art (for
>>> some of their admiration is genuine, and elicited by the quality of the
work)
>>> and attraction to the Yuppie life-style. Whereas better artists (Lee
Krasner
>>> in opposition to her husband Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein in opposition
>>> to Andy Warhol) are ignored. Note, finally, that in the two terms I have
>>> suggested, the successful artists Pollock and Warhol present a significantly
>>> more authoritarian face to the audience. Lee Krasner’s affirmative
paintings
>>> are not the loud and authoritarian statements of her quondam husband:
>>> Lichtenstein plays with the history of art in a manner that is anti-
>>> authoritarian, whereas Warhol set up an authoritarian Factory that used
>>> terror and drugs to motivate the actual producers of his overrated Brillo
>>> boxes.
I wrote:
>> Krasner -v- Pollock is an arguable judgement, as is Rauschenberg -v_ Warhol.
>> On what criterea? Adorno would see the arguing for the value of works as an
>> important critical act. On request, I could produce counter readings to
>> yours. How is Pollock (at least of the 1948-50 drips) authoritarian?
>> Rauschenberg, arguably, turns the avant-garde techniques of the 1920s, aimed
>> at the the institution of art and having the fusion of art and life
>> practices as their goal, into art, and museum art at that. At least some of
>>your judgements here seem to me to be devoid of an historical sense,and that
> >is hardly Adornian.
and the apologetic follow up:
>> Oops. Quick correction. I was still in a conversation I had earlier today.
>> So Lichenstein -v- Warhol. My point might still stand, but are you arguning
>> that Lichenstain's production was less alienated than Warhol's, or is this
>> another version of the Brecht argument, Lichenstein had the decency to make
>> his own work? If so, then this is just wrong, at least about the early parts
>> of Warhol's production, and certainly things like the disaster series, or
>> the Jackies or the Marilyns or the Soup cans. In any case, each might be
>> said to be deliberately removing any sense that the image was 'theirs' and
>> choosing an extant formal order. Does it matter who made the works?
Any response?
> Edward G. Nilges
Yours
Giles
Puss in Boots
>>>From the passage "Little Hans" (Minima Moralia, Adorno 1974), Adorno writes:
>>> "The intellectual, particularly when philosophically inclined,
>>> is cut off from practical life: revulsion from it has driven
>>> him to concern himself with so-called things of the mind. But
>>> material practice is not only the pre-condition of his existence,
>>> it is basic to the world which he criticises in his work. If he
>>> knows nothing of this basis, he shoots into thin air."
mog...@mindspring.com (Puss in Boots):
>> Well and good -- also irrelevant. Reminding intellectuals
>> that that they live in a material world is different from
>> insisting on work as a moral imperative and positing corruption
>> and decadence as the alternative.
Ed:
>Since your metalanguage is also your language, the two-dimensionality of both
>causes you to consistently rephrase three-dimensional, rounded statements as
>two-dimensional straw men. I didn't say that work was a "moral imperative."
>Using the Kantian notion of the convergence of the intellectual and the
>ethical (which is not the reduction of one to the other), I said that the
>personal corruption was simultaneously, and for Adorno, an intellectual
>corruption...which caused thought that did not meet his standards to fail to
>achieve its own stated ends.
Nah -- you didn't say anything like that. Here's what you
wrote about "personal corruption and decadence."
[Ed]:
: ... By calling for an end to work you are in my view
:calling for an opportunity for everyone to share the personal corruption
:and decadence seen over time in the upper crust.
There it is -- deprived of work, the idle rich fall into a
state of moral decay. Therefore work is a moral imperative:
not working is an opportunity to share in the corruption of the
"upper crust." That's your reason for keeping everybody on
the job eight hours a day.
Of course I'm not "calling for an end to work." I've been
calling for an end to the _necessity_ of work, so that the
work you do is a product of your freedom -- but to you, freedom
is merely an opportunity for decadence and corruption.
You also claimed to see Adorno talking about decadence and
corruption in the passage above. "The intellectual is
decadent/corrupted in 'shooting off into thin air' when
uninformed about material reality." But as I already mentioned,
shooting in the air isn't either decadent or corrupt: it's
merely futile. And the intellectual here isn't idle -- he's at
work. Adorno doesn't suggest he lacks industry.
>Empiricism shares with Continental rationalism a committment to truth, and the
>Continental claim is that empiricism even fails at truth, narrowly defined,
>because of excessive committment to pure empiricism.
>If you don't "get" this, there's realy no point in further discussion since
>you don't understand Adorno, and quoting excessive sections of the Odysseus
>story, to which I have paper access and which I've read, are not going to
>change this.
"Excessive sections..."? You claimed that I misunderstood
Adorno. I offered a single, medium-length quote that showed
exactly what I was drawing from. You erased it without a reply.
The rationalism vs. empiricism bit seems to be a flashback
to your argument with Gerry a few weeks -- months? -- ago.
I'm someobody else entirely. (One of the few points Gerry will
agree with me on.)
> You've also failed to follow Adorno's own personal example of discourse
> ethics.
I also don't dress like him, and I've never dropped a dime
on anybody.
> As part of his committment to internal structure there is a
> refreshing lack of personal attacks in Adorno: instead of calling Brecht a
> bum, Adorno writes loftily, and refreshingly, that to play worker's dialects
> against the written language is reactionary, and goes on to show why this is
> so, without mentioning Brecht.
You're insinuating that I'm unethical because I don't make
insinuations?
> One aspect of worker's dialects, with its use of brutal rhetoric, is what is
> now called the flame war and since unlike Adorno I am a real worker, I'm
> always game for one, if need be.
I thought you said that Adorno _was_ "a real worker" -- it
seemed important to you to claim he wasn't a bum. That
work-ethic of yours at work again, I figured. But today you're
"a real worker" and Adorno isn't. Go figure.
> But the flame war would not advance the
> cause of criticising media, and people are losing their lives in Kosovo in
> part as a consequence of the brutality of worker's dialects.
There was an argument recently between a Nietzschean and a
Christian. The Christian spoke civilly -- the Nietzschean
said fuck this and fuck that. But the Nietzschean made a solid
point -- the Christian had nothing to say and said it in
Sunday School language.
-- Moggin
spino...@my-dejanews.com
> wrote about "personal corruption and decadence."
>
> [Ed]:
>
> :calling for an opportunity for everyone to share the personal corruption
> :and decadence seen over time in the upper crust.
>
> state of moral decay. Therefore work is a moral imperative:
> not working is an opportunity to share in the corruption of the
> "upper crust." That's your reason for keeping everybody on
> the job eight hours a day.
This reply assumes two contradictory propositions at a deep level. The first
is that you have a right to assume, interpret, and read meaning, and the
second is that your interlocutor is some sort of straight man that can be
held to the literal meaning of his words, at your convenience.
This results from the confusion of the map with the territory that is actually
encouraged by the educational system and that a reading of Adorno, which I
recommend to you, helps to dispel.
One the one hand, you revert to the neo-barbarism of posting what I've said as
an unanswerable proof that I've said (in actuality typed) it, which is a
triviality. But only if we were dealing in legalities would this matter, it a
situation where literal meanings were critical in place of interpretation.
But then, absurdly, you make the wild assertion that I want to make everybody
work 8 hours a day.
Him make us work 16 hours a day. Help. - Allen Ginsberg, America
Of course, what I actually referred to was the 8-hour day movement of the 19th
century, which was reversed in our own era by encouraging infoslaves to
fantasize that they were CEOs, and make the 16 hour day a norm, even for women
with children.
So, at one and the same time, you want the privilege of interpretation and the
privilege to engage in literal noninterpretation.
>
> Of course I'm not "calling for an end to work." I've been
> calling for an end to the _necessity_ of work, so that the
> work you do is a product of your freedom -- but to you, freedom
> is merely an opportunity for decadence and corruption.
>
Perhaps. But it's also clear that your "freedom" is the freedom to revert to
neobarbarism.
> You also claimed to see Adorno talking about decadence and
> corruption in the passage above. "The intellectual is
> decadent/corrupted in 'shooting off into thin air' when
> uninformed about material reality." But as I already mentioned,
> shooting in the air isn't either decadent or corrupt: it's
> merely futile. And the intellectual here isn't idle -- he's at
> work. Adorno doesn't suggest he lacks industry.
>
You have a sloppy attention to words which makes me conclude you haven't read
Adorno with any depth. "Industry" as a word describing hard work is English
in origin and contains within it the image of the worker keeping up with the
machine. Adorno's language contained phrases similar to truth and its
demands but not this alienated notion.
> > As part of his committment to internal structure there is a
> > refreshing lack of personal attacks in Adorno: instead of calling Brecht a
> > bum, Adorno writes loftily, and refreshingly, that to play worker's dialects
> > against the written language is reactionary, and goes on to show why this is
> > so, without mentioning Brecht.
>
> You're insinuating that I'm unethical because I don't make
> insinuations?
Adorno wasn't making insinuations in the passage on Brecht. Instead, he was
addressing the question as to whether worker's dialects, as opposed to the
written language, are reactionary, and in so doing, he draws our attention to
the Fascist potential of Brecht.
>
> I thought you said that Adorno _was_ "a real worker" -- it
> seemed important to you to claim he wasn't a bum. That
> work-ethic of yours at work again, I figured. But today you're
> "a real worker" and Adorno isn't. Go figure.
Adorno was a "real worker" only insofar as he was engaged in the Princeton
Radio Research project. During the West German era and the era of Critical
Models, Adorno was more of an administrator, and his very reaction to the
Frankfurt incident shows this. Thirty years intervened between Princeton and
Frankfurt and a lot can happen in that time.
To be a Real worker is not a cardboard construct and the idea that it is has
caused a lot of trouble. The most bourgeois person can turn into a real
worker *instanter* by getting a part-time with United Parcel Service. The
very idea that "I yam a real worker and you're not" is cryptoracist, and
sexist, nonsense.
>
> > But the flame war would not advance the
> > cause of criticising media, and people are losing their lives in Kosovo in
> > part as a consequence of the brutality of worker's dialects.
>
> There was an argument recently between a Nietzschean and a
> Christian. The Christian spoke civilly -- the Nietzschean
> said fuck this and fuck that. But the Nietzschean made a solid
> point -- the Christian had nothing to say and said it in
> Sunday School language.
>
You've not given any details on the exchange, and "fuck this" is not a very
good argumentative move, logically speaking, in any argument with which I am
familiar. Instead, depending on the context of the exchange, the Nietzchean
probably won by the neobarbarism of the threat. This dialectical reversal
apparently operated in the former Yugoslavia, in an overnight fashion, in May
of 1992. People apparently not *au fait* enough with Nietzche had the quasi-
Christian notion of tolerance and forgiveness and getting along and these
people were shot at during a demonstration for such candy-assed ideals, and
this triggered the current series of wars.
These wars are informed by a philosophical (almost Voltarean, in the sense of
Candide) depth of horror. It's as if the Serbian gunmen, who instead of
sparing women and kids deliberately target them, have absorbed the fashionable
"fuck this and fuck that" Nietzcheanism of the past fifty years.
Nietzche, properly understood, converged the will to truth with the will to
power. But it is at least possible that at the level of convergence both
terms become other than they are commonly understood. If the will to truth
is the will to power then this NOT ONLY deconstructs the will to truth as a
mere drive for power. It ALSO deconstructs the will to power as the will to
truth. A truly symmetric understanding of the Nietzchean equation does not
"privilege" "fuck this and fuck that".
I can read my desire to win arguments as a mere pious search for the Truth,
as a quasi-Christian venture. Or I can use notions actually deriving not so
much from Nietzche as from certain African philosophies in which the notion
of "force" plays, logically, the role "truth" does in the West. If the
philosophy has a meaning at all, however, these are at best names for
underlying realities probably found in the daily lives of people.
If in African discourse "force" plays the role that in Western universities
"truth" plays, this actually helps me to see that mathematicians, say, at
Princeton's John von Neumann center were actually "playing the dozens" with
each other (and, I'd add, in my experience systematically silencing John Nash
who at the time I was there was still in his schizophrenic episode.)
But this does not mean that one of the mathematicians could have said "fuck"
as an argument, or "your mother wears army boots", unless, of course, they'd
agreed on a calculus in which "fuck", or (There exists an X)[x=your mother
AND wearsArmyBoots(x)] were valid symbols. There is instead a commonly
agreed upon symbolic move when someone tries to win arguments with "fuck this
and fuck that" and that is "call security."
