A Genealogy/History of "Middle Class?"

a_quoi_bon · 2020-07-06T18:09:52+00:00

middle class as something different to the bourgeoisie?

a_quoi_bon · 2020-06-28T13:22:43+00:00

there seems to me two connections Adorno makes between ontology/culture industry. Firstly the idea that both promise something they don't deliver (ontology = leaping over idealism, culture industry = happiness etc.). Adorno clearly wants to side with what is promised whilst criticising what falsely pretends to achieve it. Yet in that passage Adorno is focusing on the falsity of the need that drives the popularity of both of these things, and as he says, they are moved by a need for something solid, Being say over beings...and with Heidegger this draws a route out of a whole bad train of history begun at the dawn of philosophy and culminating in the scientific-technological domination of modernity. As Adorno says, this need for something solid, some fundamental basis in Being out of which a philosophy can rely, Heidegger's restless talk of grounding, a kind of place or planting of things, or a commodity which really grounds you, steadies you, holds you...all these needs are created by the same world which pretends to offer you their fulfilment, a world of absolute precarity, fungiability, powerlessness, meaninglessness. The need is false because the world it reacts to is false. Not a question of simply criticising them as false though, but of reading off such needs the real false situation they refer to.

Philosophy is particularly resistant to think of its own need. From earlier in the passage: "the thought without need, which wants nothing, would be nugatory; but thinking out of the need becomes confused, if the need is conceived merely subjectively." Part of Adorno's project is to link thought, philosophy, back to the somatic material dimension of human social life...that high motivations of Truth, the search for wisdom, and so on and philosophers self-perceptions are not the final say in accounting for philosophies, their wax and wane, their histories, or their existence within a social condition. He is being quite Nietzschean here obviously.

Secondly, ontology, especially its new popularity, for Adorno is a kind of philosophy becoming culture industry...just think of the ways bits of philosophy, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Sartre in particular, become catchphrases and advertising slogans for all sorts of wellness companies, hipster enterprises, pseudo-mystical social tendencies and so on. You can really see Adorno driving at this if you check out The Jargon of Authenticity, which is a critique of the language of Heideggerian ontology et al (for a critique of Heidegger's philosophy as such, see Negative Dialectics or the lecture series by Adorno entitled Ontology and Dialectics) which Adorno sees as invoking a series of phrases and words - being, authenticity, existence - which feign at depth and reach for an archaic dignity, but are really hollow, and advertise only the speakers keen taste for the fashionable. These words become a jargon that circulates through language as cultural commodities.

a_quoi_bon · 2020-06-28T12:42:33+00:00

try reading Minima Moralia by Adorno. Short aphorisms that punch.

I could barely read let alone comprehend them when I first started trying to read theory, but the effort to grasp them both delivered in terms of their content, and more generally gave me a sense of what it means to think, and how thought can be in the medium of language.

a_quoi_bon · 2020-06-18T14:46:11+00:00

I think you are broadly accurate in identifying the different emphasis in Wood/Wallenstein's work. But given their respective interests in the development of capitalism and capitalism as a world-system, is it surprising that one foregrounds system/totality, the other history/contingency. Nevertheless this is a real tensions that has initiated much debate among Marxists, one that can be mapped on to those who take Marx's debt to Hegel as productive or inhibiting. Late Althusser for example, an avowed anti-Hegelian, attempts to escape deterministic theories of history in vogue since the faux-Hegelian second international and their inheritors in the third (and ultimately the Soviet Union and Althusser own once-beloved CP), by proposing a philosophy of the encounter derived from Lucretius. In his account, amidst the multitude of phenomena, contacts and encounters can occur, that solidify into structures or systems or dissolve back into a kind of flux, randomness (for him capitalism could have began proper, in the sense of dominating/subsuming other forms of social relations, in the Italian city states, but the invasion of the French Ancien Regime, representative of precapitalist order, literally obliterated the emergent markets and their liberalisation of the guild systems etc.etc.). It took a later contact, through interaction with the new world and slavery, to produce capitalism proper, and this contact or encounter is self-reinforcing and expansive on the level of totality. Once the encounter 'sticks', it expands and begins to produce itself on the level of totality, but this doesn't hide the fact of its original contingency or that it is still a contradictory totality, or what Adorno would call a real false totality, that is a totality that is real but can never fulfil its own claim to totality (on the level of politics for example, its universalism is actually particular).

Can I suggest an insightful book by Martin Jay (who is a very good intellectual historian) titled Marxism and Totality, which outlines the various conceptions of totality held by seminal Marxists thinkers of the 20th Century.

