Re: further reflections

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

I can see how impossible it is to make headway here.  The nationality of Dr
van G, whose name sounds Dutch to me anyway, is of no consequence to me.
My beef with him is a chronic inability to digest other people's remarks, a
trait I've noticed going all the way back to the Hegel list.  My
anti-German obsession is triggered by the Germanic snobbery of Adorno and
some of his buddies.  German is the language of speculative philosophy;
German intellectuals are too sophisticated, too good to bother taking
barbaric Americans seriously.  But Adorno was half-Jewish, you say, and an
anti-fascist and cosmopolitan European.  Indeed, but he was so completely
and thoroughly a product a culture of whose demise he was a most
sophisticated analyst, he could neither recognize nor adapt to anyone
else's experience.  He was too jealous of his own cultural capital.  But
what about his self-mortifying tendencies, the "guilt of art", "no poetry
after Auschwitz", etc.?  Only more confirmation of his basic orientation.
He couldn't even allow his colleagues to do their work without
interference, so it seems from this book on Kracauer.  Were he a Frenchman,
he just would have aroused another of my deep-seated animosities; the
German thing means he just works my last nerve.  But the issue is not the
Jews vs. the Germans, or the blacks vs. the Germans; the issue is class,
culture, and America vs. Europe.

Now as to howe I feel about other people following his line, it's not
primarily a question of _their_ nationality.  But the chasing of
non-Europeans after European avant-garde culture is an interesting
phenomenon to explore, and it has a long history.

While we are at it, I'm going to answer publicly a question that was
addressed to me privately.  So I'll reproduce a paragraph from my personal
response to this individual:

Well, it's really not about race.  I'm not accusing Adorno or Bloch or any
of them of being racists.  There is an issue of cultural sensibilities, of
cultural trajectories, of cultural experience, and of provincialism.  The
racial dimension is symptomatic of the inability of humanistic European
intellectuals, some born before the end of the 19th century, to be able to
adapt to changing circumstances and cultural frameworks.  Remember, the
modernization and rapid technological and cultural change of Europe alone
was traumatic for them.  These pan-European humanists formed a cozy little
group at which they'd all be at home at each other's dinner parties.  They
inherited a longstanding tradition.  They were not like plebeian Americans,
upwardly mobile, fighting and scraping to become part of a civilization
that was new for them, moving rapidly upward from the peasantry to the
proletariat to the lower middle class.  The issue is not race, but of the
New World vs. the Old and the cultural psychology of those different
trajectories.  Race becomes important only because it is the marker of what
is so obviously different about the western hemisphere, and its relation to
Europe.  Race matters in this discussion only because it often marks the
battles that are to be fought in the realm of culture.  There were
African-American expatriates in Europe for decades as well as white; there
were African-American writers and artists heavily influenced by European
modernism as well as white; but race often marks the difference in
intellectual projects and the painful relationship to one's Americanness.

This paragraph will no doubt be willfully misunderstood as everything else
I have written, but it provides another piece in the overall jigsaw puzzle.
 This little piece has to do with the relation of Americans to the European
avant-garde as a resource or a refuge.  There is much to expand upon, but
we'll leave it as one little piece for now.

There are other pieces I've introduced into the discussion.  I've made some
suggestions about the uneven development of the USA, where material as well
as cultural "primitivism" co-exists with hypermodern capitalism.  I
mentioned something about the existence of indigenous folk subcultures
beginning to be tapped by the larger machinery of urban civilization.  And
earlier on I suggested that here we had a culture not hanging on
desperately at the end of its rope, kicking and screaming while the frayed
rope is about to snap, but a culture only discovering its possibilities,
with plenty of room to develop.

If I had more time this morning, I'd go on to explain how black America was
just coming to self-consciousness of its own historical destiny in the
1940s, as manifested by its musicians, writers, by political events such as
the Detroit riots of 1943, etc.  These developments have been written about
by such cultural historians as George Lipsitz.  Furthermore, at the time,
CLR James observed these developments with such a perspective, with much
more optimism about the imminence of fundamental change than his friend
Richard Wright, whose career James viewed as symptomatic of what was to
come, but who expatriated himself in 1947.  James also noted the difficulty
of various European expatriate intellectuals in adapting to their strange
new environment in the USA.  James, who characterized himself as a Black
European, which culturally he was, was just as alien to the USA himself,
but probably was more adaptable due to his experience as a West Indian
colonial, who could view what he saw differently than others.  There are
some unconfirmed anecdotes about James having some kind of interaction with
Adorno in New York.  He definitely read and was greatly influenced by
Marcuse's REASON AND REVOLUTION, but concerning Adorno and co. James is
reported to have said: they were very clever but never convinced me of
anything.

Now the rights and wrongs of James's judgment is not as important as the
very fact of a difference in perspective.  It's a difference I've been
trying to get at in my very first post.  Other than poor Llyod Spencer
himself, who introduced this topic, only one other person has shown the
slightest comprehension of or interest in anything I've had to say.
Perhaps it's time for me to throw in the towel.

One final thought: Suppose we here find ourselves at the end of our Europe
as these German(-Jewish) expatriates found themselves in the 1930s.
Wouldn't it be a shame if the Owl of Minerva only began to fly for us just
at this moment, when we've exhausted our active possibilities but can only
reflect retrospectively on how we got to this point, choking on the
intellectual sophistication we've painfully developed and struggled for,
finding spiritual communion at last with the ghosts of Weimar just when
_we_ don't know which way to turn?  I tell all my West Indian and African
friends to study Hegel and his descendants, in the hope that people with a
future will find a use for all this information and not just sit on it, not
knowing what to think or do.

At 01:40 AM 6/1/99 +0000, Gelder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>re: 'soap-dishes'.
>I had wondered about this odd mixture in your mindset: obvious
>intelligence, mixed with enormous aggression. An unusual mix.
>Is that how you see it: Jews versus Germans?