In Normativity and Metaphysics in Adorno and Hegel James Gordon Finlayson highlights the significance of 'the shudder' in Adorno's work. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno appears to be making an historical and anthropological claim that the shudder lies at the origins of human rationality in the practices of magic.
Finlayson says that the first point that needs to be made is the centrality of what Adorno calls the shudder, [Schauder/Schauer] a term which occurs both in Dialectic of Enlightenment and Aesthetic Theory. In the crucial opening section of the former work Adorno, drawing heavily on studies in the history of religion and anthropology, develops a conception of enlightenment thinking from a reconstructed prehistory of rationality.
Roughly speaking Adorno divides human development into five stages, although the division is more implied than explicitly drawn.
1. The first is a pre-animistic stage in which the world is governed by a principle of mana which is primary and undifferentiated. He does not say much about the structure of preanimistic society, apart from the fact that every member participated in the process of altering nature. He does say, that mana is born from the shudder [Schauder] in the face of the unknown, and that it contains the lineaments of the division between subject and object, because things are not experience directly as what they are but as the seat of something else, mana.
2. In the second, animistic stage human beings begin to populate the world with named deities. Through language and the mimetic power of magic they attempt to gain control of their environment. ‘The cry of fear, with which the unfamiliar is experienced becomes its name. It fixes the transcendence of the unknown over against the known, and thereby fixes the shudder as something sacred.’ (DA 17)
Primitive forms of thought thus distance the knower from the known and provide the first doubling of nature into appearance (or illusion) and essence which provides the incipient basis of myth and natural science. In so doing language and magic give the class of priests and magicians privileged access to the supernatural powers, and create a social hierarchy which from now on begins to entwine itself around the relation of human beings to the world.
3. In the third stage myth, story-telling and collective memory emerge as a kind of inchoate form of rationality. Myths attempt to subdue the unknown external world by imposing a kind of natural order upon its infinite variety and unpredictability. However, the ‘repetition of nature’ which mythical symbols represent always turn out to be ‘the represented permanence of social coercion. (DE 20 & 27: DA 23 & 28)
4. In the fourth stage metaphysics replaces myth as the best means of coming to understand and exert control over external nature. The difference is that metaphysics uses universal concepts rather than stories and images. Nonetheless these universals were just as much concealed forms of domination as their precursors. (DE 22: DA 23) But metaphysics retains a vestige of its social origins also in so far as it still aims at discovering a truth that transcends existent reality.
5. Finally, even metaphysics is overcome as enlightenment triumphs in the form of an all encompassing instrumental rationality which is totally in thrall to the status quo epistemically and politically. Adorno’s favorite examples are the natural sciences and the logical positivism of the Vienna School. But almost any kind of formal system of reasoning from mathematics to logic, or any kind of technological application of scientific knowledge counts as an instance of enlightenment. (DE 27) Their sole aim, according to Adorno, is to describe existent reality and not to criticize it. Thus they end up slavishly subservient both to external nature and to extant socio-economic relations. Ultimately enlightenment gives up its quest for universal truths and lapses into a quietistic form of nominalism: it recognizes only the existence of names, of conceptually identified objects. (DA 24)
He says:
On the one hand the impulsive response of taking flight is a negative response to an unknown and potentially hostile other. It is the origin of purposive rationality, of what Horkheimer calls instrumental reason and Adorno later calls identity-thinking. The distancing operation of conceptual, reflective thought is the means by which the subject attempts to subdue and tame the experience of shudder by controlling and mastering what provoked it. On the other hand the shudder is, epistemically speaking, a positive experience that is true to what is there prior to conceptual identification - the amorphous, the undifferentiated, the strange. It is an impulsive somatic experience that momentarily registers the presence of what occasions it. It thus stands in a more intimate relation to its other (to the non-identical) than do concepts and categories.
There is a post on the Our Kingdom blog at Open Democracy on the universities that goes beyond the crisis in the humanities in a neo-liberal mode of governance and the calls for greater public funding to consider the institutional model in a digital age where information is flowing everywhere.
