Christian Thorne • Commonplace Book

Very interesting site recently brought to my attention.  Between articles and the new translation work on Adorno'sNegative Dialectics, very worthwhile.

Christian Thorne • Commonplace Book

I do not exactly agree with his points about Marx's relation to ontology, as I do not think Marx is a deflationary thinker and hence we cannot replace the word "materialism" with "pragmatism" without accepting the Kantian transcendental move.

His point that Marx is close to Pyrrhonic skepticism is spot on, but Hegel was also an admirer and supporter of the same Pyrrhonic skepticism, as is evident from his reading of it in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy.  However, this is important in part because that skepticism does not throw out truth in the post-Kantian manner or in a way similar to the skepticism of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Some Notes on Things I've Been Reading

Reclaiming Work, Andre Gorz, 1999

This is an exceptionally interesting little book which affirms my conviction that Andre Gorz remains one of the most overlooked radical thinkers of the late 20th century.  I will post some notes on here as soon as I can transcribe them.


Interview with Anselm Jappe at the Brooklyn Rail

"Value cannot be created by decree, only by a real labor process—and it has to be “productive labor” in the capitalist sense (that means that it does not only consume capital but helps to reproduce it). Money can be created by decree—but when it does not correspond to the real amount of labor that it is supposed to “represent,” it has no “substance” and loses its value through some form of inflation (although for decades now the explosion of massive inflation has been deferred by parking large sums of fictitious capital in stock markets, real estate markets, and so on). Here the Critique of Value finds itself in sharp contrast to nearly all left-wing economists, who are generally just neo-Keynesians."

The point I put in italics is really what I find interesting vis-a-vis the notion of productive labor.  This is the clearest, most succinct reasoning as to why military production is unproductive, since military commodities cannot be used to reproduce constant or variable capital.  This is also why production of luxury goods for non-laborers is unproductive, unlike "luxury" goods consumed by potential laborers which goes toward the reproduction of labor power.

Thoughts on Varoufakis

This is a very interesting article by the finance minister of Syriza, Yanis Varoufakis.  It makes me think that we should be very keen on what is happening in Europe.

I am currently reading this article and his book, The Global Minotaur, which has a perspective towards the dollar and US double debt exploitation (trade deficit and budget deficit) related to being the currency of record still, not unlike Michael Hudson's less Marxist Super-Imperialism. 


"Europe’s crisis is far less likely to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism than it is to unleash dangerously regressive forces that have the capacity to cause a humanitarian bloodbath, while extinguishing the hope for any progressive moves for generations to come."
One of the few antidotes to this view is his own Party's coming to power in Greece (Syriza) and the rise of the left populist Podemos in Spain (http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/01/02/new-left-europe-austerity-gives-rise-new-political-parties).  However, I think on balance his point remains valid.
This is, however, a slippery slope:
"It is a confession intended to convince radicals that we have a contradictory mission: to arrest the freefall of European capitalism in order to buy the time we need to formulate its alternative."
"A radical social theorist can challenge the economic mainstream in two different ways, I always thought. One way is by means of immanent criticism. To accept the mainstream’s axioms and then expose its internal contradictions. To say: “I shall not contest your assumptions but here is why your own conclusions do not logically flow on from them.” This was, indeed, Marx’s method of undermining British political economics. He accepted every axiom by Adam Smith and David Ricardo in order to demonstrate that, in the context of their assumptions, capitalism was a contradictory system. The second avenue that a radical theorist can pursue is, of course, the construction of alternative theories to those of the establishment, hoping that they will be taken seriously.

"...wealth is collectively produced and then privately appropriated through social relations of production and property rights that rely, for their reproduction, almost exclusively on false consciousness."


"Both of them, in addition to their other errors (and, indeed, crimes) failed, to their detriment, to follow Marx’s lead in a crucial regard: instead of embracing liberty and rationality as their rallying cries and organising concepts, they opted for equality and justice, bequeathing the concept of freedom to the neoliberals. Marx was adamant: The problem with capitalism is not that it is unfair but that it is irrational, as it habitually condemns whole generations to deprivation and unemployment and even turns capitalists into angst-ridden automata, living in permanent fear that unless they commodify their fellow humans fully so as to serve capital accumulation more efficiently, they will cease to be capitalists. So, if capitalism appears unjust this is because it enslaves everyone; it wastes human and natural resources; the same production line that pumps out remarkable gizmos and untold wealth, also produces deep unhappiness and crises.
"Marx’s first error – the error of omission was that he failed to give sufficient thought to the impact of his own theorising on the world that he was theorising about. His theory is discursively exceptionally powerful, and Marx had a sense of its power. So how come he showed no concern that his disciples, people with a better grasp of these powerful ideas than the average worker, might use the power bestowed upon them, via Marx’s own ideas, in order to abuse other comrades, to build their own power base, to gain positions of influence?"

My view on this dilemma has always been that the powers that be are never perturbed by theories that embark from assumptions different to their own. The only thing that can destabilise and genuinely challenge mainstream, neoclassical economists is the demonstration of the internal inconsistency of their own models."

This is a rather succinct explanation of immanent critique entails and why it is more valid politically as well as philosophically.  To paraphrase Adorno, this society wishes to be judged by the character of its enemies, rather than by its own character, but it is only in showing how it fails on its own (immanent) terms can it really be undermined.  In terms of such, one does not counter falsehood with fact, but has to show that the truth content and the form of that content are also false, insofar as they are the ideas (the concept) of an untrue actuality.  Thus current economics, as Varoufakis points out in his book, cannot speak truthfully of its assumptions because to do so would undermine its assumption that the world is the way it must be, and that that is good.

"If workers and employers ever succeed in commodifying labour fully, capitalism will perish. This is an insight without which capitalism’s tendency to generate crises can never be fully grasped and, also, an insight that no one has access to without some exposure to Marx’s thought."

This is interesting.  He seems to have in mind that if human beings were actually reduced to mechanisms, they would have no capacity for surplus.

"For a start, a society of dehumanised automata would resemble a mechanical watch full of cogs and springs, each with its own unique function, together producing a “good”: timekeeping. Yet if that society contained nothing but other automata, timekeeping would not be a “good”. It would certainly be an “output” but why a “good”? Without real humans to experience the clock’s function, there can be no such thing as “good” or “bad”.

