RE: Adorno on TV

[Matthew Levy <mlevy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ralph said:

>
> Aw, shucks.  Thanks for your kind words.  I will reciprocate when I can,
> but not in reaction to the rest of this post.  I think you are dead wrong
> about every single film you mention.  I wish I had time to comment on each
> of your assertions.

I understand that we are all very busy.  If you do change your mind,
forget the particular film readings I gave (I have already admitted to
being seriously underinformed, I was just trying to elicit your reasons
for approving/condeming them in each case) ... I would settle for hearing
how you reconcile your aesthetic perspective with the earlier interest in
futuristic fiction which you so touchingly related the other day.  I guess
this relates to what I meant below about left-critical analysis ... of
course interpretation is an art and not a science, and yes the jargon and
dogma of the academic left is often an impediment (you're not going to
upset me by calling for the death of the university establishment, nothing
would make me happier) ... but in my experience as (I suspect) in yours,
it is exposure to Marxist and post-Marxist ideas, a kind of organic
intellectual commitment to democratic values and to skepticism of existing
socioeconomic arrangements and cultural myths, which first allows us to
see through and later to do away with the ideologies that once motivated
our aspirations and self-concepts.  I can appreciate the aesthetics of
Coltrane till all get out, but it's the fact that I also like heavy metal
music, science fiction, role playing games, etc. that make me want to have
a certain ironic distance on the symbols through which I once constructed
my identity ... Perhaps this is not interesting to you, but I wonder how
you understand your own "enlightenment" beyond the brief comments you
posted the other day.

 > > >I am committed to a
left-critical analysis of these images
which > >"mean" so much to me even as I (partly ironically) enjoy them.
>
> I never read left-critical analyses of any cultural phenomena, because they
> are all bullshit.  Interpretation is an art; there's only so much that can
> be taught, and few people are that inspired, least of all the academic left.
>
> >I need to get back to a paper on
> >(of all things) Chomsky and Heidegger
>
> What could you possibly have to say about _Chomsky_ and Heidegger?
> That the former discovered something about language and the latter nothing?
>

It was a paper I wrote in my third year of graduate school ... admittedly
pretty unsophisticated, but it led me to better ideas which I am now
trying to reincorporate into it.  Indeed, Chomsky has discovered very
important facts about language (to the extent to which such facts can be
important) ... but the real relevance of his work is that it specifically
addresses the "linguistic relativist" problems raised by
deconstructionists, structuralists, etc. ... Chomsky's work is the best
way I know of to outflank the ridiculous mystification of "speech
communities" which happens in a lot of postmodern epistemology.  Even
better, Chomsky's understanding of human communicative rationality is a
truly universal and trans-cultural one, as opposed to the
developmentalist, implicitly Eurocentric one that Habermas takes from
Piaget.  Have you ever read the sections of the Theory of Communicative
Action where Habermas talks about Evans-Pritchard and Zande Witch Women?
It's at this point that we can see that while he has basically dropped all
the interesting cultural analyses of Horkheimer, Adorno, et al., Habermas
has kept the one really obnoxious part of the Frankfurt School analysis,
the monolinear, teleological history which makes Europe and European
culture the standard against which to measure the development of the rest
of the world.
Chomsky is able to completely avoid this without falling into the opposite
trap of cultural relativism and mystification of the "other".  In practice
I think Chomsky's method might lead to a cultural investigation not so
different from what Clifford Geertz does, but with a much more coherent
and practical epistemology.


 > > ... but I will shut up before I let
> >anyone see my lunacy in its totality.
>
> Too late!
>
> Death to academia!

hell i was planning on getting out anyway.  i'll just have to speed it up
before your call to arms brings results ...

matt