In Universities in an age of information abundance Aaron Peters says that universities have been charging high fees for access to information. His argument centres around access to information:
The proposition that in the 21st century ‘information wants to be free’ is true in two key respects - firstly, information and content can move more freely between persons and communities than ever before and are no longer the monopoly of elites as evidenced in peer-to-peer file sharing, citizen journalism and blogs. Secondly, and perhaps more pertinently, the costs of information creation, reproduction and dissemination are being reduced much more quickly than legislators can ever possibly hope to adapt to.
Just as the arrival of the printing press permitted the possibility of universal literacy and hitherto impossible social innovations such as public libraries, mass education and informed, deliberational public spheres through the distribution of newspapers and other printed documents, as described by Jurgen Habermas, so too the information abundant world means that institutions predicated on the realities of information scarcity will become historical anachronisms.
He adds that the computing capabilities and costs of universities will be a wifi or VPN network and a moodle-like course platform which utilizes very cheap and exceptionally useful sound and video technologies. Furthermore, with the advent of the e-reader, universities will no longer need to buy costly editions of books but will rather purchase copies of texts that will be available to students to lend, as is currently the case with books using platforms such as Google Books or Amazon who will inevitably establish bespoke products for universities.He finishes thus:
To place so much focus on indebting young people to subsidize the university sector amounts to a state enforced private subsidy of the industry and will not incentivize such institutions to fully engage with the possibilities of a technological moment where the running costs of undergraduate and taught graduate degrees are set to massively diminish.
In Beyond the Vote: The Crisis of American Liberalism in Logos Journal Michael J. Thompson says that the most salient aspect of the modern crisis of political life in America has been a gradual shift from liberalism to populism. What writers such as Robert Putnam have described as a society suffering from a lack of “social capital” quite simply misses the larger context of the problem. The disappearance of the political, the erosion of civil society and the degradation of the public sphere all spring from the gradual colonization of society by what has been called “possessive individualism” and the logic of the market.
He adds that:
The Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács, as far back as 1923, called the phenomenon “reification.” The insight was that as market capitalism continued to develop, and deepen its impact, its mathematical, instrumental, and egoistic logic would increasingly shape all elements of culture and society. Relations between people would become akin to market relationships; the entire way that individuals approached their world would be caste in market form, defined by the matter-of-factness of the cash nexus. The individual would increasingly turn his or her back on political or moral obligations and concerns, and would be recast as a consumer facing an endless fabric of commodities in a world without meaning or spirit. Reification has in this way come to define American culture and politics and it has had a serious effect in transforming our current understandings of liberalism as well.
placed emphasis on libertarian ideas of individualism and market coordination, something that would effect a reversal in the understanding of American liberalism as a political doctrine and the political self-consciousness of American political culture. Influential thinkers during the 20th century such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, among others, gave voice to the idea—one that would become central in American political life—that economic freedom was a precondition for political freedom. Society was no longer seen as an entity in itself—as prominent thinkers of the 19th century such as Emile Durkheim had argued—it was now considered little more than an assemblage of individuals, tied together by contract enforced by the laws of a minimal government. But the main aim of thinkers ranging from Hayek to Friedman was, essentially, to redefine what American democratic culture and politics had, by the time of the end of the Second World War, become: not a democracy that was privileging individualism and liberty but, rather, what these thinkers saw as a society bent upon “collectivism,” socialism, and, in time, totalitarian communism. The future was a road to serfdom.
In his The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America Michael J. Thompson argues that the neoliberal turn of recent decades has brought upon a reorientation of democratic life as it has taken the political out of political economy. Discourse has shifted from political society to economic society, and while the American political tradition is based on the twin themes of republicanism and liberalism, the project of neoliberalism makes the latter regnant.
