A total outlier in my musical pantheon but he’s great. Julian Cope.

But such is politics isn't it? I don't like that my local school board has decided to change the bus schedules, so the neighbors and I get a bunch of signs and scream and yell and call for the outster of them all. We can substitute "change the bus schedules" to whatever issue du jour is before the community, but to think I should be limited in some way from fighting for what I want else be accused of trying to cancel someone doesn't seem fair.

A director has to be able to deal with angry students. If Arono is the sort that wants only to be bothered with the academic part of his job, then that's what he needs to limit himself to. He just seems like a really weak director.

But I guess I could snipe at the example you've provided all day long. — Hanover

I still think you're being too hasty in your judgements, not knowing much about the context. He had been working hard for a year or so to walk a line between, on the one hand, guidance and conditional support for students, and on the other hand, criticism of their approach and defence of the autonomy of the academics at the Institute, which he was deeply committed to. He had been involved in discussions with the student protesters and had supported students in conflicts with the authorities (although as I've already related he also called the police on them once).

That he couldn't deal with the disruptions might be evidence of the extreme behaviour of the students rather than of his own weakness. He had dealt with disruptions before, and you'll surely agree that when a conflict like this becomes increasingly intense there must come a point when one man cannot stand up to a room full of angry students. I don't want to label the students as terrorists but it's important to remember that the incident took place in the context of a violent long-running conflict that culminated in a series of terrorist attacks.

But if it were shown that he was just a big baby and an incompetent director, it wouldn't matter much. All I can say is that from what I've read, I don't think that's how it was. But it has to be said that he was a little old man and an old-fashioned bourgeois intellectual so he was doubtless not cut out for physical confrontation. And as I said before, I'm not here to evoke sympathy for poor little Adorno, victim of topless girls.

Your most substantive point is that the students ought to have been free to disrupt his lectures in protest at whatever they were protesting against. Well, they were free to do that, and they didn't suffer personal consequences for it as far as I know--but the result was that he couldn't lecture and found it impossible to maintain the distance from the conflict that he felt was essential in his role as independent theoritician.

What I'll accept is that there are plenty of examples of professors and administrators being denied promotions and success based upon their ideologies and not academic abilities. That is, the very concept of being free to say whatever you want without reprisal (the tenure system basically) is being misued to only allow those club members in that pass a certain belief litmus test.

That is a problem. It is the politicalization of every nook and cranny in society, from what beer we are to drink to which professor gets which appointment. It's not the wokeness. It's the Element O. I do think it forms the stated basis for why DeSantis did what he did when he re-organized the school. Whether his intent really went beyond just wanting to slap the left is very doubtful though. — Hanover

Cool. But what you call Element O is probably just an aspect of what I've been calling woke politics.

This is why I went down the path of comparing the right and the left's wokeness. It's because you were asserting there was something distinguishing in the left's wokeness that is alarming but not the right's, which I take to be that you always thought the right had a morally failed position, but not so for the left. I was only trying to point out that they've both always been morally flawed to some degree, so your belief that one prevailed over the other was just bias. — Hanover

I get that, but I disagree. I think woke politics is a particular way of doing politics that comes out of progressive neoliberalism, was originally and is still primarily left-wing (in the sense of socially progressive), but may now have become the way of doing politics across the board.

Your problem, I'd submit, is that you are having trouble understanding your anti-wokeness instinct that your brothers and sisters well to the right of you are openly embracing when those to the left of you are rejecting it. You don't sit often in the right isle, and it feels a bit uncomfortable nodding your head when you hear some of the anti-trans talk (for example). So, the question is whether the left really has to accept the consequences of what were once considered reductio ad absurdum arguments to remain on the left.

The answer, as the ideologies grow more developed, are made more logically consistent, and become less pragmatic, appears to be yes. You're left in these polarized positions where you have to accept some degree of nonsense because it flowed from your first principles. — Hanover

I understand. There’s a kernel of truth here, but you’ve got me somewhat wrong (maybe mostly). I’ve been pretty anti-woke and anti-identity-politics for decades, and have recently become more mellow and tolerant towards it. And I don’t know who you think is to the left of me; the targets of my criticism don’t seem to be.

