The Diversity of Social Theories 0857248219, 9780857248213

Citation preview

THE DIVERSITY OF SOCIAL THEORIES

CURRENT PERSPECTIVES IN SOCIAL THEORY Series Editor: Harry F. Dahms Recent Volumes: Volume 1: Volume 2: Volume 3: Volume 4: Volume 5: Volume 6: Volume 7: Volume 8: Volume 9: Volume 10: Volume 11: Volume 12: Volume 13: Volume 14: Supplement 1: Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume Volume

15: 16: 17: 18: 19: 20: 21:

Volume 22: Volume 23: Volume 24: Volume 25: Volume 26: Volume 27: Volume 28:

1980, Edited by Scott G. McNall and Garry N. Howe 1981, Edited by Scott G. McNall and Garry N. Howe 1982, Edited by Scott G. McNall 1983, Edited by Scott G. McNall 1984, Edited by Scott G. McNall 1985, Edited by Scott G. McNall 1986, Edited by John Wilson 1987, Edited by John Wilson 1989, Edited by John Wilson 1990, Edited by John Wilson 1991, Edited by Ben Agger 1992, Edited by Ben Agger 1993, Edited by Ben Agger 1994, Edited by Ben Agger Recent Developments in the Theory of Social Structure, 1994, Edited by J. David Knottnerus and Christopher Prendergast 1995, Edited by Ben Agger 1996, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann 1997, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann 1998, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann 1999, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann 2000, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann Bringing Capitalism Back for Critique by Social Theory, 2001, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann Critical Theory: Diverse Objects, Diverse Subjects, 2003, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann Social Theory as Politics in Knowledge, 2005, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann Globalization Between the Cold War and Neo-Imperialism, 2006, Edited by Jennifer M. Lehmann and Harry F. Dahms No Social Science without Critical Theory, 2008, Edited by Harry F. Dahms Nature, Knowledge and Negation, 2009, Edited by Harry F. Dahms Theorizing the Dynamics of Social Processes, 2010, Edited by Harry F. Dahms and Lawrence Hazelrigg The Vitality of Critical Theory, 2011, By Harry F. Dahms

CURRENT PERSPECTIVES IN SOCIAL THEORY VOLUME 29

THE DIVERSITY OF SOCIAL THEORIES EDITED BY

HARRY F. DAHMS Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

Emerald Group Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2011 Copyright r 2011 Emerald Group Publishing Limited Reprints and permission service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Editor or the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-85724-821-3 ISSN: 0278-1204 (Series)

Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Howard House, Environmental Management System has been certified by ISOQAR to ISO 14001:2004 standards Awarded in recognition of Emerald’s production department’s adherence to quality systems and processes when preparing scholarly journals for print

EDITOR Harry F. Dahms University of Tennessee (Sociology)

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Alex Stoner Shane Willson

ASSOCIATE EDITORS Robert J. Antonio University of Kansas (Sociology)

Lawrence Hazelrigg Florida State University (Sociology)

Timothy Luke Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Political Science)

EDITORIAL BOARD Ben Agger University of Texas – Arlington (Sociology and Anthropology)

David Ashley University of Wyoming (Sociology)

Kevin B. Anderson University of California, Santa Barbara (Sociology)

Ward Churchill Formerly University of Colorado (Ethnic Studies)

Stanley Aronowitz City University of New York – Graduate Center (Sociology)

Norman K. Denzin University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign (Sociology)

Molefi Kete Asante Temple University (African-American Studies)

Nancy Fraser New School for Social Research (Political Science) ix

x

EDITORIAL BOARD

Martha Gimenez University of Colorado – Boulder (Sociology)

Paul Paolucci Eastern Kentucky University (Sociology)

Robert Goldman Lewis and Clark College (Sociology and Anthropology)

Moishe Postone University of Chicago (History)

Mark Gottdiener State University of New York at Buffalo (Sociology) Douglas Kellner University of California – Los Angeles (Philosophy) Lauren Langman Loyola University (Sociology) Eric R. Lybeck Cambridge University (Sociology)

Lawrence Scaff Wayne State University (Political Science) Steven Seidman State University of New York at Albany (Sociology) Helmut Staubmann Leopold Franzens University, Innsbruck (Sociology) Frank Taylor Edinboro University of Pennsylvania (Sociology and Anthropology)

John O’Neill York University (Sociology)

Stephen Turner The University of South Florida (Philosophy)

Patricia Mooney Nickel Victoria University (Social and Cultural Studies)

Christine Williams The University of Texas at Austin (Sociology)

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Amy Allen

Department of Philosophy, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

Karl P. Benziger

Department of History, Rhode Island College, Providence, RI, USA

Colin Koopman

Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

Helgard Kramer

Institute of Sociology, Freie Universitaet Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Eric Royal Lybeck

Department of Sociology, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK

Johanna Meehan

Department of Philosophy, Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA, USA

Geoff Pfeifer

Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

Natalia Ruiz-Junco

Department of Sociology, American University, Washington, DC, USA

David Norman Smith

Department of Sociology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA

Jeb Sprague

Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Richard R. Weiner

Department of Political Science, Rhode Island College, Providence, RI, USA

Christopher F. Zurn

Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA, USA

xi

INTRODUCTION The contributions included in this volume provide critical assessments of both a range of traditions in social theory, and of their current relevance. In addition, they represent endeavors to apply, refine, integrate, or advance particular traditions in order to enhance our ability to analyze conditions of social life in the twenty-first century and to confront a variety of related challenges. Several of the contributions present efforts to combine the application, refinement, integration, and advancement of particular theoretical traditions. Thematically, they cover several areas in social theory and a spectrum of perspectives, including poststructuralism, feminist theory, and especially critical theory. Chapters address such issues as the authoritarian personality; charisma; the relationship between power, agency, and subjectivity; self-estrangement; pragmatism; and globalization. The contributions in Part I combine an interest in theory with an interest in history. The first two chapters address directly issues in critical theory, while the third is a contribution in a poststructuralist key. Helgard Kramer is concerned with the fate of the research program relating to the Frankfurt School’s authoritarian character studies. In particular, her focus is on differences between two versions of this research program as it evolved at the Institute of Social Research. Kramer’s study traces the history of the program and illuminates its termination in the late 1960s. David Norman Smith, on the other hand, addresses another theme that commonly has been associated with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School: the reluctance among its representatives to subscribe to the notion that the working class is the ‘‘subject of history’’ – that is, the driving force behind qualitative historical change. Focussing on the early work of Herbert Marcuse, Smith tells the story of how Marcuse grew increasingly disenchanted with the idea that a charismatic agent – whether a social class or a political leader – could bring about positive and lasting social change. In addition to demonstrating how Marcuse’s growing appreciation of sociological realism and political responsibility played an important constructive role in the development of critical theory as an explicit research program, Smith’s analysis resonates with the previous chapter inasmuch as he concludes that the early critical xiii

xiv

INTRODUCTION

theorists were able to illuminate the problematic nature of political authority by engaging in a critical analysis of ‘‘personal authoritarianism.’’ By contrast, the focus of the third chapter, by Karl P. Benziger and Richard R. Weiner, pertains to the reverberations caused by the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 for the future (i.e., the future decline) of the Soviet empire. Placing particular emphasis on the ‘‘pathos of the lost cause,’’ Benziger and Weiner show how the revolution provided people in Hungary with a narrative of democracy and progress, beyond Soviet communism. Still, the narrative rather distracted from Hungary’s troubled past, as has become apparent to a growing degree in recent years. To clarify this nexus of issues, Benziger and Weiner emphasize the need to explicate the role of traumatic memory, by relying on historical sociology as well as ‘‘memory studies.’’ The volume’s second part is dedicated to the discussion of a recent contribution to critical theory that deservedly has attracted a large amount of attention, Amy Allen’s The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (2008). In her book, Allen directly confronts the tension between the question of whether and how the self results from and reflects power relations, and the supposition that the self represents an independent potential to engage in critical reflection and the capacity of undergo qualitative transformation in ways that reveal selfawareness. On the basis of her thorough and careful discussion of such theorists and philosophers as Michel Foucault, Ju¨rgen Habermas, Judith Butler, and Seyla Benhabib, Allen contends that precisely the power relations through which the self is constituted provide the foundation for the self’s capacity for autonomy. Drawing attention to the phenomenon of subjection, her purpose is to demonstrate how it is possible for the self to be constituted by power, while also being able to constitute him or herself autonomously – thus profoundly advancing our understanding of issues relating to the constellation between power and agency, in social theory generally, and especially in critical theory and feminist theory. Specifically, her concern addresses why and how it is necessary to reframe the normative thrust of critique in Habermas within a reference frame that emphasizes the treatment of subjection in the writings of Foucault as well as Butler, and how, as a consequence, the project of critical theory can be provided with a fresh impetus, and reenergized accordingly. The first three chapters in Part II are critical assessments of Allen’s book by Colin Koopman, Johanna Meehan, and Christopher F. Zurn. Koopman’s critique concerns the status of critical theory as a philosophical project, with an eye toward the contemporary tasks of critical theory.

Introduction

xv

Should critical theory be viewed as a kind of social-scientific inquiry geared toward current critical social, political, and ethical issues, or as resembling a rather traditional philosophical project that is conducive to providing a specific approach to social, political, and ethical critique? Meehan’s contribution, by comparison, includes – but is not limited to – reflections on the issue of philosophy and empirical relevance, and points out how even though Allen’s orientation in The Politics of Our Selves is above all theoretical in nature, the questions with which she is concerned have empirical relevance as well, for example, for the relational dynamics of racism, poverty, gender, and class. Zurn’s piece, finally, centers on the question of whether – and if so, how – such accounts of subjectivity as those proposed by Foucault and Butler – with their emphasis on its socially constructed nature, and the central role of power – are compatible with the strong normative orientation of Habermas and other proponents of critical theory who share his stance to varying degrees. Their contributions are followed by Amy Allen’s ‘‘Reply to Critics,’’ in which she restates her position, illuminates further the objectives that drove her inquiry, and expands on opportunities for expansion and application. The first contribution to Part III is a discussion by Natalia Ruiz-Junco of the current utility of the concept of self-estrangement. Although in the theoretical discourse, dating back to the early translations of Marx’s writings into English, estrangement and alienation appeared to be interchangeable, in recent decades a more specific use of the two concepts appears to have taken hold. Accordingly, estrangement serves as a means to focus on the subjective dimensions of alienation as an experience that is central to the modern condition: in Marx’s famous rendering, the separation of the individuals not just from the product of their labor, but also from their own selves, from nature, from others, and from the human species, is the essence of alienation. In a manner that is consonant with one of the most notable contributions to related debates in recent years, Rahel Jaeggi’s Entfremdung (2005), a text that is not (yet) available to readers in English, Ruiz-Junco is less interested in how alienation functions as a social force that deprives individuals of the option to choose between an alienated and non-alienated existence, by undermining the possibility of such a choice. In this latter reading, individuals do not have the choice to lead an unalienated existence, due to the fact that it is a social condition – a condition of society – in such a manner that allows for strategies to ‘‘overcome’’ alienation merely (or rather, largely) as a consequence of the recognition that the modern condition is a condition of alienation that is structural, systemic, and dynamic at the same time. By contrast, estrangement ought to be understood through multiple theoretical lenses. Ruiz-Junco

xvi

INTRODUCTION

contends that both critical and interpretive classical theories failed to place sufficient emphasis on self-estrangement. In the interest of reconstructing the idea of self-estrangement, she identifies several of its interactional incarnations, by stressing the linkages between self-estrangement, institutional environments, emotions, and the body, and concludes by pointing out how the concept may serve as a means to analyze and theorize patterns of political exclusion. In the next chapter, Eric Royal Lybeck proposes a new kind of social theory informed and inspired by pragmatist perspectives. Focusing on the ‘‘pragmatic turn’’ in both philosophy and social theory, as exemplified in particular by Richard Rorty and Hans Joas, Lybeck draws attention to the place of habit as well as creativity in social action. Yet neopragmatism appears to sidestep key insights formulated by classical pragmatists, necessitating a determined move toward a project of critical public pragmatism along the lines of – but not necessarily following directly – Burawoy’s notion of public sociology and Mills’s pragmatist outlook, thus setting the stage for a stance on democracy that would be conducive to the practical fostering of Dewey’s idea of ‘‘creative intelligence’’ in contemporary societies, in a manner that is consonant with Mills’s ‘‘sociological imagination.’’ The two remaining chapters constitute explicit assessments of contributions to social theory that have informed current debates: Hardt and Negri’s Empire, and the increasingly expansive œuvre of Slavoj Zˇizˇek. Jeb Sprague is driven by the question of how critical sociologists who dedicate their labor to illuminating global capitalism have been influenced by Hardt and Negri’s best-known and arguably most influential work to date. Sprague concludes that in light of recent developments in the sphere of political economy, and subsequent contributions by social scientists, especially in sociology, central features of Empire turn out to be highly problematic, and may indeed be inversely related to efforts to grasp the logic of global capitalism and the direction of what continues to be referred to as globalization. The purpose of the chapter by Geoff Pfeifer is to excavate what could be referred to as a ‘‘positive’’ project in Zˇizˇek’s work, drawing out the place of Hegel as well as Lacan in the latter. Contrary to appearances, Pfeifer asserts, Zˇizˇek’s work may not be as inconsistent with opportunities to take an oppositional stance as many interpreters have concluded. Rather, as Zˇizˇek’s interest relates to the concurrent processes of the creation of the social and of the subject, it is necessary to balance the status of the positive and the negative, respectively, in his writings, such that what appears as ‘‘negative’’ may better be grasped as a ‘‘positive’’ in the form of a radical form of subjectivity.

xvii

Introduction

Thus, the chapters included in this volume provide a spectrum of perspectives that illustrate how ‘‘social theory’’ is not a set of practices or projects that can be construed as a particular mode of inquiry or type of theorizing, but a multidimensional endeavor that has been accompanying and expanding alongside the history of modern society. Like modern society, social theory continues in search of common foundations and consonant voices, even – or perhaps, especially – when the latter appear to become more and more elusive.

REFERENCES Allen, A. (2008). The politics of our selves: Power, autonomy, and gender in contemporary critical theory. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Jaeggi, R. (2005). Entfremdung. Zur Aktualita¨t eines sozialphilosophischen Problems. Frankfurt: Campus.

Harry F. Dahms Editor

THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL FATE OF THE AUTHORITARIAN CHARACTER STUDIES OF THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL. A LEGACY FOR THE STUDY OF RACISM, ANTISEMITISM, AND FASCISM? Helgard Kramer ABSTRACT Following Lakatos’ strategy of a rational reconstruction of science, I present a concrete example of the rise and decline of a research program from the history of the social sciences: the authoritarian character studies of the Frankfurt School. The first version of the authoritarian character studies of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research was based on a Marxist social and psychoanalytic theory, and included an initial empirical survey. The preliminary results of this survey motivated the Institute’s justin-time emigration from Germany in 1932, and at the same time do not fit into the later theory of the authoritarian character (1936). The second version of the authoritarian character studies (1950) gained the status of a social psychological paradigm, but soon turned into a declining research program, which came to a complete stop around 1968 as far as the Institute The Diversity of Social Theories Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 29, 3–31 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-1204(2011)0000029005

3

4

HELGARD KRAMER

of Social Research was concerned. Internal and external factors combined to bring about the sudden end of the authoritarian character studies.

IMRE LAKATOS’ CONCEPT OF RATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION AS A NEW HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SCIENCE AND THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL’S AUTHORITARIAN CHARACTER STUDIES Starting from the question how to measure progress and failure in the social sciences, I have used the method of rational reconstruction of science proposed by Lakatos (1982); see also Lakatos and Musgrave (1974) to view early critical theory in a new perspective. In the wake of Kuhn and Popper, Lakatos developed a new model of the historiography of science (1974, p. 56). Following Lakatos, I start from the epistemological assumption that every research program necessarily combines theoretical and empirical elements; it develops a certain relationship between theoretical and empirical research that can be described in relation to the premises of the research program, especially its positive and negative heuristics, the context of discovery, the psychological and social conditions in the concrete scientific community undertaking the research, the operationalization of the program, the results of empirical tests of the theory, and how the results are put to us. In any stage of development of a research program, internal as well as external reasons can produce epistemologically progressive transformations of the research program, a shift of focus that can lead to more knowledge, and thus to the program’s renewed preliminary confirmation. Alternatively, internal and external factors may produce a degenerative shift of focus that merely enlarges the ‘‘protective belt’’ that researchers built around the core concept. Researchers working on a certain program usually try to keep its core elements working, tending to defend the paradigm from which they start against the critique of others. In so doing they enlarge the protective belt of subsidiary hypotheses and ad hoc explanations for ‘‘scientific abnormalities’’ that cannot be explained by the original program. A program is successful as long as a series of changing versions of the program can be developed. A program fails when its core elements can no longer be immunized against critique. I will discuss the authoritarian character studies of the Institute of Social Research as a research program from a meta-level, and largely bypass questions of individual authorship, of the history of the writings of specific

Authoritarian Character Studies of the Frankfurt School

5

researchers, and of general issues concerning the culture of science. It means to pass by more or less the questions of the psychology of researchers in the genealogical context of discovery, and the process of acceptance and/or refusal within the research groups of the Institute from the 1930s to the 1960s as well as in the wider social sciences community. This means that I will also largely pass over the psychology of the individual researcher and the acceptance/rejection of his or her finding both within the Institute and in the wider social science community. All these questions have been researched extensively and one could mention examples such as Jay (1973), Wiggershaus (1986), Kellner (1989), and Marcus and Tar (1984). Although Lakatos concentrated on physics rather than the social sciences, the authoritarian character studies of the Frankfurt School fit well into his concept since it puts forth law-like relations between, on the one hand, social formations and social structures, and, on the other hand, typical character structures of individuals. In this way, it includes ideas about causes and effects in the social sciences similar to a paradigm. The theory and the related empirical studies formed for more than 30 years a consistent research program that underwent several transformations until it came to a sudden end in the late 1960s. The early works of critical theory have continued to be found compelling by many scholars and intellectuals who emerged from the New Left. To Ju¨rgen Habermas, the second-generation theorist of the Frankfurt School, the materialist, multidisciplinary theoretical and empirical project of Max Horkheimer’s early research program of 1931 was eventually lost in the pessimistic turn of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947), which Habermas considered to be the starting point ‘‘for generations of students a new, for a totalizing, self referential critique of reason’’ (1986, p. 10). According to Habermas, it is here that the retreat of the critical theorists into mere philosophical contemplation began. The first interdisciplinary research program was outlined by Max Horkheimer in his inaugural address as the Director of Frankfurt University’s Institute for Social Research in July 1931. Dubiel goes so far as to speak of a ‘‘paradigm group’’ (1978, p. 189, 195). The research group included Horkheimer, representing sociology and philosophy; the psychoanalyst and social psychologist Erich Fromm, a founding member of Karl Landauer’s Psychoanalytic Institute, housed by the Institute of Social Research from 1929 until both Institutes were closed down by the Nazis in the spring of 1933; the economist Friedrich Pollock; the philosopher Herbert Marcuse; the educational theorist and literary scholar Leo Lo¨wenthal; the economic historian Karl August Wittfogel; and

6

HELGARD KRAMER

Andries Sternheim, head of the Geneva office of the Institute, cooperating with the International Labour Organization at Geneva, and in charge of organizing European surveys for Volume II of Autorita¨t und Familie (Horkheimer, 1936). Cooperating with the Institute – without being formal members – were Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin.1 Dubiel (1978), Brunkhorst (1983), and So¨llner (1979) proposed reconstructions of this interdisciplinary research program from the perspective of the theoretical aims of older critical theory – that is, immanently – while I use a model of the historiography of science based on Lakatos, which has been developed mainly through the study of the ‘‘hard’’ sciences. I concentrate on the relation between theory and empirical research in the authoritarian character studies, while all of the above-mentioned authors concentrate on the relation between theory and practice. One exception to this is Bonss, writing in collaboration with Fromm during the 1970s. By developing a rational reconstruction of the epistemological fate of the authoritarian character studies, I do not try to revise the arguments Habermas put forward to situate his own theory of communicative action as a new beginning with respect to the early tradition of critical theory that had been discontinued by its adherents. Rather, I propose a quite different reading of the interdisciplinary research program of older critical theory as a part of the history of the social sciences. In this way, I examine its research program and its epistemological fate in a context that is closer to that of the history of social sciences. This means singling out different points of departure and different endpoints to create a different version of the Frankfurt School narrative. I also focus narrowly on the core element of the original interdisciplinary program of Horkheimer, the theory of the authoritarian character, which was continued by several generations of researchers in the Institute who tried to prove its empirical validity by explaining why people in capitalist societies would act politically against their very own interests.

THE POSITIVE AND THE NEGATIVE HEURISTICS OF THE RESEARCH PROGRAM Marcus and Tar write: ‘‘The Frankfurt School pioneered the concept of interdisciplinary research to deal with the problems of the age’’ (1984, p. 13). The positive heuristics of the research program of the Institute is defined by the effort to integrate Marxist socioeconomic theory and psychoanalysis.

Authoritarian Character Studies of the Frankfurt School

7

The program is usually referred to as early critical theory, and has been receiving much attention ever since the early books and articles of Horkheimer, Wittfogel, Gurland, and others who were considered Marxists were reprinted without their permission during the West German student movement of the 1960s.2 Writing during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dubiel (1978) and Brunkhorst (1983) might have been especially inspired by the lively discussion of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) that was going on at the time. Like Bonss, Habermas, and Honneth, they were concerned with figuring out the dynamics of the development of critical theory. Feminist approaches on the part of Benjamin (1988), BeckerSchmidt (1999), and Rumpf (1990) attempted to connect critical theory to the problems of women’s emancipation. Due to limitations of space, I cannot elaborate on this here. All of these approaches to critical theory have focused on the (political) theory–practice relationship, while I will focus on the relationship between theory and empirical social research. According to Lakatos the negative heuristics of a research program means those laws, rules, and methods that may not be used in the research program. As social scientists today, we are so familiar with the negative heuristics of the authoritarian character research program that it is at first difficult to see it at all. That neither genetics nor ‘‘race’’ can explain the character structure of persons or their psychic problems and disorders is the common sense of the social sciences and of neurobiology today.3 This was not the case during the 1920s and 1930s, notwithstanding the fact that the Nazi era escalated the use of biological, social Darwinist theories in an unprecedented way and produced absurd racist theories. But before the publication of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), with its concise review of studies of ‘‘racial differences’’ between whites and blacks, many a sociologist would leave the door open for biologically based race theories4, while the Frankfurt School excluded race theories from explaining anything. First, Dubiel (1978) links the core of the research group – with Horkheimer at its center – with the philosopher Ludwig Paul Landsberg. Landsberg, who was a member of the Institute, wrote an article on race theories in the second volume of the Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung in 1933, in which he elaborated a critical overview of contemporary ‘‘racial’’ theories, ending with the laconic statement that there were no conclusive theories about human races. And in this regard, Fromm, a member of the inner circle during the first years of the Institute, was not only its

8

HELGARD KRAMER

psychoanalytically oriented specialist linking Freudian to Marxist theory in the research program on the authoritarian character. During the same period, Fromm also wrote several articles on criminology, considering, for example, statistical variations in criminal behavior without ever uttering a single word on any supposedly biological disposition toward criminal behavior in certain individuals or minority groups (Anderson & Quinney, 2000). Anderson links Fromm’s early criminological articles to the positive heuristics of the research program, which surely can be done at the same time: ‘‘Fromm actually began his attempt to unite Marxian class analysis with psychoanalysis in a critique of the criminal justice system’’ (Anderson, 2007). My point, however, is taking Fromm’s articles on criminology indicates the negative heuristics of the research program on the authoritarian character: excluding biological, racial, and any ‘‘natural’’ explanations of individual or collective behaviour from being even considered. When we remember how heated and acrimonious the debates on environmental versus genetic heritage were in the German political and social sciences from the 1880s to the Weimar years,5 it emerges that the research program started from the Marxist premise that causal explanations of attitudes and behavior are to be sought in social and cultural structures or processes but never in biological or natural conditions. At the same time, social Darwinist conceptions of society and eugenicist notions of improving the nation were discussed not only among right-wingers but also in the social democratic Marxist movement,6 in small radical democratic circles,7 in the feminist movement, in the early gay movement, and later they were discussed seriously in the Communist movement. Helmuth Plessner, who was trained as a biologist before he started to study sociology with Max Scheler and Max Weber, has defined ‘‘the analysis of social reality’’ as the research subject of sociology. Plessner has described the obstacles to the institutionalization of sociology as an academic discipline at German universities during the second half of the 19th century. He comes to the conclusion that scientific Darwinism and social Darwinism had long been a leading paradigm for anthropological and historical thought in many academic disciplines, and this was why German university professors were not interested in the ‘‘analysis of social reality.’’ Plessner refers specifically to the fact that in 1859 Heinrich von Treitschke8 published a pamphlet against the social sciences: In this field of interacting forces an important scholarly event should not be forgotten. If the year 1859 has already been called a marker on the German road to sociology, 1859 is also the year in which Darwin’s magnum opus On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life y Its influence not only on biological thought but also on the conceptions of man and of history was enormous. It layed to ground for the idea of development and for the idea

Authoritarian Character Studies of the Frankfurt School

9

of a naturalization of human society, and thus almost inevitably pushed the analysis of social reality aside for mythologems of race disposition, race wars and breeding better races.[y] It was just alluring to hold up a suggestive picture of a ‘natural society’ instead of sticking to the painstaking business of sociological diagnosis and therapy, especially since it seemed to be as attractive to the masses as the Marxist doctrine of salvation was, and at the same time it promised to all strata of the middle and upper classes – by means of eugenics and imperialistic power politics – to change their fate from the inevitable downfall that the doctrine of class struggle had imposed on them. For this natureoriented feeling, for the Romantic nature pantheism in German thinking which always had tended to understand social relations according to models from the plant and animals, Darwinism was very convenient. We had to go through the horrifying experience of National Socialist ideology and National Socialist practice in their concentration camps to learn that Darwinism’s impact had reached deep into the categories of half-knowledge where theoretical short circuits caused discharges. (Plessner, 1960/1985, p. 195)9

The configuration of political and mental forces, which Plessner describes, survived imperial Germany, World War I, and the democratic November Revolution of 1918. Knowledge of scientific Darwinism and social Darwinism remained superficial but widespread among the general public during the Weimar years. According to Plessner, the promise of a cure for the problems of a revolutionary working class needs to be seen as one of the important roots of the Nazi victory. Thus, the Frankfurt School’s authoritarian character research program, with its negative heuristics concerning racialist theories, had been holding out in vain against the social Darwinist racist discourse at the very time when the latter started to transform reality.

FROM VERSION 1 TO VERSION 3 OF THE RESEARCH PROGRAM: A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL OUTLINE Version 1 of the Authoritarian Character Studies (1936) Horkheimer, M. (1931/1989). Die gegenwa¨rtige Lage der Sozialphilosophie und die Aufgaben eines Instituts fu¨r Sozialforschung. Frankfurt: Frankfurter Universita¨tsreden (Inaugural Lecture: The state of contemporary social philosophy and the tasks of an institute of social research). Horkheimer, M. (Ed.). (1936). Studies on authority and the family, research reports from the Institute of Social Research, Paris.

10

HELGARD KRAMER

Horkheimer, M. (Ed.). (1936). Empirical survey on blue and white collar workers 1929–1932 of the Institute of Social Research, Frankfurt (pp. 250). Kramer, H. (1974/1971). The political consciousness of working class followers of the German Communist Party (KPD) and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). In: R. Herding, et al. (Eds.), Social inequality and economic expectations, a research project of the Institute of Social Research, Frankfurt (Vol. II, pp. 2–26, chapter 11). Fromm, E., & Bonss, W. (1980). Arbeiter und Angestellte am Vorabend des Dritten Reiches. Mu¨nchen (English version: Bonss, W. (Ed.). (1980). The working class in Weimar Germany: A psychological and sociological study. Cambridge, MA.10

Version 2 (1950) Institute of Social Research (1944). Studies in anti-Semitism. Archives of the Institute of Social Research. Institute of Social Research (1944). Anti-Semitism among American labor (F. Pollock, T. W. Adorno, A. R. L. Gurland, L. Lo¨wenthal, P. Massing, F. Weil). Archives of the Institute of Social Research. Anti-democratic beliefs among American workers, 1945 (short summary of the Labor Project, with an introduction by P. Lazarsfeld and A. H. Barton), partly published in Lo¨wenthal (1982). Institute of Social Research. (1950). Studies in prejudice (5 volumes, especially T. W. Adorno, E. Frenkel Brunswick, Daniel Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality). New York.

Version 3 (1950–1968) Pollock, F. (Ed.). (1955). Group experiment. Frankfurt. Habermas, J., Friedeburg, v. L., Oehler, C., & Weltz, F. (1961). The student and politics. Frankfurt. Scho¨nbach, P. (1961). Reactions to the anti-Semitic wave 1959/60. Frankfurt. Scho¨nbach, P., et al. (1966). On radical right tendencies in the West German Press 1961. Frankfurt. Freyhold, M. v. (1971). Autoritarismus und politische Apathie (Authoritarianism and political apathy). Frankfurt. In this study, von Freyhold used empirical results of surveys undertaken by the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt between 1960 and 1966 (Schulstudie I and II

Authoritarian Character Studies of the Frankfurt School

11

1960–1962, Eichmann-Studie 1961–1962, Spiegel-Affaire 1962, Metallarbeiterstreik 1963–64, WDR: Jugend-Studie 1962, Beatrix-Studie 1966) that had been using the instrument of the A-scale (i.e., the former F-scale) to construct indicators for authoritarianism and to improve the A-scale. Jaerisch, U. (1975). Are workers authoritarian? Frankfurt.

VERSION 1 OF THE AUTHORITARIAN CHARACTER STUDIES In the empirical research of the Institute the emphasis was to be on theoretical outlines and individual experience. Horkheimer wanted ‘to pursue the great philosophical questions using the most finely honed scientific methods, reformulate the questions during the work on the subject, state things precisely, think of new methods and yet never lose sight of the general.’ In his inaugural speech he referred to the example of a study begun by the Institute on a social group that was especially important and characteristic in societal-theoretical terms, namely the qualified workers and employees in Germany. The findings of the study were, at the beginning of the 1930s, suitable to ‘influence’ and ‘change’ not only the theoretical considerations, but also their relationship to societal practice (Horkheimer, 1931, p. 11). They demonstrated that it was illusory to entertain any hope of a wider base for resistance in the event of a fascist takeover. As such they confirmed Horkheimer’s premonition of the imminent disaster and strengthened him in his resolve to prepare for the Institute’s emigration. (Friedeburg, n.d.)

From his diagnosis of the current state of the social sciences as frozen in the polar opposition of positivism to metaphysics, Horkheimer saw a slowing down of the social sciences in terms of results and a systematic blockage of findings in contemporary social theory (Bonss, 1980, p. 23). Against these tendencies, Horkheimer’s research program represented an interdisciplinary social science research program, oriented simultaneously to Marxian theory and an empirical program (Bonss, 1980, p. 25). According to Horkheimer’s inaugural lecture of 1931, the Institute’s research program centered on ‘‘the question of the connection between the economic life of society, the psychological development of its individuals and the changes within specific areas of culture to which belong not only the intellectual legacy of the sciences, art and religion, but also law, customs, fashion, public opinion, sports, entertainments, lifestyles, and so on’’ (Horkheimer, 1931/1989, p. 33). Horkheimer’s research strategy was designed to move in a three-step process, from questions of social philosophy to social research, with this leading to a theory of the historical development of society.

12

HELGARD KRAMER

Horkheimer (1936) points out: in spite of the fact that bourgeois thinking started out as a rebellion against the power and authority of tradition (nobles and the Church), in spite of the fact that bourgeois entrepreneurs had used authority to guide the evolving capitalist mode of production in a rational way, authority as the personal belief that there always has to be a hierarchical order and that obedience is a necessary condition of human interaction had long since turned into an irrational, conservative force in the present era of monopoly capitalism. To this picture, Herbert Marcuse added the part on the history of ideas, and Fromm the social psychological part, drawing on Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) and Wilhelm Reich’s Charakteranalyse (1933) in order to argue that a masochistic submission to authority would include a sadistic repression of one’s own drives on the one side and the exercise of sadistic impulses against lower ranking individuals on the other side, accompanied by a denied but strong latent homosexuality.11

FROM VERSION 1 TO VERSION 0: RECONSTRUCTION OF VERSION 0 OF THE THEORY (1929–1934) Before I consider the epistemological fate of the authoritarian character studies, I need to take one step back and investigate version 1 of the theory somewhat more closely. Version 0 of the research program – that is, the preliminary version of 1929–1934, never formalized as a research program, and reconstructed here by me – can be reconstructed from version 1 of the research program (1936) in combination with Horkheimer’s inaugural speech to the Institute of Social Research 1931 and especially with Fromm’s social psychological writings, 1929–1934: 1. Die Entwicklung des Christusdogmas. Wien 1931. 2. U¨ber Methode und Aufgabe einer analytischen Sozialpsychologie. In: Fromm, E. (Ed.), Analytische Sozialpsychologie und Gesellschafstheorie. Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung (Vol. 1, 1932a). 3. Die psychoanalytische Charakterologie und ihre Bedeutung fu¨r die Sozialpsychologie. In: Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung (Vol. 1, pp. 253–277, 1932b). 4. Die sozialpsychologische Bedeutung der Mutterrechtstheorie. In: Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung (Vol. 3, pp. 196–227, 1934).

Authoritarian Character Studies of the Frankfurt School

13

In the published research report of the Arbeiter- und Angestelltenerhebung in Autorita¨t und Familie, version 0 of the theory, tentatively formulated in Fromm’s articles in the Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung, found no explicit representation. Under the world economic crisis with 6 million unemployed in Germany, version 0 of the theory had predicted a polarization of contemporary social character along class lines: On the one hand, the bourgeois and the petty bourgeois character was ‘‘patricentric,’’ that is, father-centered, submissive to authority in general and to state authority in particular, and in terms of Freudian drive theory an anal character trying to keep his possessions to himself. On the other hand, the working class social character was ‘‘matricentric,’’ that is, mother-centered, leaning toward the fulfillment of needs, showing class solidarity, aiming at the revolution, and in terms of drive theory a genital character. Version 1 of the theory fits to version 0 of the theory insofar as both versions include Horkheimer’s inaugural speech at the Institute of Social Research of July 1931. In his speech, Horkheimer left both theoretical options open and did not decide between them: the revolutionary as well as its opposite, the authoritarian character, might turn out to become the dominant one in society. It is for this reason that the different readings of early critical theory by Jay and Habermas, as well as by Dubiel and Bonss, are seemingly unaware of the fact that the presentation of the empirical data in version 1 of the research program is contradictory to its theory. Bonss, based on Fromm’s article on the Dogma of Christ, does see that there was a previous formulation of the theory that was falsified by the empirical data of the survey on blue- and white-collar workers (Arbeiter- und Angestelltenerhebung, 1929–1931). Yet he does not elaborate on this issue. Perhaps influenced by Fromm during the late 1970s12 and by the 1934–1935 data analysis papers, which were written under the influence of the specialist in empirical sociological methods, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, who clearly favored a quantitative approach to the data that would fit theory version 1, Bonss continued this effort to adjust the interpretation of the data to the later normalized handling of empirical data and to version 1 of the theory. That means that the theory was meant by the Institute to explain why, during the Great Depression in Germany, the authoritarian character of the Nazis had turned into the preponderant character, and why the general tendency of adjusting to the Nazi system in the German population was so pronounced (‘‘Gleichschaltung’’) and resistance on the part of the working class movements was so rare.

14

HELGARD KRAMER

In the second volume of Autorita¨t und Familie, we find some clues for the version 0 hypotheses that were initially guiding the research. There, the questionnaire is reprinted before ‘‘preliminary results of the survey on the character structures of blue and white collar workers in Germany’’ are reported. The form of operationalization of the theory was oriented toward a psychoanalytic analysis of every single case in the survey (Horkheimer, 1936, p. 231ff). The operationalization of version 0 of the theory was aiming at a psychoanalytic diagnosis of the unconscious of the interviewees. One question based on far reaching theoretical considerations (ibid., p. 249) seems especially to have been designed to identify the anal-sadistic syndrome in a person: ‘‘Do you suffer from digestion problems?’’ Permanent constipation of an individual in combination with a refusal ‘‘to loan money or things to friends and acquaintances’’ could have served to identify individuals of strong anal tendencies who wanted to keep their valuables to themselves and stay in control of them to such a great extent that this anal-sadistic drive was actually producing physical symptoms such as constipation. Today we can easily see that this aim could not have been reached even if anybody of the 584 people who had filled out the questionnaire would have answered the question.13 At least in the 90 original interviews that had been stashed in the Frankfurt Institute until 1971, not a single person did. Interviewees probably refused to answer this question because they felt it was too intimate. Today, after psychoanalytic techniques of diagnosis in the intimate interaction of the analyst–patient setting of the psychoanalytic ‘‘talking cure’’14 have become much more differentiated and sophisticated, we could tell right away that even if a person is suffering from a certain somatic symptom – for example, from constipation – this symptom can still have multiple causes. Technically speaking, nobody today would dare to base such a ‘‘bold’’ hypothesis on only two indicators. The Fromm and Bonss publication (1980) includes an interpretation of some cases concerning the writing style and psychological features of expression of these interviewees by the psychoanalyst Ernst Schachtel. The examples he choose are very conclusive insofar as these interviewees were trying to find a stylish, upper class, and conservative manner of expressing their opinions, thus showing an intensive admiration of power and authority, which they themselves, coming from a petty bourgeois economic and social background, could have hardly ever exerted outside their families. But in the overall sample, there were so few interviewees who presented themselves so strongly in the described way that these examples

Authoritarian Character Studies of the Frankfurt School

15

could not serve as a model for a generalized interpretation of the survey. Typically – from the far right to the far left – they presented themselves as having a ‘‘Weltanschauung’’ linked to the ideology of the party a person had joined or voted for.15 Viewed from perspective of today, the psychoanalytic interpretation of the Arbeiter- und Angestelltenerhebung was bound to fail anyway. When preparing the preliminary results of the survey for publication in 1935, Horkheimer and his colleagues were aware of the shortcomings of the psychoanalytic analysis. While Fromm never seems to have recovered from ‘‘mourning his planned research,’’ the planned psychoanalytic case studies were mentioned in just a single sentence of the introduction to the Arbeiterund Angestelltenerhebung, while everything else fell prey to what Ludwig von Friedeburg, executive director of the Institute from 1966 to 2001, used to call the ‘‘Lo¨wenthal’sche Lo¨sung’’ (Loewenthal’s solution, as the editor of the Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung, 1932–1941), ever after a standard procedure in the Institute of Social Research: whenever interesting ideas could not be presented in a convincing way by the author, they were cut out of the research reports. Fromm and Bonss (1980) publication under the title The Working Class in Weimar Germany was based on the research papers already written in English and applying a conventional quantitative approach to the data.16 In my earlier study, I applied the same conventional quantitative approach in the interpretation of the 90 original interviews that had been kept in the Institute through its exile and return to Frankfurt (Kramer, 1971, 1974). Interestingly though, the psychoanalytic interpretation of the data did not fail completely. On the contrary, the themes of gender relations and children’s socialization turned out to be precise predictors of an open as well as a hidden, misogynist, and sadistically authoritarian, hostile attitude toward the ‘‘weak,’’ women, and children. One of those questions was: ‘‘Do you like today’s women’s fashion (short skirts – Garcon-haircut – powder – perfume – lipstick)?’’ These are the questions to which the right-wing authoritarian extremists reacted in a uniformly aggressive and punitive way. Thus, these questions also serve to detect the hidden authoritarian reactions of the ambivalent members and supporters of the SPD, and the conservative attitudes – reaffirming a traditional gender arrangement – of some outspoken communists. Aggressive opposition to women in the labor market – ‘‘a woman’s place is in the home! (Eine Frau geho¨rt ins Haus!)’’ – went along with an even more aggressive rejection of female sexuality in general: When women use makeup, they were stereotypically seen as prostitutes.

16

HELGARD KRAMER

Children, especially small children, were to be punished physically: ‘‘A young tree still can bend down, a grown tree no longer (Ein junges Ba¨umchen biegt sich noch, ein Baum nicht mehr)’’ was the typical reaction of right-wing radicals. The interesting thing is that such authoritarian responses were not confined to the followers of the Nazis and the other right-wing extremist parties, but were also found among about half of those exhibiting the ‘‘ambivalent’’ and the ‘‘revolutionary character’’. In spite of all its technical and methodological shortcomings, version 0 of the research program had been a ‘‘bold’’ theory in the Popperian sense. The theory was falsified when it underwent empirical testing in the Arbeiter- und Angestelltenerhebung. Its falsification contained the valid prognosis that the German working class was not ready for revolution and would lose in the face of the Nazi movement. The survey included about 90% men and 10% women, who had been contacted by representatives of the social democratic and Communist unions in major German cities. The respondents were of a rather above average age, and they had been gainfully employed when the questionnaire was sent out, this after a pretest in 1929 led to some improvements. The unemployed young men born between 1910 and 1913 who were roaming the streets on either the Communist or the National Socialist side, representing demographically the proportionally largest cohort of young people Germany had ever seen (Ashkenasi, 2000), were hardly even included in the survey. My own interpretation of the Arbeiter- und Angestelltenerhebung of 1971/ 1974 – and with basically the same outcome, the Fromm and Bonss interpretation of 1980 – had shown that the survey included a broad segment of older working class individuals, as it were members of the ‘‘labor aristocracy,’’ and a majority of petty bourgeois white-collar employees who were strongly inclined toward reactionary and fascist ideas.17 The discussion of the preliminary results of this survey in the inner circle of the Institute (Horkheimer, Pollock, Weil, Fromm, and Lo¨wenthal) led already in 1931 to the decision of the Executive Director Horkheimer to transfer the Institute to Geneva and the funds of the Institute to the Netherlands in the following year.18 Version 0 of the theory was completely replaced by version 1 of the theory, which – without even mentioning the political events surrounding Hitler’s coming to power in January 1933 – was nevertheless meant to propose a scientific explanation of the success of the Nazi movement by describing the function of authority as the ‘‘glue’’ of society, and with that minimizing the ‘‘explosive’’ aspect of repressed needs and emotions in the dominated masses.

Authoritarian Character Studies of the Frankfurt School

17

Horkheimer wanted to present the theory only in general terms. Therefore, he hid away the failure of version 0 of the theory and presented the Institute’s empirical findings, now turned around so as to fit version 1 of the theory in the presentation of ‘‘empirically predominant character types at the time’’: first, the authoritarian character; second, the ambivalent character; and third, the revolutionary character. While Horkheimer’s and Fromm’s theoretical essays in Autorita¨t und Familie dealt extensively with the functions of authority and the psychological features of the authoritarian character, and to a lesser degree with the psychologically ambivalent character, being submissive to authority but sometimes rebellious, the revolutionary character was not elaborated at all. Horkheimer and Fromm jointly revised the theory, moving away from expecting a social ‘‘explosive’’ to a socially ‘‘binding’’ effect of an authoritarian culture for version 1 of the theory. In Horkheimer’s words, the stability of cultural features is so decisive for everyday life in a given society that ‘‘world historic upheavals’’ cannot be expected to be carried out by a majority of individuals who – for reasons of survival – have to adjust to an authoritarian culture in a given society. Rather, upheaval would be initiated by groups of individuals led by their personal, autonomous insight, that is, on a cognitive level, and who are not psychologically hindered by a ‘‘stabilized authoritarian character’’ (Horkheimer, 1936, p. 357), in terms of version 2 of the program by the ‘‘rigid structure’’ of their personalities. The history of the failed version 0 of the theory was consciously or unconsciously covered up in presenting version 1 of the theory in 1936 to the social science community because researchers who have to confess to errors or mistakes may lose their reputation. The idea of falsifying a ‘‘bold hypothesis’’ – as suggested by Karl Popper in his Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934) – as the prime mechanism of scientific progress could not be claimed by Horkheimer, nor was this suggested by the specialist in sociological methods Paul Lazarsfeld. Not only the Institute’s members but also the international social science community as a whole was at the time unfamiliar with Popper’s new epistemological theory, which would gain an internationally predominant influence only during the 1950s and 1960s, first in the Anglo-American university systems. Thus, maintaining a good reputation for the Institute of Social Research was an existential issue as it emigrated from Frankfurt to Geneva in 1932, and after a stopover in Paris, to the United States in 1934. In any case, in the social science communities of New York and Los Angeles, the rules of the game were played harder than among German scholars.19 Without a good reputation, the research group of the Institute could not have continued its work at all, according to Marcuse.20

18

HELGARD KRAMER

FROM THE AUTHORITARIAN CHARACTER TO THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY: TRANSFORMATION OF THE THEORY FROM VERSION 1 TO VERSION 2 As the Institute continued to study the authoritarian character while moving from Europe to the United States, this meant that its researchers were required at the same time to continue to explain the success and stability of Nazism in Germany and to adapt their conceptions to U.S. conditions. Though the connectedness of antisemitic prejudice and racism against the black and Latino minorities in the United States was clearly showing up in an important way in the new interview materials of version 2 of the program, the research group ignored completely the social context of the rigid racial segregation of blacks and whites, and in some places of Jews and gentiles reigning at the time. Transformations of concepts from version 1 to version 2 of the program meant moving from ‘‘character’’ to ‘‘personality.’’ It also meant moving from ‘‘character trait’’ to political psychological syndromes – and from ‘‘Weltanschauungen’’ (right- and left-wing ideologies) of the various German political camps – to social, political, and economic convictions that form a broader ideological pattern, a mentality. These patterns are in concordance with version 1 of the theory and are meant to be expressions of deeply rooted trends in the personalities of interviewees, framed psychoanalytically in terms of drive theory. According to the theory of the authoritarian personality, antisemitic prejudice cannot be explained in terms of economic, rational interests of individuals alone, as personality type is thought to be the agency through which sociological influences on ideology are mediated. For the revolutionary character of version 0 of the theory, in version 2 of the program a democratic character was substituted: the ‘‘genuine liberal’’ personality. ‘‘The critique of (stereotypical thinking) and the study of prejudice in general were revolutionized by the American research projects of the Institute of Social Research during the 1940s. These were guided by the central claim of The Authoritarian Personality (1950) by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford ‘that the political, economic, and social convictions of an individual often form a broad and coherent pattern, as if bound together by a ‘mentality’ or ‘spirit,’ and that this pattern is an expression of deep-lying trends in his personality.’ The disposition to think in rigid categories (stereotyping) and the outward projection of unconscious emotional impulses (projectivity) were investigated as significant variables of prejudice’’.21

Authoritarian Character Studies of the Frankfurt School

19

THE FAILURE OF THE RESEARCH PROGRAM’S VERSION 3 (1950–1968): INABILITY TO REPLICATE THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY IN FOLLOW-UP STUDIES All the empirical research projects of the Institute listed under version 3 left the theoretical basis of the research program intact, and in this way constituted a protective belt for the research program’s version 2. They successively enlarged this protective belt for the core concept of the authoritarian character studies. But three projects that were actually undermining this aim led to the end of the research program altogether after Adorno’s death in 1969. The first was Group Experiment, edited by F. Pollock: In small-group (10–15 participants) discussions, about 800 persons of supposedly homogenous economic, professional, and social backgrounds were asked to talk about Nazism and democratic values. This research project was methodologically innovative in relation to the authoritarian personality research program, and the summarizing interpretation of Adorno measures up theoretically to ‘‘Types and Syndromes,’’ the summary written by Adorno in The Authoritarian Personality (1950). Rather than seeking to identify certain character structures of individuals, its research design allowed for the observation of the process of building up of political opinion in a collective situation. Students and Politics by Habermas, von Friedeburg, Oehler, and Weltz definitively shifted the theoretical research program from the psychoanalytic concept of character or personality to the level of political attitudes and opinions of individuals of differing economic and social backgrounds. This time, the research question was still about democratic attitudes and opinions of students at the universities of Frankfurt and West Berlin but the core concept of the authoritarian character as the polarizing element, which had been central to the research program of versions 1 and 2, was dropped altogether: The A-scale had been used in the questionnaire but was – as von Friedeburg states – not included in the interpretation of the empirical materials ‘‘because the ‘education effect’ could not be controlled methodologically: well-educated people from an upper class or middle class backgrounds were well aware of current communicative political taboo zones and would not express prejudices against minority groups frankly when responding to the A-scale.’’22 Methodologically, this project represented the state of the art in quantitative social research at the time

20

HELGARD KRAMER

and thus clearly represented normal social science. But it failed completely in the prognosis of the upcoming student movement, which was to start from West Berlin and Frankfurt only a few years – but one or two generations of students – later. Are Workers Authoritarian? by Ursula Jaerisch was a representative survey in the city of Frankfurt that the government of the state of Hesse, at the time Social Democratic (SPD) and shocked by the sudden success of the neo-Nazi NPD party in the 1968 election in Hesse, asked the Institute to undertake, also providing the financing for the study. The project was designed by Adorno and Jaerisch in 1968 as a quantitative empirical project, neatly tailored to follow completely the theoretical concept of The Authoritarian Personality. The results were published only in 1975 when the NPD had long since disappeared from the official political scene, that is, from the Parliament of the State of Hesse. Jaerisch’s publication, issued six years after Adorno’s death, included a thorough methodological critique of the authoritarian personality theory, connecting to the critique of Christie and Jahoda (1954) and also referring to the work of Basil Bernstein (1971) on the restricted language code of the working class in contrast to the more elaborated one of the middle and upper classes. The revisions of the original research program in the three projects mentioned above provide us with three internal reasons23 for the end of the authoritarian character studies research program: (1) the importance of context in bringing prejudice and stereotyped thinking from latent to manifest expression in human interaction; (2) the impossibility of explaining political attitudes and opinions as the effects of a specific social and/or individual character, and (3) the linguistic turn necessary to explain discrepancies between, on the one hand, expressed opinions and prejudice, and, on the other hand, the individual and collective and political action of individuals. These internal reasons were developed inside the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt but they were never discussed explicitly, and they were never brought to the attention of Adorno and Horkheimer as long as they lived. Strictly speaking, therefore, the authoritarian character studies exist only in versions 1 and 2.

