Love is a qualified term

Love is a qualified term. There are lots of adjectives that go in front of it: agape, amorous, fraternal, paternal, maternal, familial, platonic. But what if, underneath (and perhaps excluding) these different demarcations and evocations of love, there was one fundamental meaning and significance of love?

This is where we switch gears. What if love can’t have a modifier? That modifier really suggests something else, something apart from love, or something that wishes to attach itself as an appendage to it. Here’s where I say that love is writing.

Writing, of course, is also a qualified term. In the course of this exercise (my senior thesis) I still haven’t come down all the possible paths. I still haven’t explored the implications of Love as Writing. So, to begin, let’s talk about love in terms of Badiou’s essay “What is Love?”. In that essay, I think that it’s safe to say that love is in direct relation to sextuation, that is, real physical and social relations between human bodies. There are several imperatives that Badiou invokes: these philosophical procedures are labeled as “truth procedures”. They are the processes and methods by which we find truth. These processes are: Art, Politics, Science, or Love. These various processes are true to the extent that they instantiate ‘humanity,’ which is to say that these processes legitimate communities, life, and the utopian concept of human togetherness.

Already, it’s easy to see that I’ve chosen three legitimating factors that color themselves within the lines of Art (utopia), Politics (community), and Science (life). And then, there is the fourth term, Love. Badiou goes into an analysis of love in both male and female sextuations: in the male variation, love legitimates the other realms concurrently within itself (it is equal to an extent, its role and priveledge are vital to the process, but only insofar as it is just a tad less equal to politics and art because it is only true if they are true). The female position on this is very different: we see that love is the surrounding factor, the procedure that totalizes and legitimates all of the others. It is the truth that is the most true. What does this mean?

Writing is dialectical, it is for the utopian, and it speaks the political.

In the introduction to this essay, Badiou launches into his main argument with a note on philosophy and novelistic prose, something that “women” have excelled at. Here, I believe that it’s crucial to let go of the generic and physical implications of women and consider the possibility that women is a qualifier for his later conception of love. If women is a type of code name for his female model of love. What is philosophy in all of this? And why is it that novelistic prose merely “thinks the thought of love?” Here, I believe that the quantum leap is made in terms of love as writing–specifically the discursive relationship between the following:

Philosophy and the novel (literature): If the novel thinks the thought of love, it can be said that love itself is philosophy. Philosophy is the truth procedure that legitimates humanity in toto: that is to say, it legitimates art, politics, and science. The novel is the animation of this truth procedure: it is the narration that does not interpret at a glance; the thought but not the interpretation. Philosophy, on the other hand, is the explication of the thought, the procedure behind narration: the imperative and the truth.

The singular and the universal: The reader and the world (humanity) that it accesses through this truth procedure (this procedure of love is played out on a number of different valences, which I’m still trying to illuminate thoroughly, but I’ve listed them below).

The producer and the “consumer” who is transformed: Through writing (and the reading of writing) love does not allow for passive members of humanity. Love instantiates the reality of art, of science, and of politics. It transforms dismantled into dialectical.

 

The philosophical incarnations of love:

Aesthetic (the utopian): the aesthetics of love as production. The imperatives of writing for a utopia; the needs for an aesthetic imperative. Works I’m using: Schiller, young Lukacs, young Geothe, Hegel.

Political (writing as Real, as phantasm): the image of “thoughts”; the dialectically legitimate (material) image (work) and the phantasmagorial. This last word means something like a method of translating and conflating reality into merely an image. A mythology, a process. A mythology as a mode of conflating reality and the political via translation (a note on ontology as a political hermeneutic). Works: Schelling, Adorno, Brecht, Lukacs.

Scientific (dialectical): what are the direct demands of philosophy and humanity’s animation if indeed it is literature? What is realism? and how are these goal accomplished? How do we break out of the images (ideologically binding utopias, mythological phantasms, and the like), to reach a legitimate and ultimately emancipatory type of love? Works used: Hegel, Marx, Badiou.

 

 

soy amor intellectualis: that warm feelin’ ain’t your super-ego, that’s your space-heater.

In the intellectual conscience possessed of it, the social moment is no less present than the moral super-ego. Such conscience grows out of a conception of the good society and its citizens. if this conception dims–and who could still trust blindly in it–the downward urge of the intellect loses its inhibitions and all the detritus dumped in the individual by by barbarous culture– half-learning, slackness, heavy familiarity, coarseness–comes to light. Usually it is rationalized as humanity, desire to be understood by others, worldly-wise responsibility. But the sacrifice of intellectual self-discipline comes much too easily to its maker for us to believe his assurance that it is one.

