The Division of Labour, Revisited

[Dennis R Redmond]

> I assert that any "dialectical method" will result in a
> bad infinity which BY DEFINITION excludes reconciliation, and can thus
> produce nothing but a perpetual "negative dialectic". Immanent criticism
> proceeds on the basis of real convictions and commitments. In immanent
> criticism we criticize OUR OWN convictions and commitments on the basis
> of experience which shows them to be self-contradictory. Those
> convictions and commitments are expressed in action, but they must be
> articulated and made adequate to reflection when the current
> articulation proves inadequate upon experience. 

Negative dialectics, in Adorno's sense, is not strictly immanent but has a
transcendent moment as well: the moment of objectivity, or the concrete
negation of what exists. It may seem perpetual, but that's only the
subjective side of the ledger: the prison-cell of the subject, or the
moment of shock and horror when we cognize just how twisted the reality of
late capitalism is (I usually get this whenever I read the planet-raping
tirades of the Wall Street Journal, and realize that the ruling-class
really is a bunch of noxious vermin, fundamentally hostile to the 
perpetuation of biological life on this planet), is indeed a kind of bad 
infinity, which has given rise to vast swathes of dessicated theory and
the opiates of the consumer culture. But the flip side of this
is, infinity is measureable only in context with the finite: the fleeting,
fragmentary moments of utopia, which are always rooted in subjective
experience (which also has an aesthetic component: the use-values and 
new subjectivities which capitalism unwittingly creates). Adorno's point
is that you can't simply denounce the negatives and praise the positives
of capitalism, as a moral or ethical discourse generally does (i.e.
blaming greedy people instead of a system of greed); rather, you have to
think through both poles at the same time, simultaneously, i.e. critique
both poles at once. False utopias are just as lethal as false dystopias.
This can be painful, but acknowledging this pain is also, I think,
part of paying our "dues" as (mostly) First World intellectuals, with the 
time and wherewithal to think through the class struggle on the most
advanced telecommunications network in the world: where we experience 
passing negativities, our activist comrades in the Second and Third 
Worlds experience the most terrible corporeal brutalization. Which doesn't
mean their struggles are "truer" than ours, just that they use less
capital-intensive and more labor-intensive weaponry; in reality,
information and the mass media are the heaviest artillery of them all
(which is why multinational capital takes such pains to monopolize such, 
and why list-servers such as this are an important step forwards for a
putative global Left).

Theory is the class struggle of subjectivity, aesthetics is the class
struggle of experience; negative dialectics is the plug-and-play software
by which each can communicate its specific insights to the other, and
by no means a ready-made agenda in its own right. 

-- Dennis