Waning Sentimental

Less than a half an hour ago, I walked out of my French final. I am a free woman; goodbye Fall 2009. But I’m not at all happy about it. This semester was by the far the best experience I have ever had in my life. I learned how to read, how to think, how to write, how to teach.

But I know someone who would tell me that I already knew what I thought, I was already who I am, but I must take one small divergence from accepting that and say thank you to everyone in my life that assisted my education. Made my education what it is;

perhaps I shouldn’t address this entry in the second person informal–my teachers span continents, decades, often miss each other by whole lifetimes. The books they write were sometimes written for their times, but more often than not, they were written for this moment. Then there are my physically present teachers, I should call them my mentors, and without them, one in particular, I think I would have shut down and forgotten the whole bit completely.

To my friend, my housemate and person-I-can-always-convince-to-break-stupid-laws, thank you for writing with me and thank you for letting me be “cosmic” most of the time.

At the end of every Tuesday meeting for my independent study, I walked down the street, the same vacant, dirty, loud street–

There were the buildings, but they did not matter. The puddles on the side of the road, growing deeper. The way that I could walk in and out of sunshine. The frigid clouds billowing in the distance. The strip of sky above the avenue that could not, would not let itself be touched except by a spindling branch. And all the while, the new freeze washed over with the wind. Always brushing across my face, my hair on my cheek, guiding the fraying bits of daylight softly into my eyes. On the sidewalk I was triumphant.

For Post-Socratics

Minima Moralia’s no. 44:

Nothing is more unfitting for an intellectual resolved on practicing what was earlier called philosophy, than to wish, in discussion, and one might almost say in argumentation, to be right. The very wish to be right, down to its subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of that spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down.

The simplest explication for this is that being “right” is fundamentally un-dialectical. And since the task is always to explore what was formerly known as philosophy as far and wide as possible within the dialectical approach, being right is… totally wrong. Not only does wanting an absolutist form of *anything* to be accessable, one is enevitably always isolating and distilling the real problematic out of the equation, until the final result is something not too far off from a philosophy.

And what is the problem with that? In terms of philosophy, there is something always fundamentally exlusionary if it approaches all intellectual problems from so-and-so perspective; from one end to the other, something rarely able to move back on itself without proving some other distillation.

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 arguement. Dialectical thinking, from this point of view, means that an argument should take on the pungency of a thesis and a thesis contain in itself the fullness of its reasoning.

In a philosophical text all the propositions should be equally close to the center.

(And finally;)

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

What are these advocatory gestures of thought?

Notes on Minima Moralia’s Dedication:

What does it mean to pass from philosophy to method?

“To speak immediately of the immediate is to behave much as those novelists who drape their marionettes in imitated bygone passions like cheap jewelry, and make people who are no more than component parts of machinery act as if they still had the capacity to act as subjects, and as if something depended on their actions. Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the facts that there is life no longer.”

- When did we become component parts of machinery?

- When did we have the capacity to act as subjects (even if it is was, “old” subjects)?

- Since the date of this publication, has there been any evidence or theoretical argument for the “new” subject?

- What dehabilitates us from acting as subjects?

- What is this ideology that conceals from us our own misappropriated identity? How has the “new” subject false-identity managed to lag so far behind this ideology… or is it better said that the ideology is intended to supersede the idea of subject?

How can Adorno, or any other, manage to make something depend on his actions? (Is it at all possible, anymore?)

“A dim awareness that means and end are inverted have not been eradicated from life.”

“The sphere of consumption as the mere caricature of real life..”

-What is real life?

“Only by virtue of opposition to production, as still not wholly encompassed by this oder, can men bring our another more worthy of human beings.

-What is the virtue of opposition? (Is this the same as the opposition to mechanical production via ‘authentic’ production?)

-What new order will this bring out: new order of life, of production, of man? All?

“What subsists life is the opposition.”