-Minima Moralia “If knaves should tempt you”

It’s hard to imagine, as I have often thought, that we are really engaged in any sort of project, at all. So comfortable in the always contingent moment upon our success, that magic rupture that we are all patiently waiting for–I have said it before, we wait for it behind a shower of mass music. I’m not talking about the rhetorical “us” of the American public college student, nor even the quasi-intellectual. I’m talking to you–who call yourself a communist, who were once horrified by the history and the present and every word you heard over dinner. What horrifies you now but the prospect of your own failure for admission? Of your program that all our most successful teachers tell us to adopt? Deep down, we know what we’re doing isn’t a project, that it isn’t radical, or legitimate.

To be legitimate, what if we had to leave the context that might breed our distinction? Yes, that painful sacrifice to be disconnected from the soul of life that we fight so dearly for in our readings and writings and fervent meetings late at night no longer is a sacrifice if what we desire is that warmish solace for the teaching-post. It seems to me that we have plenty of teachers who are engaged in the discourse and not enough who are engaged in imagination.

A caveat: the radical imagination already exposes itself as anti-radical, as that which privileges the current cushy-ness that even the most glamorous theorists have admitted in a self-denying fashion. The utopian imagination is only radical insofar as it has already foreclosed the possibilities of life, of unity, of legitimate production towards a personal and political ethic that transcends this silly climate. This intellectual sphere that, like the private, I mean public, has been completely sealed off and radiated with the worst kind of paraben containing plastic wrap–and the microwave has been turned on full blast. Oh we are in a hothouse of trends and cynicism, where dreamers are only dreamers after they have formally addressed reality in their compatriots’ eyes’. “Radical” compatriots, who define themselves as such because they themselves are full of secret cancer cells of egoism.

Oh that ego: what would you do if the university system were eradicated? Perhaps the dirty little secret is that organization, material, and leadership are in no way contingent on the formal boundaries of this place. And at best, maybe all we can say is that this hide-out is the easiest way for us to cling to some soulful dream of nerve-scrubbing study-time. And it’s just too damn bad that we have to teach expository writing, wear tweed jackets, and write performative statements…

Reject this logic. Reject the fear. Reject the ego and its messages: no, no, it might be best to listen to it instead of following its sensuous frivolity, whose sensuousness is rooted in the consumption of the other, whose frivolity is the real confession of the project’s subordination in the margins of your mind. We didn’t get into this to get famous, or to get good jobs. Or even to get laid.

The only thing I could say we have a right to confer upon, and for, is love.

Everyone snarls at the idea that we could organize outside the institution. What if our worldly-wise responsibility is to shirk this “responsibility” in search of the jack-hammer against the imaginary bunkers we’ve built ourselves into?

Would you still have a dream?

flower chains

Is it really that much more difficult to refrain from feeling petty things? Is it a matter of soul or of situation that meetings, friendships, projects, take on the look of an a-political social club? At the fuzzy locus point, is the real belief and hope to get laid, get friends, get together, all masquerading under the equivocated “education of peers?” Or do we know why we’re here. Perhaps there has been some confusion. I used to think that feeling this way (which is less of a feeling than a confrontation), wanting things to be different in the world, and seeing them differently from others obliged me to make decisions that didn’t all together “register” in the liminal world. It was okay to break this or that “friendship;” I knew when to work and when something was performative and should be left behind. But slowly, and fearfully–and I should say–with regret enough to pass it by–that the world of thinking differently and writing and even of “being radical” has slipped under a twilight.

Projects written alone in an attic reached fewer people, were still the practice of a novice, sure. But it was there. And now, writing cover letters and personal statements and finding this or that writer “totally unintelligible” has become the norm. I can’t pretend to say that these more, oh I don’t know, middle class woes have highlighted the failing inability to really discuss politics, philosophy, ethic, spirit. Yes, on a very real level, I am behaving like a foolish child: but really, I can’t bear the thought of working this hard for entry into some tight-lipped institution with a bunch of self-loving hypocrites whose political affiliations from the get-go have already been dismantled. There is something to say for education; there’s quite a lot to say about it. On the other hand, real education is often held in the least aesthetically-appealing bits of town, on the back streets of New Brunswick, New Jersey; it’s drinking the dirty water and swimming in it, letting hair turn hard from the polluted swirl.

