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Chris Long

Domination in Dialectic of Enlightenment - The Digital Dialogue - 0 views

    • Chris Long
       
      What is the dynamic, the dialectic, at work here?
  • Not only is domination paid for with the estrangement of human beings from the dominated objects, but the relationships of human beings, including the relationship of individuals to themselves, have themselves been bewitched by the objectification of mind.  Individuals shrink to the nodal points of conventional reactions and the modes of operation objectively expected of them. (21) The countless agencies of mass production and its culture impress standardized behavior on the individual as the only natural, decent, and rational one.  Individuals define themselves now only as things, statistical elements, successes or failures.  Their criterion is self-preservation, successful or unsuccessful adaptation to the objectivity of their function and the schemata assigned to it. (21-22)
Chris Long

Negative and Positive Freedom in Freud - The Digital Dialogue - 1 views

    • Chris Long
       
      Let's talk about the understanding of the individual that underwrites these points. The reference to Contract Theory here is important - is Freud's understanding of the individual in the state of nature liberal in the traditional sense?
  • Freud seems to be taking a perspective in line with social contract theory
Chris Long

Sublimation Examination: Individual and Pleasure Principle - The Digital Dialogue - 0 views

  • "Civilization does not once and for all terminate a 'state of nature.' What civilization masters and represses--the claim of the pleasure principle--continues to exist in civilization itself. The unconscious retains the objectives of the defeated pleasure principle." (Eros & Civ, 15-16)
    • Chris Long
       
      How does Marcuse use this insight to level an immanent critique of Freud? Think about the manner in which the defeated pleasure principle is reborn in Marcuse's text.
  • And so rather than becoming ineffectual like Adorno's individual, the pleasure principle, in its diversion through alternate outlets, ends up being the driving force for all human accomplishment
    • Chris Long
       
      Let's put this in stronger terms: the pleasure principle becomes the source of possible liberation, the root of a non-repressive civilization.
Chris Long

Mechanical Reproduction and its Impact on the Individual - The Digital Dialogue - 1 views

  • As I understand the use of the word 'Aura' here, it is the unique experience of a thing relative to its location in space and time.
    • Chris Long
       
      What happens to the notion of History and tradition here?  See, section II, 220-2.
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    "This, as Benjamin gets at, draws away from the object or experiences 'Aura'. As I understand the use of the word 'Aura' here, it is the unique experience of a thing relative to its location in space and time."
Chris Long

Mechanical Reproduction and its Impact on the Individual - The Digital Dialogue - 0 views

    • Chris Long
       
      Here is an indication of the notion of uniqueness associated with the aura.
Chris Long

Hegel on Wall Street - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Hegel’s emphatic but paradoxical way of stating this is to say that if the free market individualist acts “in [his] own self-interest, [he] simply does not know what [he] is doing, and if [he] affirms that all men act in their own self-interest, [he] merely asserts that all men are not really aware of what acting really amounts to.”
  • Hegel narrates how each formation of self and world collapses because of a mismatch between self-conception and how that self conceives of the larger world.  Hegel thinks we can see how history has been driven by misshapen forms of life in which the self-understanding of agents and the worldly practices they participate in fail to correspond.  With great drama, he claims that his narrative is a “highway of despair.”
  • holier-than-thou virtue and the self-interested Wall Street banker are making the same error from opposing points of view.
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  • Both are wrong because, finally, it is not motives but actions that matter, and how those actions hang together to make a practical world. 
  • what makes self-interested individuality effective is not its self-interested motives, but that there is an elaborate system of practices that supports, empowers, and gives enduring significance to the banker’s actions.
  • What bankers do, Hegel is urging, is satisfy a function within a complex system that gives their actions functional significance.
  • Time matters here because what must be promoted is the practice’s capacity to reproduce itself.
  • the profit-driven actions of the financial sector became increasingly detached from their function of supporting and advancing the growth of capital.
  • What market regulations should prohibit are practices in which profit-taking can routinely occur without wealth creation; wealth creation is the world-interest that makes bankers’ self-interest possible
  • regulation is the force of reason needed to undo the concoctions of fantasy
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    Very interesting discussion in light of Adorno's work in Minima Moralia
Chris Long

Society Modifying Mental Life - The Digital Dialogue - 0 views

    • Chris Long
       
      This post invites us to consider the meaning of Eros in Civilization and Its Discontents more seriously. Let's look at pp. 55-7 and think about the way Eros fits into the distinction between the Life Drive and the Death instinct (80ff).
  • the super ego
  • human disposition toward social connectivity called Eros, and that "the process of civilization is a modification which the vital processes experience under the influence of a task set by Eros.
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  • to discuss the ways in which we are affected in our day-to-day lives by social standards that are outside of our control
Chris Long

on marcuse: mostly thoughts on the basic concepts, and an argument that society can be ... - 0 views

  • Marcuse agreeably calculates that an average working person works 10 hours per day (this includes traveling to and from work and preparing for work), and requires 10 hours for the sleep and nourishment of his body. When doing this, he only has 4 remaining hours to do other things. Man thus "exists only part time" (47). He goes on to say that even this part time existence is mostly used for activities which are relaxing. The activities must be relaxing because of the the double effect of being tired from work coupled with the realization that one must rest in order to be prepared for work the following day. He argues that this system, which we call society, is not so much concerned with our own happiness, as it is with the insuring our role as a productive working cog in it. Marcuse stresses the idea of a conflict between the work demanded by society, and the happiness of the individual. In the second paragraph of the introduction, Marcuse states that "Happiness must be subordinated to the discipline of work as a full time occupation"
    • Chris Long
       
      Thematize the issue of work here: what about socially useful work (210, 214ff)?
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