“yet the subject’s considerations are false from the point of view of life as appearance…”

-Isn’t this a closed-circuit discussion? All considerations start from the subject? (I want to avoid being humanist at all costs, or do I? I certainly want to avoid the closed-circuit of existentialism, while understanding this paradox…)

“For since the overwhelming objectivity of historical movement in its present phase consists so far only in the dissolution of the subject, without yet giving rise to a new one, individual experience necessarily bases itself on the old subject, now historically condemned, which is still for-itself, but no longer in-itself.” (15-16)

-What is the dissolution of the subject?

-What is this “new” subject going to arrive? (Or is there only a death?)

-Individual experience necessarily bases itself on the old subject; why? (Is “real” individual experience impossible or fatal in this subject-less self?)

What is being-for-itself subjectivity?

Is there a difference between the subject and the individual?

(I am trying to understand what Adorno really thinks about Hegel’s not upholding his own standards in understanding the individual as the fundamental category. “For this reason, social analysis can learn incomparably more from individual experience than Hegel conceded, while conversely the large historical categories, after all that has meanwhile been perpetrated with their help, are no longer above suspicion of fraud.”

-Can the question of Hegel’s patriarchal dismissal of the individual really be corrected or completed in such simple terms as “the subject is the ultimate reflection of society?” or vice versa? Wouldn’t that denote a type of furthered inversion, and not a dialectic relationship, at all?)

“In the period of his decay, the individual’s experience of himself and what he encounters contributes once more to knowledge, which he had merely obscured as long as he continued unshaken to construe himself positively as the dominant category.”

-When was this period of decay? (Are we still in it? Is it the process of capitalism, in general?)

-”continued”- he does not anymore?

-what is positivity?

They are all intended to mark out points of attack or to furnish models for a future exertion of thought.

-Does it matter what this exertion was, is, or will be?

Necessitates that the parts of Minima Moralia do not altogether satisfy the demands of philosophy; and yet they are present, and survive. What does this mean for the ideal of “philosophy?” How does “ethics” fit, or not fit, as a fundamental, silent category into Marxism?

What does it mean to pass from philosophy to method?

“To speak immediately of the immediate is to behave much as those novelists who drape their marionettes in imitated bygone passions like cheap jewelry, and make people who are no more than component parts of machinery act as if they still had the capacity to act as subjects, and as if something depended on their actions. Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the facts that there is life no longer.”

- When did we become component parts of machinery?

- When did we have the capacity to act as subjects (even if it is was, “old” subjects)?

- Since the date of this publication, has there been any evidence or theoretical argument for the “new” subject?

- What dehabilitates us from acting as subjects?

- What is this ideology that conceals from us our own misappropriated identity? How has the “new” subject false-identity managed to lag so far behind this ideology… or is it better said that the ideology is intended to supersede the idea of subject?

How can Adorno, or any other, manage to make something depend on his actions? (Is it at all possible, anymore?)

“A dim awareness that means and end are inverted have not been eradicated from life.”

“The sphere of consumption as the mere caricature of real life..”

-What is real life?

“Only by virtue of opposition to production, as still not wholly encompassed by this oder, can men bring our another more worthy of human beings.

-What is the virtue of opposition? (Is this the same as the opposition to mechanical production via ‘authentic’ production?)

-What new order will this bring out: new order of life, of production, of man? All?

“What subsists life is the opposition.”

“yet the subject’s considerations are false from the point of view of life as appearance…”

-Isn’t this a closed-circuit discussion? All considerations start from the subject? (I want to avoid being humanist at all costs, or do I? I certainly want to avoid the closed-circuit of existentialism, while understanding this paradox…)

“For since the overwhelming objectivity of historical movement in its present phase consists so far only in the dissolution of the subject, without yet giving rise to a new one, individual experience necessarily bases itself on the old subject, now historically condemned, which is still for-itself, but no longer in-itself.” (15-16)

-What is the dissolution of the subject?

-What is this “new” subject going to arrive? (Or is there only a death?)

