When Immanuel Wallerstein gave a talk titled "The heritage of sociology. The promise of social sciences," he identified six "challenges" to the traditional thinking of the social sciences. The fourth of them, so Wallerstein, stems from the natural sciences, specifically from the chemist Ilya Prigogine, who claimed that Newtonian physics had a limited applicability, it was applicable only to integrable systems, which are an exception among existing systems. In The end of certainty Prigogine claimed that most systems include "deterministic processes (between bifurcations) as well as probabilistic systems (in the choice of branches)".
What does this imply for one of the central postulates of Marxism, namely that "all of history is the history of class struggle." At first glance this would imply a completely deterministic social system, functioning according to objective laws. A second glance, especially one informed by the aforementioned "challenge", helps us to interpret Marx in a more productive way. If we were to accept that all history is the product of the dialectics between relationships and means of production, what would that imply for Marx' own intervention? Would it not mean that it was according to its own postulates futile, a mere reflection of the real base of society, which itself functions according to its inherent internal laws, unperturbed by the phantoms spooking the superstructure? Marx was of course not so naive to blindly saw off the branch he was sitting on, his intention was far more ambitious: the whole tree had to go, because it is - if we paraphrase Hölderlin - obscuring the young blossoming life underneath. The distinction between deterministic and probabilistic systems can help us to distinguish two types of history. One is the history of "business as usual", when a certain mode of production is dominant and a ruling class successfully maintains its hegemony. These stages of history can be analysed with a reference to the laws of class struggle. These are the stages between bifurcations. But there are also points when deterministic laws are not applicable, these are the moments of revolutions. The outcomes of revolutions are not arbitrary, or as Marx put it at the beginning of the Eighteenth brumaire: "People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, not under self-selected circumstances, but under found, given and inherited circumstances." The important point though is that people do make their own history, that is, the outcome of revolutionary upheavals is not determined by the laws of history. Adorno seized upon the implications of this fact in Minima Moralia 100 - Sur l'eau: "As the inevitable question [of how an emancipated society would look like] is illegitimate, so is the answer inevitably repulsive and arrogant". The question is illegitimate precisely because the outcome of revolutionary upheavals is not determined, but springs from freedom. This freedom at once implies that the choice for a return to slavery is always a viable outcome of emancipation. A determined emancipation is no emancipation at all.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Ways of living
Cultural studies decided - quite arbitrarily - to sever the descriptive idea of culture as "a whole way of life" from its normative dimension and focus exclusively on the former. It was already Adorno who during a lecture on Kant urged his students to take a more reflexive stand towards ideas:
I believe these fractures and contradictions to be far greater than uniformity, because in these fractures and contradictions truth manifests itself, while smoothing of contradictions, superficial synthesising, is easily achieved
As Lukacs before him, Adorno knew full well that the crests and crevices of theory are really a topography of the world. It is not carelessness of authors that causes contradictions to find their way into their thinking, contradictions are rather the necessary effect of mind grinding against the object. Every valid theory is contradictory, since the world itself is contradictory. In the double moments manifested in the idea of culture, at once descriptive and normative, the dialectics of the world shine through: the contradiction between particular class rule and the universalistic ideas it must necessarily develop to achieve hegemony.
I believe these fractures and contradictions to be far greater than uniformity, because in these fractures and contradictions truth manifests itself, while smoothing of contradictions, superficial synthesising, is easily achieved
As Lukacs before him, Adorno knew full well that the crests and crevices of theory are really a topography of the world. It is not carelessness of authors that causes contradictions to find their way into their thinking, contradictions are rather the necessary effect of mind grinding against the object. Every valid theory is contradictory, since the world itself is contradictory. In the double moments manifested in the idea of culture, at once descriptive and normative, the dialectics of the world shine through: the contradiction between particular class rule and the universalistic ideas it must necessarily develop to achieve hegemony.
