The following notes are from Part 1 of a 2012 CBC Ideas broadcast, The Ideas of Northrop Frye . Podcast time frames, shown in brackets, are approximate.
Conflict and Survival In this lecture Adorno recaps the first five lectures and discusses the legitimacy of the bourgeois philosopher’s idea that conflict is reality and that society survives because of its conflicts rather than in spite of them. He asks how mankind survives under these circumstances and whether or not we can imagine a history that does not involve conflict. Recap of First Five Lectures The ‘universal’ asserts itself as an ‘historical process’ and has a ‘logical structure’ (49). It has negative aspects for individuals and positive aspects for the species; it “[joins] mankind together in societies...in a totality” (49). The totality both expresses and threatens the destruction of everything beneath it while at the same time it acts as a “cohesive force to which society owes its survival” (49). Marx’s Law of Value Marx agrees with this positive view and it forms an element of his “optimistic view of history” (49). In Marx, it is expressed in “the law of value...
Levi-Strauss, in "The Structural Study of Myth" The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, Third Edition , David H. Richter, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston, NY, 2007 p 860-8) says that "...myth is language..." (861) whose "mythical value" (the story told in the myth) cannot be destroyed by even the "worst translation" .