We Are All Porn Actors

“The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations)

“… there is no way of making sensuous man rational except by first making him aesthetic.”
Friedrich Schiller (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1794)

“Unity, as the avant-gardists are aware, is always at some level a political concept.”
Terry Eagleton (London Review of Books, Nov. 2020)

“Democracy is not identical with the subordination of the minority to the majority. Democracy is a state which recognizes the subordination of the minority to the majority, i.e. it is an organization for the systematic use of violence by one class against another, by one section of the population against another.”
Vladimir Lenin (The State and Revolution)

I was thinking this week of the profound and fundamental paradoxes of our existence. This is the sort of thing one starts to ponder as one gets older (I’m 73). The fact that human sensory experience is so infinitely complex and yet we (humans) also exist with our involuntary reflexive responses in a minute by minute, or second by second manner. Humans can (and I see this in children) develop fluency and extraordinary skills in fine motor coordination after, often, a very brief time. I was walking up the stairs at my house the other day (it’s three stories) deep in thought about, well, this very topic and as I looked up — having reached the landing between floors, I was startled, for a brief half a second (nano second) by a pair of rain-overalls (one of my eight year olds) with the rubber boots still stuck in the pant leg. For that nano second I thought someone was standing there. Then in another micro second I realized what it was. It was rain gear for my kids. All this happened in an startling short amount of time. Thoughts raced through my mind (speaking of spatial metaphors). It was all involuntary. Or, for another example, take the human eye. If you have ever seen close-up film of the eye, slowed down, over the course a few seconds, the number of movements and adjustments the eye makes is almost impossible to grasp. And the mind is not making conscious decisions about almost any of it.

What struck me was this all takes place in time. And we cannot even define time. There are a number of videos out there where physicists discuss ‘time’. They are made, largely, for the lay person and are really quite interesting. Although also oddly if not acutely unsatisfying. And they all circle around Einstein and general relativity. That ‘time’ is a dimension, like space. But all of these discussions seem to never mention death. Time is, it seems to me, defined by death. Whatever it is ‘we’ are, we are something that dies. The ultimate measuring stick is mortality. The organic aspect of ‘us’ decays and stops working.

The incomplete, as an idea or concept, is tied to mortality. Death prevents completion. The *ending*, in terms of form, is a small death and endings in general can be violent deaths or peaceful deaths.

That experience of mistaking a hanging rain slicker, with boots stuck in it, for a person, happened in a nearly magical instant of ‘time’. All of human existence, it seems to me, is caught up in social relationships. Try to imagine, really, what it would be like to be the last person on earth. I think one would go insane, whatever that is, very quickly. And I say that as someone who on the grand scale of sociality, is at the far end of time spent alone. I was an only child. A sickly only child. And I grew accustomed to and dependent on, solitude. But there is always, I think, a return to the social. This sense of return is something worth pondering. And as the national narrative today feels ever more strip mined and denuded, the fact that all is allegory now means our conscious processing has become a special kind of allegory.

Another branch of this discussion is found in what I am coming to view as the cyber hyperreality of lives deeply entombed within screens. And this turn leads to our sense of public self. Our public selves. I suspect that there is a deeper accumulative aspect to screen life than previously considered. It is now decades of computer screen life and writing, and increasingly video communications, and it is now something firmly embedded in our daily lives. In the West anyway. In the industrial capitalist west. Many African countries have only about 6% of homes with computers. One forgets this.

One other aspect is the migration to smart phones. Most people I know in the West, are rarely off their phones. Not only are they rarely without them, they read more on them, even long form articles, and many communicate (I hesitate to call it writing) on them as well. Does just the sheer tininess of the keyboard not contribute to style change in prose? Clearly texting has profoundly altered writing, on all levels. There are, of course, many reasons that advanced capitalism is producing ever more alienated citizens, but the role of screens is certainly a large part of it.

An here there is a question of screen generated morality. And this in turn has a political dimension I have been thinking about a lot recently. And which segues nicely into Adorno’s last radio interview before his death.