Immanent critique
I just came across a brilliant article:
Jones, Paul. 2007. Beyond the Semantic ‘Big Bang’: Cultural Sociology and an Aesthetic Public Sphere. Cultural sociology Vol 1(1): 73–95.
The author attributes to Habermas' Structural transformation the method of immanent critique:
He wishes to immanently acknowledge the utopian prospect of an ideology (broadly, liberalism) while remaining fully aware of both its dramatic failure as an empirical account of ‘realpolitik’, and its possible success as a means of legitimation of ongoing domination. But he also wishes to acknowledge that such unfulfilled promise retains a normative potential as a court of appeal. The space so provided, the gap between ideal and reality, is the crucial point of recovery for normative discussion.
I would disagree that this description holds for Habermas at any point of his career, even when he was working at the Institute, but most certainly it does not hold for Structural transformations. The confusing nature of the work stems exactly from a deviance from immanent critique: Habermas is starting on his path of uncritical and undialectical acceptance of liberalism by stating that a public sphere actually existed in the 19. century. This claim goes against all historical evidence and contrary to popular belief Habermas was fully aware of it when writing the book. The problem was that he did not at the time have at his disposal nebulous concepts like "regulative idea" to obscure the inconsistencies of such an approach.
Enough about Habermas though, what I want to do is return to a classical text to shed some light on the logic underlying immanent critique. In the German Ideology Marx and Engels take a stand against a history, which analyses ideas abstracted from their material base:
This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e. ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.
This is a passage that Althusser obviously missed when writing about ideology, but one that the Frankfurt school understood perfectly. Ruling ideology is, according to Marx and Engels, paradoxical: at one point it is the ideal expression of the rule of a certain social class, but at the same time it is a critique of this same rule: because the ruling class came to dominance in class struggle it was forced to make concession to other classes, represent itself as the manifestation of universal values, and thereby its ideology by its universalist tendency necessarily opposes its particularist rule.
Jones, Paul. 2007. Beyond the Semantic ‘Big Bang’: Cultural Sociology and an Aesthetic Public Sphere. Cultural sociology Vol 1(1): 73–95.
The author attributes to Habermas' Structural transformation the method of immanent critique:
He wishes to immanently acknowledge the utopian prospect of an ideology (broadly, liberalism) while remaining fully aware of both its dramatic failure as an empirical account of ‘realpolitik’, and its possible success as a means of legitimation of ongoing domination. But he also wishes to acknowledge that such unfulfilled promise retains a normative potential as a court of appeal. The space so provided, the gap between ideal and reality, is the crucial point of recovery for normative discussion.
I would disagree that this description holds for Habermas at any point of his career, even when he was working at the Institute, but most certainly it does not hold for Structural transformations. The confusing nature of the work stems exactly from a deviance from immanent critique: Habermas is starting on his path of uncritical and undialectical acceptance of liberalism by stating that a public sphere actually existed in the 19. century. This claim goes against all historical evidence and contrary to popular belief Habermas was fully aware of it when writing the book. The problem was that he did not at the time have at his disposal nebulous concepts like "regulative idea" to obscure the inconsistencies of such an approach.
Enough about Habermas though, what I want to do is return to a classical text to shed some light on the logic underlying immanent critique. In the German Ideology Marx and Engels take a stand against a history, which analyses ideas abstracted from their material base:
This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e. ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.
This is a passage that Althusser obviously missed when writing about ideology, but one that the Frankfurt school understood perfectly. Ruling ideology is, according to Marx and Engels, paradoxical: at one point it is the ideal expression of the rule of a certain social class, but at the same time it is a critique of this same rule: because the ruling class came to dominance in class struggle it was forced to make concession to other classes, represent itself as the manifestation of universal values, and thereby its ideology by its universalist tendency necessarily opposes its particularist rule.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Goethe and reification
When Faust bargains with the devil for his soul he closes the deal with the words:
Werde ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch, du bist so schön!
Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,
Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn.
A translation of the meaning of these lines would go something like:
If I say to any given moment:
linger on, you are so beautiful!
