conversations

desire + repression

A quote form Ellen Willis that resonates:

Americans take for granted a level of sexual freedom, and a degree of choice in personal style and conduct and expression, that didn't exist before the '60s. The variety of food, fashion, pop-music genres, cable TV programs, the mixing and matching of cultures -- all of this is a gain in pleasure. Yet there is a strong strain of joylessness and anti-eroticism in the culture, of continual exhortation to duty, sacrifice, corporate efficiency, order, control, and putting one's nose to the grindstone. Today it does seem that our pleasures are embedded in a framework of repression. I've always thought that a taste of pleasure, however compromised, leads to the desire for more and rebellion against the obstacles to having it; but I don't see that happening right now. I've argued against the left's puritanical distaste for consumption, but our current emphasis on getting and spending has an obsessive and even hysterical edge. And there's a lot of sex, but I'm not sure passion is in such good shape. That doesn't mean things won't change, but it's a strange and contradictory moment for me.

The quote is from this interview

Deleuze: transcendental empiricism

I find this review of Matthew Kieran (ed.), Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art by Jenefer Robinson is interesting because it spells out the core of an empiricist aesthetics.

I guess an empiricist aesthetics is contrasted to the standard interpretation of the Kantian notion that aesthetic appreciation is based on to the intrinsic properties of a work. The former is the view that the "the artistic value of a work resides in qualities of the experience it elicits in an appropriately primed receiver" so that our assessments of artistic value is the reducible to the experienced effects of art works. I guess that it has its roots in the“copy theory of knowledge,” which bases most if not all our ideas on prior sensations or impressions of the given.

The central difficulty is that empiricism is better suited to the analysis of sensation of the art work than to the analysis of artworks as such; or to the 'institutional' (the societal and historical) as it bears on the world of art works; or to the role of interpretation.

Deleuze represents a rupture from classical empiricism in that he does not treat the given as epistemically primitive, but instead seeks to determine how it is produced. Thus, the empiricist dimension is to be situated in terms of how the given is produced and what conditions allow for the production of the given. It is for this reason that Deleuze's philosophy remains transcendental. As Levi Bryant says in The Transcendental Empiricism of Gilles Deleuze

Insofar as transcendental empiricism holds itself to real experience, it is an empiricism. Real experience cannot be anticipated in advance a priori, but must instead be found through the exercise of intuition. On the other hand, insofar as transcendental empiricism articulates the conditions of real experience it is a transcendental philosophy because it holds that the conditions of experience are not themselves given in sensible experience. Far from being given in the sensible manifold of experience, the conditions of experience must be arrived at through the exercise of intuition which divides the composites of diversity into the differences in intensity which allow it to display itself in diversity.

Deleuze: actualization of the virtual

Deleuze ends his discussion of the actualization of the virtual in Difference and Repetition:

Actualisation takes place in three series: space, time and also consciousness. Every spatio-temporal dynamism is accompanied by the emergence of an elementary consciousness which itself traces directions, doubles movements and migrations, and is born on the threshold of the condensed singularities of the body or object whose consciousness it is. It is not enough to say that consciousness is consciousness of something: it is the double of this something, and everything is consciousness because it possesses a double, even if it is far off and very foreign. Repetition is everywhere, as much as in what is actualised as in its actualisation. It is in the Idea to begin with, and it runs through the varieties of relations and the distribution of singular points. It also determines the reproductions of space and time, as it does the reprises of consciousness.

More on individuation at Larval Subjects

(Difference and Repetition, p. 220, emphasis mine)

Foucault: care for self

In the beginning to Senecan Moods: Foucault and Nietzsche on the Art of the Self in Foucault Studies Michael Ure states that:

The sober, dispassionate style of Nietzsche’s middle works and Foucault’s late works signpost their return to the conception of the philosophical life and practice that dominated philosophy from Epicurus to Seneca, that is to say, to the idea of philosophy as a therapy of the soul. Both turned back to the Hellenistic therapies as the question of the self, or more specifically and pressingly, of their “ego ipsissimum,” took centre stage in their thinking. Nietzsche in his middle works and Foucault in his last, incomplete researches both draw on the Hellenistic and Stoic
traditions that analyse and treat the pathologies which threaten o arise from “setbacks” to our wishes, especially from that "most touchy point in the narcissistic system”: the mortality that shadows our lives and loves and which compels us to learn how to work on ourselves and mourn our losses

I agree with Ure when he says that the shift in Foucault’s philosophical orientation and style derives from tradition that can be better understood in therapeuic rather than aesthetic terms.

Foucault clouds the true nature and significance of the Hellenistic and Stoic care of the self insofar as he presents it as a purely aesthetic project akin to nineteenth‐century Dandyism. On the other hand, if we bracket Foucault’s comments glossing these practices as purely aesthetic, and examine instead his historical analyses of the care of the self we discover the clear outlines of Hellenistic philosophy and Stoicism as philosophic therapeia of the soul.

art +instrumental reason

As we have seen in this earlier post Levinas argues that artistic representation allows us to step back and see things outside of their functional locations in the economic world. We are forced to thematize the represented objects in ways that are new. This is not necessarily a disinterested and theoretical view, as it could equally be a disturbing and uncomfortable view. The work of art forces us to recollect the forgotten, untypified and in some ways perhaps even fearful (insofar as incomprehensible), materiality of experience.

This suggests that art is contra an instrumental reason; namely the instrumental rationality of scientific abstract classification that converts all things into tools. In this mode of cognition we relate to things only to the extent that we put them to use. From this perspective, the notion of something being genuinely concrete, particular, unique, non-fungible, or incommensurable is lost. This abstract classification destroys the auratic individuality of things while conditioning us to understand objects as useful specimens. This egocentric mode of understanding leads us to believe that concepts capture objects, and the world is thus made to fit the abstract idea.

Adorno argued that instrumental reason misidentifies things when reducing their complex existences to a generalized concept. The concept’s inability to accommodate the non-identical demonstrates this deficiency and the thing’s particularity will remain overlooked and in reason’s blind spot.

Similarly for Levinas. All attempts to contain the Other within the Same will end with the Other overflowing the same and continually breaching the categories placed over it.

