Saturday, April 18, 2020

Although the nineteenth-century philosopher G.W.F. Hegel is known as a defender of bourgeois society and so of what came to be known after him as capitalism, I think the evidence suggests that his answer to these questions is far more negative than is widely recognized, and this in a distinctive sense that remains relevant today. I want to try to explain this counterintuitive claim. Hegel, of course, writing in Germany in the early nineteenth century, had no idea of the full scope of the industrial capitalism to come, but he certainly saw that a largely agricultural and artisanal/craft/predominantly homebound economy was changing into a wage-labor economy, and his worries about that alone are apposite. What makes him especially worth returning to in our present circumstances, however, is that while material inequalities and the resulting systematic unfairness were important to him, Hegel’s principal focus was on the experiences of ourselves and others inherent in the ordinary life required by such a productive system. These issues are often misleadingly marginalized as “psychological,” but as recent events have shown, they are crucial to the possibility of the social bonds without which no society can survive.
File under Drift.
More discovery of the obvious. Capitalism and technocracy destroyed bourgeois society. And Hegel was a still a "writer" in a way that later generations of moralizing pseudoscience disdained.
Robert Pippen is a lightweight, but that doesn't make him wrong. It's just another sign of confusion and slow change.

The source for the link to Pippin, Anton Jäger, the author of "It might take awhile before history starts again"
It seems almost impossible to write a ‘history of the present’ when the present itself has become so diffuse. Much like how the Marxist theory of history felt obsolete in an age after history, the unfolding corona crisis is always one step ahead of us in its awesome abstractions: 50% cut in GDP, 30% unemployment, 5 trillion dollar stimulus, 15 million jobs lost. ‘History’ is clearly taking place, but maybe we barely remember what ‘history’ means anymore.
The writing at the newest[?] vanguardist hipster rag quotes but doesn't name sources. It's all insider baseball. But don't confuse Damage with Salvage, “coffee table architectural favela porn.”

https://damagemag.com/2020/03/09/i-cant-relate/
https://nonsite.org/article/the-masses-against-the-classes-or-how-to-talk-about-populism-without-talking-about-class
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/03/left-populism-mouffe-socialist-strategy

History never stops. And the history of the present is a bourgeois fantasy of an avant-garde outside of time and place, 19th century rhetoric made into 20th century pseudoscience. "I'm not bourgeois!" is "value free science!" from the "left".
Jäger characterizes the modern state as “hard and hollow,"... 
Jäger may indeed be correct that the modern conception of populism descends from McCarthy-era suspicion of popular opinion,...
"Hard and hollow", an empty stahlhartes Gehause. It doesn't even begin with Weber, or the crushing of the Peasants' War

Idiots
Without minimizing in the slightest the conservative weight of German authoritarian institutions or the bitterness of the liberal opposition to them during the 19th century, an historical view into any period of modern German history must still acknowledge that the external posture of German liberalism has ever been qualified by its distinctive internal structure. The juxtaposition—indeed, even the connection—of one conception of liberty that could be realized only within the authoritarian state and of another that could be realized only in an absolute realm beyond all states is a commonly remarked German phenomenon. It has been traced back to Luther and up to Hitler. My problem is to show what the connection between these two apparently antithetical conceptions has been and how it has grown. 

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Jumping ahead, "nonsite": Adolph Reed, Robert Smithson and Michael Fried. I should have at least noted the reference. 

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