Then you may put me in chains,
then I will gladly go to ruin.
The infernal character of these lines does not originate merely from the fact that the devil himself is the addressee, but that they are symptomatic of reification. "Happiness" Adorno teaches us "is like truth, you do not posses it, you are engulfed in it." That is why "no happy person can ever know he is happy. /.../ The only relationship that consciousness can have to happiness is gratitute." What Goethe expresses in these lines is a reified awareness of happiness, a need to objectify and manipulate time itself, when hapiness can exist only by being fleeting and fragile, despite the efforts of propaganda agents of the culture industry, psychoanalysts and advertisers. The dictate: "be happy!" does not need to be juxtaposed to the empirical reality of the adressee to be revealed as cynical, it is a lie in itself.
Werde ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch, du bist so schön!
Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,
Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn.
A translation of the meaning of these lines would go something like:
If I say to any given moment:
linger on, you are so beautiful!
Then you may put me in chains,
then I will gladly go to ruin.
The infernal character of these lines does not originate merely from the fact that the devil himself is the addressee, but that they are symptomatic of reification. "Happiness" Adorno teaches us "is like truth, you do not posses it, you are engulfed in it." That is why "no happy person can ever know he is happy. /.../ The only relationship that consciousness can have to happiness is gratitute." What Goethe expresses in these lines is a reified awareness of happiness, a need to objectify and manipulate time itself, when hapiness can exist only by being fleeting and fragile, despite the efforts of propaganda agents of the culture industry, psychoanalysts and advertisers. The dictate: "be happy!" does not need to be juxtaposed to the empirical reality of the adressee to be revealed as cynical, it is a lie in itself.
Paradigm: everything goes
While doing some reading on interactivity I stumbled upon an article that sought to shed some light on the concept by doing expert interviews. The authors live in the fantasy that definitions are contingent upon empirical findings (as if empirical findings can ever come to be without prior definitions) and take an inductive approach to defining interactivity. The results are of course completely arbitrary and I will not go into them, let the brief critique of the process itself suffice. What really got me going was an invocation used at the beginning of the article. The chant went something like "reality is socially constructed" and was preceded by the magical word "paradigm". Kuhn probably never realized the damage his theory would do, since it tends to be taken out of context and used as a talk-nonsense-free-card. The idea that reality is socially constructed is one of such brilliant examples, especially since we are supposed to accept it simply because the authors "chose" a specific paradigm. No halfway decent philosopher today clings to such a naive Humeian interpretation of the relationship between subject and object, yet somehow it is acceptable for social scientist if only they present it as a result of their arbitrary will. Marx and Engels already had a nice response to people who believed reality was socially constructed in their day. They answered with the anecdote of a person who believed people drowned merely because they clung to this damned idea of gravity and dedicated his whole life to banishing this idea from minds everywhere he found it.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
The value of speculation
In the Feuerbach chapter of the German Ideology Marx and Engels take a strong stand against the speculative character of idealism, until at one point revolutionary zeal gets the best of them and they write:
Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place.
Being so strongly influenced by the thought of Adorno, you might imagine I find this formulation hard to stomach. Adorno was without a doubt right when he saw exactly this phenomenon: a clear-cut demarcation between speculation and praxis as the essence of idealism and of capitalist ideology: "Reason," Kant instructs us, "about anything you like and as much as you like, just obey!" But we have to ask the question how close this demarcation between speculation and positive science, or between philosophy and science, as Althusser had put it, is to Marx' own intellectual work. Can the demarcation between speculation and science really be drawn so clearly as Althusser proposes with his hypothesis of the epistemic cut? I would argue that it can not, not only with Marx, but with critical science as a whole.