CONCLUSIONS The methodological shortcomings of the different versions of the authoritarian character research program are numerous. Today, we still need to work on the overall problem of integrating qualitative and

Authoritarian Character Studies of the Frankfurt School

21

quantitative empirical research. In the heat of the fights over positivism of the 1960s, it might have been more difficult to see the problem at all clearly. The integration of quantitative research – with Mack and Larry representing the high scorer and the low scorer on the Fascism (F) scale – and qualitative research in Adorno’s summarizing interpretation, ‘‘Types and Syndromes,’’ could not be reconstructed at the Institute for a German translation of The Authoritarian Personality, which meant that the complete book was never accessible in a German translation (Adorno, 1973). However, I do not agree with Richard Sennett, who has held that The Authoritarian Personality did not represent ‘‘good normal science,’’24 nor with Fleck (2007), who seems to have a very strong dislike of Horkheimer and Adorno and has questioned their social science competence. The most important reasons for the sudden end of the research program of the authoritarian character studies are internal ones: first, the methodological problem of controlling the ‘‘education effect’’ in the situation of the post–World War II West German society as shown by Ludwig von Friedeburg, and second, in the concept of social character itself. As summarized by Oevermann (2001), the concept of ‘‘social character’’ simultaneously binds together, on the one hand, typical worldviews of social milieus, and on the other hand, psychoanalytically conceptualized structures of the individual psyche originating in family interaction patterns from early childhood to adolescence as the formative phase in an individual’s biography. According to Oevermann, the concept of ‘‘social character’’ as it was used in the authoritarian character studies – and also in David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) – is outdated today. According to Oevermann, sociologists today command far more differentiated conceptual instruments to describe and analyze reality outside the individual (cultural patterns of interpretation bound to specific lifeworlds) as well as the inner psychic reality of individuals. Social psychologists have been reacting to this point for a long time. R. Nevitt Sanford, coauthor of The Authoritarian Personality, used to test his students with a modernized F-scale when they came in as freshmen, and again when they passed their exams. He came to the conclusion that a good education reduces authoritarian attitudes, but he never would have spoken of changing a student’s character. Others, like Vester (2003), refer instead of ‘‘social character’’ to the concept of habitus, as elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu. In summing up social psychology’s progress in explaining the Holocaust and other genocides, Newman (2006) does not even refer to the individual’s psyche, motives, and

22

HELGARD KRAMER

attitudes, but only to the collective situation of the individual, and to his or her interpretation of the interaction situation. After the end of the authoritarian character research program at the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, authoritarianism did not disappear as a concept from the canon of social psychology and political psychology. Up to today, the standard instruments to measure prejudice, antisemitism, racist attitudes, and authoritarian dispositions are basically formed according to the model of the F-scale in The Authoritarian Personality (1950). But since the overall concept of social character failed, what is still valid for today from the authoritarian character studies? A differentiated assessment of this question would have to take up the contemporary outcome of empirical research in authoritarianism, a sheer mountain of empirical research,25 as well as current work in the broad field of the social psychology of stereotypes and prejudice. I would like to point out that the socialization link of the authoritarian character studies has been reaffirmed lately by secondary analyses of surveys and case studies of authoritarian aggression in adolescent males from the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research by Dornes (2004) and Su¨tterlu¨ty (2004). These authors start out with a sophisticated new combination of psychoanalytic and sociological theories. But the main trend of research in racism and antisemitism during the last 25 years has been going in a different direction, toward linking social structure and the symbolic universe in the genealogy of racist discourses.26 Can National Socialism be explained by the authoritarian character studies? Stephen P. Turner has been identifying a myth he claims to have been created and held up by sociologists in West Germany after World War II, among them Adorno, that sociology is basically a critical social science that stood alone in diametrical opposition to the irrational ideology of National Socialism. Turner writes that they also claimed that sociology had explanations for the outbreak of fascism: The evidence usually adduced to support this claim is part of the same general picture of discontinuity, suppression, and emigration. It is taken for granted that exiles on the left, such as Mannheim and the Frankfurt School, were clear-sighted in their response to the developments from which they had escaped. It is further assumed that they provided or at least contributed heavily to the intellectual framework within which competent sociological and public opinion in the non-fascist countries to which they escaped came to analyze and respond to fascism. The standard evidence for this is the analysis of authoritarianism by the Frankfurt School during the 1930s, which culminated

Authoritarian Character Studies of the Frankfurt School

23

in The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950). The impression that this represented a coherent and influential point of view during the era of fascism perhaps rests primarily on an inference that the wide availability of the writings of the critical theorists and the related works of Wilhelm Reich in the 1960s, and the retrospective coherence that could be given these works, reflects the situation of the 1930s. (1993, p. 2)

After reviewing typologies and biographical analyses of historians, sociologists, social psychologists, and psychologists of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, I came to the conclusion in my own work that indeed an authoritarian, Mafia-type interaction structure in the SS, and the prevalence of authoritarian characters among the perpetrators of the Holocaust, is a necessary boundary condition of the fact that so many ordinary German men, and to a lesser degree, ordinary German women, turned into mass murderers (Kramer, 1990, 2006). There is still valid knowledge to gain on the content level from version 1 of the authoritarian character studies even today. For example, until the end of the 1980s, supporters of neo-Nazi parties in West Germany (the NPD and later the Republikaner Party) were uniformly displaying that same conservative view of gender relations – women belong in the home, work for wages is men’s work – that had shown up in the Arbeiter- und Angestelltenerhebung at the beginning of the 1930s in every survey (not only in the ones done by the Institute of Social Research). One can say that this continued to be a cornerstone of a right-wing extremist world view until the feminist movement in West Germany, and the inclusion of East Germany with its Communist tradition of working women into the Federal Republic, caused a change of the cultural climate in this respect. A model on the conditions of transforming South American dictatorships into democracies – accompanied by wide empirical research – has been developed by the political scientist O’Donnell (1991). State authoritarianism is of crucial importance in this model. Interesting enough, Sir Ralf Dahrendorf, not a member of the Frankfurt School, and in the so-called positivism debates of the 1960s more or less an opponent of Adorno and Habermas, pointed to the political dangers of a growing state authoritarianism in Western democracies facing the threat of global terrorism: ‘‘The early twenty-first century is certainly a period in which a creeping authoritarianism is threatening to become the dominant characteristic of what can no longer unreservedly be called a free world’’ (2006, p. 15). Looking at just one important part of early critical theory, the authoritarian character research program, we come to a different assessment of its epistemological fate, here in contrast to Habermas, who insists:

24

HELGARD KRAMER The program of the early critical theory foundered not on this or that contingent circumstance, but from the exhaustion of the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness. I shall argue that a change of paradigm to the theory of communication makes it possible to return to the undertaking that was interrupted with the critique of instrumental reason; and this will permit us to take up once more again the since neglected task of a critical theory of society. (1981/1984, p. 386)

Rational reconstruction of the authoritarian character studies would interpret the concept of social character as a social science translation of ‘‘the paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness,’’ which was – at the very least – capable of guiding the empirical research of the Institute of Social Research for more than 30 years. Compared to the immanent approaches in the scholarship on early critical theory, rational reconstruction of science has the advantage of showing clearly the contradictions that cannot be handled in the process of theory building, testing of hypotheses, methodological shortcomings, and methodological progress in interpreting empirical data, this when the object of research is that same reality that is shaping the thoughts and emotions of researchers. At least in the case of the authoritarian character studies, the logic of scientific discovery has been a dialectical process.27 After all, rational reconstruction can be applied only to the history of science. It is restricted to ex post facto analysis but it helps to understand important aspects of the history of the (social) sciences.

NOTES 1. The intellectual atmosphere in Frankfurt during the Weimar years has been described vividly by Schivelbusch (1983). He describes the following institutions: the Institute of Social Research at the Frankfurt University; Radio Frankfurt and the Frankfurter Zeitung, at the time the only nationally circulated liberal newspaper; the ‘‘Ju¨dische Lehrhaus,’’ where Fromm used to teach and Lo¨wenthal did volunteer social work taking care of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe; and the IG-Farbenindustrie AG, at the time besides Dow Chemical the world’s largest chemical corporation, which led the city of Frankfurt to incorporate a huge territory southwest of the city in 1928 to benefit from the tax payments of IG Farben factories in Ho¨chst, with the central administrative unit of the corporate group established in the city of Frankfurt in 1931. 2. Habermas has recounted that a complete set of the early Frankfurt School’s Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung (1932–1941) was hidden in the cellar of the Institute during the 1950s, and how strongly Horkheimer resisted the idea of republishing any of his early works (Lu¨dke, 1987). 3. For a summary, see Bouchard and McGue (2003). 4. To take one prominent example, in his Social Action, which provides a draft of a social theory of action, Florian Znaniecki mentions as an option for communities the exclusion of ‘‘born criminals’’ (1935, p. 380). To take another example, Werner Cahnman, a well-known sociologist of German Jewry and its relations to German

Authoritarian Character Studies of the Frankfurt School

25

gentiles, writes in a 1926 article of Volk (people) not only in a political sense but also as a form of bioethnic identity (Meyer, Tar, & Marcus, 1989). 5. During the first meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fu¨r Soziologie (DGS: German Sociological Association) in 1912, Max Weber commented on Alfred Ploetz’s racist statement that ‘‘Negroes smelled differently’’ from whites: ‘‘Yes, people who work physically smell differently from others’’ (Weber, 1988). Ploetz later became a leading theorist of ‘‘race’’ under Nazism. 6. In his long-term bestseller of 1879, Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Woman and Socialism), August Bebel discusses the alternatives environment/genetic heritage around several issues, and – conforming to the left-wing worldview – while most of the time he argues for the environmental explanation, on a few occasions he favors the biological one. In his study of Jewish intellectuals, Mosse (1992) points out that Social democratic intellectuals during the Weimar years used to make fun of the ‘‘unAryan’’ looks of the leading figures of the Nazi party. For the feminist movement, see Evans (1976). 7. See Die ‘Radikalen’ in der Frauenbewegung. Feministische Studien 1988, Vol. 1. Eugenic ideas (‘‘improving the race’’) were discussed by the liberal ‘‘radicals’’ Helene Sto¨cker and Magnus Hirschfeld, as well as during World War I by Mathilde Vaerting, author of the first constructivist arguing bestseller on gender of 1921. 8. In his 1859 article, Die Gesellschaftswissenschaft. Ein kritischer Versuch, von Treitschke opposed the institutionalization of a discipline of sociology since the German ‘‘Staatswissenschaften’’ faculties, a complex of law, economics, statistics, and social theory with options in a strong central state, would lose their academic and political influence if separate social sciences faculties would become available. Later, during the so-called antisemitism fight of the 1880s, von Treitschke invented the slogan ‘‘Die Juden sind unser Unglu¨ck (The Jews are our misfortune)’’ (Massing, 1949). 9. In my opinion, Plessner is giving, here in 1960, a clear-eyed outline of the genealogy of racist social Darwinist discourse as a German mental frame of reference, one which helped enable the Nazi seizure of power. Such a discourse analysis path was to be followed only in the late 1980s and 1990s in the tradition of Foucault. 10. The German title of the book is quite different; literally translated it is: ‘‘Blue and white collar workers at the dawn of the Third Reich’’. 11. R. Funk interprets all of Fromm’s writings from the following perspective: ‘‘Fromm’s main interest is in the libidinal structure of the human being as a socialized being. Thus it is mainly a question of those passionate strivings and the unconscious of the socialized individual, as these factors make themselves evident when the unconscious of society is itself the object of study. Then there is a libidinous structure of society, which can be recognized as independent from the socioeconomic situation, since the life experience of the group is determined by the economic, social and political conditions. This means that society has not only a certain economic, social, political and intellectual-cultural structure, but also a libidinal one specific to it’’ (2007). 12. It is easy to understand that Fromm wanted to define his own trajectory during this period, after which he had had to leave the Institute and was replaced by Adorno in terms of personal and intellectual interaction with Horkheimer. Even after he had been ‘‘fired’’ in 1939, Fromm kept the 584 copies of selected answers and the originals of the 1934–1935 data analysis papers – there were no copies of these papers at the

26

HELGARD KRAMER

Institute – to round out his works on the theory of ‘‘social character.’’ In many of his subsequently published bestsellers, one can find footnotes on his ‘‘forthcoming empirical analysis’’ of the Arbeiter- und Angestelltenerhebung (1929–1931). 13. Fromm and Bonss (1980) is based on the same selection of questions and answers of these 584 interviewees – blue- and white-collar workers, which had already been transcribed from the original questionnaires. Fifteen of the 584 interviews were reprinted in this abbreviated form in Autorita¨t und Familie, 5 of them illustrating each character type: the authoritarian, the revolutionary, and the ambivalent (Horkheimer, 1936, pp. 248–271). 14. Habermas (1968/1987) has shown that it is not so much correct diagnosis – the psychoanalytic theory that is used by the therapist in the beginning – but the structure of the interaction between analyst and patient that determines success or failure of the ‘‘talking cure.’’ And there also has to be a communicative consensus between patient and analyst in this point. 15. In the short English abstract of the Arbeiter- und Angestelltenerhebung in Autorita¨t und Familie, the researchers state that if one has read through half an interview, one can guess the other half of answers to the questions unerringly (Horkheimer, 1936, p. 916). 16. Fromm elaborated on this theme in his bestsellers Escape from Freedom (1941) and To Have or to Be? (1976). But the authoritarian character discussed in Escape from Freedom is a completely different conception compared to the authoritarian character in version 1 of the research program. Meyer (2002) is wrong in stating that ‘‘Fromm’s real merit’’ was to first find out that character structures were socially formed, and would in turn function as stabilizing factors for the reproduction of society, politics, and the economy (pp. 13, 41). First, this is the central assumption of version 1 of the research program of the Institute of Social Research, which was stated much more concisely by Horkheimer in his inaugural speech of July 1931. Second, Escape from Freedom does not constitute ‘‘the basis for the study of the Berkeley group’’ (Meyer, 2002, p. 41) of the 1940s, which I have termed version 2 of the research program in the present chapter. To the contrary, version 2 of the research program takes as its point of departure Fromm’s social psychological chapter of Autorita¨t und Familie (1936), where Fromm was still arguing in a much more differentiated way. In 1936, he was still much more of a Freudian analyst, while in Escape from Freedom (1941) he is more strongly oriented toward Karen Horney’s psychoanalytic theory. Meyer focuses on a single author and his collected works. Such a procedure becomes misleading if we are interested in the social science history of the authoritarian character studies. Kelle (1992) centers her research question on how critical theory was received in educational science, and thus her viewpoint is also from a particular angle. But since she is focusing on central conceptions of critical theory instead of single authors, she develops a much better description in summarizing the development of critical theory after its first phase as differentiation and diffusion alike (see Kelle, 1992). After his final departure from the Institute in 1939, Fromm’s work takes more or less the direction of a diffusion of concepts. 17. Therefore, I think it worthwhile to do a second interpretation using more advanced qualitative methods. 18. As confirmed to me by Leo Lo¨wenthal on several occasions at the Institute of Social Research during the 1980s. See also Lo¨wenthal and Dubiel (1980).

Authoritarian Character Studies of the Frankfurt School

27

19. Contrary to his intention to discredit Horkheimer and Adorno as incompetent social researchers, the fact that competition in the Anglo-American university systems was harder than in the ‘‘Teutonic system’’ (Galtung) of Germany and Austria is shown very well by Christian Fleck in his 2007 study of empirical social research from the 1920s to the 1950s. 20. This was the explanation of Marcuse, as cited by Bonss (1980). They covered up the fact that the members of the Institute had hoped that there were revolutionary character types in the German working class ready to overthrow capitalist society. One of Horkheimer’s motives for doing so after the Institute had resettled in Frankfurt in 1950 was staying on good terms with some genuine conservatives in the Christian Democratic Party, who surely would have been offended if the Institute’s director had declared himself a Marxist. This was at the beginning of the McCarthy era in the United States where, even in the 1930s, it would not have been wise in an academic setting to declare oneself a Marxist either. 21. Ziege (2003, p. 1). In her introduction to Adorno’s November 16, 1937, letter to Fromm on women, Eva-Marie Ziege suggests that what was at stake was a paradigm shift from the macrostructure to the microstructure in the analysis of gender relations. Adorno’s main point was that instead of ‘‘authority’’ the ‘‘fetishism of commodities’’ should become the core concept of empirical research, since exchange value comes to dominate use value in modern capitalism. 22. Telephone conversation with von Friedeburg, July 21, 2008. 23. This is not to say that other projects and researchers at the Institute of the 1950s and 1960s were not involved in this process. For example, Regina BeckerSchmidt, who worked on the surveys in schools (Schul-Studie I und II) remembers that working with the A-scale made her feel as if the concept of character was ‘‘crumbling under their fingers’’ (personal communication, 1988). Due to limitations of space, I cannot elaborate more on this here. 24. See the documentary film Der Bu¨rger als Revolutiona¨r, for Adorno’s 100th birthday, Hessischer Rundfunk 2003. 25. A summary can be found in Rippl, Seipel, and Kindervater (2000). 26. Most important here is Taguieff (1988). See also the controversy between Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser (2007), available at http://www.eurozine.com/articles/ 2007-01-17/honnethstojanov-de.html (accessed January 26, 2008). 27. Perhaps Horkheimer’s longstanding wish to write a book on the dialectics of materialist logic, mentioned many times in his correspondence, especially with Adorno, originated from the experience of this dialectical process.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank especially Melitta Patzak for many discussions on the subject, and the late Ludwig von Friedeburg for comments on this chapter. I also would like to thank Prof. John Abromeit, Department of History, Buffalo State University, then at University of Chicago; Prof. Kevin Anderson, Department of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, then at Purdue University; and Prof. Tony Carnes, Chairman of the Seminar ‘‘Scope

28

HELGARD KRAMER

and Methods of the Social Sciences’’ at Columbia University, New York, for each giving me an occasion to present this chapter in January/February 2008.

REFERENCES Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York, NY: Harper & Row. Adorno, T. W. (1973). Studien zum autorita¨ren charakter. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Anderson, K. B. (2007). Thinking about Fromm and Marxism. In: Logos 6.3. Anderson, K. B., & Quinney, R. (Eds.). (2000). Erich Fromm and critical criminology. Champain, Il: University of Illinois Press. Ashkenasi, A. (2000). Neonazismus in Deutschland: Deutschland – unverkennbar und wiedervereinigt. In: H. Kramer (Ed.), Die Gegenwart der NS-Vergangenheit (pp. 336–346). Berlin: Philo. Bebel, A. (1879). Die Frau und der Sozialismus (34th ed.). [Woman and Socialism.] Stuttgart: Dietz, 1903. Becker-Schmidt, R. (1999). Critical theory as a critique of society: Theodor W. Adorno’s significance for a feminist sociology. In: M. O’Neill (Ed.), Adorno, culture and feminism (pp. 104–118). London: Sage. Benjamin, J. (1988). The bonds of love: Feminism, psychoanalysis and the problem of domination. New York, NY: Pantheon. Bernstein, B. (1971). Codes, class and control: Theoretical studies towards a sociology of language. London: Routledge. Bouchard, T. J., & McGue, M. (2003). Genetic and environmental influences on human psychological differences. Journal of Neurobiology, 54, 4–45 (Wiley Periodicals Inc.). Bonss, W. (1980). Kritische Theorie und empirische Sozialforschung: Anmerkungen zu einem Fallbeispiel. In: E. Fromm & W. Bonss (Eds.), Arbeiter und Angestellte am Vorabend des Dritten Reiches (pp. 7–42). Mu¨nchen: DVA. Brunkhorst, H. (1983). Paradigma-Kern und Theoriendynamik der Kritischen Theorie der Gesellschaft. Soziale Welt, 1, 22–56. Christie, R., & Jahoda, M. (Eds.). (1954). Studies in the scope and method of the authoritarian personality. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Dahrendorf, R. (2006). Enlightenment applied. Enlightenment betrayed. A story of liberty under pressure. Lecture delivered at a symposium in honor of Fritz Stern, at Columbia University, New York, February 27, 2006. In: GHI Bulletin No. 39 (Fall, pp. 15–22). Die ‘Radikalen’ in der Frauenbewegung. Feministische Studien 1988, Vol. 1. Dornes, M. (2004). Familia¨re Wurzeln der Jugendgewalt. Westend. Neue Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung, 1, 75–90. Dubiel, H. (1978). Wissenschaftsorganisation und politische Erfahrung: Studien zur fru¨hen Kritischen Theorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Evans, R. (1976). The feminist movement in Germany 1894–1933. London: Sage. Fleck, C. (2007). Transatlantische Bereicherungen: Zur Erfindung der empirischen Sozialforschung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Freud, S. (1921). Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse. Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.

Authoritarian Character Studies of the Frankfurt School

29

Freyhold, M. V. (1971). Autoritarismus und politische Apathie. Frankfurt: EVA. Friedeburg, L. v. (n.d.). History of the Institute of Social Research (summary). Available at http://www.ifs.uni-frankfurt.de/english/history/htm. Accessed January 24, 2008. Fromm, E. (1931). Die Entwicklung des Christusdogmas. Wien: internetpsych.via. Fromm, E. (1932a). U¨ber Methode und Aufgabe einer analytischen Sozialpsychologie. Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung, 1, 28–54. Fromm, E. (1932b). Die psychoanalytische Charakterologie und ihre Bedeutung fu¨r die Sozialpsychologie. Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung, 1, 253–277. Fromm, E. (1934). Die sozialpsychologische Bedeutung der Mutterrechtstheorie. Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung, 3, 196–227. Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from freedom. New York, NY: Owl Book. Fromm, E. (1976). To have or to be? New York, NY: Harper & Row. Fromm, E., & Bonss, W. (1980). Arbeiter und Angestellte am Vorabend des Dritten Reiches. Stuttgart: DVA. [English edition: Bonss, W. (1980). The working class in Weimar Germany: A psychological and sociological study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.] Funk, R. (2007). Life and work of Erich Fromm. In: Logos 6.3. Habermas, J. (1968/1987). Knowledge and human interest. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1981/1984). The theory of communicative action (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1986). Drei Thesen zur Wirkungsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule. In: A. Honneth & A. Wellmer (Eds.), Die Frankfurter Schule und die Folgen: Referate eines Symposiums der Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung vom 10.-15.Dezember 1984 in Ludwigsburg, Berlin (pp. 8–12). Habermas, J., et al. (1961). Student und Politik: Eine soziologische Untersuchung Frankfurter Studenten. Frankfurt: Luchterhand. Honneth, A., & Frazer, N. (2007). Available at http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-01-17/ honnethstojanov-de.html. Accessed January 26, 2008. Horkheimer, M. (1931/1989). The state of contemporary social philosophy and the tasks of an institute for social research. In S. Bronner & D. Kellner (Eds.), Critical theory and society: A reader (pp. 25–36). New York, NY: Routledge. Horkheimer, M. (Ed.) (1936). Studien u¨ber Autorita¨t und Familie: Forschungsberichte aus dem Institut fu¨r Sozialforschung. Paris: Alcan. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (1944/1947). Dialektik der Aufkla¨rung [English edition: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments. Ed. by Gunzelin Schmid Noer. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2002]. New York/Amsterdam: Querido: Institute of Social Research Jaerisch, U. (1975). Sind Arbeiter autorita¨r? Zur Methodenkritik politischer Psychologie. Frankfurt: EVA. Jay, M. (1973). The dialectical imagination: A history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. Canada: Little, Brown and Company. Kelle, H. (1992). Studien zur Entwicklung der Kritischen Theorie und deren Rezeption in der Erziehungswissenschaft. Ph.D. thesis, Fakulta¨t fu¨r Pa¨dagogik der Universita¨t Bielefeld. Kellner, D. (1989). Critical theory, Marxism and modernity. Oxford: Polity Press. Kramer, H. (1971). Die Arbeiter- und Angestelltenerhebung des Instituts fu¨r Sozialforschung 1929–1931 (40 pp.). Frankfurt: Institut fu¨r Sozialforschung.

30

HELGARD KRAMER

Kramer, H. (1974). Dimensionen gesellschaftlichen Bewusstseins bei proletarischen Anha¨ngern der KPD und der SPD (1929–1931). In: R. Herding, C. Eckart, U. Jaerlsch, K. Japp & B. Kirchlechner (Eds.), Soziale Ungleichheit und materielle Anspru¨che (Vol. 2, pp. 1–26). Frankfurt: Institut fu¨r Sozialforschung. Kramer, H. (1990). Theoretische und methodische Probleme der Vorurteilsforschung. Habilitation lecture May 21. Department of Social Sciences, University of Frankfurt a. M. Kramer, H. (2006). Ta¨tertypologien. In: H. Kramer (Ed.), NS-Ta¨ter aus interdisziplina¨rer Perspektive (pp. 253–310). Mu¨nchen: Martin Meidenbauer. Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.] Lakatos, I. (1974). Die Geschichte der Wissenschaft und ihre rationalen Rekonstruktionen. In: W. Diedrich (Ed.), Theorien der Wissenschaftsgeschichte (pp. 55–119). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lakatos, I. (1982). Die Methodologie der wissenschaftlichen Forschungsprogramme. Braunschweig: Vieweg. Lakatos, I., & Musgrave, P. (Eds.). (1974). Kritik und Erkenntnisfortschritt. Braunschweig: Vieweg. Landsberg, P. L. (1933). Rassenideologie und Rassenwissenschaft [Anthropology and race theories]. Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung, 2, 388–406. Lo¨wenthal, L. (1982). Schriften 3. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lo¨wenthal, L., & Dubiel, H. (1980). Mitmachen wollte ich nie. Ein autobiographisches Gespra¨ch mit Helmut Dubiel. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lu¨dke, M. (1987). Horkheimer und die Kiste. In: Die Zeit. Available at www.zeit.de/1987/03/ Horkheimer-und-die-Kiste? Accessed December 1, 2010. Marcus, J., & Tar, Z. (Eds.). (1984). Foundations of the Frankfurt School of social research. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Massing, P. (1949). Rehearsal for destruction. New York, NY: Harper. Meyer, G. (2002). Freiheit wovon, Freiheit wozu? Politische Psychologie und Alternativen humanistischer Politik bei Erich Fromm: Darstellung – Interpretation – Kritik. Opladen: Leske und Budrich. Meyer, J. B., Tar, Z., & Marcus, J. (Eds.). (1989). German Jewry: Its history and sociology. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction (Selected essays by Werner Cahnman). Mosse, G. (1992). Ju¨dische Intellektuelle in Deutschland zwischen Religion und Nationalismus. Frankfurt: Campus. Myrdal, G. (1944). An American dilemma – The Negro question and modern democracy. New York, NY: Harper. Newman, L. (2006). Beyond situationism: The social psychology of genocide and mass killing. In: H. Kramer (Ed.), NS-Ta¨ter aus interdisziplina¨rer Perspektive (pp. 107–120). Mu¨nchen: Martin Meidenbauer. O’Donnell, G. (Ed.) (1991). Transitions from authoritarian rule. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Oevermann, U. (2001). Die Struktur sozialer Deutungsmuster – Versuch einer Aktualisierung. Sozialer Sinn, 1, 35–82. Plessner, H. (1960/1985). Der Weg der Soziologie in Deutschland. In: H. Plessner (Ed.), Gesammelte Schriften (pp. 191–211). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Pollock, F. (1955). Gruppenexperiment. Ein Studienbericht. Frankfurt: Europa¨ische Verlagsanstalt. Popper, K. R. (1934/1959). The logic of scientific discovery. London: Routledge.

Authoritarian Character Studies of the Frankfurt School

31

Reich, W. (1933). Charakteranalyse, Raubdruck 1968, Berlin. Riesman, D. (1950). The lonely crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rippl, S., Seipel, C., & Kindervater, A. (Eds.). (2000). Autoritarismus. Kontroversen und Ansa¨tze der aktuellen Autoritarismusforschung. Opladen: Leske und Budrich. Rumpf, M. (1990). ‘Mystische Aura’: Die Bedeutung des ‘Mu¨tterlichen’ in Max Horkheimers Schriften. Discussion Paper, pp. 4–90. Hamburger Institut fu¨r Sozialforschung. Schivelbusch, W. (1983). Intellektuellenda¨mmerung: Zur Lage der Frankfurter Intelligenz in den 1920er Jahren. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Scho¨nbach, P. (1961). Reaktionen auf die antisemitische Welle im Winter 1959/60. Frankfurt: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt. Scho¨nbach, P., et al. (1966). U¨ber rechtsradikale Tendenzen in der westdeutschen Presse 1961. Frankfurt: Institut fu¨r Sozialforschung. So¨llner, A. (1979). Geschichte und Herrschaft: Studien zur materialistischen Sozialwissenschaft 1929–1942. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Su¨tterlu¨ty, F. (2004). Ist Gewalt rational? Westend. Neue Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung, 1, 101–116. Taguieff, P.-A. (1988). La force du prejuge´. Essai sur le racisme et ses doubles. Paris: Gallimard. Turner, S. P. (1993). Sociology and fascism in the interwar period: The myth and its frame. In: S. P. Turner & D. Kasler (Eds.), Sociology responds to fascism (pp. 1–14). London: Taylor & Francis. Vaerting, M. (1921). Die Neubegru¨ndung der Psychologie von Mann und Frau. G. Braun’sche Hochschuldr. u. Vlg., Karlsruhe. Vester, M. (2003). Autoritarismus und Klassenzugeho¨rigkeit. In: A. Demirovic (Ed.), Modelle kritischer Gesellschaftstheorie: Traditionen und Perspektiven Kritischer Theorie. Frankfurt: Metzler. Weber, M. (Ed.). (1988). Gesammelte Aufsa¨tze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik (2nd ed., pp. 456–462). Tu¨bingen: C. B. Mohr. Wiggershaus, R. (1986). Die Frankfurter Schule: Geschichte, theoretische Entwicklung, politische Bedeutung. Mu¨nchen: Hansen. Ziege, E.-M. (2003). The Fetish-character of ‘‘Woman’’. Introduction to ‘‘Adorno letter to Fromm on women’’. In: Logos 2.4. Znaniecki, F. (1935). Social actions. New York, NY: Farrar and Rinehart.

CHARISMA AND CRITIQUE: CRITICAL THEORY, AUTHORITY, AND THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL THEOLOGY David Norman Smith ABSTRACT For the Frankfurt School, what most decisively distinguished critical from traditional theory was that critical theorists refused to celebrate the working class uncritically. The early critical theorists accepted the premise that the working class is the most likely agent of social transformation, but unlike orthodox Marxists (and even such mavericks as their forerunner Georg Luka´cs) they did not assume that workers are progressive by nature. In other words, they disputed the metaphysic of the charismatic proletariat, a class ‘‘destined’’ for transcendence and glory. This essay sketches the emergence of this perspective in the early writings of Herbert Marcuse. Initially a partisan of the Luka´scian view, which he spiced with Heideggerian accents, Marcuse broke with transcendentalism when he repudiated existentialism and political theology. He concluded that relying on any kind of charismatic savior, whether a class or a leader, is an abdication of sociological realism and political responsibility. Reaching this conclusion placed Marcuse in agreement with Max Horkheimer, and enabled him to assist Horkheimer in the elaboration of the founding principles of critical theory. The ultimate The Diversity of Social Theories Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 29, 33–56 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-1204(2011)0000029006

33

34

DAVID NORMAN SMITH

results of this collaboration included the formulation of a new critical research agenda, which placed inquiry into the roots of authority on a new foundation. By means of critical inquiry into personal ‘‘authoritarianism,’’ the Frankfurt theorists were able to shed new light on political authority. This remains a seminal contribution and continues to animate a major contemporary research tradition.

On November 4, 1918, just days before the overthrow of the Wittelsbach dynasty in Bavaria, a debate broke out at a public meeting of the Progressive Peoples Party in the Bavarian capital, Munich. Max Weber, speaking as a last-minute replacement for the party leader, argued passionately against the radical and pacifist conclusions that many Bavarians and other Germans were drawing in the waning days of the war. He was dismayed over the naval mutiny in Kiel the day before, and he feared that the revolutionary mood would spread to Munich, where the far left was growing daily more visible and influential. ‘‘Revolution does not lead to peace y And bourgeois society can by no means be changed into a socialistic utopia by a revolution.’’1 As admirable as socialism might be – as an expression of the unworldly messianic love ethic of the Sermon on the Mount – it was nevertheless woefully unequal to the needs of the moment. For ‘‘what will be the results of a revolution? To have the enemy in our country and then a reaction worse than anything that we have lived through. And then the proletariat will have to pay the price.’’2 Only a stable Germany could negotiate a lasting peace, and stability could be ensured only by an ethically responsible politics of patience and moderation. This counsel of caution was received with disdain by radicals in the audience, who included the communist Max Levien and the anarchist Erich Mu¨hsam.3 A few days later these radicals came to power. Backed by workers from the auto, arms, and aviation industries that had sprung up during the war, dissidents led by Kurt Eisner proclaimed a republic on November 7. This republic was balancing unsteadily on a tightrope between insurrection and reaction when Weber returned to Munich in January 1919 to deliver his justly famous lecture ‘‘Politik als Beruf.’’ Invited to speak by the Union of Free Students, Weber plainly assumed that most of his listeners sympathized with Eisner. Noting that Eisner’s close friend and ally Ernst Toller was in the audience, Weber directed most of his critical fire against radical utopianism of the kind that Eisner and Toller upheld.4 He proclaimed as ‘‘fact’’ the decisive claim ‘‘that all ethically

Charisma and Critique

35

oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can be oriented to an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ (Gesinnungsethik) or to an ‘ethic of responsibility’ (Verantwortungsethik).’’ To illustrate this claim, he cites the ‘‘convinced syndicalist, believing in an ethic of ultimate ends’’: You may demonstrate to [him] that his action will result in increasing the opportunities of reaction [and] the oppression of his class, and obstructing its ascent – and you will not make the slightest impression upon him y The believer in an ethic of ultimate ends feels ‘responsible’ only for seeing to it that the flame of pure intentions is not quenched; for example, the flame of protesting against the injustice of the social order. (Weber, 1919/ 1946, pp. 120–121)

For Weber, genuine responsibility entails the recognition that politics is always morally ambiguous. He believes that the ideal of love and the reality of strife are irreconcilably opposed; that, in the Greek tragedy of politics, the ‘‘virtuoso’’ cannot be wholly virtuous. Revolutions, wars, and even civil conflicts carry the ineluctable threat of violence. About this, Weber is stern and analytic: ‘‘Whoever wants to engage in politics at all, and especially in politics as a vocation, has to realize these ethical paradoxes. He must know that he is responsible for what may become of himself under the impact of these paradoxes. I repeat, he lets himself in for the diabolic forces lurking in all violence y’’ (Weber, 1919/1946, pp. 125–126). Weber favored making politics a vocation, but without illusions about preserving moral purity. In this connection he cites Machiavelli, who, ‘‘in a beautiful passage’’ in The History of Florence, ‘‘has one of his heroes praise those citizens who deemed the greatness of their native city higher than the salvation of their souls’’ (Weber, 1919/1946, p. 126). Weber scoffed at those, like Eisner, who ascribed moral purity to revolution. ‘‘If one says ‘the future of socialism’ or ‘international peace’ instead of native city or ‘fatherland’ (which at present may be a dubious value to some), then you face the problem as it now stands. Everything that is striven for through political action operating with violent means and following an ethic of responsibility endangers the ‘salvation of the soul.’’’7 Prophesying a ‘‘polar night’’ of reaction that would frustrate all hopes for reform, including his own, Weber predicted that he and his listeners would have to ‘‘measure up’’ to harsh political realities in the very near future. He challenged his youthful audience directly: ‘‘Now then, ladies and gentlemen, let us debate this matter once more ten years from now y. I wish I could see then what will have become of those of you who now feel yourselves to be genuinely ‘principled’ politicians and who share in the intoxication

36

DAVID NORMAN SMITH signified by this revolution y. Will you be bitter or banausic? Will you simply and dully accept world and occupation? Or will y mystic flight from reality [be your escape]? Only those who soberly resist such temptations and persist in seeking change, despite all obstacles and disappointments, can be said to have a genuine ‘‘calling’’ for politics. (Weber, 1919/1946, p. 128, modified translation)5

Just months before his death in June 1920, Weber wrote to a friend, the Hungarian communist philosopher Georg Luka´cs, with a similar question. Is it ‘‘your ‘calling,’’’ Weber asked, to participate in ill-starred experiments like the abortive Hungarian revolution of 1918? Incalculable risks had been taken; with what result? Socialism, Weber felt, was likely to be discredited ‘‘for the coming 100 years,’’ and Luka´cs, an ‘‘unquestionably valuable’’ intellectual, was in danger of wasting his talents, since ‘‘everything will be reactionary for decades to come.’’6 Luka´cs, in fact, emerged as the most influential radical theorist of the interwar years. Geschichte und Klassenbewusstein (1923/1971) offered a point of departure for a decisively new kind of theory. Yet Luka´cs himself fell victim to precisely the kind of spiritual defeat that Weber had predicted. In 1926, seven years after Weber’s prophetic challenge, Luka´cs went into voluntary exile in the Soviet Union, where he made his peace with Stalin’s bureaucracy. ‘‘We are at a dark crossroads,’’ he told Victor Serge. ‘‘Let us reserve our strength: history will summon us in its time’’ (Serge, 1951/1963, p. 187).7 Recanting his earlier views, Luka´cs retreated to a shallow Stalinist orthodoxy.

CRITICAL THEORY AND THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT Critical theory was born at this dark crossroads. Fascism reigned in Italy, the Weimar Republic was about to give way to National Socialism in Germany, and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia had begun its descent into the Stalinist whirlpool. It was becoming evident that ‘‘class consciousness’’ does not spring fully formed from economic crisis, as many leftists had thought, and that socialist democracy is just as difficult to achieve as Max Weber had believed. Nowhere was this plainer than in Germany, where in 1933 the strongest labor movement in history fell victim to a grotesquely reactionary regime. Democracy in every form seemed alarmingly fragile, too feeble and embattled to resist the dictatorship that Weber had feared.

Charisma and Critique

37

This was the context in which the renowned ‘‘Frankfurt Institute’’ began its odyssey from traditional to critical theory. Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, who jointly forged the idea of critical theory in a series of essays, were steeped in Luka´csian and Weberian ideas from the start, and, like Luka´cs, were drawn into the vortex of radical struggles in this period.8 As a 20-year old, Marcuse was elected to a Soldiers’ Council in a Berlin suburb in November 1918. He sympathized with the Munich revolt and always remained faithful to its memory.9 Like Horkheimer, who was a student in Munich in 1919, Marcuse was influenced by Rosa Luxemburg, the PolishGerman leader of the radical Spartakusbund. He attended meetings addressed by Luxemburg and was moved.10 When Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were killed by death squads in January 1919 – without a murmur from the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD) – Marcuse left the SPD in anger over its ‘‘counterrevolutionary politics.’’11 Luka´cs, who also admired Luxemburg, joined Pollock and other young radicals in a ‘‘Marxist Work Week’’ in 1922 that led, a year later, to the formation of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (see Luka´cs, 1923/1971, pp. 27–45). Founded a decade before Hitler’s triumph, the Institut fu¨r Sozialforschung was initially a bastion of Marxist orthodoxy. In July 1930, however, Horkheimer took responsibility for the Institute as its second director. Under his guidance, the Institute became the source of a new and highly original brand of social theory. It is ironic that, in recent years, critical theory has often been portrayed as an Olympian culture-kritik, presupposing a fashionably postmodern metaphysic. In its origin, and in most of its endeavors, the Institute pursued what Horkheimer called a ‘‘unified,’’ ‘‘interdisciplinary’’ Sozialwissenschaft. For a quarter of a century, Horkheimer and a team of associates (Marcuse, Pollock, Erich Fromm, and Theodor Adorno, among others) carried out multidisciplinary research on an expanding universe of topics from the standpoint of a ‘‘critical’’ neo-Marxism.12 Their goal was to penetrate beneath the surface of society to discern its immanent tendencies and, if possible, its Achilles’ heel. This led them in the direction of a global social theory, in which philosophy and the social sciences were to join hands. The first step on this path was a survey of the Weimar proletariat, initiated by Fromm and Horkheimer in 1929. The results were disturbing. Evidently even many avowed liberals and radicals were susceptible to authoritarian blandishments (for details, see Fromm, 1939/1984). Fascism, it seemed, had roots not just in ‘‘material conditions’’ but also in character structure. ‘‘For the masses would hardly succumb to the brazen wink of untrue propaganda,’’ Adorno wrote, ‘‘if something within them did not

38

DAVID NORMAN SMITH

respond to the rhetoric of sacrifice and the dangerous life.’’ The task of ‘‘unified theory’’ was hence to supplement Marx’s critique of political economy with a critique of political psychology: ‘‘To be able to come to terms with fascism it was, therefore, considered necessary to complete social theory by psychology, and particularly by analytically oriented social psychology’’ (Adorno, 1967, p. 68). Hitler’s rise to power forced the Institut into exile at Columbia University, in friendly proximity to the sociology department of MacIver and Lynd. Herbert Marcuse, who was the first member of the Institute to settle at Columbia, played a major role in formulating the notion of critical theory. In pathbreaking essays on fascism, authority, philosophy, and social theory, Marcuse helped to fashion the unique blend of philosophy and social science that became the Institute’s hallmark. Like Horkheimer (1937/ 1972), who first distinguished traditional from critical theory, Marcuse synthesized elements drawn from Hegel, Marx, Weber, and Dilthey.13 The aim was to produce a ‘‘comprehensive theory’’ in which ‘‘the relative truths’’ of different outlooks and disciplines could be integrated into a unified whole (Horkheimer, 1939, p. 324). Ideally, that is, social theory should be constructive as well as critical. For Horkheimer, the ‘‘traditional theorists’’ of orthodox Marxism fell far short of this ideal. Their fatal error was to assume that revolutionary class consciousness will be ‘‘necessarily generated in the proletariat’’ when circumstances dictate (Horkheimer, 1937/1972, p. 213, emphasis mine). In fact, however, class consciousness is inherently problematic. In most ordinary cases, working people consider capitalist society to be natural and imperishable – and they can turn either left or right under the pressure of economic crisis. Socialists who fail to see this – who serenely await deliverance from the charismatic proletariat – limit themselves to faith and irrelevance, a blend of wishful thinking and watchful waiting. This, in fact, is exactly what traditional theory enshrines as its principle: The intellectual is satisfied to proclaim with reverent admiration the creative strength of the proletariat and finds satisfaction in adapting himself to it and in canonizing it. He fails to see that such an evasion of theoretical effort y and of temporary opposition to the masses (which active theoretical effort on his part might force upon him) only makes the masses blinder and weaker than they need to be. (Horkheimer, 1937/1972, p. 214)

Critical theory can play a constructive role, Horkheimer says, by helping to tip the scales in favor of ‘‘a reasonable organization of society that will meet the needs of the whole community’’ (Horkheimer, 1937/1972, p. 213).