Neoliberalism is thus an assault on the ‘social democracy’ tradition that has its roots in the New Deal periods. Neoliberalism is now an ‘entrenched ideology’ in US political culture and, in addition to legitimising economic inequality, it has resulted in a ‘decline of civic engagement, the erosion of political life, and the shattering of a once vibrant public sphere’. He says:
At the core of neoconservative and neoliberal philosophy is the notion that equality has extended as far as it will ever be able to extend without endangering individual liberty. Equality is to be realized and contained exclusively in the legal and political sphere, and even then, only in the abstract or formal sense. This differs strongly from the insight that was offered and acted upon by Progressive and New Deal thinkers who saw the role of the state expanding into the economy as necessary for a more substantive conception of democracy to flourish. These thinkers were reacting against the massive inequalities of the late nineteenth century, but, even more, they were reacting against the entire social theory upon which it had been based: laissez-faire individualism. And it is precisely this theory of society and government that has made a triumphant return in contemporary American politics.
Nevertheless, the ascendance of libertarian ideas about economy and society has not only influenced the elites responsible for public policy but also has affected public sentiment on a whole range of economic issues as well as the way that the public conceives of contemporary economic life. The inverse relation between the rise of inequality and the amount of political aversion to it requires explanation, and I think it can be found in the way that the idea of liberalism, with its emphasis on individualism and its conception of labor and property, has triumphed over broader conceptions of the common good that were espoused by republican-minded thinkers. Bled of its older political implications, a narrow sense of liberalism can no longer provide a robust critique of economic divisions, even among those who suffer most from them.
he adds that If inequality is seen merely in economistic terms and simply as a debate about “fairness,” then the political implications of inequality have indeed been lost. The critics of inequality that make up the American egalitarian tradition interpreted economic inequality as not only pernicious in and of itself but also as a threat to social and individual freedom.
In the third part of Illusion Only is Sacred : From the Culture Industry to the Aesthetic Economy in Thesis Eleven No 73 2003 David Roberts says If we agree that culturalproduction has become central to the economy and that the twin utopias of modernism – science/technology and art/culture – constitute, as R&D and as the culture industries, the key growth factors of the new economy, we can now update Heidegger’s ‘Age of the World Picture’.
Roberts says that despite all the talk of postmodernity it is necessary to stress basic conti- nuities: the two basic organizing forces of modernity are still capitalist accumulation and the centralization of power through bureaucratic rationaliz- ation. In this perspective the acceleration of globalization reinforces the Heideggerian ‘completion’ of modernity. At the same time the discourse of postmodernism does indicate a widespread sense of cultural change. He adds:
If, according to Heidegger, the essence of science/technology lies in the reduction of nature to a standing reserve, then the essence of the culture industries lies in the reduction of history, that is, the cultural heritage, to a standing reserve – an essence already inherent in the function of the 19th century museums of natural and art history, which combined the enlightenment project of ordering and classification with the romantic project of the gathering together of the relics of the national past and the trophies of imperialism. The conservation, preservation and marketing of cultural heritage sites exemplify the reduction of history to heritage experiences, packaged as tourist destinations. This reduction and reification both effects and expresses the mutation of the historicism of modernism into contemporary thematism, the progressive transformation of the relics of the past into an ever expanding theme park, in which the originals become over time their own replicas.
Roberts is using the term ‘culturalism’ to cover both the commodification of cultural heritage and the process that has led in the context of media-based globalization to culture becoming the general, decon- textualized sign and repository of value and to history becoming transformed into forms and themes of cultural expression.
Roberts adds:
The age of culturalism is the age of the symbiosis of the museum and tourism, its monuments are the architectural master works of the last half- century: the Guggenheim, the Beaubourg, the Getty, the Bilboa, the Berlin Jewish museums, to name only a few of the mega-icons of cultural tourism, places of pilgrimage no less important to the local economy than the pos- session of particularly prized relics was in the medieval period. And like medieval religious enterprise it announces a new relation between culture and the economy beyond the antagonisms of the ‘culture industry’.