-Individual experience necessarily bases itself on the old subject; why? (Is “real” individual experience impossible or fatal in this subject-less self?)

What is being-for-itself subjectivity?

Is there a difference between the subject and the individual?

(I am trying to understand what Adorno really thinks about Hegel’s not upholding his own standards in understanding the individual as the fundamental category. “For this reason, social analysis can learn incomparably more from individual experience than Hegel conceded, while conversely the large historical categories, after all that has meanwhile been perpetrated with their help, are no longer above suspicion of fraud.”

-Can the question of Hegel’s patriarchal dismissal of the individual really be corrected or completed in such simple terms as “the subject is the ultimate reflection of society?” or vice versa? Wouldn’t that denote a type of furthered inversion, and not a dialectic relationship, at all?)

“In the period of his decay, the individual’s experience of himself and what he encounters contributes once more to knowledge, which he had merely obscured as long as he continued unshaken to construe himself positively as the dominant category.”

-When was this period of decay? (Are we still in it? Is it the process of capitalism, in general?)

-”continued”- he does not anymore?

-what is positivity?

They are all intended to mark out points of attack or to furnish models for a future exertion of thought.

-Does it matter what this exertion was, is, or will be?

Necessitates that the parts of Minima Moralia do not altogether satisfy the demands of philosophy; and yet they are present, and survive. What does this mean for the ideal of “philosophy?” How does “ethics” fit, or not fit, as a fundamental, silent category into Marxism?

A contribution

As the ancient peoples went through their pre-history in imagination, in mythology, so we Germans have gone through our post-history in thought, in philosophy. We are philosophical contemporaries of the present without being its historical contemporaries. German philosophy is the ideal prolongation of German history. If therefore, instead of the oeuvres incompletes of our real history, we criticize the  oeuvres posthumes of our ideal history, philosophy our criticism is in the midst of the questions of which the preset says: that is the question. What, in progressive nations, is a practical break with modern state conditions, is, in Germany, where even those conditions do not yet exist, at first a critical break with the philosophical reflexion of those condition.

…

It is wrong, not in its demand but in stopping at the demand, which it neither seriously implements nor can implement. It believes that it implements that negation by turning its back to philosophy and its head away from it and muttering a few trite and angry phrases about it. Owing to the limitation of its outlook, it does not include philosophy in the circle of German reality or it even fancies it is beneath German practice and the theories that serve it. You demand that rea like embryos be made the starting-point, but you forget that the real life embryo of the German nation has grown so far only inside its cranium. In a word- You cannot abolish philosophy without making it a reality.

The same mistake, but with the factors reversed was made by the theorectical party originating from philosophy.

(A Contributioin to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of right 1844, Marx)

The demand. What are the demands of Marxism? Is there any one demand that reaches beyond all others; an “orthodox” demand?

“To change it.” To change the way things are; to break beyond philosophy. But how, in what ways and through which modes?

Is there any perceptible Marxian “ethics?” Obviously, if there is such a thing, this term and idea are really just starting points, and not end results, since Marxian ethics would completely dismantle itself and reveal itself as a philosophy. But there is a struggle; a constant secret churning of lumpy gravy, whose connecting material seems incomplete and peered at through blind-spots. Whose lumps have condensed over and around themselves, but also wanting to be pulled out and stirred in, again.

The “radical” call to arms; violent pamphlets and pamphlets circulating in the early 21st century are in some ways, the most direct “ethics” one might find in the field. But what is to all this dancing around? All of these incomplete formal works in the French tradition- twenty, thirty years ago written and since forgotten. But always, and now, revisited.

Yesterday, I said something quite stupid. But I am lucky that I said it. “I thought that I should be mature and get over the lack of “ethics” in Marxism. There is no getting over it; it must be explored. I have no hopes, I have no hypotheses– the empty space of ethics in Marxism has many caked fingerprints along the edges, and few within.

What is this black hole? And what do these fluorescent marks point to?