“The demand for maturity and responsibility [Mündigkeit] seems to be entirely natural in a democracy. To clarify this I should just like to refer to the start of Kant’s very brief treatise entitled ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ He there defines ‘tutelage’ – immaturity and irresponsibility [Unmündigkeit] – and thus also by implication maturity and responsibility, by saying that this tutelage is one’s own fault if it originates not in a lack of understanding, but rather in the lack of the resolution and courage to rely on oneself without the guidance of another. ‘Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.’ This project of Kant’s – which no one, even with the worst will in the world, can accuse of being unclear –seems to me to remain extraordinarily up-to-date. Democracy is founded on the education of each individual in political, social and moral awareness, as embodied in the institution of the representative vote. If this process is not to result in irrationality, then a prerequisite must be the capacity and courage of each individual to make full use of his reasoning power.”
Theodor Adorno (‘Education for maturity and responsibility’, interview with Hellmut Becker, 1969)

Itay Snir described Adorno’s late mind set: “He famously claimed that in the absence of a real possibility of changing ‘objective’ social conditions—capitalism and its attendant mechanisms of domination—emphasis must be laid on the ‘subjective’ conditions that produce violence and suffering, namely on personality structures and mindsets that may be ameliorated through education.” (Minima Pedagogica)

Now this is around 50 years ago. Ponder that. Adorno gave that lecture in 1969, the year I graduated High School, and the so called ‘summer of love’. Adorno saw nothing in objective social conditions that could change the basic contours of domination. And he then saw the idea of pedagogy as crucially important for laying the groundwork for ‘perhaps’ future movements of change.

“These strokes of luck meant I was not exposed in my own education to the control mechanisms of science, as would normally be the case. As a result, I still dare to think unguarded thoughts, which people are usually ‘cured’ of by the all-powerful control mechanism, known as ‘the university’, above all during their time as *Assistenten*, as the post is called. What this reveals is that knowledge itself, in the widest range of fields, becomes so castrated and sterilized by these control mechanisms, that the very thing it frowns on is what it needs in order even to survive. { } but really the remarkable thing about the problem of maturity, if we actually centre it on issues of teaching and learning, is that even in the literature on education – and this really is something truly frightening and very German – we find no sign of that uncompromising support for education for maturity, which we should be able to take for granted.”
Theodor Adorno (Ibid)

It may indeed be very German, but it is also very American. Adorno notes that in place of maturity the educational system substitutes commitment and authority. Hellmut Becker observes a short while later in this discussion how ‘adaptation’, or adjustment, is a huge focus for U.S. education. And the question raised then has to do with ‘thinking’, with Reason. And running alongside this the idea of autonomy. Adjustment, of course, was an idea (and term) hugely favored by the revisionist psychoanalysts that came to prominence in the U.S.

“But you are certainly right in this respect: the problem of maturity is not just a German problem, but rather an international one. And, one might add, one which reaches out far beyond the boundaries of different political systems. As in America, where it really is the case that over this issue two different demands clash head on: on the one hand, that of a powerful individualism, which will not be dictated to in any way, on the other, the idea of adaptation, derived from Darwinism via Spencer, precisely that ‘adjustment’ which, as you know, was virtually a magic word some 20 to 30 years ago in America, and which both binds and cuts back the very independence which in the same breath it proclaims. Which is, by the way, a paradox which runs through the entire history of the middle classes. The fact that ideologies with natures as different as the pragmatic vulgar ideology in America and Heidegger’s philosophy in Germany can agree over precisely the same issue, namely the glorification of heteronomy, is a confirmation of the theory of ideologies, to the extent that even mental constructs which contradict one another violently in terms of content, can then also suddenly agree in their social context, that is, through the very thing which they wish to support or defend. Just as generally there is a quite alarming correspondence between Western positivism and what still remains of metaphysics in Germany. Really these correspondences amount to a declaration of the bankruptcy of philosophy itself.”
Theodor Adorno (Ibid)

Authority of course is a complex idea, and one with both progressive and regressive aspects. In the West, however, the child learns authority through an identification with the father (Freud) which they then discover does not correspond to the ideal they have of this figure. This is a usually painful process that ends with a detachment from this ideal and a step toward ‘maturity’ (and autonomy). But if authority is clung to, in spite of everything, the result in permanent immaturity and as Adorno described it, ‘people kept unnaturally stupid’.

