Robert D'Amico

The Prison House of Language

Lukács attacked modernism in twentieth century literature as “pure formalism,” and echoed with the choice of that term a long ideological and political struggle—which was in many ways only incidentally over literature. In an article by Brecht, only recently published, the model of the nineteenth century narriative novel offered by Lukács is opposed with a paradoxical reply. “Realism is not a mere question of form. Were we to copy the style of these realists, we would no longer be realists… The criteria for popular art and realism must therefore be chosen generously and carefully, and not drawn merely from existing realistic works… By doing so, one would arrive at formalistic criteria, and popular art and realism in form only.”

Karl Popper and the Frankfurt School

The infamous “methodology dispute” in German sociology that occurred primarily between Popper and Adorno, with further details taken care of by such surrogates as Hans Albert and the young Habermas, is best described as a misfire. Popper admitted he did not know the work of the Frankfurt School at the time, and even claims he was unaware they were committed to Hegelian-Marxism until well after the debate or he would simply have repeated the arguments he made years earlier in The Poverty of Historicism. Popper considered Adorno a poor philosopher but an interesting cultural critic, and specifically a good music theorist (since that was one of Poppers life-long interests).

Desire and the Commodity Form

There is no doubt that the arena of political action can no longer be held within the limits of the direct activity of labor. It is also obvious that no matter how many nuances there are in Marxs conception of a mode of production, his analysis is, in the final moment, centered around the assumption that an effective political struggle emerges only at the point of production. It would be the height of scholasticism to take this point of Marxs account as another lacuna to be neatly filled in since it is an historical rather than purely theoretical issue. The point is that what now appears as an inadequacy is only present as the after effect of a significant shift in social integration and structure that has seen the collapse of radical working class politics and purely political-economic critiques of late capitalism.

The Contours and Coupures of Structuralist Theory

Foucault has spoken recently of the profound disruption in the domain of knowledge at every level of contemporary theory. “From the beginning of this century psychoanalytic, linguistic and ethnographic research has ousted the subject from the laws of his desires, from the forms of his speech, from the rules of his actions and from the systems of his mythical discourses.” It has become increasingly more important to deal with the thrust of these developments at the level of theory, not under the rubric of some “structuralist” ideology, but as to their true content and meaning. The obstruction until now has been its lack of a “history”.

Relativism and Conceptual Schemes

Sometimes an imaginary example characterizes a whole period of philosophy. In Locke’s Essay on Hiirnari Uiiderstariding he cites a letter from Henri Molyneux. Molyneux asked Locke whether a man born blind and then restored to sight would recognize a cube. Locke, to refute the doctrine of innate ideas, confidently answered no. Condillac repeated the problem in Essay 011 the Origin of Hiintan Knowledge and, though a Lockean, disagreed with Locke’s answer for somewhat obscure reasons, only to later change his mind. The blind man example became the central image in popularized accounts of Locke’s philosophy. Even Berkeley spent several paragraphs of The New Theory of Vision attacking Locke on this point and treating the blind man thought experiment as, oddly enough, a corrective to Lockean empiricism. Molyneux’s imaginary problem was treated as an empirical test of his doubts about innate ideas. Thus the example played the role of afantasy experiment, much like the infamous ‘wild children’ of the same period. But the debate seems unintelligible today. Would an answer to Molyneux’s question settle the existence of innate ideas? Current knowledge of vision and blindness simply does not speak to Locke’s concerns or Molyneux’s question which reflects an obsolete problem situation. The physiology of perception brings us not closer but further away from eighteenth century empiricism. Michel Foucault has suggested that eighteenth century thought was also gripped by the epistemological image of a traveler in a foreign land.

Introduction to "Special Section on Musicology": Popular Music from Adorno to Zappa

Adornos music criticism continues to haunt Critical Theory. Those writings are among the few developments of this entire theoretical orientation which remain largely unexplored. Unlike his philosophical writings, Adornos works on music achieve their inscrutability not solely because of the inherent esoteric nature of the discipline (the background needed in musical theory helps keep these writings often cited but little read). Adornos strategy was to defend the formalist avant-garde of his day, while maintaining a sometimes crude sociological account of reflection between music and social structure. (While at his best, Adorno rejected reflectioin theory, his neunced accounts of microstructured particularity were often framed by residual elements of historical materialism.) This strategy turned out to be quite clever.

The Hidden Telos

A retrospective concerning any journal is problematic. Some of the issues that motivated the formation of the journal, its continuation and its editorial decisions are often not directly reflected in the published articles or in the collective interpretation of its readers. Also, editorial boards change, are rarely if ever homogeneous, and one persons viewpoint on a debate hardly conveys its full interest or complexity. The following reflections are thus qualified, and that is one sense of the “hidden” Telos I cite in the title. The further qualification is that I want to speak of some theoretical concerns which, for a variety of reasons, were never fully represented in the journal but motivated its founding and direction.

Introduction to Squaring the Hexagon: Special Issue on French Politics and Culture

When, in Telos #55, we sought to evaluate the meaning and impact of French socialism in power, the verdict turned out to be peculiarly disappointing. The rhetorical question in the Introduction: “Beyond Reform or Revolution?” had already been effectively answered. As early as 1982 French socialism had revealed itself to be a “Gaullism with a Human Face” which did not have much to do either widi reform or revolution, and could provide nothing more -above and beyond the usual cliches—than a continuation of the same berated but unsurpassed technocratic management of the given. Socialism had turned out to be a bad idea whose time had past.

Introduction to the Foucault-Deleuze Discussion

The following discussion can be situated both in a specific response to the May events, as well as an assessment of their resolution, and the publication of a very controversial work by Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie. First, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze are now the two major figures of a new tendency in French thought, a post-structuralist theory, for want of a better name, working about in that shattered domain of the “human sciences.” But while engaged in a highly esoteric and difficult form of theory these thinkers have come to define themselves in a political “discourse” whose themes are familiar to at least a segment of the American Left.

Heideggerian in Spite of Himself

As far as I know, this is the first book-length study of Ernst Tugendhat in English. That is a bit of a surprise since Tugendhat is the last of Heideggers students who went on to develop a significantly distinct philosophical approach, and it was one closer to the practice of philosophy in the United States and England than in Germany. The fact that this book is the authors expanded translation from the Italian probably indicates that this lack of attention to Tugendhat remains in the English-speaking philosophical community. But we have to start somewhere, and this book is a useful…