It was always about that factory.
Factory as a place for reproduction.
For knowledge production.
For a means of production.
For autonomy.
For class struggle.
For observation.
For a union hall.
For breaks.
For reimagining the working day.
For reading a novel.
For organizing.
For getting away from it.
For false promises.
Maybe it was the place where we let it get away?
Borges had his labyrinth.
Stanley had his factory, ever descending into the dark depths, getting lost, coming out with books.
I loved going there with him.
He was the consummate tour guide.
I remember reading One Dimensional Man
with Stanley, Eros and Civilization, Grundrisse... so many others, unpacking the messy contours of
the dialectical method. You smiled when I told you I visited Gramsci's house in Sardenia. I tried to write one book like you wrote,
connecting my life with Frankfurt School social theory. And the book was four years late.
I
dropped by his house across from the Morgan Library to say hello and goodbye in
January. When I arrived, you sat up in
bed. You were reading Dr Faustus by
Thomas Mann. His magnum opus, you said. And a goodbye. We talked about The Human
Comedy, Labyrinths, and Absalon Absalom. From Balzac to Borges to Faulkner, he knew he was moving into a blurry space. And seemed ok with it all. He invited me
back, but it wasn’t too be.
I knew him in three phases.
The first from afar, reading his Death
and Rebirth of American Radicalism at grad school in Chicago in the mid
1990’s. And then auditing your classes
at the graduate center, 16 years ago, sneaking out of my job in the Bronx at
the syringe ex hanger to audit your classes, chatting about LeFebvre and the
New Deal. He was not a fan. We chatted about Wilhelm Reich and Freud and on
and on, the seminars with you were thrilling, reading your books for years,
Crisis of Historical Materialism. False Promises helped bridge questions about
work and play that would become a foundation for my dissertation and subsequent
books.:
“Conceptually, play can be seen as part of a continuum
from work to
leisure, pleasure and games, as Stanley Aronowitz
(1972/1992), Herbert
play is essentially separate from commerce, it is about
freedom: “playing
is not obligatory; if it were, it would at once lose its
attractive and joyous
A former student of Stanley’s once said I
had taken it all in, hook like and sinker.
It wasn't a compliment.
For me, it was a part of a conversation in motion.
In those early classes, he talked about going to protests in DC
and jazz, enjoying the city. For a while
there, he was everywhere, running for Governor, debating Marshall Berman,
optimistic and occasionally curmudgeonly or forgetful. He held a class like
none else, a conversation extending from the shop room floor as a public
commons to Habermas to Marcuse to Newark, even if you didn't remember what we
were supposed to be talking about.
The third was also after my father died
in 2014, I brought my kids to your class at the Commons. He greeted the kids with
a joke, chatting during the class, and a another joke when the kids announced
they had had enough, it was time time go. Always a joke.
Having shifted from working in the Bronx
to teaching, tenure, and full professorship at City Tech / CUNY, we were
colleagues of sorts. There were points of disagreement. I thought there was more room for Alinsky like winnable
wins. He advised we build revolutionary organizations. Direct action groups
come and go, he reminded me. And was probably right. I was always the student. And there was a lot
to learn in his Saturday classes, down the street from me. For the next five
years I would take as many of these classes as I could, reading all Saturday
morning, dropping by for a couple of hours, and then making my way to a
demo. Most of the classes centered
around the the theme of dialectical method.
“I am not a Marxist, I am a historical materialist,” he reminded us. By
this time, he was well into his ‘80’s still writing books, often about the same
thing, the knowledge factory, the crumbling business labor accord, but slowing
down. Still he was ready to teach.
Introduction to
Dialectics and Dialectical Thinking
With Stanley Aronowitz
An eight week course….
Dialectics has maintained a plethora of
meanings, many of them in conflict with each other. Kant used the term
sparingly and it was Hegel who made dialectics the moving force of all things.
Marx, although following in the steps of Hegel, did not comment directly on what
dialectics essentially is. It was through Engels, using Hegel that dialectics
was to be applied to both nature and society. Lukacs, in the 1920’s, disagreed
and considered dialectics to refer exclusively to social relations whereas
nature had laws of its own, In the same decade and for the next forty years,
the Frankfurt School philosophers were divided on this issue. However Adorno,
who avoided a direct confrontation with Marcuse on this issue, thought
dialectics applied to both nature and society. Through a close reading of
seminal texts on dialectics and dialectical thinking, this course will explore
the variegated meaning of dialectics and their relevance for our contemporary
situation.
Readings will
include:
Lukacs, Gyorgy.
“What is Orthodox Marxism?”
Lefebvre, Henri.
Dialectical Materialism
Marcuse, Hebert.
“A Note on Dialectics” in Reason and
Revolution
Adorno, Theodor.
Introduction to Dialectics.
On and on he
went, calling the streets of Brooklyn shopping malls, lamenting the
moronization of American political discourse.
Stanley lead us
through a rousing reading of Adorno’s 1958 Introduction
to Dialectics.