The kernel of truth is that it is difficult to challenge woke politics from the left, because most of its critics are on the right. And that can be uncomfortable. As I admitted elsewhere on the forum, I did come to realize some time ago that I had grown too enamoured of criticisms of wokeness that, as it turned out, were functioning to defend hierarchy and oppression. And I know it was just an example but for the record I don’t find myself nodding along to any “anti-trans talk”. (Although some would say I just have a high bar for what I consider “anti-trans talk”, but that’s another matter)

So yes, it’s difficult and uncomfortable, but no, I’m not surprised about it or mystified as to my own instincts, which I have no doubt are compatible with a principled Marxist position.

And of course, I don’t accept that what I’m complaining about stems from my, or the left’s, first principles. How does that work?

To summarize: nice try but no cigar!

Isn't it rather a strange question? — Wayfarer

I kind of feel that way too; as a philosophical orientation it looks odd. However, taken as an object of science it makes sense to puzzle over phenomenal consciousness. And perhaps unlike you, I don't see any reason in principle why it shouldn't be an object of science.

So in philosophical mode my question in place of Humphrey's would be something like, "what is it about a scientific view that makes phenomenal experience look so puzzling?"

That said, I like his answer.

The student activism exhibited sentiments that repeated around the world -- they were anti-war and anti-exploitation of the people. They were also pro-technocrats. — L'éléphant

I don't think so, at least not obviously so. The 1960s student movement, particularly the German one, was explicitly for the democratization of the universities, and against bureaucratic control. And you'll notice that Adorno says "I do not doubt for a moment that the student movement in its current form is heading towards that technocratization of the university that it claims it wants to prevent". He was intimately familiar with the movement, so I don't think he was imagining things.

However, I'm not quite clear on your point so I'd be interested if you have more to say.

Political economy and political philosophy are different fields. — Jamal

Are they? In academics, maybe. In life, not so much. In political life, economy is central: it frames so many issues, influences so many decisions, determines so many policies. Is it really possible to keep them in separate arenas? — Vera Mont

Well, political economy and political philosophy, which the OP asked about, are just the names of academic disciplines, so that's really what I was talking about. And anyway, the separation I described is not between economics and politics but between a social science that combines both on one side (political economy), and a branch of philosophy on the other (political philosophy).

But I'm all for an interdisciplinary approach and I'm all for applying these things in everyday life. One of the things I like about Marx and critical theory (at least early critical theory) is their resistance to a specialization that leads to the splitting of knowledge into smaller and smaller discrete chunks.

The episode has obvious parallels with what’s been going on in American universities over the past few years, where woke activism has led to the cancellation of academics whose opinions are not in line with orthodox identity politics. — Jamal

If you could make a case that he was being denied promotions or faced termination based upon his beliefs and not his academic accomplishments, then I'd think you'd have a parallel, but if you only have obnoxious and provocative objectors to his speech, then that seems fair game. — Hanover

I said I’d come back to it, and here I am.

As you might have predicted, my response is: sure, they’re different in some ways, but there are important similarities.

I was wrong above when I said that Horkheimer was the director of the Institute—he had already stepped down. It turns out that Adorno himself was the director at the time. So as well as being the intellectual star attraction, he was the boss. This put him in a different position to the present-day academics who are in fear of dismissal and so on. The challenge he faced was more direct.

But it was the same kind of challenge, namely that of radical students who tried to enforce the party line on a member of the academic staff, to prevent him from lecturing if he didn’t show support (and express regret for his previous unsupportive actions), and to stage direct action against the institution if it didn’t comply with their demands.

Either way it can fairly be called cancellation. That said, I’m not totally committed to the idea that he was cancelled—it doesn’t matter what we call it, but there’s certainly a parallel there.