Nick Smith argues

Levinas: aesthetics+ ethics

What is the connection between aesthetics and Levinas’ ethical phenomenology? Are they related? Separate? For Levinas, the ethical imperative precedes cognition, and the primary task of philosophy is explaining the difficulty regarding the non-violent relationship to the Other. The face of the human Other – the living second person capable
of suffering – signifies alterity for Levinas. Only the face can look back at us and thereby announce its status as something more than an object for our use. Ethical life begins not by analyzing the world with abstract moral concepts, but by listening carefully to the muffled but rich sources of meaning embedded just under the surface of instrumental life. For Levinas we do not directly experience the Other but rather only its vestige.

Where then is aesthetics situated? Where is art in all of this?

Mathew Sharpe in a paper entitled Aesthet(h)ics: On Levinas’ Shadow in Colloguy offers us an account. He says that there is as little place for art in Levinas’ ethical politeia as there was in Socrates’ for the pantomimic artist. What we are confronted with in art, for Levinas as for Plato, is nothing less than a false or ersatz transcendence, a dangerous simulacrum--or the danger of simulacra per se---that would “double” and so contest the “true transcendence.

Sharpe, quotes from 'Reality and its Shadow' to show that art for Levinas:

brings into the world the obscurity of fate, but it especially brings the irresponsibility that charms as lightness and as grace. It frees. To make or appreciate a novel and a picture is to no longer have to conceive, is to renounce the effort of science, philosophy, and action. Do not speak, do not reflect, admire in silence and in peace such are the counsels of wisdom satisfied before the beautiful. Magic recognised everywhere as the devil’s, enjoys as incomprehensible tolerance in poetry. There is something wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be ashamed of it, as of feasting during a plague.

Art is a part of, and inherits, the tradition of paganistic magic.

Levinas+aesthetics

I just come across Colloguy that is hosted by Monash University in Australia. Originally a print journal, it is now an online one, and it is a response by Monash University postgraduates to the need for a forum for postgraduate debate. The aim of the journal is to 'provide an opportunity for the dissemination of new work in literary and cultural studies and related interdisciplinary fields.' There are bits and pieces on aesthetics as distinct from literary criticism in the archives, some of which are online.

In Issue 9 I came across an article by Mathew Sharpe entitled Aesthet(h)ics: On Levinas’ Shadow. This explores Levinas' aesthetics based on number of papers Levinas wrote on literary criticism and on the nature of art in the late 1940s. Sharpe says:

For Levinas, then, the work of art is an object that has been deworlded. Outside of its existential environs, it appears in its materiality. It could rightly be said that, if for Levinas the work of art is a sign of anything, it is a sign of itself. This is why, he says, art does not stand by itself, but calls for or invites critical and theoretical reflection. This position in turn provides the basis for a remarkable challenge to the classical and Kantian understandings of the supposed disinterestedness of our reception of works of art....There is then continuity between Levinas' aesthetics and the Platonic and Nietzschean conceptions of art as tangential to the Truth. Art is beguiling, for Levinas. To the extent that artworks do (re)present things, this presentative act itself transforms what subjects become able to see iin what is presented.

I find this quite appealing given this example

Sharpe goes on to say that if Levinas denies that artworks reveal any truth about the “worldly” nature of objects, then this is not to say that artworks reveal nothing about reality:

It is just that what art reveals, according to his phenomenological aesthetics, is that about an object that eludes or exceeds its belongingness within any existential environment. In Levinas' telling words, art "expresses the very obscurity of the real." This "obscurity" is what, in his 1948 essay "Reality and Its Shadow", he dubs reality's "shadow."

I do not know Levinas’ essay “Reality and its shadow.” Nor have I read Existence and Existents, where there are a significant number of pages devoted to reflection upon the nature of the work of art.

Sharpe says that what art as art does is put us in touch with the level of reality before the phenomenological world and it does this through sensation rather than perception. The movement of art consists in leaving the level of perception so as to reinstate sensation” and this implies the differentiation of “sensation” from “perception. Sharpe says that:

In Levinas'’ more dialectical thought, the aesthetic “image, in its materiality, shows up how reality itself is always already doubled within itself – between itself and its own “image or shadow. This “shadow,” in Levinas'’ earlier terminology, is the pre-worldly or elemental plenitude into which our sense of world and meaning can always collapse or revert...Far from being a vehicle of enlightenment about what it would ostensibly represent, it involves an obscuring, erosion,...or degradation of phenomenological sense.

How then does art relate to the ethical---to the face-to-face relation----that is deemed to be primary?

personal interlude

just to lighten things up for a moment:

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Robe, 2006

Adorno: Art and irrationality

I want to return to Amresh Sinha's Adorno on Mimesis in Aesthetic Theory that I posted on here about art's dilemma of regression to magic and surrender of the mimetic impulse to thinglike rationality.

Referring to the task of critique in Adorno's doctrine of mimesis Sinha says:

Art is without doubt irrational, or at least, its origin cannot be extricated from the horror that always distinguishes it from the other, but it is also, at the same time, rational, to the extent that it must not deteriorate to the superstitious mythological level...Art is critical of rationality, yet cannot be identified with it, despite the fact that rationality, too, is a critical factor...Rationality is immanent to art, and this rationality is in many ways similar to the rationality of the outside world, but it is also, at the same time, different from the rationality of the conceptual order. No artistic work can exist in complete isolation from the "rationality governing the world outside," yet it may not reproduce or imitate the strictures of the governing logic that condemns it for having irrational features. What appears as irrational expression in art in the "eyes" of the conceptual ordering is actually the expression of the "forgotten experiences" that themselves cannot be understood by "rationalizing them."

Adorno's defense of irrationalism is prompted by a desire to defend expressionism and surrealism from the attacks of the anti-modernist critics. In Aesthetic Theory Adorno says:

To accuse art of irrationalism because it succeeds in getting out from under instrumental reason is to be ideological ...currents like expressionism and surrealism, the irrationality of which was highly disturbing to some, acted up against repression, authority and obscurantism.... "to manifest irrationality--the irrationality of the psyche and of the objective order--in art through a formative process, thus making it rational in a sense, is one thing: to preach irrationality, which more often than not goes hand in hand with a superficial rationalism in the use of artistic means, is quite another"(p.82)

I struggle to understand expressionism as an irrationality. This seems to imply that the emotions are irrational rather than modes of knowing.

My understanding is that surrealism marks the undermining of the individual bourgeois subject ----the autonomous or fixed and self-evident subject of modernity as articulated by liberal philosophers such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill. The undermining was part of the long history of decentralisation and destabilisation of the liberal subject, and it took the form of the Freudianenunciation of the unconscious binding the subject to its seemingly 'orginary' desires.

Language, Sexuality and Subversion

Courtesy of Glenn over at Event Mechanics I came across Adrian Martin, in an interview in Cinemascope Issue 7. He is talking about how to be truly critical, in a world that silences or castrates critique? He answers this from the perspective of a film culture:

Of course, we all know that ‘the real’ is not something we can simply touch, shine a torch on, and gaze at steadily in an eternal Enlightenment; language, desire, strategy,.poetic imagination will always be needed to pierce the veil or take one groping step further in the treacherous mist. We can never entirely know, in the slogans of an outmoded Communism, ‘what is to be done’, or what is to be said about cinema. If we could know these things in advance, there would be precisely be no use in trying to say any of them in public – and this is the problem of relevance (or rather, irrelevance) of a certain Marxist film critique today. Culture – an alternative, critical, counter-culture – can never be known in advance. Its canons are unclear, to be reformulated from day to day. Doubt and mystery and poetry must be accepted as vital ingredients of any political practice (as the Surrealists and their kin knew).

Martin talks in terms of an ethical orientation is possible: a direction, an intuition towards the future as well as the avant garde understood as creating as ‘new kinds of cinema and new ways of expression’.

In the interview Martin makes reference to the reception of continental philosophy and film theory in Australia which enabled the formation of an alternative, critical, counter intellectual culture in Australia. He says:

Here, I must explain something to you. I have never considered Deleuze an esoteric, cold, abstract or ultra-academic writer. When I was 17, one of the first ‘intellectual’ books I bought was a collection of essays (many translated from French and Italian) edited by several renegade Australians, called Language, Sexuality and Subversion...Could any 17 year old, precocious intellectual resist a book with a title like that? One...of the editors, Meaghan Morris, went on to become one of the best and most inspiring...film critics in my country, and she was literally ‘schooled in France’, in the textual techniques of Barthes and Genette, the ‘urbanism’ of De Certeau, the feminism of Le Doeuff, and the political analyses of Foucault. She brought all of this, and more –Deleuze included - into her work as a columnist for a newspaper that was mainly devoted to financial speculation! She was (and remains) an absolute model for me (you can read some of her great texts in Rouge). So Deleuze was never, for me,
inaccessible: he was the great ‘tool box’ as he called himself, he encouraged his...readers to take his ideas in any direction they wished. He proposed abstract ideas –all ideas are abstractions, after all! – which were designed to inspire concrete applications, experiments in every kind of domain (including film criticism). So, as a young guy, I connected immediately to his powerful ideas about desire, assemblages, the rhizome, multiplicity, etc, well before the project of his cinema books began in the ‘80s.

I remember the Morris, Meaghan and Paul Foss (eds) Language, Sexuality and Subversion (Feral Publications 1978) --I probably still have it in my library. Unlike Adrian Martin I struggled with it for years. It was so alien and difficult.

I wasn't schooled in France as it were, not did I learn the textual techniques of Barthes and Genette, I could understand Morris' film criticism in the AFR, as I had reoiled from both the commercial and cinephilia culture. I never connected to Deleuze's ideas about desire, assemblages, the rhizome, multiplicity until now, and I have not read his cinema books. I made the detour to Deleuze through Marx, Hegel, Adorno, Foucault, Nietzsche, Heidegger. I read Foucault in terms of Nietzsche and Heidegger and I did not even know about Rouge

Glenn makes reference to two other texts:

The “Beyond Marxism?: Interventions After Marx” was edited by Judith Allen and Paul Patton published in 1983 by Intervention Publications. The “Michel Foucault: POwer, Truth, Strategy” was edited by Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton published 1979 by Feral Publications. The Post-Marxism one is interesting because it introduces the problematic of difference for Marxism through esays written by familiar names (Gross, Gatens, Allen, Patton). I haven’t finished the Foucault volume yet.o far the exposition of the post-war ‘French scene’ by Francois Chatelet and translated by Morris in fantastic. Also I have read some of Patton’s comments on the (non)transition of Foucault’s work from archaeology to genealogy. Also Patton and Morris provide several pages of corrections to translations of Foucault’s work.

I spend a helluva long time working my way through these post-Marxist's texts as I was firmly within the Marxist tradition ----it was Nietzsche whom I clicked with. He argued that that we take up the challenge to reeducate ourselves, to wrestle with all our conceptions, “conscious and unconscious”. Philosophy as a way of life or self-overcoming.

Deleuze's ontology: an account

I found this text Johan Normark quite useful in coming to grips with Deleuze and Delanda: It states that DeLanda, in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (p.203) has made a list of 7 main components in the ontology of Deleuze. This is DeLanda's reconstruction of Deleuze's ontology from Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy.

Normark says:

The first (1) component is the abstract intensive spatium where intensities become organized. It is a virtual continuum of multiplicities in a non-metric (non-Eucledian) space. This is also the machinic phylum, the body without organs, and the plane of immanence in some of Deleuze and Guattari’s texts.

A continuum of multiplicities: that's the key.

Normark says that the other components are:

(2) Intensities that form multiplicities and individuations. This is the becoming of the world; (3) A line of flight that creates a communication between the virtual multiplicities; (4) Linkages and movements form a system or a network; (5) A self-organizing formation of spatio-temporal dynamism by singularities (the intensive).

Normark then adds that:

The intensive processes are followed by; (6) The differentiation of the intensive into qualities and extensions (actual multiplicities/polyagents) or the geometrical/measurable (Eucledian) world we perceive; (7) Centres of envelopment, such as codes, which creates differences between the organic and the nonorganic. This is the fluid and monistic frame for how matter and materiality emerge.

Deleuze: reality as process

Deleuze’s and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1988) moves towards a rhizomatic or machinic model of evolution, in that they emphasize an ethology of assemblages rather than one of behaviour. In contrast to Darwin and the neo-Darwinists, Bergson and Deleuze do not give primacy to the gene, the germ cell, the organism, the species or the memes. They focus on the becoming of duration and intensive processes that lack a specific spatial location. Therefore, evolution is not just hereditary transmission and reproduction as suggested by Dawkins and his selfish gene; it is one where bodies become the vehicle for instincts which are particular territories of becoming and of identities that emerge through differentiation, divergence and creation.

Johan Normark, in this post at Archaeolog says that:

Instead of behaviour being localized in individuals it is seen as a result of complex material networks which cut across individuals and which transverse boundaries of organisms or objects (rhizomes). A rhizome consists of plateaus or multiplicities that are connected to other multiplicities that form or extend a rhizome. A multiplicity is a unity that is multiple in itself. The rhizome is different from the tree metaphor (arborescent thinking and structure) since a rhizome connects any multiplicity with any other multiplicity. It has no centre and it is non-hierarchical and non-signifying. It does not consist of units, but of movement. There is no beginning or end; there is just a middle, an in-between. Whereas the tree logic emphasizes tracing in a direct line and reproduction, a rhizome is a map with multiple entryways The world is a changing field of multiplicities or in another word; assemblages of heterogeneous components (human, animal, molecular, materiality) in which the creative evolution involve blocks of becoming.

So we have reality as process as becoming, as fields of multiplicities.

Normark says that the reason why we have problems in understanding such a changing world is found in Bergson’s writings.

He argues that our mind has evolved to seek a lowest common denominator, a spatial location from where we can begin our understanding of the world. When we create a model of becoming we tend to freeze the process to a static frame and shape it into a being. We freeze duration to instants so we can analyze it. This is how science has created its categories and the way in which human beings gain knowledge (Bergson 1998). Our acts exert on fixed points in space where duration gets broken down to instants that relate to our positions (a discrete or an actual multiplicity). These instants are only snapshots that our mind has extracted from the continuity of duration (the continuous or virtual multiplicity).

He adds that:
From this, the mind forms artificially closed systems .... Our mind cannot understand the duration of the world since it uses these static frames as points of reference. We cannot understand what is fluid because we think to act, and to do that we need to calculate and foresee, something we do from fixed points and units. Therefore, we tend to forget that we have created the categories or representations we use. In reality, there is no fixed point or representation, only a continuous “stream” of duration ..... It is from these representations we “construct” our world view. In short, there is no fixed and ready society, and reality should be seen as a process rather than as a static being.

virtuality and development

Back to Deleuze, multiplicity and the virtual that I was previously exploring through reading the opening chapter of Manuel DeLanda's Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy and a chapter in Liz Grosz's Time Travels: Feminism, nature, power the issue was separating out the possible/real couple from the virtual /actual one.

DeLanda says that:

Deleuze avoids taking as given fully formed individuals, or what amounts to the same thing, to always account for the genesis of individuals via a specific individuation process, such as the development process which turns an embryo into an organism. (p.37)

Well, that is both Aristotle and Plato placed to one side. And so we move away from essentialist thinking and all topological thinking in the construction of a Deleuzian ontology.

So what does individuation mean?

DeLanda says that a plant or animal species is defined by the process which produced it:

In short, the degree of resemblance and identity depends on contingent historical details of the process of individuation ...For the same reason resemblance and identity should not be used as fundamental concepts in an ontology, but only as derivative notions.

What is rejected, says DeLanda, are static categories in favour of historically constituted individuals. Darwin gave us the means to think in terms of species as historical entities. The next step is to think in terms of virtuality (differential elements and relations or structure of an object) and multiplicity.

What Delanda is doing , as far as I can make out, is to argue that the world does not consist of static entities as the world is changing; it is becoming and this process cannot be reduced to anything static, such as numbers, words, entities or matter. If we go from the static to the moving--as we need to then, then we generate a cinematographic view of the world in which static frames follow each others. Our own language inhibits us from understanding the becoming of the world. The virtual is continuous, but the words we use to describe this are not, they are just representations.

Okay, so far so good.

Adorno: 'Mimesis and Rationality'

In the light of this earlier post on Adorno, Art and Mimesis I've started re-reading the sections on art and mimesis in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. The opening paragraph in a section entitled 'Mimesis and Rationality' is an interesting one. Adorno writes:

Art is a refugee for mimetic behaviour. In art the subject, depending on how much autonomy it has, takes up various positions vis-a-vis its objective other from which it is always different but never entirely separate. Art's disavowal of magical practices---art's own antecendents---signifes that art shares in rationality. Its ability to hold its own in the midst of rationality, even while using the meqans of that rationality, is a response to the evils and irrationality of the rational bureaucratic world.

I was suprised by the art standing in opposition to the bureaucratic world as distinct from the capitalist market or the culture industry. Is this the Webern strand of Adorno coming to the fore?

Adorno continues:

The end of all rationality viewed as the sum total of all pactical means would have to be something other than a means, hence a non-rationality quality. Capitalist society hides and disavows precisely this irrationality, whereas art does not. It represents truth in the two fold sense of preserving the image of an end smothered completely by irrationality and of exposing the irrationality and absurdity of the status quo.

Does the phrase 'the image of an end smothered completely by irrationality' refer to the incapacity of instrumental reason to talk in terms of the ethical ends of human action--eg., the image of the good life?

Adorno: totalizing and fragmenting reason

Another guest post by John C Halasz. He picks up on comments made by John Steppling in the Adorno: Art + Philosophy post about how "totalizing" tendencies are really fragmenting tendencies. Steppling says:

Adorno was never so crude as to say the "whole is false".But that the mechanisms that shape a dominated consciousness create a falsity....create illusions of authenticity. Is this actually a totalizing tendency? It would seem also a fragmenting tendency...which Heidegger sort of thought (though Im hardly all that conversent with Heidegger). That the logic of technology produced ever more rationalized modes of thought .... and production .... is what Adorno is going after when he talks of the false, or untrue.

John C Halasz comments that he want to get at how "totalizing" tendencies are really fragmenting tendencies.

I might add, that Steppling's emphasis on "mechanisms" conditioning consciousness/experience misses a bit the socially objective processes of rationalization that condition those conditioning mechanisms, which is perhaps an artefact of the way Adorno's own thinking is, inspite of its "intentions", nonetheless bound up in the conceptual apparatus of the traditional "philosophy of consciousness"). That is, of course, precisely the sort of "contradiction" that Adorno excels at identifying.

But I think it should be put in the context of post-epistemological philosophical thinking: there's that question of what philosophical thinking/activity should be "doing", once the basic, metaphysically rooted project of an epistemological "certification" of knowledge, as the correspondance of "final" truth with "ultimate" reality goes by the wayside. Knowledge is no longer the fulfillment of the plenitude of Being, nor the supreme justification of existence, nor the sure determinant and guide to action.

Knowledge is rather "deflated" and situated among social and natural processes and activities. But there was an additional notion attached to the project of philosophical epistemology, which was the idea that the "progress" of knowledge attached and amounted to a new "progressive" ethics, instead of there being the same old ethics attached to different truth-conditions. I think the "shock" of the rescinding of such epistemological expectations motivates Adorno's recourse to art/aesthetic experience as the "proving ground" of a post-epistemological philosophical thinking. (A similar, parallel problem is to be found with Wittgenstein's critical dissolution of epistemology, where, though three quarters of his references to "philosophy" are pejorative, the other quarter imply some contituation of philosophical thinking/activity which he never manages to explicitate and spell out).

What I want to get at is the way that Adorno reacts to the "end" of epistemology as a collapse of the notion of "Reason" itself, as "Reason" becoming multiply divided against itself, no longer "whole", renouncing and denouncing its very tendency to "totalization". Art then becomes a polarized extreme of the break-up/division of reason against itself, which peculiarly holds on to the impossible ideal of "wholeness", even as it expresses its contradictory reality/impossibility. Thus "wholeness" can be expressed only through the fragmentary, in and as the experience of fragmentation, even as that very expression amounts to an alternative "vision" of wholeness, as pluralistic and de-totalized. Art, as the acategorical uniqueness that protests against and rejects the totalizing ways of cognitive-instrumental categorical thinking and the objective processes which give rise to it and which it "expresses", becomes the "medium" of critical and counter-normative thinking. It becomes the repository that "expresses" the very deformations that categorical thinking is subject to.

That is, of course, a large cognitive burden to be imposed on art. But, still more, just as Marx saw that, while the rise of capitalism had dissolved the repressive narrowness of traditional social morality, it had rendered social morality effectively impossible, except as cant and private sentiment, such that it could only become possible once again as a fundamental transformation of the structural imperatives determining social organization, art, for Adorno, has become the refuge for the wrong life that can not be rightly lived, the hibernation abode of any conceivable social morality/ethical life. It becomes the means of retrieving not only cognitive aims, but ethical conditions from epistemological disappointment.

But the problem is not just that the Marxian project of social emancipation has become infected by the cognitive-instrumental categorical means, by which it sought to realize itself, but that those very categorical means and the social processes which generate and "reflect" them, have themselves become reflexive, such that they automatically reproduce and reflect the "conditions" that generate them. For example, not only has labor-capacity become a commodity and human uses been commodified as "subjective utility", but unemployment has become "natural", as NAIRU, and commodity prices are subject to "hedonic adjustments", and not only does the "mind" seek out those aspects of things that can render them somehow calculable, but "mind" itself is reduced to a mechanical/computational process. The formation of categories becomes itself subject to the processes that give rise to cognitive-instrumental "reason". The "problems" of epistemology are at once abandonned and compounded.

The Habermasian "solution" to what Adorno sees as the collapsed, multiply divided and contradictory condition of "reason", its fragmentation, is to emphasize in neo-neo-Kantian/Weberian fashion the modern differentiation of "spheres" of validity and to attempt a discursive resolution. But aside from its lack of any "concrete" historical prospect, any existential situatedness, any institutional embodiment, and any intrication with the very processes and conditions that would give rise to categorical thought, it fails to respond and "answer" to the natural history of the entwinement of categorical thinking and social morality that Adorno excavates by means of the history of art.

Adorno: art & mimesis

I've always found the category of 'mimesis 'in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory elusive. It was very very elusive in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. I appreciate that it is a counter rationality to the hegemony of instrumental rationality, but I have always found his aesthetic rationality difficult to pin down, due to the complexities around the paradoxes and contradictions. So I was pleased to come across Adorno on Mimesis in Aesthetic Theory by Amresh Sinha.

He says that art takes refuge in mimesis in order to escape from the irrationality of the death-like intensity of the reified world:

Mimesis, in Adorno, mediates between two elements: life and death. In such a dialectical context, if we assume that art's survival in the midst of its potential annihilation by the bureaucratic irrationality of the world depends on the fact that it must partake in the process of rationality, which itself is the reason for its irrationality, then its relation to death is what is manifested as its relation to life. Despite the historical fact that art emerged gradually from the fetters of magical principles, it cannot simply go back to its natural origin, when faced with the rational composition of the irrational, reified, bourgeois world. It is already a part of it. Art's emergence from the shackles of the magic world testifies to its rational principle. But it does not fully indicate the separation of subject from the object. For Adorno, the "varying positions" of art signifies two distinct features. In the first place, the work of art is endowed with the principle of rationality, which indicates its separation from the dominance of the magico-mythical realm; secondly, art also stands in opposition to the rationality, the real domination. In both instances the actual process of art is "inextricably intertwined with rationality" (AT, 80).

I presume art standing in opposition to the rationality, the real domination, refers to instrumental rationality and not rationality per se, since art is a form of rationality--an aesthetic rationality.

Sinha says that:

The dialectic of mimesis and rationality reveals the compatible but irreconcilable tendency of one to the other. Art's mimetic character is revealed in its disenchantment from and secularization of magic from the archaic period. It thus conveys the rational side of art, as well as its refusal to allow the domination of rationality to turn it into a technological perfect being. In art the resistance is felt in both directions as nothing but the mute suffering of its expression. For neither does its mimetic rationality permit it to regress to the magical realm, in order to separate itself from that type of cognition which aims at a singular conceptual grasp of the world, nor the knowledge of the "magical essence" let it slide towards the destruction of its self-identity.

So modern art swings in the wind between its alienation from magic and ritual and from instrumental rationality.