In spite of everyone’s (radical) best intentions, are we not living in the brain-dead day-to-day? We’re just boying this or that shirt for this or that event, driving late at night, mixing our contemplations of love and production within our veritable “inboxes.” If we–and here, I mean I–look deeply enough, it is perfectly legitimate to note the movement of the contemporary young person in search of radical vocation as:

1. Shocked, radicalized, bare, completely rejecting the opportunities and categories of this world
2. A slow concrete shadow, a fear of the tradition, a period of groping, of constant thought, isolation (in university context)
3. Friendships, company, respite from the depression of it all
4. An imagined agility; acceptance of context, of performance, of “system navigation”

But like those who say “you can be radical on facebook, it’s all about the system,” isn’t it high time we let ourselves in on the bad joke? That we have allowed ourselves, our impulses, our power, to be contained in the ideological? Perhaps this isn’t just facebook; it’s graduate school and the Friday night party, drinks after class… we have turned our company into a cycle of repeating consumption. Because what are we changing, versus what are we allowing to change us?

Marx said

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.

I see lots of chains, lots of ironical statements from people who know better. And I feel them. We know what we’re looking at. We know that there’s “no radical break available.” But what are we moving towards? And how might we even say we know what we long for, anymore? To never feel that sparkling pain blazing in the skies above us as truth and not as a bleeding heart! We wear our commitments like good little boys and girls, writing the pamphlets, passing the papers, organizing the events. But our lives, and everything we see for ourselves, must once again reject this long-term melancholy of retreat. Love must be seen as a matter of course and not a highway exit (else we might miss it, forever!) in the way we live our lives, with the hope, clarity, and grit conferred upon our every day existence.

We have decorated our homes and hearts in a garland, and admire our great courage to bear it all in the face of such dismantled beauty. But we are still in our homes , as the fields of flowers outside our windows are paved away in gridded squares, our hearts closing in on themselves.

the slow ache

The individual, however, find his liberation in duty. On the one hand, he is liberated from his dependence on mere natural drives, and from the burden he labours under as a particular subject in his moral reflections on obligation and desire; and on the other hand, he is liberated from that indeterminate subjectivity which does not attain existence or the objective determinacy of action, but remains within itself and has no actuality. In duty, the individual liberates himself so as to attain substantial freedom. (Thesis 149, Philosophy of Right: Ethical Life)

The individual liberates himself to attain substantial freedom; and what of those lesser drives under which so much might suffer, regardless of fortitude? Is the freedom that separation that Adorno suggested was the haunting of one’s self: the oscillation between the last separation and the objectification of self? That essence which cannot be distanced from, as much as Hegel would have liked to allow, without Right whispering quietly in the morning breeze, “say goodbye.” That distance between the most tenderly aching sores and the mind that used to understand it, cannot but feel its own pain twofold: in the dark shadows and the mind that knows its solution is not in any isolated patch-up. For Adorno, the personal life attempts to show itself as existing–whether as a foolish ruse in the face of philosophical perplexity or systemic political violence–I try to say to myself something personal, intimate, that is buried under mountains of casual sentimentality. Each time, there is desire and brutal force and emptiness, and with all of this there is still exposed feeling as nerves laid out into the cold air. But the self does not exist in the pleasant way we like to imagine suffering from our bruised egos and torn hearts, a dimly lit room at the beginning of a movie and a promise of return.

To Hegel’s due, we must remember there is no return and so we do not have to look to sell; but the inverse of this means that what we ache for, long for, is the unity based on the disjuncture, itself. We ache deeply and without insulation, for real love realized in the individual and the actual, as the only matter of course for our survival and not the arbitrary choice. It is in the ache for humanity that we might say we ever feel ourselves. This is cruelest when, in the last phases, we find out desires calling to us, in the name of freedom and bliss, all under the artful guise which crushes us further. In these middle regions, whether in weak minds or desperate times, pain seeps further due to our duty to hold out against all odds. And this task is brought to bear not on any petty whim or slowly bleeding individual desire, as much as we intuit it to be this way, but on the whole task of living; which is to say, of everything in common for the one.