Today the authority of the father has waned considerably. I have written of this before and met with heated opposition for suggesting that society needs the Oedipal conflict to be resolved, even if, inevitably, it is painful if not traumatic. As the least worst option at the moment.

“However, it is not generally perceived that in the very concept of role itself, which is after all taken from the theatre, the individual’s non-identity with himself is maintained. This means that when role is made into a social yardstick, what is also perpetuated is the idea that people are not themselves the people they just are, that they are therefore without identity.{ } My strong impression is that the superego identifications that most people make and cannot escape are at the same time always botched and incomplete. That, for instance, countless individuals internalize an oppressive, brutal and overpowering father, but without
being able to work through this identification, just because the resistances to it are so powerful. And precisely because the identification fails for them, because there are innumerable adults who are actually only playing the adult which they have never quite become, what they have to do where possible is to overact and to exaggerate their identification with such models,puffing themselves up, talking endlessly in adult tones, merely in order to make credible to themselves and to others the role in which they have in fact failed.”
Theodor Adorno (Ibid)

This remains true today. And possibly here the role of screen interaction can be reintroduced. What role does the screen occupy in terms of authority? All fathers are Max Headroom is one answer. Or, perhaps the Terminator, or even before that HAL. And 2001 Space Odyssey, came out a year before Adorno’s radio interview.

“I would say that the way in which maturity could be put into concrete form today – and it is a form which can in no way be taken for granted because it would still have to be established everywhere, really in every single aspect of our lives – that the only real concrete form of maturity would consist of those few people who are of a mind to do so working with all their energies towards making education an education for protest and for resistance.”
Theodor Adorno (Ibid)

This is, of course, true, and also, when you sit back and reflect on how this might be implemented, one realizes that the problem is institutions themselves. Art of course never thrives in institutions. Art is inevitably about tearing down the institution. Adorno says a beautiful thing a bit later, and that is that what should be taught, whatever the context, is ” All we try to do is simply to open people’s minds to the fact that they are constantly being deceived, because the mechanism of tutelage has been raised to the status of a universal mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived. Making everyone aware of these connections could perhaps be achieved in the spirit of an immanent critique, because there can be no normal democracy which could afford to be explicitly against an enlightenment of this kind.” This is what I have always tried to do, in fact, and why I am not offered employment at any institution.

As he notes, if you expose them to a movement from a Beethoven quartet, or show a film by Fassbinder or Bresson, you are doing something,however small.I remember deconstructing the opening five minutes of the original Rambo at the film school. Almost frame by frame. It was both hugely amusing but also provocative. Adorno sees pedagogy in a spirit of immanent critique. And when thinking about this one is made aware, again, because it is both forgotten and intentionally obscured, just how inflated is the insistence on happy endings and cheerfulness and optimism in contemporary culture. Both Becker and Adorno both emphasize, as the end of this radio interview, that contemporary society is deeply and profoundly invested in inertia. In curating an atmosphere of it and will go to extraordinary lengths to subvert change — of any sort.

The loss of audience for serious art is a closely related topic, actually, if we’re thinking pedagogy here — But certainly in theatre and film, audiences for demanding work are continuing to dwindle. Arts is officially ‘not’ taught in schools, and if it is it is only in the most perfunctory way. Art is brought up only if it is contemporary and additionally morally instructive, or simply contemporary and hugely popular.Beyonce will be elevated and a Peter Handke will largely be ignored. What percentage of American freshman University students know who Handke is? I’d argue its very very very tiny. One percent maybe. He won a Nobel Prize so maybe 2%. But there is a connection between pedagogy and philistinism.