39

Charisma and Critique

Theory ‘‘should be a critical, promotive factor in the development of the masses.’’22

LUKA´CS AND BEYOND Marcuse was reaching similar conclusions when he published his essay On the Critique of Sociology in 1931. As recently as 1928, in his first essay, he had advocated a neo-messianic Marxism of the kind espoused in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstein by Luka´cs (1923/1971). No one had idealized the proletariat with more e´lan than Luka´cs, and Marcuse willingly echoed him. But by 1931, as Nazism began to eclipse socialism, the limits of idealization became plain, and Marcuse soon found it necessary to move decisively beyond Luka´cs. The result was that, by the time of his entry into the Frankfurt Institute in 1932, Marcuse had undergone a striking metamorphosis. His first published essay, written shortly after the appearance of Martin Heidegger’s renowned Sein und Zeit in 1927, was utopian and unsociological, a curious amalgam of Luka´cs and Heidegger. Not long afterwards, however, Marcuse took a far subtler stance in a series of essays, including Zum Problem der Dialektik and Zur Kritik der Soziologie.14 He amplified this stance in his notable but neglected 1932 monograph, Hegels Ontologie und die Grundlegung einer Theorie der Geschichlichkeit, and in a stream of essays on philosophy, culture, and fascism that remain unexcelled to this day as examples of applied critical theory.15 Initially, Marcuse turned to Heidegger in the hope of finding a ground for a Luka´csian view of class consciousness. Thinking he had found an elective affinity between Heideggerian existentialism and Luka´csian Marxism, Marcuse sought to unite the two in a grand synthesis. The influence of Luka´cs is especially plain in Marcuse’s first essay on Heidegger and Marxism, Beitra¨ge zu einer Pha¨nomenologie des Historischen Materialismus.16 Here he begins, as Alfred Schmidt notes, with a radically activist definition of Marxism taken ‘‘verbatim’’ from Luka´cs.17 Marcuse’s ensuing arguments, and his main reasons for turning to Heidegger, are also palpably Luka´csian. Like Luka´cs, Marcuse was acutely aware that the empirical proletariat is seldom if ever ‘‘class conscious’’ in the ideal-typical Marxist sense. But Marcuse and Luka´cs were unwilling to concede that the fate of the working class is strictly circumscribed by its empirical status at any given historical moment. They believed, on the contrary, that the ‘‘mission’’ of the

40

DAVID NORMAN SMITH

proletariat is to function as ‘‘the identical subject–object of history whose praxis will change reality,’’ and that the empirical limitations of working class consciousness will be transcended as history unfolds (Luka´cs, 1923/ 1971, p. 197, cf. pp. 149, 189, 206).18 The proletariat, he adds, ‘‘represents y true reality, namely the tendencies of history awakening into consciousness’’ (Luka´cs, 1923/1971, p. 197). In a similar spirit, Marcuse writes that the proletariat is destined to be ‘‘the subject of history y when it grasps and recognizes itself as the object of history y’’ (Marcuse, 1928/1969, p. 10).19 And both writers invoke the early Marx by quoting a seminal passage from The Holy Family: It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. (1845/1975, p. 37)20

For Luka´cs in 1923 and Marcuse in 1928, the idealized ‘‘proletariat’’ was an irresistible force that would be driven to remake society by virtue of its very historical ‘‘Being.’’ No matter how self-effacing or illiberal the proletariat might be empirically, its ‘‘mission’’ was to coalesce into a ‘‘class for-itself,’’ with emancipation from class rule as its ultimate tendency.21 Luka´cs and Marcuse understood that this claim rested on a distinctive philosophy of history. Framing the issue in this way, as Luka´cs remarked, ‘‘throws an entirely new light on the problem of reality. If, in Hegel’s terms, Becoming now appears as the truth of Being, y then y the developing tendencies of history constitute a higher reality than the empirical ‘facts’’’ (Luka´cs, 1923/1971, p. 181). This was also the point of Marcuse’s claim in 1928 that Marxism ‘‘culminates in the discovery of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) as the basic parameter of human existence y’’ (Marcuse, 1928/1969, p. 4).22 For Marcuse, Heidegger’s decisive advance is ‘‘the demonstration of historicity as the fundamental determination of existence.’’23 But Marcuse departs from Heidegger to sound a note of his own: ‘‘Human freedom is realized by grasping its own necessity, and through willing its own immediate historical existence, which, in revolutionary historical situations, becomes radical action’’ (Marcuse, 1928/1969, p. 12, italics mine). The italicized clause is unique to Marcuse. By treating the proletariat rather than the individual as the ‘‘fateful subject’’ of history, Marcuse gives Heidegger’s philosophy a Luka´csian spin. The ‘‘ultimate decision’’ of the workers will be not only a ‘‘moment of vision’’ (Augenblick) in the Kierkegaardian sense adapted by Heidegger, but a moment of revolutionary action as well. ‘‘In fact, the ultimate decision arises precisely from the

Charisma and Critique

41

recognition of historicity. This decision consists in the struggle for recognized necessity, even against one’s actual traditional existence’’ (Marcuse, 1928/1969, p. 24). For Marcuse, that is, the proletariat is forced by its very historicity to overcome the ‘‘necessary decadence’’ of bourgeois society (Marcuse, 1928/1969, p. 33). Authenticity and resolve will be called into Being by history, springing from the very estrangement that now mires workers in inauthenticity and irresolution. Reification, in short, will spur its own negation, just as capitalism breeds its own gravediggers. This is not merely radical optimism, but metaphysical utopianism. The proletariat, in this vision, is charismatically transcendent. This utopianism Marcuse would soon outgrow.

FROM PROPHECY TO CRITIQUE Marcuse’s progress beyond messianism is already shown by his essay On the Problem of the Dialectic (1930–1931). Here, amid an otherwise sharp critique of a treatise by Siegfried Marck, Marcuse pauses to compliment the author on his account of Luka´cs. In Marck’s hands, Luka´cs is ‘‘scrutinized and appreciated in [his] essential significance for the development of Marxism, which cannot be overestimated’’ (Marcuse, 1930–1931/1976, p. 24).24 While Marck rightly rejects ‘‘primitive’’ criticisms of Luka´cs, he advances a critique of his own that, Marcuse says, ‘‘identifies the weak point in Luka´cs’ dialectic: the concept of ‘correct class consciousness’. This notion, like the conception of class consciousness in general, is a violation of the dimension of historicity, a construction ‘outside’ of events from which an artificially abstract connection with history must be produced’’ (Marcuse, 1930–1931/1976, p. 24, modified translation; see Marck, 1929, p. 122ff.). This criticism of Luka´cs is notable in several respects. To start, by accepting Marck’s charge that the Luka´csian imputation of predestined ‘‘true consciousness’’ to a future proletariat is an act of faith, Marcuse implicitly rejects his own earlier perspective. His earlier view, we saw, had been founded on precisely the Luka´scian notion that class consciousness is a kind of deus ex machina, a superempirical gift of history, springing full blown into existence as an expression of ‘‘necessity.’’ Nor could Marcuse have been unaware that Marck had been one of the most visible early critics of Geschichte und Klassenbewusstein (see Marck, 1924). Siding with Marck against Luka´cs on the crucial issue of class consciousness was not a small

42

DAVID NORMAN SMITH

step, substantively or symbolically. Marcuse took a second step away from pseudohistorical prophecy as well, agreeing that Heidegger was also an unreliable guide to ‘‘history and historicity’’ (Marcuse, 1928/1969, pp. 23–24). Soon after, he honed this criticism in a remarkable essay (1934/1988) that counts as one of the first genuine expressions of mature critical theory. In a taut sketch of the reigning German ‘‘antiliberalism,’’ Marcuse probed the so-called political existentialism of Carl Schmitt and his epigones Wolff, Ko¨llreutter, and others (Marcuse, 1928/1969, p. 270, no. 7).25 The foundation of this ‘‘decisive’’ new trend in antiliberalism, he held, could be found in existential philosophy, which, in Heidegger’s hands, had once seemed to promise a truly historical vision. Heidegger had defined his mission as ‘‘regaining the full concretion of the historical subject in opposition to the abstract ‘logical’ subject of rational idealism, that is, eliminating the domination, unshaken from Descartes to Husserl, of the ego cogito.’’ In the proposed new existentialism, the contemplative subject of classical philosophy would yield to the concerned, acting ego, the subject of praxis: ‘‘Heidegger’s position before his Sein und Zeit was philosophy’s furthest advance in this direction’’ (Marcuse, 1934/1988, pp. 31, 32).26 Yet Heidegger’s focus on the ‘‘concretion’’ of the subject remained strictly abstract. Ultimately, for both political and philosophical reasons, he was ‘‘content to talk of the nation’s ‘link with destiny,’ of the ‘heritage’ that each individual has to adopt, and of the community of the ‘generation,’ while the other dimensions of facticity were treated under such categories as ‘they’ (das Man), or ‘idle talk’ (das Gerede), and relegated in this way to ‘inauthentic’ existence.’’ Philosophy did not proceed to inquire into the nature of this heritage, into the people’s mode of being, or into the real powers and forces that are history. It thus renounced every possibility of comprehending the facticity of historical situations and distinguishing between them. Instead, something like a new anthropology gradually began to crystallize, absorbing in an ever more superficial way the fertile discoveries of existential analysis. This anthropology then took on the mission of furnishing a philosophical foundation for the ideal of man projected by heroic realism. (Marcuse, 1934/1988, p. 32)27

In lieu of genuine historical inquiry, Heidegger & Co. became apologists for an ahistorical creed. They defended a ‘‘heroic realist’’ view of authentic humanity as a featureless mass ‘‘whose existence is fulfilled in unquestioning sacrifices and unconditional acts of devotion, whose ethic is poverty and all of whose worldly goods have been melted down into service and discipline’’ (Marcuse, 1934/1988, p. 30). The idealized worker–warrior of this vision is

Charisma and Critique

43

a mixture of ‘‘traits from the age of the Vikings, German mysticism, the Renaissance, and the Prussian military: the heroic man, bound to the forces of blood and soil – the man who travels through heaven and hell, who does not reason why, but goes into action to do and die, sacrificing himself not for any purpose, but in humble obedience to the dark forces that nourish him.’’ Above the legions of these resolute, ascetic ‘‘mass-men’’ there towers a spiritual nobility whose gift is mastery, not service. The ideal of the hero widened, as Marcuse wrote, ‘‘to the vision of the charismatic leader whose leadership does not need to be justified on the basis of his aims, but whose mere appearance is already his ‘proof,’ to be accepted as an undeserved gift of grace. With many modifications y this archetype y can be found among the ideas of the Stefan George circle, of Mo¨ller van den Bruck, Sombart, Scheler, Hielscher, Ju¨nger, and others’’ (Marcuse, 1934/1988, p. 4).28 The ultimate failure of existentialism, in short, can be traced to Heidegger’s retreat from history to a charismatic–heroic worldview. Instead of seriously seeking to link history to will and consciousness, the existentialists turned to a political theology of apostle and disciple, Fu¨hrer and follower. Critical reason gave way to charismatic faith. The notion of charisma, which anchors Marcuse’s argument at this point, was most often associated in this period not with Max Weber, as present-day readers are likely to assume, but with Stefan George’s literary–political circle.29 George first won renown in the 1890s, and by the time of his death in 1933 he had been idolized by German readers for decades. With Rilke and Hofmannsthal he formed a kind of ple`iade of modern German poets.30 But George was an imperious and didactic antimodernist as well as a poet. After an early filiation with the ‘‘Cosmic Circle’’ of Klages and Schuler, George formed his own cult-like personal following, later widely known as the George-Kreis. This circle (which included the eminent writers Gundolf, Wolters, and Bertram) published a famed journal, the Bla¨tter fu¨r die Kunst, and many books.31 These publications were a remarkably fertile source of neo-fascist ideas and symbols. Adopting the swastika as their emblem and reviving the call for a ‘‘Third Reich,’’ the Georgianer were among the first to forge the rhetorical dichotomy of Fu¨hrer and follower, of heroism and sacrifice, and of domination and duty (Herrschaft und Dienst).32 George’s ideal follower, as Neumann explained, ‘‘must transform himself, not the world. He should put his trust in faith instead of reason, in blood rather than intellect, in nature and not society.’’33 And George’s intimates were, he said: ‘‘y to be a new ‘Elite,’ destined to influence and lead in all branches of life. George gave to this new ‘nobility’ precept and promise, dogma, and rites of paganism in his volumes

44

DAVID NORMAN SMITH Der Stern des Bundes (1914) and Das Neue Reich (1928) y. [In this vision], life is ruling or serving, achieving greatness or disintegration – nothing more.’’34

George went into voluntary exile in Switzerland shortly before his death in late 1933, perhaps alienated by Hitler’s antisemitism.35 Gundolf and Wolters had died shortly before. But the George-Kreis had affirmed a mystical elitism for decades. Neumann later said that Marcuse’s critique of charismatic–heroic realism was aimed mainly at the George circle.36 It clearly had wider relevance as well, since the most salient fact about the Georgianer teaching, for Marcuse, was that it prefigured Nazi charismatism. This anticipatory nature is well explained by Aurel Kolnai who, like Marcuse, studied in Freiburg in the late 1920s (with Husserl) and later wrote a major critique of Nazi ideology.37 Kolnai cited an initiate who said that the George circle ‘‘sets up the ideal of the Hero engendering the people; we of the age of heroism and corporative comradeship comprehend only the molding of forces, the establishment of values and forms which issue from the Mighty One, the Ruler, and irradiate over the people.’’ All democratic dialogue and planning are futile, since ‘‘it is not Reason, but Love, Eros and Charisma’’ that move society forward (Drahn, 1925, as translated in Kolnai, 1938, p. 40; cf. p. 310).38 The premise is that the community’s ‘‘mainstay’’ must be a unique ruler. ‘‘The Ruler (Herrscher) is invested with ‘divine sacredness’ y He is the one legitimate anointed, the vessel of God, ‘God’s proper instrument.’’’39 As another George devote´e explained, ‘‘God is not manifest in the too-many, but only in the fully qualified, creative personality,’’ the world-changing ‘‘Hero, Leader and Prophet,’’ who serves, in Kolnai’s paraphrase, as ‘‘the receptacle of the divine gift of grace y’’ (Kohlmeyer, 1930, as paraphrased by Kolnai, 1938, pp. 40–41, cf. p. 185). George also ‘‘reveres the people,’’ Gundolf explains, ‘‘but only as the dark womb of growth, not as a source of public opinion’’ (Gundolf, 1920, as cited by Kolnai, 1938, p. 39). The Fu¨hrer and the elite, ‘‘destined to become the ‘masters of the world,’ serve the ‘Volkheit’ y without in the least taking into account the individual wishes and tribulations of those who are not among the chosen y’’ (Sommerfield, 1938, p. xxi).40 This worldview has roots and branches. Its branches stretch into the realm of Nazi state theory.41 Here, Marcuse says, ‘‘authoritarian leadership’’ justifies itself not legally, but on the basis of the claim to enjoy ‘‘an irrational, ‘metaphysical’ power’’ – a charismatic or wonder-working power that ‘‘legitimates’’ its owner on irrational grounds. On this Marcuse cites

Charisma and Critique

45

Ernst Forsthoff, whose Der totale Staat (1933) was emerging as a canonical text of Nazi jurisprudence.42 Forsthoff held that the authoritarian Fu¨hrerstaat must be justified irrationally: ‘‘As a principle of state order, the distinction between leaders and led can be made only metaphysically (Marcuse, 1934/1988, p. 37, citing E. Forsthoff, 1933, p. 31).’’43 The legitimacy of the total-state is founded, not on popular will, but on metaphysical faith. ‘‘A government that governs only because it has a mandate from the folk is not an authoritarian government,’’ he insists. On the contrary, real authority, total authority, ‘‘is possible only if [the ruler’s mandate] comes from transcendence y’’ (Marcuse, 1934/1988, p. 37, citing E. Forsthoff, 1933, p. 30). And the result of this mandate from heaven is an elite that is literally ‘‘lifted out’’ (herausgehoben) of the people. This elite of Herrenmenschen differs from the masses not merely by virtue of titles and insignia, but ‘‘veritably,’’ as a charismatically endowed ‘‘Order of the Elect’’ whose power is not only transcendental but also, as a result, sacred and inviolable, hence Forsthoff’s campaign ‘‘against liberty as a postulate of the human spirit (E. Forsthoff, 1933, cited and paraphrased by Kolnai, 1938, pp. 107, 164).’’ Marcuse denies that this claim is merely figurative. ‘‘The word ‘transcendence’ should be taken seriously here. The foundation of authority lies beyond all social facticity, so that it does not depend on it for validation. Above all, it surpasses the ‘peoples’ factual situation and power of comprehension.’’ He returns to Forsthoff: ‘‘Authority presupposes a status that is valid over against the folk because the folk does not confer it but acknowledges it’’ (Marcuse, 1934/1988, pp. 37–38, citing E. Forsthoff, 1933, p. 30).44 To the uninitiated this claim may seem arbitrary or idiosyncratic, but it is, in fact, drawn from a well-established tradition – the theology of grace associated with St. Paul, Martin Luther, and Rudolf Sohm (from whom Max Weber borrowed the category of charisma; see Weber, 1922/ 1978, p. 1112.45 When Forsthoff defines the ‘‘recognition’’ or ‘‘acknowledgement’’ of charismatic power as the elementary duty of the Volk, and when he says that the individual is ‘‘totally bound by duty’’ (totale Inpflichtnahme), he is speaking the language of Paul and Sohm both literally and figuratively. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that, besides editing a Festschrift for Carl Schmitt, Forsthoff also edited an Archiv fu¨r evangelischen Kirchenrecht, for the roots of the charismatic worldview lie in evangelical theology as much as in Schmittian political theology. This worldview may be more or less ‘‘secularized’’ but it remains theological to the extent that it rests on faith in the divine power of a chosen ruler or elect.46

46

DAVID NORMAN SMITH

Transcendental power has been discussed under many rubrics, but the most influential analyses have been couched in terms drawn from ancient and non-Western languages – notably the Melanesian mana and the Greek charisma, or gift of grace, which Weber equates with mana (Weber, 1922/ 1978, p. 399). Kolnai, who sought to synthesize Freud and Durkheim in an early book, invokes the notion of mana (which both Freud and Durkheim also used) to classify the power imputed to the Fu¨hrer. He sees this as the divinity of the tribal chieftain writ large: ‘‘In the typical primitive ‘tribe’ there is but one social reality, but one level of social environment, imbued with a psychical fluid [i.e., mana] which is crystallized, so to speak, in the person of the ruler’’ (Kolnai, 1938, p. 31; cf. Kolnai, 1921). Not long before this, the liberal theologian Kurt Leese had made a similar point, positing an inner bond between the Nazi power-ideal (Machtbegriff) and the mana concept (Manavorstellung) that, he says, has been widely expressed in synonymous terms such as the Lakota ‘‘wakan’’ and the Iroquois ‘‘orenda’’ (Leese, 1934, p. 44).47 Neumann characterized authority in Nazi Germany in similar terms. Here, he said: Supreme leadership is not an institution regulated by rules and precedents, or an office with delegated authority, but the investiture of power in one person, Adolf Hitler. The justification of this principle is charismatic: it rests on the assertion that the Leader is endowed with qualities lacking in ordinary mortals. Superhuman qualities emanate from him and pervade the state, party, and people. (Neumann, 1944, p. 85)

The analytic virtue of this language is that, thanks to Pauline tradition, the word ‘‘charisma’’ had acquired a more subtle meaning than more routine Manavorstellungen. Rudolf Sohm is important in this context, since it was Sohm who most radically contrasted charisma with law and tradition. Neumann drew attention to this fact when he observed that the intellectual roots of charismatic existentialism lay not only in Georgianer prophecies but also in the work of ‘‘the late Rudolf Sohm,’’ whose vast 1892 treatise on church law was the leading stimulus to the 20th-century debate over charisma – a category that had been almost wholly eclipsed in the rationalist theology of Strauss, Ritschl, and Harnack: ‘‘According to Sohm, the early Church organization was not legal but charismatic y, handed down by God,’’ Neumann said. ‘‘There was no abstract equality within it, only an ordering of superiority and inferiority, according to how God distributed his gifts y’’ (Neumann, 1944, p. 486). Sohm was indeed antidemocratic (Sohm, 1887/1958, p. 159). He opposed law not because it restricts popular sovereignty – as some assume – but as a

Charisma and Critique

47

result of popular sovereignty. ‘‘The freedom of the Christian assembly,’’ he noted, ‘‘is commonly regarded as an expression of the ideal of popular sovereignty and is supposed to imply a democratic organization. This conception is radically at fault, for the assembly claimed no rights of selfgovernment, rather it recognized its subjection in all things to the will and rule of God y’’ (Sohm, 1892/1970, as paraphrased by Lowrie, 1904, p. 252).48 He asks pointedly: Did the apostle or prophet act in the name of the Church or in virtue of an authority which he had received from some congregation? No, clearly not. Whatever he did, he did in God’s name, in virtue of an authority which was God-given, resident in his personal charisma y. The leadership of the Ecclesia comes from above, through the medium of the individual who is personally endowed by God. The government of Christendom is from first to last authoritative, monarchical y (Sohm, 1892/1970, as paraphrased by Lowrie, 1904, p. 252)49

This ‘‘monarchy’’ is not a human product: ‘‘the only law y is God’s will, which is made known through apostles, prophets, and teachers; while the people have only to discern and accept’’ (Sohm, 1892/1970, as paraphrased by Lowrie, 1904, p. 101). For believers, there can be no legal election, ‘‘but only an election by God y.’’ Hence the conduct of the Christian assembly cannot be determined by the assembly itself in the exercise of self-government, but only by the way of teaching, which declares what is the will of God y The gift of teaching is the gift of rulership, a gift which empowers its possessor to conduct the government y (Sohm, 1892/1970, as paraphrased by Lowrie, 1904, pp. 233–237, translation modified)

Many Nazi ideologues held similar views. Minister of Justice Hans Frank made this clear in 1935: Formerly, we were in the habit of saying: this is right or wrong; today, we must put the question accordingly: What would the Fu¨hrer say? This attitude towards the Fu¨hrer [is] the categorical imperative to which German life must henceforward conform. We are under the great obligation of recognizing as a holy work of our Volksgeist the laws signed by Adolf Hitler’s name. Hitler has received his authority from God. Thus he is a champion, sent by God, for German Right in the world. (Hans Frank, as cited by Kolnai, 1938, p. 29)50

Even more extreme was the evangelical minister Heinrich Forsthoff, whose ‘‘authoritarian faith’’ extended this outlook to all of reality. As a ‘‘counter-concept to reason,’’ Forsthoff put forward a concept of existence that united aspects of the thinking of Heidegger, Gogarten, Schmitt, and others. ‘‘Reality does not admit of knowledge,’’ he held, ‘‘only of acknowledgement.’’51 Reason and freedom are pernicious ‘‘illusions’’

48

DAVID NORMAN SMITH

springing from the banal hubris of humanism. The only ‘‘authentic selfcultivation’’ (echte Bildung) is to be found in the realm of the existential ‘‘decision.’’ Not only Hitler but also all of revealed reality is to be ‘‘acknowledged’’ and accepted (H. Forsthoff, 1933, pp. 125, 143). The real, in other words, is the irrational – a sacred realm, to which we are duty-bound to submit. For Marcuse, this is a ‘‘classical’’ formulation, in which ‘‘irrationalist theory arrives at the extreme antipode of all rational thought y. Today the irrationalist theory of society is as essentially uncritical as the rationalist theory is critical y’’ (Marcuse, 1934/1988, p. 16).52

CRITICAL THEORY AND AUTHORITARIANISM Submission to authority – as a duty and a principle – is the substance of what Marcuse’s close associates in the early 1930s (Erich Fromm foremost among them) called authoritarianism. Initially intended as a sociological equivalent for the psychoanalytic notion of sadomasochism, the notion of authoritarianism was intended to encapsulate what Fromm, Marcuse, and their Frankfurt cothinkers saw as the unity of violence and obedience, aggressiveness and submissiveness, in the character structure of those who ardently follow authoritarian leaders. What Marcuse called the ‘‘receptive heteronomy’’ of the authoritarian follower (Marcuse, 1934/1988, p. 63) is conjoined with a wish to dominate or destroy moral and Volkish outsiders. The principle that gives this duality its psychic unity is morbid exaltation of the ‘‘leader,’’ whose supremacy is construed as simultaneously a call to obedience and a sanction for avenging violence. The originality of this approach lies in the fact that it grounds the authority of leaders – forged and sealed by the ‘‘recognition’’ of followers – in the character trends that incline people to follow in the first place. Why do some people follow mad Gesinnungsethiker who scorn ethics of responsibility, while others hesitate and still others resist? Why are some people drawn to leaders whose motives are venal or vindictive? Why do others embrace democratic norms? Weber’s political typology presupposed questions of this kind, but it was the unique merit of the Frankfurt School to bring character directly into the picture. People who differ in character will respond differently to the claims that politicians offer to win public recognition. Some claims (Volkish, punitive, mystical, fundamentalist) attract people whose tendencies are predominantly authoritarian, but the same claims repel people with

Charisma and Critique

49

democratic impulses, while those with mixed feelings (often, the large majority) are likely to be ambivalent. Sociologically, when authoritarian tendencies prevail, politicians thrive by catering to authoritarian prejudices, either expediently or sincerely; in mixed situations, which are now very common, they succeed best when they learn the virtues of double talk, tilting now one way, now the other (relying on the ever-shifting sands of public opinion). The first in-depth inquiry into authoritarianism was reported in a trio of articles contributed by Fromm, Marcuse, and Horkheimer to the great collective work Studien u¨ber Autorita¨t und Familie in 1936. Subsequent work, spread over the next two decades, resulted in a series of massive and fundamental studies, several of which were directed by Theodor Adorno and Friedrich Pollock, both of whom (like Fromm and Marcuse in the 1930s) played key roles in Horkheimer’s inner circle. One such study, The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, Sanford, Frenkel-Brunswik, & Levinson, 1950), put the concept of authoritarianism on the map, sparking a wave of research that dominated social psychology well into the 1960s. Other studies, which explored working class antisemitism and authoritarianism in the wartime United States and in postwar Germany, deepened the inquiry (see Adorno, 2010; Pollock et al., 2010; Smith, 2009; Worrell, 2008). The association between personal aggressiveness and submissiveness was firmly established. Indeed, few social-scientific results have proven equally robust. In the 1990s, research into authoritarianism revived and deepened globally, yielding a treasure trove of new and familiar findings.53 We know that authority and authority fetishism, charisma and character, remain entwined in many ways (see, e.g., Smith, 2006). It has been established that authoritarianism subdivides into two primary forms: one punitive and moralistic, and the other amoral and opportunistic (see Sidanius and Pratto, 2001). Shifts in authoritarianism have been shown to result from education, threat perceptions, and other factors (see Jost, 2006 and the whole burgeoning ‘‘terror management’’ literature). Curiously, though, the impetus of most recent work in this field has been neither theoretical nor critical. The keenest insights of the Frankfurt tradition lie fallow beside the harvest of data. Society teems with new examples of charismatic authority and authoritarian violence and obedience, yet scholars show surprisingly little interest in the interpenetration or parallelism of these phenomena. To this day, many gifted specialists remain unclear about the essential differences between critical theory and political theology, or between Max Weber and Rudolf Sohm. That must change, if our cornucopia of new knowledge is to yield new insight.

50

DAVID NORMAN SMITH

CONCLUSION The originality and lasting value of critical theory is that it takes both sides of the dialectic seriously. Leaders and followers, autonomy and necessity, the moment and historical movement, and change and ‘‘facticity’’ – all are given due weight. Although, at the start of his career, Marcuse held that people are carried along by waves of necessity, he soon realized that history, unlike nature, is a realm in which freedom and necessity are inextricably entwined. ‘‘There can be no blind necessity,’’ as he declared in 1941, ‘‘in tendencies that terminate in a free and self-conscious society’’ (Marcuse, 1941/1960, p. 318).54 A classless society is ‘‘necessary’’ only to the extent that working people consider it necessary and act accordingly. This returns us to our starting point. Weber in 1919 was harshly critical of the utopian radicals who thought that moral perfection could be conjured into reality by acts of will, without appreciating the limits imposed by history. They seemed unequal to the present: ‘‘In nine cases out of ten’’ the radical utopians seemed to ‘‘intoxicate themselves with romantic sensations’’: From a human point of view this is not very interesting to me, nor does it move me profoundly. However, it is immensely moving when a mature man – no matter whether old or young in years – is aware of a responsibility for the consequences of his conduct and really feels such responsibility with his heart and soul. He then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere he reaches the point where he says: ‘Here I stand; I can do no other.’ That is something genuinely human and moving. (Weber, 1919/1946, p. 127)

This is where the critical theorists re-enter the scene. Like Toller and Eisner, they sought a radical break from class and oppression. But they saw that the Gesinnungsethiker had been naı¨ ve. Luka´cs was wrong to entrust the future to ‘‘the identical subject–object of history,’’ just as Heidegger was wrong to depend on the ‘‘historicity’’ of Being. Like his fellow critical theorists, Marcuse thus refused to ‘‘canonize’’ history or the proletariat. Horkheimer rebuked the blinkered Marxist who ‘‘fails to see that y an evasion y of temporary opposition to the masses (which active theoretical effort on his part might force on him) only makes the masses blinder and weaker than they need to be.’’ Neither workers nor their leaders should be romanticized in Luka´csian fashion. Freedom and reason are by no means guaranteed in actual history. Subject to the tugs and pulls of real forces, the oppressed may feel deep ambivalence about freedom, and even reject it. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that freedom is a vain hope, an unrealizable utopia. It was the genius of the Frankfurt School to turn radical hope into

51

Charisma and Critique

an empirical question. They took the colossal defeat inflicted by Nazism as a challenge. While accepting the magnitude of the historical problem of freedom, they refused to accept defeat. ‘‘Only he has the calling for politics,’’ as Weber said, ‘‘who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say ‘In spite of all!’ has the calling for politics’’ (Weber, 1919/1946, p. 128).

NOTES 1. See Weber (1926/1975, p. 627) for an eloquent account of this speech. 2. Cited by Mommsen (1959/1984, p. 288) from the Mu¨nchener Neueste Nachricthen (November 5, 1918). 3. So says Rilke (1927, p. 207). 4. See Dahlmann (1987, p. 373). Toller, who was Weber’s friend, was a budding playwright of idealistic temperament. In March 1919, shortly after Eisner had been assassinated by a right-wing aristocrat, Toller succeeded him as chair of the Independent Socialist Party of Munich. On April 8, Toller was elected head of the Revolutionary Central Committee. Though an ardent pacifist, Toller authorized the use of force to repel counterrevolutionary troops. In July 1919, after the defeat of the Soviet Republic, Toller was sentenced to five years in prison. Weber spoke on his behalf at the trial. 5. The ‘‘banausic,’’ as Burckhardt had argued in his cultural history of Greece (1898–1902), is the antithesis of the heroic, and, as such, it was the moral ideal of Periclean democracy, ‘‘which, after the brightest morning, brought to the Hellenes the gloomiest night.’’ See Burckhardt (1898–1902/1963, p. 25). 6. ‘‘Most esteemed friend, of course we are separated by our political views!’’ Weber in Luka´cs (1986, pp. 281–282). 7. A few years later Serge ran into Luka´cs on a Moscow street. ‘‘He was then working at the Marx-Engels Institute; his books were being suppressed, and he lived bravely in the general fear. Although he was fairly well-disposed to me, he did not care to shake my hand in a public place, since I was expelled and a known Oppositionist. He enjoyed a physical survival, and wrote short, spiritless articles in Comintern journals’’ (ibid., p. 188). 8. See Horkheimer (1937/1972) for the original formulation of this idea; cf. Marcuse (1937/1988). 9. According to Katz (1982, p. 31), Marcuse regarded Eisner’s political movement ‘‘with admiration and always considered it to have represented one of the most progressive tendencies of the German revolution.’’ 10. According to Kellner (1984, pp. 404–405), ‘‘Marcuse told me [in 1978] that Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of revolution and the events of the Russian and German Revolutions decisively influenced his early concept of revolution y.’’ 11. See the interview with Marcuse (1967, p. 68) in the volume edited by Hansmartin Kuhn and Horst Kurnitzky.

52

DAVID NORMAN SMITH

12. For further data on this multidisciplinary effort, see Jay (1973), Dubiel (1985), and Kellner (1989). 13. Weber and Marx are the main influences on Marcuse’s essays on fascism (1934/1988) and authority (1936/1983). 14. Zur Kritik der Soziologie appeared in English for the first time in MidAmerican Review of Sociology, 16(2), 1992. 15. See Marcuse (1988, pp. 1–200) for his early contributions to critical theory. 16. This essay appeared in Philosophische Hefte, 1(1), 45–68, July 1928, Berlin. See Telos, 4, 1969, for a translation. 17. Schmidt (1968/1988, p. 64, no. 8) notes the close parallel between Marcuse and Luka´cs on Marxist method. 18. Note that, here, ‘‘proletariat’’ and ‘‘working class’’ are used as synonyms. 19. Many signs of Marcuse’s loyalty to Luka´cs are plainly present elsewhere in this text. 20. Luka´cs used this passage as the motto of an essay (1920/1971, p. 46). Marcuse (1928/1969, p. 10) cites the same passage to justify the claim that for Marx the proletariat is ‘‘the universal class.’’ 21. Marcuse says this repeatedly. ‘‘Only what must be done necessarily can be done radically, and only in knowledge can one become certain of necessity. In this historical situation, the class is the determining historical unity, and the recognition of the specific socio-historical necessity is the achievement of ‘class consciousness’. With class-consciousness, the chosen class matures to become the agency for historical action.’’ See Marcuse (1928/1969, p. 11). 22. I will often amend the translation of this text quite extensively; cf. Marcuse (1978). 23. Marcuse (1928/1969, p. 15); translation modified, as per Marcuse’s original (1978, p. 361). 24. As Kellner points out (1984, p. 388, fn. 20), the original translation of this passage erroneously inverted Marcuse’s point here. 25. See, for example, Wolff (1933) and Ko¨llreutter (1934). 26. Heidegger was, of course, not the only well-known existentialist in this period. 27. I have slightly modified the translation. 28. On the authors cited here, see especially – and still – Kolnai (1938). 29. Most scholars know ‘‘charismatic authority’’ in connection with Weber’s typology of legitimate domination. The global fame of Weber’s work, however, is primarily a postwar phenomenon, dating mainly from the translations and discussions by Gerth, Parsons, Bendix, and others. When Hitler first triumphed, only a few writers were conversant enough with Weber’s ideas to apply Weberian terms to the events of the day. See, for example, Kohn (1939, p. 85) and the writers cited by Fraenkel (1941, p. 206). 30. On George’s literary career, see Goldschmidt (1989) and (above all) Adorno (1967/1990). 31. George’s followers were also responsible for reviving the vogue of such major German literary figures as Kleist and Ho¨lderlin. 32. The idea of the Third Reich was taken from the medieval mystic Joachim of Floris, for whom ‘‘The reign of the Father is over; that of the Son is passing; that of the Holy Ghost is still to come’’ (Rosenfeld, 1940, p. 583). Herrschaft und Dienst was

Charisma and Critique

53

the title of a booklet by the eminent George disciple Friedrich Wolters, which first appeared in 1909 and was later republished on many occasions. 33. Neumann (1944, p. 133), who avows his debt to Marcuse’s ‘‘excellent analysis of this aspect of George’s philosophy (p. 490, no. 8).’’ 34. See Martin Sommerfield (1938, p. xxi) 35. Two of George’s acolytes were Jews: Karl Wolfskehl, with whom George went into exile, and Friedrich Gundolf. 36. Neumann was very close to Marcuse. Behemoth (1944), his great work on ‘‘the structure and practice of National Socialism,’’ is openly indebted to Marcuse’s great essay for many of its main ideas. 37. ‘‘It is impossible,’’ Kolnai wrote (1938, p. 38), ‘‘even for one fully conversant with the sociology of those national and class-war conditions which gave birth to fascist movements to master the philosophical substructure of National Socialism without studying the ideas of the poet Stefan George and his numerous followers.’’ 38. It was, quite consistently, a basic precept of the George circle that visionary Herrenmenschen should seek illumination rather than ‘‘orgies of Ratio.’’ 39. This is Kolnai’s paraphrase (1938, p. 40) of Drahn (1925). 40. In some ways, George was remote from the spirit of National Socialism. Even his most authoritarian writing was suffused with a rarefied hauteur distant from the gutter style of Hitler’s demagoguery. Yet George never disavowed the messianic nationalism put forward in his name by Wolters and others. It was in this spirit that one of George’s disciples, Ernst Bertram, published an apologia for the Nazi suppression of free speech under the slogan, ‘‘The most genuine freedom is a holy imprisonment of the heart’’ (cited by Kaufmann, 1959, p. 271). 41. ‘‘The kinship of this heroic figure with National Socialist ideas is obvious’’ (Neumann, 1944, p. 133). Adorno, who sees an inner link between exaltation of ‘‘essence’’ and George’s ‘‘agitatory cult of primordial powers,’’ says this cult not only prefigured Nazism but also offered it a fig leaf. George and other ‘‘mythologists’’ of the primordial ‘‘y heralded the sell-out of allegedly primal words like ‘death,’ ‘inwardness’ and ‘authenticity’ which later was consummated by the Third Reich’’ (Adorno, 1967/1990, p. 206, no. 17). 42. Bracher (1970, pp. 340–341) cites Forsthoff’s book as a primary locus of the view that ‘‘state-military and political-charismatic leader ideas’’ are indivisibly linked. 43. The notes credit this and other citations to ‘‘H. Forsthoff.’’ This is wrong but understandable, since in several places Marcuse does, in fact, cite a tract by the antihumanist theologian Heinrich Forsthoff. That this tract appeared, like Ernst Forsthoff’s study, in 1933, only compounds the confusion. 44. Marcuse can only marvel: ‘‘Acknowledgement is the foundation of authority: a truly ‘existential’ proof!’’ 45. On Weber’s debt to Sohm, see Smith (1998). 46. Marcuse and Kolnai agree that existentialism is a ‘‘secularized theological’’ conception of history and society. Marcuse says precisely this (1934/1988, p. 35) with a reference to Heidegger’s speech as the National Socialist rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933, while Kolnai calls Heidegger’s philosophy ‘‘a sort of atheistic Lutheranism’’ (1938, p. 69) – a point he amplifies elsewhere.

54

DAVID NORMAN SMITH

47. Although Leese cites ‘‘E. Mogt’’ here, his statement runs parallel to Durkheim (1912/1965, Book 2 chapters 6 and 7). 48. For an example of the erroneous view that Sohm was a libertarian, see Harnack (1910). 49. As Adams (1958, p. xii) observes, for Sohm ‘‘the government of the church was not a democracy, rule by the people; it was a pneumatocracy, response to Spirit.’’ 50. Frank later served as Governor-General of Poland and was one of the principal defendants at the war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg. 51. ‘‘Die Wirklichkeit la¨sst sich nicht erkennen; sie la¨sst sich nur anerkennen’’ (H. Forsthoff, 1933, p. 25, cited by Marcuse 1934/1988, p. 16). The phrases ‘‘authoritarian faith’’ and ‘‘counter-concept of reason’’ are drawn from Marcuse’s review of H. Forsthoff (1933, pp. 270–271). 52. This prefigures Horkheimer’s famous essay (1937/1972) that introduces the term ‘‘critical theory.’’ 53. Altemeyer (1996, 2006) is the best source on this literature. 54. On this point, see the excellent book by Marcuse’s widow, the late Erica Sherover-Marcuse (1986).

REFERENCES Adams, J. L. (1958). ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Sohm (1887/1958). Adorno, T. W. (1967). Sociology and psychology. New Left Review, 46(November–December), 67–80. Adorno, T. W. (1967/1990). The George-Hofmannsthal correspondence, 1891–1906. In: T. W. Adorno, Prisms. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Adorno, T. W. (2010). Guilt and defense: On the legacies of National Socialism in postwar Germany. Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin (Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Adorno, T. W., Sanford, R. N., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., & Levinson, D. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper & Brothers. Altemeyer, B. (1996). The authoritarian specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Altemeyer, B. (2006). The authoritarians. Available at: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/Baltemey/ Bracher, K. D. (1970). The German dictatorship. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Burckhardt, J. (1898–1902/1963). History of Greek culture. New York: Frederick Ungar. Dahlmann, D. (1987). Max Weber’s relation to anarchism and anarchists: The case of Ernst Toller. In: W. Mommsen & J. Osterhammel (Eds.), Max Weber and his contemporaries. London: Allen Unwin. Drahn, H. (1925). Das werk Stefan Georges: seine religiosita¨t und sein ethos. Leipzig: F. Hirt. Dubiel, H. (1985). Theory and politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Durkheim, E´. (1912/1965). The elementary forms of the religious life. New York: The Free Press. Forsthoff, E. (1933). Der totale Staat. Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlaganstalt. Forsthoff, H. (1933). Das ende der humanistischen illusion. Berlin: Furche-verlag. Fraenkel, E. (1941). The dual state. New York: Oxford University Press. Fromm, E. (1939/1984). The working class in Weimar Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Charisma and Critique

55

Goldschmidt, U. K. (1989). Studies in comparison. New York: Peter Lang. Gundolf, F. (1920). George. Berlin: Georg Bondi. Harnack, A. (1910). Primitive Christianity and Catholicism (‘spirit’ and law). In: A. Harnack, The constitution and law of the Church in the first two centuries. London: Williams & Norgate. Horkheimer, M. (1937/1972). Traditional and critical theory. In: M. Horkheimer, Critical theory. New York: Seabury. Horkheimer, M. (1939). The social function of philosophy. Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung, 8(3), 322–337. Jay, M. (1973). The dialectical imagination. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Jost, J. T. (2006). The end of the end of ideology. American Psychologist, 61(7), 651–670. Katz, B. (1982). Herbert Marcuse and the art of liberation. London: Verso. Kaufmann, W. (1959). From Shakespeare to existentialism. Boston: Beacon Press. Kellner, D. (1984). Herbert Marcuse and the crisis of Marxism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kellner, D. (1989). Critical theory, Marxism and modernity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Kohlmeyer, O. (1930). Stefan George und die perso¨nlichkeitsgestalt als erziehungsziel in Deutschlands zeitenwende, 2. verb. auflage. Pflanz: Lichtenberg & Bu¨hling. Kohn, H. (1939). Between democracy and fascism. In: G. S. Ford (Ed.), Dictatorship in the modern world. London: University of Minnesota Press. Ko¨llreutter, O. (1934). Der deutsche Fu¨hrerstaat. Tu¨bingen: Mohr. Kolnai, A. (1921). Psychoanalysis and sociology. London: George Allen & Unwin. Kolnai, A. (1938). The war against the West. New York: The Viking Press. Leese, K. (1934). Rasse – Religion – Ethos: Drei Kapitel zur religio¨sen Lage der Gegenwart. Gotha: Leopold Klok Verlag. Lowrie, W. (1904). The church and its organization in primitive and Catholic times: An interpretation of Rudolph Sohm’s Kirchenrecht, Vol. 1 – The primitive age. New York: Longmans, Green and Co. Luka´cs, G. (1923/1971). History and class consciousness. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Luka´cs, G. (1986). Selected correspondence, 1902–1920. New York: Columbia University Press. Marck, S. (1924). Neukritizistische und Neuhegelsche Auffassung der marxistischen Dialektik. In: Die Gesellschaft (Vol. 1). Marck, S. (1929). Die Dialektik in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, Erster Halbband. Tu¨bingen: Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Marcuse, H. (1928/1969). Contributions to a phenomenology of historical materialism. Telos, Vol. 4, pp. 3–34. Marcuse, H. (1928/1978). Beitra¨ge zu einer Pha¨nomenologie des Historischen Materialismus. In: H. Marcuse Schriften (Bd. 1, pp. 347–384). First published in Philosophische Hefte, 1(1), July 1928. Marcuse, H. (1930–1931/1976). On the problem of the dialectic. Telos, p. 27. Marcuse, H. (1931). Zur Kritik der Soziologie (pp. 270–280). In: Die Gesellschaft (Vol. 8). Marcuse, H. (1933), Review of Heinrich Forsthoff, Das Ende der humanistische Illusion, in Zeitschrift fu¨r Sozialforschung, 2, p. 269. Marcuse, H. (1934/1988). The struggle against liberalism in the totalitarian view of the state (pp. 3–42). In: H. Marcuse Negations: Essays in critical theory. London: Free Association Books.

56

DAVID NORMAN SMITH

Marcuse, H. (1936/1983). A study on authority (pp. 51–155). In: H. Marcuse From Luther to Popper. London: Verso. Marcuse, H. (1937/1988). Philosophy and critical theory (pp. 134–158). In: H. Marcuse Negations: Essays in critical theory. London: Free Association Books. Marcuse, H. (1941/1960). Reason and revolution: Hegel and the rise of social theory. Boston: Beacon Press. Marcuse, H. (1967). Diskussion zu ‘Das Problem der Gewalt in der Opposition’. In: H. Kuhn & H. Kurnitzky (Eds.), Das Ende der Utopie. Berlin: Verlag Peter Maikowski. Marx, K. (1845/1975). Critical comment no. 2. In: Marx & Engels (Eds.), The holy family. Collected Works: Vol. 4, 1844–1845. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Mommsen, W. (1959/1984). Max Weber and German politics, 1890–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago. Neumann, F. (1944). Behemoth. New York: Harper & Brothers. Pollock, F., Adorno, T. W., et al. (2010). Group experiment and other writings: The Frankfurt School on public opinion in postwar Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rilke, R. M. (1927). Briefe aus den Jahren 1914–1921, edited by R. Sieber-Rilke & C. Sieber. Leipzig: Insel-Verlag. Rosenfeld, P. (1940). The Nazis and Stefan George. The New Republic, October 28. Schmidt, A. (1968/1988). Existential ontology and historical materialism in the work of Herbert Marcuse. In: R. Pippin, A. Feenberg & C. Webel (Eds.), Marcuse. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Serge, V. (1951/1963). Memoirs of a revolutionary, 1901–1941. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sherover-Marcuse, E. (1986). Emancipation and consciousness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (2001). Social dominance: An intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Smith, D. N. (1998). Faith, reason, and charisma. Sociological inquiry, 68(1), 32–60. Smith, D. N. (2006). Authority fetishism and the Manichæan vision. In: D. K. Fishman & L. Langman (Eds.), The evolution of alienation (pp. 91–114). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Smith, D. N. (2009). Solidarity in question: Critical theory, labor, and anti-semitism. Critical Sociology, 35(5), 601–627. Sohm, R. (1887/1958). Outlines of church history. Boston: Beacon Press. Sohm, R. (1892/1970). Kirchenrecht, Vol. 1: Die geschichtlichen Grundlagen. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot. Sommerfield, M. (1938). Introduction. In: M. Sommerfield (Ed.), George, Hofmannsthal, Rilke. New York: Norton. Weber, M. (1919/1946). Politics as a vocation. In; H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills (Eds.), For Max Weber. New York: Oxford. Weber, M. (1922/1978). Economy and society (Vols. 1 & 2). Berkeley: University of California Press. Weber, M. (1926/1975). Max Weber: A biography. New York: Wiley. Wolff, H. J. (1933). Die neue regierunsform des Deutsche reiches. Tu¨bingen: Mohr. Wolters, F. (1909). Herrschaft und Dienst (3. auflage, 1923, Berlin: Georg Bondi). Berlin: Einhorn-presse. Worrell, M. P. (2008). Dialectic of solidarity: Labor, antisemitism, and the Frankfurt School. Leiden: Brill.

TRAUMA AND THE LIMITS OF REDEMPTIVE CRITIQUE: INTERROGATING THE HAUNTING VOICES OF THE 1956 HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION Karl P. Benziger and Richard R. Weiner ABSTRACT The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 shook the Soviet Union to the core and provided the West with the iconic image of the freedom fighter willing to risk all for the cause of freedom. The pathos of the lost cause provided Hungarians with a new set of heroes akin to those of the failed 1848 Revolution, the best known being Prime Minister Imre Nagy who was executed for siding with the revolutionaries in their bid to establish a sovereign republic. His belated funeral on June 16, 1989 undermined the moral and political authority of the communist regime that had attempted to consign Nagy and his confederates to oblivion and seemed to mimic Emile Durkheim’s analysis of piaculum and the conscience collective. But the spectacle of Nagy’s funeral only temporarily shrouded significant differences between and within those factions demanding pluralist society, most recently revealed in the acrimonious celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution. These debates are rooted in The Diversity of Social Theories Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 29, 57–88 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-1204(2011)0000029007

57

58

KARL P. BENZIGER AND RICHARD R. WEINER

Hungary’s deeply troubled past that strongly questioned republican values in contrast to the authoritarian values of the Hapsburg monarchy, alliance with the Axis, genocide, and its relationship to communism in the wake of the disaster of World War II. Jacques Derrida tells us that it is not easy to exorcise our ghosts; instead, we are prompted to reconstruction. Memory studies, stimulated by studies of the Holocaust, transformed the sociological imagination (especially Friedlander, 1993; LaCapra, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c, 1998d). There has been what Michael Roth referred to as ‘‘a turning of oneself so as to be in relation to the past’’ as an act of witness. The traumatic memory of the 1956 Revolution provides yet another case in which a traumatic past is still salient to the political actors in the contemporary arena. This chapter immerses itself in the emergence of historical sociology and with it ‘‘memory studies,’’ that is: (1) the relationship between identity, memory, and embodiment; and (2) the relationship between historical circumstance and collective memory formation (described in diverse approaches such as Adorno, 1959; 1997; Nora, 1989; Postone, Martha, & Kobyashi 2009). In particular, there is in historical sociology an emergent interest in (1) commemorative practices, memorializing addresses, memento; and (2) the struggles over memory, remembering, and forgetting.