If capital ever succeeds in quantifying, and subsequently fully commodifying, labour, as it is constantly trying to, it will also squeeze that indeterminate, recalcitrant human freedom from within labour that allows for the generation of value. Marx’s brilliant insight into the essence of capitalist crises was precisely this: the greater capitalism’s success in turning labour into a commodity the less the value of each unit of output it generates, the lower the profit rate and, ultimately, the nearer the next recession of the economy as a system. The portrayal of human freedom as an economic category is unique in Marx, making possible a distinctively dramatic and analytically astute interpretation of capitalism’s propensity to snatch recession, even depression, from the jaws of growth.

When Marx was writing that labour is the living, form-giving fire; the transitoriness of things; their temporality; he was making the greatest contribution any economist has ever made to our understanding of the acute contradiction buried inside capitalism’s DNA. When he portrayed capital as a “… force we must submit to … it develops a cosmopolitan, universal energy which breaks through every limit and every bond and posts itself as the only policy, the only universality the only limit and the only bond”, he was highlighting the reality that labour can be purchased by liquid capital (ie money), in its commodity form, but that it will always carry with it a will hostile to the capitalist buyer. But Marx was not just making a psychological, philosophical or political statement. He was, rather, supplying a remarkable analysis of why the moment that labour (as an unquantifiable activity) sheds this hostility, it becomes sterile, incapable of producing value."

I think Varoufakis is here struggling towards something akin to Moishe Postone's contention that value (not merely surplus value) is a social form, a human social relation, in which the dynamic between objectively dominated, waged living labor and objectively dominating, money-shaped dead labor forms the capital relation in its totality.  Without living labor, the value form and capital itself cease to be.  However, Varoufakis on p. 30 of his book seems to see consent as taking place in distribution, and thus I will be watching to see (I have a long way to go) if his critique of capital remains at the level of distribution rather than at the core of production.  Moments like this in the essay point towards the latter"

The problem of capitalism is not private appropriation, but that labor is itself, and thus the whole of "modern" production, a relation of domination.

The eventual reference to Kalecki is interesting and potentially illuminating.  Kalecki went down a road not unlike that of Sweezey and Baran in the U.S.

This is an especially good point:

Having failed to couch a critique of capitalism in terms of freedom and rationality, as Marx thought essential, social democracy and the left in general allowed the neoliberals to usurp the mantle of freedom and to win a spectacular triumph in the contest of ideologies."

Raymond Geuss makes a similar point in his book Philosophy and Real Politics and it is one we should beat every liberal and so-called Marxist with.

"Perhaps the most significant dimension of the neoliberal triumph is what has come to be known as the “democratic deficit”. Rivers of crocodile tears have flowed over the decline of our great democracies during the past three decades of financialisation and globalisation. Marx would have laughed long and hard at those who seem surprised, or upset, by the “democratic deficit”. What was the great objective behind 19th-century liberalism? It was, as Marx never tired of pointing out, to separate the economic sphere from the political sphere and to confine politics to the latter while leaving the economic sphere to capital. It is liberalism’s splendid success in achieving this long-held goal that we are now observing. Take a look at South Africa today, more than two decades after Nelson Mandela was freed and the political sphere, at long last, embraced the whole population. The ANC’s predicament was that, in order to be allowed to dominate the political sphere, it had to give up power over the economic one. And if you think otherwise, I suggest that you talk to the dozens of miners gunned down by armed guards paid by their employers after they dared demand a wage rise."

This covers much of the pettifoggery of "democratic deficit".  The political form is wholly inadequate to the task at hand, a point Marx made from the very beginning.

On the one hand, I think this is a fair accusation insofar as Marx over-estimated the objective, immediate revolutionary propensity of the proletariat of his day and the extent to which Marx intentionally curbed the making public of his own critique of his "best" followers.  His Critique of the Gotha Program did not see light when it should have.  His contempt for his German followers Liebknecht & Co. did not come to light publicly until much later.

On the other hand, it is not fair insofar as Marx did know their limitations and also reckoned against the limitations of the immediate prospects (the immediate subjective disposition or consciousness) of the organized working class.  This was clear in his decision with Engels to bury the International Workingmen's Association by sending it to New York City and his own letters to Engels and others regarding the limits of hat they could say in 1874 compared to what they had been able to say in 1848-50.

"Marx’s second error, the one I ascribe to commission, was worse. It was his assumption that truth about capitalism could be discovered in the mathematics of his models. This was the worst disservice he could have delivered to his own theoretical system. The man who equipped us with human freedom as a first-order economic concept; the scholar who elevated radical indeterminacy to its rightful place within political economics; he was the same person who ended up toying around with simplistic algebraic models, in which labour units were, naturally, fully quantified, hoping against hope to evince from these equations some additional insights about capitalism. After his death, Marxist economists wasted long careers indulging a similar type of scholastic mechanism. Fully immersed in irrelevant debates on “the transformation problem” and what to do about it, they eventually became an almost extinct species, as the neoliberal juggernaut crushed all dissent in its path."

I can't really agree with this one at all.  Marx's point was not mathematical models, but to try and grasp how the incommensurable and qualitative could be made commensurable and quantitative, in a sense, how capital was about equality of exchange and monetization.  Marx's critique has to come to terms with how everything can be expressed in that most universal, most meaningless of all forms, money.  This is key to Marx's critique of capital as social form.

It is hardly his fault that the leaders of the workers' organizations, good Lasalleans that they were looking for a fair day's wage and political equality, should have taken his critique of capital to be a manual of a "proletarian political economy" counterpoising good, productive labor to bad, unproductive appropriation.  Varoufakis himself seems subject to this error.

"In economic terms this meant a recognition that the market power, and thus the profitability, of capitalists was not necessarily reducible to their capacity to extract labour from employees; that some capitalists can extract more from a given pool of labour or from a given community of consumers for reasons that are external to Marx’s own theory."

Marx most certainly is aware of this, but if his concern is an adequate concept of the determinate social form, then he cannot start with the exceptions (one argument for why Marx could not, in Capital Vols. 1 or 2 as such, deal with other forms of labor or property.)  He must first have a concept of the determinate social form that allows other social forms to be gasped adequately.

His point on the immiseration thesis and Thatcher is spot on.

