Yesterday I watched The Grönholm method (the play, not the movie). In a nutshell the play is about a job interview where the interviewee is the subject of an experiment which tries to assess whether he possesses the appropriate psychological traits. He reacts completely ruthlessly in every situation, which impresses two of the interviewers, but the third is not convinced and in the end she proves her point. The interviewee is rejected with the words: "we are not looking for a good person who appears to be a complete bastard, but a complete bastard who appears to be a good person."
To this a quote from Adorno, again from Minima Moralia, 36 - Die Gesundheit zum Tode:
For the individual to appear physically and psychically fit, it must perform libidinous tasks that can be executed only by deepest mutilation, an internalisation of castration in the extroverts in comparison to which the old task of identification with the father appears as the child's play in which it was practised. The regular guy and popular girl must suppress not only their desire and knowledge but also all symptoms that arose from this suppression in bourgeois times. /.../ No research can reach to the depths of the hell in which the deformations that will later see the light of day as cheerfulness, openness, sociability, as successful adaptation to the inevitable and as an unthinkingly practical sense, are formed. /.../ The absence of nervousness and calmness, already a condition for the acquisition of highly paid positions, are the image of the suffocated silence, which the superiors of human resource chiefs commit politically only later on. /.../ At the core of the dominant healthiness lies death.
2 comments:
Sometimes when I read 'theorisations' - I guess like this one - I have to force myself not to nod along in a too easy association of particular situations, empirical examples with the theory. Too close an association of particular empirical instances with a general rule can belie the rule or divorce the instances from some of their other equally true meanings. I'm not being soft on capitalist recruitment practices - rather it's that age old thing about whether Hegemony really is as Hegemonic as this - wonderfully exemplary tale makes it seem or whether things are more complicated and hence difficult, problematic, tiring to tackle.
The question how to read philosophy, that you touch upon here, is very important. I think Adorno would have completely agreed with you. In his metaphysics lectures he made much the same point: that his philosophy has often been misunderstood, because it was taken as statement of fact instead of a pursuing of general tendencies. I think the value of his philosophy is shedding light on social processes by analytically pursuing their extreme forms, which means that his writing can not be read as statement of fact. Rather, the distance to empirical reality functions as leverage for critical thought.
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