Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 15:21:31 -0700 (PDT)
From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-gladstone.uoregon.edu>
Subject: Re: PHILOSOPHY & THE DIVISION OF LABOR


Ralph -- Adorno had a number of positions on intellectual labor, and in
general, as the years passed the concepts get more and more complicated:
"Dialectic of Enlightenment" has a fairly simple model of exclusion,
whereby those who work cannot enjoy, those who enjoy never know work etc.
A reasonable gloss on what the Frankfurt intellectuals experienced as
emigres in wartime America, but certainly not Adorno's last word on the
subject. The most accessible texts are from "Minima Moralia", e.g.
"Gedankenfreiheit" (page 74 in the German version), "Zur Moral des
Denkens" (pg. 80), "I.Q." (pg 221) and "Novissimum Organum" (pg 259) --
Surhkamp Verlag edition. For even wilder theoretical gymnastics, check out
the section in "Negative Dialektik" dealing with Hegel and world-history,
which is all about the problem of staging history from the standpoint of a
motivating central intelligence (not yet become a Cold War agency, though 
Adorno's critique certainly implies that the national security state was
the logical culmination of the Prussian state bureaucracy).

In general, Adorno's point is that neither intellectual labor nor manual
labor are to be hypostatized. Both are historical; they change over time,
and their relative position is by no means fixed and determinate, but
rather involves the degree of objective socialization of labor prevailing
in the society. In this Adorno is surely a Marxist: he insists, over and
over again, that thought cannot by itself overcome social contradictions,
anymore than pure somatic activity can overcome intellectual aporias by
sheer violence (the ideology of American pragmatism as much as Soviet
apparatchikism). Rather, any analysis worth its salt must synthesize both
elements in a new constellation, which does justice to both moments and
violates neither -- a difficult, but not insuperable task.

Basically, to analyze intellectual labor in the era of monopoly 
capitalism means taking the latter dead seriously: or, putting
the Marxian "productive forces" into their historical context. Models for
this might be the interaction of research and pure science in, say, the
Manhattan Project; the rise of corporate R & D; the integration of science
and technology into the consumer culture (just think of automobiles or
computers); the American and Soviet university-military complexes, etc.
etc. One might also look at the transformation of the Third World into
free-fire zones and gigantic testing laboratories for the latest weapons
systems (Indochina, Afghanistan, Iraq) and, more recently, sources of
low-cost donated organs, bodies for vaccine testing, etc. Ralph Nader
truly is the child of the Frankfurt School, in this largest sense.

As far as the infamous police raid at Frankfurt in the late Sixties, well,
the poor man clearly didn't understand the students meant well. He 
should've gone on sabbatical and smoked a lot of ganja with Foucault in
Tunisia for awhile and chilled out, but unfortunately he died of a heart
attack soon thereafter (Ernst Bloch, on the other hand, was luckier: he
lived long enough to hang out with Rudi Dutschke, giving symbolic blessing
to a New Left he probably didn't entirely understand; Sartre also hung
around long enough to at least do a few demos for the militants).
Well, we can't all be like Genet and free our minds over coffee with the
PLO guerillas. Adorno was also totally clueless about American jazz music;
on the other hand, most Americans are totally clueless about the great
atonal European composers (Berg, Webern, Schoenberg), and Adorno wrote
some magnificent theory on atonal music, so maybe it all balances
out. Hope that helps somewhat.

-- Dennis