Negative Dialectics and the Aesthetic Redemption of the Postmodern Subject (original) (raw)

; you have all stood as exemplary models of brilliance for those who have had the pleasure of being in your company. I would also like to thank my parents, Tim and Cynthia Fehrman, for giving me the ability to pursue a college education through all of their support. Special thanks to the Honor's Program Director Dr. Sarwar, as well as Erin Sutherland. I would further like to thank Dr. Chervenak of the Department of Political Science. As well, thanks to my employers over the last four years, Heathcliff Hailey, Joaquin Rodas, Walker Reisman, Tobias Womack, and Amy Mossberg for being understanding of my schedule and general transition of attitude. Thanks as well, goes out to David Bear, Elizabeth Ferguson, and August Louko for being the foils and emotional support for philosophical ideas and existential crises over the last four years. iii Foreword This paper marks for me the culmination of ruminations that began with the study of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, studies of Emile Durkheim's anomie, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, and ended with the emergence of a worldview that encompasses the current predicament faced by the postmodern individual. By investigating the construction of identity, and the rampant devaluation of traditional values in our current society, I thought there must be a common source; it has been the search for this source that has led me to this thesis over the last four years, perhaps, going back even farther. My time as student pursuing a philosophy degree exposed me to the works of philosophers that have given me the proper nomenclature and lexicon to be able to formulate this process of devaluation I see every day in society. As well, though, as I believe that individuals in the United States possess varying degrees of nihilism, I have faith that the individual will subscribe to valuations that empower, not hinder. For to be honest, if one is to understand the power structure in the West as representing the vast multitude of subjects at the bottom, overseen by the very few at the top, and if power and its attendant, authority, do not come simply from the possession of money, then power must come in the form of either truth, freedom, authenticity and/or subscribing to traditional valuations already possessing the positive power of not only participation in them, but also, intrinsically, the historical legitimacy of culture and custom. This fact may not be entirely elucidated by the following work; instead, the impression may be that subjectively subscribed valuation is a source of "surrogate" power, or "the power of the powerless" as it exists for the iv disenfranchised denizen at the bottom of the socioeconomic power structure, a proposition I am hesitant to fully make. At least, though, through the aesthetic active participation of producing art, or the project of artful living, perhaps the individual may again approach truth, freedom, and authenticity. Lastly, this work does not fully explore all the various angles and prescriptions for overcoming the disenfranchisement of universal commodification. Much of the work I did exploring this topic took me in the direction Nicholas Gane took in his work Max Weber and Postmodern Theory, whereby he used the sociological work of Max Weber and worked it out through three French postmodernists: Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Foucoult. This current paper deviates from this approach, exploring the source of the nihilism through the phenomenological position of the German dialecticians. Though, in the future, I wish to explore the notions of Baudrillard's erotic sphere, and more specifically, how sex may correlate to aesthetic objects as perhaps objects that contain not only mystery, but also, perhaps negatively, the potential for danger and death; the dialectic relationship between Eros and Thanatos that may or may not correlate to creation or annihilation that exist together within mystery objects.