“Odysseus’s crew, who cannot hear the call of the sirens because their ears are plugged with wax. In other words, Odysseus’ oarsmen know that aesthetic experience exists, but are excluded from entering the aesthetic realm by their location in the social relations of production. Second, Aesthetic Theory critiques the consumers of the culture industry. Barred from directly experiencing the promised happiness of the aesthetic realm, these individuals indulge in the false pleasures of the mass produced commodities of film, television, radio, and so forth. Such pleasures mystify social contradictions and thus perform a convenient function in the reproduction of labor-power: momentary escapism that prepares the consumer for further labor. “
Lewis Tynon (From Aesthetics to Pedagogy and Back: Rethinking the Works of Theodor Adorno)

Adorno saw Odysseus as the first bourgeois individual. The philistine however is not really those sailors with their ears stuffed with wax, the philistine is educated enough to think he knows what he hears. Or understands what he hears. The philistine is the bad art teacher. Adorno notes several times that art is always in opposition to society, or it isn’t art.

The philistine rejects this idea. The philistine then is the anti dialectical art teacher.

“Overall, education in relation to Adorno cannot be dismissed as a marginal concern. Furthermore, when framed by Adorno’s larger critique of praxis, education (as an activist oriented intervention) becomes a unique moment in which Adorno directly confronts many concrete political issues that elude his other writings. It is well known that Adorno heavily criticized praxis as an attempt to synthesize thinking and practice (hence the oft-cited and unwarranted charges of elitism and smugness). His critique of praxis is perhaps most directly summarized in the essay entitled “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in which Adorno argues that praxis, in its historically materialized forms, inevitably degrades thought to the level of mere pragmatism. The hasty movement towards activism is, for Adorno, a retreat from the labor of thinking (itself a praxis) into a collective narcissism that does not so much disrupt the status quo as it substitutes a sense of futility with the equally problematic retreat into self-congratulatory moral superiority. In the moment of praxis where practice calls for thought to service immediate needs with equally immediate solutions, the dialectic is “perverted into sophistry” closing off the power of thought to contemplate the totality of social relations that lie on the horizon beyond what is given.”
Lewis Tynon (Ibid)

A while later Tynon adds :“The “solution” that pedagogy offers against barbarism is thus not an immediate fix but rather an opening up to thinking negatively, and thus in the end, a movement away from fascism towards the possibility of aesthetic experience as a field wherein social suffering is thrown into relief and the broken promise of happiness is animated beyond fascist resentment. Stated differently, the contradiction between practice and theory is the precise place of the pedagogical imagination, which acts as a symptom of the fractured life world and a possible moment of productive intervention.” (Ibid)

And here I don’t want to lose sight of sceeen habituation and the dehumanizing aspect that comes with it; and I am reminded of a comment from my friend George McIntyre — made in the comments section of an earlier post on this blog: ” In porn the natural essence of sex has been reversed. In real sex, the sense of sight serves as initiator in the first encounter of the potential partners. As they get to know each other, sight plays a diminishing role and finally becomes redundant when actual sex takes place and the couple are too close to see each other. In porn this process is totally violated. There is of course no relationship at all and the visual aspect becomes the act itself. All of which sets up the most despairing contradictory process imaginable where the viewer is locked into the ultimate alienating trap in which possibly the most intensely visceral bodily urge is thwarted in the most aggressive way by an infinite gap between the one who desires and the object of desire.”

This is very perceptive but also, probably, can be applied to all relations mediated by the screen. I think the ubiquity of screen’s in the lives of the industrialized West has in a sense made us all like porn actors.

That sense of visual predominance, coupled to ever growing narcissism, and the sheer sense of enforced loneliness in western society today, means (and this is my sense of it, on a personal level) one cannot shake off this sense of being haunted by something. Maybe someone. I don’t know. But there are ghosts and perhaps they are just the secondary pixel afterimage that we also cannot shake free from.

The loss of skills such as cursive writing, since the advent of computers, has had rather seriously deleterious effect on children. The fluency on your iPad is significantly different than handwriting. One problem is the passive subject position that exists with all computers. One is held captive by drop down boxes. Etc. And the quality of a signature has been erased as well. One is further separated from one’s physical senses. This is all a part of the philistinism that pervades the West. Robert Hughes called his television series on modern art ‘The Shock of the New’. I think one of the problems today is that the new no longer shocks. And this is not the fault of art, but of the audience. And this is not simply (or at all) the result of image overload or access to literally everything on the internet from porn to genocide. Adorno notes that identification with the victim and the victim’s pain becomes a way to erase the ‘other’. This is very perceptive and a keen insight into bourgeois thought and sensibility. Today’s liberal is actually, in terms of schooling and perhaps everything else) is very at home in hierarchical classrooms in which teachers take on roles of power. This is not to dismiss empathy but rather to clarify the mechanisms of projection.

“The image of the teacher repeats, no matter how dimly, the extremely affect-laden image of the executioner.”
Theodor Adorno (Critical models: Interventions and catchwords)

There is an institutional unconscious that permeates all institutions. Traces of this are found in all science today, and in general the instrumental and positivist thinking that has become the model for what is trumpeted as ‘progress’. Adorno says we find in today’s new fascist (again written fifty years ago)…“a rage for organization, by the inability to have any immediate human experiences at all, by a certain lack of emotion, by an overvalued realism.” (Ibid)

There is an essay waiting to be written SPECIFICALLY about the term ‘realism’ in this context.

“But we must make it clear that for Adorno, fascism is not simply psychological, and as such, genocide is not the result of an aberrant perversion. The psychology of fascism is conditioned by the material relations of capitalism, and is thus the subjectivity necessitated by the mode of production. Adorno (1998) argues, “That fascism lives on, that the oft-invoked working through of the past has to this day been unsuccessful and has degenerated into its own caricature, an empty and cold forgetting, is due to the fact that the objective conditions of society that engendered fascism continue to exist.”
Lewis Tynon (Ibid)

Freud saw teaching as one of the impossible professions. For it exists on a border with what cannot be said. For it strives to touch the truth, as Tynon notes, but is always teetering in that domain of absence, where it remains just out of reach, or per Lacan, it is a search for the lost object of desire. This is not esoteric abstraction, but a fact for any teacher, a fact which is simultaneously a recognition that that lost object cannot be recovered, and that also you, the teacher, must become in form part of a transference process that entails much psychological violence. The teacher is both executioner and in solitary confinement.

Teaching is also tied into theatre as the ur-art form, and with our own psychological formation, our own psychic history. Like all artworks there is a level of impossibility, only that in pedagogy there is this institutional problematic.

“The project of desubjectifying our thinking about aesthetics can be seen in a variety of frameworks, of which the largest historical one is surely the turn of contemporary philosophy away from what are now known as ‘philosophies of the subject’ – that is to say, from the earlier modern attempt to ground truth in consciousness, the transcendental subject, and a variety of other subjective experiences and phenomena. This radical turn away from and against subjectivity can be genealogized in a number of narratives, which alternately begin with structuralism, with Heidegger, with Nietzsche, or even with Hegel or with Kant himself. It is objectively ambiguous, in so far as the case might also be made that this tendency in contemporary philosophy thereby replicates the tendencies and interests of the modern state and of monopoly capitalism: these last can be seen as having a stake in the planification of the individual, the reduction of individual and subjective choice in the era of organized society, the penetration and colonization of the older autonomous ego, but also of the Unconscious and desire, by the forces of the market.”
Fredric Jameson (Late Marxism)

Contemporary philosophy, certainly the Anglo-American variety, is indeed absolutely anti dialectical, anti Marxist, and hugely concerned with objective reality (and correspondingly with artificial intelligence and all things computational). I suspect ever fewer working class youth study philosophy, and its mostly the preserve of expensive private universities and directed toward very practical ends. But here there probably should be a discussion of what is meant by ‘new’. Usually the ‘new’ is seen as either a culmination of something, or it is seen as cyclical. Or recombination or recurrence. And today there seems to be a discussion to be had about something we might call post post-modernism. And this PPM (sic) is associated with computer technology and AI.

Jameson was still not entirely sold on Adorno when he wrote Late Marxism, (1991) but he was starting to be. By his final book, Mimesis, he was absolutely. And he cites here an important quote of Adorno, which is referenced a lot.