We concentrated
on lecture nine, in which Adorno recalled a memory of Walter Benjamin. “I am
going to say something scientific now,” noted Stanley. “He generally thought of
Benjamin as the cat’s piss. He was generally admiring. But his admiration did
not extend to his anarchism.” Without a university home, Benjamin freelanced
for much of his adult life, hanging out with Brecht, researching the archades.
Adorno dragged his feet in recommending Benjamin for a position at the Warburg
Institute in London. Benjamin and Adorno continued to correspond. But as the world grew dark, Benjamin fled Paris
but it was too late, eventually killing himself in Spain in September of 1940.
A small poetry
review essay gets at the feeling of being in one of those classes with Stanley
talking about his interest in reading as a child in the Bronx:
At one of
Stanley Aronowitz’s sessions on the Frankfurt School theorists last fall, I
mentioned Against Vocation and some
of my thoughts on the work. Read The Dialectical Biologist, replied
Aronowitz, a text (Harvard UP, 1985) by Richard Lewontin and Richard
Levins. In it, Lewontin and Richard
Levins argue “that a dialectical method was necessary to deal with complexity
and change in the social and natural world. Medicine.. divorces itself from the
social, and deals in simple linear, causal relationships between biological
parts: A causes B and is cured by C. But health and illness are always in
dialectical relationship with environment, society, culture and history.” So
are writing and work. We all are all a part of this dynamic, laboring in a
social environment that informs our contradictions and struggles. No one can
escape this. Whitman contradicts himself.
This is part of what makes his writings on work, and democracy so
compelling. Dialectical reason helps us come to grips with this movement back and
forth, in constant flux.
“What’s
Whitman’s contradiction? asks Stanley, referring to a queer sensibility he did
not see when he read those Leaves of Grass when he
was 14.
“If you
want to be a secure person, do not take a secure job,” Aronowitz continues.
It is
hard not to see these dialectical workings in Whitman’s poetry, regardless of
whether he worked as a real estate developer or handy man or journalist,
commenting on issues of his day as his thinking evolved. On and on Aronowitz
goes, taking us on a detour away from Marcuse, through a discussion of Whitman,
the limits of our thinking, back to the 19th century.
Marx’s reach extends in countless directions, Aronowitz mumbles, his ideas
landing with 19th century
French writer Honoré de Balzac. He is said to have wanted to study La Comédie
Humaine after completing Capital.
Afterall posits Balzac: “Reading brings us unknown friends.” Marx had few but
Engels. Marx’s exploration of Balzac’s writings on the everyday life of
laborers and revolutionaries alike would not come to be. But imagine if it
had? Walter Benjamin’s readings of
Baudelaire might have found warmer reception.
Saturday morning after Saturday morning,
I spent reading, getting ready for Marxism after Marx with Stanley Aronowitz.
Back
to the source, yet again:
“In recent times, left scholars, militants, and theorists
have returned to Marx in the hope of
We share our stories.
One narrative after another.
“I
grew up in the East Bronx,” Stanley begins.
“And played violin. My mother was a musician and dragged me to
the opera.”
Saturday after Saturday, chatting Adorno
with Stanley.
I found page after page of blog, phd, and
book notes from those classes.
On the way to class, the police pulled us for
skipping a turn style. The sun shines.
I tell Stanley about going to Gramsci’s
house. We walk from 37th street, looking at the sky, the buildings,
taking in delirious New York. Past the Graduate Center and Madison Square Park,
billowy clouds above, a rally at Union Square, we stroll through the gorgeous
Saturday…
Stanley had asked us to review some
writings on the Frankfurt School.
Past homeless people and fashion models,
skyscrapers and cabs, we walked Gotham.
Adorno reminds us that progress is
anything but guaranteed.
“The concept of progress is dialectical
in a strictly non metaphorical sense.”
The dialectic is certainly not at a
standstill.
For hours, we talk it through,
remembering Benjamin and the Frankfurt school members who dealt with a rise of fascism in their day.
Stanley Aronowitz walked me through a
vast history of ideas as we sat at the Brooklyn Commons trying to make sense of
it all.
Another Saturday, we read the Communist
Manifesto on Saturday with Stanley.
The history of all hitherto existing society(2) is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood
in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden,
now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending
classes….”
The words read
like poetry,
The struggles have only continued.
“How do you create a different world,
How do you bring the proletariat into
history,” wondered Stanley,
As
we sat chatting at the People’s Forum.
“What
does it take to make history,
Not just a living wage?”
Riffing on debates over organizational
efforts and reproduction,
Coalition politics vs revolutionary
strategies, debates that go on and on and on.
He
made fun of me for being a social worker and going to protests.
But didn’t mind if I shot out that he
needed to get out more.
“There is hardly any dialogue today,” he
lamented,
worrying about a dwindling public sphere for ideas.
Lets read some women, I suggested as we
wrapped up our conversation.
Stanley mentioned Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai, a Russian Communist revolutionary, and the
author of
The Autobiography of a
Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926).
· “I wanted
to be free. I wanted to express desires on my own, to shape my own
little life,” she wrote, reflecting
on sexual liberation and revolution.
