tom wolfe-epictetus-frankfurt

[bob scheetz]

Christopher Gunn writes:
>...That was the key point of Wolfe's
> ca. 1975 essay I mentioned earlier.  (I think the magazine title was "An
> Intelligent Coed's Guide to College," by the way.  He concluded with the
> view that idle Leftishness was really the cause of Stalinoid horrors and
> with the ultra-Right proposal that colleges and universities should be
shut
> down for a generation until such faddishness can be purged from the
> Culture.  It seems to me that this is about as close to Blood and Soil
> small-f fascism as you can find in the American mainstream, and it was the
> point at which I gave up dealing with Wolfe as an author.)

Christopher,
...actually that would be trotskyist and maoist, no?
Clearly, the non-events (literally not a shot fired in anger)
of '91, the dissolution of USSR, prove,
that stalinism was all along simply another species
(poor-man) of liberalism,... that trotsky was right.
Similarly, the cry for a cultural rev  is thee only consistent and
intellectually honest left position;
No one wants to commit economic suicide,
but the sense everywhere, ie in the humanities,  is
that there is no intellectually untenable moral justification for the
continued existence of bourgeois academia;
...a shit-faced recognition that all yer doing
is helping train up snakes to eat mice.

Furthermore, appears yer using "fascist"
(after all, a bogey only for babbittry) in a polemical sense.
It is surely a retrograde form; but, as emphatically, a populism;
ie, very much an anti bourgeois capitalism.
And, in any (lower or upper) case i can't feature wolfe
nor epictetus in this bible-belt/blood-n-soil
mystical brotherhood;...heidegger and pound, yes.

gotta be all fer now,
thanks,
bob

----- Original Message -----
From: Christopher Gunn <1k1mgm@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>
To: <frankfurt-school@lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, May 03, 2000 1:26 AM
Subject: Re: tom wolfe-epictetus-frankfurt