Production is love;

Badiou’s essay on love focuses on the dialectical procedure of love. It is not sharable or experienced by the members (lovers) who create it, for it would not be love. The thing, the love production is not based on a consumption or an experience, rather the production of it. So what is thought of (viewed as) a action of consumption, true “love” is really a creation. Likewise, in Adorno’s Me-Ti teaching that concerns itself with the ethics of revolution, or living revolutionarily, there are more than a few integral parables. The first says that there is no purpose in fighting without learning the best way to live. The second is that there are not many “you should” statements, but one is “you should produce,” and the third follows two lovers who build their love “as if they expected to write history.” The first points to an issue of revolutionary/analytical ethic in varying contexts: there is a way to live in the “everyday” that is revolutionary, that is political; and that this striving should not be in direct opposition to the present context necessarily, but that attention should always fall primarily on the “universal” or always-utopian perspective otherwise the revolutionary impulse falls prey to becoming a reactionary ritual because its physical (contextual) manifestation is repeated and not the over-arching drive. The second statement directly incites production. In the context of late capitalism, it is easy enough to disregard this kind of phrase, or to misinterpret it: after all, isn’t there a sort of over abundance of production? No, this statement is really a variation on the first; it is a question of means versus ends (creation versus consumption). Mass production is really shown to be a direct consumption, only consumption, and this massive production of material items never truly makes anything that is made for itself—it is a binding one-way relationship instead of the dialectical production of love, that will be explained in greater detail below. So, what we think of as mass production really harnesses and re-harnesses people back into the wheel of consumption, which is not genuine. What is genuine does not have any direct tie into the material realm (of course it does have ties, but it is not directly visible in the material schema that capital markets have created), thus to understand what truly “ethical” (this term is highly problematic, see note below) revolution/utopian living, is production for production’s sake. Living with endless means. This follows to the third parable that which highlights what two lovers had made for themselves. Their love was not an experience, ready-made with embroidered towels, because they were not accepting a readymade narrative or idea (see introduction to Marxism and Form), but living for the method by which they lived. Turning to Badiou’s essay, one recalls that love is not an experience but only what it is imagined to be, imagined in an ideology that does not yield to utopian productions but only to the repeated trials and disasters of “experience.” Love as a truly revolutionary and emancipatory force is only visible when the lenses of material existence are stripped away: it is the manifestation of ethics in everyday life, the utopian drive that does not demand a return aside from the method by which it is produced. Production that yields its own fruit and whose “work” is never just experienced or watched or replayed, but always integrated into the analytical fabric of production. Love, or production that is love, is written by the lovers as if they were to write history because there was a close attention to the construction and not the polished surface, because history refused to end itself or expose some impossible root. Where can we see love? In what forms do the ends of production fold themselves back into a distinctly “ethically revolutionary” capacity more than in literary production? What is sold (on the surface) as just another artifact from a broken life of consumption and finance drags the reader into the very context that he is otherwise unable to view. This is not to say that buying and even reading a book is the ethically revolutionary move that allows people to live with endless means, ie emancipate them. Nor does this suggest that all literature is emancipatory, merely that its content and readership take part in a type of “peering” in all cases, whether or not the reader or the work is aware.

What literature (perhaps this might be extended to other modes of creation…) does foster is an interpretation, an analytical extension of the “work” or product, into the intimate life, the lived life, while something like a video game is a refutation of lived experience (incommensurable) [necessary day-to-day items that are created and consumed in the larger web of mass production have other issues that clearly refute their being a tool of endless production; what I am talking about encloses narrative/ideological productions]. Production, then is not only a type of construction but also an ability to analyze, contextualize and reinvision the world in which we live. Production then, in its largest sense, has everything to do with the purpose for which we live.

It all started at 2pm in Seoul 362 days ago

I think you should all know something about me. I have a pre-myself and a post-myself period. Both epochs are slightly useful but equally flawed: pre-myself was all perception, all observation, the world was a loose connectivity of phenomena that circled around me, unknowable. Post-myself acquired the language to experience what I had felt for a very long time, the means to survey the proximity to the Idea of the Thing without ever touching it. [The outside of the persona and the impossible imagined void of being the persona, the belief from the void of belief.] But of course, I was always myself in these instances; while I may change, the enormity of consumption, of poverty, of false-realities still rattle me to no end. Only now, I’m not perplexed and sad that I can’t rewrite my world into a certain-type-of-film (which I assumed everyone else could do or had no need of doing because they were already secure in their own film-reality); I’m perplexed because I could never enter that world, even before I was myself, and I don’t know how to help others out. My pre/post demonstration does have a point, I promise.