EDIT: By the way, I'm not really interested in evoking sympathy for Adorno by portraying him as a victim, even though he was pretty shaken up by the whole thing. He was a powerful intellectual who was used to being listened to, and he was doing all right (except when he died a few months later, which was definitely a low point for him). I'm interested in the politics more than the personalities, although the latter give it some colour and drama.

I don’t want to do battle over who is more open-minded, left or right. The question is too abstract and ahistorical. Sometimes it’s the left, sometimes the right.

Certainly I wish the left were able to reclaim the cause of freedom back from the clutches of the right, because if the left is not about freedom it’s dead and worthless. Same for open-mindedness I guess.

Political economy and political philosophy are different fields. The former is about economics in the context of politics, government, and nation states. In today’s terms it’s a social science, a combination of political science and economics. Political philosophy is a branch of philosophy, and as such it asks fundamental questions about government, the state, etc. It’s not a social science doing empirical investigation.

I haven’t read the Bataille. Looks weirdly interesting.

That’s all very praiseworthy and agreeable. But…

So, to be balanced, I must condemn Element O in all its forms, both liberal and conservative — Hanover

I would say to be balanced you must not present them as if they are equally pernicious and dominant when they are not.

Now, I’m not saying they’re not, and I (hope I) don’t want to downplay conservative Element O, but which form of Element O one is most concerned about depends on, among obvious other things, where one lives, works, etc. If we’re talking about universities then I would expect left woke politics to be more of a problem. Or, if we’re talking about universities in Massachusetts rather than in Florida.

The left Element O is more interesting to me because it concerns the problems of left politics, whereas the conservative version is just conservatism doing what it does, and my opposition to the imposition of the conservative belief system is just obvious, easy, and boring. Woke politics, by which I mean left Element O, is a more complex, difficult, and profound phenomenon, I think.

But actually yes, basically I agree. In looking at wokeness recently I’ve realized that I need to cover right-wing identity politics, because although identity politics is the politics primarily or originally of progressive neoliberalism, it’s a wider phenomenon now.

I'm unfamiliar with him, but I suspect this is another example of the technophobia we see in some philosophers. Just a guess, really. — Ciceronianus

I have a feeling you might interpret him more charitably when I tell you he really hated Heidegger, philosophy and all. Adorno’s attitude to technology is probably more complex than Heidegger’s, in that it is more ambivalent (i.e., dialectical). His primary targets in this area were instrumental reason, bureaucratic thinking, and science and technology that considers only means, not ends. This is a critique of modernity from within, in a spirit of self-critical enlightenment, rather than an instinctive conservatism or a reactionary attitude. Any Heideggerians reading this may be tempted to pounce on me at this point, and that’s fair, since I haven’t studied the guy’s work.

I also guess that academics sometimes think, mistakenly, that their students are more than privileged, self-important brats indulging themselves in various ways while they can do so in a more or less safe environment, one in which they're unaccountable for the most part. Just guessing, as I say. — Ciceronianus

Maybe, but the German student movement at the time was more than just that, even if—as Adorno says somewhere—it was partly that. There was police violence and an attempted assassination from the state, terrorism from the students (the Red Army Faction came out of it). It had a specific character and happened for specific reasons, rather than just students doing their thing.

Maybe I didn’t describe the incident very well or put it in its proper context. It was a disruption that prevented him from lecturing, the students were abusive and confrontational, he had withstood or been involved in protests and disruptions for a year already, he didn’t leave the Institute for seven weeks but merely postponed that particular course, a course that he had created himself and decided to do of his own volition after discussing it with his pal Horkheimer, the director of the Institute.

What you see in the US is both sides of this issue: Those academics not felt to be woke enough being canceled … and those academics felt too woke being canceled — Hanover

In presenting these in such a balanced way you obscure the fact that they’re not balanced. The first is a nationwide phenomenon and the second is due to the eccentricities of Ron DeSantis and his conservative board of trustees at a tiny and atypical university.