In Illusion Only is Sacred : From the Culture Industry to the Aesthetic Economy in Thesis Eleven No 73 2003 David Roberts says that he proposes a more open- ended account of the culture industry and its transformations with reference to the aesthetic economy and to the cultural heritage industry. He begins with a closed conception:
The concept of the culture industry needs to be seen in the larger context of the critique of modernity. From Rousseau and the romantics, from Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Wagner, and Nietzsche onwards, the normative critique of a market-based culture has seen it as symptomatic of the decadence of civilization, of the dialectic of enlightenment, of the advent of one- dimensional man and the end of history, art, the subject and experience. The completion of modernity thus envisaged is not apocalyptic but entropic: the progressive loss of critical distinctions whose vanishing point can be described as the convergence of utopia and dystopia. This is the fate of modernity qua modernism. The rest is silence, accompanied by the gesture to the wholly Other of a world trapped in materialism.
He adds that the culture industry as analysed by Adorno is flourishing today, indeed that it embraces ever larger sectors of the economy. Thus we have:
the ever expanding scope of the entertainment industry in all its branches and multimedia forms in the leisure society; the arts and heritage industries, e.g. festivals, museums, galleries, exhibitions, heritage sites and theme parks, which are closely aligned with the tourism industry and its offshoot, museum building and heritage restoration as key means to urban revitalization; the lifestyle indus- tries, catering for body and soul, in the society of mass individualization; and of course design as the indispensable art and science of advertising from fashion to cosmetic surgery, from corporate images to shopping centres, the old/new universe of merchandizing, brand names and logocentrism in the society of the spectacle. The global reach of the culture industry is perhaps most obviously evident in the way the ideology of consumption is becoming the mass culture of economic globalization.
An ‘aesthetic economy’m emerges from the new aesthetic culture being brought into being by the marriage of art and industry, which is overcoming the split between high art and the technical, decorative and applied arts.
Roberts says that:
What distinguishes Benjamin from Adorno is that he can be understood as extending the concept of the culture industry from the commodification of culture to the culturalization of the commodity through its investment with symbolic (dream) meaning (the mythology of modernity) and through the aestheticization of consumption and of everyday life. In this sense Debord’s society of the spectacle and Böhme’s aesthetic economy complement each other.
Peter Beilharz in his Australia: The Unhappy Country, or, a Tale of Two Nations in Thesis Eleven (Number 82 2005) says that there are many narratives or myths of foundation concerning Australia.
I want to enter this labyrinth by telling two alternative tales of foundation. Then I shall proceed to tell a second tale, or set of stories, about social division in Australia, about the two – or more – nations that make up what we call Australia today. All this adds up to some- thing like what Hegel called the ‘unhappy consciousness’, the consciousness of self (or nation) as dual-natured, contradictory being, both unable to change and unable to contemplate being without change, both aware of possibility and yet afraid of its impossibility. The point is to change it. How?
If there are fundamental divisions in Australia – two nations, or more – then the resulting question might not be, why should this be so, but why have we – and others – dreamed of a false unity, a singularity of identity and national purpose, framed within the model of a singular and representative nation-state?
What remains, beneath this [nation], is a sense of cultural divide which is easy to caricature and often actually transgressed but nevertheless active, between a rural and regional culture of survival, mateship and adversity and an urban and suburban proclivity either for civic privatization and lifestyle ghettoes, or else for cosmopolitanism and alternative values in alternative lifestyle ghettoes. Are these, then, two nations? The lines of division and of difference in opinion are too varied and fine, too shifting to fit this template.
He adds that:
the populist image of the nation is a construction, a project, a task which the dominant historic bloc has to recast anew each day, or in each crisis, through each manoeuvred threat to our safety. And this, finally, is why we in Australia (and elsewhere, I venture) are bound to be the Unhappy Country, for this is a situation without a solution. The dream of new world, new start, struc- tured by British imperial consciousness, was a dream of oneness that is empirically unsustainable and ethically undesirable. That dream of a new world is now a dream for an old world. We now inhabit a brave new world, all of us, where the challenge is to exercise a hermeneutics of suspicion towards the historic values which inform our cultures, and to clarify and radicalize the immanent values in them which open to democracy and equality. Unhappiness, after all, is one precondition of the idea of future possible progress.
I'm taking advantage of Sage offering free trial access to its journals until the 15th October to explore Thesis Eleven. I rarely have access to this journal these days because it is behind a paywall and I do not belong to a university library.
