RE: Adorno on TV

[Matthew Levy <mlevy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 6 Jun 1999, Ralph Dumain wrote:

> 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?


Hmm.  Maybe you'll find my story interesting in this respect (and then
I'll get back to the paper I need to do, and leave the frankfurt school
list for frankfurt school things) - I too was very much a believer in
rational argument at an early age, encouraged by my liberal humanist
parents (both have anthropology degrees) - my father was raised a Catholic
and had rebelled, and so my parents went out of their way to make clear to
me that belief was my choice and my responsibility ... I quickly decided I
was an atheist and presented my views in argument with other children in
my first grade class in central Kentucky (not a place where atheism was
well-accepted) ... the problem was that i also had something of a
tyrannical temper (probably learned from my father's bad temper and
alcoholism, but whatever the cause a deep part of me) and the children i
went to school with learned they could taunt me about my unorthodox views
and i would get angry and scream and hit people.  So while I felt that I
was right in my beliefs and able to rationally justify them to those who
would converse with me, I was unable to deal with being teased and to
control my behavior ... so I was paradoxically hyperrational and totally
irrational (your bourgeois type?)
my anger at the people around me over the years developed as i understood
more about the world and the ways in which people other than myself
suffered in it, and as i managed to find friends who i could trust not to
taunt or belittle me ... i began to become interested in marx and just
generally in ways of being that were anti-social hierarchy and
pro-"underdog" (which was how i saw myself) and to get interested in
making myself "working class" - although my parents were well educated we
did not have much money when i was a teenager and i was certainly never
at the social level of the "in crowd" at my high school.  so i spent time
with the more "lumpen" types, which was how i got into heavy metal music
etc. (speaking of irony, i was convinced at fifteen that bands like
Metallica were revolutionary and proletarian) ... i still had a horrible
temper but in music (even if it may have been fairly conservative music) i
found an outlet for a spiritual longing that i didn't know i had ... in
college i wanted to be a "real radical" and went to some protests but
mostly dropped all that when i got my first serious girlfriend and lost my
virginity at age 18 ... then i threw all of my emotional energy into a
basically romantic sense of self, building myself around a relationship
which was doomed not to last and thinking that self-exploration in poetry,
writing, music etc. was somehow the spiritual purpose of life ... when
that relationship ended, i began a much worse relationship with alcohol
and tried to imagine myself to be the most jaded, the most cynical, the
most especially bleak person who had ever been.  i wanted to imagine
myself out of my existence because i thought it had lost all meaning and
that the truth was too horrible to act on ... i created political
rationalizations for my own alienation, using my (fairly accurate)
perception of the horrors of global capitalism as an argument that all
action or emotional involvement on my part was pointless.

then a few years ago a couple of strange things happened simultaneously.
one is that  by this point i was in grad school and encountering
various nietzsche and heidegger inspired forms of humanities theory in my
intellectual life (which i somehow separated from the emotional morass of
my personal life) ... another was that i started getting into
hallucinogens, where my previous drug use had been fairly limited.  the
final (and probably most important) thing was that i became good friends
with someone who is a recovering alcoholic and also a grad student and who
is interested in the intellectual issues involved in recovery ... somehow
all these things congealed for me and i had a series of experiences which
overall formed a "spiritual transformation" in my life.  now i am prepared
for the reaction this may elicit from those who mistake my awkward
language here for naivete or dogmatism ... i guess i can't explain it
except to say that i am simultaneously capable of understanding my life
spiritually and critically and in fact find that the two complement each
other.  from heidegger's philosophy i can draw a recognition that what
"moves" in my experience of existence is not me but some power greater
than me ... even though i can also recognize that Heidegger was an immoral
cowardly nazi piece of shit whose name deserves to be made into a public
latrine.  and i can draw sustenance from the "twelve steps" knowledge of
the recovering addicts around me (and i keep finding more and more in the
woodwork of academia) even as i recognize (as most of them do as well)
that there is a lot of state-sanctioned ideological ridiculousness in the
structure of AA and similar organizations.  anyway that's my little
narrative arc, not really sure why i'm sharing all of this right now,
maybe because this discussion has just been so damn interesting.

 >
> >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 think this is a very interesting and concise critique of psychoanalysis
... and i think your point about the intellectual capacity of children is
right on the mark.  the problem i see though is that many children, like
myself, learn to imitate and act out the counterproductive behaviors they
see in the family and these rituals can overwhelm and destroy their
conscious efforts at self-building before they even come to the point of
being able to move beyond the family and to see the capacity for
connections and forms of consciousness entirely beyond the realm that has
structured their thinking.

> >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.
>

definitely sounds worthwhile.  i will check it out when i can.

> >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!
>

careful, that particular phrasing could become just more ammunition ...

:)

anyway i must get back to what i must get back to (how's that for a
categorical imperative?)

Matt