Gary,
I’ve been silent for a week and a half, which incidentally led to the average hits per day jumping significantly. Perhaps I should shut up altogether. I’m only joking. If I was going to shut because no one is listening I would have done so years ago.
There are a number of reasons for my silence: first and foremost the conference, which is eating more and more of my time. Often all morning is taken up with it and after that I feel brain-dead and seem to be devoid of the kind of thoughts we are discussing here.
To add to this, I imprudently decided to change internet provider, and I thought I’d give Bigpond a go. Perhaps it was a coincidence but a worm jumped onto my computer as soon as I connected to them – another day down the drain. I’m just starting to feel like I’m getting on top of it all.
So I connect up to Philosophical Conversations and… you haven’t been silent in the meantime. There’s tons of stuff on Heidegger, other web sites, et cetera, and you’ve gone back to Bataille. I think this is a good move. I have a student (informal) who is working on the photographers Bellmer and Witkin from a Bataillean perspective, and she’s keeping me thinking about this stuff, but I must say that preparation for my conference paper is taking precedence. As well, I’m down to give a talk on Minima Moralia for Philosophy Jammm in July.
It’s all making me think mostly of Adorno and, interestingly, from a different perspective than any I’d taken in the past. Because of the reading group on Rosenzweig, I’ve come at Adorno from here, starting with Kracauer’s criticisms of Rosenzweig. If we could look at these two as a kind of dialectic, with Rosenzweig as the thesis and Kracauer as the antithesis, then Benjamin can be seen as a synthesis of the two, and Adorno as a critical appropriation of Benjamin. It all makes sense, at least to me.
What do they all have in common? A critical rejection of 19th century ideas, practices and arrangements. Here is a line from the Epistemo-critical Prologue to Benjamin’s Trauerspiel as an example:
‘The alternative philosophical forms represented by the concepts of the doctrine and the esoteric essay are precisely those things which were ignored by the nineteenth century, with its concept of system.’ (p. 28)
This is modernism – a radical reappraisal of constructive standards (a phrase from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory). It is what Einstein was doing, what Schoenberg was doing, what Picasso was doing. It is what these guys are doing in philosophy. It was what Heidegger was doing – reappraising constructive standards.
This stuff is all monadic, windowlessly monadic. It epitomises its time. There was also a radical reappraisal of constructive standards at this time in politics, and along came Hitler, Roosevelt, Mussolini, Stalin, and others. The crucial event that changed the whole attitude towards the 19th century was the internationalisation of capital, which took place in the wake of the 1848 revolutions. There’s a really good film on this being shown in Adelaide at the moment. It is Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, in a restored and complete version – three and a half wonderful hours.
In my view, Adorno increases in relevance precisely because this process of the internationalisation of capital is still with us and intensifies all the while. The corporate faction’s idea of a world economy is the pinnacle of the process. If at all, it can only be achieved through mass murder, which is why the political leaders of our country, as well as the UK and the US are criminals. Criminals are what is needed to pursue the internationalisation of capital at this point. There are two choices: murder or give up, and these boys are no quitters.
I’ll finish with a quotation from Canetti’s The Human Province – I hope I haven’t quoted it before. I’ve got the first signs of arthritis two weeks ago and I suppose that dementia is just around the corner. Anyway, repetition is a good pedagogical device. Back to Canetti:
‘Some people delude themselves with the idea that things could come to an end, and they calculate catastrophes on top of catastrophes. But the deeper intention of this torment is the eternal one. The earth remains young, its life multiplies, and new, more complicated, more distinct, or more complete forms of wretchedness are devised. One man pleads with another: Help me make it worse!’ (p. 107)
Posted by at April 21, 2004 10:31 AM | TrackBack