Adorno: Untruth for the Untrue
Apropos of Unkant: "Dialectics that is no longer 'affixed' to identity either provokes the criticism that it is baseless... or else that it is giddy-making. Behind the anxiety about where to take hold of a philosophy there lies for the most part nothing more than aggression, the desire to seize hold of it in the way in which historically schools used to devour one another. The equivalent of guilt and penance has been transposed to the sequence of thoughts. It is precisely this assimilation of mind to the ruling principle that philosophical reflection must see through. Traditional thought and the habits of common-sense thinking that it left behind it after its demise as philosophy call for a frame of reference in which everything has its place. Not too much importance is attached to the intelligibility of the frame of reference - it can even be formulated in dogmatic axioms - as long as it gives shelter to ever reflection while barring the way to every unframed thought. A dialectics that has discarded its fixation with Hegel can satisfy us only if it abandons itself heedlessly to the objects a fonds perdu; the vertigo that this induces is an index veri. What is so giddy-making is the shock of the open, the negativity as which it necessarily appears in the framed and never-changing realm: untruth for the untrue."
Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics #19
I'm so glad The Grand Erector posted this quote, it puts fire into the veins of several debates I'm pursuing. Marco Maurizi has upbraided me (and by implication, this whole Unkant thang) for ignoring Kant's mediations and generally adopting an "easy" Marxist-Leninist contempt for all Kant's fine distinctions: but when I read Adorno's attack on bourgeois common-sense (which "traditional thought ... left behind it after its demise as philosophy") I know he's dissing Kant. Also, consider these lines from J.H. Prynne's Kazoo Dreamboats, lines I used today on the radio to introduce Frank Zappa's "Stink-Foot": "For "not" is the/bilayer extruded from itself as then power of concretion, never later/rather than sooner, but continuously "not now" nor ever postural/pretty much, totally not all alike because not "total" even by tran-/scendental count to intergration over difference, where divergence/cannot be itself nor "not" be in convergence to zero redeemed" (p. 10). Emma, carer at Mordecai's nursery, commented on his refusal to war his bike helmet: "He's in the "not" phase". NOT is the dialectic, the insistence on our own place in the debate. If it breaks your frame (I once defined Adorno as a writer for whom "moving the goalposts" WAS the game), then that's your problem, not philosophy's ...
ReplyDeleteOTL
never said "fine mediations", that's like Stalin accusing Trotsky of being a "traitor". Bullshit. It's called "dialectics", not "mediation", and it's the relation between immediacy AND mediation. So easy. And Kant is part of it.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.autodidactproject.org/quote/adorno11dv.html
Yes, folks, Marco never did say "fine mediations" but the phrase expresses how I felt when Marco said "Ben Watson knows perfectly well he **does** ignore mediations" in Apes from Utopia. We are not in a court of law here in the AMM, citing each other's dead letters to each other as if words can be driven into the body of truth like nails, that would result in the language of the legal contract. We need the freedom to describe the spin we perceive in our comrades' expressions, to unpack social utterance and explain its tendency. I'm not like Stalin because instead of burying "Apes from Utopia", I broadcast it on the radio, and now here we are arguing in public. In contrast, Stalin and his bourgeois fellow travellers (all the way on up to poststructuralist and postmodernist Paris; when Nina Power advised someone top read Kojeve as an introduction to Hegel instead of CLR James we see the same thing) ERASED TROTSKY FROM HISTORY because Stalinism cannot win in a forum of Marxists except by restricting free debate. Well, of course, for us truly to be unKant we've got to know our enemy! And I completely agree with Marco saying "Lenin’s polemic was directed not against Kant himself but against those whom he identified as his cultural enemies: the Neo-Kantian (anti-Hegel) fashion in Europe of the late 18th century. To believe that, in 2011, we have the same cultural enemies as Lenin is to believe that culture is an eternal sphere independent from social reality. So, polemic is right. It has to be local, though, and timing." As Lars T. Lih has shown, the Stalinists did irreparable damage to Marxism as a revolutionary social science by embalming "What Is To Be Done?" as eternal doctrine, and the same should not be done to Lenin's anti-neo-Kantian "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism" of 1908. However, I don't think it's right - as some do - to use Lenin's notes on Hegel written in 1914 to dismiss the earlier book. I was warned by academics that "M&E-C" was full of "unsophisticated" reflection theory and crude materialism, but when I read it I found a superb defence of materailism against the creeping religiosity of the neo-Kantians and Machists and it gave me the impetus to write Art, Class & Cleavage versus the creeping religiosity of the postmoderns. If Marco can go into Kant and find ammunition against reaction, I'd be very pleased. I myself at the moment find Kant mechanical, legalistic and blocked, his tragic antinomies reminding me of the postmodern "turn to ethics" (the useless bleating of gilded lambs). Hegel, on the other hand, writhes with insights on sex, procreation and our species being. Marco, paragraph 244 of the Smaller Logic will leap into relevance for you somertime in June!
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I see your point Ben and I don't think anybody's interested in a quarrel about Kant. I'm just saying that Kant - like every true philostopher (like, say, Plato and NOT John Locke) - has interesting contradictions and tensions which I think it's worth going through. Thus, for me, Kant is not THE enemy. I suppose positivism and analytical philsophy ARE (and, by the way, they're often anti-Kantian as well!). Also, Teddie and Max were Kantian from beginning to end, because they criticized Hegel's assumption that thought is identical to the thing conceived. Hegel - not Kant - was the one who said that "everything under the sun is mediated", because Kant believed that reality hits us very hard on the nose. There's immediacy in Kant, too, and it is precisely that kind of immediacy that Adorno and Horkheimer loved AGAINST Hegel, i.e. the non-identity between thought and reality.