I love taking little trips down the short pike, finding its breaks, finding its intersections, its segues, departures. But there are six hours that can’t be accounted for. [Of course, I could die immediately after posting this and then there'd be the 3-day chunk but I consider that more accounted for than not.] But there’s a rift in the road, something I can’t cross over or get back. There’s tear in the universe and I’m convinced that that’s where my *conversion* is; and I’m more convinced every day that that’s where I am, too.

I wrote ^ and walked away from my computer for a while… I forgot that I had to say goodbye to 2009 and I’m not too thrilled right now, either. Sometimes I get caught up in the moment that I slip out of justly and minutely accounted time. This was the year that I will always remember. This was the year that I began to want to live; I began living (in the very dusty, small capacity that I can).

No, I’ve been wandering around the planet this year six hours out of joint. At least, that’s how I thought it started. Like any of my stories (fiction and non) I’ll begin before the beginning, to get into the mood of things. Two days before my Rutgers-funded trip to Cambodia began, my friend and I looked at our itinerary and found a twelve-hour gap in Korea–twelve hours on New Year’s Day in Korea and no one had figured this out before us. Cut to: Seoul-6am New Year’s morning. Last I recalled in New York, it was somewhere around 11:45pm. We landed, the mountains were purple and pink in 2009′s dewy, 12-degree mist. The bus from Incheon was round, clean, incubatory. But where had my new year gone? It was already there, but it slipped away from me–there was a TV on the bus but it was all in Korean. The letters were round and incubatory, too. There was a long line of condos-it stretched from the airport to the city, most of the windows facing each other. But I could still see the sky and the mountains and the pink orb to the east, gently rising on a day that hadn’t happened.

We had breakfast at a  nice hotel, bread and jam and coffee. We took the subway. But I don’t remember the subway, really. I only remember walking up the stairs into the sunlight, it could have been any city; it was Seoul, South Korea. It was 2pm, it was midnight, it was 2009. That was it. Somewhere my life was compressed and mushed back together again up the stairs. I’ve been trying to find the caution sign in all the photos, I can’t see anything pointing to a rift in the universe. I think I was the only one.

The flight to Cambodia was non-existent. We got off the plane into a building that mocked the worst kind of Disney Cambodia airport. I don’t really want to talk about Cambodia. It was good and bad and I was more bad than good, not because I *did* anything to help or not in the token sense, not because I got drunk and pretended to be an Australian because I was too embarrassed to be an American. (This is stupid, of course, because either way I was totally invading… “helping their economy.” Developing it.)

No, because I realized my world-situation and I realized that no mural-painting in an orphanage in Phnom Phen can change the implicit acceptance, the implicit violence with which I painted it. No four-hour tour in a land-mine museum exempts me from the rich history of ignorance, of cultural relativist bullshit I played in to for nineteen years. No amount of delicately taking pictures of trash pickers in the garbage dump will make me “one of them.” The accepted NGO worker, the joke-feministing activist, the John Smith of the Third New World. I had a situation and it didn’t come printed a manufactured laptop case — express yourself! My worlds could not be separated, from that day onward. The walls and roofs were for the tourists, the tents, the rotting river boats were for the natives.

I get back from Cambodia–I sleep for a few days. I think I was detoxing from all the alcohol. And I started writing my story. The same story I work on today, and probably for the next few years. It had nothing to do with Cambodia (in a negative way, I think it has everything to do with it). But in a more general sense, it was about people entrenched in positions, in non-positions, and knowing nothing about it. To be perfectly frank, it’s about being dumped out into the world as a product, and a failing one at that.

Spring semester- Althusser’s spring. Lenin and ideology sealed the deal, I was in for the long haul. The snow was falling heavily and I sat on a bench in Brower Common for a few hours, leaping back to the opening pages every now and then. It was the first time I had really worked towards something, felt something. But summer was the worst.

I lived in the back of Cook campus. I got it. I read “The Coming Insurrection;” I was alone for the most part. I was almost fired for reading War and Peace. It always rained. I was out of joint with my friends, my boyfriend, my bed, the food I ate, my body. I started reading Lukacs, abandoned him for Althusser again. Abandoned him for youtube videos on social alienation. I could have watched myself. I freaked out and I stopped writing, I stopped reading. I recoiled and felt the warm last efforts of August. Something Big was coming.

