Re: THE CONTRADICTIONS OF ENFORCED SOCIALITY

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

Ralph Dumain wrote

[Lumpen prose cut]
>
>Beautiful!

Oh dear. Caught in the act of committing criminal damage to the english
language, I can only say it's a fair cop Guv, but society's to blame.
Mind you, a very late night and far too much coffee probably didn't help.
Could we just pretend I didn't write that?

Somewhere in that morass was a response which, had it had its wits about
it, might have gone something like this. You wrote:
>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.
A perspective that is outside bureaucracies? One that transcends the class
system? But then how can it find a realisation in the social world as it
exists? It seems to me that such a perspective can only exist as a claim,
one which reveals the inadequacies and failures of existing social life.
This is partly how you use it in your post, in order to expose the limits
and complicities of the 'whole person' schooling by contrasting the promise
of 'whole person' with its actuality. But when a claim is made in terms of
another, realised set of values, then surely it is being made from a
particular place, or a specific identity. So, on the one hand the 'whole
person', on the other, identity politics. It is clear, I think, from your
posts that you do not believe in either.
> 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?
In what does this freedom consist? They are not free from the 'social
system' and it is hard to see any space that currently exists in which
that freedom might take positive form. They cannot be free, even in their
souls, until freedom has a positive meaning.

Putting aside the question raised by Peter Fleming about the origin of such
perspectives, I think that what you describe does suggest that Adorno was
wrong to restrict the arenas in which non-identity thinking or negative
dialectic could take place. The significant difference between these moments
and the forms of negation imagined by Adorno might be that such moments are
not necessarily given aesthetic form or philosophical reflection. Adorno,
perhaps understandably, does not see any space for the negative except for
those which are already socially redundant - spaces which are somehow free
to mark their unfreedom as a condition. By insisting on the embodiment of
this situation in the work of art or in critical reflection, Adorno seems to
refuse any validity to experience which is not given a developed reflexive
form.

For a hypothetical, a striker who has just seen her union sell out the
strike in the cause of realpolitik might be faced with something of the
condition that Adorno's phrase "Even solidarity, the most honourable mode of
conduct of socialism, is sick." addresses. She might well find that
'solidarity', for all of its promise of particularity, has done awful things
to her particular condition. Solidarity is a claim made by something which
doesn't yet exist AND an instrumental device in the hands of trade union
aristocracy.  Whatever the response of my hypothetical striker, she is, at
least for a little while, in the position of putting what exists in a
critical relation to its unfulfilled promise, something that goes far beyond
the immediate goals of the strike. Of course, the old problem of somehow
translating the promise into a practical politics remains.

Although Adorno might well have been right in his diagnosis of the tendency
of capital to reduce such concepts to its own forms - a process that your
account of the 'whole person' makes clear - I don't think that it has
happened fully. Moreover, as the discussions about jazz suggested, he might
well also have been wrong in not considering the ways in which different
social and cultural practices/traditions register their existence within
monopoly capitalism. Perhaps it doesn't have to be Beckett to have a value
as negative. But then, I wouldn't know. I like Beckett.

Yours shamefacedly

Giles