"A Greek or a Portuguese or an Italian exit from the eurozone would soon lead to a fragmentation of European capitalism, yielding a seriously recessionary surplus region east of the Rhine and north of the Alps, while the rest of Europe is would be in the grip of vicious stagflation. Who do you think would benefit from this development? A progressive left, that will rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of Europe’s public institutions? Or the Golden Dawn Nazis, the assorted neofascists, the xenophobes and the spivs? I have absolutely no doubt as to which of the two will do best from a disintegration of the eurozone."

The end of the article is very open and decent, I think.  I do not know that saving capitalism from itself is our task, but neither is reveling in immiseration, as if empty bellies led to revolution rather than counter-revolution.

At least he is not claiming to save capitalism in order to build a new working class movement like that of old.  I take his view to be that if we allows the world to fall into the abyss, the future will be bleak, not bright, and thus we have to somehow stop that slide into the abyss long enough for the idea that we could have a better world rather than a worse one to find a material form.

However, I don't think he engages radically enough with the problem that we don't really know what a way out might mean.  Maybe he can't, but I would like him to pose the problem a bit more sharply.

Chris

Challening the Record: Amadeo Bordiga and the Myth of Antonio Gramsci

I have absolutely never been impressed with Antonio Gramsci and I have always found his activities in the PCI in the 1920's dodgy, but I happen to think that this piece makes a compelling vindication of Amadeo Bordiga in particular and a necessary challenge to the academy-approved and Stalin-approved versions of the history.  It is also a first rate introduction to the history.  This is well worth reading alongside The Bordigist Current by Philippe Bourrinet (do not get the ones from the ICC, they have edited the book to their ends and pretend that Bourrinet did not write it.)

“Amadeo Bordiga and the Myth of Antonio Gramsci”

Class Notes by Adolph Reed Jr.

The poverty of radical writing on race, community, and representation in the U.S. scene is devastating, especially as the attacks on civil rights being directed at the poor and minorities in particular.  Exactly this poverty acts to hide itself from view, since there are so few voices calling out the domination of both (and I say “both” because the discussion is largely between revanchist re-segregationists and spineless liberals who seem to fundamentally accept the terms of the debate, sharing as they do the same fundamental agreement on the neoliberal order and its commands) sides.  This poverty makes writers like Adolph Reed Jr. all the more valuable.  His Class Notes is a devastating rejoinder both to the faux-radical Black intellectuals (bell hooks, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, et al) and to what is left of the “white Left” that seems hell bent on tail-ending them and succumbing to an essentializing non-politics of “whiteness”, eviscerated of its particular connection to a radical working class politics that fell off in the early 1970’s, and made into a mechanism by which to eliminate rather than stimulate a critique of racialization.  When Reed takes up communitarian notions of race, community, and representation, much of the book reads like it was written last year, not mostly 15 years ago.  And yet Reed remains committed to an activism which trumps his critical reason at crucial moments, short-circuiting a really adequate critique and leading to a banal commitment to a social democratic politics that is as dead as the liberalism whose Left it formed.

A few essays in the book convey both its strengths and weaknesses alike and so without spending time going through each piece, I will just take up a couple of the essays, keeping in mind that the entire book is a valuable read and each essay hammers at his key points from a slightly different angle.  This repetition with slight variations is not only acceptable, but it feels absolutely necessary in order to chip away the crust of shit that covers us in the present moment.

I think I can summarize the thrust of this book by saying that there is no such thing as a unitary “Black Community”, except in the racist minds of whites who want to make the task of dealing with Black people simple by imagining a simplistic monolith and in the opportunistic minds of Black elites who want to make their careers by proclaiming their role as “representatives of the race” and interpreters of the “natives” to those whites.  Along the way, Reed pulls apart the inner differences of this Black elite, since it is not composed of a singular group any more than Black people form a homogenous Community.  There is a struggle over who gets to be the “authentic representatives”, even as all the contestants agree that there is a monolithic Community and they are its gatekeepers.

The result is that whether we are discussing Jesse Jackson and Minister Farrakhan, or Cornel West and Tavis Smiley, or Al Sharpton and Barack Obama,  or the Mega-Churches and Michael Steel, the fundamental assumptions about who they represent to whom and what the problems are do not appreciably change.  They all agree that they represent a Black community to white America, that they are its authentic representatives largely by reason of their being, that is, an essentialized Blackness, and the problem is the moral regeneration of this Black Community.  The racial construction of America does not so much disappear, as it becomes the lesser part of a morality play with a politics not dissimilar to those of Booker T. Washington, looking down upon a benighted and nihilistic (Cornel West’s favorite descriptor) Black Community that is desperately in need of spirituality, uplift, and education whether through the churches or the jails.

On the other side, there is the white-guilt panderers of the White Left (Reed documents his own struggle to avoid this term in one of the essays and I use it only in light of this essay and his worries, which remain valid) from Race Traitor to Tim Wise, who also agree that an “authentic” leadership of the Black Community can only come from “Authentic Black Leaders”, who whites need to support, but whom they cannot criticize in any meaningful way because they, unlike these “Authentic Black Leaders”, they don’t know what it is like to be Black in America.  Hence the pandering to opportunists like Jesse Jackson, proto-fasicsts like the Nation of Islam, and neo-liberal preachers in radical haircuts like West, Dyson, et al and a constant hum of denunciation of all whites as “privileged”, and the Black Community as an ethical weathervane of progressive sentiment.

Not only does this whole outlook on both sides share similarly rotten communitarian sentiments, but it is profoundly ethically and intellectually destructive and debilitating.  On the one hand, it projects an anti-democratic, authoritarian model of politics onto Black people by assuming that “they” are defined first and always foremost by race (hence the need of some Black women to call themselves “womanists” to avoid being associated with feminism as always-already “white”), and even within that definition, by the broadest cultural concerns that emphasize homogeneity and not concerns over poverty, housing, jobs, etc. that would point to sharpened class divisions within, thus exposing the lack of a monolithic Black Community.

Reed goes further than this, however, and points out that reducing anyone to a single “essence” like their race obscures that no person is reducible to a single identity or even to a collection of identities (p. xvii).  The whole multiculturalist move to talk about a person as a collection of identities is not less essentializing, it is just piling on the same error (p. xviii).  His point here is very reminiscent of Richard Gunn’s criticism of essentializing notions of class in his essay Notes on Class.