> At 10:46 PM 5/2/00 -0400, bob scheetz <rscheetz@cboss.com> wrote:
> >... nice topic for the eve of kent state, no?
> >
> >This year's speaker is to be an electronic mumia.
> >I guess we know what would be wolfe's opinion
> >of this kinda  lumpen-loving faker-leftist bourgeois liberalism;
> >but, can we imagine adorno's, an any less towering contempt?
>
> Well, by late in his life this had become one of his big hairy problems,
> and his own micro-Kent-State (calling the cops on his own student
> protesters) was a kind of case in point.  I'm not as dismissive of the
> "late Adorno" as a lot of people and I'm not convinced his overall
> life-project diverged that much;  specifically, _The Jargon of
> Authenticity_ ought to be on more reading lists as an antidote to what may
> have Adorno's real late-life vexation:  the tendency of people to adopt
> emancipatory-*sounding* rhetoric for personal aggrandizement and
> snob-value, with the result that emancipatory goals become subverted or
> [worst] cynically and reflexively turned into their opposites.
>
> (I should add that I can use this insight at least to make peace with some
> of Adorno's views of music.  I'm not convinced that he disliked, say, jazz
> as a musical form as much as he hated the Jazz Buff and the whole emergent
> hipness industry.  I hope I'm making the obvious point that Adorno not
only
> hated commodification of dissent, he particularly hated those who went
> around with reflexive "Commodify Your Dissent" buttons in order to exempt
> themselves from the process. )
>
> Now, this of course is also one of Wolfe's main themes and one of his main
> criticisms of the political and especially "cultural" Left:  the Left as
an
> idle consumer commodity, a way for pathetic framing-shop clerks to feel
> like the Conscious Element in History.  That was the key point of Wolfe's
> ca. 1975 essay I mentioned earlier.  (I think the magazine title was "An
> Intelligent Coed's Guide to College," by the way.  He concluded with the
> view that idle Leftishness was really the cause of Stalinoid horrors and
> with the ultra-Right proposal that colleges and universities should be
shut
> down for a generation until such faddishness can be purged from the
> Culture.  It seems to me that this is about as close to Blood and Soil
> small-f fascism as you can find in the American mainstream, and it was the
> point at which I gave up dealing with Wolfe as an author.)
>
> Now, what this means is that I haven't read _The Right Stuff_, _The
Bonfire
> of Vanities_, and _A Man in Full_, and that I have no intention of plowing
> through 2000+ pages of what I regard as drivel.  But on the basis of
> Wolfe's earlier work I will proceed as follows....
>
> Wolfe's model of human life basically goes beyond naturalism to a kind of
> biologicism.  He sees humans as a particularly nasty species of ape that
> has infested the globe and now struts around with Ideology and Morality
and
> big cars and Ivy League degrees and trophy wives that serve the same
> purpose and identical as baboon's purple asses and eye-markings:
> power-symbols to ward off fang-slashing fights over women, tasty tubers,
> and antelope carcasses.  (See Wolfe's "ecological" sketches in his first
> few essay collections if you have any doubts about this.)  Almost all of
us
> can spot and reject this model when it dresses up in sociobiological garb.
> It even has a sociological manifestation that I consider interesting
> although at heart wrong (see Harrison White, _Identity and Control_).
>
> But Wolfe's take on this is ultimately Romanticized, eroticized, and in my
> opinion fascist.  I can perhaps best explain this by comparing his views
> with those of the filmmaker David Lynch (take _Blue Velvet_ or _Wild at
> Heart_ as the key expressions here).  Lynch, like Wolfe, sees mankind as a
> type of nasty ape;  Lynch sees "civilization" as what we do so we won't
see
> the bugs under the lawn and the unimaginably *worse* things that humans do
> to each other, one-on-one and in groups.
>
> At this point I have to fall back on a literary rather than critical
> understanding:  Lynch ultimately takes a *tragic* view of this situation
> (even though his techniques are often comic).  He uses his films to hook
> the viewers with a voyeuristic look at how *others* behave in [literally]
> beastly ways and then wraps the matter around until we understand that his
> critique is not that "civilization" is there to keep us from seeing what's
> around us but that it's there to keep each of us from seeing who he/she
> *is*.  Which is why Lynch at his best gets us leaving the theater with a
> bad case of the creeps.  [Adorno would say that this enterprise is (a)
> impossible, and (b) pure crap masquerading as art, but, hey, what the
hell;
>  these are debased times.]
>
> Wolfe, on the other hand, doesn't have a tragic bone in his body (at least
> in what I've read) and regards humanity and those stuck in its delusions
> with contempt.  He tickles our postmodern sensibilities by not explicitly
> exempting himself and friends and insisting that all knowledge is
> perspectival, nobody here but us chickens, BUT at heart he winds up
> worshiping Form, Power, Control, Discipline.  In true paleo-conservative
he
> argues that yes, we're nasty animals, but Bound Together--while we can
> never *be* more--we can *create* more.  This is at best beer-hall Stoicism
> and I use the term "beer-hall" with all the attached symbolism.... I
> suppose you can argue that it's no worse than George Will on a bad day,
but
> I'm inclined to see what people like Stephen Holmes (with whom I don't
> agree on most things, by the way) call "hard anti-liberal."  I.e., Karl
> Schmitt or in a more Romantic vein T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound.  Is this
> untrue?  Are you willing to take what look to me like instances shallow
> sentimentality in the late Wolfe and pump them up into some kind of
> humanitarianism?
>
> >"Man in Full" construes this form under the aspect of farik fanon,
> >trivialization of wretched-of-earth rage into football superstar rapist,
and
> >the pol (cf jesse championing the illinois high-school hooligans) who
> >opportunistically demagogues this criminality.
> >
> >Anyway, yer "friendly-fascist" thesis, i agree,
> >has been long the accepted wisdom on the left;
> >but, still seems really hard to square with this novel.
> >And wouldn't it be our shame to miss recognizing
> >an authentic postmodern consciousness,
> >a liberating and dignifying mirroring?
> >Conrad's hands unmistakably mark him for a prole
> >...as the epictetus is clearly meant for
> >an authentic exploited-class consciousness,
> >(comradeship, resistance, struggle,... )
> >rising to a kinda salvific everyman religion.
> >
> >...what fascism?
>
> My esteemed academic advisor, David Norman Smith at the Univ. of Kansas,
> has argued informally that a really good Critical Theorist has about 15
> years of first-rate work in him before he suffers an almost inevitably
> failure of nerve....  How long can you live with the contradictions of the
> dialectic of modernity, the awareness that your best and most sincere work
> will probably make things worse rather than better.  Smith and I see the
> core, key work of Critical Theory as happening from the late '20s when
> Fromm and Reich came on board until the early '50s, when _The
Authoritarian
> Personality_ capped the Franks' work stateside and Adorno and Horkheimer
> went back to Germany to wrestle with their own demons (and lose more often
> then win, at that point).
>
> The key issue for the Frankfurters' prior to nerve failure was a massive
> adherence to the Hegel side of the Hegel/Kant divide, an insistence on the
> ontological reality of the social.  Humans by their daily concrete
activity
> in their actual lives wake up to a built-world of domination and reproduce
> the domination both consciously and unconsciously.  "Men make their own
> history only *not* just as they please";  Horkheimer:  "Humans by their
own
> action reproduce the tools of their own enslavement."  Similarly, people
> reproduce the micro-history of their own familial tragedies and in doing
so
> make themselves incapable of seeing the extent to which they are not free.
> This is the basic Marx + Freud equation and without it you don't really
> have Critical Theory, just it's frightened Kantian academic successor.  If
> you take away from Critical Theory an insistence on the
> hard ontological reality of the macro-social (Marx) and the micro-social
> (Freud) then you're left with a bucket of mush.  Might be good mush
> (_Jargon of Authenticity_) but it's not Critical Theory at its best.
>
> From this viewpoint "postmodern consciousness" is not "liberating and
> dignifying" but evasive and ultimately contemptuous.  That is what I
> believe Wolfe is not only saying, but embracing.
>
> We should perhaps take this discussion to private e-mail unless there are
> some signs of outside interest soon.....
>