Fall semester began. It was the greatest semester I’ve had, yet. It’s all too fresh to condense (I’m sure it’s all there in my ramblings). When I say it was great, I don’t mean emotionally. Emotionally it’s shit to be isolated, to make do with the attenuated thread of communication you have with the outside world. But it all got me to thinking, it got me to writing. I’m doing more now that I’ve ever done. Just ask Me-Ti.

When I isolate the days, one from the next and last, I can never string them right along each other again without losing the capacity of time–I mean, with every pause, there’s something lost. And those six hours, I think it might really be a lifetime.

On the subject of solistices

The inherent human urge and pleasure in giving is given its most generous opportunity- a frenzy o f giving contained by Thanksgiving and New Year’s. But the buying of gifts is more misery than joy for many people. I find myself always returning to Adorno’s 44: giving, like love, is arrested and controlled through the brilliant spectacle of things, of shopping, of pre-orchestrated frustration. The frustration of a woman at the bookstore, a sad woman who I want to love, to show I’m trying to love her, but I can’t because we’ve been blocked off from one another. So I surprise her and buy the coffee she loves but didn’t ask for and didn’t think I’d remember.

I still watched “White Christmas” more than a few times today (24 hours on AMC) but it wasn’t as bubbly as a shiny pink cellophaned room. When the title says “white” Christmas, that’s just what it means– the cracks on post-war propaganda a very evident (whereas before I think they played into my flawed conception of history, which is what I think they intend to do)…

Forgive my harping on White Christmas, Bingie and all. On the train scene to New York but then Vermont, why do they have to order two club sandwhiches from a black attendant? Why does the attendant have to be black…? (There are more than one; this is slightly less repulsive than in “Holiday Inn” where Bingie or maybe Fred Astaire have a *mammy* and two small caricatured black children who later play Old Father Time and Baby Time at the New Year’s pageant). The more the implicit message of dominant post-war culture is bashed into my head, the more I see that it’s not enough to see that everyone is white and clean and rich and happy. No, that’s not enough. The other must be present, must be at all times a caricature of himself, he must love his oppression and his oppressor. Perhaps this all means to account for them within the scope of the film (They are not *somewhere else* being middle class, no they are serving Bingie sandwiches.)

The major theme of the movie (aside from Christmas and the fool’s device of the “love” plot,) is nostalgia for war.  ”Gee, I wish I was back in the Army,” is exactly the kind of message that still winds its way into our culture’s romanticization of war, of occupation and imperialism. Because of course, the outfits were free, the meals were free, it was the best place to find romance. But at every moment, “White Christmas” proves, that the culture industry can reach back in time and replaster the finish of the American subject (this hit was made in 1954 and addressed the *forgotten* i.e. domesticated masculinity of WWII Patricians and Plebs..)

More later I’m sure. blah blah blah ’tis the season.

Oh, and speaking of imperialism, there was a Christmas special airing from a base in Baghdad. If you think that’s a “good idea” then please refer to my earlier post where I freak out about cultural ignorance. Noel, noel, let’s go blast some fucking Pakis.

Constanze (110) A first reading;

Another extremely dense illumination by Adorno.  (Opposed to Nancy Armstrong and French grammar.)

This entry, more than the others in Minima Moralia is paradoxical. Love, as a bourgeois concept, is at once the primary hiding-space (its own redemptive qualification) for itself. But is the thing that is an alibi for the economy (it arrests the individual in a certain frame of non-thought and pacification) as the true manifestation of “insubordination to society’s command?”

If love in a society is to represent a better one, it cannot do so as a peaceful enclave, but only by conscious opposition. This, however, demands precisely the element of voluntaries that the bourgeois, for whom love can never be natural enough, forbid it.* Loving means not letting immediacy wither under the omnipresent weight of mediation and economics, and in such fidelity it becomes itself mediated, as a stubborn counter-pressure.**

*When Adorno says that love cannot be viewed as a voluntary action, he is referring to the arresting capability that the bourgeois ideal of love has on the individual. Where the voluntary opposition to society through love might emerge from the confines of bourgeois society, it is arrested in pacifism.

Why might this be so? **I think that the second portion of the quote is not quite loving in the idealized (or reified) notion, but the actual B. application of it within the society. Here, we see the arresting qualities that “fidelity” forces onto the lover. And I began to wonder how fidelity (which is precisely the thing Adorno attributes the possibility of societal insubordination) must be reified as a bourgeois concept so that it continues to carry out these actions both for and against us all.

