Re: THE CONTRADICTIONS OF ENFORCED SOCIALITY

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

Each bout in the intellectual struggle is a confirmation of the necessity
of the working class autodidact to rise up and seize the valuable
storehouse of knowledge monopolized by learned wastrels.  There is a
history of this, too, one which we shall one day painstakingly recover.

Peter Fleming's total misunderstanding of my post left me speechless.  What
can one say in such a circumstance?  Stony silence may be the best reply.

At 01:35 AM 6/12/99 +0100, Giles Peaker wrote:
>A perspective that is outside bureaucracies? One that transcends
>the class system?

Mr. Fleming similarly took my claim of a perspective outside
_bureaucracies_ to be equivalent to one outside of _society_.  Those terms
are far from equivalent.  As for being inside or outside of society, there
is something else to consider: how does one get into society in the first
place?  What happens during socialization of and the simultaneous formation
of individual being?  If there is a root fo free consciousness and
individual being in surplus of an ensemble of social relations, this is
where we must begin to understand it, if not to end there.  Does Mr.
Fleming believe that I do not already understand and thus require the
repetition of his platitudes?

Thanks for reminding me of the necessity to fight tooth and nail the
reactionary communitarianism inscribed in all anti-Enlightenment,
multiculturalist, postmodern, post-Marxist (not to mention Stalinist) and a
whole lot of other thinking.

>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.

A claim which arises within society and within the individual's struggle to
negotiate one's aspirations with the possibilities offered within society.
Also, because children are yet "abstract" in their thinking (in the
Hegelian sense), they may not have yet internalized the sophisticated
excuses by which we justify or even explain the barbarity of the world and
of recorded history.

>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.

Very good.

>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.

Unclear.

>So, on the one hand the 'whole
>person', on the other, identity politics.

Non sequitur.  Also, identity politics is by definition group identity,
which hardly exhausts personal identity, which is one reason it is so
dangerous.

>It is clear, I think, from your
>posts that you do not believe in either.

Unclear.  No, I don't believe in the military academy's "whole person" nor
do I believe in "identity politics".  But it seems you are saying something
more.

>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.

Here you slipped up, because the positive _meaning_ of freedom is not a
mystery; the problem is the structure of society, the minefield through
which one navigates.

>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.

This is the most exciting part of your intervention.  It is key to opening
up the whole discussion.

>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.

Good, and they may be given those forms as well, without having to be
expressed in the inherently speculative German language.

>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.

Excellent.

It is class privilege which grants the exclusive right of reflexivity to
the designated representatives of the repository of culture.  This is the
illusion that Hegel began and Marx ended.

>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.

Excellent.

>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.

My point all along.

>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.

You have expressed the eloquence I strive for.

>But then, I wouldn't know. I like Beckett.

I would and I don't.  The universe of Krapp's last tape is not that of John
Coltrane.