BODILY SOCIAL MEMORY, PIACULAR SUBJECTIVITY, AND RECONCILING COMMEMORATIVE PRACTICES? ‘‘What disgusts me is that those who are hanging me will one day rehabilitate me.’’ (The character Imre Nagy speaks his final words at his trial on June 15, 1958, as portrayed in a film by Ma´rta Me´sza´ros, A Temetetlen Halott (The Unburied Man), 2004) ‘‘The Hungarian people and the International Working Class will acquit me of the allegations set against me and as a result I have to sacrifice my life.’’ (Imre Nagy’s final words at his trial on June 15, 1958 (Rainer, 1999, pp. 430–431)

The dead man is not mourned because he is feared; he is feared because he is mourned. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 shook the prestige of the Soviet Union and remains one of the iconic events of the Cold War. The freedom fighter became Time magazine’s man of the year and the pathos of the lost cause provided Hungarians with a new pantheon of heroes who had risked all for the short-lived Republic. Among the best known of the martyrs was

Trauma and the Limits of Redemptive Critique

59

Imre Nagy, Prime Minister of Hungary during the Revolution, who, though initially against the Revolution, ultimately sided with the revolutionaries and helped establish a liberal state akin to that established in 1848, which had also ended in failure. For this act and his refusal to back the new regime established by the Soviets and their Hungarian allies after the Revolution was crushed, he went to the gibbet still proclaiming the legitimacy of the Revolution. Nagy’s funeral on June 16, 1989 can be seen as a critical moment in the Hungarian transition to a democratic republic as it explicitly undermined the moral and political authority of the communist regime then in power. This Nagy memorial signified a longing for a national identity tied to the spirit of republicanism that had been thwarted in 1956 and had roots going back to 1848. The unity of purpose displayed by the Hungarian people at the funeral brings to mind Emile Durkheim’s analysis of piaculum and the conscience collective. For Emile Durkheim, piacular rites emerge:  where the trauma of collective misfortune is valorized as an intensely cathectic basis of identity (transcendent signifier);  where propitiatory sacrifice associated with the trauma reveals a need for self-negation felt by the community (i.e., through atonement practices); and  where the metaphoric shared ‘‘drinking of the blood’’ generates a ‘‘collective effervescence’’ that restores sacred identity and mutual recognition of stabilizing social bonds (i.e., through sacralizing imagery). But the spectacle of Nagy’s funeral only temporarily shrouded significant differences between and within those factions demanding pluralist society. A fact revealed in the bitter political debates between center-left and centerright parties after the establishment of the Republic and the acrimonious celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Revolution that seemed to unleash the furies. This type of fragmentation seems to fly in the face of the powerful collective moments demonstrated by the Hungarians during the 1956 Revolution and Nagy’s funeral. Hungarian politics are acted out over the long dure´e. One can think of the politicized versions of history like frames of a film that can be arranged and rearranged to create a narrative that utilizes the past, present, and future. The narratives provided by opposing political factions about Nagy and 1956 rarely merge as they utilize these frames for their own political end. For example, in Ma´rta Me´sza´ros’s film narrative A Temetetlen Halott (The Unburied Man) released in 2005, Nagy is portrayed as a redemptive sacrifice that highlights this debate over narrative. In her account, Nagy repudiates and separates himself from his former colleagues,

60

KARL P. BENZIGER AND RICHARD R. WEINER

whereas in the trial transcript his final words repudiate his accusers, but maintain his staunch allegiance to communism and the working class. Hungarian political ideology in the twenty-first century is contested and factional narratives about 1956 compete for public attention (Derrida, 1994). Jacques Derrida (1994) tells us that it is not easy to exorcise spectres, that is, our ghosts. We are prompted to adjuration, not exorcism. Not mere retrieval but also reconstruction. Adjuration is the affirmative taking of a solemn oath as an appeal to our human conscience, so as to be called to act and bear witness. In the name of those who have died, who have not yet died, and who have not yet been born, we must speak to and with spectres, the haunting discourse of ghosts. Our adjuration is one of bearing witness in the name of some sacred commitment. This is a necromancy of raising the dead rather than exorcising daemons. (Cf. Abel Gance’s film J’Accuse of 1919 and 1938 where the dead are ‘‘called’’ back to life to remind us of what horrors we are capable of.) In the wake of Claude Lanzmann’s 9 hour 36 minute documentary Shoah (1985), there was a growing discursive shift and displacement of deconstruction. Add to this the revelations around the same time of Paul deMan’s wartime antisemitic tracts. Context and ‘‘positioning’’ as well as aura, piety, trauma, mourning, witnessing, testimony, ritual, healing, and redemption increasingly became emergent in historical discourse (Klein, 2000). And the 1990’s memory studies of the Holocaust transformed the sociological imagination (especially Friedlander, 1993; LaCapra, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c, 1998d; Roth, 1995). There has been what Michael Roth referred to as ‘‘a turning of oneself so as to be in relation to the past’’ as an act of piety, as an act of adjuration. This chapter immerses itself in the emergence of historical sociology and with it ‘‘memory studies,’’ that is: (1) the relationship between identity, memory, and embodiment; and (2) the relationship between historical circumstance and collective memory formation. In particular, there is in historical sociology an emergent interest in (1) commemorative practices, memorializing addresses, memento; (2) the struggles over memory, remembering, and forgetting. The development of ‘‘memory studies’’ and Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonian film project enriches the potentials of both historical sociology and social theory, and answers the query raised two decades ago in an article title Have Historical Sociologists Forsaken Theory? (Quadagno & Staples, 1992), as well as takes up the challenge raised (Gotham & Stipler, 1996) for historical sociology of ‘‘narrative analysis.’’ Not until 1977 in his study of death, mourning, and memorial practices L’homme devant la mort did Philippe Arie´s (1981; cf. McManners, 1981)

Trauma and the Limits of Redemptive Critique

61

shake up the discipline of history by employing the methodological tact of the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) and the historian of the Annales School Marc Bloch (1886–1944): social construction of collective memory as manifested in performative bodily acts/practices/rituals/ceremonies. Collective memory not only records the past but also reminds us of the commitments that this past implies for future generations. Halbwachs and George Gurvitch (1894–1965) were key second-generation Durkhemian sociologists of knowledge, the latter occupying the master’s chair. Collective memory/social memory is neither a given nor a mystical group mind. Rather it is a social construction. An individual actor does not remember events directly. The past is stored and interpreted by social institutions (i.e., institutional/institutionalizable practices). For Halbwachs, Gurvitch, and Bloch – unlike Karl Mannheim – collective memory is fluid in transmitting collective identity; it is not made up of fixed structures/frameworks of belongingness. Unlike Mannheim, these three understood the past as knowable not only on the basis of historiography and biography but also in addition through symbols and rituals. Theirs was the social reconstruction of the context in the recovery of lost voices and forgotten events. This came to be defined by Domenick LaCapra as ‘‘constructivist historiography’’ (Also see LaCapra, 1992; 1994; 2004; 2007). Constructivism became in the twentieth century the eye of the storm in historical sociology and social theory. The bonds and norms of integration were less the sacral mythic forms of ordering, and were social constructivist representations of finite reasoning. For Halbwachs, Gurvitch, and Bloch, it is through participation in commemorative practices with group members of the current generation that (1) we can imaginatively and performatively reenact a past that we risk losing; and (2) we can constitute the individual self into a civic self, a citizen with a commitment to civic belonging.

COMMEMORATIVE SPECTACLE I – THE FUNERAL OF IMRE NAGY The funeral of Imre Nagy on June 16, 1989 provides us with a dramatic example that fuses commemorative practice with civic belonging. Over 300,000 Hungarians attended his funeral that explicitly undermined the moral and political authority of the communist government then in power. His decision to side with the revolutionaries and their demands for a liberal republic led to his arrest and execution on June 16, 1958 by the Soviet-backed

62

KARL P. BENZIGER AND RICHARD R. WEINER

government. The legitimacy of the 1956 Revolution was based on its linkage to the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1848 against the Hapsburgs, as evidenced by the demands for a liberal republic enunciated by students and other key actors of both national dramas. In this light, Nagy could be portrayed as a ve´rtanu (blood witness) and his funeral in the tradition of Hungary’s national martyrs (Benziger, 2008, pp. 17–32). The connection between personal mourning ritual and politics is long established in Hungary, especially after the establishment of the Dual Monarchy in 1867.1 Kegyelet is synonymous with Durkheim’s concept of piacular rites and is defined as duty toward the dead (Durkheim, 1965, p. 446). Hungarians often use the analogy of Antigone’s obligation to her brother in describing how powerfully this value operates in Hungarian society. Kegyeleti ritual, which includes leaving flowers and lighting candles, reinforces that value in order to interpret the historical context of the present through the remembrance of the past. Funerals in the wake of the failed 1848 Revolution served to fortify Hungarian nationalism. The return of the remains of the 1848 revolutionary Lajos Kossuth in 1894 from Turin, Italy, was marked by a funeral accompanied by three days of mourning (Lukacs, 1988, p. 210). According to historian Alice Freifeld, the return and eventual internment of Ferenc Ra´ko´czi II, leader of the failed Ra´ko´czi Rebellion against the Hapsburgs, 1704–1711, was linked to the romanticized myth of the nation surrounding Kossuth and 1848. Public sentiment was such that Emperor Franz Joseph rescinded a law that had declared, ‘‘Ra´ko´czi a traitor and [by extension] accepted the cult of an anti-Hapsburg rebel’’ (Freifeld, 2000, p. 8). On the other hand, Imre Nagy as a national figure has troubling roots. As a founding member of the Stalinist state in Hungary, Nagy helped engineer the destruction of the Republic of Hungary established after World War II that was marked by a brutality that often resulted in juridical murder. His role as Minister of Agriculture burnished his image in the minds of many Hungarians and served his political interest due to the popularity of land reform (Kenez, 2006, pp. 110–117; Rainer, 1996, p. 255). The death of Joseph Stalin on March 5, 1953 and the critique of his policies by the new Moscow regime under Nikita Khrushchev provided Nagy with yet another opportunity to gain the upper hand over his rivals. He became Prime Minister of Hungary (1953– 1955) and his calls for democracy in the context of a one-party state seemed radical in comparison with the repressive state that had preceded him. His reforms known as the New Course that included a slowing down of forced collectivization and the release of many political prisoners convicted by the former Stalinist regime brought him great popularity among students and

Trauma and the Limits of Redemptive Critique

63

workers (Borhi, 2004, pp. 208–216; Lacquer, 1992, p. 304; Rainer, 1996, p. 397). His rivals brought him down in 1955 and he was ousted from the communist party (Be´ke´s, Byrne, & Rainer, 2002, pp. 60–64; Be´kes, 2002; Borhi, 2004, pp. 236–238; Rothschild, 1993, pp. 154–155). But the genie had been let out of the box; Nagy’s encouragement of critique within the Party was fortified by Khrushchev’s critique of Stalin at the Twentieth Soviet Congress, February 1956, and was broadcast to Hungarians via the official Party journal.2 This, in turn, only emboldened Nagy’s supporters to continue critiquing the new regime and demand that Hungarian Stalinists be made to account for their errors.3 Nagy’s continued critique of Stalinist politics after his ouster demonstrated the limited potency of his enemies and in the radicalized atmosphere of October 1956 students demanded that he be returned to power in the context of a multiparty state, a political concept he considered anathema (Be´ke´s et al., 2002, pp. 188–189; Be´kes, 2002; Dea´k, 1979, pp. 69–73). The outbreak of the Revolution ensured his return to power, but he only gradually joined with the revolutionary’s conception of a multiparty state. Although he forcefully defended the legitimacy of the Revolution, after its failure he went to his death on June 16, 1958 proclaiming his faith in communism (Benziger, 2008, pp. 72–73; Rainer, 1999, pp. 430–431). The Soviet-backed regime under Ja´nos Ka´da´r very well understood the symbolic power of Imre Nagy. Nagy was buried anonymously after his execution as were approximately 400 other persons accused of counterrevolution who suffered juridical murder at the hands of the state.4 Consigning Nagy and the memory of the Revolution to oblivion was accomplished by what the sociologist Ja´nos Kis calls the pact of forgetting. Hungarians could enjoy a freedom of movement and participate in economic activity that provided real economic benefit not found in other parts of the Soviet sphere in exchange for public silence about the Revolution (Gati, 1986, pp. 165–166; Kis, 1989, p. 79). Opposition to the Soviet-backed state developed slowly. Initially those seeking loved ones attempted to locate gravesites in Plot 301 of the Ko¨ztemeto+ (Public Cemetery) in order to perform kegyelet.5 This could be dangerous and often police were posted to keep people away. After Ka´da´r declared amnesty for political prisoners associated with the Revolution in 1963, breaking the taboo of silence could mean loss of a job, or expulsion from the university that would ensure a much less comfortable standard of living (Husza´r, 2006, p. 274). A host of factors accounted for the ending of the one-party state that included a worsening economy and Mikhail Gobachev’s policy of glasnost and perestroika, but perhaps the most potent weapon wielded by reformers within the communist party and those

64

KARL P. BENZIGER AND RICHARD R. WEINER

in opposition outside the party was the demand that Imre Nagy be reburied (Benziger, 2008, pp. 99–114). Historical reevaluation of 1956 had been undertaken by reformers within the communist party such as Minister without Portfolio, Imre Pozsgay, and by the Historical Justice Committee set up by the opposition (Pozsgay, 1993, p. 91). On January 28, 1989, the communists came to the same conclusion as those demanding an end to the single-party state: the Revolution had been a legitimate national uprising, thus creating a moral imperative for a proper burial of Nagy and his confederates (Benziger, 2008, p. 107; Pozsgay, 1993, pp. 95, 224). The funeral for Nagy and fellow martyrs was held on Heroes Square that includes a pantheon of kings and heroes from Hungary’s past. The square was built as part of the grand scheme to celebrate Hungary’s millennium in 1896. The occasion was solemn as hundreds of thousands of Hungarians came to perform kegyelet leaving flowers in front of the bier, in some cases overwhelmed with grief.6 The speeches dramatically asked the Hungarian people how they could ‘‘live without freedom’’ and in some cases demanded an end to the Soviet occupation of Hungary.7 The economist Tibor Zima´nyi was even more forceful in his denunciation of the State: ‘‘Our only sin was that we took democracy seriously y they [the communists] destroyed the moral world y.’’ Then turning his attention to the martyrs, he said, ‘‘with this funeral we do not bury you; you start to live only now.’’8 The loudest applause went to Viktor Orba´n of the Young Democrats (FIDESZ) who stated, ‘‘the bankrupt state that has been placed upon our shoulders is the result of the suppression of our Revolution y We cannot understand that those who were eager to slander the Revolution and its prime minister have suddenly changed into great supporters of Imre Nagy’’ Kamm (1989).9 Nagy and his fellow revolutionaries were brought back from oblivion and buried in clearly marked graves in Plot 301 that was now transformed into a place of national memory. The spectacle of Nagy’s reburial on June 16, 1989 undermined the moral authority of the communist government and can be analyzed as a contested narrative on the power to suppress and the power to actualize republicanism in terms of Emile Durkheim’s analysis of piacular rituals and the collective conscience. As a collective celebration of the ve´rtanuk (blood witnesses), Nagy and those reburied with him provided contrast to the Soviet-backed regime then in power, and, thus, deadly attachment to the Soviet-backed counter-revolution. This first level of meaning revealed by the funeral, though important as a contingent factor of political change, tends to downplay the more complicated narrative of this political history. The effervescent moment of unity displayed

Trauma and the Limits of Redemptive Critique

65

by the Hungarian polity certainly contributed to a referendum decision that stripped the party of power. This moment was short lived, however, as evidenced by debate over the nature of the state, haunted throughout by memories of the Revolution and Hungary’s tumultuous twentieth-century past. What was the meaning of Nagy’s symbolic status in a country whose revolutionary spirit had been largely subdued and co-opted by the socialist ‘‘prosperity’’ that separated Hungary from other satellites under Soviet thrall? In this guise, historical attachment needed to be found in the events leading up to the Revolution or prior to the ascension of the Stalinists in 1948. As we have briefly reviewed, the example of Nagy who had played a key role in the establishment of the Stalinist state is problematic to the kind of heroic narrative used to legitimize various contemporary political factions, especially those that view the political transition of 1989 as the triumph of the capitalist model. Historical memory in this light is selective. The anthropologist Katherine Verdery claims that Nagy’s symbolic magnetism can be found in his power to legitimate a diverse number of platforms (both negatively and positively).10 According to Verdery, Nagy has legitimating effects ‘‘not because everyone agrees on [his] meaning but because it compels interest despite divergent views of what [he signifies]’’ (1999, p. 31). Because of this, Verdery claims that she is ‘‘not interested in the shared mentalities found in the conscience collective, but for conflict among groups over social meanings’’ (1999, p. 36). But is it not possible that the shared mentalities that Durkheim found in the conscience collective are a result of, or a manifestation of, continuing discourse regarding the various social frames under consideration? Jay Winter underscores the importance of affect – how the ritual associated with World War I memorials served both the purpose of commemoration and the possibility of forgetting. Citing Sigmund Freud’s discussion of melancholia, he reasons that forgetting helps create the boundaries necessary for one suffering from melancholia to once again look forward rather than remain locked in grief (Winter, 1995, pp. 113–114). In this light, perhaps the funeral of Imre Nagy created the possibility of settling the past and looking toward the future, or more cynically as an attempt to lock out the past. The locked out political factions associated with the former communist regime or those to whom Marx is anathema. As noted earlier, however, forgetting and selective remembering stimulates discourse as well as contest of the memory narrative. Winter’s discussion also underlines a limitation of structuralist theory as formulated by Durkheim in that his theory relies on a collective conscience determined by social facts that exist externally to the individual.

66

KARL P. BENZIGER AND RICHARD R. WEINER

Durkheim associates epistemological and phenomenological connotations with the collective conscience that enables him to employ this concept in explaining moral obligation. With respect to its epistemological meaning, the collective conscience according to Durkheim refers to: (1) a conscience ‘‘which is shared in common with our group (i.e., a particular social entity) in its entirety, which, consequently, is not oneself, but society living and acting within us’’;11 (2) a conscience of shared moral meanings, that is, the awareness and sharing of moral norms derived from symbolic representations engendered collectively;12 and (3) a conscience that ‘‘by definition is diffused throughout the whole society, but it nevertheless has specific features which make it a distinct reality.’’13 As for the various qualitatively distinct phenomenological experiences associated to such a conscience of collective norms, Durkheim notes: (1) that the projections of the collective conscience are experienced as an echo in ourselves of a force that is foreign to us and that is superior to what we are;14 (2) that these projections are experiences: (a) impersonally (b) objectively (as they are external to the associated individuals of a social entity15) (c) as obligatory, that is, these collective norms function as moral constraints16 that have an ‘‘imperative character’’;17 they ‘‘exercise a sort of ascendancy over the will which feels constrained to conform to them’’;18 (3) that the moral experience comprises: (a) the perception of collective representations (b) the internalization of collective norms;19 (4) that such collective norms may be internalized differently and hence may affect individual members of society very differently Winch (1958).20 The sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, a student of Durkheim, saw the collective conscience as fluid, asserting that, ‘‘what we can know of the remembered past depends entirely upon its commemorative leavings’’ (Hutton, 1994, p. 149).

Trauma and the Limits of Redemptive Critique

67

According to Halbwachs, each generation must reinterpret the past in the context of the present in order to come to a collective understanding of the event or person under study.21 His seminal study entitled The Legendary Topography of the Gospels provides a historical case study of how contemporary understandings and needs over time created sites of memory in Jerusalem that would accord with the stories laid out in the four gospels. Importantly, Halbwachs claimed that in spite of differences found in the stories of the gospels themselves, they represent a collection of memories held in common (traces of history). Legitimacy of the sites rests in how closely they remain to the gospel, not the historical reality of the site itself (Halbwachs, 1992, pp. 194, 231–235). As Lewis Coser reminds us in his introduction to Halbwachs’ work on collective memory, ‘‘the past is always a compound of persistence and change’’ (Halbwachs, 1992, p. 26). Halbwachs’ presentist approach recognized the continuing discourse that surrounds issues of memory. As historian Patrick H. Hutton asserts, ‘‘memory is a function of power to determine the way the past is to be represented y setting scholarship on a genealogical course’’ (1994, p. 150). Addressing the construct of power, Barry Schwartz asserts that collective memory has an ‘‘orientational function y being both a mirror y and model for society’’ (Olick & Robins, 1998, p. 124; Schwartz, 2000, pp. 18–19). ‘‘Unlike Durkheim Halbwachs’ approach to collective memory considered groups rather than attempting to create universals. In this guise collective memory is multifaceted and can be an ‘‘effective marker of social differentiation’’ (Olick & Robins, 1998, p. 111). Seen in this light, the funeral signified the republican spirit infused with the demand for a sovereign state and at the same time stimulated ‘‘discourse and argument’’ regarding the meaning of the 1956 Revolution and its relationship to Hungarian politics in 1989 that was temporarily subdued during the funeral.22 The collective conscience can be seen not as external to each conscience, but immanent within it. This is based on the phenomenologists’ ‘‘intentionality’’: the conscience exists as a tension toward that which is beyond it and resists it; consciousness is consciousness of something. Contrary to Durkheim’s ‘‘classical’’ conception of the individual consciences closed up within them, and passively receiving external and objective representations of the collective conscience, Georges Gurvitch’s notion of the collective conscience is presentative. By virtue of the latently open conscience, there can be interpenetration or participation of consciences, immanent within each conscience Schutz (1970).23

68

KARL P. BENZIGER AND RICHARD R. WEINER

COMMEMORATIVE SPECTACLE II – THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE 1956 REVOLUTION October 23, 2006 marked the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution and was marked by the Hungarian public being denied access from much of the public state ritual that had been broadly advertised prior to the event.24 The Parliament had been cordoned off and the official flag raising ceremony that began the day’s events was attended only by guests and the diplomatic corps. As if to underline the emptiness of what had been the epicenter of mass mobilization 50 years past, a televised broadcast later that day revealed dancers performing to an empty square in front of the Parliament.25 Instead of a demonstration of political unity as revealed by Nagy’s funeral in 1989, the event was marked by deep political divisions that included a separate commemoration staged by the Socialist’s main opposition party FIDESZ (Young Democrats). Indeed, mass participation was revealed only in the FIDESZ event attended by over 100,000. Demonstrations and violence erupted in the streets and were met head on by the police with one confrontation ending only in the early hours of the next day. Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsa´ny of the Socialist Party and President La´szlo´ So´lyom who had been a founding member of the centerright Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) claimed it was their intention to celebrate 50th anniversary commemorations of the Revolution with the entire country. Jeno¨ Fonay, a revolutionary and member of the Emle´ke´vet + ´ szito+ Bizottsa´g (Committee to Prepare for the Anniversary Year), Eloke asserted that the statue being erected on the site where one of Joseph Stalin had stood until torn down by the revolutionaries would bring a renewed sense of solidarity among the Hungarian people. Underlying these assertions of unity, however, was a sense of bitterness that threatened to dilute the plans for a unified celebration. Speaking on the occasion of the annual commemoration held for Imre Nagy on June 16, 2006, Ma´ria Wittner – a revolutionary and member of FIDESZ – bitterly criticized what she claimed was a false sense of unity asserting that ‘‘we are not going to assist in the preparations for the commemorations [in this context].’’ Raising the wellworn linkage between the Socialist Party and the former communist party, she stated, ‘‘Those who suppressed or assisted in the suppression of the Revolution will have their celebration and those righteous people [revolutionaries and those who remained true to those ideals] will have their celebrations.’’26 Another FIDESZ MP Ja´nos Horva´th who had been a member of Nagy’s government hoped that differences could yet be put aside

Trauma and the Limits of Redemptive Critique

69

for the sake of the momentous national occasion. And yet, at the time of the memorial former FIDESZ Prime Minister Viktor Orba´n had remained silent and FIDESZ did not organize a memorial for the occasion giving the impression that Nagy embodied ideas only for the center-left parties.27 In the wake of the Socialist victory in the spring of 2006, questions of economy dominated the Hungarian’s attention as the Socialist/Free Democrat (SZDSZ) coalition unrolled an agenda that proposed severe cutbacks in health and education to the chagrin of the public.28 The election like the one held in 2002 was close in both rounds of voting.29 The opposition seethed over what they viewed was a purposeful subversion of democracy made plain by the withholding of critical information regarding Hungary’s economic health during the first and second rounds of voting. Discussions and problems regarding the 50th anniversary commemorations were placed in the background as the public discussed and debated the economic program forwarded by the majority. On Saturday, September 16, 2006 a stunned nation listened to the broadcast of a leaked tape that captured Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsa´ny admitting in a closed-door session of the Socialist faction that his Party had lied about the state of the economy. The effect was immediate. Demonstrators primarily from the center-right opposition parties gathered the next day at Kossuth Square, and the demonstrations continued day and night through the evening of October 22. FIDESZ responded to the Prime Minister’s announcement by insisting that he resign based on his lack of veracity with the public.30 The size of the crowd ebbed and flowed, and swelled to the size of tens of thousands at major events sponsored by FIDESZ that included speakers and music. Protestors moved from Kossuth Square to the headquarters of the national television on Monday, September 18, 2006, taking up in the downstairs foyer. The demonstrators were ultimately driven out, but not before they set several cars on fire and damaging the building.31 The violence and the vandalism was apparently the work of an extreme rightwing faction associated with a soccer club, although a FIDESZ representative was spotted among the crowd. Viktor Orba´n, cofounder of FIDESZ, disavowed the use of violence and distanced himself and his party away from the incident at the television station and other instances of violence in the streets that occurred later that week. But the Socialists quickly countered that FIDESZ in its support for the demonstrations in front of the Parliament and confrontational demands that Gyucsa´ny step down were in fact encouraging the more extremist right-wing elements that had attached themselves to the demonstration. Indeed, some demonstrators

70

KARL P. BENZIGER AND RICHARD R. WEINER

carried flags emblazoned with the Royal Coat of Arms, and the red and silver A´rpa´d flag that had been incorporated into the fascist Arrow Cross flags at the end of World War II. Some even voiced their demand for the restoration of the Kira´lysa´g (Hungarian Kingdom) before its dismemberment after World War II.32 Neither Gyurcsa´ny nor Orba´n was willing to back down and both jockeyed for political advantage. The countrywide elections for local governments on October 1 provided the opposition with an opportunity to gauge public dissatisfaction with the socialist coalition and their economic program. During the run up to the election FIDESZ leaders energized their base with demands for Gyurcsa´ny’s resignation. The mayor of Debrecen suggested that local leaders be given the power to veto governmental budgets in order to ‘‘help Hungarians defend their towns and cities against the Prime Minister.’’ Orba´n hoped that if the Socialists lost, they would be forced to give up on the Socialist economic program.33 The rhetoric became even more heated as election day approached. At a rally in mid-September, Orba´n stated, ‘‘We need every single vote so we could begin moving against the government y Once they have the results of the Revolution [election] y they [the opposition in Parliament] can stand up to the government in a radical deliberate way y the foundation to stand up against the government must be laid by the people.’’ Gyurcsa´ny pounced, ‘‘Orba´n is questioning the legitimacy of the government y we can have a debate about everything, government decisions, promises y But to promote radical resistance y steps over the line y Today the President of FIDESZ crossed over the Rubicon.’’34 If Gyurcsa´ny’s proposed cutbacks to Hungarian’s social security had enraged the populace, his revelations on September 16 sealed the deal and the Socialists took a beating at the polls.35 Gyurcsa´ny all but ignored calls for his resignation and his coalition remained firm in their promotion for austerity. He instead requested vote of confidence from the Parliament on October 2, 2006. Orba´n responded to Gyurcsa´ny by demanding that the Socialists dismiss Gyurcsa´ny from office within 72 hours. Orba´n dismissed Gyurcsa´ny’s request for a vote of confidence saying that this was ‘‘an old trick,’’ what was really needed was a vote of censure.36 The vote was a foregone conclusion for the center-left coalition, 207-165, with 12 abstentions. The vote was followed by an apology of sorts from the Prime Minister. He apologized that ‘‘y they [the Socialists] had tried to avoid simple answers y they did not speak honestly with the people.’’ Gyurcsa´ny continued by apologizing for his use of ‘‘harsh and rude language’’ that many found offensive. He also defended himself against the accusations that the government had

Trauma and the Limits of Redemptive Critique

71

cheated and knowingly misled the people in connection with the national elections the previous spring. He then launched into a frontal attack against Orba´n stating ‘‘y the debate in Parliament is an attempt by the minority to attack the constitution y their goal is to force early elections y and [once in power] rewrite the constitution to Viktor Orba´n’s taste.’’37 It was in this atmosphere that FIDESZ spokesman Pe´ter Szijja´rto´ announced that they would not participate in any of the planned commemorations in which the Prime Minister was scheduled to speak. FIDESZ would only attend ceremonies where the President would speak as he represented a symbol of national unity. The final blow came with the announcement that FIDESZ would hold a separate commemoration on October 23.38 In this poisoned atmosphere the FIDESZ demonstrations in front of the Parliament replete with calls for the Prime Minister’s resignation and the ‘‘Revolution’’ of October served to fold the contemporary political crisis into the memorialization of what was the pivotal event of Hungary’s twentieth-century history. Who were the inheritors of 1956? Discussion of 1956 and the principal actors such as Imre Nagy can easily melt into an evaluation of the communist period. Though committed to a unified celebration of the Revolution, President La´szlo´ So´lyom expressed his unease with Nagy and his confederates when he stated, ‘‘It’s up to the youth to create a holiday on October 23 like that on March 15 y we have almost + everything for that y even if we do not have symbolic individuals like Petofi and Kossuth y.’’39 The revolutionaries of 1848 present less controversy as they are portrayed as remaining steadfast to the ideals of the liberal revolution to the end. Though utilized for different political ends, the events and players of 1848 have been highlighted by Hungarian governments since the establishment of the Dual Monarchy in 1867. Even the Stalinist state included the glorious story of the Revolution in secondary school textbooks, albeit with a Stalinist interpretation tagged on at the end. The year 1848 provides a certain consensus that legitimizes the actions of its heroes, unlike the historical actors of 1956 whose actions are interwoven in the past and present.40 As we have reviewed former revolutionaries themselves were divided over the idea of reconciliation. In the politics of the new Republic of 1989 the right-wing factions proposed various narrative strands from the past that portrayed the communist period as an aberration not reflective of the national spirit. In this guise the leader of Hungary’s interwar regime, Miklo´s Horthy (1920–1944), is recognized for his steadfast stand against Bolshevism and preservation of Hungary’s independence. Hungary’s

72

KARL P. BENZIGER AND RICHARD R. WEINER

alliance with the Axis powers and Horthy’s role in the Holocaust is either downplayed or ignored.41 Likewise, Socialists and other center-left parties see themselves as inheritors of Nagy’s social reforms. His Stalinist past is in part shrouded by his association with land reform following World War II that was a common goal of the majority parties of the short-lived Republic (1945–1948). Further complicating this story was the common goal among many within the dominant Smallholders Party and governing coalition that included the communists to rid Hungary of its fascist strand. The problem lay in the fact that the Soviets and their Hungarian cohorts used this purge in their bid to create a one-party state. Politicians regularly resurrect the past in order to bludgeon their opponents. The historian Zolta´n Ripp has suggested that from the perspective of the second Soviet attack against the revolutionaries on November 4, it is possible to portray the Revolution selectively as a War of National Liberation where focus is placed on the heroism of the streets and as an uprising against communism.42 This has also served the needs of those distancing themselves from Nagy and his fellow communist reformers.43 According to journalist Ildiko´ Hanko´, ‘‘We will need many decades to understand that the true heroes were not those thinking within reform [Imre Nagy and his confederates], but the young ones [street fighters] whose natural instinct was for freedom.’’44 The terror enacted by Ka´da´r very deliberately targeted workers and adolescents who had fought alongside them.45 For some within the spectrum of the center-right coalition it remained galling that former members of Ka´da´r’s regime were still actively engaged in politics and desired what they considered a completion of the goals of the Revolution that included purging communists from government.46 The question of lustration had been raised in 1989 and in response to the demand for a more radical regime change Jo´zsef Antall replied, ‘‘[you] should have fomented Revolution’’ (Bozo´ki, 2002, p. 252). In 2006 scores remained unsettled. The demonstrations continued right up to the weekend that the official State commemorations were to begin. Initially the demonstrators had been told that they would have to clear the square by midnight Friday, October 20. At the last minute the authorities changed their minds and instead erected a barricade that cut off the demonstrator’s sight line to the area where the ceremonies would take place.47 In response, demonstrators threatened to use their amplifiers to drown out the commemorations taking place on the other side of the barricade. Then, early in the morning of October 23, the police used the pretext of a security search to ensure the safety of the foreign delegation attending the ceremonies that day, and cleared the demonstrators

Trauma and the Limits of Redemptive Critique

73

off the square.48 The square was sealed off from the public with a fence manned by the police. A series of noisy but small demonstrations ensued later that morning resulting in the police expanding the security zone around the Parliament. Commemorations did take place, but with the public in most cases kept at a distance for fear of violent disruption. The exclusive nature of the official celebrations was a sharp contrast to the mass participation that was the mark of the actual Revolution, and a photograph of the Prime Minister performing kegyelet at the new monument to the Revolution during the dedication ceremony seemed to heighten this fact.49 Even more bizarre were a series of performances at the Parliament that took place with no audience. During the performances, a television camera panned an empty Kossuth Square.26 This pattern continued throughout the next two weeks and concluded on the evening of November 4. The final event of the commemorations that took place on Heroes Square was the wreathing of the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in honor of those revolutionaries who had died fighting for their country.50 Prior to the ceremony the public was told via loudspeaker to leave as the official commemoration was about to begin. The Prime Minister, his guests, and a military honor guard alone in the square conveyed a message far different from the message that briefly informed the Hungarian polity on June 16, 1989. Where did everybody go on October 23? A counter-commemoration was sponsored by FIDESZ and KDNP at Astoria, the site of bitter fighting during the Revolution. A crowd of over 100,000 showed up, and included many families with children. The speeches were fiery in their denunciation of the Gyurcsa´ny and the Socialist coalition. FIDESZ and the Christian Democrats proposed that a referendum in which education, pensions, health care, and what they identified as democratic guarantees should be presented to the Hungarian people. Orba´n proclaimed, ‘‘This [the referendum] will seal the fate of the government based on lies.’’ He explained that by lying about the economy during the spring elections, they had ‘‘cheated us y they took away the right of free elections y the right that was achieved by the heirs of 1956.’’ The impassioned speech hearkened back to the tactics FIDESZ and SZDSZ had used to push the communists out of power in 1989. He concluded, ‘‘1956 was a miracle in its birth, short life and death y it happened in a country tortured twice by the greatest lie of the twentieth century, Socialism!’’51 The speech concluded with thunderous applause by an enthusiastic audience unaware that the police were driving a violent demonstration in their direction.

74

KARL P. BENZIGER AND RICHARD R. WEINER

A group of several thousand noisy demonstrators confronted the police on Ka´roly ko¨ru´t, which is part of the inner ring of Pest and not far from Astoria. The violence was reminiscent of clashes that had characterized the week of September 18, except this time the police were much more aggressive in their use of tear gas, water canons, and rubber bullets. Orba´n had again distanced himself from the violence and instructed those attending the commemoration to do so as well. The demonstrators cast themselves as inheritors of the Revolution and were not to be quelled. Their nationalist banners pointed to the recidivist politics of the extreme right wing, and yet there was also a certain feeling of anarchy to the event. At one point several young men commandeered a Russian tank that had been on display and drove through the streets adding to the unreality of the scene.52 The riot ultimately wound up near Erzse´bet Bridge with the police and demonstrators doing battle until the early hours of October 24. Accusations abounded that the police had trapped innocents in their cordon, including some of those who attended the FIDESZ event at Astoria only a few blocks away.53 Denying the public the opportunity to participate in the State commemorations certainly played into the hands of the Socialist’s opponents. But what of the many who had stayed at home? Many Hungarians were disconcerted to see a building that had been beautifully restored after the Revolution being damaged. Further the chaos in the streets and demonstrators mocking the police with chants of AVH from behind barricades served to alienate many. What FIDESZ might have gained by Gyurcsa´ny’s revelations seemed to be somewhat thwarted by a public disgruntled by the violence. Finally, though many Hungarians sympathized with the FIDESZ critique of the Socialist’s economic program, their accord with the various aspects of the right-wing agenda was dubious. At a conference held at the Italian Institute of Culture in Budapest on September 28, 2006, Jeno+ Fo´nay provided an account of the fighting at Sze´na Square, his relationship with Pe´ter Mansfeld, and his time in prison. Fo´nay’s anti-communist views are well known and he wrote passionately regarding the Socialist appropriation of Imre Nagy prior to the parliamentary debate over the Memory Bill. And yet, at the conference, he underscored the connection between Imre Nagy and the revolutionaries, echoing Otto´ Sa´ndorfy’s assertions that the two cannot be separated.54 He was among many former revolutionaries who accepted honors from the Hungarian government and on October 22 shook hands in the Parliament with both the President La´szlo´ So´lyom and Prime Minister Ferenc Gyucsa´ny. This act of reconciliation was not followed by all present, but indicated the possibility that the commemorations signified.55

Trauma and the Limits of Redemptive Critique

75

TRAUMA AND INTERROGATING MEMORY CLAIMS Dominick LaCapra claims that the generalizations found in competing narratives pose a danger in the ability of a society to ‘‘come to terms with the past’’ (1997, p. 84). Societies that have experienced trauma and violence are often thought to require a rebirthing in order to come to terms with what has happened – to face its truth and ‘‘work through it.’’ LaCapra has repeatedly emphasized how the psychoanalytical concept of ‘‘working through’’ is essential to any adequate understanding and response to trauma (1997, pp. 80–82, 1999). In The Origin of German Tragic Drama/Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Walter Benjamin talks of chasing spirits back into their bodies, and redeeming them through law. In discussing these German ‘‘mourning plays’’ (Trauerspiels), Gillian Rose recalls the burial of the Athenian general Phocion, unjustly executed and slandered. His wife – determined to mourn his death and provide proper burial rites beyond the city walls of Athens – ate his ashes, giving them a proper burial, incarnating him. Rites of mourning extend into hope for the future, for new attachments, and for reengagement with life.56 LaCapra points us to a third option. This is more self-questioning meta-narrative – one which helps us to gain critical distance from the trauma and collective effervescence associated with it so that we can assume responsibility in dealing with it.57 The Nagy memorials ultimately refer to how we participate in the tragedy of Nagy’s execution. It is in the tradition of the lamentation and spectacle of the Central European mourning play that Benjamin critically analyzed in the middle 1920s. This is a tradition that Benjamin saw as dissolving the tragic into spectacle Benjamin (1988). Beyond the mourning, Benjamin argues, can we transcend the spectacle of suffering, shared melancholy, and shared atonement? Can we do so in a meaningful and shared participation in the tragic, not as a closed drama based on myth, oracular mystery, martyrdom, or the uninterred corpse? Can we do so as an incomplete and unfolding drama characterized not by a sense of redemptive finality, but by an ongoing redemptive critique – with a collective conscience that history might have been different and can be different? Narratives enable us to grapple with the ambiguity, the diversity, the discontinuity, and the mystery that come with our being in the world, and with the collective memory that comes with being. To an extent, the collective representations involved in the reconstruction of knowledge within a narrative may reveal an immanent propositional content of the way we negotiate our world and our humanity. Narrative attempts to provide

76

KARL P. BENZIGER AND RICHARD R. WEINER

closure to some sense of our being in the world. In so doing, narratives foreshadow, back shadow, and side shadow. As readers (or viewers), we need to guard against illusory or mythic unifying narratives. We can appreciate dialectical unfolding of collective memory without invoking either static concepts of static abstract time or – as Wolin (1990, 1994) wisely advises – messianic concepts of universal transhistorical times. Agonistic contestation (Mouffe, 2007) over reconciling practices involves a ‘‘moving on’’ rather than closure. Such ‘‘working through’’ involves recalling evanescent, fleeting even fugitive instances of transgression so as to recoil and plunge ahead – to recall Sorel. The dead refuse to go away. They stir up dread and haunting – until their promise is fulfilled and their narrative is completed, ‘‘until their stories register’’ Lemert (2006). Events, images, memories, and explanations are conjured up diremptively. There is both a collective forgetting in overcoming trauma by confining it to oblivion Auge (2004) and a collective remembering. Piacular subjectivity and collective conscience, as Charles Lemert notes,58 are ghost concepts that live on, haunting us, refusing to go away, open to revision. Piacular subjectivity as a collective conscience could be understood as the master narrative from which the aforementioned meta-narratives derive. Thus, piacular subjectivity can be understood as the depth-level narrative relations of moral conscience shared collectively – in terms of both a need to recollect and recognize transgressions/sins and a need to atone for them. Yet our attempt at narrating the piacular subjectivity involved in the funeral reveals less of a master narrative, and more of a field of traces – both representational and nonrepresentational images and practices. What we have re-collected and revealed is a text of yearning and longing for a Hungarian collective identity in the practices and movements of historical groups. That text reveals a great deal of presence of absence, and a field of recombinatory images, ideas, and yearnings open to diverse reassembling. In closing, we may also ponder the events of October 23, 2006. Specifically, we may consider the extent to which the piacular subjectivity studied in the Hungarian context can fragment into an extremism that can be characterized as a baroque subjectivity: the mournful and melancholy evocation of a sense of passion and ecstasy, the assaulting of the senses and the emotions rather than the invocation of resignifying commitments that relate past moments to the present and future ones, as well as to a rebirth. A baroque subjectivity can

Trauma and the Limits of Redemptive Critique

77

manifest the weakness of a core collective conscience: marked by the grotesque, the bizarre (barroco in Portuguese), and positioned between a melancholic despair and the dizzying, inhabited by ghosts, zombies, and the dead, bleeding both into the past and into the future.59 The historian Saul Friedlander has commented that when examining a contested historical event that includes the memories of living political actors, the line between memory and historical reality is blurred. Constructing a narrative in this context is enhanced by the memories of victims, perpetrators, and bystanderswho then shed light on an event asinterested parties.60 The bitter struggle that marked the 50th anniversary commemoration called upon specters and traces from the past in an attempt to manipulate the event to accord with political ends rather than a detailed accounting of the event that would reveal the complexity and ambiguity associated with the event. The focus on political ends shrouded rather than highlighted contemplation on this contested history, dampening the possibility for the reconciliation hoped for by the planners of the commemoration. The national narratives of the 1848 and 1956 Revolutions found in school texts provide a certain consensus regarding the heroism and righteousness of these events. The stories found in more advanced texts actually make an attempt to engage the complexity of these events and provide evidence of a collectively shared story. But the possibilities presented by these narratives are occluded by the ideologies we have identified and their differing portrayals of these histories, providing a counterpoint that has yet to find resolution.61 As we have reviewed, newspapers and other media associated with the various factions or parties tend to repeat these ideologically driven stories. Strands of memory from Hungary’s unsavory twentieth-century past that includes alliances with fascist states and communism create damning narratives that only fan the flames of discord. Myth provides answers without ever explicitly posing a problem, specifying an argument, or developing a demonstration. A century ago in The Decomposition of Marx (1908), Georges Sorel under the influence of Henri Bergson (1907; 1908; 1933; 1986; cf. Guerlac, 2006; Moulard-Leonard, 2008; Muldoon, 2006) noted the critical difference between the appeal to the nonlogical illogical (also Vilfredo Pareto’s terms) provided by myth and the interpellating capability regarding reconstructing the trajectory of argument in diremptive ideal types (See Sorel, 1908; 1976; 1990; cf. Hughes, 1958, 1966). The diremptions eschew snapshot slices and offer more cinematic flow of images in time: a method picked up in Deleuze’s own Bergsonian cinematic project. (See Deleuze, 1966, 1968; 1983; 1985; 2001;

78

KARL P. BENZIGER AND RICHARD R. WEINER

Deleuze & Guattari, 1980; cf. Ansell-Pearson, 1997.) Diremptions juxtapose dialectically a number of mutually incompatible statements with multiple moments in time. This is a juxtaposing within an immersing oneself in the agonistics of contesting positions that offers the possibility of uncanny reconciliation: if not redemption. It may be that a certain resolution/reconciliation can come only as the actors of this drama leave the political stage. The liberal society that lies at the heart of 1848 and 1956 were realized only for a brief moment before being repressed. The generation that only now is coming to its full is the first to live fully in the context of a democratic state; what stories will they write? In concluding, we understand why LaCapra focuses on witnessing, piety, and testimony: what Emile Durkheim referred to as piacular rites. We comprehend this adjuration or piety intersubjectively as secular reverence, belongingness, and mutual devotion to the ‘‘sites of memory’’: sites that LaCapra sees as ‘‘generally sites of trauma.’’ And he links ‘‘belated returns’’ of traumatic events often repressed and forgotten to a concept of memory discourse, that is, a discourse defining our transferentiated relation to the past. Beyond the constructivist historiography and historical sociology spurred by memory studies, LaCapra’s work on trauma and memory calls on us to wrestle with the crucial moral issues that Durkheim dedicated sociology to: 1. How do we work through trauma and mourning not to messianic redemption but to a ‘‘countervailing force to the endless repetition of the past’’ (LaCapra (1998b, p. 8)? 2. How do we redeem memory claims as truth claims? By what Theodor Adorno inferred as the awakening of self-reflecting and self-surpassing potentiality understood within a constellation. That constellation can be understood critically and discursively as an arc of signifiers: for example, claims, collective identities, and interpretive schema. It is in this way ghostly/spectral commitments – that is, sacred justifications in discourse theoretical terms – make claims on acting subjects. They exist independently of the acting subjects, not just as an institutional supply of justifications, but as a trajectory with semblances and traces along an arc of what poststructuralists – such as Michel Foucault and Chantal Mouffe – refer to as subject positions. The past is never dead. It is not even past. (William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, Act I, Scene III)

Trauma and the Limits of Redemptive Critique

79

NOTES 1. The compromise of 1867 established internal sovereignty for both Austria and Hungary although the Austrians (Hapsburgs) maintained control of foreign policy for the empire (Frank, 1994, pp. 252–253). According to historian Istva´n Re´v, the ‘‘history of Hungary is one of battles lost, the normal public rituals are therefore funerals and burials rather than victory parades y’’ (1995, p. 31). 2. ‘‘Recognizing mistakes from the past provides a new way for the future’’ (‘‘A Szovjetunio´ Kommunista Pa´rtja´nak XX Kongresszusa uta´n [After the 20th Congress of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party],’’ Ta´rsadalmi Szemle, 11, 3 (March 1956), pp. 16–20. 3. Critique of the Stalinists was surprisingly direct in the Party journal. For example, ‘‘y real party democracy can be found only where there is no obstacle to critique y there are still places that do not like critique and mute those who do so.’’ ‘‘A Pa´rte´let tova´bbi Demokratiza´la´sa´nak U´tjai [Further avenues to democratizing party life],’’ Ta´rsadalmi Szemle, 11, 5 (May 1956), pp. 5–6. 4. Be´la Ko¨ve´r, ‘‘301-es parcella Ko¨ztemeto+ [The Public Cemetery’s Plot 301],’’ Magyar Nemzet, May 3, 1989, p. 21. 5. Imre Me´cs, interview by Benziger, November 7, 1997. 6. Samizdat film, June 16, 1989, Black Box, videocassette, and Imre Nagy’s Life and Immortality [Nagy Imre: E´lete e´s halhatatlansa´ga], produced by Ro´bert Bokor (Budapest: Hungarian Television, 1996), videocassette. 7. June 16, 1989, Black Box. 8. Ne´pszava, June 17, 1989, p. 3. 9. Magyar Nemzet, June 17, 1989, p. 3. 10. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz discusses the importance of charismatic figures in their ability to stimulate both negative and positive political dialogues in his seminal essay Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power (1973, pp. 121–146). 11. Durkheim (1933[1895], p. 151). 12. see Wallwork (1972, pp. 35–36). 13. Durkheim (1933[1895], p. 79–80) 14. (Wallwork, op. cit., p. 35). 15. Durkheim, La Science positive de la morale en Allemagne, Revue Philosophique, v. xxiv, 134. 16. (ibid., p. 56). 17. Durkheim, Cours de science sociale: Revu internationale de le´nseignement, XV, p. 48. Cited and translated by Lukes (1973, p. 42). This passage is from the opening lecture of Durkheim’s first course at the University of Bordeaux entitled ‘‘La solidaite sociale.’’ 18. Ibid. 19. (Wallwork, op. cit., p. 36). 20. Collective representations in Durkheim’s scheme do not constitute the social reality itself; they are only the projections, only the manifestations of it. Such typical manifestations of collective life include moral rules, precepts, religious beliefs and practices, juridical codes, myths and folklore, proverbs, popular sayings, and language. These collective representations, he indicates, ‘‘cannot form a circle closed

