On Thu, 25 May 2000, Louis Proyect wrote:
> Jay points out that the Frankfurters reject the notion that class conflict
> is the locomotive of history, a basic Marxist theory.
Nonsense. Walter Benjamin once wrote that the Revolution is really the
emergency handbrake on Progress. The greatness of the Frankfurt School is
that they insist that the objective tide of history is catastrophic, an
outrageous violence done to vulnerable bodies, and that we must think this
catastrophe through, understand how it is that the total system works, if
we're going to fight it properly (meaning, we have to stop the violence,
even the kind we do to ourselves). Here's Adorno on how even the most
ethereal theory relates to the dignity of the body:
"Both, body and mind, are abstractions of their experience, their radical
difference a decree. They reflect the historically-achieved
'self-consciousness' of the mind and the casting off of that which it
negated, due to its own identity. Everything spiritual is modified
corporeal impulse, and such modification qualitatively redounds into what
is not merely such. Compulsion is, according to Schelling's insight, the
forerunner of mind.
The presumed essential facts of consciousness are anything but. In the
dimension of pleasure and displeasure, the bodily reaches deep into them.
All pain and all negativity, the motor of dialectical thought, are the
ceaselessly mediated, occasionally unconscious shape of the physical,
which like all happiness aims at sensual fulfillment and garners its
objectivity by it. If any aspect of happiness is frustrated, then it is
none whatsoever." Negative Dialectics:202 (my translation)
What the IMF/WB bean-counters and Wall Street punters do not wish to see
is precisely this negativity: the economy ought to be an instrument of
human happiness, not an engine of inhuman, murderous accumulation. But the
Frankfurters give us the tools to look at it, and draw strength from that
knowledge.
-- Dennis