Still, you were right to question my parallel so as I say I’ll probably respond once I’ve done some thinking. I suspect the differences you point out will be enlightening.

Assuming you’re serious, you’ve jumped to a lot of silly conclusions there. Total misinterpretation of the events. However…

If you could make a case that he was being denied promotions or faced termination based upon his beliefs and not his academic accomplishments, then I'd think you'd have a parallel, but if you only have obnoxious and provocative objectors to his speech, then that seems fair game. — Hanover

This is a good point. Maybe I’ll come back to it and try to salvage my point somehow.

It’s tempting then to say that it didn’t really matter to them if it was implemented. I mentioned the basic aimlessness of the protests in 1968-69; but having aims and plans that are impractical, useless, or redundant is hardly different.

That’s great stuff and makes a lot of sense.

It occurs to me that there are more mundane reasons too, though they probably emerge out of the processes that you and Adorno identified. In 1968, the administrative society was a conscious target for the left. This century, not so much—people like David Graeber being an exception, I suppose.

Hm, not sure about all that.

But I’ll leave it there for now. I have enough mental plates to juggle. :smile:

Yeah, but there was no such discovery for bachelors.

It could be the case that all analytic statements were simply one-time synthetic statements that were conventionalized. — schopenhauer1

Was there a time when it wasn’t common knowledge that all bachelors were unmarried men? You know, before it was discovered?

Maybe “all bachelors are unmarried men” seems synthetic when it informs someone who doesn’t know what a bachelor is. So it could be reworded to show that the statement in this case is about the word rather than about bachelors: “‘bachelor’ means ‘unmarried man’”. This is synthetic (as I’m supposing all definitions are) and it follows from it that “all bachelors are unmarried men” is analytically true.

What could he have meant? — Jamal

According to Alexander Stern in the Hedgehog Review, the answer lies in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where enlightenment and myth, reason and unreason, are bound together in complex and paradoxical ways. The irrational and basically aimless activism of the students was the flipside of the administered society. In assuming that rejecting the administered society implied a rejection of rationality itself, they tacitly acknowledged the administered society’s instrumental reason as identitical with reason as such—forgetting what was vitally important to Adorno, which is that we can be rational without treating people as means and as cogs in a machine.

The result was the uncompromising and unthinking movement Adorno was subjected to. The movement was characterized by all-or-nothing thinking, conspiracy theory, and a refusal to reason about ends, which is mistakenly seen as the logic of the enemy. “Every calculated realization of interests,” Habermas writes, “whether of preserving or changing the system, is ridiculed.”

These student movements tended, therefore, to be escapist. In the communes and cults of the 1960s and 1970s and the “occupations” and “autonomous zones” of more recent times, we see a familiar desire to create another world outside the grip of administration. These exaggerated rejections of the system ensured their failure by depriving themselves of the resources of rationality and argument necessary for reform. They also played into the hands of reaction, which took the childish, cultish chaos as an opportunity to reassert control.

As many theorists have recognized, these movements were frequently absorbed by popular and professional culture and provide, often by way of the media, a simulacrum of the transgression that remains comfortably within—and even actively encouraged by—the confines of the existing political, educational, and economic institutions. Any contradictions or harshness are eased by new intermediaries like self-help and self-actualization culture and human resources departments, which form an ideology that absorbs rebellious tendencies and bridges the gap between the personal and the managerial. In the end, the energy of 1968 was used to reproduce the system.

What we’ve witnessed of late is a tightening of this union between the bureaucratic logic of institutions and the pseudo-liberatory logic of affluent students and young people. This is the endpoint of the affinity between technocracy and the student movement that Adorno recognized in 1969. It helps explain why the current movement tends to accept, echo, and appeal to the general logic of the administrative power structure, rather than genuinely criticizing or resisting it. As Adorno put it, “The prominent personalities of protest are virtuosos in rule of order and formal procedures. The sworn enemies of the institutions particularly like to demand the institutionalization of one thing or another.”

