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I visited the Pretty Much Pop podcast to give my take on Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s film You Can See Everything. My remarks were based on my piece from a couple of weeks ago. You can listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll notice that the never-ending fascism debate has flared up again. Not that I think the analogy needs any more justification, but I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve been up to this past decade; I’ve tried to refine and qualify my arguments to fit reality, but at the very beginning, just after the 2016 election, my initial vision of Trumpian rule was the total collapse of US society, something like Charlottesville, January 6th, and Minneapolis happening every day. Of course, that was my imagination running wild, without any critical discipline of the intellect, but I thought recently about Adorno’s description of thought in Minima Moralia:
While thought relates to facts and moves by criticizing them, its movement depends no less on the maintenance of distance. It expresses exactly what is, precisely because what is essential to it is an element of exaggeration, of over-shooting the object, of self-detachment from the weight of the factual, so that instead of merely reproducing being it can, at once rigorous and free, determine it. Thus every thought resembles play, with which Hegel no less than Nietzsche compared the work of the mind. The unbarbaric side of philosophy is its tacit awareness of the element of irresponsibility, of blitheness springing from the volatility of thought, which forever escapes what it judges.
In other places, he stated similar principles. "I have exaggerated the gloomy side of things, following the maxim that today only exaggeration can be the medium of truth,” and “All thinking is exaggeration, in so far as every thought that is one at all goes beyond its confirmation by the given facts. Yet this difference between thought and its factual confirmation harbors the potential for delusion as well as for truth.”
The last quote comes at the end of this example in “The Opinion Delusion Society,” which I think is comically German and also rather touching:
