Propelled Towards the Absolute

“Bloch refuses to respect the boundary between finite and infinite, between the phenomenal and the noumenal, between the limitations of reason and the unreality of faith. Behind every word stands his resolve to break through the solid barrier which ever since Kant common sense has inserted between consciousness and things in themselves. The very ratification of this barrier is assigned to the realm of ideology and is interpreted as the expression of bourgeois society’s acquiescence in the reified world it has fabricated, the world of commodities, the world for the bourgeois. This is the meeting point of the positions of Bloch and Benjamin. The sheer love of freedom makes Bloch tear down all the boundary posts and in the process he does away with the now ossified ‘ontological difference’, so beloved of German philosophy, between essence and mere existence. In the recuperation of motifs derived from German idealism, and ultimately from Aristotle, existence becomes force, potentiality, propelled towards the absolute.” (Adorno, ‘Ernst Bloch’s Traces‘)

Next Generation

The first outing of the so-called ‘third-generation’ Frankfurt School is somewhat inauspicious. Too much in the thoughts of Rainer Forst, Stefan Gosepath, Christoph Menke and Nicole Deitelhoff seems to have been adopted from the second generation, its reformist institution-tinkering and preoccupation with challenges to democracy. Asked how far they would take their own democratic impulse there’s a familiar complaint about the dangers of Rousseauism. Their foregrounding of the threat of climate change and the injustice of the Konjunkkturpacket (bail-out) are welcome, but add nothing to what has been said already over the last year. Menke at least has some arguments against die Linke, that they forget the critique of the state current in ’70s Marxism, and against the dodgy solidarities Leftists tend to form with hierarchical groups supposedly feindlich to imperialism.

The only element suggesting commonality with the first generation Frankfurt School is something in their defence of human rights discourse as not exhausted by an imperialistic application, that reaches back to Ernst Bloch’s Naturrecht und Menschenwürde, and has radical potential. There’s also more recognition of the difficulty of consensus than was found in their second-generation Vorläufer.

But reading their thoughts makes me think those of us championing a self-critical version of first-generation approaches and ideals – those of Adorno, Marcuse, Neumann and the tag-alongs Benjamin and Bloch – have in no way been rendered obsolete.

Wellmer, Adorno, London

Thursday 5 November, 4:30-6pm
Albrecht Wellmer (Berlin): Discussion of “Adorno and the Difficulties of a Critical Reconstruction of the Historical Present”
Room G3, 11 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3RA

“Professor Wellmer is one of the most distinguished living German philosophers and this is a rare opportunity to see him in this country. In 2006 he was awarded the Adorno Prize (previous winners include Ligeti, Derrida, Godard, Boulez and Habermas). He will be discussing his acceptance paper in this seminar, the text of which is available here: http://www.amsterdam-adorno.net/T_wellmer_twa.pdf “

Bierhallenkitsch

The Frankfurt Jewish Museum is staging an exhibition, the Frankfurt School: a Return to Germany, presenting an opportunity for Die Zeit’s writers to recall Leo Löwenthal’s observations of the Stunde Null (year zero) and Trümmerlandschaften (rubble landscape) after the war. It’s interesting to read how quickly the reinstated Munich Bierfest filled up with the same “bellowing, zombified masses” Löwenthal had earlier seen cheering on the Führer. (Today the bellowing is more likely to be that of tourists, paying over-the-odds to hear Schlager and ogle low-cut Dirndls). Löwenthal goes on to note the casual anti-semitism of the time: “Everyone knows the Jews had the money”, a taxi driver tells him, not realising he is Jewish, a scene which recalls Herr Treibel’s treatment in Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss. With some bathos, the author illustrates the piece with a comical picture of Adorno at Fastnacht. Who says he was a grumpy old man?

Fichte lived here

Wozu has a brief but suggestive criticism of Meillassoux up. It’s a bit different to mine, which looks at the slippage in the term ‘correlation’ itself. Contra Meillassoux, there clearly is a relation between thought and being, and one which is two-sided, a co-relation, though the unfortunate statistical provenance of ‘correlation’ means this mutual relation has been misconstrued (and so easily discarded) as simple identity, or as unilinear determination. Even Fichte (Lectures 1 -3 on the Wissenschaftslehre) recognised that non-identity is implied by the identity of thought and being. Arguably the same Fichte sacrificed non-identity in the last instance, and for this reason Hegel sought to rescue the play of the identity and non-identity via phenomenology, something Adorno in turn believed Hegel to have neglected, and so the rebellion of the sons against the father continued once again. One of Adorno’s mistakes was to see Hegel’s Absolute as some permanency, not as a possible achievement which could also be lost or forgotten; the Bacchanalian revel was frozen in its pause, and rebelling against it would take up the revel again, as the restless negative dialectic of that which exceeds the concept. Adorno and others missed that the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit takes us ironically, when its own post-history, its after-life, has fallen back into the darkness of misrecognition, back to the beginning, to somewhere in the middle, to the renewed play of identification and recognition of non-identity. Sadly, none – or hardly any – of these thinkers and their texts are read today by those who believe the critique of the identity of thought and being to be something new: revealingly, the Phenomenology is absent from Brassier’s bibliography; Adorno’s Negative Dialectics is only mentioned in a footnote, his early collaboration with Horkheimer taken as representative; Hamilton Grant reads German idealism – tendentiously so – but not Adorno. Harman seems to have read neither Hegel nor Adorno.