Sister Mary Edward explains it all to you. Pity I can't rap your knuckles,
because I think that misreading Nietzche is at fault for both Littleton CO and
Yugoslavia. The Goths of Littleton may not have read Nietzche, indeed they
probably did not: for there is something about merely reading that chills
people out. Instead, they were influenced by second-hand, superficial
understandings of Nietzcheanism (such as fostered by Brecht.) On the other
hand, it appears (from both the written record and personal testimonies of
refugees, some of whom are my students) that the Chetniks actually exposed
themselves to some of this actual reading, but again in a superficial way.
My talk on Adorno at Chicago's College of Complexes was criticised by a
number of listeners, who were primarily older lefties and IWW members, as
needless obfuscation. I have a responsibility to simplify: but my major
concern is the opposite neobrutalism of formulations such as "culture is
dogshit." Adorno himself addresses this in a passage on how, in administered
contexts, a form of industrial bottleneck operates such that the text,
whether written or spoken, has to be downsized so that the dullest person is
on-message. I have the responsibility to respect people whose lives have
been much harder than mine but I have the responsibility also to give them
what I regard as the truth, as simply as possible, but no simpler. A
fashionable Nietzcheanism provides no ground to this responsibility.
Giles Peaker
(Apologies for any double posting, but I sent this a couple of days ago and
it hasn't shown up on Dejanews. I have newsreader problems - one sees but
doesn't send, one sends but doesn't see. Giles)
throught the roof. Slave labour helped, and they might have been a little
bit alienated.
> Employees are most productive
> when encouraged to combine the conditions and preconditions of work, and
> although it is unremarked by academic commentators on Adorno (unfamiliar as
> they are, owing to the tenure system, with work per se), note that Adorno was
> physically subject to alienation at the Radio project.
And we still don't know how alienation arises, but apparently getting
employees to think about what they are doing overcomes it. Here something
goes badly wrong and we have entered the realms of management speak. It
seems that overcoming alienation increases surplus value, because the happy
workers (sorry, employees - a term that speaks volumes) are more productive,
but one presumes, don't actually have to paid any more. Of course, the real
danger about giving people the luxury to genuinely think about their work
(rather than think about it up to the point that it would get them in
trouble) is that they might decide to organise it differently, without
having to work for an employer, without having to spend hours in work over
which they have no control because, well, they have to. They might even
start to question what the work was for. Or, to put it bluntly, they might
object to the relations of production and distribution. But then they might
not be 'more' productive in your sense. Oops.
Just in case anyone thinks that Adorno might have been more 'productive' had
Princeton allowed him to 'combine the conditions and preconditions of work',
or even if they hadn't be so nasty to him, a little more Minima Moralia:
"All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and participation
merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity".
> I was able, in 1971, to get away with questioning the preconditions of the
> computer work because at that distant date, computerisation in and of itself
> was not the magic bullet it is assumed to be now, and at that distant date and
> at a labor-oriented university, I was not automatically assumed to be engaging
> in backtalk and slacking off. It appears that Adorno merely assumed that
> “theory” was part of the job if the job had to do with truth, whereas
> Lazarsfeld was more au fait with American labor discipline, and its higher
> degree of separation of tasks.
And Adorno's need of a 'position' (as it was an academic post) had nothing
to do with US immigration laws? Or financial need?
> Moggins consistently interprets my views as “the Protestant ethic.” This
> wrongly maps a three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional space, because
> Adorno’s commitment to truth underlay, but was not exhausted by, the
> Protestant ethic.
The only connection I can think of between Adorno and the 'Protestant ethic'
was via Weber, and Adorno took the concept of social rationalisation from
Weber - rationalisation being the problem. I see no 'underlay'. By the way -
I have reread the correspondence - Moggin did not bring up the 'protestant
ethic' or use the term to describe you. You introduced the term and (so far)
where the only one to use it.
> It is clear from Wiggershaus (who did not have any special admiration for
> Adorno) and from Martin Jay’s book that Adorno walked into the Princeton
> Radio Research position with a commitment to truth that is unfamiliar to
> academics who work in industry today. Most academics who work in industry
> today expect a situation of mutual exploitation, and this expectation
> produces the very conditions in which the private concern exploits the
> academic, and the academic produces the results desired by the private
> concern.
Just a small point, but Adorno was not working in industry. He was working
in an academic research project (funded by industry, yes, but it is not
quite the same thing, or at least wasn't then).
> Karl Lazarsfeld was clearly this sort of academic and when Adorno would not
> get with the program, Lazarsfeld condemned him in a memo for a variety of
> elementary logical mistakes, such as failure to consider alternatives to his
> views.
What of the possibility that Lazarfeld was, simply, a throughgoing
empiricist? Believe me, they exist. You seem to assume that he must have
been consciously self-deluding rather than 'damaged' (which seems to miss
the point about ideology).
> Of course, Adorno had been doing so all along (on his own time, on
> the trips to and from Newark, and even before being engaged) and had rejected
> views which Adorno had decided were not credible – such as the very idea that
> people in Depression New Jersey had the aristocratic leisure to be able to
> appreciate classical music out of the box. Of course, Lazarsfeld did not
> want Adorno to exhaust the alternatives because in other communications he
> condemned Adorno’s density of words (in actuality Adorno’s density of IDEAS –
> see below.) Lazarsfeld presented Adorno with an impossible demand: be snappy,
> and consider ridiculous alternatives. The whole situation smacks of Dilbert.
>
>> This was not what Moggin said. You used wordy, and it is a culturally a term
>> of disparagement - wind over content. if you just meant that Adorno has a
>> close attention to style and a very precise sense of the value of using
>> certain terms, why not say so?
>
> Because our culture's rejection of what is called "wordiness" has become a
> rejection of ideas in addition to words.
I think that is what I implied. 'The value of using certain terms'?
> Adorno IS wordy
No he isn't. Even by your own statement, he uses 'just enuf' words. This is
not wordy. No 'surplus', no mere verbiage, no inflation of ideas, so not
wordy. The term has never been descriptive, but always a term of
disparagement. If you call him wordy, then you accept that disparagement.
> but it has been
> decided even by his mavens that “excessive” words are always a sure indicator
> of badness of ideas. This is owing to the overinfluence of Brecht, who
> preferred formulations like “culture is dogshit.”
No he didn't. I said that he said 'the palace of culture is built on
foundations of dogshit'. Don't misquote me quoting Brecht. If you object to
this then you must also object to Benjamin's comment to the effect that
there is noelement of culture which is not also a record of barbarism, a
comment endorsed by Adorno.
