File spoon-archives/frankfurt-school.archive/frankfurt-school_2000/frankfurt-school.0005, message 11


Date: Tue, 02 May 2000 01:00:43 -0400
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: Sloterdijk and Adorno


At 11:45 PM 05/01/2000 -0400, Ben B. Day wrote:
>In a way, this notion is the image of the Nietzschean free
>spirit, somehow able to invent itself, not needing to project and disown
>its values onto some convenient objective Other (God, reason, etc.).

Before Nietzsche there was Max Stirner, who was effectively eviscerated by
Marx in THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY.  And the ironic attitude that thinks it is
above all commitment to knowledge goes back to Friedrich Schegel.

>The challenge that such a form of action poses to the Frankfurt tradition
>of Ideologiekritik is clear: you can critique any tradition that
>fetishizes its own legitimacy (i.e. - we didn't create our movement's
>legitimacy, we "found/discovered" it!) by exposing its constituted nature
>by placing it in a particular historical moment, cultural position, etc.
>How, though, do you critique a claim that acknowledges its own
>subjectivity (as it were)? "Cynical reason" makes itself immune to
>Ideologiekritik by getting there first, by wearing its ideological
>character on its sleeve, by not taking itself too seriously.

An excellent characterization.  All of postmodernism fits here.

>There is, of course, a totalitarian possibility within such a logic. The
>surrealists - one of the most amusing but also most dictatorial groups in
>recent history - immediately spring to mind as an example of pre-empting
>criticism of one's fascist tendencies by refusing to take onself seriously
>in the first place. One's critics are then forced to take a
>transcendental, or metadiscursive point of view in order to attack the
>"jokers" (by dismissing them as not properly serious - as seriousness is
>required for these matters), and thereby also exposing themselves (the
>critics) to a critique of their ideology, an historical/cultural placement
>of their /criticism/.

Perhaps you're thinking of the Dadaists, rather than the surrealists.  This
doesn't sound like surrealism to me, though Breton was indeed an autocrat,
and an armchair advocate of the gratuitous act.  But surrealism was a
left-wing movement and did take itself seriously.

>I think that this problem is, first of all, deserving of its own name -
>the "Sloterdijk paradox" or the "Sloterdijk problem." The first generation
>Frankfurters, unlike Habermas, arrive at a modernist perspective largely,
>or exclusively, through a negative logic of critique, and it is precisely
>at the level of critique that Sloterdijk strikes. Although, certainly,
>the implications of Sloterdijk (if we buy into the possibility of cynical
>reason) don't challenge the efficacy of Ideologiekritik as such, but, as I
>said at the outset, offers it its limits by describing a mode of action
>that stands beyond its efficacious capacities. And, presumably, if actions
>taken under this mode expand, so too will the capacities of a critique of
>ideology shrink. Or, even better, if such types of action have been more
>prevalent in the past than we may have thought, then the critique of
>ideology may be shown to have been been historically more constrained than
>it might hope.

I do not understand this passage.



   

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