This points up a limitation of Reed’s however.  In the Introduction he specifically treats class as “functional location in the system of social reproduction” (p. xxvii), but as Gunn argues, class is not a location.  It is a relation, a field in which we find ourselves.  The capital-labor relation is the class relation.  Class isn’t a “location” one can point to and that becomes evident every time someone tries to define who is and who is not working class.  However, this is a theory that goes hand-in-hand with the viewpoint of an activist, who needs to be able to locate the object of her activism.

This reflects a fundamental weakness in Reed’s work.  From the beginning he believes that theory needs to be subordinated to practice (p. x).  Theory that does not find its reflection in a program, a list of demands, and a kind of organizing activity is at best disconnected and at worst an apologia for the present state of affairs.  Instead, Reed wants us to adopt his kind of theorizing, the kind that leads to slow, pain-staking organizing to build a constituency which can challenge control over the state and economy by the capitalist class, through existing institutions.

The impact of this in his work becomes evident however, as one reads on.  I most likely know some of the people he refers to as solid activists doing good work, especially the ones who left the sectarian Left, and yet my view of them was not quite the same.  Mostly they were people who found a home as the Left of the Democratic Party or within the union apparatuses as low to mid-level functionaries.  Their main activities were to focus on daily items and “achievable” near-term goals with some vague notion that this would contribute to long-term radical class organizations that could be an effective political counterweight.  Some of them were in Teamsters for a Democratic Union, others were in New Directions in the United Auto Workers, and many of both participated in the formation of the Labor Party, a stillborn effort.  Some others were in the now-defunct ACORN or the unions in Chicago close to them like the SEIU.  Some came out of the Trotskyist and Maoist sects of the 1960’s and 70’s.  Almost all of them were utterly hostile to anything or anyone to their left and extremely limited in their ability to stake out an independent position to the union and Democratic Party functionaries to their right.  This isn’t to say that all of them were bad people.  They were mostly good people with a deep distrust of the sectarian Left no matter who you were, and often for good reasons.  But they were as opposed to a criticism of the union by non-union members as they had been of their group by non-members rght up until they quit.  And they had no vision of the limitations of the unions, which they blithely assumed were the legitimate economic organs of the proletariat against capital, rather than the mediating bodies between labor and the law in capitalist society.

The organizations I have mentioned are dead.  The programmatic basis of their activity is largely gone.  Some of the unions continue on, largely among service workers without the concentrated power that say auto workers had 70 years ago.  There is nothing in Reed’s approach that allows us to take stock of the transformation of the capital-labor relation in its actuality, in the valorization process which includes the labor process, as well as the circulation and consumption of commodities.  Rather, there is a static “location” and in that location are all people who can be defined as “workers” or as member of the set = “working class”.  And the problem that animates the weakest part of the book is how to convince activists to follow Reed’s logic instead of being bewitched by the ideas of the post-modern faux-radical intellectuals.

In this, the book is amazingly like Russell Jacoby’s work (with which Reed is familiar as he notes in his essay on Black Public Intellectuals), in that the failure of the present rests on the adoption of bad ideas.  They both certainly have some ideas of their own why these bad ideas are adopted, in Reed’s case mostly ascribed to the petty bourgeois nature of these free-floating intellectuals, which begs the question why Reed, clearly not a steelworker in his day job, was immune.  The answer has to circuitously come back to having a better practice and ideas grounded in that practice.  Which then begs the question of the failure of those ideas to catch hold if they are so valid.  So then the answer is that the activists scrapped them out of a mental disposition towards defeatism and a despair over earlier defeats which is a product of their petty bourgeois class position.  And round and round we go.

What is truly stunning in this is on the one hand Reed’s perspicacity in nailing who Obama was back in 1997, and on the other his incapacity to see that the Labor Party was a stillbirth and that groups like DSA are nothing so much as Swedish Welfare State-porn liberals.  Ultimately, his theoretical failure amounts to a fundamental misunderstanding of the state and the relationship of the unions to the state.  Neither of them are outside or above or independent of the capital-labor relation, but are themselves moments of it, expressions of that contradiction, forms of it whose contradictions give the relation room to move.  The state not only isn't our "friend", but it only "is" insofar as it is a mode of existence of our domination.  For someone so utterly concerned with the critique of "community" and "identity" as forms of representation, Marx's critique of the state as "the illusory form of community", as the epitome of representation, is lost on him.  Reed has no problem with the the validity of representation by the state or the unions, without ever making it clear why these are more valid, and so political activity for Reed is activity oriented towards the state and the legal mediation of labor known as the unions.

This helps to explain, at least in part, the self-contradictory demand for theory that is only valid if it can define and guide political practice and be validated by that political practice.  If that is the criterion, by his own admission all his view can project is a trade union reformism that is, like unionism as a whole, in decline and suffering from less and less relevance.  That his argument amounts to a criticism of the failure of activists due to a bad theory and to intellectuals for a bad practice justified by a bad theory idealism of the purest water does not seem to occur to him..

What is missing from this collection is the kind of analysis that might reflect on what is going on in capitalist society that might lead to the adoption of the kind of ideas he (rightly) disparages with such wit and incisiveness.  Like Jacoby, aside from some vague discussion of defeats and changes in class location, it is a battle of ideas (good vs. bad) that eschews a more rigorous analysis of the changing aspects of the class relation and of capitalist society.  Oddly enough, one might even note that the only consciousness he evinces any non-instrumental concern for (that is, consciousness’s that are not merely the object of patient education and programmatic wining-over) is exactly that of the faux-radical academics he excoriates.

________________________________________________________________________________

That said, I can’t think of anyone else I would rather read on race, community, and representation in the U.S.  Only Paul Gilroy, among Anglo-American contemporaries, strikes me as having the same kind of seriousness and intelligence on these matters.

Utopia and Pragmatics

I have just finished two books by Russel Jacoby, The End of Utopia and Picture Imperfect.  Both are nominally about the decline of utopian thought, why this is a problem, and something akin to its causes.  The books are very different, which I suppose justifies two separate works, but Picture Imperfect definitely has the feel of left over material from the last chapter of The End of Utopia and picks up and develops the themes of the culpability (or not) or utopians for the travesties of the 20th century.  The End of Utopia has a very different character for most of the text.  It is essentially Jacoby's confrontation with so-called post-modernism as a philosophical just-so story that is complicit with contemporary capitalism despite a supposedly ultra-radical character.  However, the limits of Jacoby's works resonates with Maurizio Lazzarato's The Making of Indebted Man, and so a few words on that work will illuminate Jacoby's limitations.

