From owner-marxism-international  Fri Apr 11 14:33:26 1997
Message-Id: <v03020901af742561a7c5@[128.146.43.56]>
In-Reply-To: 
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 1997 13:31:46 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1@osu.edu>
Subject: Adorno (was Re: M-I: SIDE NOTE: PANIC PROYECT)

Stephen wrote:
>However, at the same time
>that he locates "experience" as the condition of knowing, he marks
>Adorno's knowledge of fascism as "false"...Adorno "experienced" fascism
>you know ...  Adorno explained it "in context".  His Marxism (and we in no
>way endorse his reading of dialectics) is by far more historical, more
>materialist, more subtle and more complex than anything Louis Proyect has
>produced.

I don't know if these fragments from Adorno would speak to you, but let me try.

>From _Minima Moralia_.

"He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others
and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private
interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a
true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the
image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls
the momentum of the bourgeois within him. The detached observer is as much
entangled as the active participant; the only advantage of the former is
insight into his entanglement, and the infinitesimal freedom that lies in
knowledge as such. His own distance from business at large is a luxury
which only that business confers. That is why the very movement of
withdrawal bears features of what it negates. It is forced to develop a
coldness indistinguishable from that of the bourgeois" (26).

[Anybody who claims to be a "revolutonary" while in graduate school should
keep in mind the immense quantity of the surplus value extracted from
workers all over the world that supports his lifestyle and allows him to
write pieces of virtual propaganda.]

"Among the motifs of cultural criticism one of the most long-established
and central is that of the lie: that culture creates the illusion of a
society worthy of man which does not exist; that it conceals the material
conditions upon which all human works rise, and that, comforting and
lulling, it serves to keep alive the bad economic determination of
existence....But precisely this notion, like all expostulation about lies,
has a suspicious tendency to become itself ideology....For meaning, as we
know, is not independent of genesis, and it is easy to discern, in
everything that cloaks or mediates the material, the trace of insincerity,
sentimentality, indeed precisely a concealed and doubly poisonous interest.
But to act radically in accordance with this principle would be to
extirpate, with the false, all that was true also, all that, however
impotently, strives to escape the confines of universal practice, every
chimerical anticipation of a nobler condition, and so to bring about
directly the barbarism that culture is reproached with furthering
indirectly....Marxists are not proof against it either. Cured of the
Social-Democratic belief in cultural progress and confronted with growing
barbarism, they are under constant temptation to advocate the latter in the
interests of the 'objective tendency,' and, in an act of desperation, to
await salvation from their moral enemy who, as the 'antithesis,' is
supposed in blind and mysterious fashion to help prepare the good end....If
material reality is called the world of exchange value, and culture
whatever refused to accept the domination of that world, then it is true
that such refusal is illusory as long as the existence exists. Since,
however, free and honest exchange is itself a lie, to deny it is at the
same time to speak for truth: in the face of the lie of the commodity
world, even the lie that denounces it becomes a corrective."

[Earlier I saw one of the Buffalo posts in which the idea and practice of
dialogue--even among marxists--is rejected as a stale petit-bourgeois
notion. In the Buffalo posters' mind, everything that is "good" or "alive"
affirms nothing but bourgeois life. Some parts of Adorno's writings may
have encouraged such a frenzy of "revolutionary" exocism and purification,
but the other parts of Adorno should serve as a corrective for the tendency
to mistake self-imposed marginalization for "revolutionary" discipline.]

Yoshie Furuhashi





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