80

KARL P. BENZIGER AND RICHARD R. WEINER

upon itself, the source whence they derive must be found outside them. Either the conscience collective floats in the void, like a sort of inconceivable absolute, or it is connected with the rest of the world through the intermediary substratum on which, in consequence, it depends. On the other hand, of what can this substratum be composed if not of the members of society as they are socially combined.’’ Cited by Lukes, op. cit., p. 231 (from a review on Antonio Labriola in Revue Philosophique, XLIV in 1897, pp. 645–651; cf. That substratum to which collective representations are attached is what Durkheim labels institutions: recognized normative patterns or social bonds. And this notion gave rise to his development of ‘‘depth levels’’ of social reality. 21. Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins point to the connections between Halbwachs, Edward Shils, and Benedict Anderson in regard to generational memory. Edward Schils asserts that younger generations define themselves in contrast to earlier generations and both authors underscore the importance of youth in nationalist movements (Anderson, 1991; Olick & Robins, 1998, pp. 109, 123; Shils, 1981). 22. The speeches at the funeral were remarkably similar calling for Hungarian sovereignty, democracy, and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. See especially the speeches of Sandor Kopacsi, Imre Me´cs, and Viktor Orban. It has been remarked that the applause stirred by Orban’s speech could be found in the tenor of the presentation and the fact that he represented the future generations of Hungarians at the time (Benziger, 2000, pp. 152–153; Weiner, 2004, pp. 6–34). 23. Symbols are the mediation between the content of the signification intended and the collective actors involved. Such symbols can veil the communication they seek to disclose and so hinder participation in it. Gurvitch believed that there are depth levels of social reality below the symbolic levels that are spontaneous, innovating, and creative in nature and ontologically prior as the foundation of any social framework of knowledge. See Gurvitch (1971, supplement, pp. 231–234, 1963; also see Gabel, 1963). It is a social interaction that Alfred Schutz saw as essential to all communication: ‘‘a mutual tuning-in relation’’ by which I and Thou are expressed by the participants as a ‘‘We.’’ See Schutz (1970, chapter nine, especially pp. 214– 217). Gurvitch asserts that beneath all forms of collective attitudes, organizations, patterns, signs, roles, and symbols, there exists a sphere of collective behavior, ideas, and values, and at the most profound level: the collective conscience. + 24. For example, see ‘‘Ko¨szo¨net a szabadsa´u¨g hoseinek, 1956–2006 [Thank you to the heroes of freedom],’’ Ne´pszabadsa´g, October 21, 2006, p. 10. The events began on October 21 and continued through November 4. 25. Fireworks that took place later in the evening could only be viewed on the public television; see Zsolt Gre´czy, ‘‘Za´rt kapuk mo¨go¨tt, me´lto´sa´ggal [Behind closed doors with dignity],’’ Ne´pszabadsa´g, October 24, 2006, p. 2. 26. Zsolt Gre´czy, ‘‘Ke´t u¨nnepre ke´szu¨l a jobboldal? [Does the right wing prepare for two celebrations?],’’ Ne´pszabadsa´g, June 16, 2006, p. 3. 27. Zsolt Gre´cy, ‘‘Nagy Imre csak a balodale´? [Does Imre Nagy belong only to the left?],’’ E´pszabadsa´g, June 17, p. 3. 28. For example, the proposed reduction of hospital beds, closing of hospitals, introduction of co-pays for medical visits, and the introduction of tuition in higher + education. See Iniszteri programmorzsa´k: Megkezdodtek a bizottsa´gi meghallgata´sok-Sla´gerte´ma´k, hato´sa´gi energiaa´r [Ministerial program crumbs: Committee

Trauma and the Limits of Redemptive Critique

81

hearings began – Most popular subjects co-pay, centrally regulated energy pricing],’’ Ne´pszabadsa´g, June 7, 2006, pp. 1–2. 29. In the first round FIDESZ polled 42.16% of the vote as opposed to the Socialist majority of 43.30%. The other two parties polling over 5% were the SZDSZ 6.29% and MDF 5.03%. See ‘‘Ne´gypa´rti parlament! [Four party Parliament],’’ Ne´pszabadsa´g Online, April 9, 2006, available at http://www.nol.hu/cikk/400127 and Csaba Luka´cs, ‘‘Me´g ne´gy nehe´z e´v (Four hard years),’’ Magyar Nemzet Online, April 24, 2006, available at http://www.mno.hu/print.mno?type¼3&id¼350393& rvt¼ 114&t¼undefined 30. President So´lyom seemed to support the opposition’s position saying, ‘‘There was nothing new in the content of [Gyurcsa´ny’s speech]’’ and claimed that the false promises made by the Socialists had created a moral crisis. As the President, however, he could not request his resignation. ‘‘Mora´lis va´lsa´g Magyarorsza´gon [Moral crisis in Hungary],’’ Ne´pszabadsa´g, September 19, 2006, p. 2. 31. After the crowd was driven away from the building, they attacked a monument commemorating the Soviet liberation of Budapest. ‘‘Megta´madta´k az MTV-t, az ellenze´k sem ura a helyzetnek-Mi lesz ma [They attacked the MTV, even the opposition parties cannot control the situation, what will happen today?],’’ + [Riot in front of Ne´pszava, September 19, 2006, pp. 1–2 and ‘‘O¨sszecsapa´s a te´ve´ elott the television station],’’ Ne´pszabadsa´g, September 19, 2006, p. 1. 32. For example, see Anto´nia Ra´di, ‘‘Ria, ria, Hunga´ria [Football slogan that rhymes with Hungary],’’ Hvg, 28, 38 (September 22, 2006), pp. 10–11 and in regard to the sighting of the FIDESZ representative Ne´pszava, September 19, 2006, p. 1. These symbols were ever present throughout the demonstrations and were available at small stands set up along the periphery of Kossuth Square. 33. Da´vid Trencse´ni, ‘‘Vakhit [Blind belief],’’ 168 o´ra, 18, 36 (September 7, 2006), pp. 10–11. 34. ‘‘Orba´n radika´lis felle´pe´st ı´ ge´r [Orba´n is promising a radical platform],’’ Ne´pszabadsa´g, September 14, 2006, p. 2. 35. The FIDESZ victory at the mayoral and county levels was decisive. Though SZDSZ/MSZP and MSZP candidates won mayoralties in four of Hungary’s major cities, Budapest, Szeged, Miskolc, and Pe´cs, FIDESZ won decisive county majorities in all but Budapest and Heves county. See Ne´pszava, October 2, 2006, pp. 1–2. 36. See ‘‘Gyurcsa´ny Ferenc bizalmi szavaza´st ke´r [Gyurcsa´ny requests a vote of confidence],’’ and Ildiko´ Csuhaj, ‘‘Orba´n Viktor 72 o´ra´s ultima´tomot adott [Viktor Orba´n issues a 72 hour ultimatum],’’ both in Ne´pszabadsa´g, October 3, 2006, p. 3. 37. ‘‘Folytathatja munka´ja´t a korma´ny [The government can continue with its work],’’ Ne´pszava, October 7, 2006, p. 3 and Gyo¨rgy B. Nagy, ‘‘Gyurcsa´ny harmadszor is bizalmat kapott [Gyurcsa´ny received a vote of confidence for a third time],’’ Ne´pszabadsa´g, October 7, 2006, p. 2. 38. Ildiko´ Csuhaj, ‘‘FIDESZ-Gyurcsa´ny ne szo´laljon meg az 56-os megemle´keze´seken [Gyurcsa´ny should not speak at the 56 commemorations],’’ Ne´pszabadsa´g, October 12, 2006, p. 2. 39. From a speech given at the State Opera House as part of the national commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Revolution, Zsolt Gre´czy, ‘‘Za´rt + to¨bbse´ge Kapuk Mo¨go¨tt, me´lto´sa´ggal, Biztonsa´gi okok miatt az a´llami vezetok lemondta re´szve´tele´t az esti u¨nnepse´geken (Behind closed doors with dignity, due to

82

KARL P. BENZIGER AND RICHARD R. WEINER

security reasons the majority of the state leaders excused themselves from the evening celebrations],’’ Ne´pszabadsa´g, October 24, 2007, p. 2. 40. ‘‘When past and present remain interwoven, there is no clear dichotomy between history and memory’’ Friedlander, 1988, p. 18). 41. Horthy enjoyed wide backing for these policies that were seen, in part, for redressing the unjust settlement at the Trianon Palace. Alliance with the Axis powers had ensured territorial redress that restored parts of Slovakia, Serbia, and Transylvania to the Hungarians (Dea´k, 2000, p. 48). 42. Hungary withdrew from the Warsaw Pact and declared neutrality on November 1, 1956. 43. Zolta´n Ripp claims that this approach can easily be connected to the hero cult of the Pesti Sra´c (young street fighters of Pest) whose memory can be constructed in contrast to the communist reformers in Ripp (2006, pp. 106, 108). 44. Ildiko´ Hanko´, ‘‘A MagyarJeanne d’Arc, Te istudod,hogy a va´d hamis,csak a szent forradalmat akarja´k bemocskolni,’’ Magyar Demokrata, 10, 2 (October 12, 2006), p. 66. 45. For example, Pe´ter Mansfeld who was hanged in 1959 was 15 when he fought with the revolutionaries at Sze´na Square (Litva´n, 1996, p. 142; Szakolczai, 2002, pp. 174, 179). 46. A policy of lustration had not been enacted in 1989. According to Beverly A. James, a verbal agreement had been reached at the Roundtable talks that ensured there would be no retaliatory justice of this kind (2005, p. 107). 47. The demonstrators had the legal right to be on the Square until October 25, and so, the government had to negotiate with them. The police ordered them off the square, but renewed negotiations led to an arrangement in which the demonstrators agreed to a police cordon and to maintain order. Later it was reported that they + [The could stay with no restriction. See ‘‘Felte´telekkel maradhatnak a tu¨ntetok demonstrators can stay with restrictions],’’ Ne´pszabadsa´g, October 19, 2006, p. 2 and ‘‘Maradhatnak a Kossuth te´riek [The Kossuth Square demonstrators can stay],’’ Magyar Nemzet, October 21, 2006, p. 5. 48. ‘‘Vı´ za´gyu´, ko¨nnyga´z e´s gumilo¨vede´k az utca´kon [Water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets on the street],’’ Ne´pszava, October 24, 2006, p. 11. 49. For example, see Ga´bor Kerte´sz’ picture of Gyurcsa´ny on page 3 of Ne´pszava, October 24, 2006. 50. The construction of Heroes Square was begun in 1896 to celebrate the millennium of the Hungarian Kingdom. Alice Freifeld makes the point that the ‘‘Millennium Exhibition remained in Hungarian historical consciousness as a monument to past greatness’’ (2000, p. 277). The establishment of the Dual Monarchy enabled Hungarians to reimagine the glory of their past medieval kingdom (Anderson, 1991, p. 82; Somogyi, 1994, p. 251). Like the manipulation of holidays and textbooks by liberals, authoritarians, and communists, Heroes Square serves the same purpose (Benziger, 2008, pp. 88–90, 144–145; Freifeld, 2001). The sociologist Gabor Gyanni underscored this penchant for manipulation regarding the replacement of statuary in the square to accord with politics of the day. For example, Marx and Engels replaced Hapsburg figures after the 1919 Commune (Gyanni, 2008). 51. ‘‘Refomne´pszavaza´st kezdeme´nyez a Fidesz [FIDESZ will initiate a reform referendum],’’ Magyar Nemzet Online, October 24, 2007, available at http:// www.mno.hu/print.mno?type¼2&id¼380010&rvt¼2&t¼undefined

Trauma and the Limits of Redemptive Critique

83

+ 52. See the A´rpa´d Kurucz photo and ‘‘Az eroszak du´lt az utca´n [Violence in the streets],’’ Ne´pszabadsa´g, October 24, 2006, p. 4 and ‘‘Vı´ za´gyu´ [Water cannon],’’ Ne´pszava, October 24, 2006, p. 11. 53. Da´vid Trecse´ni, ‘‘U¨nnep az utca´n [Holiday in the streets],’’ 168 o´ra, 28, 43 (October 26, 2006), p. 10. Ne´pszava reported that the day began and ended the same way with the police dispersing demonstrators. In the middle of Orba´n’s speech it was learned that the police were dispersing the riot on Ka´roly ring and some tried to leave, but were unable to do so because of the size of the crowd. ‘‘Tı´ zezrek az Astoria´na´l [Tens of thousands at Astoria],’’ Ne´pszava, October 24, 2006, pp. 1, 9. According to La´szlo´ Rab, some thought that the crowd had been provoked but the nature of the crowd definitely changed around seven in the evening when a barricade was erected and some within the crowd appeared with baseball bats and masks. The location of the rally certainly made it hard for some at the rally trying to leave in + ´ s [Entrapped rally],’’ Ne´pszabadsa´g, October 24, 2006, ‘‘Csapda´ba csalt nagygyule p. 6. According to HetiVa´lasz, the police were supposed to protect the FIDESZ rally + ´ l [Spiral of violence],’’ 6, 43 (October 26, from the other group in ‘‘Eroszakspira 2006), p. 4. 54. ‘‘1956 and Hungary: The memory of eyewitnesses in search of freedom and democracy,’’ Conference, Italian Institute of Culture, Budapest, September 28–29, 2006. 55. ‘‘Kitu¨ntete´sek az e´vfordulo´n [Honors on the anniversary],’’ Ne´pszabadsa´g, October 22, 2006, p. 7. 56. Rose (1997). 57. Interview with Professor Dominick La Capra, Shoah Resource Center, Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, June 9, 1998, available at http://www.yad-vashem.org.il/ odot_pdt 58. See Charles Lemert, Durkheim’s Ghosts. 59. Our discussion of the ‘‘baroque’’ is informed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos: (1) ‘‘Three metaphors for a new conception of law: The frontier, the baroque and the south,’’ Law and Society Review, 29, 4 (1995), pp. 569–584; and (2) ‘‘Nuestra America: Reinventing a subaltern paradigm of recognition and redistribution,’’ Theory, Culture and Society, 18, 6 (2001), pp. 185–217. Also note the Chilean filmmaker living and working in Paris: Ruiz, R. (2005). Poetics of cinema (B. Holmes, Trans.). Paris: Dis Vior. 60. For example, Saul Friedlander uses this technique as he debunks the myth of German ignorance of the Holocaust (2007, pp. xxvi, 510–517). 61. Political actors continue to perceive the benefit that might accrue to them in a battle over history. Ideology of the present obscures the complex historical layering of the past century (Benziger, 2008, p. 116; Gyanni, 2008).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the 2005 European Consortium for Political Research Conference in Budapest at Corvinus University, and at the 2008 ‘‘Narrative Matters’’ Conference at the

84

KARL P. BENZIGER AND RICHARD R. WEINER

University of Toronto. This research and analysis was helped considerably by the archivists and librarians at the Sze´chenyi Library, the Library of the University of Szeged; the Rhode Island College Faculty Research Fund; Kla´ra Margit Benzigerne´ Gendur for her wonderful help with translation; and the continuing support and stimulation of the Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. We are most grateful for the critique and suggestions provided by three anonymous reviewers for Current Perspectives in Social Theory.

REFERENCES Adorno, T.W. (1959). The meaning of working through the Past. In: H. Pickford (Ed.) & T. Adorno (Trans.): Critical models, interventions and catch words (pp. 89–103). New York: Columbia University Press. Adorno, T. W. (1997). The semblance of subjectivity (T. Huhn & L. Zuidervaert, Eds. & Trans.). Cambridge, USA: MIT Press. Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and the spread of nationalism. New York: Verso. Ansell-Pearson, K. (1997). Deleuze and philosophy: The difference engineer. New York: Routledge. Arie`s, P. (1981). The hour of our death (H. Weaver, Trans.). New York: Knopf (first published in 1977 as Le Homme Devant le Mort. Tome 1: Les temps des gisants [Man before death: Vol. 1. The time of recumbent statues]. Paris: Seuil, 1985). Auge, M. (2004). Oblivion (M. de Jager, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Be`ke´s, C. (2002). The sixteen points prepared by Hungarian students, October 22–23, 1956. In: The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A history in documents (pp. 188–189). Budapest: Central European University Press. Be´ke´s, C., Byrne, M., & Rainer, J. M. (Eds.). (2002). Notes of discussion between CPSU Presidium and a HWP leadership delegation in Moscow on January 8, 1955. In: The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A history in documents (pp. 60–64). Budapest: Central European University Press. Benjamin, W. (1988). The origins of the German tragic drama (J. Osborne, Trans.). London: Verso. Benjamin, W. (1988). Ursprung der deutschen Trauerspiel (J. Osborne, Trans.). [The origin of German tragic drama.] London: Verso and Benjamin, W. (1973). Versuche u¨ber Brecht (S. Mitchell, Trans.). [Undersanding Brecht.] London: New Left Books. Benziger, K. P. (2000). The funeral of Imre Nagy: Contested history and the power of memory culture. History and Memory, 12(2), 142–164. Benziger, K. P. (2008). Imre Nagy martyr of the nation: Contested history, legitimacy, and popular memory in Hungary. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Bergson, H. (1907/1998). Creative evolution (A. Mitchell, Trans.). New York: Dover Books. Bergson, H. (1908). The memory of the present: False recognition (H. Weldon Carr, Trans.). Westport: Greenwood.

Trauma and the Limits of Redemptive Critique

85

Bergson, H. (1932/1938). The two sources of morality and religion (A. Audra & C. Brereton, Trans.). Garden City: Doubleday. Bergson, H. (1986/1991). Matter and memory In: N. Paul & W. Palmer (Ed. & Trans.). MindEnergy (pp. 111–153). New York: Zone Books. Bloch, M. (1962). The historian’s craft: On the nature and use of history and the techniques and methods of those who write it (P. Putnam, Trans.). New York: Knopf Vintage Books. Borhi, L. (2004). Hungary and the cold war, 1945–1956: Between the United States and the Soviet Union. Budapest: Central European University Press. Bozo´ki, A. (2002). The Hungarian roundtable talks of 1989 in a central European comparison. In: L. W. Congdon & B. K. Kira´ly (Eds.), The ideas of the Hungarian Revolution, suppressed and victorious, 1956–1999. New York: Columbia University Press. Dea´k, I. (1979). The lawful revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians. New York: Columbia University Press. Dea´k, I., Gross, J. T., & Judt, T. (Eds.). (2000). The politics of retribution in Europe: World War II and its aftermath (p. 48). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Deleuze, G. (1966/1993). Bergsonism (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1968/1993). Difference and repetition (P. Paton, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1983/2001). Cinema 1: The movement-image (H. Tomlinson & B. Habbarjam, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1985/2001). Cinema 2: The time-image (H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (2001). Pour immanence: A life (A. Boyman, Trans.). New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). A thousand plateaus (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1994) Spectres of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of meaning, and the new international (P. Kamuf, Trans.). New York: Routledge. Durkheim, E. (1933[1895]). The division of labor (G. Simpson, Trans.). New York: Macmillan. Durkheim, E. (1965). The elementary forms of the religious life (J. W. Swain, Trans.). New York: The Free Press. Frank, T. (1994). Hungary and the Dual Monarchy, 1867–1890. In: P. F. Sugar & P. F. T. Hana´k (Eds.), A history of Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Freifeld, A. (2000). Nationalism and the crowd in liberal Hungary, 1848–1914 (p. 277). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. Freifeld, A. (2001). The cult of March 15: Sustaining the Hungarian myth to the present. In: M. Burcur & N. M. Wingfield (Eds.), Staging the past: The politics of commemoration in Hapsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the present. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Friedlander, S. (1988). A conflict of memories? The new German debates about the final solution. Leo Baeck memorial lecture. New York: Leo Baeck Institute. Friedlander, S. (1993). Memory, history and the extermination of the Jews in Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Friedlander, S. (2007). The years of extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. Gabel, J. (1963). Dialectique et sociologie d’apre`s Georges Gurvitch. Annales: Eˇconomies, Socie´te´s, Civilisations, 18e anne´e(4), 794–797. Gati, C. (1986). Hungary and the Soviet bloc. Durham: Duke University Press.

86

KARL P. BENZIGER AND RICHARD R. WEINER

Geertz, C. (1973). Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Gotham, K., & Stipler, W. (1996). Narrative analysis and the new sociology. Sociological Quarterly, 37(3), 481–501. Guerlac, S. (2006). Thinking in time: An introduction to Henri Bergson. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gurvitch, G. (1963). The spectrum of social time (M. Korenbaum & P. Bosserman, Trans.). New York: Springer. Gurvitch, G. (1971). The social frameworks of knowledge (N. Thompson & K. Thompson, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Gyanni, G. (2008). Collective national memory and the cultic use of metropolitan space. In: Humanities Center Workshop on Contested Spatialities. Harvard University. Halbwachs, M. (1992). On collective memory (L. A. Coser, Ed. & Trans.). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hughes, H. S. (1958). Consciousness and society: The reorientation of European social thought 1890–1930. New York: Random House Vintage Books. Hughes, H. S. (1966). The obstructed path: French social thought in the years of desperation. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Husza´r, T. (2006). Ka´da´r Ja´nos: Politikai E´letrajz [Ja´nos Ka´da´r: A political biography]. Budapest: Corvina Kiado´. Hutton, P. (1994). Sigmund Freud and Maurice Halbwachs: The problem of memory in historical psychology. The History Teacher, 27(2), 145–158. James, B. A. (2005). Imagining post communism: Visual narratives of Hungary’s 1956 Revolution. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Kamm, H. (1989). The funeral of Imre Nagy. New York Times, June 17, p. 6. Kenez, P. (2006). Hungary from the Nazis to the Soviets: The establishment of the communist regime in Hungary 1944–1948. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kis, J. (1989). Politics in Hungary: For a democratic alternative. New York: Columbia University Press. Klein, K. L. (2000). On the emergence of memory in historical discourse. Representations, 69, 127–150. LaCapra, D. (1992). The personal, the political and the textual: Paul DeMan as object of transference. History and Memory, 4, 178–191. LaCapra, D. (1994). Representing the Holocaust: History, theory and trauma. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. LaCapra, D. (1997). Revisiting the historian’s debate: Mourning and genocide. History and Memory, 9(1/2), 43–72. LaCapra, D. (1998a). History and memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. LaCapra, D. (1998b). ‘‘Interview’’ with A. Goldberg Shoah Research Center at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 28 June. LaCapra, D. (1998c). Trauma, absence and loss. Critical Inquiry, 25, 32–55. LaCapra, D. (1998d). Lanzmann’s Shoah: Here there is no who. Critical Inquiry, 27, 23–69. LaCapra, D. (1999). The Holocausthistorians:Theoryand trauma. Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress. LaCapra, D. (2004). History in transit: Experience, identity, critical theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. LaCapra, D. (2007). Writing history, writing trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Trauma and the Limits of Redemptive Critique

87

Lacquer, W. (1992). Europe in our time. New York: Penguin Books. Lemert, C. (2006). Durkheim’s ghosts: Cultural logics and social things (p. 6). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Litva´n, G. (Ed.) (1996). The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Reform, revolt, repression 1953– 1963. London: Longman. Lukacs, J. (1988). Budapest 1900. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Lukes, S. (1973). Emile Durkheim. London: Allen Lane. McManners, J. (1981). Death and the French historians. In: J. Whately (Ed.), Mirrors of morality: Social studies in the history of death. London: Europa. Mouffe, C. (2007). Artistic action and agonistic spaces. Art and Research, 1(2) (University of Glasgow). Moulard-Leonard, V. (2008). Bergson–Deleuze encounters. Albany: SUNY Press. Muldoon, M. (2006). Tricks of time: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur in search of time, self and meaning. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Nora, P. (1989). Between memory and history. Representations, 26, 7–25. Olick, J. K., & Robins, J. (1998). Social memory studies: From ‘collective memory’ to the historical sociology of mnemonic practices. Annual Review of Sociology, 2, 105–140. Postone, M., Martha, V., & Kobyashi, Y. (2009). History and heteronomy. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy. Pozsgay, I. (1993). 1989: Politikus-pa´lya a pa´rta´llamban e´s a rendszerva´lta´sban [A politician’s career in the party-state and transition]. Budapest: Pu¨ski Kiado´. Quadagno, J., & Staples, K. (1992). Have historical sociologists forsaken theory? Sociological Methods and Research, 20(4), 481–507. Rainer, J. M. (1996). Nagy Imre: Politikai E´letrajz [Imre Nagy a political biography], Elso¨ ko¨tet (Volume I), 1896–1953. Budapest: 1956-os Inte´zet. Rainer, J. M. (1999). Nagy Imre 1953–1958: Politikai E´letrajz II. [Imre Nagy a political biography.] Budapest: 1956-os Inte´zet. Re´v, I. (1995). Parallel autopsies. Representations, 49(Winter), 15–39. Ripp, Z. (2006). Proble´ma´k, hia´nyok, e´s ne´zetku¨lo¨nbse´gek 1956 to¨rte´netira´sa´ban. Mu´ltunk, 51, 4[Problems, absence, and differences of viewpoints in the writing of history of 1956]. Rose, G. (1997). Mourning becomes the law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roth, M. (1995). The ironist’s cage: Memory, trauma and the construction of history. New York: Columbia University Press. Rothschild, J. (1993). Return to diversity: A political history of east central Europe since World War II (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schutz, A. (1970). On phenomenology and social relations, edited by H. O. Wagner. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Schwartz, B. (2000). Abraham Lincoln and the forge of national memory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Shils, E. (1981). Tradition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Somogyi, E. (1994). The age of neoabsolutism, 1849–1867. In: P. F. Sugar, P. Hana´k & T. Frank (Eds.), A history of Hungary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sorel, G. (1908). The decomposition of Marxism. In: I. L. Horowitz (Ed.), Radicalism and the revolt against reason: The social theories of Georges Sorel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Sorel, G. (1976). From Georges Sorel: Volume 1: Essays in socialism and philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.

88

KARL P. BENZIGER AND RICHARD R. WEINER

Sorel, G. (1990). From Georges Sorel, Volume 2: Hermeneutics and the social sciences (J. Stanley, Ed. & Trans.). New Brunswick: Transaction Books. Szakolczai, A. (2002). Repression and restoration, 1956–1963. In: L. W. Congdon & B. K. Kira´ly (Eds.), The Ideas of the Hungarian Revolution, suppressed and victorious, 1956–1999. New York: Columbia University Press. Verdery, K. (1999). The political lives of dead bodies: Reburial and post socialist change. New York: Columbia University Press. Wallwork, E. (1972). Durkheim: morality and milieu. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Weiner, R. R. (2004). Discourse and argument in instituting the governance of social law. Central European Political Science Review, 5(15), 6–34. Winch, P. (1958). The idea of social science (p. 23). London. Winter, J. (1995). Sites of memory, sites of mourning: The great war in European cultural history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolin, S. (1990). The presence of the past. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wolin, S. (1994). Fugitive democracy. Constellations, 1(1), 11–25.

THE DIRECTION OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL THEORY: A RESPONSE TO AMY ALLEN’S THE POLITICS OF OUR SELVES Colin Koopman ABSTRACT This review essay of Amy Allen’s The Politics of Our Selves focuses on the book’s excellent work in addressing some of the centermost philosophical and metaphilosophical problems in contemporary critical theory. I first consider the book’s intricate discussions of the work of Habermas and Foucault. I then leverage these discussions to pose a question that is crucial for contemporary critical theory. The crucial question concerns the metaphilosophical status of critical theory with respect to what we ought to expect contemporary critical theory to do. What is the best way of interpreting critical theory as a philosophical project?

Amy Allen’s The Politics of Our Selves (2008) may be the very best recent synopsis and advancement of contemporary critical theory we have both, in terms of its grasp of the central issues that have characterized the past The Diversity of Social Theories Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 29, 91–103 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limted All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-1204(2011)0000029008

91

92

COLIN KOOPMAN

few decades of work in critical theory as well as in its statement of the best future directions now available to social and political research in a criticaltheoretical perspective. The book ably brings into focus a set of issues that I take to be the centermost philosophical and metaphilosophical problems for contemporary work in critical theory. And it excellently formulates these issues in such a way as to develop new pathways forward. In what follows I shall offer a few comments on the book that are intended to bring these new pathways into better view. Doing so will enable me to put to Allen a crucial question that I think it behooves us to consider if we find Allen’s new pathways appealing, as I do. The crucial question I shall bring into focus concerns the metaphilosophical status of critical theory with respect to what we ought to expect contemporary critical theory to do. This question concerns the best way of interpreting critical theory as a philosophical project. In what new direction(s) should we take contemporary critical theory? Is critical theory best regarded as a set of philosophical methodologies meant to facilitate social scientific inquiry into the critical social, political, and ethical issues of our time? Or is critical theory better seen as a more traditional philosophical project, a sometimes systematic and often theoretical endeavor, in virtue of which philosophy is capable of making its own autonomous contribution to the project of social, political, and ethical critique? A more methodologicalanalytical critical theory would be necessary but not sufficient for many forms of social critique. A more theoretical-systematic form of critical theory, by contrast, would be by itself sufficient (and presumably also necessary) for the forms of social critique on our radar today. Of course, both forms of critical theory are today probably requisite, but my question concerns which form of critical theory we should prioritize, privilege, and emphasize in our philosophical practice today.

THE PROJECT OF ALLEN’S BOOK I shall begin with a few comments on the philosophical problematic at the heart of the book. The book takes as its central concern the relation between power and autonomy in contemporary social theory from a critical theoretical perspective. The difficulty of the problem is familiar to us all and can be stated in many ways. Ontologically and metaphysically, the problem concerns the compossibility of power and autonomy in the constitution of contemporary subjectivity. Politically and ethically, the problem concerns

The Direction of Contemporary Critical Theory

93

the fragile status of agency in social scenes in which the very appearance of agency is dependent on forms of power that are structuring at the same time that they are constitutive. Methodologically, the problem can be stated in terms of the challenge of gaining analytical and diagnostic grip on contemporary social practices without either reducing these practices to mere effects of social power or tracing these practices causally back to a suspect concept of agency that is both individualist and substantivist. The past fifty years of work in critical theory show us that this is one of the centermost philosophical problems of our time – moreover, philosophical work in other traditions including feminist philosophy, phenomenology, pragmatism, and even many corners of analytic philosophy confirm the critical status of the problem of thinking power and validity together. I hold Allen’s book in high regard not because it has solved this central problem. Problems this deep do not admit of solution. What Allen achieves, rather, is a new perspective on the status of the problem itself and what might count as a possible relaxation of the many difficulties we experience when facing it. This new perspective, in short, involves understanding the way (or ways) in which power and validity are, to use Allen’s term, ‘‘entangled’’ with one another. The entanglement of power and validity does not imply a reduction of either to the other. It implies, rather, an affirmation of the full complexity of the emergence and constitution of modern subjectivity. An affirmation of this complexity leads us, in my view and I think in Allen’s view too, to an idea of philosophy as a form of inquiry that must bring the social sciences into its orbit. Allen’s critical-theoretical account of the politics of our selves has ‘‘three principal aims: y to analyze subordination y to critique such subordination y and third, to consider how such social transformation might be accomplished’’ (p. 19). Achieving these aims, again in my view and I believe in Allen’s also, requires a practice of philosophy that brings practices of critical social science into its orbit. Power and validity cannot be philosophically disentangled. But through careful inquiry we can gain analytical grip on the composites that they together form. Thus Allen calls for ‘‘an interrogation of specific forms of rationality and the ways in which they are connected to relations of power and modes of subjection’’ (p. 66). On my view, this idea of a philosophicallyinformed critical social science does not solve the power–autonomy and structure–agency problems. What it does instead is to reconfigure the philosophical requirements we impose on critical analyses of the social, political, and ethical processes we take as our subject. The new requirements, in short, ask of philosophers that we affirm the full complexity characteristic of our social practices, rather than abstracting

94

COLIN KOOPMAN

this complexity away by emphasizing power at the expense of autonomy, or agency at the expense of structure. Allen’s conception of the complex entanglement of power and validity is facilitated by rereadings of two of the most important contributions to recent critical theory, namely those of Michel Foucault and Ju¨rgen Habermas. Allen reconfigures Foucault’s account of freedom in a way that facilitates compatibility with Habermas’s emphasis on the importance of validity claims in social interaction. In parallel, she reinterprets Habermas’s account of validity in a way that renders it amenable to Foucault’s insights about the profound grip that power has on us all. These revisions are in their own right valuable contributions to contemporary scholarship on Foucault and Habermas. Allow me now to shift gears and seek clarification on the philosophical terms of these rereadings by way of posing two questions about these reinterpretations.

ON HABERMAS With respect to Habermas on validity, Allen confronts Habermas with the objection (already familiar through the work of Nancy Fraser, Thomas McCarthy, Axel Honneth, Seyla Benhabib, and Richard Bernstein) that his attempt to establish validity in terms of a requirement for context transcendence is impossibly strong because too formalist and idealist in construction. Her proposal is that we initiate a ‘‘temporalizing, pragmatizing, and contextualizing of communicative rationality’’ (p. 148). I am in favor of this. I do, however, wish to enter a small, and I hope instructive, caveat regarding Allen’s rejection of what she calls ‘‘radical contextualism’’ as the view supposedly held by pragmatists such as Richard Rorty.1 On my reading, Rorty, like John Dewey and William James before him, would be prepared to accept Allen’s version of ‘‘contextualist validity’’ without insisting that validity is always and everywhere irremediably local. The important thing about validity, for both Habermas and Rorty, is the way in which it invites transcending the context in which it is rooted. No reasonable pragmatist has ever meant to suggest that validity claims are inextricably bound to just that context in which they are offered. The thing about which philosophers might reasonably disagree concerns whether or not contexttranscendence is a process that takes place over time in practice or if instead it is automatically implicit in every validity claim as a kind of transcendental condition of its possibility. Do validity claims push themselves to extend

The Direction of Contemporary Critical Theory

95

beyond the contexts in which they are offered? Or are they pulled free of their context by transcendental conditions? On my reading, Rorty and the later Habermas agree that we do not need transcendentality-as-condition if we can give social scientific accounts of transcending-in-action. I mention the pragmatists here only because I believe that their ready emphasis on temporality and historicity as at the heart of inquiry and ethics can provide critical theorists with resources for better understanding this aspect of their tradition.2 These resources may be needed to overcome the obstacle of Habermas’s earlier insistence on a strong requirement for transcendentality.3 However, if I understand Habermas’s more recent work correctly, he now prefers to play down transcendentality in favor of processes of transcending.4 If this is so, then pragmatism can help. These issues concerning the proper interpretation of Habermas, and the philosophical status of competing interpretations now on offer, can be focused in terms of a series of pointed questions. How strong is Habermas’s requirement for transcendence? Is transcending-in-action enough on his account? Or does he still require something more transcendental in orientation? Would, and should, critical theorists be content with a more process-driven version of transcending in place of a substantive version of transcendental critique? If this final question can be sensibly answered in the affirmative, then I think pragmatists like James, Dewey, and Rorty can be of immense use to contemporary critical theorists insofar as they have already developed accounts of the ways in which norms internal to practices are portable to other practices through processes that preserve their normative validity. Further addressing these issues concerning Habermas so as to move beyond this merely conditional claim would require a much fuller engagement with his work than I can here develop. The questions as stated, without answers, can I hope serve to bring into focus a set of issues for the Frankfurt wing of contemporary critical theory prompted, but not yet fully resolved, by Allen’s work. These questions in view, allow me to now turn from Frankfurt to Francophone critical theory.

ON FOUCAULT With respect to Foucault, Allen’s reading is nuanced, creative, and enormously fresh. Foucault’s reception in philosophical circles, especially Anglophone philosophical circles, led to a radical hyperbolization of claims, methodologies, and philosophical strategies that were in Foucault’s own work rather more sensible than many are now inclined to believe. Allen

96

COLIN KOOPMAN

brings us back to a reading of Foucault as a philosophical radical but also radically philosophical figure. Foucault, on Allen’s reading, has a firm place in the history of philosophy not by virtue of having rejected the supposed pretensions of high modern philosophy, but rather by virtue of having appropriated and transfigured the valid concerns of modern philosophy. For instance, Allen offers a compelling rereading of Foucault as a Kantian. The North American readership that invented the label of postmodernism and then floated Foucault under that banner would find it difficult to square their Foucault with Allen’s Kantian Foucault. Allen’s reading possesses the crucial virtue of squaring itself rather precisely to the text of Foucault’s thought, and in doing so Allen convincingly shows the depth of Kant’s influence on Foucault’s thought. Kant is the one philosopher who shows up in every major period of Foucault’s work, from his 1954 translation of and commentary on Kant’s anthropological writings to the famous 1984 essay that borrows its title from one of Kant’s own contributions. In my own work on Foucault, I too make a big deal of Kant’s influence – but whereas Allen sees Kant’s influence reaching into Foucault’s conception of freedom, I see Kant as a more methodological influence from whom Foucault inherits an idea and practice of critique.5 My view is more modest, in part because I cannot overcome a worry I have about the sort of Kantian Foucault offered by Allen. The most characteristic feature of Allen’s view is the claim that autonomy is the central notion in Foucault’s conception of freedom. This involves the case for a strong normative conception of freedom in Foucault. Allen’s view is that Foucault offers a two-part notion of autonomy drawn up in terms of ‘‘capacities for critical reflection and self-transformation’’ (p. 2). Now, I agree with Allen that Foucault understood freedom in terms of critical reflection and self-transformation, but I have always understood these as enactive practices rather than possessed capacities. If freedom is conceived as a capacity, then mustn’t this capacity inhere in or be possessed by something? If so, doesn’t this invite the disposed transcendental (or even worse, substantial) subject in through the back door? By contrast, conceptualizing freedom as what we do rather than as what we are shuts the door on (a certain conception of) transcendental critique and opens up vistas of immanent critique. Foucault (1984, p. 245) once wrote, in a striking formulation, that, ‘‘Liberty is a practice.’’ His point, I always took it, was that freedom is something that we do rather than something that we have or are and to which we can appeal.6 My understanding is that Foucault refused to appeal to liberty in the name of liberation. His work, rather, involves facilitating the practice of freedom by way of rigorous inquiry into ways in

The Direction of Contemporary Critical Theory

97

which we tend to passively evade practices of freedom. ‘‘The guarantee of freedom is freedom,’’ he said.7 Now, I believe that Allen’s Foucaultian ethics of autonomy could certainly be made to accommodate the emphasis on practice as a process rather than capacity as a state.8 But I am not sure whether she would find such accommodation amenable. This is a point on which I wish the book had offered further clarification. What is the heart of Foucaultian freedom for Allen? Practices, acts, and processes of reflection and transformation? Or rooted capacities for reflection and transformation? Reflecting and transforming in actu? Or reflection and transformation in posse? If the latter, what is the basis for these capacities, and what evidence do we have for them above and beyond the processes which the former point to? Where do we find autonomy except in its practice? What would the value be of a non-practiced capacity for autonomy?

CRITICAL THEORY AND ITS METHODOLOGY Turning now from Foucault and Habermas to a consideration of the connection among the two, my own sense is that Foucault and Habermas have an abundance to offer one another, especially if both are read through the lens of active practical processes, as I have been urging. Habermasian and Foucaultian perspectives have for too long been seen by critical theorists as opposed. I regard Allen’s book as the first in what I expect will be a whole suite of contributions making effective use of Habermasian and Foucaultian ideas together. There are, however, at least two possible ways forward for those of us who propose to follow the pathway cleared by Allen. What this shows is one way in which contemporary critical theory is at a critical metaphilosophical crossroads today. This brings us to the crucial question I mentioned at the outset. One way of charting the path proposed by Allen would involve a wholesale integration of the centermost aspects of Foucaultian genealogy and Habermasian critical theory. Navigating this route requires reconceptualizing the philosophical contributions of Foucault and Habermas so as to demonstrate their compatibility with and utility for one another. The impressive result of this approach would be, presumably, a philosophical theory that integrates crucial components of Foucault and Habermas. This Foucaultian–Habermasian perspective might take the form, for instance, of a critical theoretical reconceptualization of the relationship between abstract concepts like power and validity, or strategy and freedom, or society and

98

COLIN KOOPMAN

subject, so as to overcome certain philosophical difficulties that have in the past acted as obstacles to correctly bringing into view the politics of our selves, insofar as understanding such politics invariably involves invoking these concepts. This seems to be Allen’s ambition in the book. What this approach promises is a set of philosophical capacities for reflectively, and presumably somewhat speculatively, resolving certain philosophical puzzles that obfuscate (or even negate) critical social theories of contemporary social realities. On this approach, the primary achievement of philosophy is to be located at a certain level of abstraction appropriate to what we often refer to as ‘‘theory’’ or ‘‘system’’ such that gains made at a more modest empirical level are regarded as mere consequences of theoretical insights achieved by rigorous philosophical thought. There is much to be said for this approach. No self-respecting philosopher should be willing to dismiss it, at least not without much pause and reflection. But many of us who feel the pull of this approach are also poignantly aware of certain recurring difficulties that must be met by any proposal for a new philosophical theory. In this case, the primary difficulty that this approach faces is of showing how, at an abstract level, the concepts of power and validity are always already entangled. Critics of this approach (be they traditionalist Habermasians or hyperbolizing Foucaultians) will be eager to throw up counterexample after counterexample of instances of validity claims purified of power entanglements, or of the reducibility of validity claims to strategic power relations, and so on. Perhaps these counterexamples can be reinterpreted according to the new theoretical edifice. But if not, then the new theory will have to delimit certain conditions for dismissing such examples as not under the coverage of the theory. For example, it might be claimed that a given theory of freedom applies only to the political (and not the economic) domain or only to liberal (and not despotic) regimes. The familiar reply to this move is to question as artificial the distinctions in virtue of which the theory conveniently sets its own parameters of application. These debates are familiar to us all. It is not clear how, at an abstract level, the familiar impasses in which they tend to resolve can be overcome. The impasses can, however, be overcome by descending from the abstract to the concrete. A descent of level along these lines does involve a surrender of certain systematic and speculative gains whose condition is precisely the theoretical integration of power and validity at an abstract level. But what it loses for philosophy as an autonomous practice it might win back for philosophy reconceived as an inherently cross-disciplinary practice that, to do its business, must involve itself in history, sociology, anthropology, economics, cultural studies, and much more besides.9

The Direction of Contemporary Critical Theory

99

The second way forward for contemporary critical theory thus begins by abandoning the traditional philosophical strategy of integration in favor of a more modest strategy of delegation. Navigating this route involves tailoring the analytical and diagnostic apparatuses supplied by Foucault and Habermas such that we can make effective use of each where they are most needed in the context of our critical inquiries. Following Seyla Benhabib’s distinction quoted by Allen at the outset of the book, this view suggests that Foucault provides us with tools useful for ‘‘diagnostic’’ thinking (or what Foucault himself described as problematizational thought) whilst Habermas prepares us with concepts crucial for ‘‘anticipatory-utopian’’ critique (or what Habermas and Dewey both described, in their own ways, as reconstructive learning processes). This is my own approach, which I offer in my own work in part as an amendment of Allen’s view and in part by way of a pragmatism-informed repositioning the critical contributions offered by problematizational genealogy and reconstructive critical theory.10 Philosophical pragmatism, with its ready insistence on the temporality and historicity of both social structure and rational normativity, might have an important role to play in mediating in this way the long-standing but seemingly-exhausted Foucault–Habermas impasse. If we can reread Habermas and Foucault, as I have implicitly urged above, as philosophers of transitions, processes, and dynamics of socialization and subjectivation, then we have already gone a long way toward reading them as philosophical social scientists. For a reading along these lines suggests that their primary aim is not to capture the essence of any given object of inquiry so much as to conceptualize some fragile and ephemeral equilibrium that has congealed around an ever-flowing object of inquiry that is already on its way elsewhere in the very course of our analytical interrogation of it. Pragmatism may be of particular value for such a reconciliation of genealogy with critical theory insofar as it already has a foot firmly in each door. With Habermas, the pragmatists emphasize the potential of transformative agency in meliorating, or reconstructing, problematic features of our social lives. With Foucault, the pragmatists are attentive to the need for understanding contemporary problems historically in light of the often-hidden dimensions of our social lives that make these problems possible (though I of course accept that Foucault was much better at this than most pragmatists). Lastly, pragmatism also endorses a metaphilosophical perspective whereby we might sensibly achieve a methodological reconciliation of the quite different toolsets provided us by Habermas and Foucault. As pragmatists we need not feel guilty about drawing now from Habermas, now from Foucault.

100

COLIN KOOPMAN

The guilt disappears because our aim is no longer that of a systematic, wholesale, or overarching theoretical edifice. The aim is rather one of diagnosing and responding to contemporary political, social, and ethical problems. This is an aim that I think both Foucault and Habermas shared with the pragmatists, especially James and Dewey. Delegating separate responsibilities to Frankfurt and Francophone critical theory in this way might appear to some to be a blatant evasion of the persisting philosophical oppositions that set these two camps apart. But there is on the view I favor, properly speaking, no opposition. For problematization and reconstruction need not compete for the same space or terrain of inquiry. This is because these two philosophical projects need not be read as efforts in systematic or speculative philosophy. They can, and I think they should, be read rather as efforts in philosophical methodology. Indeed, the delegational strategy requires treating genealogy and critical theory as philosophically-informed methodologies or analytics rather than as philosophically-ambitious theories or systems. Genealogical problematization is best read as a methodology for clarifying and intensifying the niches of dangerousness that motivate the elaboration of present practices. If this reading is right, then we should not try to mine from Foucault a theory of power, but rather look to his work for an analytic methodology for inquiring into the way power functions in specific contexts, as well as for rather precise conceptualizations of power that flowed from Foucault’s own deployment of his methodology in the contexts where he located his own work. Likewise, critical theoretical reconstruction should be read as an effort in methodology that equips us to interrogate ways in which we can respond to the problematic dangers we face in the present. The best contributions of Foucault and Habermas can be recognized in these methodological reinterpretations of their work. Furthermore, according to these reinterpretations, philosophy best does its work in concert with, rather than as a substitute for, the social sciences. Foucault was always at his best as a philosopher-historian. Habermas’s best appeal consists in his work as a philosopher-sociologist. We need not decouple the uniquely philosophical aspect of their work (whatever that may be) in an effort to achieve gains by way of forms of speculation and systematization only enabled by abstraction. All we need to do is to show that there are no profound philosophical incompatibilities separating Habermas from Foucault. Showing this requires not nearly so much as showing how we can successfully pull off a full-scale theoretical integration of the two views. I have suggested that Allen’s book evinces a strong preference for the integrationist approach at the wholesale level of theorization. By contrast,

The Direction of Contemporary Critical Theory

101

I prefer the strategy of delegation at the retail level of methodological application. But I also think Allen should prefer it too and in virtue of certain commitments already internal to her project. Recall my discussion at the outset of a philosophical collaboration with social science. If a collaboration among critical philosophy and critical social science is indeed what Allen envisions, then all she needs, and indeed all she should want, is a critical-theoretical methodology drawing on both Habermas and Foucault. If philosophy provides analytics for studying specific composites of power and validity, then it need not systematically theorize these composites. My thought here is just that we may not need a theory to show how power and validity are entangled if we can analytically engage actual social practice in terms of their entanglement. And perhaps it is this analytical engagement of actual social practices that we should prioritize and prefer (over abstract theorization) as we expend our limited energies as critical theorists in the face of the profound difficulties we face midst the mobilities of our contemporary moment. In everything we do as philosophers there is the discomforting reality of irreversible opportunity costs. Philosophy, after all, is a practice just like any other.

