[FRA:] Marcuse question

[Ralph Dumain]

I can see how pointless a further debate on this subject is going to 
be.  For the record, here are two viewpoints on DofE:

Jeffrey Herf on Reactionary Modernism & Dialectic of Enlightenment
http://www.autodidactproject.org/quote/herf1.html

R. Dumain's Critique of Dialectic of Enlightenment
http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/dofe.html

I'm ore interested in pursuing the differences between Horkheimer and 
Adorno that are broached at severl points in essays in ON MAX HORKHEIMER, 
as well as comments on the coherence of Horkheimer's interdisciplinary 
program of the '30s.  I still don't buy your characterization of "Tradional 
and Critical Theory" as paranoid.

I just ordered a cheap copy of Dubiel's _Theory and Politics: Studies in 
the Development of Critical
Theory_, which looks to be right up my alley with respect to Horkheimer's 
program.

At 06:31 PM 2/24/2006 +0000, simon smith wrote:
>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