ReplyDeleteEr, where did Hegel say "everything under the sun is mediated" or are you expressing your feelings here? I like you talkin' about when it hits yer hard on the nose, it reminds me of Uncle Remus. You've got to point me to the good bits in Kant (news of Teddie and Benjie diving into Kant doesn't work, wasn't it just the unfortunate fashion for intellectuals in their time? like aggressive agitators having to work through Zizek these days?) because every time I read him I grind my teeth. It's interesting when you say Plato is a true philosopher and Locke isn't, but it's quite a personal opinion. The more I read Plato the more pissed off I get about how stage-managed and undialectical is Socrates' teaching of the truth. He never really seems to get anyone arguing against him with FIRE in their veins. I prefer us now ... I'm not committed to philosophy in the way you are, but I'm certainly committed to thought and truth. I know "philosophy" means "love of truth" but the word now implies a specialisation and I baulk at that. The AMM is about the END OF SPECIALISATION BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY including political action, music, jokes, sex and random rubbish ...
ReplyDeleteThis is funny. I remember Adorno quoting Hegel: "According to Hegel, there is nothing between heaven and earth that is not "vermittelt" [mediated]"
ReplyDelete(Three studies on Hegel: http://books.google.it/books?id=-84zWGqJN6MC&pg=PA57&lpg=PA57&dq=hegel+%22There+is+nothing%22+mediated+adorno&source=bl&ots=uooSDeipLF&sig=mbsaJehZps16r_OBsvfPBGAaIrQ&hl=it&sa=X&ei=BHVGT4zHIImK4gTD1by3Dg&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false)
And this goes to my point about what is both great and problematic in Hegelianism for Teddie. If everything's mediated - there is no thing-in-itself - it is because idealism is true and there is only identity (no tension, no negativity). That's the point where Kant becomes interesting for Adorno, he never forgets the difference between thinking and reality and stands for not-identity. From the other hand (historical dialectics!), Kant is too harsh and abstract in denying the possibility of real knowledge, while Hegel can be translated into a materialist, so Adorno constantly plays Kant against Hegel and viceversa.
That said, I looked for the mysterious Hegelian quote about immediacy and discovered that Teddie quoted him wrong! As Hegel puts it in his Logic it is very much MY point of view about immediacy and mediation being inseparable moments of dialectics:
"There is nothing, nothing in heaven, or in nature or in mind or anywhere else which does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation"
(http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlbegin.htm)
You could take this sentence and put it in my Liege paper on Zappa & Beefheart, it is precisely what I meant. Immediacy AND mediation, no way you should choose between them.
I know philosophy could be considered a form of hair-splitting and an intellectual diversion (I'm not saying you believe this), the point is that philosophy is NOT a specialistic doctrine, it's just history of thought and I do think it is relevant for materialism as such. I'm just back from a Lesson at the University and got surrounded by people asking for MORE MORE MORE, more of that wild speculations about reality. Eeeeleeectricityyyyyyyyyyyy! It is fascinating to see how the Faculty of Philosophy has changed through the years. It is no more the showcase for wanna-be intellectuals. You get housewives, workers, old men, people that explicitly chose a faculty where nothing is guaranteed and where knowledge is of NO USE, it doesn't give you points for social carreerism, there is no know-how to learn, but rather freedom to interrogate and investigate ourselves and our social environment and nature. I do think they're gonna shut down Faculties of Philosophy in the next future (well, they're already trying to do it, substituting philosophy with "social sciences" and other aborts).
ReplyDeleteA good way to start with Kant is to read his most werid work, the "Critique of Judgement", it couples the study of Beauty and the study of natural organism. It's funny, even when Kant holds a Prussina discussion about jokes (telling jokes that aren't funny anymore but that probably were in his time...) or when he talks about art and says that music is in itself "impolite" becuase you can always disturb other people that don't want to hear it. The good thing about Kant is that you learn from his teaching even when you don't agree with him (John Locke is simply stupid and I won't discuss the topic anymore, consider it idiosincratic if you wish, but I think he is not worth discussing).
Critique of Judgement was the first book I read as a student of philosophy and still remember it with pleasure. It really "opened" my mind, like a sort of brain-training.
Plato. How can someone don't like Plato's dialogues? "Fire in their veins"? Well, that's not the idea of truth that the Greek population had at their time, you know. That's not Plato's fault, it's like attacking him for not being Marx. Who cares? And yet, in the "Republic" he staged the wild assault of Thrasymachus against Socrates,that's a telling moment, really exciting. Come on, "Parmenides" is a masterpiece of dialectical thought and he is always more funny and nuanced to read than mr. I-m-gonna-tell-you-right-Aristotle. And when I say "nuanced", I'm not saying "mediation", I'm saying "dialecitcs", irreducibility, contradiction, tensions (the concept of "chora" in the Thymeaus is a good example of philsophy - ie. "pure" thought - that comes near to his self-destruction and opens the possibility for dialectical materialism...). Everything dialectical in Aristotle (and, probably in the entire history of philosophy) comes from Plato. Something can be totally wrong and yet be usefull. That's dialecitcs, too, and HEGEL!
I wish I could enrol in your classes, Marco, it sounds amazing. I think we're kind of agreeing at the moment, so the dialogue is winding down. Yes, Plato is high style. I always found Aristotle kind of dull. You can diss John Locke all you like ...
ReplyDeleteI turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe,
And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire
Wash'd by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation: cruel Works
Of many wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden, which
Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.
William Blake, Jerusalem
PS But I STILL think a bit of immediacy is very exciting. Now and again. But only because everything gets so damn mediated ...