THE CONTRADICTIONS OF ENFORCED SOCIALITY

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

"Even solidarity is sick."  -- T.W. Adorno

One problem of responding in a fragmentary and reactive manner to the flow
of stimuli in an e-mail discussion list is that one will be led in all
kinds of contradictory directions, without a picture of a coherent whole
emerging.  One of the many issues surfacing in these discussions is the
question of the individual and the social, and how we evaluate each of
these components.  However, the exact nature of the relationship between
these poles is one of the many silences not addressed throughout all these
discussions.  Comments have been made about whole cultures, about
intellectuals, about the development of individuals, with a number of
statements being made that, when you add them up, create an overall picture
which is paradoxical at least.  I know I've neglected to tie these
contradictory components together in an explicit manner, though I'm not so
schizoid as not to recognize the paradoxical aspects of the claims being
made.  My overall picture to me is my "common sense", but it takes a lot of
detective work for others to figure out what it is, and of course, there
are only particular aspects of what I'm going to say that will be
positively valued, till something else comes along and I punch somebody in
the stomach a minute after he/she thinks he/she is on my wavelength.

Now let me do one more reversal.  I've both condemned and praised Adorno,
though no discussion has ensued following my positive remarks about him.
I've cited CLR James to counter what bugs me about the cultural perspective
of European intellectuals, and even though I made one or two parenthetical
remarks sauggested a skepticism about James too, I never specified what
that might consist of.  And then I came out with a militant defense of
individualism, which was actually prompted by a private discussion  that
really rubbed me the wrong way.  Then followed several expressions of
resentment directed against both the upper and lower classes (and against
both low life stagnation and social climbing ambition) in discussions of
personal development, life experiences, music, movies, and TV.  And there
is always the question of personal standards and how they relate to social
standards.  Now there is an overall consistencey in my world view but you
might not know from reading all of these debates.  Or you might have been
clever enough to piece it together.  Here is one more fragment to add to
the collective picture.

I had an experience earlier today that shocked me into recognition.  It was
just something I read, but it aroused a whole train of thought that
connects many of the things I've been thinking and some of what I've been
saying.  First, a little background.  Because the DC schools are so bad,
certain partial attempts have been made to ameliorate the situation, or
perhaps to put it more cynically, to deflect attention away from the total
solution that is required to lift everyone out of the morass they're in,
not just to skim off the more promising children and cultivate them while
the rest sink deeper and deeper.  Of course, if you are a parent, you want
your kids to belong to that small group who are groomed for success rather
than homelessness or prison fodder.  So, in addition to the small number of
decent public schools in this urban shithole, there have been created a
limited number of experimental charter schools with special characteristics
modelled after private institutions.  And I happen to know a number of
parents who with limited resources at best are trying to get their kids
into the best possible schools.  So I was reading the educational plan and
mission statement of one of these programs run by a private foundation that
specializes in boarding schools.  Naturally it's appeal is its highly
advanced and demanding academic porgram.  I know a number of parents
dissatisfied with the paltry academic program of even the better DC public
schools, who want to put their kids into this program.  From an academic
standpoint, it makes perfect sense.  However, I noticed that a central
priority of this educational program is "character development", intense
family involvement (including parent retreats, etc.), and attention to the
"whole person."  All of a sudden I became physically ill.

When I was a kid the last thing I wanted was for anyone to pay attention to
the whole person.  No, I just wanted to excel at what was expected of me
academically and then to be left alone.  Clearly my class instincts were at
work.  I noticed the type of people who gravitated to positons of
leadership in school, which reproduces the class relations of the entire
society: who wants to be editor of the school yearbook, who runs for the
student council, etc.  I avoided such positions like the plague, but
naturally the upper (compared to me) middle class kids gravitated to such
positions like white on rice, since education is not just about making
something of yourself but about taking your rightful place among the
managerial elite, which nobody I knew from the lower middle class had any
interest in.  We wanted to be scientists or mathematicians or programmers
or educators or something using our brains, but the last thing we wanted to
do or could even imagine ourselves doing was to run society.  We didn't
want to involve the whole person, just the intellect required to do our
best exercising our talents in a way that would benefit society and
ourselves, and then go home and mind our own fucking business, just as we
expected others to mind theirs.  But noooooooo, everybody's supposed to be
a fucking big shot or knuckle under to someone who is.

Anyway, never having been a team player, I was disturbed by the implied
totalitarianism of this school program and the necessity to have a
"positive attitude."  Excuse me?  But they are not advertising elitism.  On
the contrary, they emphasize community service, helping the poor and
unfortunate, helping your fellow classmates rise to the exacting standards
mandated of them, rise above the peer pressure mentality, develop courage
and character and strong convictions, etc.  Sounds beautiful on paper, and
very attractive if you come from a background rife with family or other
social problems that may hold you back. Development of confidence, "proper"
behavior, interpersonal skills, etc., all sound very attractive given the
depressing inner city environment in which many of us here live.  However,
it is also obvious that the overall tone is precisely that of the elite
English public school or the military academy, and it is this undertone
that I find so menacing.

And what is doubly ironic is that the kids I know _already_ have much
HIGHER personal standards that those touted by this organization.  I tell
them time and time again that their own personal values and standards are
and will remain much higher than any social institution they encounter
throughout the course of their lifetime, and that they will always be able
to do what is expected of them but they will always find their own values
and standards to exceed what any instituion has to offer or can demand.
And this is becuase they have a perspective on life that is based OUTSIDE
of all bureaucracies, that transcends the class system from top to bottom!
So they are already above the perspective of being groomed as a managerial
elite doing charity work on their days off.
And they are not cynical about the value of life, but they do know that the
whole social system is unfair.  Hence in their souls they are already free.
 Hear what I say?  Hear what I say?

Now I can imagine why poor Adorno was so extreme.  Everything around him
constituted a totalitarian threat.  To be sociable, to be one of the boys,
to participate in the collective existence, what's the difference between
that and joining the storm troopers?  I know just how he feels.  Of course
he was a grouchy loner.  Can you blame him?

Hence there is indeed a question more complex than simple snobbery.
However, there is nothing Adorno ever wrote that I have yet read that
suggests that there was any way out of the net for anyone other than the
cultivated intellectual and the avant-garde artist on the old European
model, though theoretically, the negative dialectic suggests there is
something somewhere that exists beyond the false totality.  (I raised a
question in this vein a year ago and did not receive any useful information
to change my view.)  We need to open up this narrow space and look at other
people's experience.

On the other hand, while pondering the implications of military academy
type education, I remembered that CLR James was the product of the English
public school system as transplanted to Trinidad, thoroughly imbued with
the Victorian ethos of muscular Christianity, whose values he upheld until
his dying breath.  James once got really pissed off when an Englishman
dared to mock his own public school education, so thoroughly was James
devoted to its exalted standards.  Not the first time that colonials take
this stuff to heart while the privileged just take it for granted.
(Post-colonial intellectual, my ass!)  I remember sitting with a Black
British colleague watching a documentary of James recounting his boyhood
upbringing, reciting all the boys magazines he read, the ethics of the
cricket field, the whole Victorian shebang, without any sense of irony or
skepticism, while we were sitting in our chairs laughing our asses off at
this constipated British mentality.  Of course James rejected the elite for
which he was groomed a life-long dedication to the emancipation of the
lower classes, but James never learned to be cynical about sociality even
under alienated conditions.  That is the Achilles heel of his perspective.
In a perverse world, to be sincere, one can never be cynical enough.

Could someone please give me a full citation for the opening quote from
Adorno?.  I think it comes from MINIMA MORALIA, but I don't have this book.