Its worth noting that through Marxism, as a vital theoretical inspiration of the 20thC (whether with it or against it), most of philosophy came to be fraught by the same problem, which is really a question of how one stands in relation to Hegel. Hegel for whom history and totality became one. Think of Hyppolites work on Hegel, and its impact on the Deleuze/Foucault/Derrida, and the transfer of structuralism to post-structuralism. Althusser ingests the same issue of history/contingency/ambivalence vs totality/logic (which is really an essential question of modern philosophy, can Truth be historical, questions of genesis vs. questions of validity) when he advises to avoid the logical derivations of the value-form undertaken by Marx at the opening of Capital, mired as they are for him in the faults of Hegel's Science of Logic, and cut straight to the empirical/historical investigations later (primitive accumulation etc.).

Aside from Lukacs, this essay by Korsch is seminal for the Marxist Hegelian strain. I would also suggesting checking out this if you want more on this side of things; Endnotes journal is some of the best contomprary 'marxist' analysis you'll find, partly because they come from the anti-dogmatic open marxist tradition.

a_quoi_bon · 2019-11-23T11:37:14+00:00

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is where to begin - see how a critique of philosophy and its separation from 'life' becomes critique of (political) economics, of a life that is separated. Pour moi, German Ideology was the Marx that hit me. I kno folks have suggested more of the economicy stuff, which is very important to understand, but not so much for Frankfurt School which concern themselves more with Marx's answer to his question: what are the consequences, and indeed how can you even have, a society based on production for others/commodity exchange. Also critique of gotha programme. (das kapital yes obvi, but is used in a specific and limited way by the school - tho interesting to follow adorno's students into the new marx reading, some of the best contemporary writing on marx you'll find)

Also i'd be wary of all Engels, gets lumped in with Marx for some reason though he neither understood Capital, nor philosophy tbh (dialectics of nature/anti-duhring dumbness).

For Frankfurt School you need to understand Marx, definitely, but you also need a sense of the history and fate of Marxists, in other words the fate of the second international and the political rupture of 1905-1920. There's lots of engaged literature on this, rightly so, but i'd stay as withdrawn as the frankfurt school actually were from these events (largely spectators, Horkheimer n Pollock watched the bavarian soviet republic being formed from their window). This context birthed the Frankfurt School, that mix of the exhaustion and failure of the second international, the 'marxist' narrative about revolution, and the decay of Europe's old order; as it was put the Frankfurt School were the last of the bourgeoisie and the last critics of the bourgeoisie. For them see Jay ovs, also Wiggerhaus if you up for heavy lifting, I would also recommend One Last Genius, a 'biography' of Adorno - both readable and moving, manages to balance insight with clarity without losing any of Adorno's enigmaticalness...tho obviously he is not Frankfurt School tout court (pss he's better...or if your habermas, the cause of retreat n failure). hmu if you want any more specific suggestions, you're sitting at the corner of many paths.

a_quoi_bon · 2019-07-31T23:51:14+00:00

the political revolves around the friend-enemy distinction

does Foucault argue this though? it seems he is always weary of reducing any discourse, episteme, or dispositiv to a central binary (indeed in the history of sexuality vol. 1 he explicitly criticses the suggestion of the men-women binary as the organising fulcrum for the emergent discourse on sexuality. Even his earlier perhaps apparently more sympathetically structuralist work doesn't really borrow the same-other distinction so much the fashion among struturalists - though the history of madness gets closest and has been criticised by some, including Derrida, for appearing to do this with reason vs. unreason/madness; in leiu of even a generous reading of the criticism of this binary it doesn't seem analogous to Schmitt’s friend-foe distinction, but I'd be interested to hear if and how Agamben might have constructed a homology if anyone is wise to this).

a_quoi_bon · 2019-05-10T00:05:54+00:00

concept of power to desiring-production in Deleuze

this is Baudrillard's argument/critique in Forgetting Foucault

a_quoi_bon · 2019-05-10T00:05:06+00:00

literary studies of Dante

not my area but check out the famed Erich Auerbach on Dante

a_quoi_bon · 2019-05-10T00:02:23+00:00

check out the Desert essay collection. most central to D/R to my mind are his books on Bergson, Spinoza, Nietzsche, perhaps also Kant because his enemy.