I want to take up what I like about the books as a whole first because I believe what he wants to say is valuable.  He also happens to be correct in associating the hatred of universality and universals with a hatred of utopian thought and an all-too-easy intellectual complicity with the world as it is.  There is something crucial for the human imagination in a sense of a truly other, better world that is not a heavenly beyond, but a this-worldly potential.

Jacoby is right to defend utopian thought.  Most of the bloodshed of the 20th century was not the product of utopian dreamers.  As he is at pains to show, Naziism was not utopian.  Nationalism is not utopian.  Religious sectarianism and racialism are not utopian.  That is, by utopian was always meant a vision of a universal emancipation of humanity from poverty, ignorance, cupidity, and collective misery.  As a result, philosophies which attack universalism and universality sans phrase evince a reactionary fore-shortening of human potential, a restriction of humanity to an eternal present, which is a present largely composed of a range of experiences from utter horror (genocides, perpetual hunger, homelessness, war) to a dulling herd-like conformity and repetition absent of artistic passion, intellectual grandeur and all the other things that would go hand-in-hand with freedom from work.

I have no investment in what is called post-modernism, whether of the Levi-Strauss/Althusser/Lacan structuralisms or the Derrida/Foucault/Deleuze & Guattari post-structuralisms, but I have to say that in many respects Jacoby's work is a hatchet job.  Is he wrong that these writers and their progeny, who are considerably worse in many cases, conflate obfuscation with depth?  No.  Is he wrong that multiculturalism easily slides into a relativism that can become an apology for tyranny and oppression?  No.  In fact, I rather like his argument that multiculturalism in particular manages to define "culture" so closely akin to the way advertisers define "niche markets" that every difference indicates a different "culture" without really delving into what the nature of the cultural difference is, except that it validates claims of particularistic identities that allow elites to both politically manage and economically exploit these cultural constituencies.  Race, for example, in the United States does not create two cultures, one black, one white.  Rather, racialism constitutes United States "culture" and there is no separation of black from white or white from black because neither one makes any sense without the other.  Or rather, the utter non-sense of both relies on each side of the antagonism.  There is no "black particularity" separate from "white particularity" and there is no American history that is not African-American history.  At the same time, and against black nationalism, there is no African-American history that is not American history.  The blade cuts both ways.

This is a different claim, however, than arguing in favor of a generic universalism, which is a trap that Jacoby falls into.  Matthew Arnold may be a more interesting and complex thinker than intellectuals now hold him, but this in no way validates that species of universalism and cannot hold a a vindication of a Hegelian or Marxian universalism.  In fact, there is an odd failure by someone so immersed in Frankfurt School critical theory to make this kind of differentiation. 

This failure is nowhere more evident than in his treatment of science as an example of universal truth.  I find it singularly depressing that Jacoby simply rehearses the "Sokal Affair" as if Sokal was a heroic leftist scientist attacking the obscurantist "pomos".  There is something disingenuous in Sokal's treatment of science that obliterates the tentative, imperfect nature of scientific work and knowledge.  If the knowledge of the natural world was not imperfect, we would have had no reason to replace the Newtonian understanding of astrophysics with Einsteinian conceptions, and the crisis of that understanding is itself evident today in the kinds of acrobatic intellectual tricks required to maintain it, such as theories of dark matter.  Or, in a much more politically charged way pointed out with admirable clarity by Paul Gilroy in Against Race, it was the official opinion of biology for many decades after Darwin that the human species was divided into a hierarchy of fundamentally different races or even that "human = white" and "non-white < human".  The typical defense that science has "self-correcting mechanisms of reason" can only be held with a blindingly naive ignorance of the role of struggles for emancipation in practically challenging the irrational character of that "knowledge".  It also requires a failure to grasp the possibility of backsliding by official science, such as the mainstream scientific adoption over and against logic and evidence to the contrary, of the tenets of sociobiology, especially by "Leftist" defenders of Sokal like "The Chronicle of Higher Education".  That science can un-correct itself in an atmosphere of generalized intellectual reaction is completely missed by Jacoby.  If he means nothing more than "the chemical composition of water is H2O everywhere, for everyone", then he is saying something almost trivial.  If he is saying that "race doesn't exist in nature" then he is sorely mistaken if he believes there is scientific consensus on this among the scientists.  He would be correct in noting that anti-utopians of all political stripes, including racial nationalists on all sides disavow a universal humanity, not merely as something not yet practically achieved, which seems self-evident, but as something biologically impossible.

Again, it is especially odd in light of his immersion in the critical theory.  Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment is a thoroughgoing indictment not of Enlightenment, but of an Enlightenment which does not treat itself to the same critical self-assessment it subject all other thought to.  By the end of the book it is not hard to feel that Jacoby has lost that critical element in his eagerness to defend universalism against the overwhelming relativism of contemporary philosophy posing as "radical".  He is right that it is a radicalism without an emancipatory vision, but he is wrong to not deal with the reasons that the old radicalism with its emancipatory vision failed and has fallen in the face of such an otherwise impoverished philosophical turn.  The universalism to which Jacoby appeals is by the end no less a fetishized, abstract universality than the particularity of his erstwhile opponents is fetishized and abstract.  As any careful student of Hegel or Marx or the Frankfurters should know, neither of these can hold and each falls in some respect to criticism by the other.

This brings me to what seems like the key moment of the book.  On page 158 Jacoby summarizes what sees as the reason for the loss of a vision of universal emancipation, of a utopian impulse, in the ideas even among college-aged youths:

"It is also inexplicable inasmuch as the economic situation is not dramatically worse than it was twenty of thirty years ago, when a buffer seemed to exist - at for some - providing a momentary protective space from crushing economic imperatives.  The danger that the good sons and daughters of the middle and upper middle class will end up homeless may keep people on a narrow career path, but has little basis.  What has led to a jump in careerism and practicality among students is not the collapse of the economy, which has not collapsed, but the collapse of a belief in a future that might be different.  The conviction that the future will replicate the present stifles utopian longings."

