File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9709, message 225


Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 15:22:39 -0700 (PDT)
From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-gladstone.uoregon.edu>
Subject: M-TH: Re: Lukacs + Adorno


On Mon, 29 Sep 1997, Michael Hoover wrote:
> are you familiar with an address that A gave to the German Sociological
> Conference in 1968 (a year before his death)?...Tom Bottomore cites
> this in his thin primer entitled *The Frankfurt School*/1984...
> 
> According to Bottomore, Adorno pursues an argument in which he
> concludes that "the system", now independent of all members
> of society, including those in the commanding positions, is driven on
> by the impersonal forces of technological rationality...Michael

Yes, it was called "Late Capitalism or Industrial Society", I think. It's
quite a good essay. I've not run across Bottomore's argument, but it
sounds similar to the usual rap on Adorno, namely that he was (1)
apolitical or (2) hopelessly gloomy. My response to this is, Adorno was
plenty political, but not in the sense of heaving Molotov cocktails into
the streets of Paris. In Adorno's essay, he makes the point that the usual
arguments about capitalism being either "late capitalism" or
"industrial society" don't hold water: in fact, capitalism circa 1968 was
both of those things. This means that a genuine resistance has to fight on
both fronts at once: we have to find a planetary alternative to
transnational accumulation, and we also have to find local alternatives to
the deadening homogenization and authoritarian identity-politics of
capital. Some may call this being gloomy, because it makes the futility of
rioting in the streets palpable; I call it bracingly realistic, because it
acknowledges the utopian impulse of 1968, but also insists that the
Revolution can't happen that way. Adorno's model would be countless
micro-revolutions, tied together in strategic ensembles; in "Negative
Dialectics" he points out that true dialectical thinking in late
capitalism has to avoid centralizing its categories, and must think in an
ensemble of "Modellanalysen" or thought-models. This is where the Greens,
the identity movements, lesbian-gay liberation, multi-culturalism,
feminism et. al. come into play: such movements are indeed revolutionary,
to the extent that they organized against the reigning Wealthy White Male
Power Establishment, and invented new kinds of incipiently
transnational solidarity. Today, these solidarities are 
becoming Resistances, e.g. the transference from 1968's
"the personal is the political" to the 1997 UPS "the personal
packaging-service is political". Which makes it all the more important to
think through Adorno's work for the coming millenium. In a soundbite,
Adorno is postmodernism's Karl Marx.

-- Dennis



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