> This is simple but also
> flat and one-dimensional because it ignores how the workers produced the
> dogshit culture. For example, it classes grand opera with the dogshit but
> fails to see how grand opera confronts, from Fidelio to La Wally, patriarchal
> authority. Whereas in “Surabaya Johnny”, the authority has to be unquestioned
> precisely because it acknowledges no foundation which can be questioned:
> thanks to Brecht, it was Politically Correct from about 1930 to about 1980 to
> abuse women from no higher position than superior physical strength.
I'm sorry but I can't see the sense here. Brecht had a very clear idea who
built the palace of culture and under what conditions (foundations of
dogshit). 'High' culture, particularly in such labour intensive forms as
Grand Opera, is made by workers. Who built Versailles, the Louvre etc. etc.?
Under what conditions? I'll happily agree that at times it was closely
connected with their struggle - Verdi's song of the Hebrew Slaves as an 19th
century Italian proletarian anthem, for instance. But the time of Fidelio to
La Wally in terms of their production is hardly their full history. The
bourgeois were, after all, a revolutionary class for a brief while (or to
Guy Debord, so far the only revolutionary class), but hardly any longer. Ask
the audience at the Met whether their patriarchal authority has been
questioned. I am not arguing about the structure of these works. There we
might agree, but you want to claim a value for them as Agit-prop ('confronts
patriarchal authority'). Their class models ain't the revolutionary class
any more and their sentiments are consumed as exactly that by the very
people who embody patriarchal authority and who forgot the contradictions of
their own class ideology in 1848. Incidentally, have you read Adorno on
Fidelio, or indeed Mozart, Rossini, etc..
You seem unable to get Brecht right, 'Surabaya Johnny'is one song from a
show called 'Happy End', not a whole opera in itself. So, given that you are
so sure of its value, considering the whole work which is most guilty in
your book, Brecht's libretto or Weill's music?. I notice you didn't respond
to my comments on Brecht above. You constantly disparage Brecht whilst
showing, so far at least, little evidence of actual study. In this regard,
your misquote of me quoting Brecht is telling. After all, in the 1930s works
Brecht's aim was not to 'tell people' anything, but to present them with
situations which revealed both complicity and the consquences of that
complicity. This was something that the audience would have to deduce from
the situation, and come to their own conclusions. I begin to see why you
wouldn't like this.
>> He undermined the boundary to point out that neither were free. You were the
>> one equated freedom from necessity as leisure, not Moggin, not Marx and
>> certainly not Adorno.
>
> You're both it appears confused by the fact that language is a two-dimensional
> screen on which we project three-dimensional realities.
In a classic bit of British Brechtian worker's dialect, You what?
(pronounced yerwaa?). I feel a spectre of Sokal coming on.
> It is true that Adorno would agree with concepts including Lawrence Friedman's
> "discplined mobilisation of everyday life" as exhibited at Disney world and
> Adorno would agree with Aldous Huxley's question as to why, in a place of
> amusement, nobody seems amused. This seems truer in America and Britain, less
> true in the Romance language speaking countries: it seems that the French get
> une bang even out of Eurodisney,
Except they don't. French resistance to Eurodisney has been notable,
particularly compared to other parts of Europe. Even internally - after a
strike (Disney's first since the great 'Dumbo as blackleg film' 30s strike)
which was notable because Disney had banned unions, Eurodisney is now
unionised. It is also the only Disneyworld to serve alcohol. The French
still aren't going in any great numbers. (OK so they prefer to go to Parc
Asterix, but still you are wrong in the specifics).
>and Carnival time in Venice is Katy-bar-the-
> door,
Mainly US tourists, certainly hardly any 'natives' except paid extras.
> whereas "holiday camps" in Britain (at least as described by Paul
> Theroux) and Disney in America are grim spectacles of the bourgeois getting
> their goddamn money's worth.
The bourgeois? In holiday camps in Britain? My, you really do have trouble
with class identification. First you want to make 'employees' more
productive, and now you place the bourgeois in overtly industrialised
entertainment. The British bourgeoisie are all in Tuscany (the Kulcha, the
vino, the villa), or more likely somewhere just a smidgen more exclusive.
Not that this means that their reactions aren't thoroughly prepackaged.
> The very infection of leisure by work seems to have informed much of his
> thinking on leisure (cf. Adorno's In Search of Wagner for how the cares of
> the bourgeois affected listening)
I know. That is (nearly, but not quite) what I said. Except that I did not
suggest that leisure was something that had somehow become infected. Leisure
does not predate industrialised work. (Not labouring does, of course, but
leisure, as Adorno points out in the works on the culture industry, and also
borrowing from Kracauer, is industrialised 'not labouring'). You have
accused both Moggin and myself of holding to bourgeois categories where (as
far as I can tell) neither of us were. But you are the one who constantly
identifies 'not working' as leisure, even while you claim that you go along
with Adorno's 'undermining' of it.
> but I think's it simple-minded to conclude
> that therefore we must (1) cleanse the term leisure of worklike constraints
> and (2) eliminate "work."
That is not what I said, and not what Adorno says. Again, as apparently I
must repeat, the problem is necessity (whether 'natural', which can be
overcome, or as imposed by capital, which can, one hopes, also be overcome).
However, seeing as you have just equated 'work' and 'constraints', I would
be intrigued to know what you see those constraints as. I am presuming, from
all that you have said so far, that you see the current situation as
needless constraints (of thought, dress and behaviour) being placed on a
basically alright structure. Do away with 'surplus repression' (your phrase)
and all will be well. Apart from the intriguing possibility that 'surplus
repression' means that there is a necessary level of repression - which
would fit some of your comments - I note that you do not consider the
fundamental structure of work under capitalism: alienated labour; surplus
value and all, to be a fundamental determinant, or even a problem. If I am
wrong, please correct me - I base this only on what you have written in this
thread so far. But if this is so, then I cannot see how you can possibly
claim any common ground with Adorno.
> That's because although Adorno did not like the
> infection of leisure by work issues related to scarcity, his passage on the
> intellectual that I quoted in a previous post ALLOWS for an infection of the
> one term by the other.
First, it has nothing to do with 'scarcity' in Adorno, indeed quite the
reverse. Adorno starts from a point of 'unnecessary' consumption (i.e. the
creation of false needs to satisfy capital). Crises of
capital do not come through scarcity, but overproduction. Secondly, the
point is not that one term 'infects' the other, but that the two come into
being through the same structure. The division of labour, the commodity form
and accompanying rationalisation of the world. It is only a rationalised
world that could consider 'not working' as leisure.
