RE: Adorno on TV

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

At 11:19 AM 6/5/99 -0700, Matthew Levy wrote:
>my feelings of alienation have always been directed towards
>wanting other people to
>behave differently than they do so that I can put more of myself
>into the social web, not towards the idea of being completely
>apart from it.

Interesting.  Why didn't I think of that?  As early as the age of 4, I
decided that if I couldn't reason with people, I didn't want to be bothered
with them at all.  I wonder if this is how Habermas got started.

I also remember my fascination with science, which goes back as far as I
can remember.  As a very young child, I learned the date of Galileo's
birthday thanks to my subscription to HIGHLIGHTS FOR CHILDREN, and so I
started celebrating it regularly all by myself.  Why waste your time on
religious holidays when you can celebrate something worthwhile?

>I suppose what surprises me is not your
>disdain for "unthought" social relationships, but the idea that
>you (or anyone) could ever exist completely beyond them.

Of course not.  One can almost never find alternatives to assauge one's
dissatisfaction without finding them somewhere in one's external
environment.  So one just feels different and proceeds accordingly.  This
too is a long story.  But one should never underestimate the intellectual
capacity of children.  Because Freud's theory is based on the
unquestionable dogmatic foundation of the bourgeois patriarchal family as
absolute, one presumes that reconciliation of family conflicts is what life
is about.  It is not.  It is as if no one could ever conceive of himself as
a conscious being with any other perspective than positioning himself
within a family hierarchy.  The bourgeois vacillates between the poles of
absolute rationalism and absolute instinctual animality.  Sometimes he
assigns one role to himself, the opposite to others.  But he always misses
the truth of man.

>I've heard good things about that one.

HARRIET THE SPY learns to deal with the world through establishing her
identity as a writer.  Not a published author, but a writer,  learning to
respect the capacity of her own individual consciousness and learn the
limitations of sociality in an often unkind world.

>This is the second time now our conversation has taken a turn
>towards the phallic ... wonder what this means.

But you know who's out there reading and you already know what they're
thinking about this.  Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke!