D Gross
Biographic Data
| ID | 6089625 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Gross |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Gross |
| SIGNATURE | GROSS D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Colorado System |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5400-8708 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
A New Direction? The Religious Critique of Modern Culture
During the 1960s, it seemed obvious to many on the American and European Left—including the founders of Telos in 1968—that a thoroughgoing cultural critique was badly needed, since the dominant forms of culture in the West appeared either to be promoting false consciousness or to have literally become false consciousness
Where is Telos Going
It may seem surprising to many people that Telos has not only survived long enough to publish its 100th issue, but that, as journals go, it is still relatively alert and healthy, showing as yet no signs of internal deterioration. Other journals which, like Telos, either first appeared along with the New Left in the 1960s or were otherwise closely associated with it (Studies on the Left, Liberation, democracy, etc.) have long since expired. Yet Te…
More on Tradition
My book The Past in Ruins: Tradition and the Critique of Modernity was the subject of a lengthy symposium in Telos 94. Though some of the commentary was positive, much was critical. In what follows, I will neither restate my position nor respond directly to all my critics. Rather I will attempt both to articulate a broader view of traditions and to present a more useful way to approach them. In 1905, in an address to the Verein für Sozialpolitik,…
Taking Potshots
It is no news that Russell Jacoby writes well. Anyone familiar with his Social Amnesia or The Last Intellectuals knows that already. Few cultural critics can match him in clarity of expression or the ability to craft a well-turned phrase, and fewer still can leaven their critiques with humor and yet not diminish the impact of what they have to say. Almost no one writing today can presume to assail the prose of others, as Jacoby does in Dogmatic W…
Rethinking Traditions
One of my main concerns in The Past in Ruins is the issue of tradition and how it ought to be dealt with today. My starting point is an obvious one: that we in the West now live so entirely within the framework of modernity that it is neither possible nor desirable to seek a return to pre-modernity. The triumph of what Baudelaire called la vie moderne has of course brought with it gains as well as losses, and certainly among the most notable of t…
Rescuing the Past
All the central ideas of Critical Theory were originally formulated between the early 1930s and the mid-1950s. Though it is true that some of the major works of Critical Theory appeared subsequent to the 1950s — for example, Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964) or Adorno's Negative Dialectics (1966) — it is also true that these works were essentially elaborations on concepts developed two or three decades earlier. Ironically, it was just at the p…
Block's Philosophy of Hope
Ernst Bloch The Principle of Hope, trans, by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986). Three volumes, 1419 pp. + xxxiii, $95
Weber in Context
Harry Liebersohn Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1870-1923 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 282 pp
Hope Among the Ruins
Jacoby builds his argument about the decline of public intellectuals on the assumption that there have been roughly three stages through which intellectuals have passed in this century. These give his argument a structure and help explain the disappointments he feels regarding the last of these stages — the one we are in. The first stage consists of those intellectuals born around 1900 (Mumford, Wilson, McDonald) who made their living primarily b…
Symposium on Soviet Peasants
In 1981, an extraordinary work, written by Lev Timofeev, was smuggled to the West and immediately printed in Russian. It has now been translated into English for the first time under the title Soviet Peasants (or: The Peasants'; Art of Starving).' The book is a rare exercise in social anthropology in as much as Timofeev manages to bring together an expert's knowledge of Soviet agricultural policy with penetrating observations on the everyday life…
Left Melancholy
It is fascinating to see the extent to which European thought took a melancholic turn in the decades before World War I. Almost simultaneously, a number of related ideas became matters of major concern, particularly for middle-class intellectuals. Among these were the notion that life is by nature “incomplete,” that there is an irreconcilable opposition between desire and fulfillment, that the contemporary world is ugly and “impure,” and that exi…
Time Allocation
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Marxism and Modernism
Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982, 330 pages
Space, Time, and Modern Culture
One of the most significant developments of this century — a development that has affected all of us whether we are aware of it or not — is the easy and practically universal acceptance of what might be called the spatialization of thought and experience. Because we are so much in the middle of this phenomenon, few have noticed it. Most live this spatialization as if it were entirely normal. But historically speaking, it has not been the norm. Th…
Lowenthal, Adorno, Barthes
“Popular Culture” has been defined in various ways, but essentially it means two things: (1) the system of shared meanings and values that unite most of the people in any given society, and (2) the actual embodiment of these qualities and attitudes in particular objects or performances that can then be exchanged, consumed, observed, or otherwise experienced by other members of the community (e.g., paintings, plays, books, songs and the like). The…
Introduction to the Luxemburg--Jogiches Correspondence
The best way to learn what a person was like, as compared to what he or she merely thought, is to consult a good biography. In this respect, Rosa Luxemburg was luckier than many on the Left in having two or three excellent biographers who provide perceptive insights into her character. Still, a balanced biography can only reveal so much; its main purpose is to explain an individual's accomplishments, not to explore the configurations of a persona…