> The difference between the infection of leisure by
> work at the holiday camp and the fact that the violinist's practice is both
> leisure and hard work is that the recalcitrance of the violin is dictated by
> nothing other than the medium itself. The key concept is alienation:
> somebody else decides that the Disney-goer does not have the chits necessary
> for the ride whereas the violinist's struggle is dictated by his
> non-alienated decisions.
Where did the violinist come from? There is no conceivable way that the
orchestral violinist's situation is unalienated (or, for that matter, the
soloist's) for Adorno. What surprises me is that you claim that this has
some congruence with Adorno's writings. Not only did Adorno mount a critique
of the conditions of production and reception of the symphony orchestra
(past and present), but he has next to no interest in 'performance' in terms
of the significance of the artwork (Obviously it is highly significant for a
sociology of culture). See, for instance, the various essays in Quasi una
Fantasia, or Philosophy of Modern Music. What is significant about a musical
work is in its structure, not in its performance, otherwise the game would
be well and truly over.
> Some neoconservative critics have talked about "elitism" in which guys like
> Adorno make the call for others that the holiday camp is a place of amusement
> where nobody is being amused. They don't see how alienation plays its role.
I'll sort of go along with this, except that there is no way in
which Adorno is a 'guy' (other than simple biology).
> This factor, however, is becoming almost invisible as more and more zones of
> culture are alienated, so much so that people, including and at times
> especialy academics and intellectuals, search for opportunities to be
> alienated: an example from music would be extreme "original instruments"
> wherein the artist subjects himself to the fantasy that he can recreate
> Beethoven as Beethoven originally "sounded." People alienated even by
> high-level jobs, with their other-directed search for ways to offload blame
> and reuse credit search, I think, for alienation in listening and one way is
> to search for anhedonic opportunities.
'Even' by high level jobs? I don't think that you really got the point of
the passage from the Dialectic of Enlightenment that Moggin quoted. Even the
idle person with 'independent' income can only escape the divsion of labour
'to a certain extent', which means, ultimately, not at all, as even that
extent is determined in its limits and its possibilities.
> Moggin prides himself on what seem flat readings of a thinker whose thought
> appears to me very complex, because at this late date, much education and
> indoctrination confuses the map with the territory: it becomes the mark of
> the superior mind to confuse the map with the territory in the administered
> world. It would seem that Adorno, had he lived now, would like “original
> instruments” because Adorno thought that a radio symphony was debased because
> it was the image of a live performance. However, the key concept for Adorno
> was not recreation of live performances of the 1820s, it was recreation of
> nonalienated scenes.
No it wasn't. The 'key concept' is that art, in the modern period, can
enact, and therefore reveal to a critical interpretation, the condition of
alienation. Otherwise, why would Adorno insist that what is important about
art is that it fails to fulfill its promise. It promises the unalienated,
but can only do so by failing to deliver it. I wonder if Moggin was right -
have you actually read Adorno rather than filtered him through your own
preoccupations?
> The contrast is between formalism, and the dictation of internal stucture in
> the round.
This needs clarification, otherwise you just sound like a bad director faced
with Shakespeare.
>
>> Of course it did, and it does for the capitalist epoch, and always will, but
>> the point would be that the possiblity currently exists for the the
>> 'reproduction of material existence' to no longer form a major determinant
>> on possible forms of life. See the Communist Manifesto (1848!) A simple
>> question, why aren't all production lines automated, given that they could
>> be?
>
> The answer to this question lies in the domain of theory and not in
> technology.
I know that it is practically possible, that is not what I asked.
> The science-fiction vision of the totally automated world imagines that there
> are things like “tasks” which can be reified, and therefore automated. It
> neglects the fact that interfaces between tasks produce new tasks at a
> potentially nondenumerable rate. It falsely imagines that tasks exist outside
> of social relations.
Tasks ARE social relations.
> For example, selected for its simpleminded clarity, the Jetsons preserve the
> family structure and mobilisation of every day life of a mid-century American
> group. Their necessary tasks as automated therefore are an isomorph of
> midcentury American life. This of course ignores the necessary way in which
> technical advance changes social structures.
No. If this were true, then all production lines would be automated.
Unfortunately, social relations shape technical advance. A small but simple
example, why was the female pill developed some 30 years before the (still
experimental) male pill? Or, again, why haven't all production lines been
automated? (Hint: It might have something to do with surplus value).
> For example, the Jetsons seem to need a “maid” because upper middle class
> families in America up until the 1960s showed status by hiring African
> American domestics: therefore the Jetsons have a robot “maid.”
First, your example contradicts your statement. You say technological
advance changes social relations, then by example show how a fantasy of
technological advance is structured by exactly the same social relations.
Second, would this mean that any attempt to reduce the necessary labour of
maintaining a living space is inevitably the result of a class/racial
division of labour in pre 1960s USA. Surely not, but that is your logic.
> Unfortunately for his followers, Marx’s work predated work in the foundation
> of mathematics and as such Marx failed to see the concept of
> nondenumerability which was constructed by George Cantor after Marx for pure
> mathematical reasons. Simple-minded Left thinking such as is fostered in the
> universities regard this as bourgeois science and therefore untrustworthy: it
> ignores the very idea, found in the primary texts of the left itself and in
> Adorno, that it is the bourgeois that produce the only worthwhile science on
> tap, whereas the working class, because of its very oppression, produces
> astrology and conspiracy theories.
Where in Adorno is this claim about bourgeois science stated? I'm serious,
give me a reference. Until then, I claim the right to be very, very
doubtful. Adorno's work on astrology is, if I remember right, not class
specific at all. If it is class specific, then it is the fault of the
bourgeois, as he argues that it is bourgeois rationality that has
reintroduced fatum.
> Thus to Marx, had he thought about the matter, “use values” and “exchange
> values” could be enumerated. However, use values and exchange values are
> constructed by language which has at least the capability to construct
> nondenumerable lists of same: this was capitalism’s genius: for example, as we
> run out of coal we CHANGE the need statement from coal to energy. If we
> exhaust energy resources we find that we can reduce the need for energy.
Marx did think about it. Use value cannot, by definition, be enumerated.
Exchange value is nothing but enumeration. This is a fundamental
contradiction. Go on, overcome it, enummerate a use value.