Violent Twilight of Oil

Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis on the Politics of Oil on Tuesday NOVEMBER 10th at 6:30PM. Join Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis as they discuss big oil’s cultural and political violence with Peter Maass, contributing editor at The New York Times Magazine and the author of the recently published Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil.

The event is moderated by Ashley Dawson, Associate Professor of English, The Graduate Center, CUNY.  The event will take place at the Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave btwn 34th and 35th (The Skylight Room, 9100), New York.

Logics of Compliance

A new book on the edu-factory, focussing primarily on teaching staff, and a nice riposte to government attempts to measure the ‘value’ of post-graduate education.

Plus ça change

“The metaphysical constructions of the cosmos that we are obliged to witness in our own time either bear a suspicious similarity to older, and mostly much more dynamic and illuminating, intellectual schemes, or are products of the most execrable dilettantism.”  (Heinrich Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation in the Natural Sciences [1902])

“All fanaticism [Schwärmerei] is and necessarily becomes a philosophy of nature.”  (Fichte, Characteristics of the Present Age [1806])

Shoot First, Ask Questions Later

Heidegger stole some of the best words. Sometimes it would be necessary to steal them back. Not all of them, mind. Some of them have been irredeemably dirtied by his hands. But I always liked ‘Holzwege‘, as in, ‘Ich bin auf dem Holzweg‘. It refers to those paths which woodcutters make in the forest (and no, the Schwarzwald isn’t the only forest in the world, you see Holzwege wherever there are woods, and you find the expression from Sachsen to Hessen). Someone who doesn’t know the territory may follow such a path, thinking it will take them through the forest, but it doesn’t; it just leads to the wood pile somewhere in the middle. Ich bin auf dem Holzweg – I’m on the false (but plausible, tempting) path.

This reading of Hegel is just such a Holzweg. Reading Hegel as endorsing precisely what he’s criticising – here any view that there can be a ‘pure insight’ or ‘pure idea’ without mediation, without muddiness, complexity, is precisely the standpoint of ‘consciousness’ (Bewusstsein), which has not yet acknowledged its own multiplicity (Selbstbewusstsein), its history, its own determination, and allowed its effortless, ostensibly passive insight to move. Knowledge cannot be without content, that is, impurity; it is not insight. The pure idea of something precisely turns into its opposite, the emptiest category: nothing. The observer who merely ‘looks at’ is left behind at the transition to human-animal desire (Begierde); activity is the truth of self-certainty. Almost a century later Husserl barely moved phenomenology beyond the already criticised standpoint, even in his nods towards ‘intersubjectivity’, which makes equation of the two thinkers ludicrous. So much for the Phenomenology of Spirit. The same Holzwege abound in this reading of the Philosophy of History. It stops at Adorno’s unspeculative, anachronistic view of the ’slaughter-bench of history’, attacked with the indefatigable weaponry of Holocaust piety. Adorno’s mistake was to think consciousness of the value of freedom wasn’t still affirmed in its attempted negation – genocide – wasn’t actually reinforced in the very horror we rightly feel at the event.

There’s something of what Frederick Beiser called the ‘Shoot First, Ask Questions Later’ school of reading here, beloved of analytics, but here the continentals’ path into the woods.

The anti-metaphysical tendency of Anglophone scholarship has been based upon a specific hermeneutic, a certain method of interpretation, which has been widely practiced by analytic philosophers. This method is entirely ahistorical. It has little interest in the genesis or context of a text, still less in the nuances of meaning in the original language. These are deemed historical details, irrelevant to philosophical content. The chief aim of this method is to reconstruct ‘the arguments of a philosopher’, to assess their value as solutions to apparently eternal problems…. This method assumes that texts are self-contained and self-illuminating wholes, as if their meaning should be fully apparent to the intuitions of a contemporary Anglophone reader. When their meaning is not obvious, one resorts to guesswork and asks ‘What could this possibly mean?’; where the suggestions are meant to be logically exhaustive, though they usually reveal the limits of the philosophical culture of the interpreter. When the guessing is over, target practice begins; the hapless historical figure becomes an ‘Aunt Sally’, whose chief fault is not being one of us….It is a remarkable, and indeed embarrassing, fact that some of the most notable practitioners of this method seem to have scant conception of the chief alternative to their own. They show little awareness of, or scant interest in, the historical methodology developed and practiced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Wilhelm Dilthey, Rudolf Haym, Benno Erdmann, Erich Adickes and Ernst Cassirer. Their method is the very antithesis of the contemporary Anglophone one: it insists on understanding and assessing a text in its own terms, according to the author’s intentions and historical context. Pace the suggestions of Strawson and Bennett, it was never reverential or deferential to historical figures; rather, they were criticized from within, according to their own standards and assumptions. These German scholars fully recognized that the best criticism only emerges from the deepest sympathy, from the most plausible reconstruction of an author’s meaning. It is an enormous pity that their work has not been better known in the Anglophone world. In many respects they provide a model for how to approach and understand a text historically. Their achievements dwarf anything produced in the Anglophone world. They stand to their Anglophone counterparts as men to boys.” (Frederick Beiser, ‘Anglophone Scholarship since the 1960s’)

So nicht weiter

Updates on the actions at American Universities and links to corresponding European struggles from Marc Bousquet. To the left, my own photo of the strike at the Berlin Theologische Fakultaet. Utopian Discourse has good links to the American and the European side. Meanwhile here is a timely reminder of how to think of the University, in contrast to some overly Bakuninan pronouncements from the barricades.