Listen now | Alex Hochuli is a co-host of the Aufhebunga Bunga podcast and a co-author of "The End of the End of History: Politics in the 21st Century". He joins me to discuss universalisms, organization and the difficult way forward.
"In the time of public philosophies and social religions, the great communities were positive, A positive community is characterized by the fact that it guarantees some kind of salvation to the individual by virtue of his membership and participation in that community. That sort of community seemed corrupt to the economic man, with his particular version of an ascetic ideal tested mainly by self-reliance and personal achievement. The positive community was displaced, in social theory, by the neutral market. Now, in the middle of the twentieth century, the market mechanism appears not so much corrupt as a fiction to psychological man, with his awareness of how decisions are made in the social system. In order to participate self-protectively in the manipulative and acquisitive game, psychological man builds his tight family island, living for the remainder of his time in negative communities. But these collections of little islands surrounded by therapeutic activities, without any pretense at a doctrine of salvation, are themselves infected by the negativity of the larger community and become manipulative arenas themselves, rather than oases of escape from the larger arena.
The indefinite prolongation of psychoanalytic therapy is itself a form of membership in the negative community. Positive communities were, according to Freud, held together by guilt; they appear attractive only now, in distant retrospect, but the modern individual, faced with the necessity of merging his own life into communal effort, would have found them suffocating. Instead, the modem individual can only use the community as the necessary stage for his effort to enhance himself—if not always, or necessarily, to enrich himself." Philip Rieff (1965)
"It has to do with a suppression of synchrony over diachrony, a development Fernand Braudel explained by the enormous proliferation of specialized theories and disciplines, which turns the search for a simple linear cause, a simple linear narrative of causality, into a conjuncture or meeting place of multiple "factors" (including the temporal ones) in an atemporal present of thinking: at that point, then, the relationship of the factors to each other needs to be visualized and not surcharged in time, where... they become illegible. Space the becomes a kind of multitude of synonymies, ambiguously translatable or substitutable, which one has to articulate... and thereby bring the whole system into emergence and legibility." Fredric Jameson (2019)
Nice interview with Alex Hochuli--thanks.
"In the time of public philosophies and social religions, the great communities were positive, A positive community is characterized by the fact that it guarantees some kind of salvation to the individual by virtue of his membership and participation in that community. That sort of community seemed corrupt to the economic man, with his particular version of an ascetic ideal tested mainly by self-reliance and personal achievement. The positive community was displaced, in social theory, by the neutral market. Now, in the middle of the twentieth century, the market mechanism appears not so much corrupt as a fiction to psychological man, with his awareness of how decisions are made in the social system. In order to participate self-protectively in the manipulative and acquisitive game, psychological man builds his tight family island, living for the remainder of his time in negative communities. But these collections of little islands surrounded by therapeutic activities, without any pretense at a doctrine of salvation, are themselves infected by the negativity of the larger community and become manipulative arenas themselves, rather than oases of escape from the larger arena.
The indefinite prolongation of psychoanalytic therapy is itself a form of membership in the negative community. Positive communities were, according to Freud, held together by guilt; they appear attractive only now, in distant retrospect, but the modern individual, faced with the necessity of merging his own life into communal effort, would have found them suffocating. Instead, the modem individual can only use the community as the necessary stage for his effort to enhance himself—if not always, or necessarily, to enrich himself." Philip Rieff (1965)
"It has to do with a suppression of synchrony over diachrony, a development Fernand Braudel explained by the enormous proliferation of specialized theories and disciplines, which turns the search for a simple linear cause, a simple linear narrative of causality, into a conjuncture or meeting place of multiple "factors" (including the temporal ones) in an atemporal present of thinking: at that point, then, the relationship of the factors to each other needs to be visualized and not surcharged in time, where... they become illegible. Space the becomes a kind of multitude of synonymies, ambiguously translatable or substitutable, which one has to articulate... and thereby bring the whole system into emergence and legibility." Fredric Jameson (2019)