tom wolfe-epictetus-frankfurt

[bob scheetz]

Christopher Gunn writes:
> 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.

Christopher, i believe we are roughly in the same camp,
but...
who's the kantian here?
...surely the above abstraction is a idealized formulation, no ?

lemme suggest for you, first,  "the 18th brumaire,"
for the method of historical materialist analysis,
and then mein kampf, the classic fascist exposition.

thence to comprehend the phenomenon, "fascism,"
as a form of popular governance which obtained
as an inexorable consequence of a set of objective
historical conditions
...as, for example, in germany:
(1) the defeat & destruction of whiggery
(traditional king & junker class allied with big bourgeois,  engineered by
bismark) by the war (ww1) with england for imperial primacy,
(2) the imposition by the victors of the versailles reparations
regimen of economic execution,
and finally (3) the abysmal failure of "weimar"
(the big bourgeois+ petit bourgeois idealist technicians)
in the cataclysm of the world economic depression.

German national socialism was a determination
of these concrete historical circumstances.
In the default of the other classes, a kinda pis aller,
a logical popular form generated to meet the ultimate raison d'etat,
survival.

mein kampf  describes the formation, sentimental
education, of the hero of the fascist form.
a youth, like pip, with great expectations, artist/architect,
forced to survive at the bottom of the urban food chain,
drilled in the tender mercies of the bourgeoisie during its period of
primitve industrial accumulation towards its proletariate, and finishing
with the most advanced course, the storm of steel, the immense atrocity of
ww1, confirmed in a perfection of contempt for the bourgeoisie and its
"humanism"; and initiated into the
secret heart of darkness of power.

fascism and communism are one historical name
for the opposing terms, reactionary - progressive,
of the proletarian intra-class political dialectic.
the particular details of reactionary populist ("fascist") expression,
as "exaggerated respect for authority," "aggression," etc.,
are a function of the specific historical conditions.
Thence, wm jenning bryant's "cross of gold" or patrick buchanan's
& ross perot's opposition to nafta/gatt &wetbacks
are not idealized expressions of gratuitous popular malignancy
(racists, red-necks, truck-drivers, crackers, greasers...nso on),
the accustomed class demonization,
(as opposed to bourgeois humanitarianism) against
jewish bankers or bean'rs, but the most basic exigencies
of working-class survival
...the "left" posture of extreme fastidiousness towards buchanan,
and such supposed supreme execrations as "fascist"
gainst him and tom wolfe,
merely express the conventional (pc) mind-set of
bourgeois liberalism.

anyway... enuf for now.

still find "man in full" (epictetus) and adorno a remarkable fit.


thanks,
bob


----- Original Message -----
From: Christopher Gunn <1k1mgm@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>
To: <frankfurt-school@lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 05, 2000 1:01 AM
Subject: Re: tom wolfe-epictetus-frankfurt


> 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.
>