RE: hip hop in Cincinatti

["Vince Tseng" <vince@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Men men men... are we all just a bunch of men?  Where are good ol' Hannah
and Monique when you need them?

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-frankfurt-school@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-frankfurt-school@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of
kenneth.mackendrick@xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Friday, April 20, 2001 9:40 PM
To: frankfurt-school@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: hip hop in Cincinatti


On Fri, 20 Apr 2001 22:34:02 -0400 Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> This juvenile commentary by McKendrick--so characteristic of the theory
industry--shows how poverty-stricken is the contemporary intellectual who
knows nothing but the word "essentialism" and the trivial practice of
purporting to explain historical and cultural development by translating in
into a metaphorical language masquerading as serious theory.

Well, get over it. I'm all in favour of essentialism, ie. I'm essentially
opposed to sexism for instance. But this is a serious business we're in, and
my
'translation' is hardly metaphorical. The theorists of which I spoke are
masculinist thinkers - and gender remains for them a private category.
Horkheimer argued that women should stay at home, because then, at least,
they
would avoid the alienation of the workplace. That's a really nice sentiment,
I
mean that, but can't women decide this for themselves? Marcuse argued, in a
late essay, that the heart and soul of the revolution lay in the hands of
socialist-feminism, and he was thinking of motherly love here. That's a nice
sentiment too, but is feminism doomed to be maternalistic? These are serious
issues - have you read the dichotomous 'ethics of care' vs. 'ethics of
justice'
stuff that has emerged in the last couple of decades? Rotten luck for those
of
us who think that justice/autonomy and care/solidarity are not mutually
exclusive categories. So, whatever, theory industry or not - I'm not going
to
let the subject get changed just it isn't fashionable to point out that
Woman
has been, and often remains, the assigned phallic property of men.

> People who  prate about essentialism are the most obtuse in the totalism
they
deploy in their treatment of history, subsuming the richness of the concrete
under their puny metaphorical constructs.

Errr... the richness of the concrete. That's why I'm talking about
the treatment of gender-sex. Hobbes theorized men to be like mushrooms,
sprouting out of the earth as autonomous and independent. I guess mom
wasn't a good enough metphor. When Locke argued for the separation of church
and state, gender, art and religion all became objects of the propertied
male.
That's not all that metaphorical. Rousseau expelled the theatre from the
ideal
city, and along with it - women, whose wanton passion was a threat to
civilization. Hegel thought women to be like plants, despite the fact that
his
mother taught him latin and Caroline Schlegel's participation in the
formation
of the infamous great system of idealism. Marx could not extend even a
handshake to Mary Burns. If we can learn anything from Adorno, it must be
that
the theory, like the work of art, is crafted by living hands - and the
conditions under which production takes place are inevitably linked with the
historical circumstances under which the labourer labours. It would be
quaint
to conflate the two, but as far as constellation goes, we must at least make
the attempt to grasp both as not being separate. In this, we must pay the
strictest attention to the details, the concrete. In this, I assume, we can
agree?

ken