Blogora Classic: Aune on I Heart Adorno Part Zwei, May 03, 2005

May 03, 2005

I Heart Adorno Part Zwei

The Ashton translation of Adorno's Negative Dialectics into English is notoriously riddled with problems. I just found this terrific website with a complete English translation and study guide. N.B. the section on rhetoric at the end of the Introduction.

I'm working on a (perhaps unpublishable) set of reflections on rhetoric, aesthetics, and politics in imitation of Adorno's paratactic writing. Some preliminary notes follow. Comments are very welcome, even if just to tell me not to quit my day job.

Rhetoric, Aesthetics, Culture

In Lieu of a Preface [A problematic rhetorical form, at least since Hegel’s Phenomenology. Each paragraph of the preface announces a theme that will be taken up in subsequent chapters. Composition in parataxis first gains the good will of a certain kind of audience, just as hypotactic composition does another. I want to persuade both, but the audience for paratactic discourse is a “harder sell.”]

Christian Wolff invented a technical language for German philosophy. Baumgarten coined the term “aesthetics.” Kant posed the problems subsequent philosophers of aesthetics would try to solve, all the way down to Adorno.

This work is written amid the ruins of Adorno’s Aesthetics. It rejects the whole “German” isolation of aesthetics from other arts of language, especially rhetoric, yet even in that rejection it must make its arguments speak German—if only because—if there remains anyone yet with an open mind capable of being persuaded—it would be a good thing if the Germans learned to speak the language of Greek and Roman rhetoric that they destroyed in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries.

Only a mutilated reality is capable of missing what rhetoric once meant to culture.

The strategy, then, is bound up with the canon of Disposition: paratactic reflections imitating Adorno, or—going back further—the aporetic early dialogues of Plato, yet unlike Adorno, culminating in an oration on the classical model: exordium, partitio, confirmatio, refutation, digressio, peroratio.

Only out of the most radical program of cultural reaction will we find resources for an exodus from the administered world, a newer form of the Great Refusal. The name of this program? Ciceronian Marxism. [This is not a Burkeian perspective by incongruity. Perhaps Marxist Republicanism would be better, but by personifying Communism and Republicanism in their two most important rhetors, the figure stresses agency and personality—two factors which, if rejected, in the name of scientific socialism or post-structuralist interpellation, lead to the Cult of Personality.]

Out of the ruins of liberalism—in its statist and its laissez-faire varieties—and out of the ruins of Communism, a renovated republicanism proposes an end to Empire, a new order of the ages, a new virtue. [This book also is composed in the shadow of two academic best-sellers: Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Multitude. In fetishizing constituent power, out of a dubious reading of Spinoza, they neglect the necessity of the Constitution. They refuse the Written Constitution—the American innovation—and thus the rule of law, without which every revolution founders.]

From Adorno: the figure of the constellation. What pattern emerges out of the conjunction of rhetoric, poetics, aesthetics, ethics, politics, law as they move at different speeds through the only history we know? What content will find its form both in the world and separate from it? In Invention, the prospect of thought endlessly circulating to avoid compromising its revolutionary goal helps imagine a different kind of audience, a virtuous audience capable of taking up arms for the republic.

Another constellation: the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, 1848, the Paris Commune, St. Louis, 1905, 1917, 1989. We are not yet done representing these moments, or understanding the forces of attraction and repulsion they still exert on each other.

We will not be afraid to use the word “Bourgeois.” [It is so much easier to hate them now—the bourgeoisie. Will the role of hatred and revolutionary violence in this book seem dangerous or, at best, the gauchiste reflections of an armchair socialist? I hope not, and, like Marx and Engels themselves, I refuse to rule out the possiblity of a peaceful evolution toward socialism, even in the U.S., which is capable of mounting the greatest bourgeois resistance. My emphasis on the rule of law and Constitutional—rather than “constituent”—power is intended to check those forces which prolong revolutionary violence beyond the amount that is absolutely necessary.] But we may be skeptical about the word “Proletariat”—in part because of the mixing of linguistic and historical codes, yet mostly because of the disintegration of a proletarian public sphere—if not of the Proletariat itself. For the first time, the Proletariat does not recognize itself as such. [Let us avoid any ethnocentrism here, by noting that across the Globe some proletariats continue to recognize themselves as such. In contrast to Lenin, who attacked capitalism at its weakest link, I propose attacking capitalism at its strongest link: the United States and, particularly, the rural and Southern United States. Revolution in “America” means, a fortiori, revolution everywhere else. Revolution in Texas means, a fortiori, revolution throughout the U.S.] The perennial search for new subjects of revolution, since at least Marcuse, begins anew. This time, however, the task is to persuade the subjects that, like the branch bent by the water, they were always whole, and always stronger than it appeared. [from Robert Bly, Sleepers Joining Hands]

As Timpanaro observed, one finds in the poetry of Leopardi the possibility of secular solidarity—in the struggle of humanity against nature. See the conclusion of La ginestra: La Ginestra O Il Fiore del Deserto (Broom Or The Flower of the Desert) (tr. Eamon Grennan)

[conclusion]