Adorno+ethics

In her summary of the Adorno Conference at Anglia Polytechnic University, May 2001 Zoe Hepden says that Gordon Finlayson of York University, in a paper entitled ‘Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable’, dealt with the problem that Adorno’s notion of truth results in a negative theology. She says:

Finlayson examined Adorno’s claim that the social world is false. Inasmuch as it is false, there is no way of knowing what is true, or in other words, there is no way in which we can have a conception of the good. Finlayson argued that this claim contains the ‘normative basis’ for what he referred to as Adorno’s ethics of resistance. For Finlayson, like Andrew Bowie, Adorno’s claim that the truth of the social world is its untruth results in a negative theology. For Bowie this is inconsistent with Adorno’s philosophical project. However, Finlayson argued that a negative theology can be read as consistent with Adorno’s critical philosophy if it is connected to Adorno’s concern with ‘the ineffable’. Finlayson prioritised a concern with the ineffable, a sort of active ‘not-knowing’, which replaces identifying thinking with non-discursive insights, as a basis for practical strategies of resistance to the bad, even in the absence of any real conception of the good. Finlayson claimed that however inaccessible the good is, Adorno’s negative philosophy is compelled to seek modes of access to it, and that while there is no doubt that Adorno’s work contains a negative theology, when this is linked to the idea of the ineffable it does not result in irrationalism, pessimism or philosophical inconsistency.

Hepden concludes by saying that this is an important argument in terms of the debate over whether Adorno’s philosophy fails to present a coherent project of practical resistance to the social world.

Adorno: art + philosophy

As is well known for Adorno, art in general and especially modern art have a utopian function insofar it creates or preserves an ideal of a life which is not completely degraded by commerce and alienation. Adorno argued that art has the mimetic function of helping the subject remember that it is a sensuous being and part of nature, and thus helps to oppose the rational domination of nature.

Austin Harrington in this article in Radical Philosophy says:

A central preoccupation of German aesthetic theorists over the last thirty years has been with the social and political truth-potential of works of art. Drawing on the distinctively Idealist and post-Idealist tradition of German philosophy since Hegel and the early romantics up to Heidegger, Gadamer and Adorno, several theorists have argued that works of art can and should be understood in terms of their capacity to communicate knowledge and enlightenment of our social-political and existential condition. This contrasts with the eighteenth-century British empiricist tradition and its partial continuation in contemporary analytic aesthetics, which tends to treat artworks solely as objects of pleasure or to focus solely on the structure of aesthetic judgements.

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno famously argues that contemporary artworks must negate their immediate sensuous tendencies in order to hold out the prospect of a utopia that resists pandering to the `system of illusions' of capitalist consumerism and lapsing into premature reconciliation with the status quo. This entailed a special necessity to think art's relation to critique and cognition, and to philosophy in particular.

Thus Adorno defines the truth-content of artworks in terms of an `enigma' awaiting resolution by philosophy. On the one hand, a work's aesthetic qualities suggest a mode of knowing to which the determinate categories of discursive reason are not adequate; but on the other hand, aesthetic experience cannot itself impart enlightenment without the aid of philosophical reflection. Harrington quotes Adorno:

Philosophy and art converge in their truth content: The progressive self-unfolding truth of the artwork is none other than the truth of the philosophical concept.... The truth content of artworks is not what they mean but rather what decides whether the work in itself is true or false, and this truth of the work in-itself is commensurable to philosophical interpretation and coincides ... with the idea of philosophical truth. For contemporary consciousness, fixated in the tangible and unmediated, the establishment of this relation to art obvious poses the greatest difficulties, yet without this relation art's truth content remains inaccessible: Aesthetic experience is not genuine experience unless it becomes philosophy.(p.

Harrington says that in response Rüdiger Bubner argued that Adorno ended only by assimilating aesthetic experience to theory and conversely by making theory itself aesthetic, in effect collapsing art into philosophy.

This is a common claim---Richard Wolin makes it as well. It is not that Adorno thinks philosophical concepts are realized or fulfilled or find evidence for themselves in art practices. Rather Adorno argues that high modernist practices provide, however temporarily, the condition of possibility of there being philosophy at all--- they provide the condition of possibility for us being or becoming self-conscious about who we are, what the world we inhabit is like and how those two fit together. Art undertakes the difficult task of reconstructing thought after Auschwitz.

What I find most puzzling in Adorno is the negative valuation or silence on the place of visual arts in post-Auschwitz aesthetics--say abstract expressionism.

Levinas' critique of light & vision

In his review of Cathryn Vasseleu's Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty Joshua Shaw over at Film Philosophy says that in Part 111 Vasseleu considers a Levinas's critique of philosophy's obsession with vision and light.

The danger in philosophy's obsession with vision and light, for him, [Levinas] is that it's symptomatic of philosophy's relentless quest to comprehend all of reality, to see all of reality exposed to the light of reason. Philosophy's obsession with light renders it hostile, in turn, to all that resists conceptualization and, consequently, to the transcendence of other men and women. Thus Levinas has an ethical impetus for critiquing the role of light and vision in philosophy, and a major goal of his work, on Vasseleu's reading, is to give an account of sensation that isn't hostile to alterity in this way. Levinas achieves this goal by shifting focus from vision to touch.

On Vasseleu's interpretation Levinas critiques the emphasis on intentional, theoretical, quasi-visual consciousness in philosophy, and he emphasizes instead a notion of touch that conceives of sensibility in terms of passivity. To be a sensate being, to be a creature that is capable of sensation, isn't, for Levinas, a matter of being an active agent that sees the world. Sensibility rather consists in being exposed to the world: it consists in vulnerability, the possibility of being wounded.

philosophy, vision and light

As Joshua Shaw over at Film Philosophy observes in a review of Cathryn Vasseleu's Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty:

Metaphors involving light and illumination have played a vital role in Western philosophy. One thinks of Plato's allegory of the cave, divine illumination in Augustine, Descartes's *lumen naturale*, or the reference to light in terms like enlightenment or *Aufklarung*. Philosophers have often turned to metaphors of light and vision to help them explain the nature, methods, and goals of philosophy. Jacques Derrida has recently argued that these metaphors in fact play a foundational role in philosophy. Metaphors involving light and vision aren't mere rhetorical devices philosophers have used to decorate their prose; light is the suggestive metaphor that launches the very enterprise of philosophy. 'Derrida argues', Vasseleu explains, 'that light is not just one metaphor used in philosophy, but the metaphor which founds the entire system of metaphysics of metaphoric truth'.

Vasseleu presents Merleau-Ponty as trying to show how subject-object relations can be understood in terms of touch.

