Date: Wed, 03 May 2000 00:26:11 -0500 From: Christopher Gunn <1k1mgm-AT-KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU> Subject: Re: tom wolfe-epictetus-frankfurt At 10:46 PM 5/2/00 -0400, bob scheetz <rscheetz-AT-cboss.com> wrote: >... nice topic for the eve of kent state, no? > >This year's speaker is to be an electronic mumia. >I guess we know what would be wolfe's opinion >of this kinda lumpen-loving faker-leftist bourgeois liberalism; >but, can we imagine adorno's, an any less towering contempt? Well, by late in his life this had become one of his big hairy problems, and his own micro-Kent-State (calling the cops on his own student protesters) was a kind of case in point. I'm not as dismissive of the "late Adorno" as a lot of people and I'm not convinced his overall life-project diverged that much; specifically, _The Jargon of Authenticity_ ought to be on more reading lists as an antidote to what may have Adorno's real late-life vexation: the tendency of people to adopt emancipatory-*sounding* rhetoric for personal aggrandizement and snob-value, with the result that emancipatory goals become subverted or [worst] cynically and reflexively turned into their opposites. (I should add that I can use this insight at least to make peace with some of Adorno's views of music. I'm not convinced that he disliked, say, jazz as a musical form as much as he hated the Jazz Buff and the whole emergent hipness industry. I hope I'm making the obvious point that Adorno not only hated commodification of dissent, he particularly hated those who went around with reflexive "Commodify Your Dissent" buttons in order to exempt themselves from the process. ) Now, this of course is also one of Wolfe's main themes and one of his main criticisms of the political and especially "cultural" Left: the Left as an idle consumer commodity, a way for pathetic framing-shop clerks to feel like the Conscious Element in History. That was the key point of Wolfe's ca. 1975 essay I mentioned earlier. (I think the magazine title was "An Intelligent Coed's Guide to College," by the way. He concluded with the view that idle Leftishness was really the cause of Stalinoid horrors and with the ultra-Right proposal that colleges and universities should be shut down for a generation until such faddishness can be purged from the Culture. It seems to me that this is about as close to Blood and Soil small-f fascism as you can find in the American mainstream, and it was the point at which I gave up dealing with Wolfe as an author.) Now, what this means is that I haven't read _The Right Stuff_, _The Bonfire of Vanities_, and _A Man in Full_, and that I have no intention of plowing through 2000+ pages of what I regard as drivel. But on the basis of Wolfe's earlier work I will proceed as follows.... Wolfe's model of human life basically goes beyond naturalism to a kind of biologicism. He sees humans as a particularly nasty species of ape that has infested the globe and now struts around with Ideology and Morality and big cars and Ivy League degrees and trophy wives that serve the same purpose and identical as baboon's purple asses and eye-markings: power-symbols to ward off fang-slashing fights over women, tasty tubers, and antelope carcasses. (See Wolfe's "ecological" sketches in his first few essay collections if you have any doubts about this.) Almost all of us can spot and reject this model when it dresses up in sociobiological garb. It even has a sociological manifestation that I consider interesting although at heart wrong (see Harrison White, _Identity and Control_). But Wolfe's take on this is ultimately Romanticized, eroticized, and in my opinion fascist. I can perhaps best explain this by comparing his views with those of the filmmaker David Lynch (take _Blue Velvet_ or _Wild at Heart_ as the key expressions here). Lynch, like Wolfe, sees mankind as a type of nasty ape; Lynch sees "civilization" as what we do so we won't see the bugs under the lawn and the unimaginably *worse* things that humans do to each other, one-on-one and in groups. At this point I have to fall back on a literary rather than critical understanding: Lynch ultimately takes a *tragic* view of this situation (even though his techniques are often comic). He uses his films to hook the viewers with a voyeuristic look at how *others* behave in [literally] beastly ways and then wraps the matter around until we understand that his critique is not that "civilization" is there to keep us from seeing what's around us but that it's there to keep each of us from seeing who he/she *is*. Which is why Lynch at his best gets us leaving the theater with a bad case of the creeps. [Adorno would say that this enterprise is (a) impossible, and (b) pure crap masquerading as art, but, hey, what the hell; these are debased times.] Wolfe, on the other hand, doesn't have a tragic bone in his body (at least in what I've read) and regards humanity and those stuck in its delusions with contempt. He tickles our postmodern sensibilities by not explicitly exempting himself and friends and insisting that all knowledge is perspectival, nobody here but us chickens, BUT at heart he winds up worshiping Form, Power, Control, Discipline. In true paleo-conservative he argues that yes, we're nasty animals, but Bound Together--while we can never *be* more--we can *create* more. This is at best beer-hall Stoicism and I use the term "beer-hall" with all the attached symbolism.... I suppose you can argue that it's no worse than George Will on a bad day, but I'm inclined to see what people like Stephen Holmes (with whom I don't agree on most things, by the way) call "hard anti-liberal." I.e., Karl Schmitt or in a more Romantic vein T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. Is this untrue? Are you willing to take what look to me like instances shallow sentimentality in the late Wolfe and pump them up into some kind of humanitarianism? >"Man in Full" construes this form under the aspect of farik fanon, >trivialization of wretched-of-earth rage into football superstar rapist, and >the pol (cf jesse championing the illinois high-school hooligans) who >opportunistically demagogues this criminality. > >Anyway, yer "friendly-fascist" thesis, i agree, >has been long the accepted wisdom on the left; >but, still seems really hard to square with this novel. >And wouldn't it be our shame to miss recognizing >an authentic postmodern consciousness, >a liberating and dignifying mirroring? >Conrad's hands unmistakably mark him for a prole >...as the epictetus is clearly meant for >an authentic exploited-class consciousness, >(comradeship, resistance, struggle,... ) >rising to a kinda salvific everyman religion. > >...what fascism? My esteemed academic advisor, David Norman Smith at the Univ. of Kansas, has argued informally that a really good Critical Theorist has about 15 years of first-rate work in him before he suffers an almost inevitably failure of nerve.... How long can you live with the contradictions of the dialectic of modernity, the awareness that your best and most sincere work will probably make things worse rather than better. Smith and I see the core, key work of Critical Theory as happening from the late '20s when Fromm and Reich came on board until the early '50s, when _The Authoritarian Personality_ capped the Franks' work stateside and Adorno and Horkheimer went back to Germany to wrestle with their own demons (and lose more often then win, at that point). The key issue for the Frankfurters' prior to nerve failure was a massive adherence to the Hegel side of the Hegel/Kant divide, an insistence on the ontological reality of the social. Humans by their daily concrete activity in their actual lives wake up to a built-world of domination and reproduce the domination both consciously and unconsciously. "Men make their own history only *not* just as they please"; Horkheimer: "Humans by their own action reproduce the tools of their own enslavement." Similarly, people reproduce the micro-history of their own familial tragedies and in doing so make themselves incapable of seeing the extent to which they are not free. This is the basic Marx + Freud equation and without it you don't really have Critical Theory, just it's frightened Kantian academic successor. If you take away from Critical Theory an insistence on the hard ontological reality of the macro-social (Marx) and the micro-social (Freud) then you're left with a bucket of mush. Might be good mush (_Jargon of Authenticity_) but it's not Critical Theory at its best. >From this viewpoint "postmodern consciousness" is not "liberating and dignifying" but evasive and ultimately contemptuous. That is what I believe Wolfe is not only saying, but embracing. We should perhaps take this discussion to private e-mail unless there are some signs of outside interest soon.....
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