CONCLUSION I have posed three questions for Allen and am greatly interested to learn from her answers. The questions can be summarized as follows. First, what is the best way of preserving Habermas’s idea of validity? Does detranscendentalization require something more than context-transcending-in action? If not, can we agree that Habermas is accurate in recent work to label himself a Kantian pragmatist? If this is so, does he share more with Rorty and with Dewey than is commonly acknowledged? Second, how are we to understand Foucault’s concept of freedom? What is central here, freedom as an autonomous capacity or freedom as autonomous activity? Third, how are we to construe the reconciliation between genealogy and critical theory? Does reconciliation here require a philosophical integration whereby we fashion a new philosophical perspective that integrates elements of both? Or can we get by with a more humble methodological reconciliation that delegates the use of genealogical and critical theoretical perspectives where they are needful and effective in the context of a philosophical social science? This final choice between these two strategies raises a crucial metaphilosophical question which I believe we must challenge ourselves to confront if our projects in critical theory are to

102

COLIN KOOPMAN

remain in the near future. What should we expect of critical theory today? And of these two approaches, the theoretical and the methodological, which better performs the critical functions we expect of ourselves as contemporary critical theorists addressing ourselves to today?

NOTES 1. Allen’s critique of Rorty follows Cooke (2006) on many points. 2. See my Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (2009) for a full-scale reinterpretation of pragmatism along these lines. 3. As for instance in The Theory of Communicative Action ([1981]1984, 1987) and other writings of that period. 4. Here I am thinking of Between Facts and Norms ([1992]1996) as well as other more recent works. 5. See my forthcoming manuscript. Genealogy as Critique: Problematization and Transformation in Foucault & Others (forthcoming/2012). 6. This, after all, is how he famously described power in The Will to Know (and elsewhere). This point is instructive just insofar as Foucault affirmed that powers and freedoms are correlatively-constructed transactional realities. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality ([1976]1994); first published in French under the title Histoire de la sexualite´, 1: la volonte´ de savoir. 7. Foucault, ‘‘Space, Knowledge, Power’’, p. 245. I concede that Allen can draw ample evidence from elsewhere in Foucault’s writings to justify her description of ‘‘capacities’’ for ‘‘autonomy.’’ For example, in the recently translated 1983 course lectures at the Colle`ge de France, Foucault described his project as ‘‘a history of ontologies which would refer to a principle of freedom in which freedom is not defined as a right to be free, but as a capacity for free action’’ (see Foucault, [1983]2009, p. 310). But I might note that even here Foucault’s primary emphasis is on freedom as an action rather than as a state (in other words, we have here an operative emphasis on processes of freedom rather than capacities for freedom). 8. See for a suggestion to this effect Sawicki (2005, p. 388), discussing a draft manuscript of Allen’s Selves Koopman (forthcoming/2012). This is how I read Foucault’s ethics in my previously mentioned book manuscript. 9. The best recent statement of this, to my mind, is in Williams (2006). See for another example the perspective elucidated in Hacking (2002). 10. As I argue in Chapter 7 of my forthcoming Genealogy as Critique.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my colleague Rocı´ o Zambrana for insightful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. This chapter is a revision of a brief presentation given at the Critical Theory Roundtable at Duquesne

The Direction of Contemporary Critical Theory

103

University in October, 2010. My thanks to the organizers of the CTR for the opportunity to participate in an author-meets-critics session.

REFERENCES Allen, A. (2008). The politics of our selves: Power, autonomy, and gender in contemporary critical theory. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Cooke, M. (2006). Re-presenting the good society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Foucault, M. ([1983]2009). The government of self and others. (A. Davidson, Ed.; G. Burchell, Trans.). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. (1984). Space, knowledge, and power. Interview with Paul Rabinow. In: P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault reader (pp. 239–256). New York, NY: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. ([1976]1994). The history of sexuality, volume 1: An introduction. (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage. Habermas, J. ([1981]1984). The theory of communicative action. Vol. I: Reason and the rationalization of society (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. ([1981]1987). The theory of communicative action. Vol. II: Lifeworld and system (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. ([1992]1996). Between facts and norms. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hacking, I. (2002). Historical ontology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Koopman, C. (2009). Pragmatism as transition: Historicity and hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Koopman, C. (forthcoming/2012). Genealogy as critique: Problematization and transformation in Foucault & others. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Sawicki, J. (2005). Queering Foucault and the subject of feminism. In: G. Gutting (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Foucault (2nd ed, pp. 379–400). Cambridge: Cambridge University. Williams, B. (2006). Philosophy as a humanistic discipline. In: A. W. Moore (Ed.), Philosophy as a humanistic discipline (pp. 180–199). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

WHO ARE WE AND WHO DO WE WANT TO BE? AMY ALLEN’S THE POLITICS OF OUR SELVES Johanna Meehan ABSTRACT Amy Allen’s book, The Politics of Our Selves, advances feminists beyond current stalemates that insist that to acknowledge the importance of Habermas’s normative insights, is to deny the significance of Foucault’s description of the impact that power has on subject formation. In this article I describe Allen’s position and suggest its strengths and importance, criticize some of Allen’s arguments and offer suggestions for advancing the direction of Allen’s argument.

While there are many topics important to feminists, all are ultimately related in some way to subjectivity and power. Subjectivity is delimited and shaped in the inequitable social and political relationships that make us who we are, and gender is one of the most fateful of the relational matrices through which power operates. Thus, social theorists, especially feminist theorists, must be interested in power, and as Allen’s felicitous book title suggests, they must also theorize The Politics of Our Selves (2008). Articulating a politics of the self is not easy as the heated debate in feminist theory over the past twenty or so years indicates, but the task has been made far easier by The Diversity of Social Theories Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 29, 105–116 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-1204(2011)0000029009

105

106

JOHANNA MEEHAN

Allen’s lucid contributions to our understanding of the importance of both normative claims and vexed questions about power, gender, and autonomous agency. Allen’s overarching aim is to fully recognize the impact of power on gendered subjectivity while at the same time defending feminists’ normatively informed dreams of justice and women’s capacity for critical thought and transformational practices. These rest on our ability to critically reflect on the play of power that is always an aspect of human interactions, appeal to regulative norms rooted in the secular and antiauthoritarian aspirations of post-modern political life and organize for political change. Allen turns to Foucault’s and Butler’s accounts of power to describe the (de)formations of modern subjectivity, and to Habermas to describe the emancipatory norms and ideals of autonomy implicit in political critique. While Foucault and Butler offer us ways to understand the costs of socially constructed expressions of gender, Habermas describes the normative ideals of justice and autonomy that have evolved in the context of the West’s ethical institutions, practices, and self-understanding. While Habermas claims that these norms are trans-cultural and universal, Allen rejects this appeal to transcendent ideals and instead offers a deflationary reformulation of his normative arguments with the help of Thomas McCarthy and Maeve Cooke. Allen concludes by reminding us of the challenges that feminists face, not only in the form of sexist social and political practices, but as a result of the inculcated desires that are the legacy our the gendered identities. Turning to Foucault’s reading of Kant, Allen traces a reading as fruitful as it is unique, arguing that the thread that ties Foucault’s work together is his sustained attention to and interest in the conditions of modern subjectivity. If we pull at this thread, we can discern a coherent path of argument that extends from Foucault’s early work through the later books, articles and interviews written before his premature death. A more common reading of Foucault, of course, denies that Foucault had such an interest in his early work argues that, that his earlier and later work cannot be characterized as continuous, and that his ethical interests in the self develop only in his later works. Allen rejects this reading, arguing that it fails to grasp the real nature of Foucault’s project. Foucault did not reject the notion of the subject as unimportant to political theorizing, he took it to be at its heart, as Allen does. The problems that Foucault’s work raises revolve not around discontinuous claims, but around continuities that we have failed to recognize. Just as Kant sought to reveal the conditions that make the exercise of reason possible, Foucault used his genealogies to explore the historical/political conditions of the constitution of the modern subject.

Who Are We and Who Do We Want to Be?

107

His aim, Allen argues, is to open a space for reflecting on the possibilities of a post-naı¨ ve, but also post-cynical, ‘‘post-modern’’ subject. Foucault asks how the depressing underbelly of modernity and the workings of power responsible for the modern subject can become conditions for the subject’s remaking. The explorations of subjectivity and discipline of the self in Foucault’s late works continue the work of his earlier reflections on autonomy, rationality, and interiority. Discipline, sexuality, the body, normativity, law, and governmentality are the conditions in which modern subjectivity is produced, and it is from these that new forms of subjectivity must evolve. Foucault, like McCarthy, argues that we must begin any ethical projects from where we already are and modern subjects are shaped by modern practices of power. Allen’s reading of Foucault’s Kant is especially important. Kant, of course, articulated the conditions that make reason and autonomy possible, and claimed that because they are a function of reason itself, they are universal and transcend historical time, geographical place, and the particularity of any one person’s thinking. Allen’s Foucault returns to Kant’s questions about what makes reason and moral thought possible and considers the political conditions that produce the knowing, willing, and judging subject. Foucault rejects Kant’s account of reason’s universality and transcendence, arguing that Kantian subject, the modern subject, is located and produced by the discourses and practices that constitute it. His genealogies are meant, Allen argues, to trace the shape of modernity and the workings of power that set up the conditions that structure and produce specific forms of reason and subjectivity. The feminist lessons that Allen draws from Foucault are fourfold. First, Foucault and Allen agree, there is no outside to power. Power is everywhere, deforming and informing us, producing our desires, beliefs, and values. If we are to understand how gender constructs psyche we must acknowledge the relationship of power and subjectivity. Second, norms cannot be inoculated from power because the reason and autonomy that define modern ideals of freedom are themselves both the effects and conduits of power. Third, our political aspirations and the norms to which we appeal are shaped in relation to the power we resist. Finally, although the ideals of autonomy and equality to which feminists appeal may seem to suggest that we can articulate norms that transcend the relations of power that mark all human interactions, or free ourselves from the distortions of gender, neither are possible. Rights claims and feminists’ other political and moral beliefs have been shaped by power, as are the motivations and desires that constitute subjectivity.

108

JOHANNA MEEHAN

Feminists condemn current social arrangements because of what is seen as normative violations, subversions of freedom and failures to support the development of autonomy. In doing so, they appeal to normative claims about freedom, justice, authenticity, agency, and other political and ethical ideals. Such appeals, as Allen fully acknowledges, put feminists in the same difficult theoretical position that all social theorists have found themselves in of late. Deconstructive efforts to trace the workings of power have left good reasons to be cynical about political norms that once were taken to be self-evidently positive aspirations. Perhaps Kant, Locke, Condorcet, Jefferson, the satirical Voltaire, and even the forever conflicted Rousseau, could link progress to reason, justice and democracy without wincing, but the benefit of hindsight and Foucault has, as Allen argues, shown us that the ideals of justice, universality, truth, consensus and autonomy defended by earlier philosophers, have often been mobilized in support of empire, god, whiteness, rationality, wealth, and patriarchy. This has been the case so often that it is tempting to jettison them altogether, like the proverbial baby the in filthy bath water. Some feminists, like other social critics, struck by the intersection of such values with imperialism, sexism, and capitalism have been attracted to this ‘‘ditch the norms’’ strategy. While Allen embraces the insights that Foucault’s genealogies offer, including the way that they unmask the violence that ideals can wreak, she counsels against such a move. All social critiques, feminism included, require normative legs. While there is no untainted normative ground upon which feminists can stand (or anyone else can, either for that matter), feminism is what Horkheimer and Adorno describe as a critical theory, that is, it offers insight into the social and political forces at play around us and is conceived with an emancipatory intent. Feminists work to transform lives by changing political and social relationships and enabling greater capacities for moral autonomy, The omnipresence of power never led Foucault to believe that we cannot think about or imagine alternative and more just forms of life, Allen argues. Even though discourses, normative or otherwise, are inevitably shot through by power and thus are always impure – even those that Habermas describes – are inevitably power-ridden, if not power-driven, but this does not mean that reason is useless or that ethical commitments cannot be defended however. Foucault has much to teach us about power and has already proved useful to feminist critiques, although he fails to distinguish emancipatory power from power that violates. While agreeing that there is no outside to power, Allen suggests that there are some forms of power that are enabling and others that are toxic. As she argued in an earlier book, such distinctions are important, especially to women whose oppression is

Who Are We and Who Do We Want to Be?

109

not well served by the classical critiques of class, or even by more recent theoretical accounts of racism. Indeed, one central thread of Allen’s argument is that without some normative position the critical politics essential to feminism can only be viewed as arbitrary. Feminists must acknowledge the reality of power and the distortions of reason and affects that it brings about, while aspiring to egalitarian social relations and politically mobilizing in their pursuit. Allen concludes her discussion of Foucault with the acknowledgement that as powerful as his account of power is, feminists cannot find the normative resources needed to justify critique and to articulate our political aspirations in his work. Although Allen believes that Habermas’s argument must be re-worked, she also believes that his description of the role that normative discourses can play in intersubjective social relationships offers feminists a way to think about current political arrangements and transformations necessary for change. Allen argues that merely viewing Habermas as a Kantian straw-man, as some theorists do, is both to read him unfairly, and to relinquish the powerful normative framework that his work offers. While she believes that his account of the subject and normative discourses screens out power and fails to understand the limits, coercive potential or even the fundamental historicity of normative claims, she believes that these are failings that can be remedied. Habermas distinguishes communicative and instrumental rationality and argues that the emancipatory aims that motivated the best ideals of the Enlightenment, are rooted not in the instrumental reason that drove the development of modern science and technology, but in the development and spread of reason-giving practices that democratized and secularized the West’s intersubjective negotiations of value. It is the institutionalization of ‘‘communicative reason’’ that allowed the ‘‘unforced force of the better argument’’ to structure more personal, local, national and international interactions. While recognizing the importance of Habermas’s moral theory, Allen does not believe that his claims to the universal validity of norms can be sustained. While Allen argues against the sort of relativism of the sort that Rorty, for example, defended, she also argues that there is no view from nowhere from which norms could be proposed or evaluated. Normative claims arise in specific political contexts and are rooted in particular ways of life that are shaped by historically particular values and ethical practices. One of the less than fully realized ideals that has evolved with the development of modern forms of subjectivity and secular and democratic social practices and institutions is the theoretical, if not practiced, commitment to resolve differences by defending claims by appealing to rational arguments that could be agreed on by all rational agents.

110

JOHANNA MEEHAN

Feminists offer critiques and make judgments that appeal to normative claims that have emerged as important to modern self-understanding. The reason-giving practices to which feminists contribute exemplify a commitment to communicative rationality. While they may not result in a consensus about rights or to whom they apply, and the best argument and most fair claim may not carry the day, as McCarthy argues, the commitment to continue to argue is one of the most important of modernity’s normative legacies. Habermas’s account of rationality properly de-transcendentalized and made porous to power can offer us a way to think about the normative dimensions of emancipatory social critiques and political movements, but his account of subject formation, Allen argues, is even more critically in need of serious re-vamping than his normative arguments. Habermas has claimed that individuation and socialization happen in a single stroke; we become subjects as we become aware of our relationships to others and theirs to us. Moral agency is, as Jonathan Lear puts it, an effect of our ‘‘second nature,’’ it springs not from reason itself or from the moral will, as Kant argued, but from the capacity to engage in normatively organized intersubjective relationships. Allen points out that Habermas has had an increasing tendency to view development as a primarily cognitive process, describing moral agency in terms of the reflexivity and autonomy required by the post-conventional moral reasoning that is important to posttraditional forms of life. Autonomous thought and action are capacities that are necessary if individuals are to act on perceived gaps between norms and practices, but our capacities to think and act are related to motivations and desires that are not fully subject to reason. Identity formation, Allen argues, is not a solely cognitive process; it includes the development of needs, motivational structures, and desires. Reason clarifies how gender works and why our current gender arrangements are pernicious; but Allen is all too aware of the gap between what feminists know and women feel and want. Any theory that takes the of gender seriously must worry about how needs and motivations develop, and about the perversions of desires produced by what Foucault and Butler call ‘‘subjectification.’’ Because gender is so deeply rooted reaching as we might say ‘‘all the way down,’’ claims that rational reflection can change what we feel and want seem less than convincing. Allen is less sanguine than Habermas about the role that reason can play in our efforts to reincarnate ourselves as living and breathing, and not just thinking, feminists. Recent emphases on the impact that language and narrative can have on us do not cut close enough to the psychic bone to capture the real challenges that

Who Are We and Who Do We Want to Be?

111

girls and women face. Using Seyla Benhabib’s work on gender, narrative and identity as a foil, Allen argues that gender goes more than story-deep; it cuts into the tissue of our desires and self-worth, working behind our backs and spitting back at us our choices of whom we love, what we want, and what we need. These are shaped by emotionally powerful relational interactions that not only can blind us to our subjection, but leave us wanting what can imprison us and cripple our best aspirations. It is, Allen claims, only when we grasp the mechanics of domination and decipher the ways that it can disguise itself – stubbornly suborning our will and hijacking our desires – that we can then appreciate the impact of gender. Without understanding what Jessica Benjamin calls ‘‘the bonds of love’’, and Butler identifies as the processes of ‘‘subjection,’’ feminists are unable to explain not only why men can find feminism difficult to embrace, but why women sometimes do as well. Butler and Benjamin both argue that infants come to be selves and understand and relate to others through relational interactions that engage affects and imagination, love and identification, and the complex psychic processes of repudiation, projection, introjection, mourning and splitting. The self’s will, desires, and reflective capacities are formed in the context of early relationships and the quality of these relationships have a powerful impact on later interactions. Butler, Benjamin, and Allen all characterize infant/caregiver relationships as significantly shaped by infants’ extreme dependence. Butler attends almost exclusively to the inequalities of children’s and parents’ relationships, emphasizing the intensity of needs that hold children hostage to their parents. Motivated by physical and psychic needs – including the need to construct a socially intelligible identity – children are willing to endure the pain of loss, denial and splitting that heterosexual and gendered identities require. Allen argues that Butler’s description of parent/ child relationships is too negative and does not capture the more positive dimensions of relationships and the autonomous subjectivity that they make possible. While she does not dispute that infants are very dependent on caregivers, and that inequities of power in these relationships are inevitable, Allen argues that Butler’s account conflates dependence with domination. Children’s dependence and the extreme difference of the degree of power wielded by parents (though even infants do not always seem as wholly powerless as Butler suggests, I must say) mean that infant/caregiver relationships will never be fully democratic, there are better and worse relationships, more and less emotionally competent parents, and more desirable and less desirable ways of relating to children. Allen turns from Butler’s account to Benjamin’s evaluation of the impact of both negative and positive relationships on the developing self. Benjamin

112

JOHANNA MEEHAN

describes relationships as dynamic interactions in which recognition, mutuality, omnipotence, destruction, and repair are all possible. Benjamin believes that infant/caregiver relationships can be mutual and that parents can and often do recognize the autonomy exercised by even very young infants. Emotionally supportive parents allow an infant to establish and control gaze direction and length, shift a child’s body so that they are able to feel secure and comfortable while being carried (carrying them in the first place is already a form of need recognition), respect the integrity of their bodies, think about what the world is like from the child’s point of view and explain what is happening around them. By taking their unhappiness and needs seriously and responding to them with respect, caregivers help infants relate to themselves and others in ways that make less repressive and more egalitarian relationships possible. In doing so, parents support the development of more rather than less flexible identities and more rather than less autonomy. Whether we can cope with the challenges that are provoked by our experiences, regulate our own emotions and cope with the challenges of a social and political world filled with people whose differences will at some times be threatening depends on competencies first developed in early relationships, and later supported by social practices and difficult and deliberate re-negotiations of identity. ‘‘Good-enough’’ parenting and the right kinds of social and political institutions and practices, can make reflection and emotional and cognitive integration possible. These help make meaningful reciprocal relationships in which destruction can be limited, repair initiated, and mutual recognition achieved, possible. While socialization will never be painless, Allen concludes, it need not be exploitative, dominative, and oppressive either, although it is true that the current political and cultural constraints on gender and sexuality make negotiating those aspects of our identities fraught and damaging. With an eye to constructing a new synthesis that captures the importance of both power and autonomy in the constitution of subjects, Allen refuses both skepticism and foundationalism, insisting that we cannot skip hard questions about power, or abandon the normative commitments that inform feminist critique and action. It is in the end this negotiation of the real and the ideal that is at the heart of Allen’s powerful book. For far too long, feminists have been framing discussions about gender as pro-/antiHabermas, or pro-/anti-Foucault. One of the most important purposes of Allen’s book is to make clear why framing issues this way leads to different, but equally difficult practical and theoretical problems. While she rejects the hard-nosed view that reduces rationality and autonomy to mere epiphenomena of power, she is equally critical of the naive belief that we can erect a

Who Are We and Who Do We Want to Be?

113

cordon sanitaire around reason and autonomy and protect them from the contaminations of power and irrationality. The intersubjective experiences through which the self is constituted, Allen argues, mean that power and reason, autonomy and subjectification, are entwined at the heart of the subject. For this reason, if we are to understand the loves, the hates, and the desires that are important for poltical critiques, and social movements and their emancipatory longings, Allen argues, we must re-consider the processes of identity-formation so that we can better map the many forces at work in its constitution and more adequately understand how we come to be capable of insight and violence, critique and destruction. Allen’s is an important project and the ground she clears in its execution is very significant. If her argument is to have serious sticking power, her readers will have to be convinced of the legitimacy of her most pivotal claims. These include her argument that Foucault’s account of power is not fundamentally incompatible with a notion of an agentic self, that Habermas’s communicative ethics does not require that reason transcend the particular moments in history is which it is exercised, and that mutually positive interpsychic relationships are possible and support the development of reflexivity and autonomy. I think that all of these claims can be defended, and I share Allen’s belief that only when we understand the complexity of the operations of power, can we understand how it is perpetuated and endlessly re-signified. A problem of central importance to Allen’s book strikes me however as being a bit less successfully resolved. Oddly enough, given the thrust of Allen’s argument, the issue of gender is, to some extent left hanging. Let us return to Allen’s discussion for just a moment. Butler argues that gender is constituted by a loss sustained when identification and desire are structured by the social, reality of gender difference. This loss, Butler argues, is instantiated in a melancholic wound that haunts the self and constitutes the gendered subject. Allen counters Butler’s pessimistic account with an appeal to Benjamin’s description of mutual recognition. While Benjamin insists that there is always a ‘‘sting’’ in an encounter with an ‘‘other,’’ she does not believe that relationships are always destructive. In addition to the urges to negate and destroy caused by the experiences of narcissism, anxiety and omnipotence, our relationships are also motivated by love that can be realized and supported in reciprocal and mutual loving relationships. Allen argues that it is in such relationships that we achieve the autonomous and reflective capacities that – at least at some moments – free us from the distortions of gendered subjectivity. But what does mutual recognition mean when it comes to gender? Benjamin argues that the ability to experience difference and to

114

JOHANNA MEEHAN

identify with others across differences allows for less rigid, hostile, and constraining experiences of gender. She tells us approvingly of a little boy who having discovered that he is male, and thus differently gendered than his mom, reassures himself and her that while he has to be Mickey Mouse and she Minnie, they can still be alike; both can still be mice. Benjamin clearly appreciates the emotional creativity that allows a child to bridge the differences imposed by gender distinctions, but what would Butler think? Butler argues that splitting, denial, loss, and mourning produce the content of gender. Thus, gender originates in and is realized by actively repudiating the ‘‘alien’’ gender. For Butler, the issue at stake is not whether a child has had the kind of supportive relationship that can make the mutual recognition psychologically possible, mutual recognition that is expressed in the child’s reassurance that he and his mom can both be mice (though, even on this score Butler is skeptical). Because gender itself is destructive and negative, even a well-parented child cannot develop a gender identity that does not itself emerge from repudiation. For this reason, while there are better and worse ways to respond to and support infants’ autonomy, there is really no good way to ‘‘recognize’’ someone’s gender because gender, itself is an effect of failed recognition. To be male is to be a ‘‘not-female,’’ and to be female is to be a ‘‘not-male.’’ To be Mickey means to be a ‘‘not-Minnie.’’ Not all differences must be negatively determined. The content of what it means to be Canadian, for example, is not essentially tied to not being Dutch, or being a flute player does not essentially mean that one is not a piano player, and so on. One might even, however vaguely, be able to imagine a world where one’s gender is not so fundamentally understood in terms of the opposition of one gender to another. But in the world in which we now live, mutual recognition and gender seem hard to reconcile. There are a raft of questions that Allen discusses, that remain in need of further exploration. These include the question of how to understand the relationship of affects to reason, and desire to autonomy. Long ago, in Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas acknowledged the importance of the non-cognitive dimensions of autonomy, writing ‘‘Critique could not have the power to break-up false consciousness if it were not compelled by passion’’ (Bernstein, 1978, p. 200). He has, however, never returned to the question about how we become selves with a passion for critique. Allen’s book make the limitations of Habermas’s cognitivism clear, but to undertake the agenda that Allen’s book proposes we need more detailed accounts of the development of the self with special attention paid to the role of affective experiences that she, Butler, and Benjamin all recognize to be so critical.

Who Are We and Who Do We Want to Be?

115

Comparisons of the development trajectories of girls and boys, and an appreciation of different ways to express autonomy, as well as studies of the ways that parents support or undermine its’ development, could be important for feminists. Carol Gilligan’s work linked traditional notions of autonomy to forms of independence associated with masculinity and argued that our traditional concepts of autonomy have celebrated independence and denied dependence to an almost pathological degree. Recent efforts in psychology, intersubjective psychoanalysis and even evolutionary biology (Susan Hardy) have begun to acknowledge the importance of human interdependence and to challenge claims about what should count as autonomous action. Cross-cultural studies raise further difficult questions about what autonomy looks like, especially when it does not look as we expected it to. My final point is to suggest a direction for future work that would take Allen’s as its starting point. While Allen’s intervention is a primarily theoretical one, the questions she raises can be considered empirically as well. Work with infants and children demonstrates that a sense of self and of others develops in response to environments – particularly social environments. Alan Shore’s work on affect regulation links early affective experiences with neural, psychological, and social development. He points to a number of abilities that play a critical role in this process including prelinguistic cognitive distinctions, perception, bodily awareness and movement (including awareness of the internal body, and the location and movement of the physical body in space), several kinds of memory, the ability to mimic, affective responsiveness and attunement, and a social awareness that includes a pre-linguistic grasp of intentionality. Research on children’s ability to ‘‘mentalize’’ experience (i.e., their ability to recognize that different minds experience the world differently) suggests that this important ability is linked to self-reflexivity, autonomy, and genuine relationships with others. Empirical research on the relational dynamics of racism, poverty, gender, and class can also help us understand the impact that social identities have on children’s reflective and agentic abilities. The work of Valerie Walkerdine, Wendy Holloway, and Bronwyn Davies, for example, are especially helpful for understanding how children’s interactions in classroom and play-grounds are influenced by gender norms that are instantiated and reproduced through books, toys, cartoons, and teacher’s encouragement and discipline. Because development is shaped by experiences, it is a precarious process that reflects the specific nature of a particular child’s experiences. Negative

116

JOHANNA MEEHAN

experiences, especially negative relational experiences, can cause physical symtoms like those that elicit the diagnosis ‘‘failure to thrive’’ and those commonly associated with PTSD. Furthermore, psychological symptoms can make it difficult to integrate multiple aspects of experience including perceptual, affective, conceptual, and linguistic ones. James Gilligan’s and Michael Lewis’s work on the legacy of violence rooted in childhood abuse, abuse that is exacerbated by poverty, drugs, alcohol, ignorance, hopelessness, selfishness, and cruelty, suggests that development is not just a private matter. How children develop affects the fabric of our social relationships, and thus, it should matter to all of us. Accounts of the impact of social relationships on the self could lead to constructive insights about the kinds of social interactions in which subjects develop most fully, and about the inter-social skills that are encouraged or thwarted in various kinds of relationships and social interactions. In closing let me say that there is no doubt that Allen’s book is thoughtful and exciting. It shifts the terms of current debates and rescues feminists from arguments that seem to have lost their traction and gotten us stuck in unhelpful positions. I believe that Allen, having developed a tight and persuasive line of argument, opens the door to new efforts for making sense of the gendered relationships that have us by the throat and from which we find it so hard to escape.

REFERENCES Allen, A. (2008). The politics of our selves: Power, autonomy, and gender in contemporary critical theory. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Bernstein, R. (1978). The restructuring of social and political theory. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

EXPLAINING THE POWER OF GENDERED SUBJECTIVITY Christopher F. Zurn ABSTRACT This chapter is a critical review of Amy Allen’s book The Politics of Our Selves. It briefly reconstructs some of the book’s impressive achievements: articulating a synthetic account of gendered subjectivity that accounts for both subjection and autonomy; imaginatively integrating poststructuralist and communicative theories; and, furthering important new interpretations of Butler, Foucault, and Habermas. It also raises critical concerns about Allen’s project: her specific conception of autonomy and its justification; her suspicions of the notion of historical progress; her psychological explanation of the continuing power of pernicious norms of gendered subjectivity; the usefulness of psychoanalysis for critical social theory; and, the role of cultural, structural, and materialist explanations and political strategies.

ALLEN’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS Amy Allen’s latest book The Politics of Our Selves (Allen, 2008) – like her previous book – endeavors to come to terms with social conditions that are alternatively enabling and constraining, and sometimes both at the same

The Diversity of Social Theories Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 29, 117–130 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-1204(2011)0000029010

117

118

CHRISTOPHER F. ZURN

time. Her earlier The Power of Feminist Theory (Allen, 1999) was concerned to differentiate and investigate the various contemporary forms of power that need to be grasped to understand the struggles and wishes of the age, in particular, feminist struggles against and for various modalities of power. Her latest book is also concerned with enabling and constraining social conditions, although the focus here is subjectivity and autonomy, specifically individual subjects’ complex relationships to gender, power, normativity, and politics. And like that previous book, her latest makes several extremely important contributions to political thought, especially to that form of thought concerned with articulating interdisciplinary explanatory theories of complex social phenomena with a normative impulse towards emancipation – that is, to critical social theory. It is worth very briefly summarizing Allen’s achievements in this latest book, before turning to some questions and concerns about some of its claims and motifs. The central achievement, as I understand it, is to have provided a synthetic account of gendered subjectivity that can incorporate the most important insights of both poststructuralist accounts of how subjects are produced through gender-differentiated power structures (as exemplified in the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler) and intersubjectivist accounts of how reflexive autonomy emerges through the communicative socialization of individuals (as exemplified in the work of Ju¨rgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib), without taking on overly stringent and polemical theses often used to pit these two broad forms of theory against one another. Rather, Allen convincingly shows how a theory oriented toward subjection – the processes by which historically specific power-laden processes of subjugation produce modern subjects – and a theory oriented toward autonomy – the capacities of individuals to gain reflective theoretical insight into the social relations they act within and to be able to transform themselves in the light of that insight – reciprocally require one another. In particular, any explanatorily satisfying and practically insightful theory of society oriented toward understanding and overcoming gender-based subordination will need to grasp both how individuals come to inhabit deleterious gender identities and how they can overcome the effects of those identities through justifiable means of self-transformation. The foundation for Allen’s synthetic account is found in her interpretations of Foucault, Habermas, Butler, and Benhabib, which are not only supple and insightful, but more importantly show in detail how there is much more in common between the four than is often acknowledged. Allen’s interpretive tack is twofold: on the one hand, to undercut overly stringent skeptical conclusions of some poststructuralists vis-a`-vis normative

Explaining the Power of Gendered Subjectivity

119

differentiation between better and worse forms of subject formation and, on the other, to undercut overly idealized accounts of context-transcending validity and the powers of rational insight given by some communicative action theorists. I don’t want to go into too much detail here, since those interested could hardly be better served than by reading Allen’s lucid prose. But it is worth mentioning some of her leading conclusions, as they are quite important – and to my mind convincing – contributions to on-going discussions of how to interpret these major social theorists. To begin with Foucault, Allen argues that he never argued for or celebrated the death of the subject simpliciter, nor for allied concepts such as individual agency, autonomy, and self-reflexivity. Rather what he rejected as untenable was a particular conception of the subject: what Allen calls the ‘‘transcendental-phenomenological subject.’’ This thesis is supported by a detailed and careful reading of Foucault’s life-long consideration of Kant throughout his corpus. Particularly notable here is Allen’s elucidation of Foucault’s introduction to a French translation of Kant’s Anthropology (a manuscript accessed by Allen in the Foucault archives), which reveals Foucault’s identification of the problematic of the transcendental-empirical doublet throughout Kant’s work. The upshot of this reading is that Foucault takes the subject as his central topic throughout his career and sees his theoretical work as a continuation-through-transformation of Kant’s original project of a critique of the subject. By clearing away an overly strong reading of Foucault’s skepticism about the subject, Allen is then in a position to present and endorse Foucault’s account of the relationship between modern modes of power and the constitution of the modern subject, an account that suggests that the subject’s autonomy is always inflected by relations of power even as autonomy is not merely reducible to a pure effect of power. Allen then turns to Butler’s account of the psychic anchoring of power as an explanation of how individuals become attached to, and so invested in, subjectifying social norms, such as socially current norms of femininity and masculinity. Butler’s account of the psychodynamics of identification is shown to fill in a lacuna in Foucault’s account, for Foucault was never really able to answer how or why individual subjects would invest themselves in and seek to maintain norms constituted through those new techniques of disciplinary power that he memorably identified. However, Allen also points to some normative shortcomings in Foucault’s and Butler’s respective theories, specifically concerning the possibility of differentiating normatively defensible forms of intersubjectivity from subjugating forms of power. Both have, in short, a hard time distinguishing between worthwhile forms of

120

CHRISTOPHER F. ZURN

intersubjective recognition and reciprocity from forms of intersubjectivity that are inherently subjugating and oppressive. Habermas’s theory of communicative action is, of course, oriented just to these latter kinds of normative distinctions. Allen pays particular attention to Habermas’s intersubjectivist account of the formation of subjects, with its stress on individualization as achieved in and through socialization into structures of linguistic intersubjectivity. That account then provides a robust and defensible theory of autonomy, where autonomy (for Allen) is defined in terms of individuals’ abilities (a) to have reflexive insight into the enabling and constraining conditions of their socialization and (b) to be able to transform themselves and their societies in the direction of more emancipatory practices and forms of life. Could this account of intersubjectively secured autonomy then be connected to the Foucault–Butler account of subject formation through power and gender norms? In a fascinating series of investigations, Allen turns to a number of different places in Habermas’s corpus where one might hope to theorize the relationship between subject-forming power and individuals’ capacities for autonomy, and thereby link up poststructuralist and communicative accounts of subjectivity. She concludes, however, that Habermas’s thesis of the colonization of the lifeworld, his occasional remarks on the psychodynamics of moral socialization, and his conception of systematically distorted communication each cannot, in the end, be used to understand the power of subjection. Instead she recommends that at least the Habermasian account of communicative reason can be given a suitably pragmatic and contextualized reading – what she calls ‘‘principled contextualism’’ – so as to be made compatible with the notion of immanent critique that she has attributed to Foucault. Allen turns her critical acumen, finally, to Benhabib’s narrative account of the self to see whether this more contextualized version of communicative theory is able to adequately understand the power of gender in subject formation. While in agreement with Benhabib’s more dynamic and historicized version of communicative reason, Allen finds that there is a still a problematic rationalist core in certain implications of Benhabib’s view, such as the notion that gender is but one more set of narrative scripts that individuals could choose to reject or overcome in their self-forming narratives. In the end, Allen argues that the self is gendered ‘‘all the way down,’’ as it were, and that individuals form deep psychic attachments to gender norms, norms intimately bound up with specific techniques of power oriented towards constituting docile subjects. Nevertheless, she agrees with the communicative theorists that there are realistic possibilities for the exercise of reflective insight and self-transformation – for the exercise of autonomy –

Explaining the Power of Gendered Subjectivity

121

vis-a`-vis gender. We can make important normative distinctions between better and worse forms of subjection and thereby exercise our autonomy, even if we cannot, in the end, hope to transcend, through the exercise of pure reason alone, our context and its specific configuration of gendered practices, norms, and forms of power. Allen thus shows us a way of understanding gender, power, subjection, and autonomy simultaneously as enabling and constraining conditions, and puts forward useful suggestions for paths to progressive social transformation of these conditions.

AUTONOMY AS RATIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY Notwithstanding my deep admiration for Allen’s accomplishments in this book, I would like to take up some themes and claims I believe warrant further attention. To begin, I should put my theoretical cards on the table: in previous work, I attempted to elucidate and defend Habermas’s intersubjectivist, competence-theoretic account of the development of subjects, specifically against contextualist worries about the historical, ethical, and institutional specificity of the structures of personal identity, and I attempted to show how this robust conception plays an important normative role in critical social theory’s substantive diagnosis of social pathologies (Zurn, 1999). While I presently plump for the substantive results of that project, it should be pointed out that Allen shows how this general type of project should have been done all along. I agree with Allen that the core of Habermas’s account of autonomy is the notion of rational accountability. On his account, an autonomous person is able in intersubjective contexts to defend, at ever higher levels of reflexivity and abstraction if need be, the meaningfulness and validity of her or his speech and action as based on defensible reasons rather than on contingently given or taken for granted meanings, truths, conventions, values, etc. Allen’s reading of autonomy repeatedly foregrounds two central capacities as necessary for autonomy: the capacity for critical reflexivity with regard to socially current meanings, truths, norms and values, and the capacity for selftransformation away from personal identification with regressive, oppressive, or subordinating meanings, norms, and so on. While Habermas surely takes these two capacities as important entailments of autonomy, I wonder whether foregrounding them in the way Allen does as virtually synonymous with autonomy leads her to give an overly rationalist and idealist – hence insufficiently pragmatic and empirical – reading of Habermas’s conception of the subject. I wonder, further, whether her reading misunderstands the kind

122

CHRISTOPHER F. ZURN

of justification Habermas is giving for his more universalist, enlightenmentstyle claims concerning individual autonomy, namely, that autonomy is a defensible normative ideal built into to the structures of intersubjective life, and not merely one historical mode of subjectivity among others. Because this is a complex set of issues, it will take a bit of explaining. On my reading, the broad notion of rational accountability provides a window into various different types of interactive competences required by individuals, where those competences span across a number of different domains. Surely critical insight into one’s social conditions and the ability to change oneself in light of insight are important competences for autonomous individuals – these are captured in German idealism’s celebration of selfunderstanding, self-direction, and self-realization. But the distinctiveness of Habermas’s competence-theoretic rendering of these themes is the way the account combines the results of empirical studies of individual development across many different domains, and then shows that progressive development across these diverse competences can be characterized in structurally similar ways. The diverse forms of competence include cognitive abilities, comprising the types of epistemic competence captured by Piaget, linguistic competences isolated by linguistic developmentalism and formal pragmatics, and normative-interactive competences analyzed by the likes of Mead and Goffman. One must also consider psycho-motivational competences, achieved through both psychosexual maturation as outlined in Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis and psychosocial development as analyzed by Erikson and other life-cycle analysts. There is further a set of individual identity competences: capacities for self-ascription, social role integration, self-determination, biographical appropriation, narrative integration and authenticity, and other aspects of self-realization. Finally there is developed moral competence – the particular focus of much of Habermas’s work on autonomy – which combines cognitive, psycho-motivational, and individual identity competences with normative-interactive competences. This is a more differentiated and capacious conception of the domains across which intersubjective answerability ranges than Allen’s narrower definition of autonomy. However, the key justificatory move is not made by the breadth of these different competences alone, but rather by the structural claim: namely, those identical or very similar structural transformations characterize progressive learning, improvements in individuals’ ability to cope with and negotiate the intersubjective world, across these quite distinct domains of speech and action. In short, similar developmental logics underlie the progressive acquisition of these different interactive competences, and to the extent that these similar developmental

Explaining the Power of Gendered Subjectivity

123

logics can be characterized as increasing capacities for rational accountability, the intersubjectivist account of autonomy can justify heightened capacities for accountability as normatively defensible. Habermas is of course aware that there is a specific socio-historical context in which these progressive achievements have been demanded of subjects – namely modern, complex, pluralistic, and functionally differentiated societies – but that context of genesis does not imply that autonomy is simply the byproduct of historically specific disciplinary regimes. On my reading, furthermore, Habermas’s defense of autonomy as rational accountability is not a matter of reason working itself pure as Allen sometimes implies, but is rather based on a complex reconstructive claim: the claim that diverse results of empirical social sciences can be understood to buttress one another by evincing underlying structural homologies, thereby shedding light on the underlying developmental logic of progressive learning, through socialization, in the direction of increased generalization, abstraction, and reflexivity.

THE DEFENSE OF MODERNITY This point about rational reconstruction relates finally to a problem Allen rightfully gives a fair amount of attention to: the relationship between empirically specific contexts that we find ourselves in and the sense of context transcendence that we attach to our validity claims. She is particularly concerned that Habermas’s strong theoretical claims for the context-transcending universality of core elements of Western modernity are insufficiently attentive to the impurities of the empirical contexts in which and from which such claims are raised. I cannot go into this topic sufficiently, but I do want to raise one issue for consideration. I agree with Allen’s general strategy of giving a more contextualized reading to Habermas’s philosophical project, and I found her assessment of the work of Maeve Cooke and Thomas McCarthy in this direction to be quite useful. As I understand Allen’s project (which may be a misunderstanding), she seeks to portray both Foucault and Habermas as engaged in imminent critique of modernity. They are engaged in critique because both are attempting to critically investigate and evaluate contemporary norms, forms of reason, and ideals of autonomy to investigate whether and how they might be the unacknowledged result of power, interest, or desire, rather than the vaunted non-illusory ideals they purport to be. They are engaged in immanent critique because both deny the ability of critical

124

CHRISTOPHER F. ZURN

theory to be able to escape its socio-historical, power-laden context, to be able to escape the rootedness of everyday reason from a pure, rational view from nowhere. To put Habermas and Foucault together in this way, Allen needs to read Foucault as engaged in a more substantive normative project, one that has commitments and ideals, one that is not a mere form of ‘‘happy positivism,’’ but rather a continuation through transformation of the self-critique of the enlightenment itself. And she needs to read Habermas as giving up on his ambitious meta-theoretical claims to be able to give a rational defense of reason itself, and so to prove rationally the trans-contextually validity of ideals such as autonomy, settling instead for an acknowledgement that validity is always connected to power and that reason always impure. As she puts the position, ‘‘we can rely on the normative ideals of universal respect and egalitarian reciprocity in making normative judgments while at the same time acknowledging that these are ideals that are rooted in the context of late Western modernity.y This requires us to be more historically self-conscious and modest about the status of our normative principles than Habermas himself has tended to be’’ (Allen, 2008, p. 180). I would want to give a different reading to Habermas’s project than the attempt to divorce validity claims from history. In particular, I do not think he is giving a de-historicized and power-free rational defense of the ideals of reason and autonomy, but a thoroughly historical one. On my reading, Habermas does claim that the normative ideals of reason, autonomy, equality, reciprocity, and the like can be justified, precisely because they have shown themselves to be the results of historically particular learning processes. Hence they are not defended from a contexttranscendent view from nowhere, but rather from a rational reconstruction of the practices of modernity, whereby earlier and deficient ideals and practices were overcome through determinate negations. This is of course a progressive vision of history, one descended from Hegel. However, it is not justified on the grounds of metaphysics or pure philosophy as Hegel (and Kant) attempted, but rather on the grounds of the empirical results of diverse social scientific reconstructions of observable learning processes, where developments in different domains of social life can be seen to exhibit the same or similar stage-to-stage structural transformations. In short, on my reading, Habermas’s historically situated and empirically based defense of the normative ideals of modernity is quite similar to his defense of the ideal of autonomy as rational accountability for individuals: both can be seen, from a reconstructive perspective, as the outcome of progressive and directional learning processes achieved through coming to

Explaining the Power of Gendered Subjectivity

125

terms with the problems of intersubjective life befalling both societies and subjects. Grand claims to be sure and an audacious justificatory strategy. But this is a different program than the one of a pure philosophical justification of the idealizations of modernity. Allen does at one point recognize that this kind of societal developmentalism is central to Habermas’s project, but it is not one she is anxious to recuperate, calling it ‘‘perhaps the most problematic assumption of Habermas’s entire project’’ (Allen, 2008, p. 154). Not only do I respectfully disagree concerning societal developmentalism, but I would like to point out that a similar form of developmentalism is crucial to the robustness of Habermas’s account of individuation and his normative defense of individual autonomy as rational accountability. If my reading is correct, then even though both Habermas and Foucault are engaged in a form of critique-throughtransformation of enlightenment ideals, they seem not nearly as compatible as Allen argues they are. Whatever common theoretical antipathy both may have for the Kantian transcendental subject, Foucault’s equally forceful antipathy to Hegelian progressive developmentalism is surely not shared by Habermas.

