NEGATIVE DIALECTICS (1)

[Hector Rottweiller Jr.'s Place]

Ralph writes (By the way -- I'm Curtiss, the account is "Hector"):

> In a related matter, I do not understand the implications Hector draws out
> of the following statement:
> 
> At 06:33 PM 3/3/98 -0500, Hector Rottweiller Jr.'s Place wrote:
> >If philosophy isn't identical to itself, then its claims to
> >primacy -- and I don't know Heideigger too well, but it seems the 
> >primacy of philosophy was very much on his agenda -- have to be 
> >disregarded or at least viewed with suspicion.

	Adorno is an anti-foundationalist; he doesn't try to ground his
philosophy in a theory of knowledge or theory of being.  Heideigger,
as far as I can tell, tried to ground philosophy on a theory of being,
and wanted to establish or re-establish its eminence as the foundation
of the sciences.  In the _Jargon of Authenticity_, Adorno notes that
instead of being primary, such a theory of being is instead the philosophical
expression of a specific social tendency, namely an "intellectual 
anti-intellectualism" with conformist, repressive, and finally fascist
intentions.  If the _Jargon_ shows Adorno exposing the social 
characteristics of the authentics, _ND_ shows Adorno attacking the 
authentics philosophically, and the opening of that attack is to
wreck ontology's claim that philosophy is about the self-identical
and is itself self-identical ("being of Being" is Heideigger's murky phrase,
isn't it?).  So if ontology isn't the bedrock foundation of thought,
ontology's covert political agenda can't claim any sort of primacy.
But as the opening sentence of _ND_ makes clear, philosophy and reason
still have a role to play, but a role within history and the division of 
labor; Adorno may debunk philosophy's pretentions, but he is also out to
salvage philosophy's use-value.

Regarding Ralph's comment:

> ...a great percentage of academic theorizing in many schools of
> thought--postmodernist, Habermasian, or the stuff you find right here--is
> also naive in spite of the morbid self-reflexiveness that accompanies it,
> because everyone is convinced that this sort of theorizing is what it
> purports to be.  

I think I know what these "strong identity claims"  are, but I'm not sure.
Post-whatever thought, at least as I've been exposed to it, may have 
officially renounced any foundational or primary claims, but its practitioners
*behave* as if philosophy's authority had been established once and for all.
If anyone wants an example, I could site Samuel Weber's keynote lecture 
at the conference "From Enlightenment to Dialectics" last week.  Under the
guise of making Adorno a proto-deconstructionist, he attempted to bleed
all the definite, political content from the critique of the Culture 
Industry -- at one point saying that the nightmare of the Culture
Industry was "the nightmare of reading and writing," not Capitalism!
It got even worse: because of seeming inconsistencies in Adorno's use of
terms denoting interiority and exteriority, part and whole, Weber concluded
that the critique of the Culture Industry couldn't hold.  Nutty stuff.

--
Curtiss Leung
hncl@panix.com