It is the test of feeling through permanence, even though it be as obsession. The love, however, which in the guise of unreflecting spontaneity and proud of its alleged integrity, relies exclusively on what it takes to be the voice of the heart, and runs away as soon as it no longer thinks it can hear that voice, is in this supreme independence precisely the tool of society. Passive Without knowing it, it registers whatever numbers come out in the roulette of interests.

Here, I think Adorno is trying to showcase love as the true hiding place for the primary force of bourgeois society: the individual. The lover is not faithful to the ideal of love, but rather the reinforced sense of independence via his own “voice of heart.” In the b. society, the “voice of the heart” is the reified “voice of interest” and rarely maintains its fidelity when it does not act as it ought to, (the voluntary opposition to society) which, in this case, might be the opposition to his own voice of heart once it has convinced itself that the fluttering chimes of the other have receded.

The fidelity exacted by society is a means to unfreedom, but only through fidelity can freedom acheive insubordination to society’s command.

In what I’m beginning to recognize as true Adornian fashion, the sublimation of all previous dialectical conversation condenses itself int he last line of his writing. There are two versions of fidelity at work in this sentence: the fidelity of b. society (which amounts to fidelity to b. society) and true fidelity. The lover as faithful to his own voice (ear?) of heart is he who is pacified by the material whims of reified love. This love isn’t really love at all. The fidelity to independence isn’t anything but a sad distortion of its true form.

The second fidelity in the concluding sentence is a very different thing; it is the fidelity to the other in spite of its voice of interest. It seems to be the fidelity to the greater good, to the real positing of oneself against society in hopes of sublimation.

—

The next time I talk about this, I think I might want to think about the way we think about love and relationships (maybe the b. notion of love has been to corroded from its true form that we cannot even recognize it…)

More for 44.

Here’s a stab at re-reading.

When philosophers, who are well known to have difficulty in keeping silent, engage in conversation, they should try always to lose the argument, but in such a way as to convict their opponent of untruth.

After discussing For Post-Socratics for well over an hour, I find that some of the passages are so seductively dense, that this deceptively short explication deserves even more concentration.

And since I would like to focus on the possibility (or misplaced hope for the possibility of) ethics in the Marxist tradition, the bit above was one of the most intriguing. Adorno, more than simply saying “don’t try to hammer your point into someone’s head with the intention of being “right,” he also gives a slightly positive sense of what *to* do.

I won’t attempt to specify the parameters of conversation (i.e.–whether I really should abandon converstions on my front stoop in a semi-intoxicated state with someone who insists that most everything is ironic). But let us move on, and say that I often engage in conversations that I will most assuredly lose. According to Adorno, I should always *try* to lose, but in the mean, make my case in such a way that the opposition (assuming that the opposition is fighting in terms of right and wrong) asks the questions, or refute my statements in such a way that they might expose his own assumptions and tautologies.

Let’s move on to another passage.

To say this is not, however, to advocate irrationalism, the postulation of arbitrary theses justified by an intuitive faith in revelation, but the abolition of the distinction between thesis and argument.

Here, again, is a high point in Adorno’s ethical discussion. It also seems to be concerned in making a case for itself, or securing itself within the limits of dialectics without sprawling too far out into the “irrational” realm of deconstruction. (There is more than relates to dialectics in 45, 46, and 47… I would like to continue this idea there.) Turning back to the ethical meaning of the passage, it offers a set of limits and demands for writing.

The thesis, Adorno goes on to say, should be more than “bridging concepts” in order to reduce things down to a manageable “truth.” The thesis should be able to stand alone on the strength of its fullness in reasoning. In Adorno’s words, “an argument should take on the pungency of a thesis and a thesis contain within itself the fullness of its reasoning… In a philosophical text all the propositions ought to be equally close to the center.”

This model of writing doesn’t seem to fit very well in the current undergraduate one (or at least *my* model of writing at the undergraduate level). But I will try to do less point-proving, and more explication.

Yes, yes; I’m sorry. Me, me, me.

One last thing for now: here I am, forcing out the “positive” advocatory elements in Adorno’s 44, when that is precisely what he calls for and end of.

One of the tasks of dialectical logic is to eliminate the last traces of a deductive system, together with the last advocatory gestures of thought.

In other words, if I were able to work completely within the method of dialectical logic, perhaps I wouldn’t bother at all to manipulate the “what to do” out of the Marxist tradition, at all. Maybe what-to-do is to learn to think dialectically.

Which might be a life’s work in it’s own.