“Where art is experienced purely aesthetically, it fails to be fully experienced even aesthetically.”
Theodor Adorno (Aesthetic Theory)

Now here is important to note that the American left, which following the second world war, was firmly entrenched in the University system. By the sixties of course lots else was happening in the culture. The point that needs making is the fundamental anti intellectualism of Americans in general. Even Jameson notes it and observes :

“But the American left, as it was reborn socially in the 1960s, also rediscovered its older populist traditions and began to reformulate its cultural positions in an essentially populist idiom. Meanwhile, the essentially European traditions of aesthetic modernism, now canonized in the academy, ossify and are felt to be ‘academic’ in the bad sense; the repudiation of this kind of modernism by the populist left then merges with an anti-intellectualism which in American business society has paradoxically been a political tradition here on the left as well as on the right; while finally modernism itself, as an artistic movement, for whatever larger systemic and socioeconomic reasons, comes to an end during or shortly before this period. ”
(Ibid)

The mostly privileged students of the sixties, those enrolled at expensive Universities, did not want to listen to Bartok, or watch plays by Sophocles, or even Strindberg, nor read William Empson. Or read Marx if it came to that.

I have written so much on this topic of kitsch taste and camp, and the pseudo populism of the US left that I can’t bear to write more. Only to note it. Adorno was later to become fashionable, to a degree, and famous in these circles, but he then again fell out of favour. Once the post structuralist phase mercifully passed, there was a decided turn toward pragmatism and the never really abandoned positivist sensibility. But again, we are speaking of very narrowly defined group of white academia. In any event, the domain of aesthetic culture was never large in the U.S. There is a sort of nostalgia associated with this fake memory, but its not real history. And I think one aspect of this, and this is just a side bar to a much longer discussion, is that the role of rock n roll in the US, from the 50s onward was a very useful emotional valve for Americans too impatient to listen to Webern or Stockhausen. There was also jazz, which already was being compromised by the sixties, but which still contained figures of charisma and of musical importance, in Coltrane and Miles, and Mingus and Sonny Rollins, and later Ornette. That was the secondary valve after rock– but white cultural management, as it were, recognized early on that Mingus was a non-starter, couldn’t be controlled (I mean Miles was bad enough) and what they went about creating was a Jay-Z. It took some time but when I see Jay Z I am aware of looking at thirty years of Madison Avenue at work.

There is a relationship between professional sports and rock music. Both to some degree retain the unconscious traces of the plantation. And sports networks like ESPN are the new minstrel show. Black intellectuals, black seriousness, is totally absent. In rock, white seriousness is absent, in its way, too. There is also an entire deep state analysis to be done regards Rap and black Hollywood. Producers do not hire black actors (there are exceptions like expensively ivy league educated Jeffrey Wright) but rather rappers to do some ‘acting’. Its seen as an economic strategy — and it is — but thats not all it is.

But I wanted to return to both pedagogy, Adorno’s notions of activism, and finally death and time.

Allow me a longer quote here from Jameson:

“Our inquiry into the way in which Adorno conceives of the negative or ‘opposite’ of art, however, is still not complete. We have in effect identified not one but two such oppositional terms, which do not quite overlap conceptually: there is on the one hand an absence of art altogether [das Amusische], a position occupied by Odysseus’s crewmen; and alongside that the somewhat stronger negative term of the anti-art or ‘bad art’ of the Culture Industry, with its betrayed and victimized public:“The missing fourth term in this system is secured less by a new form of culture (or its absence) than by a generalized negation of the other three terms that, playing across a range of thematic levels, can itself only be identified allegorically as a character in Adorno’s deeper ideological and phantasmatic narrative. This ‘slot’ constitutes the negation of ‘anti-art’, for example, not by way of the end of the Culture Industry and the emergence of some new and positive ‘negation of the negation’; but rather as the opposite number to the latter’s drama of victimization, as the agency of that victimization and the place of the production of the Culture Industry itself. Beyond them, of course, the term expands to include the philistines in general, who are not, in Adorno’s scheme of things, those who passively consume mass culture, nor are they the oarsmen, who are deprived of the very sense organs for any culture, whether authentic or commercial, but rather those who carry in their hearts some deeper hatred of art itself.”
Fredric Jameson (Late Marxism)

The philistine as Adorno describes him/her is a crucially important factor in western culture. They understand art all too well, as Jameson notes. The philistine today occupy posts in various government arts organizations, they teach often, and they also organize things like ‘youth art fairs’ or disadvantaged youth programs. But this is taking us incrementally closer to death and time. Closer to the political implications and closer to the metaphysical.