[Nature]: She's the one he calls the enemy,
And believing the human family
Leagued to oppose her, as in truth it is
And has been from the start, he sees
As allies all men, embraces all
With unfeigned love, giving and expecting
Prompt assistance, useful aid
In the many hazards and lasting hurts
Of the common struggle [Della guerra comune]. And he believes
It sheer madness
To arm your hand against another,
Lay snares or stumbling blocks for your neighbor,
As mad as, in a state of siege--
Surrounded by enemies, the assault at its height--
To forget the foe and in blind rage
Turn your force upon your friends,
Smite with the sword, sow havoc and panic
Amongst those fighting on your own side.
When ideas such as these are clear,
As once they were, to the common people,
And when the terror that first forged
For human beings the social bond
Against the savagery of nature
Shall, in part, be again restored
By a true grasp of things as they are, then
Justice and mercy
And an open, honest civil life
Will no longer take root in those swollen fables
On which our stolid common morals
Are mostly grounded, and where they stand
As steady as anything built on sand.

Posted by jim at May 3, 2005 10:26 PM

Rhetorics in Unusual Places: From my "Military Leadership" class, at Marquette University's ROTC program

Rhetorics in Unusual Places: From my "Military Leadership" class, at Marquette University's ROTC program

Blogora Classic: Aune on Weaver, March 26, 2005

March 26, 2005

Rhetorical Concepts V: Richard Weaver

Richard Weaver (1910-1963): The study of rhetoric as a cure for the cultural crisis engendered by science, industrial capitalism, and “mass” education/communication.

I. Life:
A. Grew up in Asheville, NC, and Lexington, KY. Attended U of Kentucky, where he joined the Socialist Party.
B. Attended Vanderbilt, where he studied with the Southern Agrarians (I’ll Take My Stand) John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate. They argued against modern science and industrial capitalism, defended an agriculture-based society like that of the Old South (but without slavery).
C. Taught at TAMU from 1937-1939, where he “encountered a rampant philistinism, abetted by technology, large-scale organization, and a complacent acceptance of success as the goal of life. Moreover, I was here forced to see that the lion of applied science and the lamb of the humanities were not going to lie down together in peace, but that the lion was going to devour the lamb unless there was a very stern keeper of order.” As he drove back to College Station in the fall of 1939 he realized he didn’t have to go back, and instead turned around and enrolled at LSU for his PHD.
D. Taught at U of Chicago for many years, primarily lower-level writing courses (which he enthusiastically volunteered for). Author of Composition: A Course in Reading and Writing (1957); Ideas Have Consequences (1948); The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953); and Visions of Order (1964).
E. Helped found Modern Age and National Review, as well as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (publisher of Intercollegiate Review—if you want a free subscription, ask me). Like Russell Kirk (The Conservative Mind), he was a supporter of the “traditionalist” wing of American conservatism, as opposed to “libertarians” and “fusionists,” who were most concerned about free enterprise and anti-Communism, respectively. Traditionalists believe the central problem facing us today is cultural decay.

II. Some core ideas:
A. Defense of rhetoric:
1. “Language is sermonic”: a critique of the social-scientific, journalistic, and general semantics view that you can have neutral, “objective,” “scientific” communication. ALL acts of communication take a point of view and attempt to persuade

2. Healthy cultures have a balance of dialectic and rhetoric. “Dialectic is abstract reasoning on the basis of propositions; rhetoric is the relation of the terms of these to the existential world in which facts are regarded with sympathy and are treated with that kind of historical understanding and appreciation which lie outside the dialectical process” (Visions of Order, 56). Education or journalism that is only negative, always questioning assumptions is destructive.
3. My favorite definition of rhetoric (from his essay on the Phaedrus): “So rhetoric at its truest seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves, links in that chain leading up to the ideal, which only the intellect can apprehend and only the soul have affection for. This is the truly justified affection of which no one can be ashamed, and he who feels no influence of it is truly outside the communion of minds. Rhetoric appears, finally, as a means by which the impulse of the soul to be ever moving is redeemed.”
B. A healthy culture:
1. Has a “tyrannizing image”: the idea of a culture’s excellence, embodied in ritual, scripture, literature, codes of conduct, enforced standards of value and exclusion: “A culture integrates by segregating its forms of activity and its members from those not belonging.” Culture satisfies a deep-seated psychic need. (Note that TAMU has the lowest crime/violence rate of any US university.)
2. A healthy culture has style: recognized in:
a. Elaboration: more than the merely functional—it is “over the top” in some way
b. Rhythm: clear marking of beginnings and endings
c. Distance: a sense of grandeur, monuments, courtesy

C. Types of argument:
1. Argument from definition: analysis of Lincoln: In dealing with slavery, other leaders looked to law, American history, or practical expediency. Lincoln asked: “is the negro a man?” William F. Buckley’s favorite definition of conservatism: “The true conservative is one who sees the universe as a paradigm of essences, of which the phenomenology of the world is a sort of continuing approximation.”
2. Argument from circumstance: basing conclusions on standards such as: will it work, is it useful? Analysis of Edmund Burke, who argued against firm principles in politics (the attack on Burke was part of a debate in American conservatism in the 1950's about the relevance of English conservativism to the American experience).
3. The abortion debate is a classic example of a conflict between argument from definition and argument from circumstance.

Posted by jim at March 26, 2005 03:37 PM