> Therefore, at this late date, it simply boggles the mind to think that “all
> production lines could be automated.” They cannot, because their very
> definition has to be produced by human thought-labor and human physical
> labor. If we could define our needs then production lines could be
> established to meet those needs but we are in constant turmoil about these
> very needs.
It is a matter of human social relations. It is a matter of ends rather than
means, That is all I asked. (The obvious answer, and the one that I would
have gone for is Surplus value. An automated production line means that
there is no possibility of increasing- or maintaining, when cutting prices -
surplus value by screwing more unpaid labour time from the workers. Ah, yes,
I was forgetting, you call this 'increased productivity' and this is a GOOD
thing, at least if it involves being able to think about your job a bit.
But, according to you, humans are incapable of defining their needs. I find
this suggestion odd for a variety of reasons. One, because it would seem to
rule out virtually any production at all, ever. Two, because if humans can't
define their needs, then God knows how they manage to satisfy material needs
(assuming of course, that they are allowed to). Three, because Capital
manages to establish production lines and even, to some, extent, vary the
material produced. This would seem to rule your suggestion out on at least
one count, that production is inflexible and will therefore fail to meet
shifting needs. (I know, Capital doesn't fully automate, and that capital
manufactures need - but your argument would apply to ANY production line,
automated or not). Four, you seem to presume that the situation currently
exists in which humans can freely define their needs. Such a freedom, if I
remember rightly, is what I was going on about, and which you have ignored.
Mind you, you seem able to define human needs for them - they need to go to
work, for their own good.
> A “totally automated society” is self-contradictory, because the automation
> zone, by definition, has an interface with humanity.
Yes. But automation can remove exactly the necessity for the labour to
reproduce material existence that you have been banging on about. Sure the
machines would need tending. Perhaps that prospective future generation
could take turns, but they sure as hell wouldn't be stuck in the vision of
Komosol dam repairs that so far have made up your vision of the socialist
utopia. Personally, I have no vision of that utopia, for two reasons. One,
because as Adorno says, thought cannot separate itself, even by a
hairsbreadth, from what is (for reasons why see the Minima Moralia quote),
second because, assuming humanity ever makes it, what they do is up to them.
Freedom, remember. That is why Marx calls our current state human
prehistory.
> Ultimately, humanism is
> far more than a set of pieties about humanity: it is instead the humanism of
> Jon Schell’s books on the actual consequences of a nuclear war in which the
> elimination of the human term (his image “a republic of insects and grass”)
> produces a situation both logically and psychologically untenable. The
> cognitive and the ethical merge. A vision of a society of Eloi without any
> human Morlocks (to use the forgotten terminology of the mid-century science
> populariser H. G. Wells) is just silly, both cognitively and ethically: and
> the fact that Mr. Wells saw fit to illustrate (in his book The Time Machine)
> the necessity of a debased working class (the Morlocks) means that the
> scienctifiction popularisers of our own day have descended beneath his level.
I think that these references are telling. Have you read Adorno's critique
of Huxley in Prisms? It seems particularly relevant to this discussion.
Has it not occured to you that H.G. Wells work was a critique of the
division of labour - the Eloi were made by this division just as much as the
Morlocks. This account was made by Wells made in terms of the *late*(not
mid) 19th century. But then Wells was a social democrat,
let us not forget. He wished to see workers reach an accomodation with
capitalists, not an overthrow of capitalism. For a different 19th century
vision, try News from Nowhere, William Morris. But I was forgetting, you
don't see the reduction of necessary labour as a good thing. I would suggest
starting again from the division of labour (a clue, alienation is not just
the result of non-inclusive management, nor of not having a suggestion box.
Stupid? Perhaps, but I cannot see how any means of 'reducing' the alienation
of workers whilst adhering to existing relations of production could be any
less of a sticking plaster (band-aid?)).
Puss in Boots
>>: ... By calling for an end to work you are in my view
>>:calling for an opportunity for everyone to share the personal corruption
>>:and decadence seen over time in the upper crust.
mog...@mindspring.com (Puss in Boots):
>> There it is -- deprived of work, the idle rich fall into a
>> state of moral decay. Therefore work is a moral imperative:
>> not working is an opportunity to share in the corruption of the
>> "upper crust." That's your reason for keeping everybody on
>> the job eight hours a day.
Ed:
>This reply assumes two contradictory propositions at a deep level. The first
>is that you have a right to assume, interpret, and read meaning, and the
>second is that your interlocutor is some sort of straight man that can be
>held to the literal meaning of his words, at your convenience.
>This results from the confusion of the map with the territory that is actually
>encouraged by the educational system and that a reading of Adorno, which I
>recommend to you, helps to dispel.
I didn't assume I had a right to interpret you -- I simply
went ahead and did it. Are you saying I had to apply for a
license before I replied? Anyway, you're free to disagree with
my reading -- I won't mind.
Thanks for the reading suggestion. I can't return it, tho.
>One the one hand, you revert to the neo-barbarism of posting what I've said as
>an unanswerable proof that I've said (in actuality typed) it, which is a
>triviality. But only if we were dealing in legalities would this matter, it a
>situation where literal meanings were critical in place of interpretation.
I didn't claim it was an "unanswerable proof." _Now_ it's
pretty clear you can't answer it, but that's not something I
would have predicted. I didn't know how you would respond, and
I didn't make any guesses.
>But then, absurdly, you make the wild assertion that I want to make everybody
>work 8 hours a day.
It's not a wild assertion -- I got it right from you, just
like the above. It even came from the same place. You
rejected freedom on grounds it led to "corruption and decadence,"
then went on to call for a "third way" suitable for "real
grown ups." "Real grown ups are scarce these days," you stated,
"but real grown ups in the 19th century got the 8 hour day
because people need to work but not all the time."
So your alternative to what you describe as "a future free
of work" is a supposedly 'adult' world where people work
8-hour days because they _need_ to. You never made it clear why
they _needed_ to put in 8 hours, but apparently it was to
avoid the "personal corruption and decadence" you had mentioned
just before.
> Him make us work 16 hours a day. Help. - Allen Ginsberg, America
Nice poem. Here's how it starts:
America I've given you all and now I'm nothing
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
America will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need
with my good looks?
>Of course, what I actually referred to was the 8-hour day movement of the 19th
>century, which was reversed in our own era by encouraging infoslaves to
>fantasize that they were CEOs, and make the 16 hour day a norm, even for women
>with children.
