Why is that?

[kenneth.mackendrick]

I was talking with my friend Scully yesterday over a 
cigarette (or two), a coffee, and a couple of beers and 
we wondered why the Frankfurt List, in general, has 
such an adverse reaction to examining concrete 
issues.  I've been looking over the last 200 or so posts 
and have found a disturbing trend...

Each time someone introduces a concrete issue - 
whether hip-hop, banking, advertising, works of art, 
pensions, or the automotive industry - a series of posts 
dump all over it - some of the responses include 
identifying the concrete issues as elitist, meaningless, 
useless, unimportant, outmoded, missing the point, 
wrong, misunderstood, universalist, utopian, triffle, 
abstact, puzzling, escapist, undialectical, positivist, 
pseudo-issues, lumpen, unreasonable, irrational, 
ambiguous, indeterminate, regressive, ideological, 
false forms of consciousness, ignorant, exclusive, 
bullshit, masterbatory, secondary, of little concern, 
misguided, uninformed, ironic, and laughable... just to 
name a few.

Now I'm sure, as I look through these assorted posts, 
that I have made my fair share these comments - but I 
wonder here why there is such hostility or disregard for 
concrete issues in favour of the more abstract 
questions about freedom, reason, dialectics, eggheads, 
proles, truth etc. in contradistinction to more 
substantial issues - like the speculatory practices of 
the stock market, the laws against homosexuality, the 
legal toleration of poverty, minimum wage, the use of 
technology, gender, history...  It is not that the posts 
start out so abstractly - but they always seem to end up 
there... not that abstraction is a bad thing - but it tends 
to blur what is actually going on in most instances.

And yes - this is another abstract question to attract the 
attention of the more theoretically obsessed.  Since 
this was brought to my attention - i just thought i'd 
share the concern... and try to wrap my thoughts 
around yet another problem...  Why is that?  Why do I 
do that?  I suspect it has something to do with going 
after the whole via the particular - but in these cases it 
does not seem that issues are discussed with enough 
sensitivity to the details to warrant such a leap.

yours in abstraction and finitude,
ken