RE: Adorno on TV

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

At 04:26 PM 6/4/99 -0700, Matthew Levy wrote:
>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.

If you mean my childhood interest in SF .... I don't defend the SF I read
back then, as I have read much better stuff since.  Samuel R. Delaney is my
favorite living fiction writer.  What I read as a kid was a mixed bag.  The
genre in literary form is much more varied than what you see in TV or
movies.  But I was getting at something beyond the actual quality or
content of the SF.  For me SF wasn't swashbuckling adventure across the
galaxy, or the clash of empires, it was contemplative and metaphysical: a
sense of wonder, an interest in the inner secrets of the universe, which in
my secular universe, meant in some mythical semblance of material reality,
however unreal in the real world.  Space travel, time travel, above all
other dimensions--how I loved other dimensions, the most inward and
spiritual of those categories.  I wasn't interested in charactrers,
adventure, or human relations; it was a sense of wonder, and a fundamental
humanistic orientation that one improves the world through interest in
ideas, science, and technology, that a relationship with one's ethical
ideas takes precedence over social relationships or fitting into social
groups.  What could a child learn from the great classics of literature?
Who cares about Othello or Julius Caesar?  What did they do to enlighten or
improve the world?  Why should I show an interest in what you call human
relations?  Human relationships are beneath me,
unless they are based on conscious understanding.  My interest in Sf was
instinctive, and this is how I analyze it now, though I could not have
then.  Of course there was and is reactionary filth in this genre aplenty,
and also some good social criticism, but I wasn't interested in the social
or political character of fictional universes; I was indulging my sense of
wonder.

I've learned a hell of a lot more about the real world since then, and so
my imagination, my ability to negate the limited assumptions of my
empirical social world, has also evolved.  I think I was correct in my
rejection of human relations as a subject of interest until I was old
enough to think them through consciously.  Soap opera is fetishistic
indulgence in empirical social relations, predicated on the assumption that
people are congenitally unconscious.  I stand by my militant lone wolf
individualism and autodidacticism, and my penis throbs harder than ever for
Enlightenment values.  You can only think if you stand alone, because only
then you know who are and where you stand in whatever network of social
relations you find yourself.  Only left intellectuals are too stupid to
understand this, because they have no self-respect.  There is no friendship
in the development of intellect, though there is friendship elsewhere.
There is no other path if you ever want to learn, so you'd best teach your
kids that at an early age.  When they learn self-respect, when they learn
to be conscious beings, they will be able to guide themselves through the
rest of their lives, and also make friends worth having.

> that make me want to have
>a certain ironic distance on the symbols through which I once
>constructed my identity ...

Is ironic distance a phenomenon of the 80s and 90s?  I mean there's a lot
of dumb shit I don't take seriously any more, and I'm still addicted to bad
TV.  Is this ironic distance?  I'm puzzled.

>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.

The pun aside, I left out what happened later on.  My childhood universe
was insufficient to enlighten me.  My environment was too restricted, my
world too provincial.  The rest of the story is too long to tell, but I
learned the hard way the consequences of provincialism.  It takes a victim
of same to really appreciate what that does to the human mind, and
therefore what's at stake in the struggle for the human mind.  One must dig
deeper and deeper and make the personal sacrifice of learning through
living, and this a bureaucrat cannot do, no matter how much Freud and
Derrida he and she spout.  To think something through profoundly is more
than to be a footnote-whore, and this is what gets educated out of you, not
less by the left than by anyone else.  Feminist, poststructuralist, or
Foucauldian, they are all Stalinists in their innermost souls.

> 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.

That is, raised to a philosophical level, like "Cartesian linguistics", an
extrapolation from Chomsky's scientific work beyond its actual scientific
content to more general hypotheses about human cognition.

>Chomsky is able to completely avoid this without falling into the
>opposite trap of cultural relativism and mystification of the >"other".

I'm not sure how widely you can sow Chomsky's seeds, but one should be
aware how ignorant and superstitious the left is about language and how
badly they need chastisement.  For example, Chomsky wrote a forward to Adam
Schaff's book on language that demolishes Whorf's simple-minded bullshit.