Basically, yeah. And you held up the 8-hour day as a norm
for "real grown-ups" -- "grown-ups" who you treat like
children, since you take it on yourself to decide how long they
"need" to work in a day.
[...]
Moggin:
>> Of course I'm not "calling for an end to work." I've been
>> calling for an end to the _necessity_ of work, so that the
>> work you do is a product of your freedom -- but to you, freedom
>> is merely an opportunity for decadence and corruption.
Ed:
>Perhaps. But it's also clear that your "freedom" is the freedom to revert to
>neobarbarism.
That's not plain at all: it's merely your assertion. The
only clear thing is that the idea of freedom is a threat to
you. First you said it would lead to "corruption and decadence"
-- now you claim "neobarbarism" would result.
Moggin:
>> You also claimed to see Adorno talking about decadence and
>> corruption in the passage above. "The intellectual is
>> decadent/corrupted in 'shooting off into thin air' when
>> uninformed about material reality." But as I already mentioned,
>> shooting in the air isn't either decadent or corrupt: it's
>> merely futile. And the intellectual here isn't idle -- he's at
>> work. Adorno doesn't suggest he lacks industry.
Ed:
>You have a sloppy attention to words which makes me conclude you haven't read
>Adorno with any depth. "Industry" as a word describing hard work is English
>in origin and contains within it the image of the worker keeping up with the
>machine. Adorno's language contained phrases similar to truth and its
>demands but not this alienated notion.
Right -- Adorno _doesn't_ say that the intellectual in the
passage is guilty of idleness. He also doesn't describe the
intellectual as decadent and corrupt. So you're misreading him
on both counts.
[...]
Ed:
>>> One aspect of worker's dialects, with its use of brutal rhetoric, is what is
>>> now called the flame war and since unlike Adorno I am a real worker, I'm
>>> always game for one, if need be.
Moggin:
>> I thought you said that Adorno _was_ "a real worker" -- it
>> seemed important to you to claim he wasn't a bum. That
>> work-ethic of yours at work again, I figured. But today you're
>> "a real worker" and Adorno isn't. ...
Ed:
>Adorno was a "real worker" only insofar as he was engaged in the Princeton
>Radio Research project. During the West German era and the era of Critical
>Models, Adorno was more of an administrator, and his very reaction to the
>Frankfurt incident shows this. Thirty years intervened between Princeton and
>Frankfurt and a lot can happen in that time.
That's not what you said before. According to you, "...as
opposed to being a bum, the guy got a real job at the
Princeton Radio Research project and later when the Frankfurt
institute was reestablished in the 1950s in Germany." Get back
to me when you've made up your mind.
>To be a Real worker is not a cardboard construct and the idea that it is has
>caused a lot of trouble. The most bourgeois person can turn into a real
>worker *instanter* by getting a part-time with United Parcel Service. The
>very idea that "I yam a real worker and you're not" is cryptoracist, and
>sexist, nonsense.
Why spout it, then?
Ed:
>>> But the flame war would not advance the
>>> cause of criticising media, and people are losing their lives in Kosovo in
>>> part as a consequence of the brutality of worker's dialects.
Moggin:
>> There was an argument recently between a Nietzschean and a
>> Christian. The Christian spoke civilly -- the Nietzschean
>> said fuck this and fuck that. But the Nietzschean made a solid
>> point -- the Christian had nothing to say and said it in
>> Sunday School language.
Ed:
> You've not given any details on the exchange, and "fuck this" is not a very
> good argumentative move, logically speaking, in any argument with which I am
> familiar. Instead, depending on the context of the exchange, the Nietzchean
> probably won by the neobarbarism of the threat.
[....]
He didn't make any threats, and "fuck this" wasn't an
"argumentative move." It was just the way he talked: what you
would call his "brutal dialect." By contrast, the Christian
was entirely civil. But he had nothing to say; the Nietzschean
contributed the only substantial point in the dialogue.
-- Moggin
spino...@my-dejanews.com
In article <moggin-2904...@user-2ive85b.dialup.mindspring.com>,
mog...@mindspring.com (Puss in Boots) wrote:
>
> It's not a wild assertion -- I got it right from you, just
> like the above. It even came from the same place. You
> rejected freedom on grounds it led to "corruption and decadence,"
> then went on to call for a "third way" suitable for "real
> grown ups." "Real grown ups are scarce these days," you stated,
> "but real grown ups in the 19th century got the 8 hour day
> because people need to work but not all the time."
>
> So your alternative to what you describe as "a future free
> of work" is a supposedly 'adult' world where people work
> 8-hour days because they _need_ to. You never made it clear why
> they _needed_ to put in 8 hours, but apparently it was to
> avoid the "personal corruption and decadence" you had mentioned
> just before.
This absurd interpretation of the struggle for the 8-hour day, which is
incomplete world-wide, is an example of "recreational" Marxism. Akin to John
Kenneth Galbraith's useful concept of "recreational" foreign policy, in which
solemn conferences are convened at high-status venues with zero input on
actual decisions, "recreational" Marxism is the striking of poses and it is a
game which I do not play.
People lost their lives in the struggle for the 8-hour day, and you do them
wrong to caricature the struggle as in any way forcing them to work 8 hours a
day.
"Recreational" Marxism reinforces hegemony since it strikes poses and, in
effect, creates straw men for Old Massah. It is equivalent to the
recreational politics of Rush Limbaugh.
Puss in Boots
>>>>: ... By calling for an end to work you are in my view
>>>>:calling for an opportunity for everyone to share the personal corruption
>>>>:and decadence seen over time in the upper crust.
mog...@mindspring.com (Puss in Boots):
>>>> There it is -- deprived of work, the idle rich fall into a
>>>> state of moral decay. Therefore work is a moral imperative:
>>>> not working is an opportunity to share in the corruption of the
>>>> "upper crust." That's your reason for keeping everybody on
>>>> the job eight hours a day.
[...]
Ed:
>>>But then, absurdly, you make the wild assertion that I want to make
>>>everybody work 8 hours a day.
Moggin:
>> It's not a wild assertion -- I got it right from you, just
>> like the above. It even came from the same place. You
>> rejected freedom on grounds it led to "corruption and decadence,"
>> then went on to call for a "third way" suitable for "real
>> grown ups." "Real grown ups are scarce these days," you stated,
>> "but real grown ups in the 19th century got the 8 hour day
>> because people need to work but not all the time."