“This encapsulated mythic history, whose context is a discussion of the peculiar unpleasurability of modern art (and even its vocation to be resolutely unpleasurable), dramatizes the moment of differentiation of what will become the three distinct positions that come into being over against art: those who are initially excluded (Odysseus’s crew), those who come to demand consumer pleasure in the place of what they have been excluded from (the public of the Culture Industry), and finally those who come to demand consumer pleasure in the place of what they have been excluded from (the public of the Culture Industry), and finally those who, more keenly aware of the whole process (and of what Odysseus is able to hear), conceive a more generalized reaction to it, which must now be identified: it is none other than the great figure of ressentiment most dramatically elaborated in Nietzsche.”
Frederic Jameson (Ibid)

Today, the philistine are those who finance the ships Odysseus uses on his voyage. Musk and Bezos and Larry Ellison. And Jameson, as have several others, pointed to the last chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment as perhaps the most profound. The chapter is titled Anti-Semitism. And here is exactly the point where these multiple threads converge.

“For what the philistines ‘understand only too well’ in the (modern)works they hate and characterize as incomprehensible is of course the deepest vocation of art itself – the ‘promesse de bonheur’, in the form of art’s ‘broken promise’, which keeps the idea of happiness alive at the moment of denying its present existence. It is, then, this ultimate relationship to ‘happiness’ and to utopian fulfillment which is symbolically at play in the passion of the ‘homme du ressentiment’, and can thereby become manifest on a range of other social levels.”
Frederic Jameson (Ibid)

The promise of culture, in its entirety, is necessarily broken.

“The rights of man were designed to promise happiness even to those without power. Because the cheated masses feel that this promise – as a universal – remains a lie as long as classes exist, it stirs their rage; they feel mocked. Even as a possibility or an idea they repeatedly repress the thought of such happiness, they deny it ever more passionately the more imminent it seems. Wherever happiness seems to have been achieved in the midst of universal renunciation, they must repeat that gesture of suppression which is really the suppression of their own longing.”
Adorno and Horkheimer (Dialectic of Enlightenment)

and then Jameson adds, in one of his best bits of analysis:

“The emergence of the ‘anti-Semite’ as a strong manifestation of the social form of the ‘philistine’ in general now also makes a little clearer the cultural ‘convergence theory’ of Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which a Hollywood and New Deal USA is structurally characterized as bearing a family likeness to Hitlerian Germany. The deeper continuity is precisely secured by this figure, who, anti-Semite in the Nazi social order, is in the United States identified as the seemingly more benign figure of the philistine of the Culture Industry: both negative embodiments of the deeper *ressentiment* generated by class society itself.”
Frederic Jameson (Ibid)

And here one begins to understand the lacerating hatred of communism that drives Western Capitalists; the philistine is both the producer of Hollywood jingoism and militarism, and the producer of Afterschool Specials, the entitled Imperialists, both cultural and political, manufacture the mechanisms of sentimentality and victims’s rights, gun control, and Sesame Street. The philistines gentrify and occupy the communities of the poor (and all the better if the poor are black and brown) in U.S. inner cities — the occupation of American cities is exactly mirrored by Zionist settlers in Gaza and the West Bank. Zionism is the perfect mirror of Nazism, even to the point of weaponizing anti-semitism by declaring it at every turn. And the sleight of hand that directs hatred toward Trump but ignores Biden. Obama was the first president disguised as black. Resentment is forever disguised as something else because resentment is the most intolerable of emotions for the liberal subject to discover within him or herself. And this is because class society does nothing so well as breed resentment.

