RE: Adorno on TV

[Matthew Levy <mlevy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ralph said:

> 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.

I didn't ask you to defend it ... must all aesthetic judgment ultimately
come down to a keep/discard choice?

 Samuel R. Delaney is my
> favorite living fiction writer.

I love Einstein Intersection, haven't read much else of his ... everyone
recommends him highly.

 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.

do you still think this?  REALLY????  you remind me here in some ways of
my roommate, who told me as a child he had a fantasy of floating in a
bubble, alone, high over Pluto, staring into the depths of space.  This
may be a kind of psychology that I will never really understand.


  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.
>

i find this fascinating as a document of your psychology, but totally
baffling as an attempt at communication.  And don't tell me that this is
due to my limited life experience ... sounds to me like you're just plain
weird.  I will spare you the obvious cliche of offering my sympathy, but I
really can't see how anybody can actually live such an ideology.  And this
seems to cast everything else we've been discussing into "radical doubt"
... you believe in lone wolf autodidacticism, yet you were just talking
about raising children.  in what reality can you reconcile these?

> > 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.
>

no, that's basically it.  except i guess if you can laugh at and point up
the contradictions in the bad TV you are watching, and enjoy the
experience more for doing it, that would be even closer to it ... I know
it's a ridiculous catchphrase, I'm just talking about the fact that
whereas I found myself just as annoyed by the racial slapstick of the new
Star Wars movie as everybody else, I still love the protestant
righteousness with which Obi-Wan Kenobi says "Mos Eisley Spaceport: You
will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.  We must be
cautious." in the original film, even though I now am capable of
understanding that film's conservative ideology in the context of its time
with 20 years of hindsight ... but I still love it.  And basically a lot
of who I am and how I think of myself is formed around this kind of
recycled kitsch, and almost none of it is formed around "art".  And while
I don't think there's anything admirable about this, I'm not ashamed of it
either.

 >
>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.
>

sure.  but what do you mean by "learning through living" and how does this
exclude the experience of slogging one's way through academia and fighting
an uphill battle to make a difference.

 > > 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.

yes.  the argument is that the empirical work shows us that all natural
languages have basically equivalent syntactic structures at the deep
level, and thus principles of logical proof can be easily translated
between cultures, and thus linguistic relativist attempts to spread
epistemological hypochondria are unfounded.  capiche?

> > >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.

I'm not particularly interested in chastising anybody, but I do think that
Chomsky's critiques of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Kripke's Wittgenstein,
Rorty, Quine, Searle, Putnam, Saussure, structuralism, post-structuralism,
etc. are all right on the mark ... late 19th century linguistics and
anthropology dropped the ball in the face of the vastness of their data
and propagated a lot of very silly approaches to language and culture
which only exacerbated the nationalistic and racist tendencies of the
politics of the time ... Chomsky wants to restore the Cartesian faith that
reason transcends culture, but he wants to do it by carefully subsuming
the empirical data on the diversity of human languages to show exactly
what it is that is transcendental (in this case, a fundamental structure
of our communication).

	The only problem I see with this is if it is taken justify a
particular set of standards of "rational behavior" ... because all
Chomsky's theory says is that our reasoning capacity is innate and equally
universally distributed, not what conclusions we must draw from this.  I
look at it as a sign that there is hope that we can *in principle* agree
upon ways of treating one another (systems of rights and responsibilities)
which can form a kind of immanent social contract as opposed to the
mythical, ahistoric one that liberal political theorists get off on.  I
think this is basically what we do anyway whenever we attempt to reach a
moral consensus .... I guess the advantage of Chomsky over Habermas is
that he doesn't need a developmental narrative of modernity to justify it.
On the other hand it's damn difficult in practice to actually reach such
consesus or even necessarily to become rationally conscious of all of
one's feelings or even to take responsibility for all of one's behaviors
(I mean, we may accept the consequences after the fact but does that mean
we were in control of the act itself?)  i don't think that Chomsky can
dismiss completely notions of the subconscious, etc., but he can prevent
them from relying on ridiculous misrepresentations of language and maybe
give us a start towards an investigation of mind and brain function that
simultaneously respects data and souls ...

anyway i'm running out of steam and am not sure that you wanted to hear
all this anyway.

later,
matt