At least three problems are evident in this paragraph.  Firstly, the only way in which Jacoby can imagine these privileged youth lacking a utopian imagination could come about would be an economic collapse.  Why a collapse would do that is not clear.  There was a definite economic collapse in the 1890's and again in the 1930's and there was no lack of utopian vision.  This is a red herring.  Secondly, it assumes that utopian visions arise from the privileged youth more than from elsewhere.  Lastly, he draws the conclusion that the problem is one of faith.  This might explain why both of the books spend more time on religious thinkers of utopia like Landauer and More and proponents of universalism like John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold than on Marx or most of the other "utopian" Marxian and anarchist thinkers, of whom there is quite a long list, all of whom were intellectuals of the sort Jacoby laments the loss of and none of whom turned their backs on a universal, emancipatory vision.

What Jacoby lacks is a comprehension of what has happened in actuality since the 1930's, of the actual transformations of society that has undermined the conditions of the imaginary he has in mind.  This is where the otherwise philosophically crippled work The Making of Indebted Man makes a definite contribution.  This work points out the extent to which the general human condition under capitalism beginning after World War II is one of debtor-creditor.  Lazzarato may not quite be able to grasp that this new condition is itself an outcome of the revolutionary rising and counter-revolutionary triumph that took place from 1917-1945, but he is quite right to note that the transformation of the majority of individuals into debtors has altered their relation to capital.  If this process of becoming-indebted was under way after 1945, and went hand in hand with this breaking of the emancipatory institutions of the working class, often of their transformation into bulwarks of the capital-labor relation, it was also expressed in the ongoing displacement of living labor by dead labor, of the practical knowledge of the worker by the direct application of the haute-bourgeois scientific knowledge of the engineer and scientist that undermined the relation of the laborer to the labor process in ways that have undone the world which gave rise to an emancipatory imagination connected to workers' control of production or the working class winning the war over who ran society.  The the creation of the mass consumer through the massive extension of debt (home, appliance, and car loans from the 1940's on, and then in the 1970's forward as "neoliberalism" took full effect, the extension of debt to student loans, medical bills, and many other areas of life) has both ended the threat of immediate immiseration, something Marcuse noted in One-Dimensional Man, and at the same time more completely than ever tied the individual to the imperatives of capital not merely in the present but into the future as well.  The real fount of emancipatory dreams in the 19th and 20th century, a revolutionary proletariat with its own culture and institutions, parties and newspapers, has ceased to exist.  That working class lost the battle for control over society and the practical cut of its utopian visions is irrevocably blunted.

Further, if the capacity to imagine the future is reduced, at best, to moderately improved visions of the present it has something to do to the degree to which the future of ourselves, our children and our children's children is already leveraged as debt.  In his example, one need look no further than the amount of debt those same students will accrue to get their education and the paucity of positions for people not engaged in glorified technical programs under the rubric of "Business Schools" or "Liberal Arts and Science" programs which primarily service law offices and think tanks and NGOs and which provide no end in themselves.

A new emancipatory vision will not be bred by the hope of proletarian democracy and workers' control of production and confederations of councils.  It has to go deeper, to the vision of Marx and others that was not limited to this or that phenomenal configuration of the working class around a specific labor process, but one that saw emancipation in terms of the emancipation from labor.  Marx expressed it in Volume 3 of Capital as follows:

"In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite." (italics mine)

Jacoby seems to get this, but what he seems to not be able to get is that capital has in fact already made most human labor unnecessary, but without having abolished Labor (as Marx describes it in Capital, Vol. 1) as the mediating form of social relations.  That is, what I have laid out briefly above has more to do with the death of the utopian than Jacoby's demonic (anti-)intellectuals.  They are a pernicious symptom, indeed, and one that if left untreated further the course of the disease, but they are not the disease itself.  

The problem, to whit, is not Derrida, though Derrida's philosophy as a structurally implicit apologia for capital is a problem, but a capitalism that has come close to abolishing labor while doing everything in its power to not abolish itself.  That is a crisis felt by the college students of today, as opposed to the college students of the 1960's, and it is one in which the future, for the moment, seems foreclosed by obligations of debt and guilt to a capitalism seemingly without opposition.  

It is not without opposition, however.  Capitalism brings about its own demise.  Capital as social form determined by the mediation of labor cannot subsist indefinitely without coming into a general crisis through its own logic of domination and exploitation.  We live today in a world where labor (the realm of necessity and thus of domination) is conflated with freedom (the realm of freedom from necessity, of freely disposed time)  to a hitherto unimagined degree, and yet it is a world in which the end of hunger, homelessness, ignorance, cupidity, and collective misery has never been materially closer to hand.  Maybe we live in a moment where we stand so close to so huge that we cannot see it or bring it into focus.

Notes on The Culture Industry by T.W. Adorno

I am constantly struck by the overlap between Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse's various critiques of the culture industry and one-dimensional man and Guy Debord's notion of spectacle.  I found this affinity once again in reading The Culture Industry, a collection of Adorno's articles by J.M. Bernstein under the heading of the concept first proposed in Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment.  The culture industry referred to a specific transformation of capitalist society as a certain threshold was reached in how much capital had fully subsumed all social formation, all social relations, all of the means of thinking against and beyond capital.

If in 1967-8, the Society of the Spectacle still imagined a two-dimensional quality of capitalist society, this would be gone by the time of Comments on the society of the Spectacle with the notion of the "integrated spectacle", which saw the transformation to a one-dimensional world of the sort that Adorno and Marcuse saw as already actual by the end of World War II.

A large part of The Culture Industry, like One-Dimensional Man, is concerned with the harm done to the capacity for experience and the capacity for critique by the development of what Adorno will end up referring to as "late capitalism".

For the moment, I want to focus on the ending two essays, however, which focus on two important themes in Society of the Spectacle: time and the relationship of theory and practice.

"Free Time" focuses on the way in which the time not spent working has been transformed into an adjunct of labor time, time spent preparing to be working.  One of the first things Adorno notes is the difference between 'free time' and 'leisure'.  Leisure was a lifestyle; one lived "a life of leisure" which indicated a cultured life.  'Free time', however, is just literally the time left over after work (and it does not matter if that work is waged or in the home), time spent recuperating and preparing to do it all over again.

