Yes indeed. I certainly won’t disparage the rhetorical side of the manifesto. I even managed to get the importance of expression into my AI announcement yesterday, when I said that…
And of course, this isn’t just a coincidence. What we’re fighting on TPF is very relevant to all this.
The allergy against expression in the entire official philosophical tradition, from Plato to the semanticists, conforms to the tendency of all Enlightenment, to punish that which is undisciplined in the gesture, even deep into logic, as a defense-mechanism of reified consciousness.
— Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Rhetoric
There’s a danger in rhetoric—Plato’s criticism of sophistry is not wrong—but we want to find the sweet spot where…
the rhetorical moment takes, contrary to the vulgar viewpoint, the side of content. (Ibid.)
I think your rhetoric takes the side of content—it’s not all fur coat and no knickers—because it enacts the excess.
So, just as the logical base condition for meaningful words in language is a systemically conditioned flexibility that always implies an “excess” of meaning, so is the logical base condition for free subjectivity in culture a systemically conditioned flexibility that implies that the subject as a carrier of cultural meaning is also meaningful to itself. And this meaningfulness to itself, this semantic self-flexibility, forms the basis of agency and freedom. Subjects are subject to culture but not absolutely. They are generally stable units but also mutable in a way culture cannot entirely predict or control. And this appears necessary to allow culture to quickly adapt and change according to changing circumstances in a way that simple socialities of unfree units, e.g. ant colonies, can never do.
— Technoethics: Freedom, Precarity, and Enzymatic Knowledge Machines
But if the excess is one of culture’s dependencies, it becomes one of capitalism’s dependencies, a functional component of the system. Couldn’t this apparently unassimilable wildness even be located at the root of capitalism’s own multi-century revolution? So how can it be held in place as a site of resistance against the claws of the market?
But I realize I’m putting you in a position where you cannot win. I’m forever pushing back, saying “and capitalism will co-opt that as well!” I think my aim is to be the devil’s advocate. And I presume that would have to be an element in this revolution anyway: eternal vigilance and scepticism.
Because I think I understand and agree with the Bartleby stuff. This is a negativity I’m familiar with and attracted to.
Contradiction is non-identity under the bane of the law, which also influences the non-identical.
— Adorno, ND, Dialectics Not a Standpoint
The excess or nonidentical cannot shine through in its own right, but always appears as contradiction, as a problem, as dirty snow. Bartleby’s excess doesn’t appear as the fullness of freedom, or the potential, that it really is.
I guess I’m on board then!
I’d like to just mention for the record that I was going to pick up on this egregious example of bourgeois ideology in a semi-humorous fashion but decided not to.
Both this and your other comments about the excess made me think of this:
There is no light on human beings and things, in which transcendence is not reflected. Inextinguishable, the resistance against the fungible world of exchange in that of the eye, which does not want the colors of the world to be destroyed.
— Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Meditation 11 on Metaphysics
BTW I don’t want all the Adorno quotes to be a distraction here; it’s just what I happen to be deeply immersed in at the moment (and for the forseeable future).