[FRA:] Marcuse question

[Catherine Liu]

Individualism is a dialectical category -- arising out of triumphal 
bourgeois consciousness -- it has been instrumentalized by cultural 
industry.

I think what's missing from this critique of the critique of 
individualism is the mediating reification.

What Adorno is criticizing is the REIFICATION of individualism. Even 
critiques of conformity as has been discovered can be reified, but 
that doesn't mean we cease to be vigilant about it.

What can be forged as a form of resistance against reificaition and 
conformity can only take place at the level of the individual -- the 
historical agency of the proletariat is something that Adorno 
rejected in Vulgar Marxism. Marx himself knew that history is often 
made behind the backs of the triumphal and revolutionary class.

So if you're saying that we are criticizing reified Individualism in 
exactly the same way as Adorno and each other, I would say that is 
correct and a happy thing, for at the same time happiness takes place 
in a thinking in which everyone can participate.

To demand of each of us a particular, i.e. individual mode of 
criticizing individualism is absurd.

-- 
Catherine Liu
Visiting Associate Professor
Film and Media / Visual Studies
235 Humanities Instructional Building
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA  92697-2435
tel: (949) 824-2428
fax: (949) 824-2464

http://www.higher-yearning.org/blog.html