I thought of him visiting Casa Grasci in Sardinia
a few years ago.
The museum
displays portraits, as well as copies of the author’s copy of the Divine Comedy. He wrote, he organized, and he believed in
our capacity to think, to believe
in our own intelligence. One of the great joys of my life was reading
the Prison Notebooks, Il Quaderno,
with Stanley Aronowitz, who wrote extensively about Gramsci in books and essays
including: “Gramsci’s Theory of Education: Schooling and Beyond”….
Stanley loved reading Il Quaderno with everyone.
It was as if he
thought something magic might happen if we read it close enough.
Maybe this time, we might get it right, connecting theory and practice.
And maybe it
did?
Or maybe it
didn’t?
Sometimes we met
at his old apartment by the graduate center. We talked about György
Lukács and Western Marxism, Honoré de Balzac, who Stanley said considers the
totality perhaps more than any writer, and the importance of culture and the
novel. Life and age are getting away from him, but he's still sharing.
Stanley recalled a
moment when he was teaching at UC Riverside.
"I was at the movies and the lights went on. And there was Herbert Marcuse. He was in the front and I was in the back.
'Stanley what did you think of the movie?' he asked. 'Pretty good,' Stanley
replied. 'Your aesthetics are crap' Marcuse replied. He wasn't very interested in the
movies."
Finishing the talk with Stanley, Phil and Tibby and I
walked out into the New York streets, telling stories and enjoying the
afternoon.
I took his classes all the way until the pandemic.
But time getting away from him.
He was often forgetful.
And then one more meeting last January, chatting about it all, one more time. I hadn’t seen him for over a year and wasn’t sure how he was going to be after a series of strokes and falls.
“What do you think of our new union leadership,” he said,
greeting me, with a smile, gossiping about trade union politics and books,
talking about Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus,
his master work, Benjamin and Faulkner and Absalom
Absalom!.
I asked Stanley about the fights.
“If you are interested in a fight, think about Stalin and
Trotsky.
That was a fight.”
“That’s not exactly a resolution I’m looking for, one man
stabbed…” I paused.
“Well, you said fights,” he replied, pausing. “How about Vladimir Lenin fighting with George Valentinovich Plekhanov,
Russian Democratic Party.”
We kept chatting away, talking about books and
Honoré de Balzac and John Paul Sartre.
“He wrote a wonderful essay about New
York City.”
“What do you think I
should be reading?” I followed. Stanley
had never lead me astray.
“Try Adorno’s 1951 Minima Moralia.”
He writes:
“Whoever
wishes to experience the truth of immediate life, must investigate its
alienated form, the objective powers, which determine the individual existence
into its innermost recesses.
“Thanks for reading with me through the years.”
“Try Hannah Arendt’s edited Benjamin.”
“We read it together,” I replied.
“It reminds me of the city, ever evolving, mechanical
reproduction”
Like Allen’s poem, our lives ever changing.
A few more minutes and Stanley started fading.
And we said goodbye.
He gave me a way to look at the world and history and
social theory.
I do not always agree with the confrontational approach.
But the engagement, the joy of reading on a Saturday, of
getting up early, even after Halloween for a class, unpacking a complicated
paragraph in Grundrisse or Il
Quaderno, connecting the dots in a history of ideas, between our
union and the Frankfurt school, that I miss more than ever.
A few of us chatted after we got the news last night.
It’s incredible how he changed our lives.
I feel like I’d be so fucked without him in my life.
Heather Gautney I
know... with him in or not in....what a mensch... I met you through him....he
adored you... talked a out you all the time…
Heather Gautney agreed.
He created so much for us.
Hard to write through tears. He brought so many of us
together. I owe him so so much. Can’t even explain…
Michael Pelias wrote:
“The loss of Stanley for us is
immeasurable- he was the great bridge, a wide span one at that, connecting the
New Left and the Old Left. Truly, the organic intellectual of his time. I will
be in touch about memorials and classes- his corpus needs studying and to be
kept alive.”
On the dialectic of work and play, Stanley was there like
no one other....
Benjamin Heim
Shepard it was from Stanley that I learned about Marx, Luckas,
the Frankfurt School, and many many other important figures that shaped my own
ideas and possibilities. I am forever grateful.
Tom Bue
I don't have the words to adequately signify the impact that Stanley Aronowitz has had on my intellectual development. One paragraph of close reading with him was worth an entire curriculum (and much more). To this day I practice close reading with students in all my courses. Stanley was the consummate political intellectual. Unperturbed by the arbitrary mandates of orthodoxy, the domination logic that seeks to reduce subjectivity to a mere "thing", he eloquently combated the false dichotomies of self and other, thought and action, everyday life and revolutionary struggle, with righteous fervor. Stanley's appreciation of art was infectious (as he was wont to say, "I wrote a book on that!"). He often recited lines from his favorite poems. Here's to you Stanley. See you on the other side of the widening gyre. "Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" Stanley Aronowitz, 1933 - 2021. RIP
RIP
Stanley. Thank you. Godspeed.
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