Merleau-Ponty uses the example of one hand rubbing another to illustrate his understanding of touch. Suppose I rub my hands together: Does my right hand touch my left hand? Or does my left hand touch my right? Is my right hand touched, or is it the agent doing the touching? It seems as if my skin quivers between these possibilities. Merleau-Ponty suggests that this ambivalence is paradigmatic of touch. To be an embodied being, a being that touches and is touched by the world, is to be a site where this ambivalence occurs. Thus Merleau-Ponty tries to show how subject-object relations, which have generally been analyzed in epistemological terms like 'knower' and 'known', or in visual terms like 'viewer' and 'viewed', are reducible to opposing poles of this primal ambivalence that occurs at the level of 'flesh'.

theory blogging: what's the fuss?

Over at The Valve John Hoblo has a post on what he calls theory blogging, which I assume is substream of intellectual blogging. This picks up on an article by Jodi Dean entitled Blogging Theory at Bad Subjects which explores their practice of critical conversation beyond and through existing institutional frameworks. I had mentioned Dean's post here. Hoblo says:

There is such a thing as a ‘theory blog’, which will be marked by a distinctive style of appropriation of, and attitude towards, a more or less specifiable set of (mostly European) thinkers. Dean herself clearly takes it to be obvious and not in need of much explanation, let alone conceptual defense, that ‘theory blogging’ will not include most philosophy blogs, of which there are, of course, scores and scores; let alone other academic blogs, including academic blogs about politics and culture and so forth. It won’t include Michael Bérubé because, even though he is sympathetic in many ways, he doesn’t clearly ‘do theory’. The piece drops the heavy hint that there is not just something importantly distinctive but distinctively good about theory blogging. But how could this be due to anything but the distinctive, good character of theory? And if it makes sense to assert it is distinctively good, can it really be nonsense to consider that it might be distinctively bad?

Well, philosophical conversations is both philosophy and theory in that it is orientated to European texts and it is part of a constellation of weblogs that form a loose network. There is no assumption that this makes me more intellectually sophisticated than others, or that those who don't do theory cannot understand the deep thoughts of extremely difficult texts; are anti-Theory or anti-intellectual. I'm reading these texts because they are interesting: they critically address some of my philosophical assumptions and open up new ways of thinking.

This concern with continental texts emerged in a particular historical context--the 1980s in Australia as a critical reaction to analytic philosophy, and it has continued to develop within and outside the academy. It initially had its roots in Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, was initially a hermeneutics of suspicion but become poststructuralism and it was cross disciplinary (English, French, Philosophy departments) within the Humanities. Marx dropped away in favour of feminism, Derrida and Foucault, Freud gave way to Lacan, and Derrida and Foucault gave way to Deleuze. The background to the cultural academic scene can be found at Mark Bauerlein’s Butterflies and Wheels essay on “Theory’s Empire.” The institutional standing of Theory as opposed to its intellectual content is important for many.

Dean characterises these theory blogs in terms of being both a conversation/discussion spreading over half a dozen or more blogs over the course of weeks, like some kind of long running seminar; and as an experiment in writing. So I guess that I would interpret Holbo's comment that Dean 'drops the heavy hint that there is not just something importantly distinctive but distinctively good about theory blogging' in terms of their difference from other kinds of blogging, rather than it being due to the distinctive good character of Theory.

As Holbo points out in the comments to the Valve post that this ongoing conversation spread over different blogs for a couple of weeks is not just a special characteristic of theory blogs --it also happens on The Valve. This kind of conversation is one way that the ivory tower does connect with the public sphere, and there are different flows of conversations that have their feet in, say cultural studies and literary theory.

Do I discern the old conflict between literature and philosophy briefly surfacing here? Possibly. But probably not. Is it conflict within culture between a specific kind of literary theory and cultural studies/critical left theory? Possibly. There is a resistance (briefly explored in this ) to specific continental texts in the Anglo-American academy and amongst cultural conservatives in the review pages of the broadsheet press (where 'Theory' means 'postmodernism' and left politics in terms of the culture wars). It is hard to engage with the broad sweep of Theory (a monolith) as a cultural phenomenon, as opposed to specific arguments in specific texts.

I guess we need to return to the debates around Theory's Empire; to undersatand why the word 'empire' is used to imply a stranglehold on the study of literature. In his initial post John Holbo says:

'Theory' is a name for an academic movement, or school or style of thought, or cluster of them. As such, it is prima facie reasonable to consider that a different school or style might be superior, or at least might be worthy of consideration as a competitor.The problem is that defenders of Theory have gotten into the bad habit of foiling the formulation of this thought.The easy, one-step procedure: misinterpret anti-Theory arguments as if the target were theory in a lower case sense.

Let's accept that this happens.
Holbo adds:

In practice, Theory is appallingly imperial. Well, it's not so bad as that. Apart from a few celebrity Theorists who really do seem to think they are entitled to unlimited deference, ordinary practitioners are willing to be set right now and again, by others within the circle of those who 'do Theory'. But they still assume those outside their little circle, 'antitheory' types, must be wrong. Bog-standard dogmatism of our species, in short.

Adorno and Critique

Towards the end of Minima Moralia Adorno writes:

"The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption....Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects - this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because the situation demands imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consumate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror image of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hairsbreadth, from the scope of existence... The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible".

for Adorno, philosophy can only be practiced "in face of despair"’ and in the form of ‘micrologies’, that is, through involvement with the particular that resists subsumption into the universal.

For Adorno, post-Auschwitz thought must remain dedicated to the task of voicing the irresolvable contradiction, as a form of resistance to the modern, totalizing logic of identity, while at the same time acknowledging its own inexcusable implication in the violence of that logic.

intellectual blogging #2

I want to return to this post on intellectual blogging in the light of these talks on the subject at a panel session of the MLA Convention.

Bitch PhD usefully links current academic blogging to the little magazines of the 18th century. The argument is this:

In effect, my blog was doing more or less the same thing that 18th-century periodical essayists were doing: writing more-or-less personal essays on a regular schedule, using a consistent eponymous pseudonym, about topics from politics to the latest news to what the author dreamt last night or where he or she had dinner, and what the company talked about. And, more specifically, just as the Female Tatler consciously courted an audience by explicitly presenting an "alternative" viewpoint, "Bitch Ph.D." was a title chosen--however casually--in order to represent a kind of paradox, an "alternative" point of view on the ostensible success of having finished the degree, landed a good tenure-track job, and embarked on an academic career that I felt I was kind of faking (and blogging itself magnifies that feeling--after all, as I said in the beginning, Bitch is a far more successful academic than [swmnbn]).

