Pasted below is my exchange in a group Im in, just now with a very kosher comrade much more in the Situationist tradition than I am, on the Frankfurt Schools critical take on being in and of Modernity, but also against the form it has taken. Red Hughes I have to say I find the anti-enlightment schema really confused. The idea that rational thinking as such, rather than material interests, lead to the horrors of contemporary capitalism, seems like it can justify anything. As I understand the derive and the method of detournment, they werent arbitrary decomposition but decomposition of a false map of the world in order to recompose into a truer map. 13 hours ago Christian Garland Its not anti-Enlightenment though. Its aware that it is itself the product of the Enlightenment, but recognizes the original concepts of rationality and rational thought *science* in fact, as being far from spared interrogative critique, since the technological rationality that mass production offered may have the potential to eliminate hunger and poverty forever, but that same use of rational planning, was also used to try to eliminate an entire people , and all others deemed enemies of the Third Reich, in the Holocaust. Similarly, since the Enlightenment, in the epoch of Modernity - Postmodernity/Liquid Modernity is my preferred critical qualifier - humanity has the technological capacity to abolish labour completely, and offer everything the First World has to the Third World, rather than the extremely uneven and haphazard capitalist development it does, i.e. in erasing hunger, disease, etc. but this scientific knowledge, is instead used for creating the means for erasing human beings from the face of the earth, first glimpsed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What the standpoint of Adorno and Horkheimers Negative Ontology understands, is that it could go either way - and the bleak passage of history is seen by Benjamins Angelus Novus in the Theses on the Philosophy of Hisory - and there is no guarantee at all, that it will be the realization of freedom (communism) - but for all that, in fact *because* of that terrifying uncertainty on which the future hinges, we have no choice but to try and make it so. A more street-level and obviously revolutionary maxim for that, would be, No justice, just us.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 18:27:03 +0000
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