Culture and Negativity
A lot can be learned about a culture by observing how it deals with the underside of life—with all those things it decides, for whatever reason, are unacceptable or beyod the pale. Every society, like every individual, holds up an image of what it thinks it is, but this is never the whole of what it actually its. Underneath the façade, in the interstices of social life and in the hidden spaces still considered taboo, one can often find the key to…
"Irony and the "Disorders of the Soul
In 1908 the Russian poet Alexander Blok made a statement which could be taken as an epigraph for our age. “All the most lively and sensitive children of our century,” he wrote, “are stricken by a disease unknown to our doctors and psychiatrists. It is related to the disorders of the soul and might be called ‘irony’.” How true this insight has become by the 1970s probably even Blok could not have imagined. Though no one has put it quite this way, …
The Seventh Hero
Philip Rosenberg, The Seventh Hero: Thomas Carlyle and the Theory of Radical Activism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974. 235 plus xi pages. $10.00
Fluometuron, Metobromuron, Chlorbromuron, and Chloroxuron
On Writing Cultural Criticism
Why Write? In 1947 Sartre asked this question. Since then others, especially in France, have addressed themselves to this same question. Why, and to what end, string words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs until at last a final product appears: the article, the book, l'oeuvre? The issue Sartre raised is so simple that it had never been phrased in quite this way before. And in response there have been several answers. Sartre suggests th…
The History of Ideas
George Boas' recent book The History of Ideas (New York, 1969) has all of the shortcomings of the discipline he attempts to describe. In his view, the task of intellectual history is to study ideas an sich. But what is an idea? For the Ideenhistoriker it is essentially a concept in a vacuum, i.e., a notion which somehow floats above time and space, and therefore above history. And yet, like Hegel's World Spirit, it also condescends to enter into …
Space, Time, and Modern Culture
One of the most significant developments of this century — a development that has affected all of us whether we are aware of it or not — is the easy and practically universal acceptance of what might be called the spatialization of thought and experience. Because we are so much in the middle of this phenomenon, few have noticed it. Most live this spatialization as if it were entirely normal. But historically speaking, it has not been the norm. Th…
Block's Philosophy of Hope
Ernst Bloch The Principle of Hope, trans, by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986). Three volumes, 1419 pp. + xxxiii, $95
Rethinking Traditions
One of my main concerns in The Past in Ruins is the issue of tradition and how it ought to be dealt with today. My starting point is an obvious one: that we in the West now live so entirely within the framework of modernity that it is neither possible nor desirable to seek a return to pre-modernity. The triumph of what Baudelaire called la vie moderne has of course brought with it gains as well as losses, and certainly among the most notable of t…
Rescuing the Past
All the central ideas of Critical Theory were originally formulated between the early 1930s and the mid-1950s. Though it is true that some of the major works of Critical Theory appeared subsequent to the 1950s — for example, Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964) or Adorno's Negative Dialectics (1966) — it is also true that these works were essentially elaborations on concepts developed two or three decades earlier. Ironically, it was just at the p…
Hope Among the Ruins
Jacoby builds his argument about the decline of public intellectuals on the assumption that there have been roughly three stages through which intellectuals have passed in this century. These give his argument a structure and help explain the disappointments he feels regarding the last of these stages — the one we are in. The first stage consists of those intellectuals born around 1900 (Mumford, Wilson, McDonald) who made their living primarily b…
The History of Ideas
George Boas' recent book The History of Ideas (New York, 1969) has all of the shortcomings of the discipline he attempts to describe. In his view, the task of intellectual history is to study ideas an sich. But what is an idea? For the Ideenhistoriker it is essentially a concept in a vacuum, i.e., a notion which somehow floats above time and space, and therefore above history. And yet, like Hegel's World Spirit, it also condescends to enter into …
Fluometuron, Metobromuron, Chlorbromuron, and Chloroxuron
On Writing Cultural Criticism
Why Write? In 1947 Sartre asked this question. Since then others, especially in France, have addressed themselves to this same question. Why, and to what end, string words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs until at last a final product appears: the article, the book, l'oeuvre? The issue Sartre raised is so simple that it had never been phrased in quite this way before. And in response there have been several answers. Sartre suggests th…
The Seventh Hero
Philip Rosenberg, The Seventh Hero: Thomas Carlyle and the Theory of Radical Activism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974. 235 plus xi pages. $10.00
"Irony and the "Disorders of the Soul
In 1908 the Russian poet Alexander Blok made a statement which could be taken as an epigraph for our age. “All the most lively and sensitive children of our century,” he wrote, “are stricken by a disease unknown to our doctors and psychiatrists. It is related to the disorders of the soul and might be called ‘irony’.” How true this insight has become by the 1970s probably even Blok could not have imagined. Though no one has put it quite this way, …
Introduction to the Luxemburg--Jogiches Correspondence
The best way to learn what a person was like, as compared to what he or she merely thought, is to consult a good biography. In this respect, Rosa Luxemburg was luckier than many on the Left in having two or three excellent biographers who provide perceptive insights into her character. Still, a balanced biography can only reveal so much; its main purpose is to explain an individual's accomplishments, not to explore the configurations of a persona…
