tom wolfe-epictetus-frankfurt

[Christopher Gunn]

At 10:11 PM 5/3/00 -0400, bob scheetz <rscheetz@cboss.com> wrote:

Bob, I'm having trouble figuring out where you're coming from.  You're
making what mathematicians or logicians would call a 'sign error' on almost
everything you say.  -B instead of B;  13 instead of -13;  0 degrees
instead of 180 degrees.  I don't believe that you're being insincere or
being a provocateur.  I think instead that you've made a fundamental
ontological error in a Kantian direction, to such an extent that you no
longer even see your viewpoint in any kind of dialectic tension with Marx
(and ultimately Hegel).  As such, you've got yourself in a spot where you
can't even see what they (and I) are even talking about.  Don't feel bad
about this, people like Habermas and Rorty have taken the same wrong train,
along with just about everybody who tries to imagine that they're both
"Left" and "Postmodern."  (The latter isn't impossible but it's damned hard
even for folks who are pretty good theoretically--e.g. Foucault dying of
AIDS while defending the Iranian fundamentalists as they stoned homosexuals
to death....)  After all:  if reflexive subjectivity is ALL there is, then
why bother with emancipation?  There's nothing to emancipate but your mind.
 If it feels good, do it, right?

The only real cure is to read the "Paris Manuscripts," _The German
Ideology_, and at the very least Chapter 1 of _Capital_ over and over
again, in sequence, until you've got a grip on what alientated labor is and
what it is that people need to be emancipated *from*.  An alternative is to
get back to the real Frankfurt stuff, i.e., what Adorno, Horkheimer, Reich,
Marcuse, Fromm had to say prior to about 1950 (prior to the writing of _The
Dialectic of Enlightenment_ for A & H).  For Horkheimer, try his essay
"Egoism and the Freedom Movements" (or a title close to that), which
happens to be on exactly the topic you're discussing....  Or just do what I
try to get some of my working-class students to do:  read Fromm's _Escape
from Freedom_ slowly and carefully.  Fromm is soft-pedaling the Marx even
in 1941 so you have to read between the lines in places, but his points are
still valid.

There's no law that you have to be vividly Red to be a Critical Theorist,
but you need to have at least some echo of the early Horkheimer's rage at
discovering "a conspiracy against happiness," and an awareness that (a) the
nature of the conspiracy is human domination of other humans;  (b) that the
key mechanism of domination in the contemporary world is alienated labor,
and (c) what we call the whole package is "capitalism."  There are many
ways to be a happy capitalist in today's world, even a happy worker, and
those ways are expanding all the time!  It's what Tom Wolfe calls "a
Happiness Explosion!  Frisbee!!"  But if you don't see how that's exactly
precisely opposed to Critical Theory then I'm not sure what I can say at
this point beyond the reading I've suggested above.  Maybe Kellner's
_Critical Theory_ overview book, too.

I'm not trying to be patronizing here.  I just don't know what to do or say.

[A plea for help:  does anybody know JUST WHERE Horkheimer uses the phrase
"conspiracy against happiness."  I'm about 96% sure I really read it in a
Horkheimer text but now I can't find it.  Maybe it's Kellner or Bob Antonio
or somebody instead, but it sure *sounds* like Horkheimer, doesn't it?]

>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.)
>...actually that would be trotskyist and maoist, no?

No, I've thought about it a bit and decided it would be 100% big F Fascist,
that it would be Franco's columns marching in after Garcia Lorca shouting
"Viva la Muerte!"  What is it you want or need here?  Try to ask yourself,
"What's wrong with this picture?"

>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.

He was right that Stalinism competing with capitalism could only become a
kind of state-central capitalism....  But empirically Stalinism wasn't
vulgar liberalism but allied with Fascism, almost like the mainstream
political scientists said at one point.  Sam McFarland and collaborators
administered a Russian version of Bob Altemeyer's Right-Wing
Authoritarianism scale to old Stalinists in the former Soviet Union and
found their scores extremely high, in the same territory as former SS men
and active British Silver Shirts of another era.

>Similarly, the cry for a cultural rev  is thee only consistent and
>intellectually honest left position;

End of capitalism?

>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.

Don't we wish!  At Harvard, maybe.  The rest of us are teaching mice that
the snakes are their FRIENDS.  Maybe, slipped in amongst the crap, we can
teach 'em a few mongoose moves, although I've got to be in a better mood
than I am today to believe that's possible.

>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.

You have a clue here, in suggesting that the American Right has Calvinist,
otherworldly strains and that a non-Calvinist rightist (like Pat Buchanan)
seems somehow weird, even--some deluded people think--kind of Left.  It's
true that a Hitler or a Franco wouldn't resonate with North Americans....
But that doesn't mean we can't talk intelligently about fascism or even
Fascism in a contemporary or American context.  One of the things I do for
a living is study authoritarianism and its expressions.  Find an F scale
(Adorno's or a new one like Altemeyer's) and tell me what high scorers are
up to....  I use 'fascism' in a narrow and technical sense of a political
movement to close or cover up the contradictions of liberal (really,
Liberal) capitalism by a 'binding together' of an imaginary People through
the specific authoritarian expressions of exaggerated submission to
authority, exaggerated aggression against "outsiders," and the valorization
of an imaginary "conventionality" in which name all is done.  I'm not sure
it's possible to be more specific.

And no, people like Wolfe don't expect to be down at the rallies.  Elitists
of that sort prescribe fascism for the masses so that they'll leave the
better sort of people alone.