Status Updates From Negative Dialectics

Excited to be reading this again cuz I hate myself!

big day for a guy like me

I have been reading Gouldner's "The Two Marxisms", where the use of Weberian ideal types has repeatedly frustrated me and had me thinking "maybe Benjamin could teach us how to talk about these big concepts through concrete examples". So Adorno's endorsement of Weber as a more productive form of thinking with "constellations" than Benjamin's "metaphysical investigations" is really disappointing.

So this "causal web" would be a new aspect in the process of regression, towards the Age of Aquarius maybe? In causal web, ultimately, things become all the more intensely "caused" because of the inability of reflection on it as a cause, which is now a more like just a program. It is the ultimate solidification of the search for a cause yet also its destruction at the same time, following the development begun by God

In fact, what we are seeing in science and technology in modernity is the increased emphasis on the web: the ultimate teleological myth running through the fabric of modern science then is AGI, and the challenge of how much can everything be pushed away from solid causality towards a web of correlations, and remain functionally identical. But is it the web any longer? Or is it causal model made into a web equals ???

If the universal form of the web is the monism, then how is the web to be explained? Once again, merely through a self-limitation and the consequent positing of the many by the One. The web is a destroyed totality, and the web destroys itself towards causality, just like the One is as matter, as limited and extended. Causality is the solidity of the web: the dialectic is regressive, rather than progressive.

This is maybe the best and most interesting Kant criticism I've come across, though probably I would be a bit more charitable towards Kant. If holism and interdependence can be universalized to Parmenidean monism if followed through to their conclusion, same is true for the category of causality. The universal form of causality is a web of dependency and the universal form of web of dependency is monism.

Let's try negative: [This] is [not] that vs [This] is not [that]. In the first, what is negated is merely the that, without wider extension of positivity: in the second, the extension presumes existence while negating a particular.