[FRA:] Marcuse question

[simon smith]

In message <200602232351.k1NNpIxT011666 at electra.cc.umanitoba.ca>, 
Kenneth MacKendrick <kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca> writes
>but what seems to have disappeared is the historical concreteness that 
>Ralph is concerned about. The excursus is metaphysical - Adorno and 
>Horkheimer don't really deny that - and it is metaphorical "that cannot 
>survive being taken literally."

I like Simon Jarvis' notion of 'serious play' to describe what Adorno 
and Horkheimer are doing in the excursus. "The account of 
'enlightenment'... is not an account of a historical period, however 
broad, but an attempt to decipher the pre-history of our own 
instrumental rationality..." (Jarvis 'Adorno' p26.) Odysseus' offended 
pride at the idea that his hand-crafted bed could be moved, when, as he 
explains in great detail - over 18 lines - how he fashioned it all by 
_himself_ is really quite odd, and the leap of imagination with which 
Adorno compares his attitude to the property-owning DIY hobbyist, who 
uses his privileged spare time to do as a hobby what to his underlings 
is a means for survival, is both comic and as Jarvis puts it, 
'burlesque'.
Is this the sort of thing 'that cannot survive being taken literally'?

  "... the essay's innermost formal law is heresy. Through violations of 
the orthodoxy of thought, something in the object becomes visible which 
it is orthodoxy's secret and objective aim to keep invisible"
"The Essay as Form" (Notes to Literature p 23)

-- 
Simon Smith




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