A SHARED PROBLEM FRAME IN CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY I want now to raise a different set of questions about Allen’s theory, revolving around the role that theses concerning psychic attachment are playing in her theory. The foregrounded problem Allen’s book addresses can be construed as the question: is the social constructionist, power-laden account of subjectivity that is convincingly put forward by Foucault and Butler consistent with, or in fundamental tension with, the strong normative ideals articulated by Habermas and allied theorists? There is however another problem that crops up throughout the book, and might even be interpreted as the deep problem that Allen sets out to solve. I can give some indication of this problem by showing how it parallels a theoretical-cumpractical problem faced by early Western Marxism, and in particular by the first generation of the Frankfurt School. The problem for them (at least on certain potted readings) was prompted by the question: how was it that the expected revolution did not occur even after relentless and convincing critique of the status quo? For the early Frankfurt School (as for Luka´cs), the question was more specific: how could it be that workers did not revolt

126

CHRISTOPHER F. ZURN

in the most advanced capitalist countries even though they were in the best position to have insight into their oppressive conditions and to understand how overcoming capitalism would be in their objective interests? It strikes me that Allen is asking a structurally similar question: how is it that women (and men) have not revolted against the manifold forms, practices, and norms of gender subordination even after relentless feminist critique of the status quo has convincingly shown how gender subordination ill-serves the interests of women particularly and the interests of sociality generally? This parallel can be pushed further. Consider how both Allen and the earlier theorists of revolutionary disappointment take materialist explanations off the table as unconvincing. According to (the potted story of) Western Marxism, individuals’ material interests are matters of relatively clear-headed rational calculation. The Marxist critique of capitalism shows all too clearly how participation in capitalism is not in the rational selfinterest of the proletariat as a whole, even if it is practically necessary for any isolated individual faced with either starving or accepting a stingy wage. Thus, by pure self-interest, it should have been clear that collective action by the proletariat against capitalist structures was justified, and this rational critique should have had even more practical effect among more educated workers in highly developed industrial societies than among the peasant societies where some form of revolution actually succeeded. So materialist explanations of revolutionary failure won’t work; some other form of psychological or social or cultural explanation will be needed. Similar kinds of considerations might be driving Allen away from materialist explanations (since androcentric oppression is clearly not in the self-interest of women) and toward other form of explanation for the failure of convincing feminist critique to overcome gender subordination. Another parallel: both Allen and (at least some members of) the Frankfurt School seem to turn particularly to depth psychological explanations, strongly influenced by psychoanalytic accounts of how we become invested in selfdamaging and irrational thought processes and activities.1 Allen turns not to the Freudian drive theory as they did, but rather to Butler’s account of psychic attachment, to understand how subjection becomes anchored in individuals’ desires. Recall that Butler provides a way of completing the story of how power-inflected gender norms, as analyzed by Foucault, become internalized and supported by the very subjects subordinated by such norms. To be a bit brisk, the account starts with the notion of primary narcissism as a fundamental drive, particularly powerful in children, and especially formative in its effects for later life. The idea is that children deeply desire to be positively recognized by others to satisfy their narcissism. But the specific cultural forms

Explaining the Power of Gendered Subjectivity

127

that such recognition can come packaged within are thoroughly gendered, and perniciously so, insofar as these gender norms serve to perpetuate women’s subordination to men. So girls become psychically attached to – they identify themselves in and through – the very norms supporting the subordination of women. However, even when these norms are subjected to relentless critique, a critique that is even theoretically convincing to the subjects themselves, it is too painful to give up one’s attachment to them. As Allen frequently and vividly puts the point, it is less painful to be recognized through subordinating norms, than to forgo recognition altogether. The pain of a loss of social identity is much greater than the self-lacerating pain of being recognized through, and attached to, disadvantaging norms. Psychic attachment thereby explains (at least in part) the failure of convincing critical feminist theory to produce the overthrow of the disciplinary power of gender. Let me now briefly raise three concerns about this intriguing account, two about its generalizability and a third about the relation between psychological and other forms of explanation. To begin, it is worth considering whether Butler’s account of psychic attachment to gender is to be understood as generally true for women in contemporary Western societies, true for men and women, or perhaps only true for some men and women, or even only some women? I wonder in particular here about its generalizability when considering all those persons who seem to have been able to extinguish their early psychic attachments to distorting norms in general; not just to gender norms (though there seem many examples of this), but to other kinds of selfsubordinating norms as well. Many in our society tell a common narrative of full, authentic self-realization through painful and difficult – but, in the end, achieved – liberation from self-lacerating norms of disciplinary power they were socialized into as children, and there seems good evidence to believe at least some of those stories. If then the Butler/Allen account is not fully generalizable, it could at best play but a partial role in explaining our disappointment at the apparent impotence of feminist critique of the status quo. If, in contrast, the account is intended to be generalizable, then much more will need to be said about how and why some do and some don’t continue to seek recognition through deleterious gender norms, and so the depth psychology will need to become much more elaborated. A second issues concerns the generalizability of depth psychology itself, and so its proper role in a critical social theory. For instance, Allen is right to point out that, by the end of the 1970s, Habermas had stopped trying to integrate specific psychoanalytic themes into his work. While he has consistently claimed that the maintenance of secure ego identity requires certain motivational (and so psychic) competences, he has stopped trying to specify both the details of

128

CHRISTOPHER F. ZURN

such competences and any generalizable stage-sequential learning processes underlying motivational maturation. Allen argues that Habermas dropped detailed consideration of psychoanalysis because he sorts cognitive competences into transcendental philosophy and psychodynamics into empirical social science. As I indicated above in the second section, I understand all the interactive competences identified in Habermas’s intersubjectivist account of individuation to be supported through reconstructive arguments using evidence from the empirical social sciences – so I don’t agree with Allen’s argument here. I have speculated, in contrast, that Habermas’s changing relationship to psychoanalysis in particular and psychodynamic theories of development in general resulted from his conclusion that there simply was no identifiable consensus amongst researchers on the crucial empirical questions, thereby indicating the unreliability and potential partiality of psychodynamic generalizations (Zurn, 1999). Whatever the truth of this speculation about Habermas, the underlying concern about the lack of generalizable empirical results concerning psychic formation indicates that it is at least an area of serious concern for any critical social theory that wants to put explanatory weight on a specific account of psychic formation. It is also worth noting here, that similar kinds of theoretical worries about generalizability might be raised by Foucault’s forceful arguments concerning the contextual specificity of the psychoanalytic notion of the deep self, a self that is seen as a product of the truth eliciting practices of specific therapeutic (and disciplinary) techniques (Foucault, 1978). A third issue harkens back to debates within Western Marxism and concerns the relationship between depth psychological explanations and other forms of explanation, especially materialist and structural. To begin, does the Butler/Allen account of psychic attachment unduly ignore the material dynamics of gender subordination, in particular, the real social benefits that males gain structurally through the maintenance of androcentric advantage? Might not the failure of feminists to change the incentive dynamics of patriarchal power structures be an equally compelling reason for disappointment? And what exactly would be the Allen/Butler story concerning males’ gender identity attachments? There seems a kind of asymmetry in the accounts here between men and women, since it appears much more straightforward to say that men attach to their masculinity to reinforce the advantages of continuing patriarchy in terms of power, money, and status. There is no evidence that Allen intends to discount or rule out of bounds such materialist and structural explanations (even as she does specifically argue against one account of femininity as a rational choice for individual women), and so my thoughts here are really an invitation to

Explaining the Power of Gendered Subjectivity

129

broaden the palette of potential explanations and to consider the ways in which different kinds of explanations might interact in this case. There is one final issue on which Allen’s work can be complementarily contrasted with the work of the first generation of the Frankfurt School: namely, thinking critically about what a politics of emancipatory transformation might be. (Again on the potted version) Frankfurts School theorists faced a political problem about failed revolution, gave an explanation relying in part on depth psychology and in part on a culturalist critique of the shape of Western reason, and ultimately either fell into a practical pessimism about the impossibility of any progressive change or, at most, hoped for a fundamental metaphysical revolution in the direction of mimetic and anti-instrumentalist forms of reason. Allen faces a parallel political problem, offers an explanation relying in part on depth psychology and in part on an institutionalist critique of disciplinary practices of power, but unlike the Frankfurt School, offers some intriguing and concrete suggestions about what a transformative and emancipatory politics of the self might look like. She endorses diverse possibilities for action ranging across cultural, psychological and social domains: consciousness raising groups; new recognitive spaces within which girls and women could subvert dominant norms of femininity; critical experimentation with new modes of gender performance; vibrant forms of practically-oriented feminist and queer theory; the development of artistic counter-publics aiming to change the cultural imaginary relevant to our desires and fantasies; and, social movements constructing new experiments in sociality, forms of subjectivity and modes of life. Although questions about practical political strategies are not the focus of the book, I would like to register a request for further work in this area. In a spirit of contributing to further development in that area, I suggest that Allen not underestimate the way in which much positive normative content – for instance gender egalitarianism – can be socially stabilized, solidified, and even positively promoted through institutional structures. So for instance, Allen may be right in following Jessica Benjamin’s theory that true mutual recognition is a mere fleeting possibility within dynamic and temporally changing face-to-face interactions. But it seems to me that there is more hope for reciprocal relations of mutual recognition that are determinately institutionalized, for instance in law or politics or schools, or in normalized (and normalizing) practices in business, parenting, or intimate relationships. In these institutional contexts, we might even say that persons are often more or less coerced into living up to more egalitarian, more reciprocal forms of mutual recognition than they might otherwise adopt without the institutional pressures and ‘‘oversight.’’ There are also important structural changes, for instance in economic incentives that

130

CHRISTOPHER F. ZURN

foster the maintenance of gender subordination, that warrant further attention. If these suggestions are right, then it is worth exploring a politics that aims at transforming not only the cultural imaginary and various desire-constituting practices but also whatever institutional and economic structures are materially implicated in the maintenance of subordination through gendered subjectivity. I expect that the insightful conceptual and explanatory theory of gendered subjectivity that Allen develops in The Politics of Our Selves would provide an excellent foundation for further work on the manifold ways in which members of oppressed groups, and those in solidarity with them, overcome the deleterious power of gendered subjectivity.

NOTE 1. The interest in marrying a form of Marxist analysis to Freudian and other forms of psychoanalysis is a constant throughout both Marcuse’s and Fromm’s career; a like interest is influential in the work of both Adorno and Horkheimer from the formation of the Institute for Social Research in the late 1920s at least through the late 1940s studies of authoritarianism; a similar interest in the explanatory and theoretical roles of psychoanalysis in critical social theory are prominent in Habermas’s work at least through the 1970s.

REFERENCES Allen, A. (1999). The power of feminist theory: Domination, resistance, solidarity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Allen, A. (2008). The politics of our selves: Power, autonomy, and gender in contemporary critical theory. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: Volume 1, An introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York, NY: Pantheon. Zurn, C. F. (1999). Competence and context: Conceptions of the self in the critical social theories of Ju¨rgen Habermas and Charles Taylor. Ph.D. dissertation. Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA.

POWER, AUTONOMY, AND GENDER: REPLY TO CRITICS Amy Allen ABSTRACT In this chapter, I respond to the thoughtful and insightful critical discussions of my book, The Politics of Our Selves, offered by Colin Koopman, Johanna Meehan, and Christopher Zurn. After distinguishing between the interpretive, conceptual, and practical–political aims of the book, I defend my interpretive claims vis-a-vis Foucault and Habermas against criticisms raised by Koopman and Zurn, clarify my understanding of the conceptual aim of the book in response to Koopman’s critique, and indicate how my approach to the practical–political questions about overturning gender subordination raised by Zurn and Meehan can be developed further.

It is a great honor and pleasure to have the opportunity to respond to the careful and insightful critical discussions of my book offered by Colin Koopman, Johanna Meehan, and Christopher Zurn. All three readers have reconstructed the book’s aims and achievements in a thoroughly generous way and have raised deep and important issues that merit further reflection. In what follows, I’m afraid I will not be able to do justice to all the complex and difficult concerns that they raise, and, in some cases, a response that gestures toward my current and future research projects will have to suffice. The Diversity of Social Theories Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 29, 131–144 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-1204(2011)0000029011

131

132

AMY ALLEN

From my point of view, The Politics of Our Selves has three central aims. The first aim is interpretive. The book constitutes an intervention in the Foucault/Habermas debate and its feminist iteration, the Butler/Benhabib debate. With respect to this aspect of the book, my goal is to argue that there is misunderstanding on both sides of these debates and that a middle position between these two theoretical perspectives is not only possible but also conceptually coherent. In line with this goal, I attempt to correct certain misreadings of Foucault that have become prevalent in both the critical theory and feminist literature on his work and to stake out a contextualist reading of Habermas’s notion of autonomy that is compatible with a Foucaultian conception of power and subjection. The second aim is conceptual and theoretically constructive. In this respect, the goal of the book is to use the resources found in the work of Foucault, Butler, Habermas, and Benhabib to rethink the relationship between subjection and autonomy, in a way that does justice to the deep and complex role that power relations play in the constitution of the subject without thereby undermining the ideal of autonomy. With respect to this conceptual question, the case of gendered subjectivity serves as my focal point. The third aim is the practical–political one of trying to understand why gender subordination in particular has proven to be so intractable, despite several decades worth of second – and now third – wave feminist critique. With the benefit of hindsight and in part as a result of the insightful criticisms raised by my interlocutors, I now see that the book is more successful on the first two fronts than it is on the third. While acknowledging that these three strands of the book are interrelated and therefore cannot be entirely pulled apart, I will nevertheless structure my response in terms of these three distinct aims. Hence, in what follows, I shall: first, defend my interpretive claims about Foucault and Habermas against criticisms raised by Koopman and Zurn; second, clarify my understanding of the conceptual aim of the book and show how this consists of a third possible way of taking up the project of critical theory, one that lies between the abstract-theoretical and pragmatic-methodological options offered by Koopman; and, finally, concede, in response to questions raised by Zurn and Meehan, that the practical–political aim is the least well-realized in the book, but attempt to clarify my approach to this set of issues and to indicate how this approach might be developed further. Allow me to begin with the interpretive questions posed by Koopman and Zurn. Koopman raises a worry about my reading of Foucault’s late work in terms of a conception of autonomy, derived, in a fashion that I claim is characteristic for Foucault, from a kind of internal critique of Kant’s

Power, Autonomy, and Gender: Reply to Critics

133

account of autonomy. Koopman agrees with me that Foucault’s conception of freedom is influenced by Kant, but raises concerns about the strongly normative connotations of my use of the term ‘‘autonomy,’’ and about my use of the language of capacities to flesh out that notion. Koopman interprets critical reflection and self-transformation in Foucault as ‘‘enactive practices rather than possessed capacities’’ (Koopman, Chapter 4, this volume). The danger with the term capacities, as he sees it, is that a capacity must inhere in something, and thus, to define autonomy in terms of capacities is to ‘‘invite the disposed transcendental y subject in through the back door’’ (Koopman, Chapter 4, this volume). My initial response to this criticism is to point to textual evidence to back up my use of these terms. As Koopman himself acknowledges, there are passages in which Foucault uses the language of capacities to fill out his conception of freedom and autonomy. In addition to the passage from the 1983 lecture course that Koopman cites in a footnote, I would also point to Foucault’s important late essays ‘‘The Subject and Power’’ and ‘‘What is Enlightenment?’’ (Foucault, 1983, 1997). In the former, Foucault famously defines an exercise of power as ‘‘a total structure of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action’’ (Foucault 1983, p. 220, emphasis added). In the latter, Foucault suggests that his late interest in practices of the self – which he also refers to as practices of freedom – is motivated by the question of ‘‘how y the growth of capabilities [can] be disconnected from the intensification of power relations?’’ (Foucault, 1997, p. 317). In both of these passages, Foucault connects his understanding of freedom with the notion of a subject’s capability (or capacity) for action. But, as I said, Koopman grants that there is some textual evidence for my use of the term capacity in this context, so the real disagreement between the two of us must lie elsewhere. Here it is worth pointing out that, textual debates aside, I have my own constructive philosophical reasons both for focusing on Foucault’s use of the ‘‘autonomy’’ as a way of filling out his understanding of freedom and for defining autonomy in terms of capacities. My focus on these aspects of Foucault’s late work is designed to draw attention to the points of contact between his conception of freedom and (a certain understanding of) Habermas’s notion of autonomy. But Koopman’s question ultimately concerns whether such a reading really captures what Foucault meant by freedom. Is Foucaultian freedom, he asks, best understood in terms of subjects and their capacities or enacted practices and processes of

134

AMY ALLEN

transformation? In response to this question, I’m inclined to say: both. Koopman is right to say that my account emphasizes the former over the latter, and to point out the potential dangers of this approach, but I am not convinced that Foucault’s understanding of freedom can make sense if it is completely divorced from the notion of capacities or capabilities. To be sure, we should be attentive to worries about the metaphysical baggage that talk of capacities might bring with it. But Foucault’s account of freedom starts from where we are, which is to say, it starts from an understanding of ourselves as subjects who have been constituted through power relations as having certain capacities. Perhaps the ultimate goal of Foucault’s critical project is to thoroughly leave such modes of subjectivity behind. Even if that’s the case, the only way to get there is by mobilizing the very capacities for autonomy, freedom and action that have been instilled in us through the operation of power, with the goal of disentangling the growth of those capacities from the intensification of the relationships of disciplinary power and normalization to which they are currently bound. Koopman also raises some questions about my interpretation of Habermas, questions that are echoed in Zurn’s chapter. Both Koopman and Zurn suggest that my reading of Habermas is unfair insofar as Habermas is more of a contextualist, empiricist, or pragmatist, and less of a rationalist or an idealist, than I make him out to be. Although the general worry is the same, Koopman and Zurn develop this criticism in somewhat different ways, so I will take up their criticisms in turn. Koopman grants that my reading of Habermas may fit his middle period work, up through and including The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas, 1984 and 1987), but that it fails to appreciate the fact that in his later work, from Between Facts and Norms onward (Habermas, 1996), Habermas takes a more contextualist and pragmatist turn. The contextualist reading of Habermas’s later work is one that is gaining some currency, but I’m not convinced of it as an interpretive claim. Although I would not dispute the claim that Habermas’s work has evolved in complex ways, I read his later work as advancing the same basic position vis-a`-vis the status of the normative claims as does his middle period work. The position in his work on political and legal theory seems more contextualist because its focus is not moral but political and legal norms, and these are necessarily rooted in the forms of life of a specific legal and political community. But Habermas holds on to the idea that legal and political norms, however contextually grounded they may be, are not valid if they contravene universally valid moral norms, where the validity of moral norms is tied to their redeemability in a properly structured moral discourse. Hence, I don’t

Power, Autonomy, and Gender: Reply to Critics

135

see a big shift between Habermas’s middle period work on communicative action and discourse ethics and his later contributions to political theory, at least with respect to the issue of his meta-theoretical position regarding norms. For what it is worth, Habermas himself seems to share this understanding of his own work. Throughout Between Facts and Norms and even his most recent work on religion, Habermas consistently and adamantly rejects contextualism.1 For example, in Between Facts and Norms, Habermas claims that although contextualism is ‘‘an understandable response to the failures of the philosophy of history and philosophical anthropology, it never gets beyond the defiant appeal to the normative force of the factual’’ (Habermas, 1996, p. 2). Similarly, in his more recent work on religion, although Habermas acknowledges that contextualist positions ‘‘may initially have the innocently pragmatic sense of sharpening our sensitivity for contexts,’’ he also sharply criticizes ‘‘the flat anti-Platonism that circulates so thoughtlessly in today’s modish late Heideggerian and late Wittgensteinian currents’’ (Habermas, 2002, p. 159). In any case, this interpretive question takes us away from the main focus of my book, which is on Habermas’s middle period work, up through and including his essays on discourse ethics from the 1980s. I focus on that phase of Habermas’s work because that is where one finds his most detailed discussions of the intersubjective process of subject-formation and of autonomy. If Koopman is right that Habermas’s late work, which I don’t discuss in the book, is more contextualist in orientation, then so much the better for my overall constructive project, which consists in recasting his central insights in a contextualist vein. But even if I’m right Habermas remains staunchly anti-contextualist throughout, I think that Koopman and I are in agreement that his normative project need not be taken up in this way. Its core insights can be formulated in a more contextualist and pragmatist way than, on my view, Habermas himself is willing to do. Indeed, showing that this is the case and articulating the benefits of this way of taking up the Habermasian project is one of the main aims of my discussions of McCarthy, Cooke, and Benhabib in Chapters 5 and 6 of the book. Zurn raises a set of different, though not unrelated, questions about my reading of Habermas. His first concern is that I don’t do justice to the empirical richness of Habermas’s account of the development of the autonomous subject, and, thus, that I fail to appreciate what is doing the justificatory work in Habermas’s defense of autonomy. As Zurn sees it, my focus on the capacities for critical reflexivity and deliberate

136

AMY ALLEN

self-transformation as central to Habermas’s account of autonomy, though not incorrect, is too narrow to make sense of Habermas’s ‘‘more differentiated and capacious’’ conception of rational, intersubjective accountability (Zurn, Chapter 6, this volume). As Zurn puts it: Habermas’s defense of autonomy as rational accountability is not a matter of reason working itself pure as Allen sometimes implies, but is rather based on a complex reconstructive claim: the claim that diverse results of empirical social sciences can be understood to buttress one another by evincing underlying structural homologies, thereby shedding light upon the underlying developmental logic of progressive learning, through socialization, in the direction of increased generalization, abstraction, and reflexivity. (Zurn, Chapter 6, this volume)

I’m enormously grateful to Zurn for pointing out how the details of Habermas’s account of the self ought to be filled in, and I concede that Zurn’s presentation of that account is richer and more differentiated than the one offered in my book. What I don’t see, at least not yet, is how this richer and more differentiated picture affects my criticism of Habermas. Zurn emphasizes that Habermas charts the development of interactive competences across a variety of domains – including the linguistic, epistemic, and normative-interactive – and then identifies a structural similarity in those developmental processes. My general worry about Habermas’s developmental account of autonomy is that he fails to take seriously the implications of the role that power necessarily plays in the constitution of the subject. And I don’t see how Zurn’s more differentiated reconstruction of Habermas’s account would fare any better on this score. After all, power arguably plays a structurally similar role in the development of all the interactive competences that he delineates – epistemic, linguistic, and normative-interactive. Although I certainly can’t fully justify such a claim here, as a way of making it plausible I would at least point to the relevant literature in feminist philosophy, which explores the ways in which conceptions of reason and/or knowledge are defined in sexist ways,2 language is gendered in ways that reinforce notions of maleness as universal and femaleness as deviant,3 and normative-interactive competence requires, in part, competently performing an intelligible gender identity, which, in turn, requires conforming to subordinating gender norms.4 If those feminist concerns are at least plausible, then however illuminating Zurn’s appeal to the more differentiated version of Habermas’s account of the self may be, it doesn’t change the general point. Moreover, although I appreciate Zurn’s point that Habermas’s method of rational reconstruction is a far cry from a priori rationalist theorizing, my concern is that it nevertheless tends to bracket questions of power, viewing them as ‘‘merely’’ empirical issues.

Power, Autonomy, and Gender: Reply to Critics

137

So appealing to the method of rational reconstruction doesn’t resolve the worry about Habermas’s tendency to aim for purity; instead, it simply recapitulates that worry in a more methodological vein. Zurn’s second concern has to do with my lack of attention to the role that Habermas’s Hegelian philosophy of history plays in his account. Zurn emphasizes that Habermas’s defense of the ideal of reason and autonomy is thoroughly historical and criticizes my account for failing to recognize this. Specifically, he takes me to task for accusing Habermas of being insufficiently ‘‘historically self-conscious and modest about the status of our normative principles’’ (POS, p. 180; cited in Zurn, Chapter 6, this volume). Moreover, he insists that Habermas’s commitment to a post-metaphysical, empirically grounded societal developmentalism ‘‘is crucial to the robustness of Habermas’s account of individuation and his normative defense of individual autonomy as rational accountability’’ (Zurn, Chapter 6, this volume). The claim, I take it, is that Habermas’s normative defense of autonomy doesn’t make sense without his post-metaphysical and empirically grounded but nonetheless developmentalist and progressive reading of history. Once again, I’m grateful to Zurn for pointing out the need for a fuller discussion of philosophy of history and the role that this plays in the Foucault/Habermas debate. I think he is correct that this is a serious lacuna in the book. I also agree with him that, if this point were fully worked out, it would most likely prove to be more of a sticking point in that debate than the issues of subjectivity and autonomy that I deal with more directly in my book. However, I do want to take issue with his reading of my claim that Habermas is insufficiently historically self-conscious and modest about the grounding of his normative claims. Although I’m sure I could have expressed it more clearly, my point there was not that Habermas offers a de-historicized rational defense of autonomy. Rather, my worry was precisely about what sort of understanding of the status of our normative ideals follows from the realization that ‘‘the notions of universalizability and context transcendence are themselves situated in the context of late Western modernity’’ (POS, p. 180). In other words, although I could and should have discussed the background commitments in philosophy of history in much greater detail in the book, the worry is precisely about Habermas’s claim that although the normative ideals of modernity emerge from a particular context they are nonetheless universal and context-transcendent. Zurn is absolutely correct that, for Habermas, this claim is grounded in his reading of history as a process of collective learning. In my book, I argue for a more modest, contextualist reading of the normative status of those ideals, one that understands them as context-transcending rather than context-

138

AMY ALLEN

transcendent. Relatedly, with respect to the philosophy of history, I would argue for a more modest version of the claim about historical learning processes, one that indexes the claim that modernity is the outcome of a learning process to the values of modernity itself. So, I agree with Zurn that a fuller discussion of these issues is required, and, ideally, would have been included in my book. Unlike Zurn, however, I think that a fuller discussion of the role that philosophy of history plays in the Foucault/Habermas debate should lead one to be more skeptical of Habermas’s Hegelianism rather than less. On this point, I’m in complete agreement with Johanna Meehan, when she says, Perhaps Kant, Locke, Condorcet, Jefferson, the satirical Voltaire, and even the forever conflicted Rousseau, could link progress to reason, justice, and democracy without wincing, but the benefit of hindsight and Foucault has y shown us that the ideals of justice, universality, truth, consensus and autonomy defended by earlier philosophers have often been mobilized in support of empire, god, whiteness, rationality, wealth and patriarchy. (Meehan, Chapter 5, this volume)

Moreover, although Habermas’s Hegelianism is post-metaphysical and highly deflationary, the notion of a learning process cannot be given a thoroughly empirical grounding, as I’m sure Zurn is well aware. The idea of a learning-process only makes sense from the presumption of some normative standpoint that serves as the goal toward which learning aims. Without the presumption of such a standpoint, shifts in interactive competences or political forms of life or what have you could not be characterized as anything other than mere changes. The key questions, then, concern how we conceptualize the normative standpoint from which we make such judgments about learning. Is that standpoint universal and context-transcendent? Or is it embedded within history, social practices, forms of life, and relations of power? To be clear, Habermas and I agree that this normative standpoint must be understood in terms of the idea, central to the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory, of transcendence within immanence. The central point of contention concerns how best to make sense of this idea. Unless the notion of a learning process were deflated to the mean learning for us, rather than learning per se, then it looks to me like the notion of a learning process is going to pull Habermas back toward the transcendental5 realm. On the contrary, to accept that the notion of a learning process is defined in terms of learning for us rather than learning per se is to accept the very contextualist view that Habermas himself seems at pains to reject. The conclusion I would draw from this discussion is not that we must endorse Habermas’s Hegelian understanding of history.

Power, Autonomy, and Gender: Reply to Critics

139

Rather, it is that the work of contextualizing Habermas may be even more difficult than I imagined when I was writing this book. But this is question that I am taking up in my current work, and I’m grateful to Zurn for his sharp formulation of this issue. Turning now from the interpretive to the conceptual issues, I’d like to take up Koopman’s ‘‘crucial question,’’ which concerns ‘‘the best way of interpreting critical theory as a philosophical project’’ (Koopman, Chapter 4, this volume). Koopman sketches two possible ways of understanding the project of critical theory today. The first would be to view it as a traditional philosophical project that aims at constructing an overarching, integrated theoretical system, while the second would be to understand it as a more methodologically modest project that aims to develop analytical frameworks that can facilitate critical social and political inquiry into concrete, practical problems. Koopman reads my book as in line with former understanding of critical theory, inasmuch as he sees its aim to be ‘‘a wholesale integration of the centermost aspects of Foucaultian genealogy and Habermasian critical theory’’ (Koopman, Chapter 4, this volume). Koopman, by contrast, favors the latter vision of critical theory and suggests that we abandon ‘‘the traditional philosophical strategy of integration in favor of a more modest strategy of delegation’’ (Koopman, Chapter 4, this volume). Adopting this sort of pragmatist strategy, Koopman suggests that we might then delegate the task of genealogical diagnosis or problematization to Foucault, and that of normative reconstruction to Habermas, without having to get ourselves bogged down in abstract, philosophical debates that may not admit of resolution. I find much to admire in Koopman’s approach, and I don’t wish to downplay its importance here. And, if pressed, I would be willing to admit that my aims are probably more traditionally philosophical and less socialscientific than Koopman’s are. I think it would be fair to say, for example, that my book focuses more on clarifying the philosophical foundations of critical theory than it does on ‘‘doing’’ critical theory (about which more below). Be that as it may, I would have described my conceptual aim in the book somewhat differently than does Koopman. As is my way, I would attempt to stake out a middle position between the two options he offers. That middle position consists in characterizing the aim of the book as showing that there’s no conceptual obstacle to the kind of methodological integration that he proposes. Now, Koopman recognizes that this is an important task,6 but it seems to me that we might disagree – though I’m not sure about this – about its degree of difficulty. For example, if the charge that Foucault kills off subject, denies the possibility of autonomy, and/or

140

AMY ALLEN

believes that autonomy is thoroughly pernicious, then it is difficult to see how a methodological approach grounded in his work can be coherently combined with a more Habermasian methodology, which presupposes, to put it somewhat crudely, that autonomous subjects exist and that autonomy is good. Similarly, if Habermas’s normative project can’t be reconstructed in a contextualist manner but has to be ultimately given a more transcendental grounding, then it is hard to see how a Habermasian reconstructive methodology could be combined with a Foucaultian genealogical method. In other words, even if we approach critical theory pragmatically and methodologically, our methodologies need to be compatible with one another, which means, I take it, at the very least, not contradictory. But showing how the theoretical assumptions driving Foucault and Habermas’s projects are in fact compatible, or can be made to be so, despite the predominant interpretations of them, requires complex and painstaking conceptual and interpretive work. Doing such work is the conceptual aim of my book. I don’t want to make too much of this issue, since my sense is that Koopman and I are not, in the end, as far apart on this question as it may seem. But I do think it is worthwhile answering the question that he poses at the end of his chapter: ‘‘of these two approaches, the theoretical and the methodological, which better performs the critical functions we expect of ourselves as contemporary critical theorists addressing ourselves to today?’’ (Koopman, Chapter 4, this volume). In response, I would say that my worry about the more modestly pragmatic and methodological approach that Koopman favors is that it cannot swing free of the thorny and, yes, potentially intractable theoretical and philosophical questions that Koopman seems to want to avoid. For instance, to insist on the temporality and historicity of reason and normativity, as Koopman does (see Koopman, Chapter 4, this volume) is already to take a position on a deep, fundamental, and controversial philosophical question. Retreating to pragmatism sidesteps the difficult (and, from my point of view, important and interesting in its own right) question of how the ideas of rationality and normativity, on the one hand, and temporality and historicity, on the other, can be thought together. Moreover, although this is a bit of a quibble and would require a great deal of textual argument to justify, I would contest Koopman’s reading of Foucault and Habermas as pragmatists in his sense. Although I certainly would not deny that the work of both men aims at ‘‘diagnosing and responding to contemporary political, social, and ethical problems’’ (Koopman, Chapter 4, this volume), I think that it also and at the same time aims at rethinking traditional philosophical problems such as those of truth

Power, Autonomy, and Gender: Reply to Critics

141

and validity. Indeed, as I read them, these two aspects of Foucault and Habermas’s work can’t be completely disentangled. Hence, I’d be inclined to describe them not, as Koopman does, as ‘‘philosophical social scientists’’ (Koopman, Chapter 4, this volume), but rather as social-scientific philosophers. Finally, both Zurn and Meehan raise important questions about the practical–political aims of my book, particularly with respect to my theorization of gender subordination and the prospects for overcoming it. In the space that I have here, I will not be able to address fully these complex issues. The most I’ll be able to do is to clarify my approach and to give some indications of how it might be developed further. Zurn is right, I think, to point out that the question of why feminist revolution hasn’t occurred is one of the deep problems motivating the book. It is also, in my view, the problem that is least well resolved in the book. (In my defense, though, this is a notoriously difficult problem! It is probably asking too much of any one book to solve it.) My reading of Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power (1997) is at the heart of my attempt to address this question, and Zurn raises two questions about this reading. First, he wonders, how generalizable is Butler’s psychoanalytic account of subjection? The answer, he suggests, is: not very. Furthermore, Zurn claims that a similar worry about the empirical generalizability of psychoanalysis that explains Habermas’s own abandonment of psychoanalysis in the 1970s. Second, he asks me to clarify the relationship between the psychoanalytic explanation for the stubborn persistence of gender subordination offered in the book and more materialist or structuralist modes of explanation. Taking up these issues (albeit too briefly) in turn, Zurn’s first line of criticism raises thorny and difficult questions about the usefulness of a psychoanalytic depth psychology model for critical social theory in general and its compatibility with my Foucaultian inspired version of critical theory in particular that can’t be dealt with fully here. Addressing such questions is a focus of my current work, which strives to articulate the importance of certain insights of psychoanalysis for critical theory, even of the sort inspired by Foucault’s analysis of power. The guiding thought here is that psychoanalysis has an important role to play vis-a`-vis critical theory in that its highly developed account of irrationality offers critical theorists a realistic conception of the person that can enable us to understand the barriers and limits to critique as both a theoretical and a practical–political project.7 Fully developing this thought is, to be sure, a complex task, and doing it well will most definitely require addressing the sort of methodological issues raised by Zurn.

142

AMY ALLEN

With respect to the second issue, I would like to clarify that the psychoanalytic answer to the question of why the revolution hasn’t occurred that I sketch in the book is not intended to rule out more structuralist or materialist modes of explanation. On the contrary, I think that such modes of explanation may well have an important role to play in a more complete answer to the practical-political question posed in my book. Indeed, the relationship between structural power relations and the role that power plays in the constitution of individual subjects is one that I explored in my first book (Allen, 1999), and I haven’t abandoned the overarching framework for analyzing power that I offered there. The Politics of Our Selves focuses on a specific question related to power – how to understand subjects as constituted by power and yet capable of autonomous selfconstitution at the same time – and it not intended as a replacement for the more overarching conception of power sketched out in my earlier work. I should like to emphasize, however, that although I have no objections to more materialist and structuralist answers to the specific question about subjection and autonomy explored in my book, I would be skeptical of any approach that claimed that a materialist explanation is sufficient – that is, that, when properly filled in, a structural-economic explanation obviates the need for a psychological one.8 Meehan raises a different sort of question about my account of gender subordination. She discusses my reliance on the work of both Butler and Jessica Benjamin and stakes out their divergent understandings of gender itself. Whose account, Meehan wonders, do I side with in the end? Do I believe, as Benjamin does, that mutual recognition within a framework of binary gender difference is possible, that boys can be Mickey and girls can be Minnie but that they can both be mice (see Meehan, Chapter 5, this volume)? Or do I think, with Butler, that binary gender difference itself is itself the problem, that genuine mutual recognition – if it is possible at all – is impossible within this binary framework, hence, that overcoming gender subordination requires, as Butler would put it, undoing gender itself? (see Butler, 2004). Meehan is right to point out that I don’t make my view on this central question about gender clear in the book, and she is right to take me to task for it. In the book, I reconstruct Butler and Benjamin’s disagreement about the possibility of mutual recognition per se, and I argue in favor of Benjamin’s less pessimistic view of recognition, but I do so without discussing their opposing views on the relationship between gender and mutual recognition. In answer to the question posed by Meehan, let me take the opportunity to clarify my position. I tend to agree with Butler rather the Benjamin, and to view gender difference as inextricably linked to gender

Power, Autonomy, and Gender: Reply to Critics

143

dominance. Hence, although I obviously cannot make the case for this view here, I would argue that genuine mutual recognition, as fleeting and precarious a possibility as it is, can only be possible in a world beyond gender. Here I would just add the caveat that we have to be agnostic about what a world beyond gender would look like, since gender so thoroughly structures our language, social practices, cultural norms, economic structures, and modes of subjectivity, that it is virtually impossible to imagine life without it. Meehan also raises some very interesting and important suggestions about directions for future research that might use my theoretical framework as a starting point. She is quite right that my book poses but does not fully explore complex questions about the relationship between desire and autonomy, affects and reason. Rather, I content myself with pointing out the limits of Habermas’s overly narrow, largely cognitivist, approach. I agree with Meehan that an account of the complicated relationships between affects and reason can be staked out theoretically but should also be investigated empirically. Although this is not a project that I myself intend to undertake, at least not in the immediate future, I view it as an important related project. In conclusion, let me say that I am truly grateful to have had the chance to respond to three such rigorous, generous, and interestingly critical readings of my book. It is the greatest honor an author can have to have her work taken so seriously by such insightful and thoughtful critics.

NOTES 1. I discuss Habermas’s critique of contextualism in his late work in more detail in Allen (2011). 2. For classic statements of these issues, see, for example, Lloyd (1993) and Harding (1991). 3. For a classic feminist exploration of this idea, see Wittig (2007). 4. The locus classicus for feminist discussions of the relationship between normative competence and subordinating modes of gender identity is Butler (1990). 5. Or even, in Habermas’s recent work on religion, to the point of view of the divine. I discuss this aspect of Habermas’s recent work, and the issue of how best to understand the notion of transcendence within immanence, in Allen (2011). 6. Koopman acknowledges that this is an important task (see Koopman, Chapter 4, this volume), but seems to think that it can be folded into his more pragmatic, methodological approach. I see it as a third option between the two approaches he sketches. 7. Here I am following an argument made by Axel Honneth. See Honneth (2006). 8. I discuss this issue in more detail in Allen (2008).

144

AMY ALLEN

REFERENCES Allen, A. (1999). The power of feminist theory: Domination, resistance, solidarity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Allen, A. (2008). Rationalizing oppression. Journal of Power, 1(1), 51–65. Allen, A. (2011). Having one’s cake and eating it too: Habermas’s genealogy of post-secular reason. In: C. Calhoun, E. Mendieta, & J. Van Antwerpen (Eds.), Habermas and religion. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY: Routledge. Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York, NY: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1983). Afterword: The subject and power. In: H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (2nd ed., pp. 208–226). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1997). What is enlightenment? In: P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ethics, subjectivity, and truth: Volume 1 of the essential works of Michel Foucault (pp. 303–319). New York, NY: The New Press. Habermas, J. ([1981] 1984, 1987). The theory of communicative action (Vols 1 and 2). Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. ([1992] 1996). Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (2002). A conversation about god and the world: Interview with Eduardo Mendieta. In: E. Mendieta (Ed.), Religion and rationality: Essays on reason, god, and modernity (pp. 147–167). Cambridge: Polity Press. Harding, S. (1991). Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women’s lives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Honneth, A. (2006). The work of negativity: A psychoanalytical revision of the theory of recognition. Critical Horizons, 7(1), 101–111. Lloyd, G. (1993). The man of reason: ‘Male’ and ‘female’ in western philosophy (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Wittig, M. (2007). Les Gue´rille`res. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

STRANGER TO YOU AND STRANGER TO MYSELF? THEORIZING SELF-ESTRANGEMENT Natalia Ruiz-Junco ABSTRACT As a major concept in sociological theory, estrangement can be understood through a diversity of theoretical lenses. However, there is a tendency among sociologists to identify the idea of estrangement with a version of alienation. In this chapter, I counter this tendency to reduce estrangement to one of its conceptual possibilities. To provide a theoretical analysis of estrangement, I first examine the classical views of the issue. I argue that classical theories – both critical and interpretive – fail to theorize sufficiently self-estrangement, a dimension of the concept that remains underexplored. Thus, I move beyond classical sociology to reconstruct the idea of self-estrangement, drawing on more recent interpretive and critical theories, especially theories of social interaction and the self. Specifically, I discuss several interactional forms of selfestrangement, and the connection between self-estrangement, institutional contexts, emotions and the body. Finally, I consider this concept in the context of civil society. This discussion demonstrates the merits of a focus on self-estrangement applied to the study of political exclusion. The Diversity of Social Theories Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 29, 147–168 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-1204(2011)0000029012

147

148

NATALIA RUIZ-JUNCO

INTRODUCTION The idea of estrangement has a conceptually rich history that goes back to the beginning of sociology (Ross, 1917; Simmel, [1908] 1971). As a major concept in sociological theory, it can be understood through a diversity of theoretical lenses. Most sociologists, however, have a narrow conception of estrangement: they identify it with alienation. And despite advances in alienation research that effectively broaden the concept’s applicability, most discussions still reproduce a macro-filtered notion of alienation, reduced to the consequences of the political economy of production (Langman & Kalekin-Fishman, 2006). I counter this tendency to reduce estrangement to one of its conceptual possibilities. This reductionist tendency simplifies our understanding of estrangement, narrowing it down to a very specific realm of social reality and experience. The critical view of estrangement has received much more attention than other views on the subject. The contributions of interpretive theory, however, have remained in the background because estrangement has been identified mostly with alienation and alienation, in turn, with the critical theory tradition. Thus, I argue for a broader understanding of the idea of estrangement in sociology – one that takes into consideration estrangement in relation to self from several theoretical traditions, especially from interpretive theory and its analysis of social interaction. How does self-estrangement look in social interactions? How do people experience self-estrangement? These are questions that can be answered using interpretive social theory. Whereas there are some lines of thinking within critical theory that do indeed suggest a path for theorizing self-alienation, the interpretive view is key to reconstructing the idea of self-estrangement in contemporary social theory. In the first part of this chapter, I consider both the critical and the interpretive views of estrangement in classical social theory. As will be shown, each of these classic traditions fails to substantively theorize estrangement from the perspective of the self. Thus, it is necessary to move beyond classical ideas on estrangement to gain insights into the complex workings of selfestrangement and its multiple social manifestations. I reconstruct this concept in the second part of this chapter, where I draw on interpretive and critical theorists. Without subsuming some perspectives under others, I illuminate several dimensions of self-estrangement in ways that one cannot derive from any of these traditions separately. Surprisingly, the topic of self-estrangement remains vastly underexplored, thus the ground that I cover here contributes to elaborating self-estrangement in a move to extend the theoretical possibilities of the general idea of

Stranger to You and Stranger to Myself? Theorizing Self-Estrangement

149

estrangement. Finally, in the last section I examine estrangement from civil society to demonstrate the merits of a focus on self-estrangement applied to the study of political exclusion.

TWO CLASSIC VIEWS ON ESTRANGEMENT Two major views of estrangement emanate from classical theories and then cascade into more contemporary ones. In this section I discuss some of their features. First, I offer a reading of Marxian alienation and follow some of its developments in the critical theory tradition. Second, I provide a reading of Simmel’s estrangement and stranger concepts. My examination of these two views shows that each fails to substantively theorize estrangement from the perspective of the self. That is, critical and interpretive classical social theories of estrangement fail to theorize the ramifications of self-estrangement, a point that I take up in the second part of this chapter.

Estrangement as Alienation in Critical Theory Alienation is the most common category to theorize estrangement in sociology and remains a constant reference in social theory.1 The history of this concept, therefore, is a necessary ingredient of any sociological discussion on the topic. Alienation appears in its German form Entfremdung before it enters into English vocabulary (Dahms, 2006). Similar ideas had been around in the western context long before Marx’s adoption of the category (Langman & Kalekin-Fishman, 2006; Me´sza´ros, [1970], 2005), but it is thanks to Marx ([1844] 2000) that alienation becomes a crucial element of the sociological ‘‘canon’’ (Baehr, 2002). We can find Marx’s emblematic definition of alienation in Alienated Labor. In this short piece, Marx argues that alienated workers experience alienation from what they produce, from their ‘‘productive activity,’’ their ‘‘species-being,’’ and each other (Marx, ([1844] 2000, pp. 88–91). For Marx, alienation is a social phenomenon characteristic of societies with a particular economic configuration that renders workers incapable of a meaningful connection to the work they do, the outcomes of their work, their community and even their own personal and collective history as a species. Marx’s former ideas continue to be fundamental pieces of the definition of alienation (Ollman, 1971; Me´sza´ros, [1970] 2005). Parallel to Marx’s previous formulation, Ollman distinguishes the major types of alienation

150

NATALIA RUIZ-JUNCO

according to four types of ties: ‘‘man’s relation to his productive activity;’’ ‘‘man’s relation to his product;’’ ‘‘man’s relation to his fellow men;’’ and ‘‘man’s relation to his species’’ (Ollman, 1971, pp. 136–152). However, this conventional reading of Marx may obscure the degree to which the idea has been transformed, first within Marx’s corpus, and later in contemporary formulations in the social science literature (Lukes, 1977; Postone, 1993; Wegner, 1975). Marx builds his theoretical framework in an organic movement that blends old conceptual elaborations with newer conceptual elements to produce increasingly complex theoretical articulations. His alienation concept is no exception; as Marx’s theory evolves, alienation acquires new meanings. Several commentators raise the issue of the changing conceptual textures of alienation throughout Marx’s ouvre (Harvey, 2010; Postone, 1993). Moishe Postone (1993) grounds his reading of Marx’s theory on a historically contextualized understanding of the concept of labor in Marx’s late period, and thus distinguishes an early from a late conceptualization of alienation. More importantly, while a dominant preoccupation of his early writings, Marx’s notion of self-alienation suffers as he articulates his overall theory. The theme of self-alienation loses force while other themes, such as alienation as a consequence of socio-economic and political conditions, gain relevance within Marx’s theoretical system. In Postone’s rendering, alienation is the result of domination whereby ‘‘people do not really control their own productive activity or what they produce but ultimately are dominated by the results of that activity’’ (Postone, 1993, p. 30). This version of alienation, however, does not do justice to the specific ways in which alienation takes place from the perspective of the self. The insufficient treatment of self-alienation has become a frequent criticism leveled at Marx’s theory. Churchich (1990, p. 104), for example, argues, ‘‘Marx’s theory of self-alienation is far from being clear and consistent.’’ If Marx’s treatment of self-alienation is insufficient, do any of Marx’s followers provide a satisfactory correction to this? I do not think so. Some give us important clues as to how expand the inquiry into selfalienation, but they do not develop fully their ideas on the subject. Let me mention Walter Benjamin and Erick Fromm who give us promising although incomplete articulations of the idea of self-alienation. An early member of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin ([1955] 1978, p. 156) describes the ‘‘flaˆneur’’ as a social type, a´ la Simmel. Benjamin characterizes the flaˆneur by the ‘‘uncertainty’’ of her or his roles in the social structure, by being ‘‘on the threshold, of the city as of the bourgeois class.

Stranger to You and Stranger to Myself? Theorizing Self-Estrangement

151

Neither has yet engulfed him; in neither is he at home’’ (Benjamin [1955] 1978, p. 156). The flaˆneur has an estranged gaze because she or he is situated on the margins of societal space. Thus, ‘‘flaˆnerie’’ is a type of alienation defined by the (dis)location of the flaˆneur. The flaˆneur is a (dis)locating agent because she or he turns alienation’s ‘‘sense of playing a role in an impersonal system which one does not understand or control’’ (Lukes, 1977, p. 89) into an aesthetic and political position. Erich Fromm’s ([1961] 2004) critical theory provides another influential interpretation of self alienation, this time based on the idea of productivity. For Fromm, alienation is the ‘‘negation of productivity [emphasis in the original]’’ (Fromm, [1961] 2004, p. 37). Fromm goes further than simply stating that alienation is rooted in an unjust structure of social production; that is, his definition of productivity is not restricted to the sphere of economic production. Weaving his ideas into Marx’s classic notion, Fromm makes abundantly clear that alienation may be construed as estrangement from the capacity to comprehend the world in which one must act: ‘‘[A]alienation (or ‘estrangement’ [my emphasis]) means, for Marx, that man does not experience himself as the acting agent in his grasp of the world, but that the world (nature, others, and he himself) remain alien to him’’ (Fromm, [1961] 2004, p. 37). Fromm’s rendering of the famous concept explains alienation as a result of feelings of self-estrangement. One can conclude from Fromm’s rendition that an alienated person is not only alienated from her or his natural and social environments but is also self-estranged. The achievement of Fromm’s version of alienation is to insist upon the important point that alienation occurs to someone – radically affecting the source of people’s motivation for action. It is clear from this discussion that these two authors put forth two paths – albeit preliminary – for theorizing self-estrangement. On the one hand, Benjamin highlights the marginalizing position of the flaˆneur who refuses her or his inscription in bourgeois society. On the other, Fromm stresses the limits of social and personal transformation under alienated circumstances. Alienation, for Fromm, is always self alienation and is equivalent to the lack of agency in the construction of the social world. Taken together, both flaneurism and Fromm’s negation of productivity show two important directions to think about self-alienation within the critical theory tradition. Being critical theorists, the two authors understand that this cannot be the endpoint of a discussion on alienation. For them, the ultimate goal of critique is the normative shaping of social conditions. In this tradition the accepted way to address alienation is to appeal to the power of social consciousness – to transcend alienation both in theory and in practice.

152

NATALIA RUIZ-JUNCO

In line with the normative core of this tradition, one of the most famous sentences from The Communist Manifesto makes no quibbles about the need to transcend alienation: ‘‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind’’ (Marx & Engels, [1848] in Marx, 2000). The Manifesto exhorts the reader to leave behind mystifications that block the conscience of existing conditions and the presumably politically futile realization of the impermanence of things, and to transcend alienation in practice. In other words, the critique of alienated conditions is not enough to transform social reality; undoing alienation in practice entails the eradication of the conditions of alienation. What does this mean for students of Marxism? For Postone (1993, p. 32), for example, the disappearance of alienation ‘‘would allow the ‘mere worker’ to become the ‘social individual’ – one who incorporates the human knowledge and potential first developed historically in alienated form.’’ The eclosion of the social individual, a new beginning after capitalism, signifies ‘‘overcoming the opposition between individual and society’’ (Postone, 1993, p. 32). In concluding, Marx’s followers have produced important analyses of alienation reworking the classical meanings and founding new ones; however, they have developed only preliminary paths for theorizing alienation from the perspective of the self, without explicating self-estrangement from the perspective of social actors. Marxian thinkers have not taken up the issue of self-estrangement in social interactions and institutional settings other than those determined by the sphere of production. This inquiry has its most important development in the interpretive tradition.