With the exception of the police, made conspicuous by their excessive violence, administration is not a target of the current movement, even symbolically. This self-described “left” is much more likely to act in lockstep with this structure, turning its ire on relatively powerless individuals instead. — Alexander Stern

This is complex. I get that students unknowingly ceded ground to bureaucratization while believing they were against it, but what I’m not quite clear on is how that is related to the actual embrace of bureaucratic politics that Stern describes towards the end of this passage.

Nice.

It’s a low-effort OP, a casual undeveloped thought that popped into your head. You’ve been told about this before.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7110/how-to-write-an-op

Why wouldn't it belong in this section? — TiredThinker

What section? It’s in the Lounge, like most of your discussions.

I’m not discussing it any more. I’ll be deleting them from now on instead of cluttering up the Lounge.

The intelligentsia and technocrats butted heads. Adorno, Habermas, Mancuse are part of the intelligentsia. The intellectuals were supposed to be the analysts of what's going on in politics and society. 'The government should be a representation by the common people, not a rule by the elites, etc.' — L'éléphant

Right, and not only that: Adorno had been criticizing technocracy for decades. But the puzzling thing is that he saw the chaos of the student activism as contributing to that technocracy.

Note that it implies they reject the scientific, objective truth as offered by the experts -- engineers, scientists, etc. -- the technocrats. — L'éléphant

You can reject rule by engineers and bureaucrats and the instrumentality of knowledge without rejecting the knowledge gained under those conditions. Certainly, Adorno, Habermas, and Marcuse did not reject the scientific and objective truth offered by experts.

@universeness Something’s been bothering me. This discussion has been hovering around on the first page for ages, and I find the title annoying. Is it meant to be Emergence? If so I can change it.

Well, there is truth in Hegelian dialectics, and it comes when the sublation of contradictions allows one to the see whole, and not just the parts—and from there to see the parts again as they relate to the whole, that is, more truthfully. But I’m a beginner with Hegel and might not say any more about this. Feel free to respond but I might not take it any further myself.

Thanks, that’s interesting, and interestingly wrong I think. However, I’m not sure how to tackle it directly. I might think about it and return to it some other time.

I’m not sure I want to encourage you here MU, but what the hell: you’re going to have to unpack that.

I'm not familiar with Adorno, but going by this crib-sheet, he seems a bit unenlightened. — unenlightened

Yes, although I feel duty-bound to forestall the common misinterpretation that Adorno was simply anti-Enlightenment. As he saw it, what he was doing was trying to intensify its own self-criticism from within, because an Enlightenment that is not self-critical is no Enlightenment at all—and you end up with Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now.

So a movement of resistance to the dehumanising tendencies of 'the establishment', as arbitrary rules about hairstyle, sex, venal politics the Bomb, The Vietnam war the cold war, the prison of consumerism and suburbia, etc, could not sustain itself, and dissolved into the same greedy and unprincipled mess that it had set itself against. — unenlightened

Rejecting the great god Mammon, the hippies became mere thieves, no different from their forebears — unenlightened

And this sort of thing suggested to Adorno that revolutionary action was actually impossible, that there was, at least at the time, no break in the wall of the status quo that could allow any progress to better ways of life. This was his main difference with Marcuse, and it meant that he was more likely to support the freedoms of liberal democracy than the far left protesters who seemed to just want to destroy it all.

Perhaps Adorno interpreted the anarchic protests of the student movement as agitating for 'universities to be administered by student groups (councils) at the expense of bourgeois, ivory tower, tenured scholars'. — 180 Proof

Although you’ve put it cynically, I agree. He did treasure the independence of the bourgeois scholar and the liberal tradition in education, against which he saw a bureaucratization in the student organizations, despite the anarchy of their activism, that merely reflected the “administered society” that he’d been complaining about for decades.