The broken promise is ubiquitous today, and as such it has ceased to function as a promise. The emergence of modernism following in the wake of the commodity form, of Capitalism, can be seen as a kind of ‘fall’, historio-mythic, and the inherent tendencies for abstraction and instrumentality and ‘realism’ and control — can be viewed (as Jameson notes himself) as a project that began with ancient Greece, or later with the Gutenberg Press, or most easily with the Enlightenment — and Heidegger certainly (and maybe Freud, too) saw the Latinizing of Greek thought as the engine that pushed toward this fall, but in all cases the *modern* ushered in a specific form of potential resistance, if not actual, in modernist art. This had profound implications for bourgeois society as it developed and for class relations.

“The state is by no means a power forced on society from without. The state is equally not ‘the reality of the ethical idea’, ‘the image and reality of reason’ as Hegel maintains. The state is a product of society at a certain stage of development; the state is the recognition that this society has become entangled in an irresoluble contradiction with itself, that it is divided into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to escape.”
Friedrich Engels (The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State)

In the U.S. there was a specific lingering Puritanism that gave a lingering specific shape to the violence of its culture. Slavery and Manifest Destiny and genocide. And the parallel current of *science*. From Fordism to the Rolodex to the current DOGE.

“What is to be retained in the aesthetic context of these older descriptions of scientific rationality is the way in which each state produces historicity and the past in the very process of canceling it: scientific ‘progress’ is thus synchronic rather than diachronic, not merely sweeping away its older mode of production as pensée sauvage, but with each new act transforming the very precursor steps of its own, now ‘rationalistic’, scientific activity into superstition and metaphysical survival.”
Frederic Jameson (Ibid)

I noted above this feeling of ghosts today. And this naturally has some relationship to that lost object of desire, of the teacher as executioner (and certainly actors on stage, with their first entrance of the play, are recreating the walk to the guillotine). But I am reminded of psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, and their book The Shell and the Kernel. (not easy to find unfortunately).

“The image of the phantom does not come to us accidentally as a term for the analyst’s torment.) This image points to an occasion of torment for patients as well—a memory they buried without legal burial place. The memory is of an idyll, experienced with a valued ohiee: and yet for some reason unspeakable. It is memory entombed in a fast and secure place, awaiting resurrection. Between the idyllic moment, and its subsequent forgetting (we have called the latter “preservative repression ’),” there was the metapsychological traumatism of a loss or, more precisely, the “loss” that resulted from a traumatism. This segment of an ever so painfully lived Reality—untellable and therefore inaccessible to the gradual, assimilative work of mourning—causes a genuinely covert shift in the entire psyche. The shift itself is covert, since both the fact that the idyll was real and that it was later lost must be disguised and denied. This leads to the establishment of a sealed-off psychic place, a crypt in the ego. { } The “shadow of the object” strays endlessly about the crypt until it is finally reincarnated in the person of the subject. Far from displaying itself, this kind of identification is destined to remain concealed. We consider it useful to complement Freud’s metapsychological formula, in “Mourning and Melancholia’ —which shows “the ego in the guise of the object” —by its opposite, in order to signal an initial clinical finding: the “object,” in its turn, carries the ego as its mask, that is, either the ego itself or some other facade. This one is an imaginary and covert identification, a cryptofantasy that, being untellable, cannot be shown in the light of day. The identification concerns not so much the object who may no longer exist, but essentially the “mourning” that this “object” might allegedly carry out because of having lost the subject; the subject, consequently, appears to be painfully missed by the “object.” Clearly, an identifying empathy of this type could not say its name, let alone divulge its aim. Accordingly, ithides behind a mask, even in the so-called “periodic states of manic depressive psychosis. The mechanism consists of exchanging ones own identity for a fantasmic identification with the “life —beyond the grave— of an object of love, lost as a result of some metapsychological traumatism.”
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (The Shell and the Kernel)

This is my speculation on time, which seems a perfectly pointless exercise for well paid physicists to ponder. Time is measured from beyond the grave. But ghosts do haunt this society, haunt everyone in it. Pedagogy is the profession of the ghost. Shakespeare I think grasped this. Theatre is another impossible form. For that haunting (I’ve written of this before) flees as the lights come up. But the philistines killed it, killed the culture. Capitalism coerced them, and they did it — and I think our ghosts are our mourning. This is what came to me more clearly this week.

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