[Nettime-bold] Oversized Narratives ///////// The Flexible Personality, part I

[Nmherman@aol.com]

In a message dated 1/5/2002 4:13:40 PM Central Standard Time, 106271.223@compuserve.com writes:


> The demonstration takes the form of a dialectical reevaluation and
> actualization of some of the central theses of the Frankfurt School.


Hey Brian, I'm sort of an expert on the F School myself, check http://www.geocities.com/genius-2000/DoctorowPaper.htm.

I really try to champion the F School over the (pardon me) French writers.  It's a matter of under- and over-rating I think.  So I'm with ya there.  Some day we'll look back on this and it will all seem funny.

I also have a long history of supporting Benjamin's messianic rescuing criticism.  I also love Adorno on instrumental reason and its regression into subjectivity gone wild, not to mention Horkheimer on the mutual internal/external violence of instrumental reason.  Check one of my very first pages:  http://www.geocities.com/genius-2000/daily.html and click on the ducks.  

Also a quote from my paper:

Here White is trying literally to place the process of the evolution of meanings within--"in the middle"--of a discursive form, i.e. narrative. This could well account for White's belief that narrative is not "one code among others," but a universal, because no matter what permutations of cultural discourse occur they will always be bounded by the form which iself enables change. The flaw or weakness in this argument is clearly the risk of tautology; to argue that since narrative accommodates all change it must itself be unchanging avoids the possible forms of change that evolve "verbal modes" to forms not reconcilable with narrative. Benjamin also recognizes the transformation of discourse that can occur within artifacts, but he articulates this transformation in both subtler and more complex concepts. "Rescuing critique" is the name Benjamin gives to the mode of criticism which aims...at rescuing a past charged with the Jetztzeit. It ascertains the moments in which the artis!
tic sensibility puts a stop to fate draped as progress and enciphers the utopian experience in a dialectical image....[artifacts] have to be revived in another, as it were, awaited present and brought to readability for the sake of being preserved as tradition for authentic progress. (Habermas2 138)Clearly, Benjamin wishes to discern the moments of change that occur within artifacts. However, the true change the artifact creates may have to lifted out of the artifact itself--out of the chain of tradition and formal language in which it occurred--in order not to be lost to "authentic progress." The point here is that where White seems to consider all changes that occur within narratives to be containable within narrative as a form (hence the form's durability, historiographical preeminence, etc.), Benjamin acknowledges a much greater complexity in the transformations that can occur within discourse-moments--even to the point of transcending or "blasting open" the continuum of n!
arrative models. In a passage with strong linkages to the Isaacsons in Doctorow's novel (as the threatened dead), Habermas summarizes the necessity of the conservative/revolutionary action of rescuing criticism as follows: "The enemy that threatens the dead as much as the living when rescuing criticism is missing and forgetting takes its place remained one and the same: the dominance of mythic fate" (Habermas2 137). Again, it is a moral obligation to both living and dead humanity (and perhaps culture) that requires we resist the "forgetting" of the formally self-transcendent potentials within artifacts by accepting a false view of progress as cumulative reiterations of mythic--or literary-mythological narrative--discourse continuums. White's deficiency vis-a-vis Benjamin's aesthetic-historical theory here also bears a moral cast. Benjamin's thought, like that of Kunow and White, centers around an aporia or energizing point of paradoxical contradiction. This point of indetermin!
acy in Benjamin lies at the location where, in historical representation, "the time of the now...[is] blasted out of the continuum of history" (Benjamin 261). (To call this moment an aporia involves some license; my intent is to draw parallels between three critics' characterization of a certain temporal or dialectical moment of meaning-creation. For Benjamin, the moment of "blasting open" is a starting point for his thought and not, as in Kunow, a sort of end point. All three emphasize this moment's unpredictability, and characterize it as--from certain discursive standpoints--unexpressible or "unnarratable," that is, not representable in all terminologies.) 
[from my MA dossier, May 1998, Syracuse University USA]

I hope all this helps to shed some light, and I wonder how the flexible personality relates to Genius 2000 ideas.

Be cool,

Max Herman
I See You Standin
Standin On Your Own
It's Such A Lonely Place For You
For You To Be
http://www.geocities.com/genius-2000/madrejm.htm

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