Adorno expands into the activity which comes to absorb free time and it is most definitely not the cultured time of a life of leisure.  I think we can leave aside Adorno's examples of listening to radio and watching TV as well worn paths, and we can move directly to MMORPGs or Massively Multi-player Role Playing Games, like World of Warcraft (WoW.)  A huge amount of time in the game is spent doing three things: leveling, trading, and repeating quests.  All MMORPGs involve leveling, the way a character becomes more powerful, gets new skills and abilities, and in general improves to be able to take on challenges.  If this sounds familiar, then you went through the modern school system just like I did.  Think of making the top level (there is always a maximum level) as getting your doctorate.

However, your development does not stop by getting to the maximum level.  Once there, your goal is to finish quests that require groups of people to complete.  These might grant special pieces of equipment or new ranks or special powers, which of course are available to everyone if they are willing to do the same task over and over against, dozens and dozens of times.  Considering that these end-of-game-content quests can take anywhere from 3-10 hours apiece and require going in again and again, you literally can spend hundreds of hours in a handful of these quests.

Since money is important in all of these games in one fashion or another, there is the need to sell and trade all of the things you acquire that you do not want.  Technically, this also includes learning "crafting skills" that allow you to make not only things you need, but also a large number of items other people need, in return for money.

Finally, and this is a very important component, the game world never really changes.  You might get stronger and more powerful and richer, but every quest and every opponent and every opportunity resets.  The only things that don't reset are the battles between players.  In other words, you might benefit from competing with other people, but the world itself is always the same.

In other words, WoW and other MMORPGs are capitalism's daily life in fantasy form.  Not only do they reproduce its conformity, lack of change, tedious repetition, but it trains the mind to enjoy these.  Even more so than the average computer game with a finish (although almost all of them today can be replayed), the MMORPG is truly the Nietzschean 'eternal return of the same', and like Nietzsche's uber-mensch, every hero gladly welcomes that return each time, rather than seeking an end to it.

I particularly like his contempt for the do-it-yourself (DIY) culture.  Not only does he hit on its amateurishness, but it idolizes this amateurishness.  It is an extension of the hobby, something else Adorno finds appalling, and with good reason.

"Resignation" not only picks up a few of these themes, but connects them to the anti-intellectualism of activism.  Resignation is the charge hurled by activism as the "disengaged" intellectual.  Adorno turns this charge around and shows how the real disengagement comes from the need to be active even when activity amounts to nothing so much as "feeling good about oneself", "feeling part of what is happening", etc.  It is the activity of the activist, but also of the group-builder.

Adorno seems to put a special emphasis on the anarchist, but everything he says just as clearly applies to the Marxisante sect.  If the DIY culture Adorno excoriates applies to the anarchists (and to many autonomists too), a recruitment culture applies to the socialist sect.  The organization in which thought is prohibited or circumscribed by the party program, and there really is no difference in this case between prohibition and limitation, also expects that most of its members fill their time building the organization through recruiting, selling the paper/magazine/whatever, giving talks expressing the party line, etc.  The demand for a really effective praxis and that theory conform to and serve first and foremost as a guide to praxis is a demand to kill critical thought.

This does not really do justice to the article.  It did make me think of something, however.  I find a profound difference between the one-dimensionality thesis and this critique of militantism.  One-dimensionality is a kind of Cassandra call (see John Holloway, Open Marxism, Vol. 1 or 3, I don't remember which), a fatalism, but this is radically different.  This is a demand for the autonomy or thought, of reason, relative to any immediate practice.  It is a challenge to the voluntarism of individuals who would prefer to do than to think and in so doing, do more to reproduce capital than the theorist ever could.

Book Review: Not Adorno's Negativity

John Holloway, Fernando Matamoros, Sergio Tischler
Negativity & Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism
Plutio Press, 2008. 256pp.  $37.00 pb
ISBN 9780745328362

     One of the novel features of the struggles over the last 6 or 7 years has been their negativity in the sense of a lack of demands and in their tendency towards a raw refusal without an alternative. In light of this, the title Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism would seem to promise an interesting union of this negative activity and Theodore Adorno's philosophical notion of negativity. Yet the title is discordant, even jarring. Negativity. Revolution. Adorno. Political Activism.

     Revolution and Political Activism? “Activism”, with its connotations of a kind of professionalization of political action, carried out by specialists known as “activists”, goes uninspected in this entire book. In a book which nominally takes Adorno seriously his profound distrust of activism generates no self-reflection.

     Negativity and political activism? The activist negativity, the “No!” of refusal, has little to do with Adorno's philosophically informed negativity, which is to say as determinate negation. The two are forced together in an uncomfortable union. This is enabled by the repetition, over and over again, of certain formulations of Adorno's, taken out of context and without any attention to the development of those formulations, a very un-Adornian way of proceeding. This general lack of critical reflection on activism is nowhere more self-evident than in chapter 5, which poses a post-vanguardist activism against a vanguardist activism, but which has no notion whatsoever of where that vanguardism came from or that the activism in both cases is possibly more critical in binding them together than the vanguardism in question drives them apart.

     Adorno and Revolution? Adorno was a determined enemy of this society. He sought to work out in concepts its increasingly barbarous character. However, Adorno did not believe that revolution was on the front steps, around the corner or even in the same neighbourhood. Not only did he not think that the massive counter-revolution that ran from 1923-1945 was simply going to be reversed, but he believed that capital was going about consolidating its victory in a variety of ways that would likely cement it in place, at least for the indefinite future. Most importantly, Adorno believed that the problems of the present were not simply grounded in capital, but in instrumental forms of Reason going back to the Greeks. Sadly, little to nothing of Adorno's own political thought is engaged with, but instead he is himself used instrumentally.

     Which brings us to Negativity and Adorno. Despite the invocation of Adorno's negative, most frequently this is reduced to nothing so much as a “No!”. Negativity as raw refusal goes against every ethical aspect of Adorno's thought. Interestingly, this denigration of negativity gives rise to a constant need to scold Adorno for his role in 1968. The “No!” is first and foremost said to Adorno, ritualistically, at the beginning of almost every chapter. You can almost invariably tell the quality of the coming chapter simply by noting the presence or absence of this revolt against the Father in the first 4-5 paragraphs. This means that the Introduction and Chapters 2 and 6 lack any awareness of how far they depart not only from the negativity of Adorno, but from Holloway's own earlier work before he was usurping the Name of the Father in order to kill the Father. 

