I can’t recall where I read it but somebody somewhere came up with an observation about “the fallacy of origins” whereby any item can be traced to its roots and the roots explain everything. In other words, everything IS just its roots. This seems to me to be the attitude of Rockhill and most of what you might call the “grand conspiracy theorists” who spend most of their time tracing the origins and funding of everything and then step back with a sense of “Gotcha!” and that’s all that needs to be done. But Adorno – and Marx too – would never have blushed to be “found out” to have bourgeois origins.
The fundamental flaw of this assumption that a revolution can only come “out of the blue”, i.e. from outside as if it has to be “pure”, is that this simply cannot happen. Change has to be produced “internally”. And I think Marx would have said that it is precisely the most advanced capitalist formation (in the parlance of the origin tracers, the “most corrupted” formation) that is most likely to produce something new.
Thus it is not necessarily an objection to any writing that it was “funded by the CIA”.
You could also argue that, for any CIA funded phony dissident site to be convincing, it has to “make the right noises” and the best way – even the only way – to do this is to actually employ people who genuinely ARE dissidents. But that obviously sets up an ambiguity or an “instability” which has the potential of leading to a result unfavourable to the original “fiendish puppeteers”.
In short, you can call Rockhill’s bluff here and say, “Well let’s say that what you claim is true. So what?”
Cf. The Frankfurt School and pessimism, Horkheimer had a fixation with Schopenhauer which gave a curious tension to his outlook – split between Marxian optimism and Schopenhauer’s atavistic dourness which was based on a ferociously static view of existence.
Adorno’s dislike for Arendt was reciprocated. But, to be fair, Adorno did rub a few people up the wrong way – not least Schönberg.
I can’t recall where I read it but somebody somewhere came up with an observation about “the fallacy of origins” whereby any item can be traced to its roots and the roots explain everything. In other words, everything IS just its roots. This seems to me to be the attitude of Rockhill and most of what you might call the “grand conspiracy theorists” who spend most of their time tracing the origins and funding of everything and then step back with a sense of “Gotcha!” and that’s all that needs to be done. But Adorno – and Marx too – would never have blushed to be “found out” to have bourgeois origins.
The fundamental flaw of this assumption that a revolution can only come “out of the blue”, i.e. from outside as if it has to be “pure”, is that this simply cannot happen. Change has to be produced “internally”. And I think Marx would have said that it is precisely the most advanced capitalist formation (in the parlance of the origin tracers, the “most corrupted” formation) that is most likely to produce something new.
Thus it is not necessarily an objection to any writing that it was “funded by the CIA”.
You could also argue that, for any CIA funded phony dissident site to be convincing, it has to “make the right noises” and the best way – even the only way – to do this is to actually employ people who genuinely ARE dissidents. But that obviously sets up an ambiguity or an “instability” which has the potential of leading to a result unfavourable to the original “fiendish puppeteers”.
In short, you can call Rockhill’s bluff here and say, “Well let’s say that what you claim is true. So what?”
Cf. The Frankfurt School and pessimism, Horkheimer had a fixation with Schopenhauer which gave a curious tension to his outlook – split between Marxian optimism and Schopenhauer’s atavistic dourness which was based on a ferociously static view of existence.
Adorno’s dislike for Arendt was reciprocated. But, to be fair, Adorno did rub a few people up the wrong way – not least Schönberg.