On Sat, 12 Dec 1998, Doug Henwood cross-posted: > Duccio Trombadori: Probably the difference rests in the refusal or > impossibility for the Frankfurt School to think of the "origin" of man in > the historical-genealogical sense, rather than in "metaphysical" terms. It > is the theme or the metaphor of the "death of man" that is in question. Ho ho. If I had a nickel for every time someone said "The F-school is too metaphysical/abstract/neo-Hegelian" I'd be richer than Bill Gates. Fact is, they haven't read the shit, or didn't get what Adorno was saying about the culture industry molding and dehistoricizing people. Adorno's stuff overflows with historical-genealogical thinking, he's constantly relating early liberal capitalism to late monopoly capitalism, brushing metaphysics against the grain, etc. > Michel Foucault: ...The second aspect that > I mixed up and confused with the first is that in the course of their > history, men had never ceased constructing themselves, that is, to shift > continuously the level of their subjectivity, to constitute themselves in > an infinite and multiple series of different subjectivities that would > never reach an end and would never place us in the presence of something > that would be "man." Man is an animal of experience, he is involved ad > infinitum within a process that, by defining a field of objects, at the > same time changes him, deforms him, transforms him and transfigures him as > a subject. Yes, this is just the thing, Foucault is reinventing Sartrean existentialism's notion of the infinity of human projects, of this blooming, buzzing confusion of riches of subjectivity. Too bad Adorno beat him to the punch, in his famous saying that people are always better than their system. Foucault just isn't thinking through his own insight here: if the potential for subjectivity out there is so vast, what prevents its realization? Well, the subjects are hardly created equal, they're antagonistic and fight for scarce resources. It's the basic foundation of all capitalist ideology: because everyone supposedly has a chance to be the next Bill Gates, capital's ideologues proclaim that all is well, let the market forces rip, and excellence shall flourish. In reality this dooms us all to McDonald's-world and crashing Win 95 servers. Put simply, Foucault has a great sense of how individual subjects are controlled by institutions, but he doesn't quite grasp that institutions (corporations!) are themselves in an equally conflict with one another. -- Dennis