     More importantly, the general lack of a properly philosophical negativity seems to go hand-in-hand with a positive, ontological treatment of labour, of sociality, and of direct, unmediated relations that was foreign to Adorno.

   Good, concrete labour is posited against bad, abstract labour, but Adorno saw communism entailing a world in which labour no longer mediated the relation between Man and Man. Labour belongs to the realm of necessity, not freedom, a point which Adorno understood explicitly. Along with Holloway's contributions in Chapters 2 and 6, so too Sergio Tischler's chapter 7 sings the praises of living labour as Doing. This hypostatization of labour, of living labour against dead labour, is just the lauding of variable capital against constant capital. The raw, simplistic “No!” to capitalism gives way to a joyous, simplistic “Yes!” to the ontological positing of “Doing”. Such a positing of Doing is no better than a positing of Being, since all it can claim in effect is that our Being is our Doing and so we run full circle back to a social ontology of Being, and thus capital reappears through the back door. The irony of this conception of labour is that the familiar, and philosophically underdeveloped, critique of Deleuze's concepts carried out in chapter 4 by Alfredo Bonnet can be turned on this conception of labour with equal force. Just as Deleuze turns away from negativity and dialectic towards difference, desire, and life and thereby make these into first principles, into metaphysical and positive-ontological essences of a transhistorical human existence, so Holloway in particular transforms labour into just such a creative essence.

     The positive adulation of the social goes hand-in-hand with this reading of labour. The romantically non-alienated aspect of everything social is part and parcel of a Leftism that denigrated the individual in favour of the collective, at times with utterly murderous consequences. Further, pre-capitalist society was oppressive and exploitative exactly through directly social relations of domination. Marx never deploys pairs of concepts except to indicate their existence as categories of capital. Use-value is a category of capital, the way in which things people use exist first and foremost as useful for valorization. Concrete labour is the particular labours through which abstract labour must subsist, but it isn't labour free from social form. So too sociality and individuality dance as a pair. If it was any other way, it would be hard to make a claim that use-value was self-contradictory, that is, that the contradiction between using things to meet human needs comes into contradiction with objects as useful for valorization, first and foremost among these, labour

     Finally, there is a tendency to imagine revolution as direct irruption of social Doing, as the end of mediation. This depends on a frequent elision of or confusion over the difference between mediation, contradiction, and antagonism. The end of antagonistic social relations does not necessarily entail the end of contradictions, the absence of which does not entail the end of mediation. The struggle with this is nowhere more clear than in Werner Bonefeld's essay. The very idea that critical theory has as its task to de-mystify actuality of course assumes what Bonefeld himself has long criticised: the idea that appearance is merely illusion, rather than the mode of existence of the essence, its necessary form of appearance. There is no de-mystification which can lead us to some direct knowledge of what really is the case. The appearance “really is” because it is the way in which essence must express itself, and not as two different worlds, but as one world which appears in a mediated fashion. Bonefeld actually formulates the problem of the entire approach taken by the majority of essays in this book:

Marx’s thesis that the understanding of the world of things has to comprehend human practice implies that this practice is constitutive. However, this formulation is full of dangers, too. It presupposes a definite resolution to the stated problem: If social practice constitutes, is it ursprünglich, be it primitive or original? If it constitutes, does it remain external to its creation? Can it remain innocent in the perverted world that it has created? (116)

However, not far down the conflation of antagonism and contradiction already occurs: “There is only one reality - a reality of disunion, contradiction, fissures, and antagonism” (117). Where Marx suggests that all science would be unnecessary if essence and appearance directly coincided, this entails that this non-coincidence is a part of actuality as such, not merely one where antagonistic relations obtain. Nor is contradiction synonymous with antagonism. There is a difference between a contradiction and an antagonistic contradiction in both Hegel and Marx. A contradiction in Marx's sense involves two unlikes which can each subsist only in and through each other, that is, which constitute a relationship of opposites which mediate each other. This contradiction does not need to be antagonistic. Nor does the resolution of the contradiction result in some kind of immediacy in relation to either object. That is, even in a resolved contradiction, the result is not an unmediated actuality.

     Were mediation to indicate only mediation of a contradiction and that contradiction only capable of being antagonistic, then communism would entail a world without mediation, of pure immediacy. This would erase the conceptuality of the world and reduce us to a world of pure immediacy, which would in effect be a state of psychosis. Following Bonefeld's own logic in reverse, if mediation exists, then contradiction exists, and then antagonism exists, and so capital becomes a closed loop.

     This results from the un-Adornian treatment of labour, immediacy, and sociality. Once one has taken the path, it is hard to veer off of it. So I do not find it surprising that the main political concept of a book on negativity is very positive: dignity. The concept has deep roots in Kant's own bi-polar, antinomic split of ethics and law. It is fitting that Adorno himself says that “Dignity was never anything more than the attitude of self-preservation aspiring to be more than that.” (133, Theodore Adorno 2002. The Jargon of Authenticity, 2^nd Edition (London: Routledge).)  This Adorno, no doubt associated with the Bad Father who called the police and was against activism, is not only of no interest to most of the authors, but is replaced with the Good Father, Subcommandante Marcos.

     The ultimate note of discord echoes from the effect of two chapters, which seem oddly out of place because they are distant from activism and genuinely engaged with Adorno. Adrian Wilding actually stages both a spirited engagement with Adorno's lectures and a subtle appreciation of his care to avoid becoming a guru or an institution, showing how badly his own students misunderstood him by trying to condemn him with the words “Adorno as an institution is dead.” Marcel Stoetzler's chapter provides a nuanced critique of sexual dimorphism, gender, and sexuality and the problem of the “liberation of sexuality” as opposed to human liberation. At odds with most of the rest of the book both in terms of quality and tenor, they set in relief rather than bring relief from the weakness of the book as a whole.

     The book remains a disappointment, despite these last, genuinely valuable contributions. The editors intended to produce a work that was self-consciously not a scholarly treatment of Adorno, but a genuine appropriation of his dialectic of negativity. They have indeed produced a work which is not scholarly, but they have not produced a convincing appropriation, critique or comprehension, of Adorno's negative dialectic.