I’ll say a bit more. Although you frame the history differently from the way I do, I think you’ve identified what I’m most interested in, namely progressive neoliberalism, which can be said to have started with Clinton and Blair. Where you see them as a break from neoliberalism, or from Reagan and Thatcher, I see them as a continuation economically—despite the differences you mention—but a break in terms of social attitudes. In other words, they represented the formation of the left wing of neoliberalism, of which identity politics and wokeness are the latest developments on its left wing. (To clarify in case anyone takes this too weakly: I mean that identity politics and wokeness are the politics of the progressive wing of the ruling class of neoliberal capitalism.)

And this might have something to do with postmodernism, as you allude to here:

Philosophically, Michel Foucault’s idea of Biopolitics and “Left Governmentality” are worth checking out. Some say he was flirting with neoliberalism in those lectures. — NOS4A2

I’m trying to pull stuff together. Currently I’m not sure how postmodernism fits, though it’s a common observation that neoliberalism and postmodernism fit together pretty well.

This presented a problem for disaffected socialists after the collapse of the Soviet Union, both ideologically and politically. They could no longer deny that central planning was a failure, and that their popularity was waning. This led critics of the "neoliberalism" of Reagan and Thatcher, and newly disaffected socialists and social democrats like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerd Schröder, to re-brand as free market progressives. They tried to push it as a global movement. It's odd; though they were explicitly critical of the supply-side economics of Reagan and Thatcher, they are somehow considered in the same pantheon as Reagan and Thatcher, with neoliberalism flowing through them.

Personally, I take a different approach. I would call their agenda and the period since Thatcher and Reagan (and perhaps Bush Sr.) "neosocialism", because it better represents the spirit of its architects and reflects their turn away from the Old Left socialism into what Bill Clinton called the New Democrats, or what Blair called New Labour. This political triangulation flows right into "compassionate conservatism" of Bush Jr. and David Cameron. Tony Blair stood in front of the International Socialist Congress in ‘97 and pleaded for a "modernized social democracy", and this modernized social democracy prevails. — NOS4A2

I don’t think the differences are as significant as you’re making out. The fact is that deregulation, privatization, and globalization continued apace, no matter the rhetoric. Reagan and Thatcher laid the groundwork for an abnegation of political control over the economy, the establishment of a system in which voters are not able to decide on the basic structure of society, capitalism being mostly left to do its thing except when things go wrong.

As others in this discussion have pointed out, echoing Quinn Slobodian and the SEP article I linked to in the OP, neoliberalism is okay with an interventionist state, if it’s interventionist in the right way. This doesn’t make it non-neoliberal unless you take neoliberal to be something like right-libertarianism, which it never was.

To me the term “neosocialism” doesn’t really work unless you’re just negatively fetishizing government, in the popular fashion of the American right; socialism is about common ownership and control, and we don’t have anything like that.

really do look similar to many of what I'd term neoliberal interventions on behalf of the market. I know what you mean there, which is what really distinguishes neoliberalism from classical liberalism and the limited state types and is a reason to call it something different. — Moliere

Yep, exactly what I was getting at.

Fascinating as always NOS. I may say more tomorrow.

We seem to be in agreement. :scream:

That's probably why I wanted to define it: I found myself using it a lot and it occurred to me that I might not know what I was saying.

I have no idea, but it wouldn’t surprise me, because the word is used sometimes as a loose term of abuse—a mere “polemical tool”—everywhere as far as I can tell.

Cool, but it doesn’t show that there’s a difference between American and European uses, which is all that I objected about in your first post.

I'm happy to be persuaded, just don't see it so far.

I think it’s the same here. The difference is more likely between popular and academic uses.

Interesting post, but none of it goes against neoliberalism as understood in Europe, as you imply. I don’t think there’s much of a difference between US and non-US uses of the term. It has globalized itself successfully.

Interesting, thanks. On the other hand there’s a difference between neoliberals, who want to reduce taxes, and libertarians, who might be against tax in principle.

From now on I’ll be deleting discussions like this rather than moving them to the Lounge, whether or not they’ve received replies by the time I see them. @TiredThinker has been asked many times to stop posting low-effort OPs, and the Lounge is not the place for them either, because it’s meant to be for casual chat.