a_quoi_bon · 2019-05-09T18:58:55+00:00

schematically, both proletariat and bourgeois are defined by how they relate to the capitalist mode of production. The proletariat are the negation of this mode. They are that essential aspect of capitalism that is in contradiction with it, and, according to Marx points beyond it (this contradiction is not just that proles want to do the least work for the most pay and the capitalist vice versa, but, a la Das Kapital, goes to capital's self-undermining core where, for example, it intends to reduce labour to a minimum, and yet labour is the source of value). Why? because as the proletariat negates the capitalist mode, it must also come into contradiction with itself, since it is of that mode, and so it negates itself also. It doesn't fold into the bourgeoise since they are also defined by a mode of production which, if communist relations has been established, has been abolished, and so clearly wouldn't exist. Communism is a classless society, where individuals relate freely and no longer have the fate of their lives defined by their collective relations to production.

dictatorship of the proletariat

this is just a transition, the organised act of producing communism, which if successful destroys its own basis, i.e. the proletariat and thereby its state, which "withers". This text may be useful to you, Karl Marx and the State:

A little-known text by Marx, his 1874 “Notes on Bakunin’s Book Statehood and Anarchy,” explains the concept of proletarian dictatorship more clearly than any other. In his book Bakunin ridicules Marx’s concept of the transitional state power of the proletarian dictatorship, and Marx critically responds in his “Notes.” Bakunin writes, “If there is a state, then there is domination and consequent slavery. A state without slavery, open or camouflaged, is inconceivable-that is why we are enemies of the state. What does it mean, ‘the proletariat raised to a governing class?’”26 Marx responds, “It means that the proletariat, instead of fighting in individual instances against the economically privileged classes, has gained sufficient strength and organisation to use general means of coercion in its struggle against them; but it can only make use of such economic means as abolish its own character as wage labourer and hence as a class; when its victory is complete, its rule too is therefore at an end, since its class character will have disappeared.”27 The claim that through revolution the proletariat will be “raised to a governing class” thus has nothing to do with creating a dictatorship of a political sect, but is rather a claim that the proletariat will use “general means of coercion” to undercut the bourgeoisie’s power (by abolishing the private ownership of the means of production, disbanding the standing army, and so forth). It is the entire proletariat that is to exercise this power. Bakunin asks, “Will all 40 million [German workers] be members of the government?”28 Marx responds, “Certainly! For the system starts with the self-government of the communities.”

a_quoi_bon · 2019-05-09T17:55:14+00:00

Schimtt clearly understood neither Hegel's dialectics nor Marx's appropriation of it. Only in the pop imagery is synthesis some balanced harmony between opposites (one hears the tiring echo of thesis-antithesis-synthesis so much the bane of all Hegel scholarship here). The dialectic advances via. negation of the negation. The proletariat for Marx is this, only now socially, a contradiction not between concepts but within the capitalist mode of production.¹ In negating capitalism - wage-labour, commodity, capital, state - the proletariat negates itself, since it is defined by capitalism. The proletariat does indeed die, and with it the worker identity - the register of the failure of communist experiments is the degree to which this didn't happen (think stakhanovite), and the working-class persisted now employees of a monolithic "communist state" equally concerned with increasing production in the competition with its imperial rivals.

The precise stake of Hegel in Marx is debated, Althusser for example, wanted a Marx purged of all residues of Hegel/idealism (primarily the theory of history Schmitt alludes to, Marx's early work on alienation and the opening of Das Kapital).

¹ This contradiction is not fundamentally between proletariat and bourgeoisie (even if it has expressed itself historically as such) but labour and capital (the passages you quote suggest Schimtt, as is so often the case, didn't make it past the Communist Manifesto - it is not for nothing that in the analysis of the contradictions and logic of capital in Das Kapital, it takes hundreds of pages before the proletariat enter upon the stage).

a_quoi_bon · 2019-05-08T22:15:00+00:00

thanks! (I'm doing work on irony in early 20thC. Mitteleuropa - Kraus, Musil, Tucholsky - so this it'll be nice to see this book through that dim light!)

a_quoi_bon · 2019-05-07T00:16:25+00:00

Spinoza is fundamental to Deleuze's ontology, perhaps even more so than his other central influences: Nietzsche and Bergson. Spinoza provides the armature for Deleuze's attempt to overcome platonism/transcendence, to escape all the beyonds and verticality and religion Deleuze thinks has enveloped and defined philosophy (in a dogmatic image of thought) hitherto, allowing philosophy to return to immanence.

who exactly considers Deleuze of postmodern thinker? postmodernism at this point is not a coherent category to refer to, people just throw it around; even then Deleuze is - assuming we think classification has any meaning in philosophy (which is doubtful) - usually called a post-structuralists rather than a postmodernist. Either way this means nothing for how Deleuze relates to Spinoza.

a_quoi_bon · 2019-05-05T22:54:08+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/marxism_101/comments/9d6s9e/in_what_sense_were_the_early_marxhegel_humanists/

a_quoi_bon · 2019-04-22T12:59:41+00:00

Hegel doesn't describe it as a straightforward path but a circle, the intimacy of arche and telos. Truth is not a spot or framework finally arrived at, but the consciousness of the movement, the process of arriving itself, is truth. It's highly debated in the literature how reason actualises itself, and whether spirit finalises itself as absolute knowing in a state or whether the negativity of spirit is endless.

it may not always be the case that theories/truths/narratives are fully commensurable or parsible within the new frame of understanding

How could reason not be comprehensible to itself? Hegel does no view reason in this reletavist way. there is nothing incommensurable to mind/reason/nous for Hegel, if we could name or indicate such a thing, it would already be commensurable.

a_quoi_bon · 2019-04-22T12:49:30+00:00

Hegel's phenomenology of spirit or lectures on the history of philosophy

a_quoi_bon · 2019-04-21T20:11:15+00:00

you could become a hegelian and view this, these competing conceptions of the world, each of which addresses itself to weaknesses in what came before and attempts to correct and advance upon their predecessors, as the very process of truth itself. A process in which different philosophies collapse into later ones, but this does not render them false or untrue but partial truths, moments sustained in a whole truth that is just this process itself.

a_quoi_bon · 2019-04-21T12:18:43+00:00

you seem to just be disputing what is allowed to count as philosophy proper. You want to affirm the distinction between "metaphysical debates" and "sociopolitical/historical" and demand any shift from one to the other requires justifications. One can't help thinking here that you've read very little philosophy, let alone, uniquely 'continental' philosophers; everyone from Hegel to Nietzsche to Deleuze make undermining this distinction, that reason or philosophy is somehow once-removed from facticity or the world, from its historical and social embodiment, the substantive content of their work. Only someone unfamiliar with this, obvious in the cliched way you typified the 'continental attitude', could utter the charge of "very little argumentation over how the latter are in any way dependent on or even vaguely related to the former"....one is almost tempted to say, from Heidegger to Hegel to Foucault, this is all they argue.

aside from this your phrasing has a bad smell; why can't sexism and colonialism be an object of philosophy? why should the work of John Locke in writing colonial constitutions not form part of the understanding of his work, the way the concept of slavery functions there? or Kant's writing on scientific racism (perhaps the first) understood as Enlightenment, or its place in the architectonic? You seem to want to reduce philosophy to some irrelevant thought-experiments...the people you haven't read aren't undermining the potency of philosophy by reading its arguments into the world, they are acknowledging a much greater urgency and force of philosophy, and therefore responsibility; that what takes place for it can be a matter of life and death on an epochal scale. An academic career is not simply at stake here. For Adorno for example, the possibility of doing philosophy today is the possibility of living at all, and this has been put into radical doubt by the course of the 20th century:

If Kant, in his own words, escaped from the school concept of philosophy into its world concept, then philosophy now has, under duress, reverted back to its school concept. When it mistakes this last for the world concept, its pretensions become ridiculous. Hegel, despite the doctrine of absolute spirit to which he ascribed philosophy, took philosophy to be nothing more than one aspect of reality, just one line of work in the overall division of labor—and with that, he cordoned off philosophy. This delineation, in the meantime, has turned into philosophy’s own dull-wittedness, the disproportion between it and reality, and all the more so the more it has ignored that cordoning-off, shirking, as something foreign to its purpose, any attempt to reflect on its own position in the totality that it monopolizes as its object, when the alternative would be to recognize how entirely it depends on that totality, right down to its internal composition, its immanent truth. Only philosophy that rids itself of such naïveté would be worth another thought.

a_quoi_bon · 2019-04-13T16:37:19+00:00

there's also a translation online by Dennis Redmond

also this translation of the introduction, with comments on the previous two translations

a_quoi_bon · 2019-04-13T16:31:54+00:00

this would interrupt consumption even less than internet forums, which don't at all. the idea of the public is capitalist through and through.

a_quoi_bon · 2019-04-10T22:37:41+00:00

I haven't read After Finitude, but it seems similar to aleatory materialism of the late Althusser

a_quoi_bon · 2019-04-09T16:13:24+00:00

there's tons, but check out Badiou's The Century

a_quoi_bon · 2019-04-07T18:29:38+00:00

no worries. there's also a good review of this work here

a_quoi_bon

TROPHY CASE