Let us leave Marx aside for a moment and turn to Marcuse and his notion of utopia. He rejects the notion that socialism is an utopia in the sense of something that can not be manifested:
The other group of projects, where the impossibility is due to the absence of subjective and objective factors, can at best be designated only as "provisionally" unfeasible. Karl Mannheim's criteria for the unfeasibility of such projects, for instance, are inadequate for the very simple reason, to begin with, that unfeasibility shows itself only after the fact. And it is not surprising that a project for social transformation is designated unfeasible because it has shown itself unrealized in history.
Since, as Marcuse points out, the feasibility of projects for social transformation can only be shown "after the fact", hence it is impossible to fully exorcise speculation from critical science, that is science that aims at a substantial transformation of social reality.
Now let us turn to Marx and two central concepts of his theory, that is value and class. The fact that these two concepts are speculative might quite easily elude us . In chapter one of Capital Marx builds his theory of value and he states that the value of a commodity is defined by the amount of abstract human labour involved in its production plus the value that has been transmitted from the means of production. Is this value an empirically verifiable phenomenon? No, it is not. Value is not the same as price, since price can vary according to supply and demand, while value is indifferent to them. Value is rather the long-term tendency that price revolves around, but in itself it is not an empirical concept. The same holds for his concept of social class. The distinction between class for itself and class in itself is exactly the difference between a latent, only potentially existing class, and a manifest, empirically existing class. When writing about class Marx went even further, not only must people realize this latent class, but they must also take into account developmental tendencies of capitalism. The - obviously far fetched - political demand was for the petite bourgeoisie, peasants, lumpenproletariat, etc. to identify with the proletarian struggle for a classless society since all these classes will inevitably become proletarians themselves if capitalism is allowed to continue.
Where speculation ends – in real life – there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place.
Being so strongly influenced by the thought of Adorno, you might imagine I find this formulation hard to stomach. Adorno was without a doubt right when he saw exactly this phenomenon: a clear-cut demarcation between speculation and praxis as the essence of idealism and of capitalist ideology: "Reason," Kant instructs us, "about anything you like and as much as you like, just obey!" But we have to ask the question how close this demarcation between speculation and positive science, or between philosophy and science, as Althusser had put it, is to Marx' own intellectual work. Can the demarcation between speculation and science really be drawn so clearly as Althusser proposes with his hypothesis of the epistemic cut? I would argue that it can not, not only with Marx, but with critical science as a whole.
Let us leave Marx aside for a moment and turn to Marcuse and his notion of utopia. He rejects the notion that socialism is an utopia in the sense of something that can not be manifested:
The other group of projects, where the impossibility is due to the absence of subjective and objective factors, can at best be designated only as "provisionally" unfeasible. Karl Mannheim's criteria for the unfeasibility of such projects, for instance, are inadequate for the very simple reason, to begin with, that unfeasibility shows itself only after the fact. And it is not surprising that a project for social transformation is designated unfeasible because it has shown itself unrealized in history.
Since, as Marcuse points out, the feasibility of projects for social transformation can only be shown "after the fact", hence it is impossible to fully exorcise speculation from critical science, that is science that aims at a substantial transformation of social reality.
Now let us turn to Marx and two central concepts of his theory, that is value and class. The fact that these two concepts are speculative might quite easily elude us . In chapter one of Capital Marx builds his theory of value and he states that the value of a commodity is defined by the amount of abstract human labour involved in its production plus the value that has been transmitted from the means of production. Is this value an empirically verifiable phenomenon? No, it is not. Value is not the same as price, since price can vary according to supply and demand, while value is indifferent to them. Value is rather the long-term tendency that price revolves around, but in itself it is not an empirical concept. The same holds for his concept of social class. The distinction between class for itself and class in itself is exactly the difference between a latent, only potentially existing class, and a manifest, empirically existing class. When writing about class Marx went even further, not only must people realize this latent class, but they must also take into account developmental tendencies of capitalism. The - obviously far fetched - political demand was for the petite bourgeoisie, peasants, lumpenproletariat, etc. to identify with the proletarian struggle for a classless society since all these classes will inevitably become proletarians themselves if capitalism is allowed to continue.
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