>> So your alternative to what you describe as "a future free
>> of work" is a supposedly 'adult' world where people work
>> 8-hour days because they _need_ to. You never made it clear why
>> they _needed_ to put in 8 hours, but apparently it was to
>> avoid the "personal corruption and decadence" you had mentioned
>> just before.
Ed:
> This absurd interpretation of the struggle for the 8-hour day, which is
> incomplete world-wide, is an example of "recreational" Marxism.
My point isn't about "the struggle for the 8-hour day" but
about what you _said_ about the 8-hour day. You firmly
rejected the idea of "a future free from work" -- as you called
it -- because you saw it as an opportunity for "personal
corruption and decadence." As an alternative, you promoted the
8-hour day, claiming that people _need_ to work.
[...]
> People lost their lives in the struggle for the 8-hour day, and you do them
> wrong to caricature the struggle as in any way forcing them to work 8 hours a
> day.
Not _them_ -- you. You turned the possibility of removing
or reducing the necessity of work into the idea of "a future
free of work," then rejected it as an opening for decadence and
corruption. Instead of letting people work less, if they
chose, you wanted to keep the 8-hour day, because people have a
"need to work."
> "Recreational" Marxism reinforces hegemony since it strikes poses and, in
> effect, creates straw men for Old Massah. It is equivalent to the
> recreational politics of Rush Limbaugh.
I don't see any Marxists here, unless you're talking about
Adorno.
-- Moggin
spino...@my-dejanews.com
> about what you _said_ about the 8-hour day. You firmly
> rejected the idea of "a future free from work" -- as you called
> it -- because you saw it as an opportunity for "personal
> corruption and decadence." As an alternative, you promoted the
> 8-hour day, claiming that people _need_ to work.
No, I pointed to the STRUGGLE for the limitation of the workday to 8 hours OR
LESS, which is incomplete and which is actually undercut by Recreational
Marxism, as an example of the dignity of labor, and the dignity of the
control of the conditions of labor by the laborer herself. Recreational
Marxists, and their spiritual heirs (Leninists) are characterised by contempt
for work and labor.
>
> [...]
>
> > People lost their lives in the struggle for the 8-hour day, and you do them
> > wrong to caricature the struggle as in any way forcing them to work 8 hours a
> > day.
>
> Not _them_ -- you. You turned the possibility of removing
> or reducing the necessity of work into the idea of "a future
> free of work," then rejected it as an opening for decadence and
> corruption. Instead of letting people work less, if they
> chose, you wanted to keep the 8-hour day, because people have a
> "need to work."
>
Bullshit. Leisure is defined by work. Without work, leisure is exploitation.
> > "Recreational" Marxism reinforces hegemony since it strikes poses and, in
> > effect, creates straw men for Old Massah. It is equivalent to the
> > recreational politics of Rush Limbaugh.
>
> I don't see any Marxists here, unless you're talking about
> Adorno.
A rose by any other name.
>
> -- Moggin
Puss in Boots
>>>>>>: ... By calling for an end to work you are in my view
>>>>>>:calling for an opportunity for everyone to share the personal corruption
>>>>>>:and decadence seen over time in the upper crust.
mog...@mindspring.com (Puss in Boots):
>>>>>> There it is -- deprived of work, the idle rich fall into a
>>>>>> state of moral decay. Therefore work is a moral imperative:
>>>>>> not working is an opportunity to share in the corruption of the
>>>>>> "upper crust." That's your reason for keeping everybody on
>>>>>> the job eight hours a day.
Ed:
>>>>>But then, absurdly, you make the wild assertion that I want to make
>>>>>everybody work 8 hours a day.
Moggin:
>>>> It's not a wild assertion -- I got it right from you, just
>>>> like the above. It even came from the same place. You
>>>> rejected freedom on grounds it led to "corruption and decadence,"
>>>> then went on to call for a "third way" suitable for "real
>>>> grown ups." "Real grown ups are scarce these days," you stated,
>>>> "but real grown ups in the 19th century got the 8 hour day
>>>> because people need to work but not all the time."
>>>> So your alternative to what you describe as "a future free
>>>> of work" is a supposedly 'adult' world where people work
>>>> 8-hour days because they _need_ to. You never made it clear why
>>>> they _needed_ to put in 8 hours, but apparently it was to
>>>> avoid the "personal corruption and decadence" you had mentioned
>>>> just before.
Ed:
>>> This absurd interpretation of the struggle for the 8-hour day, which is
>>> incomplete world-wide, is an example of "recreational" Marxism.
Moggin:
>> My point isn't about "the struggle for the 8-hour day" but
>> about what you _said_ about the 8-hour day. You firmly
>> rejected the idea of "a future free from work" -- as you called
>> it -- because you saw it as an opportunity for "personal
>> corruption and decadence." As an alternative, you promoted the
>> 8-hour day, claiming that people _need_ to work.
Ed:
> No, I pointed to the STRUGGLE for the limitation of the workday to 8 hours OR
> LESS, which is incomplete and which is actually undercut by Recreational
> Marxism, as an example of the dignity of labor, and the dignity of the
> control of the conditions of labor by the laborer herself.
Not so. You didn't even mention "the STRUGGLE." You said
that workers "got the 8 hour day," as tho it was handed to
them. More to the point, you claimed that they got it "because
people need to work but not all the time." That was the
alternative you offered to the nightmare of "a future free from
work," which you said would lead to "personal corruption."
> Recreational
> Marxists, and their spiritual heirs (Leninists) are characterised by
> contempt for work and labor.
Ed:
>>>people lost their lives in the struggle for the 8-hour day, and you do them
>>>wrong to caricature the struggle as in any way forcing them to work 8 hours
>>>a day.
Moggin:
>> Not _them_ -- you. You turned the possibility of removing
>> or reducing the necessity of work into the idea of "a future
>> free of work," then rejected it as an opening for decadence and
>> corruption. Instead of letting people work less, if they
>> chose, you wanted to keep the 8-hour day, because people have a
>> "need to work."
Ed:
> Bullshit. Leisure is defined by work. Without work, leisure is exploitation.
Only if someone is exploited. Since you say that nobody's
working, it's not plain who that exploited person could be.
Keep in mind this is your scenario: the "future free from work."
I'm talking about removing the _necessity_ of work, or at
least reducing it to a minimum -- it's not clear you've grasped
the distinction.
-- Moggin