EXPRESSIVE TOTALITY?

[Licensed User]

Martin,
I'd say it is just off-track to frame the questions as you do, for A & H, at least, never quite subscribe to a Lukacsian notion of totality, expressive or otherwise, let alone to Althusser's version of it.  Remember for Adorno, the whole is the untrue, an
d I think this is fully implicit in the "mid-period" as well.  And I think you can find in both Benjamin and Adorno, at least (and my Marcuse is sadly weak and forgotten),  a profound and ethically driven antipathy to positing, to thinking via a first-pri
nciple.   Adorno's whole project in re philosophy and dialectics is get round doing just that in any form.  Rather than seeing DofE as beginning with, or even utilizing, a "single generating idea" to express some totality called the Enlightenment or moder
nity, I'd say look at that "bleak" and brilliantly complicated book as a constellation.  A constellation that turns upon several "generative" ideas or concepts, but which are also not merely concepts but meant to refer, albeit imperfectly, to very real, h
istorical forces: reason (instrumental, dialectical, and perhaps other forms, but also reason as such); patriarchy; the law of value; bureaucratization or administration; reification; mimesis; libido in/and the ego. (Of course one can disagree with the it
ems I've  just put down in this quick laundry list.)  I think you can say the constellation of these concepts does serve a larger purpose: to approximate -- as opposed to "name" or "express" --  "the" dialectic of Enlightenment (and yet even this dialecti
c, which can look like a spiral of the worser and worser, is not quite tidy, or is still in process).   This is to say the argument of the book is not simply, or perhaps not at all, cause-and-effect, which I think the notion of "expression" must presuppos
e.  To think via a constellation is, I'd say, more of a spatial logic, or closer to overdetermination than anything else.   I've found Susan Buck-Morss's book, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, quite illuminating about these issues of method, as well as 
Gillian Rose's Melancholy Science.  
Hope you find some of this of interest.

"But true revolutionary practice depends on the intransigence of theory in the face of the insensibility with which society allows thought to ossify." (DofE, 41)

Best,
Daniel Vukovich
Dept. of English
University of Ilinois at Urbana Champaign
Urbana IL 61801
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From: 	Martin Spaul[SMTP:mspaul@vaxe.anglia.ac.uk]
Sent: 	Thursday, October 03, 1996 2:56 AM
To: 	frankfurt-school@jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Subject: 	Re: EXPRESSIVE TOTALITY?

Now that we've all (me, especially) have been straightened out on the
basic provenance and definition of 'expressive totality', can we take
a look at what it means in terms of practical critique?

Is it right to see mid-period Frankfurt School critique (Dialectic of
Enlightenment, One-Dimensional Man, etc.) as driven by the idea that
modernity is an 'expression' of the basic idea of instrumentalism and
total administration? Or is this a misuse of 'expressive totality'?

This sort of 'single generating idea' critique doesn't seem to be
restricted to the (overt) Hegelian tradition. For example, Lewis Mumford's
idea that the clock was the defining technology of the industrial
revolution has spawned attempts to characterise modern technology, and the
life form that goes with it, as driven by the urge to subdivide and
regularise time and space (... I suppose we are also straying into
Foucault's territory here). Would this be an appropriate instance of
'expressive totality'?

Martin Spaul