Re: THE CONTRADICTIONS OF ENFORCED SOCIALITY

["Giles Peaker" <G.Peaker@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ralph Dumain wrote:
> "Even solidarity is sick."  -- T.W. Adorno >
[snip]
> 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.
>

It is at the beginning of section 31 of the first part of Minima Moralia.
The full passage goes:
"Even solidarity, the most honourable mode of conduct of socialism, is sick.
Solidarity was once intended to make the talk of brotherhood real, by
lifting it out of generality, where it was an ideology, and reserving it for
the particular, the Party, as the sole representative in an antagonistic
world of generality."

But perhaps another passage, from the end of section 5 might be more to your
purpose. It goes:
"All collaboration, all the human worth of social mixing and participation
merely masks a tacit acceptance of inhumanity".

As to your truly terrible, if not unsurprising, story about the education
'initiative' in Washington and how it brought about a certain rapprochment
between you and Adorno, I can only say yes, yes, exactly. Although to be
fair to the old grouch, nobody escapes, not even
> the cultivated intellectual and the avant-garde artist on the old European
> model
Their only advantage is being face to face with their failure to escape,
together with the promise of escape implicit in what they do.
However, one thing that Adorno won't readily admit, highlighted by your
comments on the children whose ethics already exceed those who would teach
them what it is to be human, is that the experience and labour of the
negative goes on elsewhere, outside those realms, everyday. One must believe
that a significant amount of those children's experience is going to have to
consist of a determinate refusal: not accepting bureaucratic values even as
these become their benchmarks; not being a part of... (and God knows that is
hard for all of us, let alone for children); not having an accepted, or
apparently viable, place from which to make their judgements - at least
without falling into either the very rhetoric of individual 'becoming' which
seeks to ensnare them, or seeking some other identity politics. And so on
and so on.

I hope this isn't too digressive and, for anyone who might make the call, no
I am not excepting myself, far from it.

Giles