“As we deal with this distressing reality we need to remember who we are and where we come from.”

Keeping track of who is wringing hands over what is becoming an increasingly fraught and splintered concern. Moreover, my impression of The Youngs is they view any “Hey, wait a minute(s)” as gauche posturing, at best. But hey — I’m 55, and I’ve been too clever by half for most of those years. I  am wringing my hands, and here is who I am keying into for some perspective on this fact.

Let’s start with the whopper: Eric Weinstein yacks with Brett Easton Ellis, here.

Alright, now the caveats: this is where I have always been re: BEE. As for Weinstein I knew little about him going into the conversation, but reflexively consider anyone tight with Peter Thiel as guilty by association (we all have our prejudices).

Right out of the gate I found them both insufferable — I can be polite to cats like this, but cultivating any sort of friendship would take some doing. And yet I invited them along on a two-hour drive, and never kicked them out of the car. Short version: they circle around some of my own ambivalence with the current cultural roil, without landing satisfactorily on how best to discern a path that might lead through it. Money quote goes to Weinstein: “I am anti- anti-anti-Trump.” Well, there we are, then!

This is the larger provocation: Jon Baskin yacking with Justin E.H. Smith, over here. Although I should back up a bit — larger than that is the piece that led up to it, JEHS’s It’s All Over. But this early quote from Off the Wave is what launched me into them both:

In 1968, student activists had occupied the facilities of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Theodor Adorno was corresponding about this with his colleague Herbert Marcuse, who was in sunkissed Californian exile, and Marcuse was saying, Come on! Let the kids express their political will, it’s good to have this sort of turnover. And Adorno was like, What are you talking about? I spent my life building this Institute up, it means everything to me, and these kids don’t value it, they think I’m just some old man. And how can you, my old friend, tell me that that’s something I should just bow to, as if all of our work meant nothing. 

It’s so poignant, and what I found shocking when this correspondence between Adorno and Marcuse was circulating recently — it was before I left Facebook so it must have been three years ago now — was that all of my academic colleagues who were roughly my age were at least publicly saying “yeah, Marcuse!” To a person, the Facebook crowd at least pretended to gather under the banner of Marcuse and to disdain Adorno’s stance and in general his whole old-man vibe. 

One doesn’t want to share in that old-man vibe and die of a heart attack after a student protester shows us her breasts, or whatever the contemporary equivalent would be, but one also doesn’t want to abandon years of work and a whole critical-theoretical framework just because it’s fallen out of fashion. So, how to navigate between those two hazards?

I initially read the exchange and thought Smith was misrepresenting Adorno as some variety of conservative. I am only glancingly familiar with Adorno, buuuut (checks the Wiki one last time) let me make one thing perfectly clear — Nixon hated Adorno. Or he would have if the prof was anywhere on Nixon’s radar (no member of the Silent Majority, he).

After reading It's All Over I am committed to re-reading Off the Wave. Smith is unquestionably better versed in Adorno than I will ever be, so “conservative” cannot possibly be what Smith is invoking. Still, was Adorno truly gored by one horn of the dilemma while his buddy Marcuse jauntily leaned against the other? It seems to me that Adorno was desperately searching for the elusive Third Way, much the same way Smith seems anxious to find his own in these perilous times.

In either case, kudos for introducing me to this GIF.

The answer, as my late mentor/SF-superfan/friend to my father was keen to say, lies in further study. The letters between Adorno and Marcuse evoke a remarkable moment of drama from the past well worth digging into, and I am grateful to Smith and Baskin for the introduction.

More than that, if you have not yet read It’s All Over please do so — it’s not too late (or is it?).

The blog-heading is the conclusion to T Bone Burnett’s anecdote from this post. His particular mode of remembrance takes the form of dour Episcopalian renunciation set to a sonic invocation of his beloved Skyliner Ballroom of yore. His truest self-expression might be The Invisible Light, but I think his very best is Gregg Allman’s penultimate studio album Low Country Blues.

“Remember who we are and where we come from” — an injunction that once again gets me queueing the voices of René Girard and Ivan Illich. During the 90s, the mandarins of Academia robustly dismissed both as pig-headed conservators of the patriarchy. Girard seems not to have lost much sleep over the matter, while Illich retreated in wounded silence. Both insisted they had been grievously misread. If Peter Thiel is any indication, that particular tradition continues apace.

Forward in all directions, then.

*Thiel is an interesting guy to contemplate. His reverence for Girard and Tolkien seems acidly ironic — both, I believe, would be appalled by some of the directions he took while ostensibly under the influence of their theories and narratives. Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, on the other hand, not so much.