The conclusion of the argument, that blogging's just like 18th-century periodical publication, is that blogs form a public sphere in liberal capitalist societies.

As is well known, Habermas argued that the public sphere can be most effectively constituted and maintained through dialogue, acts of speech, through debate and discussion. there was a deformation of the public sphere through the advance of social welfare, the growth of culture industries, and the evolution of large private interests. Large newspapers devoted to profit, for example, turned the press into an agent of manipulation, attempts to manipulate and create a public where none exists, and manufactures consensus. Marshall Soules states that in "Further Reflections," Habermas claims that public debate can be animated by "opinion-forming associations"-voluntary associations, social organizations, churches, sports clubs, groups of concerned citizens, grassroots movements, trade unions-to counter or refashion the messages of authority.

However, the techniques of advertising and publicity have invaded and corrupted the public sphere ,whilst image management (and image substitution) combines with a style of authoritative discourse to constrain the possibilities of dialogue. Intellectual blogs open up the possibilities. Habermas moves the locus of rationality from the autonomous subject to subjects in interaction. Rationality is a property not of individuals per se, but rather of structures of undistorted communication.

Bitch PhD draws two implications from blogging being similar to 18th-century periodical publication .The first is:

the “enabling fiction” of the public sphere: that is, the idea (which even Habermas’ critics invoke more or less self-consciously) that we should work towards such a thing, and that (though this is somewhat more debatable) that we’re all more or less in agreement about what such a thing would involve. Second, along the same lines, that we really don’t know how unrealized the imperfect textual public sphere really was (then) or is (now)....makes me want to hypothesize that the content of public writing is determined less by gender per se than by issues of property and authorship.

Blogging, as one form of the electronic modes of communication, is creating new public spheres of debate, discussion, and information.

internal relations

Thoughtfactory is experiencing severe download problems. A cable was cut in Atlanta, US, yesterday and that was a main route to Hosting Matters--my hosting company---in Florida. So the site was down for most of the day. Hosting Matters says on its Emergency Forum that:

We are currently seeing Level3/WCG timeouts in multiple locations that are preventing requests from reaching the network. This is also affecting the remote monitor, which will show multiple servers down although they are not in fact down....it is indeed confirmed to be dropped routing. Based on the explanations we have received thus far, it appears that an OC3 was taken out by one provider, and with that maintenance, numerous routes were dropped at the same time. Those routes are being rebuilt/readvertised at this time and we hope things will return to normal shortly based on that activity....From Peak10, Telcove has had a major fiber cut in Atlanta, and our Level 3 Circuit is carried over the Telcove line. Telcove technicians are onsite trying to repair the cut right now...the crews are working on it. The word has come down that a couple of other providers also experienced cuts.... the last update we have is that the new fiber has been pulled, is in place, and the splicing process is beginning. They were unable to give us an estimate of how long this will take,

We are back online today but I cannot upload any images or files from my computer. I'm not sure why. Presumably it is something to do with the event of dropped routing in the US.

And there you go. An accident in Atlanta affects people in Adelaide and Florida. That's how internal relations in a network work. I recal this doctine being dismissed in terms of the butterfly fluttering in China going to have a major impact on the logic of what I choose for breakfast today. But no serious supporter of internal relations would hold that.

The dropped routes indicates that the world is not composed of many distinct, independent entities, each of which can be considered in isolation from its relations to other things.The stress on internal relations is to correct the atomistic and dualistic tendency to view parts as being non-integrated and separate from the whole of which they are parts. It also indicates how we have a network of flows or processes and not just things, relations and qualities.

Adorno, critique, nihilism

Autonomy is a key ethical (and aesthetic) category for Adorno given his analysis of rationality.Though it enables humans to separate themselves from nature, and thus the dominance of the mythic, this entails also a dominance over the self and others. It is a a rationality which thereby subjects the human to a new myth. As this quote from the entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Adorno indicates, the autonomous individual is a threatened species in liberal capitalist societies:

Adorno argues that reason has become entwined with domination and has developed as a manifestation of the attempt to control nature. Adorno thus considers nihilism to be a consequence of domination and a testament, albeit in a negative sense, to the extent to which human societies are no longer enthral to, for example, moral visions grounded in some naturalistic conception of human well-being. For Adorno, this process has been so thorough and complete that we can no longer authoritatively identify the necessary constituents of the good life since the philosophical means for doing so have been vitiated by the domination of nature and the instrumentalization of reason. The role of the critical theorist is, therefore, not to positively promote some alternative, purportedly more just, vision of a morally grounded social and political order. This would be to far exceed the current bounds of the potential of reason. Rather, the critical theorist must fundamentally aim to retain and promote an awareness of the contingency of such conditions and the extent to which such conditions are capable of being changed.

I understand that, for Adorno, avant-garde art and music respond to this situation by preserving the truth through expressing the reality of human suffering. But how do we respond ethically? Where is the critical, emancipatory intent in Adorno's virtue ethics? Or is philosophical ethics grounded in aesthetic theory?

Without a revolutionary working class, Adorno had no one to rely on but the individual subject. But, as the liberal capitalist social basis of the autonomous individual receded into the past, the dialectic based on it became more and more abstract-- a negative dialectic based around the non-identical. We do have the gains of the sixties, the new possibilities for individual autonomy and spontaneity, the new acceptance of desire and creativity, and the new recognition of cultural pluralism.

So how does this square with Adorno? Clifford Duffy over at the eyebeam list says that Adorno is a historical relic, period:

Adorno's ideas about technology and by extension the web have also to be seen critically. He ideas represent a typical looking backward to the old dualities of machine verus the human of will versus power of organic verus non-organic. He has no means of integrating such sophisticated ideas as desire-machine, or body without organs, or plane of consistency. Nor has he the means of thinking (I mean this in exact transitive sense of actually thinking the object at hand, and not thinking about it) multiplicity as that which adds to the already made. He has no methods which allow him to see the ethical in a world which no longer even remotely thrives on the so-called classical verities. Adorno is plagued by the nostalgia and malaise of old Europe. A period which pre-dates the events and realites of the 20th. century. In that respect he shares with Heidegger a false understanding of technology and machines.

This kind of blanket dismissal is disturbing. Yet it is common.