Thesis Eleven refers to Marx’s eleventh Feuerbach thesis, which states that ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’. Taken literally, this means that people should stop being philosophers (and by extension, social scientists) and engage the world practically.
Martin Jay in The Moment of Thesis Eleven in Issue 100 February 2010 says that since its appearance in l980, Thesis Eleven has joined two other comparable journals, one British, the other American, as a leading clearing house for the reception and development of critical social theory in the English-speaking world, and more. Its elder brothers, New Left Review, founded in 1960, and Telos, begun in l968, served as the conduits of a welter of ideas from the European New Left, while struggling mightily to apply their lessons to conditions in their respective countries.
Jay adds that unlike New Left Review or Telos, the Australian Thesis Eleven never adopted a truculent, politically aggressive tone or polemicized with other currents on the left:
Thesis Eleven made the transition to non- dogmatic, post-Marxist critical thinking with considerable grace and agility. It thus continues and deepens the tradition begun by NLR and Telos of acting as a clearing house for and analyst of the most advanced ideas that emanate from Europe and North America, as well as doing something they never did: providing the rest of the world access to the most trenchant Australian con- tributors to the larger international conversation.
One fundamental task we set ourselves in the first editorial was to engage thoroughly with everyday life. Julian Triado and I began a major paper called ‘Theses on Everyday Life’, which was consigned to the gnawing criticisms of the local possums. What did happen, as far as I can tell, is that our imperative to take a political turn eventually was confirmed as a cultural turn. This much was entirely consistent with our firmer moorings, in western Marxism and critical theory. After all, Gramsci’s signal orientation was towards western culture, in contrast to the disastrous Soviet turn to the east. Yet to take culture seriously would also mean taking our location in Australia or in the antipodes seriously. And this would remain a major creative tension for the journal, dealing with our European and transatlantic roots while seeking to make sense of our own locations and later of other, alternative modernities, from Latin America to Asia.
Thesis 11 provided a fascinating and unique window on Australia and Australian theory, it described itself from the start as both Australian and international, and understood Australia to be located at the ‘edge of empire’ with the United States understood to be the ‘centre of empire’. I respected the journal because it has been interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary, bringing together thinkers from the social sciences and the humanities in new and surprising constellations and its exceptionally broad and generous practice of transla- tions enabled an Australian audience to follow theoretical developments abroad. Given the central role played by Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, György and Maria Markus, émigré members of Lukàcs’ Budapest School, the journal has also been intercontinental, keeping the rest of the world informed about the extraordinary theoretical work being done in Australia.
As George Steinmetz points out in 30 years of Thesis Eleven: A Survey of the Record and Questions for the Future in this issue the journal’s core concern wavers between social theory and critical theories of modernity. By 1996 social theory was becoming the journal’s overarching focus and critical and Marxist theory the subordinate categories .In 2002 the journal revised its subtitle to ‘critical theory and historical sociology’. This entailed a reassertion of critical over social theory and the journal was now associated with a specific academic discipline, sociology, for the first time since its founding as a pluridisiplinary journal.
Whilst Sage offers free access to its journals until the 15th October I want to return to Kirsten Henderson's 'Review Essay: Water and Culture in Australia: Some Alternative Perspectives' in Thesis Eleven August 2010 that I had mentioned earlier. This is important because water in Australia has remained under-analysed for so long, and policy responses to water issues have remained constrained by the understandings of water that frame it as an abstract (often economic or environmental) entity and never anything else.
In this review Henderson mentions the work of Eric Swyngedouw---- Social Power and the Urbanization of Water: Flows of Power. She states that his approach has profound implications for understanding water in Australian society. It means reorientating the focus of enquiry from the processes of consumption of water (as occurs in the majority of Australian scholarship on water) to the processes of production of water in Australia as a hybrid, socionatural entity that reflects and creates the relationships between capitalism, modernity, environment, space and contemporary social life.
She says that like Worster and Wittfogel:
Swyngedouw applies a theoretical perspective to the role of water in culture, focusing specifically on tracing it in the production of what he calls ‘socionature’. Writing from a broadly political ecological and critical geographical standpoint and taking his cues from Bruno Latour (1993), David Harvey (1989), Henri Lefebvre (1991), and Neil Smith (1990), Swyngedouw argues for the recognition that nature and society are deeply intertwined and that it is best to consider any waterscape as a ‘hybrid’ of the two.