Culture and Negativity
A lot can be learned about a culture by observing how it deals with the underside of life—with all those things it decides, for whatever reason, are unacceptable or beyod the pale. Every society, like every individual, holds up an image of what it thinks it is, but this is never the whole of what it actually its. Underneath the façade, in the interstices of social life and in the hidden spaces still considered taboo, one can often find the key to…
Lowenthal, Adorno, Barthes
“Popular Culture” has been defined in various ways, but essentially it means two things: (1) the system of shared meanings and values that unite most of the people in any given society, and (2) the actual embodiment of these qualities and attitudes in particular objects or performances that can then be exchanged, consumed, observed, or otherwise experienced by other members of the community (e.g., paintings, plays, books, songs and the like). The…
Space, Time, and Modern Culture
One of the most significant developments of this century — a development that has affected all of us whether we are aware of it or not — is the easy and practically universal acceptance of what might be called the spatialization of thought and experience. Because we are so much in the middle of this phenomenon, few have noticed it. Most live this spatialization as if it were entirely normal. But historically speaking, it has not been the norm. Th…
Time Allocation
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological ...Read More
Marxism and Modernism
Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982, 330 pages
Left Melancholy
It is fascinating to see the extent to which European thought took a melancholic turn in the decades before World War I. Almost simultaneously, a number of related ideas became matters of major concern, particularly for middle-class intellectuals. Among these were the notion that life is by nature “incomplete,” that there is an irreconcilable opposition between desire and fulfillment, that the contemporary world is ugly and “impure,” and that exi…
Symposium on Soviet Peasants
In 1981, an extraordinary work, written by Lev Timofeev, was smuggled to the West and immediately printed in Russian. It has now been translated into English for the first time under the title Soviet Peasants (or: The Peasants'; Art of Starving).' The book is a rare exercise in social anthropology in as much as Timofeev manages to bring together an expert's knowledge of Soviet agricultural policy with penetrating observations on the everyday life…
Hope Among the Ruins
Jacoby builds his argument about the decline of public intellectuals on the assumption that there have been roughly three stages through which intellectuals have passed in this century. These give his argument a structure and help explain the disappointments he feels regarding the last of these stages — the one we are in. The first stage consists of those intellectuals born around 1900 (Mumford, Wilson, McDonald) who made their living primarily b…
Block's Philosophy of Hope
Ernst Bloch The Principle of Hope, trans, by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986). Three volumes, 1419 pp. + xxxiii, $95
Weber in Context
Harry Liebersohn Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1870-1923 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 282 pp
Rescuing the Past
All the central ideas of Critical Theory were originally formulated between the early 1930s and the mid-1950s. Though it is true that some of the major works of Critical Theory appeared subsequent to the 1950s — for example, Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964) or Adorno's Negative Dialectics (1966) — it is also true that these works were essentially elaborations on concepts developed two or three decades earlier. Ironically, it was just at the p…
Rethinking Traditions
One of my main concerns in The Past in Ruins is the issue of tradition and how it ought to be dealt with today. My starting point is an obvious one: that we in the West now live so entirely within the framework of modernity that it is neither possible nor desirable to seek a return to pre-modernity. The triumph of what Baudelaire called la vie moderne has of course brought with it gains as well as losses, and certainly among the most notable of t…
More on Tradition
My book The Past in Ruins: Tradition and the Critique of Modernity was the subject of a lengthy symposium in Telos 94. Though some of the commentary was positive, much was critical. In what follows, I will neither restate my position nor respond directly to all my critics. Rather I will attempt both to articulate a broader view of traditions and to present a more useful way to approach them. In 1905, in an address to the Verein für Sozialpolitik,…
Taking Potshots
It is no news that Russell Jacoby writes well. Anyone familiar with his Social Amnesia or The Last Intellectuals knows that already. Few cultural critics can match him in clarity of expression or the ability to craft a well-turned phrase, and fewer still can leaven their critiques with humor and yet not diminish the impact of what they have to say. Almost no one writing today can presume to assail the prose of others, as Jacoby does in Dogmatic W…
Where is Telos Going
It may seem surprising to many people that Telos has not only survived long enough to publish its 100th issue, but that, as journals go, it is still relatively alert and healthy, showing as yet no signs of internal deterioration. Other journals which, like Telos, either first appeared along with the New Left in the 1960s or were otherwise closely associated with it (Studies on the Left, Liberation, democracy, etc.) have long since expired. Yet Te…
A New Direction? The Religious Critique of Modern Culture
During the 1960s, it seemed obvious to many on the American and European Left—including the founders of Telos in 1968—that a thoroughgoing cultural critique was badly needed, since the dominant forms of culture in the West appeared either to be promoting false consciousness or to have literally become false consciousness
Philosophy (19 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Art (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · History (8 works)