Bronner on Dialectic of Enlightenment

[matthew piscioneri]

And Marx's philosophy of history ISN'T about abstract dynamics:

>Marx has been abandoned in favor of Nietzsche.  The book neglects concrete 
>institutions and qualitative distinctions.  Instead, there is an abstract 
>dynamic in play by which enlightenment reinstitutes myth (that it 
>submerged) through instrumental reason.

It probably wasn't composed in the luxurious surrounds of Bronner's 
state-capitalist provided office suite:

>There are no distinctions or qualifications in this analysis; it overlooks 
>actual movements as well as the Counter-Enlightenment. What we get is an 
>anthropological fog: "the metapolitical obliterates the political."  (E.g. 
>analysis of Odysseus.)  Also simplistic and wrong assertions such as 
>liberal theory is de facto apologia for the existing order.

>A D/E sequel never materialized.  Why?  Probably because the authors had 
>nothing "positive" to say.  D/E was based on a metapolitical and 
>metahistorical approach, viewing social organization as a seamless 
>administrative totality, reified, without qualification.  Here were the 
>roots of negative dialectic, aversion to the student movement.  "1968" 
>could be viewed as the inversion of D/E: anti-consumerist, 
>anti-instrumental-reason, and too metapolitical itself in its conception of 
>revolution.

It sounds to me like Bronner belongs to the whingeing historical-status 
seeking class of '68. You know the sort: in '68 we raised the barricades in 
Berkeley. Just another attempt to write history from a baby-boomer 
perspective. Poor babies. Just imagine having to bear the neglect of 
history...no-one understands what we did, why aren't we in the history books 
of resistance.

To be fair, earlier today I was thinking that following the slaughter of the 
working class on the battlefields of France that inspired the revolutionary 
moment of the 1916-1920s, the 1960s did come closest to making that moment 
happen again. What happened? Ralph you got wasted and pampered in the 1970s. 
That's what happened. So maybe Stephen has a point. I hope you gave it to 
him as good as you gave it to poor old Bruno Latour. Now there's an enemy of 
the working classes if ever there was one. You should be ashamed of 
yourself.

>I shall keep this in mind when I can find time for D/E.

You are so frigid Ralph. Read D/E for god's sake :-).

MattP.

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