Rather than arguing as Worster does, that via the social relations of production nature as a real, intrinsically significant, autonomous entity is obliterated in the ‘onward march of progress’ (Worster, 1985: 26):
Swyngedouw calls instead for consideration of humanity’s work in the world as ‘metabolism’ through which both nature and society are produced and reproduced. Nature is not obliterated by labour, only transformed. In consequence there is no ‘first’ or a priori nature and, therefore, neither is there a ‘second’ nature. There is only, following Latour, ‘quasi-objects’: part social, part natural, yet deeply historical and thus produced – objects/subjects that are intermediaries that embody and express nature and society together. These assemblages are simultaneously real, like nature; narrated like discourse; and collective, like society (Latour, 1993: 6; Swyngedouw, 2004: 27; 2006: 25). The ‘enrolment’ of these assemblages into the capitalistic relations of production means that nature becomes a constitutive part of society, one that both helps create and is created by that society.
rather than conceptualizing the power dynamic between nature and society as one emanating from a unified source leading to the domination of one ‘side’ by the other, Swyngedouw understands this relationship as part of a production process of a nature/society hybrid that leads to the multiplication of sites of struggle in a way that Worster’s perspective does not allow. In other words, power can be exercised (and creative responses to oppressive conditions developed) by groups and through sites that in other formulations (such as Wittfogel’s and Worster’s) would be regarded powerless and inhibited.
Rather than the technological transformation of water provision being the driving force for change, it is the continual socially and technologically determined process of production acting through multiple internal and dialectical dynamics of force and resistance that is the catalyst for change. The resulting creativity of society and nature co-determines environmental and social changes. Both society and nature are produced, malleable, transformable and transgressive. These metabolisms produce a series of both enabling and disabling social and environmental conditions and, as such, are never socially or ecologically neutral. Questions of socio-environmental sustainability then become deeply political questions of what or who needs to be sustained; who controls, who acts and who has the power to produce what kinds of socionature.
Mike Gane's Foucault on Governmentality and Liberalism in Theory Culture and Society December 2008 is a review of Foucault's lectures of 1977-78 and 1978-9 at the Collège de France. Gane says that:
The underlying challenge of the 1978–79 lectures is the question: is it not the case that neo-liberalism reverses classical liberalism? Something has changed, for it seems that now ‘one governs for the market, not because of the market’ (2008: 121). Modern liberalism no longer privileges ‘exchange’, today it privileges ‘competition’ (2008: 118). It asks: how can government be modelled on the market? So there is a paradox: if neo-liberalism continues the emphasis of classical liberalism in insisting on the non-intervention of the state, and that the state must not correct the destructive effects of the market, how is it that ‘neo-liberal neo-governmental intervention is no less dense’ (2008: 145)? The great mutation is that modern liberalism shifts the object of strategy from the individual (homo economicus) as producer or consumer, to the individual as the site of ‘enterprise’ (2008: 145). It is important to grasp, Foucault insists, that neo-liberalism is not laissez-faire liberalism, it also has a remarkable social programme that is based on taking the market as the formative ‘truth’ and ‘power of society’.
This programme, if examined carefully, is also seen to require a mutation in the function of law and juridical institutions (new functions, new terrains). So the paradox is explained: far from bringing less government, neo-liberalism will bring a different type of government and inserted at a different site: a new site of truth, a new application of power, and a new set of demands on conduct.
Gane says that what Focuault picks out from the latter is:
the new conception of human capital, and a critique of earlier liberalism in terms of time. Work is economic conduct; the individual becomes the ‘entrepreneur of himself’. This introduces the conception of the individual’s culture as a form of capital, and the individual’s body as involving genetic capital, the object of a new biopolitics. So the American version of neo-liberalism entails the extension and unlimited generalization of ‘enterprise’ through the culture, providing the basic intelligibility of a new form of governmentalization.