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A protestor expresses her surprise at being arrested by the NYPD during the Occupy Wall Street march on the Brooklyn Bridge, 1 October 2011: photo by James Fassinger/The Guardian
Now as before, human beings, individual subjects, stand under a bane.
It is the subjective form of the world-spirit, whose primacy over the externalized life-process is reinforced internally.
What they can do nothing about, and which negates them, is what they themselves become.
It is the subjective form of the world-spirit, whose primacy over the externalized life-process is reinforced internally.
What they can do nothing about, and which negates them, is what they themselves become.
They no longer need to acquire a taste for it as what is higher, which it in fact is in contrast to them, in the hierarchy of degrees of universality.
On their own, a priori, as it were, they behave in accordance with what is inescapable.
On their own, a priori, as it were, they behave in accordance with what is inescapable.
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In human experience, the bane is the equivalent of the fetish-character of the commodity.
What is self-made becomes the In-itself, out of which the self can no longer escape; in the dominating faith in facts as such, in their positive acceptance, the subject worships its mirror-image.
The reified consciousness has become total as the bane.
That it is a false one, holds the promise of the possibility of its sublation: that it would not remain such, that false consciousness would inescapably move beyond itself, that it could not have the last word.
The more the society is steered by the totality, which reproduces itself in the bane of subjects, the deeper too its tendency towards dissociation.
This latter threatens the life of the species, as much as it denies the bane of the whole, the false identity of subject and object.
The general, which compresses the particular as if by an instrument of torture, until it splinters, labors against itself, because it has its substance in the life of the particular; without it, it sinks down into the abstract, separate and voidable form.
The reified consciousness has become total as the bane.
That it is a false one, holds the promise of the possibility of its sublation: that it would not remain such, that false consciousness would inescapably move beyond itself, that it could not have the last word.
The more the society is steered by the totality, which reproduces itself in the bane of subjects, the deeper too its tendency towards dissociation.
This latter threatens the life of the species, as much as it denies the bane of the whole, the false identity of subject and object.
The general, which compresses the particular as if by an instrument of torture, until it splinters, labors against itself, because it has its substance in the life of the particular; without it, it sinks down into the abstract, separate and voidable form.
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What some prefer to call angst and ennoble as an existential, is claustrophobia in the world: in the closed system.
It perpetuates the bane as the coldness between human beings, without which the woe could not repeat itself.
Whoever is not cold, who does not make themselves cold as per the vulgar figure of speech of the murderer who ices the victim, must feel themselves condemned.
Along with angst and its grounds, the coldness, too, might pass away. Angst is the necessary form of the curse laid in the universal coldness over those, who suffer from it.
It perpetuates the bane as the coldness between human beings, without which the woe could not repeat itself.
Whoever is not cold, who does not make themselves cold as per the vulgar figure of speech of the murderer who ices the victim, must feel themselves condemned.
Along with angst and its grounds, the coldness, too, might pass away. Angst is the necessary form of the curse laid in the universal coldness over those, who suffer from it.
Theodor Adorno: Bane, from Negative Dialectics, 1966, translated by Dennis Redmond, 2001
Transparent City #12: photo by Michael Wolf, 2008
...their having stumbled into
a free market wonder
land in which value
had come to seem forever
detached from even the
thought of actual labor,
there grew among the young
men on the Street
an assumption that
they could do anything...
Transparent City #28: photo by Michael Wolf, 2008
Rooftop bar at Soho House, New York City: photo by pvsbond, 5 June 2007
Clubhouse, Jekyll Island Club, Georgia, site of the secret drafting, in 1910, by many of the country's leading financiers, of the legislation which created the U.S. Federal Reserve. On the evening of 22 November 1910, Senator Nelson Aldrich (R.-R.I.) and A.P. Andrews (Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department), Paul Warburg (a naturalized German representing Kuhn, Loeb & Co.), Frank A. Vanderlip (president of the National City Bank of New York), Henry P. Davidson (senior partner of J. P. Morgan Co.), Charles D. Norton (president of the Morgan-dominated First National Bank of New York), and Benjamin Strong (representing J. P. Morgan), together representing about one fourth the world's wealth at the time, left Hoboken, New Jersey by train, in complete secrecy, dropping their last names in favor of first names, or code names, so that their actual identities would remain concealed. The public pretext for the trip was a duck hunting expedition to Jekyll Island. "The utmost secrecy was enjoined upon all. The public must not glean a hint of what was to be done. Senator Aldrich notified each one to go quietly into a private car of which the railroad had received orders to draw up on an unfrequented platform. Off the party set. New York’s ubiquitous reporters had been foiled... Nelson (Aldrich) had confided to Henry, Frank, Paul and Piatt that he was to keep them locked up at Jekyll Island, out of the rest of the world, until they had evolved and compiled a scientific currency system for the United States." (Forbes Magazine founder Bertie Charles Forbes, q. in G. Edward Griffin: The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, 1998): photo by torqtorqtorq, 17 May 2007
Inland marshes of Jekyll Island, Georgia: photo by Matrixboy84, 2006
"A free market wonder...": TC, from Something in the Air, 2010
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