Estrangement in Interpretive Theory The best starting point for introducing interpretive theories of estrangement is Simmel’s sociology. The stranger is a classic concept in sociological theory and a vital component of sociological research. Georg Simmel famously writes that the stranger is a person ‘‘who comes today and stays tomorrow’’ (Simmel, [1908] 1971, p. 143). For Simmel, strangers remain part of the social group even if they are simultaneously separate from it;2 they have a dual position in the group, ‘‘being outside it and confronting it’’ (Simmel, [1908] 1971, p. 144). What is the implication of this dual position? First of all, the stranger’s dual position problematizes the group’s heterogeneity, creates social tension, and reinforces the group’s internal boundaries, marked by the

Stranger to You and Stranger to Myself? Theorizing Self-Estrangement

153

groups’ self-definition in terms of an opposition of ‘‘us’’ versus ‘‘them.’’ Simmel suggests that the reason for this lies in social space itself; social space produces outsiders.3 Most importantly, Simmel points out that it is this objectification in social space that leads the stranger to acquire ‘‘objectivity.’’ Group members are aware of the objectifying perspective of strangers, sometimes even intending to benefit from it, as it occurs when group members transmit secrets to strangers. However, this objectivity-seeking on the part of the group does not change the relationships between group members and strangers. Strangers do not possess individuality in the eyes of the community; they ‘‘are not really perceived as individuals, but as strangers of a certain type’’ (Simmel, [1908] 1971, p. 148). Thus, Simmel makes the connection between the stranger’s objectification in social space and the stranger’s objectivity without specifying how the former connects to the latter. In other words, he does not explicate objectivity from the perspective of the stranger. Following Alfred Schutz, the stranger’s objectivity can be best described as a form of cognitive objectification – an objectification different from the former objectification in social space. Alfred Schutz (1970) shows us a different dimension of the objectivity/objectification pair in his commentary on Simmel. Schutz (1970, p. 87) defines the stranger as ‘‘the man who has to place in question nearly everything that seems to be unquestionable to the members of the approached group.’’ In Schutz’s opinion, this cognitive process consists of an objectification of the interpretive frames and cultural practices of the group, since the stranger – missing the concrete member socialization into the group – does not take the results of this socialization for granted and is more predisposed to objectify the community’s norms, values and practices. Therefore, Schutz links objectivity to objectification as the process by which the stranger makes sense of her or his world cognitively. This discussion of the stranger’s objectivity directs our attention to a related question that speaks to Simmel’s concerns. If strangers are endowed with a particular objectivity, and estrangement is the process by which they are estranged, is there an intrinsic relationship between commonly understood scientific or intellectual objectivity and estrangement? The answer to this question is no, for while objectification is necessary for intellectual activity, the stranger’s objectivity cannot be simply translated into the construct of scientific objectivity that crystallized in the 19th century and that represents the dominant understanding of objectivity today. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2007, p. 17) express the essence of this scientific objectivity as follows: ‘‘To be objective is to aspire to knowledge that bears

154

NATALIA RUIZ-JUNCO

no trace of the knower – knowledge unmarked by prejudice or skill, fantasy or judgment, wishing or striving.’’ Unlike the scientific observer implied by the former view, the stranger does not withdraw her or his body or experiential contact to observe; thus, the stranger’s objectivity results from the intersubjective knowledge and personal immersion in a group from which he or she is excluded. It is this paradoxical position that makes the stranger able to embody an objectifying perspective that transcends ‘‘mere detachment’’ (Simmel ([1908] 1971, p. 145). This is evident in Simmel’s words on the stranger: Because he is not bound by roots to the particular constituents and partisan dispositions of the group, he confronts all of these with a distinctly ‘objective’ attitude, an attitude that does not signify mere detachment and nonparticipation, but is a distinct structure composed of remoteness and nearness, indifference and involvement.

In closing, it is important to note the affinities that exist between the idea of the stranger and alienation. Similar to alienation, the stranger has been reinvented multiple times since its inception4 and is invoked frequently in contemporary theoretical discussions (Ahmed, 2000; Alexander, 2004). More important, this pair of concepts and related ones have inspired new perspectives in critical theory and remain central to critical theory’s project of understanding the standpoints and positionalities of marginalized social groups (Collins, 1986, 2000). Like the classical critical view, the interpretive one proves inadequate in explaining how self-estrangement occurs in everyday social interactions and in various institutional settings that transcend the realm of the economy. In addition, neither the critical nor the interpretive views are immune to the dangers of reification. Both risk reifying estrangement in two ways: first, by making it correspond to the outcome of all-encompassing, external conditions that necessarily sweep away the person without assuming that they will also necessarily sweep away the collective (conventional reading of alienation); second, by imputing stranger identities that lead to what Sarah Ahmed (2000:79) calls ‘‘an ontology of the stranger’’ (the Simmelian view). Before closing this discussion, it is important to note that the theoretical traditions to which these classic views belong seldom converge in recent discussions on estrangement. Against this tendency, I draw liberally on contributions from these two traditions in my exposition of self-estrangement. Taking into account that this concept has remained underexamined in social theory, both in the critical and in the interpretive tradition, I follow two steps in the remainder of this chapter: first I set up the discussion of self-estrangement from the point of view of interpretive theory; after this I combine interpretive

Stranger to You and Stranger to Myself? Theorizing Self-Estrangement

155

and critical theorists to articulate further the possibilities of a concept of selfestrangement.

THEORIZING SELF-ESTRANGEMENT The term self-estrangement has been used before, but its previous conceptualization differs from the one I offer here. Melvin Seeman (1975, pp. 93–94) divided up the concept of alienation into several components; one of them was ‘‘self-estrangement’’ that he defined as ‘‘the individual’s engagement in activities that are not intrinsically rewarding vs involvement in a task or activity for its own sakey.’’ Although Seeman believed that this was the core or essence of alienation, it is clear that this is not the dominant theme today. The prevalent view of alienation is still focused on the economic sphere, industrial society and conflict, and thereby does not shed much light on the process of self-estrangement. Interpretive theory can help us reconstruct this aspect of the concept. From a general interpretive perspective I argue that self-estrangement refers to the person’s dis-involvement from social practices, situations, contexts, and even groups. I ground this definition in classical interactionist theory. I use G. H. Mead’s ([1934] 1992) conceptualization of the self as my starting point. According to Mead,5 a person’s self is ‘‘an object to itself’’ (Mead, [1934] 1992, pp. 136–137; see Blumer 1969). As interactionists generally admit, ‘‘the self is not an object that has inherent meaning, but is a construct that is given meaning through an actor’s choices, mediated by the relationships, situations, and cultures in which she or he is embedded’’ (Fine, 1993, p. 78). Self-construction involves several processes. People (1) identify themselves and others as objects; (2) take several perspectives on the objects they encounter, including their selves; and (3) construe them according to patterns learned and practiced in social interaction (see Blumer 1969). These intersubjective processes of knowledge of self and others cannot be conceived without the skill of imagination. To borrow from another classical theorist in this tradition, Charles H. Cooley ([1902] 1998), the process of self-construction implies that people imagine how others see them and thereby imagine how others would perceive that they are being perceived. Having established the link between classical interactionist theories and objectification, I turn to consider modern theories that tie objectification with estrangement. Social theorist Karl Mannheim’s idea of ‘‘self-distantiation’’ is

156

NATALIA RUIZ-JUNCO

relevant here. In Mannheim’s view, self-distantiation is different from alienation – he describes the latter in emotional terms as ‘‘the cooling off of emotional relationships’’ (Mannheim [1956] 1992, p. 307). In contrast to alienation, Mannheim’s self- distantiation is ‘‘the experience that I am a stranger to myself [my emphasis], or rather that I can be more or less close to myself’’ (Mannheim, [1956] 1992, p. 309). Self-distantiation is objectification that leads to self-detachment establishing distance between self and the experience of and identification with self. Mannheim’s ([1956] 1992) ‘‘I-myself relationship’’ stands as an example of how objectification based on distance serves the purpose of self-detachment. Mannheim ([1956] 1992, p. 344) defines the I–myself relationships in the following way: ‘‘[i]n hierarchically organized societies, however, man tends to think of himself in terms of his place in the social hierarchy. He is compelled to experience himself, not as a person, but as the specimen of a social category.’’ The social distance in this case is first and foremost defined by hierarchical position. Thus, there is a clear similarity between Mannheim’s I–myself relationship and other ideas already discussed: the distance between the stranger and the group in Simmel’s theory or that between Benjamin’s flaˆneur and her or his antagonized society. What the I–myself relationship highlights is how social distance translates into a distance from self. In short, self-distantiation and the I–myself relationship open the door for an examination of estrangement from the point of view of the self, the topic of next section. In what follows, I aim at illustrating several possibilities of self-estrangement. I do not provide an exhaustive list of the categories of self-estrangement, a task that would require much more in-depth discussion than I can offer in these pages.

Forms of Self-Estrangement Any discussion of self-estrangement will be hopelessly incomplete unless it contains a close consideration of the relationship between self-estrangement and social interaction. Therefore, I begin with such a consideration. In this task Erving Goffman’s sociology will prove invaluable. Goffman remains one of the most influential interpretive theorists to shed light on estrangement in social interaction.6 The importance of Goffman’s sociology in the study of social interaction is undisputed. Goffman’s contribution to the study of the self, however, is less clear to some because Goffman (1959, p. 253) defends emphatically the idea that the self can be studied as a playing field of reflections, projections, and refractions not of the making of any

Stranger to You and Stranger to Myself? Theorizing Self-Estrangement

157

single person. While this idea does not depart substantially from classical interactionist theory in that it denies an essentialist and individual-based notion of the self, it nevertheless points us in a different direction than did the classics. Goffman’s theory departs from classical interactionist theory most notably in the assumption about the performative nature of the self. Some commentators suspect Goffman’s thesis of the self viewing Goffman’s concept of self as reducible to a play of identity performances, a play of shadows with dubious ontological referents. For example, Alasdair MacIntyre (1984, p. 32) in an alarming tone argues that ‘‘Goffman y has liquidated the self into its role-playing y .’’ MacIntyre is not the only one to view Goffman’s theory in this manner. The criticism is common among Goffman’s critics. While their questioning of Goffman’s idea of the self is intriguing, it seems that they often miss his underlying argument. Goffman defines his theoretical point of departure with the common world of gestures and rules that people share. Then he moves on to reveal the unstable nature of this intersubjective world that depends on human interpretation. People interpret each other and their circumstances differently, with the consequence that no one can ultimately guarantee how their actions will be interpreted by others. Because this is a possibility, people may fail – unintentionally or intentionally – to communicate transparently; this is where the possibility of power plays, where deceit and conspiracy are ordinary, lies. This possibility is especially associated with one of the two venues of social communication that Goffman studies. Goffman (1959) describes two venues that people use to communicate with each other: first, the venue of available human language and its conventions; and second, the venue of socially mediated assumptions that may question the purpose and content rendered via the first venue. The latter is susceptible of being manipulated by anyone who distorts intentional meanings and deliberately produces ‘‘misinformation’’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 2). As the preceding suggests, people find advantages in manipulating the social scripts that are otherwise constraining of their actions. But to liberate the flow of misinformation or to strategize over their performances people need an everyday understanding of what Goffman calls the stage. How do people relate to the stage in everyday life? They need to distinguish it from the backstage and know the practical distinction between performance and non-performance, stage experience, and behind-the-scene experience. The stage metaphor and the self are not unrelated concepts in Goffman’s theory. Rather, people stage their dramas because they are reflexive actors and able to objectify themselves and others in a multi-faceted process that

158

NATALIA RUIZ-JUNCO

suggests the existence of the self but also the lurking possibility of estrangement. Without the idea of an ‘‘I’’ or self that is underlying and directing this set of performances and that can be detached from the multiple identities the person enacts, the metaphor that made Goffman famous becomes problematic. MacIntyre (1984, p. 32) concurs recognizing in Goffman’s sociology a ‘‘discernible ghostly ‘I’, the psychological peg to whom Goffman denies substantial selfhood, flitting evanescently from one solidly role-structured situation to anothery.’’ In fact, Goffman’s concern with estrangement is perhaps the best proof that he was deeply interested in the self. His analyses of social interaction reveal that when people are alienated or under the threat of alienation, they use their reflexive abilities to objectify themselves and their social situations. In Interaction Ritual Goffman (1967, p. 114) describes how ‘‘the individual can become alienated from a conversational encounter, the uneasiness that arises with this, and the consequence of this alienation and uneasiness upon the interaction.’’ Moreover, Goffman identifies a set of practices that indicate estrangement in social interaction. In what follows, I draw partly on Goffman’s sociology to consider self-estrangement in social interaction and institutions, the body and the emotions. Interactional Forms of Self-Estrangement Although all forms of self-estrangement may develop in social interactions and encounters, for the purposes of exposition one must distinguish general types of self-estrangement. Drawing on Goffman’s sociology, we can identify four general types of interactional self-estrangement, present in a wide range of interactions and social and cultural contexts. First, the person may concentrate inappropriately on her individual participant performance in the interaction, thus losing grip of the flow of the interaction by excessively considering herself and being ‘‘self-conscious.’’ Second, the person may engage in ‘‘interaction-consciousness,’’ which entails inappropriate regard for how an interaction unfolds. Lastly, the person may be involved in an obvious maneuver to attract attention and extract particular reactions from select others in interaction, falling into ‘‘other-consciousness’’ (Goffman 1967, p. 119 ff.). The imputed flaws of character associated with other-consciousness are ‘‘insincerity, affectation, [and] y immodesty’’ (Goffman, 1967, p. 124). Finally, ‘‘self-delusion’’ is the fourth general type of interactional selfestrangement (Goffman, 1959, p. 81). Goffman coins the term to refer to people’s estrangement from self as a consequence of their deep immersion in interaction. The term stands for the confusion of stage actor and audience.

Stranger to You and Stranger to Myself? Theorizing Self-Estrangement

159

In cases of self-delusion, the lines between the social actor as a ‘‘performer’’ and her or his ‘‘audience’’ are blurred. As Goffman notes, whether acting in ‘‘teams’’ or alone people can easily cross these lines and fall prey to their own theatrics, by believing their social scripts wholeheartedly. Self-delusion obliterates the distinction between the scripted behaviors that society expects from a person and that person’s willingness to conform. Unlike the case of interactional self-estrangement discussed before, selfdelusion does not depend on the state of being overtly conscious of the dynamics of interaction and of feeling that one’s performances are forced and lack spontaneity. Yet it implies estrangement due to the absence of objectification of self, others, situations, and encounters. Dementia-Insania Self-Estrangement One can find illustrations of a type of self-estrangement related to mental illness in the sociology of Goffman, albeit the term I employ here to characterize this form of estrangement originates with Peter Ludz (1973). Ludz introduces this term in his discussion of alienation. According to this author, alienation extends to three realms: ‘‘the legal sphere,’’ ‘‘the societal sphere,’’ and ‘‘the medico-psychological sphere’’ (Ludz, 1973, p. 11). He argues that the last two spheres are associated with the concept of alienation in the social scientific literature; he calls the third ‘‘demantia-insania’’ because it refers to ‘‘the sense of derangement of mental faculties or mental illness’’ (Ludz, 1973, p. 11). Total institutions such as psychiatric facilities constitute settings where one can find examples of self-estrangement. In these settings, minds and bodies are disciplined through institutional mechanisms (Foucault, 1995, 1971). People who experience dementia-insania estrangement are institutionally expected to lack the capacity to be full-fledged self-actors and design independently their courses of action. This is a characteristic trait of total institutions, as described in Goffman’s theoretical ethnography of St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Washington DC. That is, ‘‘total institutions disrupt or defile precisely those actions that in civil society have the role of attesting to the actor and those in his presence that he has some command over his world – that he is a person with ‘adult’ self-determination, autonomy, and freedom of action’’ (Goffman, 1961, p. 43). The perspective of mental patients represents the paradoxical position of someone who, having been an insider in the social group, is now totally segregated from it. The barriers and boundaries of society harden in these institutions and its power over individuals can be overwhelming. As Goffman’s (1961) Asylums shows, the margins created by the structures of total institutions marginalize those inside them, but also give them a special

160

NATALIA RUIZ-JUNCO

outlook into the ‘‘natural attitude’’ (Berger & Luckman, 1967; Schutz, 1970). Like Simmel’s stranger, self-estrangement in these institutional settings operates through boundaries that define insiderness and outsiderness. Bodily and Emotional Self-Estrangement Several social theorists consider the body central to the construction of the modern self. Interpretive theorist Paul Ricoeur (1992), for example, remarks that while personal identity is often perceived differently across time, the body is a resilient part of us and thus reflects a strong link to a deeper notion of identity or self. G. H. Mead’s theory also recognizes the essential connection between body and self, but does not provide us with a full elaboration of this topic.7 In critical social theory, authors have explored how power shapes the process of disconnection between people’s sense of self and their bodies, simultaneously considering the aspects of subjection and of resistance to power (see, e.g., Butler, 1999, 2004). In this chapter, I consider the defining characteristic of bodily self-estrangement as the person’s perception of a rebellion taking place within one’s body, a body which feels alien to self. Anthropologists who study the body and experiences of illness refer to this as ‘‘bodily alienation’’ (Csordas, 1994, p. 8) and sociologists use similar terminology in their studies (Frank 1995). Sociologist Arthur Frank (1995), who discusses the relationship between the self and the ill body in his work The Wounded Storyteller provides an apt illustration of this general phenomenon. In his analysis of experiences of illness, Frank (1995, p. 2) claims that ‘‘[t]he body is often alienated, literally ‘made strange,’ as it is told in stories that are instigated by a need to make it familiar.’’ Frank (1995, p. 29) uses the term body-self to signify the general connection between self and body; nevertheless, he makes clear that the term denotes several paths of identification between body, self, and others rather than a single relationship between body and self. Critical theorist Axel Honneth (1996) also examines the connection between self and body. In his model for the study of disrespect, Honneth specifies several dimensions of disrespect that have some obvious implications for the study of self, body, and estrangement. The three categories of disrespect in his model are: body-based (denial of love broadly understood), law-based (denial of rights), and group-based disrespect (denial of social respect) (Honneth, 1996, pp. 132–134). These three forms of disrespect may result in estrangement; but whereas bodily disrespect is framed as a cultural constant – in the sense that the interpretation of its ensuing harm remains stable across time – the other two are not culturally constant since they change with given historical dynamics (Honneth, 1996, p. 133).

Stranger to You and Stranger to Myself? Theorizing Self-Estrangement

161

Honneth’s body-based disrespect depends on the effects of social denial; by contrast, self-estrangement as a bodily experience emerges out of a perceived rebellion from inside one’s body whose biological reality may not be imputed necessarily to self or to other. Honneth (2007, pp. 133–134) states, ‘‘a physical injury becomes a moral injustice if the person affected has no choice but to view it as an action that intentionally disregards an essential aspect of his or her well-being; it is y the accompanying consciousness of not being recognized in one’s own self-understanding that constitutes moral injury.’’ Hence, body-based disrespect involves a moral injury that reflects directly a broken relationship of recognition involving self-understanding. The disrespected body evinces society’s lack of respect for the self-in-the-body. As a consequence, experiences of bodily self-estrangement may ensue. I turn now to emotional self-estrangement. Succinctly, this refers to emotionally experienced estrangement. It is generally assumed that social theorists have construed estrangement as opposite to emotion (Lutz, 1998). For Lutz (1998, p. 57), this is part of a strain of dualisms in western social thought: ‘‘life against death; community and connection against alienation; relationship against individualism; the subjective against the objective; the natural against the cultural; the authentic against the contrived; commitment and value against nihilism or morality against amorality; and the female against the male’’ (Lutz, 1998, p. 57). However, if themes related to emotions can be found in the canonical writings of sociology (Shilling, 2002), themes related to emotions and estrangement can also be found, although they are not easily visible and require careful reading. On analysis, it becomes evident that Simmel’s strangers are the object of strong emotions. Simmel notes the repulsion that strangers provoke in group members. Thus, the emotion of the community – the bred repulsion – is crucial in shaping the very identity of the strangers and their context of interpreting their own realities of marginalization. In short, estrangement and emotion are linked at the core of interpretive theory. In the last section I explore this idea of estrangement in the case of civil society. This discussion gives me the opportunity to illustrate the theoretical benefits of using a concept of self-estrangement to understand political exclusion.

SELF-ESTRANGEMENT AND CIVIL SOCIETY The study of exclusionary dynamics in civil society has been traditionally connected to estrangement at a macro-level; consequently, less attention has been given to how people’s self-estrangement accompanies these processes

162

NATALIA RUIZ-JUNCO

of exclusion. In this last section I draw on several theoretical perspectives to think about estrangement from civil society. First it is necessary to clarify what it is generally understood by civil society today. There is no such thing as a single meaning for civil society (Alexander, 2006), but two historical understandings of civil society seem important to analysts. In his investigation of the development of the concept in western intellectual history, John Ehrenberg (1999, p. 3) distinguishes the ‘‘classical’’ idea of civil society ‘‘as a politically organized commonwealth.’’ The classical view is associated with Aristotle who put forth the citizen as ‘‘a moral category’’ (Ehrenberg, 1999, p. 16). By contrast, Thomas Hobbes departs from the classical idea and introduces the notion of the Leviathan or state born out of the initiative of rationally motivated individuals, who are willing to give up their power – because they know their self-centered impulses will lead them to destroy each other if they do not do so (Ehrenberg, 1999, pp. 70–80). Hobbes’s theory signals the moment in which civil society comes to be understood as a function of ‘‘individual interest’’ (Ehrenberg, 1999, p. 79). Today’s civil society concept remains embedded in this latter tradition. While the former concept is common today, I employ an idea of civil society that is not restricted to the community of interests. I define civil estrangement as the effects of preventing people from taking part in the affairs of a political community; specifically it refers to the phenomena that stem from this exclusion as people experience them. In addition, estrangement from civil society also points to people’s ablation from the ‘‘positive’’ symbolic construction of the community (Alexander, 2006). Finally, this type of estrangement necessarily involves a politics of belonging.8 Estrangement from civil society takes multiple forms. It ranges from transitory to absolute in scope and consequences. The work of Sara Ahmed (2000, p. 13) is illustrative of how the concept of estrangement plays into the analysis of exclusion in civil society, since her perspective focuses on how ‘‘globalisation, migration and multiculturalism as particular modes of proximity, produce the figure of ‘the stranger’ in different ways y.’’ To take an example of severe consequences, foreign-born people in countries where they are not regarded as ‘‘one of us’’ are singled out and made to feel strange through institutions, regulations, cultural norms, and codes that shape and define who is a deserving national (Ahmed, 2000). Everyday civil estrangement refers to group-initiated processes of exclusion of persons and groups rather than to ostracism freely chosen. With either partial or total severance from the group possibly resulting from it, the symbolic and material implications of everyday civil estrangement

Stranger to You and Stranger to Myself? Theorizing Self-Estrangement

163

cannot be dismissed. As it occurs with demantia-insania, the label ‘‘unfit for this society’’ is cast upon one or more social groups. This type of civil estrangement relates to the process of marking.9 Through marking the divide of ‘‘us’’ versus ‘‘them’’ fixates on the social space and through group exclusion it reproduces the implicit notion of an ‘‘outside’’ to society. Inasmuch as it fixes this divide in the social fabric, marking can be discussed alongside stigmatization (Goffman, [1963] 1986). Police profiling constitutes evidence of the marking process in civil estrangement, as officers associate certain physical and culturally constructed traits of people with ‘‘criminality’’ and law-breaking behavior and thus simultaneously mark and place certain people ‘‘outside’’ of society. However, it is important to note that civil estrangement does not always eliminate solidarity. Regarding the case of migrant people, Ahmed (2000, p. 94) argues the following: ‘‘[t]he process of estrangement is a condition for the emergence of a contested community, a community which ‘makes a place’ in the act of reaching out to the ‘out-of-place-ness’ of other migrant bodies.’’ Finally, any consideration of civil estrangement from the point of view of the self makes us return to Honneth’s (1996) critical theory. Honneth’s lawbased and group-based disrespect can happen simultaneously, as groups of people can be expelled from the political community while at the same time being denied law-based equal access to that community. It is clear from Honneth’s theory that estrangement from civil society is also a form of estranging the self: people estranged from civil society are excluded from the means of self-definition in terms of a political and symbolic community that excludes them.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I interrogate two traditions of social theory – interpretive and critical – and the concepts of estrangement, alienation, and the stranger. These two traditions have sometimes been viewed as irreconcilable; notwithstanding it has been my contention throughout this chapter that it is possible to reconstruct the concept of estrangement using classical and contemporary social theory from these two traditions. In fact I argue that we can learn much from this exercise. I focus on a neglected dimension of the concept: self-estrangement. Undoubtedly, self-estrangement is less developed in the alienation research

164

NATALIA RUIZ-JUNCO

of critical social theory than in interpretive studies. To counter this unbalance, I show several avenues to theorize self-estrangement in interpretive and critical social theory; more importantly, I show their usefulness in theorizing seemingly distant areas of sociology such as citizenship, emotions, and the body. In addition, I center the debate on people’s practices of self-estrangement. How do people estrange themselves in social interactions and within institutions and larger political entities? This is a question that deserves much more sustained attention from theorists than what I can offer in these pages. What I provide here is only a starting point of a necessarily more extensive discussion. My main aim has been to recapture the appeal (and promise) of the notion of self-estrangement across theoretical traditions. I turn to a final issue that has remained unspoken. Wouldn’t this analysis be better off explaining estrangement without the reference to the self? I think not. The reason is that the focus on the self raises the fruitful question of the who – who is ultimately experiencing estrangement. This entails taking into analytical view the reflexivity of self-experiences. Self-reflexivity or the capacity of a person to objectify oneself and to act with the knowledge of this awareness also implies awareness of one’s estrangement. It seems to me that without the premise of an agent who is reflexive, who can change her or his conduct based on rational and/or nonrational considerations, and who has the capacity to decide a course of action for himself or herself, it is very difficult to conceptualize estrangement. This is not to suggest that estrangement or alienation should be conceived as individual-level phenomena. It is, however, an argument for the incorporation of the self into the discussion of estrangement and alienation. In the same way that the self cannot be conceived apart from society, estrangement cannot be conceived apart from the reflexivity of the (social) person. Therefore, it is very important to attend to the self in our discussion of estrangement and alienation. The self is a crucial theoretical element for interpretive theory, but also for critical theory. As some critical theorists note (Allen, 2008), experiences of liberation begin with self reflexivity and a critical imagination. As interpretive theorists would have it, people develop this critical imagination in similar manner that they develop a self. First they objectify themselves and others; later, it is through the enactment of reflexivity in relation with self and others that they access the opportunity to understand themselves and others in a critical light.

Stranger to You and Stranger to Myself? Theorizing Self-Estrangement

165

From critical accounts such as Allen’s (2008) the lesson about the self, agency, and social change may be summarized in three points: without self there is no critical imagination; without critical imagination there is no social critique; without social critique there is no enduring social transformation. Reflecting on self-estrangement is thus a pressing task for both critical and interpretive theorists and a way of nurturing a critical imagination and the self-reflexivity necessary to understand and transform the social world.

NOTES 1. This is true despite the usual claims that routinely pronounce the concept dead (Seeman, 1975, p. 91). 2. I should add that Simmel touches on the total exclusion of the stranger from the community, although he does so briefly. Simmel ([1908] 1971, p. 148) coins the term ‘‘non-relation’’ arguing that the ‘‘very connection on the basis of a general quality embracing the parties is precluded’’ among non-relations. Simmel ([1908] 1971, p. 148) points out that ‘‘all the cases in which the general characteristics one takes as peculiarly and merely human are disallowed to the other’’ are examples of non-relations. For a critique, see Alexander (2004). 3. It is precisely this objectification in social space that makes Alexander (2004) criticize Simmel’s notion for not being interpretive enough. Alexander states that the stranger idea should not have referred to ‘‘an objective position in physical or social space but [to] an interpretive position vis-a`-vis the ‘social ideal’ that is the critical factor in creating the stranger in society’’ (Alexander, 2004, p. 89). 4. Undoubtedly, its permanence as a classic idea in sociology owes something to what Levine (1985, pp. 73–88) calls ‘‘inventive misinterpretation.’’ In his explanation of Simmel’s stranger, Levine points out that the concept has been systematically misidentified with the ‘‘marginal man’’ and with ethnically defined groups (Levine, 1985, pp. 74–75). Levine believes that inventive misinterpretation advances social science. 5. Mead did not create a single model from which to consider the self. For a discussion of this issue see the following: Athens, 1995; Joas, 1998; Vryan, Adler, & Adler, 2003; Ruiz Junco, 2008. 6. For a recent statement of Goffman’s sociology, see Scheff (2006). 7. In explaining Mead’s position, Hans Joas (1996, p. 183) states: ‘‘We first become able to treat our bodies as a unity via the social path of self-identification. The separation of mind and body, which appears self-evident, is in fact the result of a process in which inanimate objects are gradually recognized as such.’’ 8. As Sarah Ahmed (2000, p. 99) notes, ‘‘the formation of a dwelling or place of residence involves a definition of who or what does not belong (estrangement).’’ 9. The idea of marking is intrinsically connected to estrangement in the critical theory literature. For example, Ahmed (2000, p. 93) argues: ‘‘estrangement marks out particular bodies and communities y’’

166

NATALIA RUIZ-JUNCO

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Harry Dahms and three anonymous reviewers for their feedback on a previous version of this chapter. Some of the ideas expressed in this chapter were initially developed in my dissertation.

REFERENCES Ahmed, S. (2000). Strange encounters: Embodied others in post-coloniality. New York, NY: Routledge. Alexander, J. C. (2004). Rethinking strangeness. Thesis Eleven, 79, 87–104. Alexander, J. C. (2006). The civil sphere. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Allen, A. (2008). The politics of our selves: Power, autonomy, and gender in contemporary critical theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Athens, L. (1995). Mead’s visions of the self: A pair of ‘flawed diamonds’. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 18, 245–261. Baehr, P. (2002). Founders, classics, canons: Modern disputes over the origins and appraisal of sociology’s heritage. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Benjamin, W. ([1955] 1978). Reflections. New York, NY: Schocken Books. Berger, P. L., & Luckman, T. (1967). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. New York, NY: Anchor. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York: Routledge. Churchich, N. (1990). Marxism and alienation. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Collins, P. H. (1986). Learning from the outsider within: The sociological significance of black feminist thought. Social Problems, 33, 14–32. Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought. New York, NY; London: Routledge. Csordas, T. J. (1994). Introduction: The body as representations and being-in-the-world. In: T. J. Csordas (Ed.), Embodiment and experience: The existential ground of culture and self (pp. 1–24). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Cooley, C. H. ([1902] 1998). On self and social organization. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Dahms, H. (2006). Does alienation have a future? Recapturing the core of critical theory. In: The evolution of alienation: Trauma, promise, and the millennium (pp. 23–46). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Daston, L., & Galison, P. (2007). Objectivity. New York, NY: Zone Books. Ehrenberg, J. (1999). Civil society: The critical history of an idea. New York, NY: New York University Press. Fine, A. (1993). The sad demise, mysterious disappearance, and glorious triumph of symbolic interactionism. Annual Review of Sociology, 19, 61–87. Foucault, M. (1971). Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason. New York: New American Library.

Stranger to You and Stranger to Myself? Theorizing Self-Estrangement

167

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Vintage. Frank, A. W. (1995). The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and ethics. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Fromm, E. ([1961] 2004). Marx’s concept of man. London, UK: Continuum. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York, NY: Doubleday. Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual: Essays on face-to-face behavior. Garden City, NY: Anchor. Goffman, E. ([1963] 1986). Stigma. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Harvey, D. (2010). A companion to Marx’s capital. London and New York: Verso. Honneth, A. (1996). The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Honneth, A. (2007). Disrespect: The normative foundations of critical theory. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Joas, H. (1996). The creativity of action. Cambridge, UK: The University of Chicago Press. Joas, H. (1998). The autonomy of the self: The meadian heritage and its postmodern challenge. European Journal of Social Theory, 1, 7–18. Langman, L., & Kalekin-Fishman, D. (2006). Introduction. In: The evolution of alienation: Trauma, promise, and the millennium (pp. 1–20). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Levine, D. (1985). The flight from ambiguity: Essays in social and cultural theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ludz, P. (1973). Definitions and distinctions. Current Sociology, 21, 11–13. Lukes, S. (1977). Essays in social theory. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lutz, C. A. (1998). Unnatural emotions: Everyday sentiments on a micronesian atoll & their challenge to western theory. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. MacIntyre, A. (1984). After virtue: A study in moral theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Mannheim, K. ([1956] 1992). Essays on the sociology of culture: Collected works. London: Routledge. Marx, K. ([1844] 2000). Economic and philosophical manuscripts. In: D. McLellan (Ed.), Karl Marx: Selected writings (2nd Ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Marx, K., & Engels, F. ([1848] 2000). The communist manifesto. In: D. McLellan (Ed.), Karl Marx: Selected writings (2nd Ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Mead, G. H. ([1934] 1992). Mind, self, and society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Me´sza´ros, I. ([1970] 2005). Marx’s theory of alienation. London: Merlin Press. Ollman, B. (1971). Alienation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Postone, M. (1993). Time, labor, and social domination: A reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1992). Oneself as another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ross, E. A. (1917). Estrangement in society. American Journal of Sociology, 23, 350–358. Ruiz Junco, N. (2008). The passages of theory: A critical interpretation of the Ortega-Mead connection. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 31, 81–100. Scheff, T. (2006). Goffman unbound! A new paradigm for social science. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Schutz, A. (1970). On phenomenology and social relations: Selected writings. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Shilling, C. (2002). The two traditions in the sociology of emotions. In: J. Barbalet (Ed.), Emotions and sociology (pp. 10–32). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing.

168

NATALIA RUIZ-JUNCO

Seeman, M. (1975). Alienation studies. Annual Review of Sociology, 1, 91–123. Simmel, G. (1971). On individuality and social forms. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vryan, K. D., Adler, P. A., & Adler, P. (2003). Identity. In: L. T. Reynolds & N. J. HermanKinney (Eds.), Handbook of symbolic interactionism (pp. 367–390). Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Wegner, E. L. (1975). The concept of alienation: A critique and some suggestions for a context specific approach. The Pacific Sociological Review, 18, 171–193.

FOR PRAGMATIC PUBLIC SOCIOLOGY: THEORY AND PRACTICE AFTER THE PRAGMATIC TURN Eric Royal Lybeck ABSTRACT A reinvigorated social theory based on the social philosophy of John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, William James, and others has begun to make significant contributions to the study of human societies. The so-called ‘‘Pragmatic Turn’’ in philosophy and social theory, associated especially with Richard Rorty and Hans Joas, has drawn our attention to the role of habit and creativity in social action. This chapter reviews some of these trends, but argues that the modern revival of neopragmatism sidesteps many of the core insights of the classical pragmatists. Relating the issue to Michael Burawoy’s call for ‘‘public sociology,’’ and drawing on the pragmatism of C. Wright Mills, a critical public pragmatism would seek to provide the preconditions for democracy via the cultivation of a public that valued what Dewey called ‘‘creative intelligence,’’ and what Mills called ‘‘the sociological imagination.’’ Keywords: Pragmatism; public sociology; sociological imagination; praxis; John Dewey The Diversity of Social Theories Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 29, 169–185 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-1204(2011)0000029013

169

170

ERIC ROYAL LYBECK

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. –Karl Marx

PRAGMATISM AND PUBLIC SOCIOLOGY Michael Burawoy in his 2004 presidential address to the American Sociological Association called upon his colleagues to engage in public sociology with multiple publics in multiple ways by becoming ‘‘partisans’’ for civil society (Burawoy, 2004). Burawoy’s call to action has since been critiqued and defended in several venues (Brady, 2004; Clawson, 2007; Deflem, 2005; Nielsen, 2004; Tittle, 2004). Burawoy breaks down his idea of public sociology as representing one of four types of sociology, none of which are independent from the others – that is, each are necessary, and are represented in varying degrees within the work of most sociological practice. These four types are (1) professional, (2) policy, (3) critical, and (4) public. As in Table 1, ideal types 1 and 2 are considered ‘‘instrumental’’ and directed toward rational ends in the Habermasian/Weberian sense (Habermas, 1971; Weber, Gerth, & Mills, 2009), whereas 3 and 4 are considered ‘‘reflexive’’ because they involve dialogue about ends. On another axis, 1 and 3 are considered ‘‘academic’’ and internally oriented, whereas 2 and 4 are considered ‘‘extra-academic’’ and externally oriented (Burawoy, 2004, p. 11). These categories are not mutually exclusive, and therefore to suggest the promotion of applied sociology should seem relatively uncontroversial, provided one continues to produce ‘‘good’’ science or knowledge, however defined (Calhoun, 2005). One major recurring controversy within the internally related debate surrounding public sociology, however, is the question of how much Table 1.

Instrumental knowledge Reflexive knowledge Source: Burawoy (2004, p. 11).

Division of Sociological Labor. Academic Audience

Extra-Academic Audience

Professional Critical

Policy Public

For Pragmatic Public Sociology: Theory and Practice after the Pragmatic Turn 171

politics, especially progressive politics, should be a part of such a project (Nickel, 2009; Sprague & Laube, 2009). But what I will argue here is not that politics should be removed from social science, or that reflexive sociology should not be promoted to and for multiple publics. Rather, I will suggest the social theory of pragmatism in its classical and neopragmatist forms as a framework from which all four of Burawoy’s divisions of sociological labor (professional, policy, critical, and public) can be produced. In order to substantiate this claim, I shall first review the present state of neopragmatism, especially the social theoretical work of Hans Joas and Neil Gross, as well as the philosophy of Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and others. I will also note key insights found in the classical pragmatist writings of John Dewey, William James, C. S. Peirce, Jane Addams, and others, which point to public sociology as a necessary imperative of social thought – a point that deserves reemphasis in contemporary social theoretical reformulations of ‘‘creative action.’’ As the paladin of public sociology, C. Wright Mills, argued in his doctoral dissertation 70 years ago, pragmatism was, at its core, a social philosophy oriented toward the public and its problems.

HABIT, CREATIVITY, AND ACTION: THE GENERAL THEORY OF NEOPRAGMATIC SOCIOLOGY The philosophy of pragmatism has had a long history of influence upon the discipline of sociology, although the popularity of the indigenous American mode of thinking has waxed and waned over the years (Gross, 2007). Several scholars have noted the absence of American sociological thought, such as that of the pragmatist-influenced Chicago school, in Talcott Parsons’ canon defining text, The Structure of Social Action, which emphasized European theorists, especially Max Weber and Emile Durkheim (Camic, 1992; Joas, 1993; Joas, Kno¨bl, & Skinner, 2009; Parsons, 1937). Still, theoretical traditions including the symbolic interactionism of Herbert Blumer and the communicative action paradigm of Ju¨rgen Habermas have kept the perspective of the pragmatists alive in sociology, especially the social psychology of George Herbert Mead (Blumer, 1969; Habermas, 1987). In the realm of philosophy, a major challenge to analytic philosophy and logical positivism was taken up after the mid-1960s by neopragmatists Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and others (Menand, 1997; Putnam 1981). The most well-known of these philosophers, Richard

172

ERIC ROYAL LYBECK

Rorty, was associated with the emergence of ‘‘postmodernism’’ and ‘‘relativism’’ due to his staunch rejection of metaphysics and Kantian idealism more generally (Gross, 2008; Rorty, 1983, 1999). However, Rorty’s philosophy, which emphasized the pragmatism of John Dewey, also incorporated the ‘‘Nietzschian’’ insights of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, inhibiting incorporation of his philosophy directly into sociology due to his relativism in relation to scientific knowledge. The recovery of pragmatist insights into formal social theory has come most prominently from German sociologist Hans Joas, whose book The Creativity of Action drew upon George Herbert Mead and other theorists (e.g., Johann Herder, Henri Bergson, etc.) who recognized the inherent open-endedness of creativity within social action (Joas, 1996). Joas’ project has been to replace both the rational-choice utilitarian and the normativefunctionalist general models of action with one that recognizes that both habit and creativity are involved in all action. Drawing on Dewey, Joas noted that the pragmatist notions of experimentation and adaptation involve a dialectical relationship between habits/routine/tradition and innovation (ibid., p. 133). Actors do not prefigure ends rationally, as the utilitarians suggest, nor do they remain fully constrained by normative structures as in Parsonian functionalism. Like the classical pragmatists and neopragmatists in philosophy, Joas’ project was intended to upend the entire sociological model of human action, which is based on a flawed conception of how humans think and act. The powerful advice of Dewey, James, and Mead’s psychological models suggests that the problem for social theory is not necessarily what individuals think, but rather a problem in the way philosophers and theorists think they think. Sociologists have become increasingly drawn to Joas’ neopragmatist social theory, finding in it potential solutions to the age-old theoretical problems of structure vs. agency, cultural tradition vs. social change, and reflexive vs. teleological action. One of the most robust incorporations of this perspective is Neil Gross’s synthesis of various macrotheories of causal mechanisms via the habit/creativity dialectic (Gross, 2009). Finding theories of causation within traditions ranging from Charles Tilly to Critical Realism inadequate, Gross draws upon a theory of practices and habit influenced by Joas and Pierre Bourdieu to state: Social mechanisms can be understood y as chains or aggregations of actors, problem situations, and habitual responses – always with the possibility, greater in some circumstances than others, that a novel way of responding to a problem could emerge

For Pragmatic Public Sociology: Theory and Practice after the Pragmatic Turn 173 for any of the actors involved, potentially altering the workings of the mechanism (ibid., p. 369).

Others, including Gary Herrigel, have applied the creative action framework to empirical and historical studies including an analysis of the industrial recomposition of steel manufacturing in the United States, Germany, and Japan (Herrigel, 2010). Critiquing neoliberal economic and modern institutionalist interpretations of twentieth century manufacturing, Herrigel reminds us that Action is social, reflective, and creative. Institutions (rules, norms) are markers or expressions of the (always provisional) arrangements that actors have created. Institutions do not constrain or enable actors; actors constrain and enable themselves (Herrigel, 2010, p. 7).

From this perspective, Herrigel can trace the recombinatorial processes that emerged over the course of the twentieth century as they occurred nonteleologically. Manufacturing innovations, as well as the dynamic democratic political contexts in Germany and Japan, emerged from the working through of practical problems. These dynamic processes developed not at the causal level of institutional systems or rationally calculating actors, but at the interaction level through creative, experimental practices. Perhaps, a surer sign of the emerging influence of the ‘‘pragmatic turn’’ in social theory is the emergence of substantive critiques against it. For example, Nicos Mouzelis argues that Joas’ project has been largely philosophical and does not provide the specific ‘‘theoretical consequences the introduction of concepts borrowed from ‘constitution theories’ will have on such fundamental Parsonian concepts as the AGIL scheme, pattern variables and the notion of evolutionary universals’’ (Mouzelis, 2008, p. 93). Similarly, Margaret Archer suggests that Joas leaves creativity ‘‘tantalizingly undefined,’’ though he seems to indicate it does not necessarily involve premeditation, thus leaving open-ended the role of reflexivity in relation to habitus (Archer, 2010, p. 273). My own work, drawing on that of Harry Dahms, has criticized Joas’ model of creative action for being too general to provide insight into concrete mechanisms of power and the distributions of creativity within populations – a neglect that could be redressed through incorporation of Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of entrepreneurialism and creative destruction (Dahms, 1995; Lybeck, 2010; Schumpeter, 2008; Schumpeter & Opie, 1934).

174

ERIC ROYAL LYBECK

POSITIVISM, NONPOSITIVISM, AND THE PRAGMATIC TURN The brief outline of the major trends in creative action theory above indicates that the potential of neopragmatism from a social theoretical point of view has begun to be realized. In fact, one could argue that the pragmatist development represents a fifth addition to George Steinmetz’ chronology of nonpositivist sociological paradigms during the post-Fordist era (Steinmetz, 2005, pp. 275–323). Theories of creative action allow for analyses of structure-like features generated by habit and routine, while also accounting for the openness of nonteleological action. This openness potentially invalidates many of the principles of empiricist positivism, which tend toward generalizable, law-like claims based on readily observable, measurable data (Bryant, 1985). Positivism, which Raymond Williams called, ‘‘a swear word, by which nobody is swearing (quoted in Steinmetz, 2005, p. 29), is a particular philosophical model of science which became dominant in postwar American social science due to a combination of its affinities with the instrumental requirements of the military-industrial complex and an immanent desire within the social sciences to develop more rigorous methods, particularly those of the quantitative sort. Steinmetz, however, argues that since the period of positivist hegemony during the 1950s and 1960s, several nonpositivist alternatives have been promoted with increasing regularity as the stable Fordist regulatory system has evolved into a post-Fordist political-economic system of flexible production and lax government control of business. The most radical forms of these critical attacks on positivism were the neo-marxist/feminist turn, neo-weberian historical sociology, the cultural turn, and the epistemic turn. He writes, Neo-Marxism and feminism attacked empiricist ontology, historical sociology provided tools for dismantling the positivist emphasis on invariant and time-independent laws, and the cultural turn reasserted the importance of concept dependence (Steinmetz, 2005, p. 311).

However, Steinmetz suggests that, just as Craig Calhoun had challenged historical sociology for having been ‘‘domesticated’’ – that is, integrated into the positivist mainstream – the same might be said of the other ‘‘turns.’’1 And yet, what is interesting about Steinmetz’ analysis of the nonpositivist challenges to positivism is that they appear to have been politically motivated, either intentionally or contextually. Both Steinmetz and Burawoy point to the same phenomenon within the credentialization process of academic sociology – namely that many

For Pragmatic Public Sociology: Theory and Practice after the Pragmatic Turn 175

students tend to be drawn to the social sciences based on idealistic expectations that their insights and research might change the unequal social structures we are so good at observing, only to find professionalization procedures including difficult quantitative methods courses and high-stakes threats of job insecurity when they begin sociological practice. Burawoy, for example, opines How often have I heard faculty advise their students to leave public sociology until after tenure – not realizing (or realizing all too well?) that public sociology is what keeps sociological passion alive. If they follow their advisor’s advice, they may end up a contingent worker in which case there will be even less time for public sociology, or they may be lucky enough to find a tenure track job, in which case they have to worry about publishing articles in accredited journals or publishing books with recognized university presses. Once they have tenure, they are free to indulge their youthful passions, but by then they are no longer youthful. They may have lost all interest in public sociology, preferring the more lucrative policy world of consultants or a niche in professional sociology (Burawoy, 2004, p. 15).

This is also a theme within Ben Agger’s critical theoretical analysis of ‘‘public sociology,’’ which predated Burawoy’s alternative definition of the term (Agger, 2007; Nickel, 2009). Agger described a number of vicious circles in which the rhetorical model of positivist quantitative journal articles exclude the production of sociological insights that are relevant or accessible to the public. Like Agger, I would suggest that any sort of selfreferential theorizing and empiricism that does not engage with the public on a regular basis has a greater potential to be incomplete, or worse, irrelevant. This is the danger I wish to highlight in reference to the emerging social theoretical tradition of neopragmatism, which I have indicated demonstrates great promise in terms of transcending many of the major concerns within general social theory, while also having useful empirical applications. An indication of this risk can be found in Joas’ more abstract philosophical analyses that bear little resemblance to the common sense language of Dewey or James, or when Neil Gross explicitly distances himself from Burawoy for having ‘‘moralistic and political understandings,’’ which are not as interesting to ‘‘many researchers with more strictly explanatory aims’’ (Gross, 2009, p. 358). This is problematic not only because such a stance runs the risk of domesticating pragmatism into a dry, reified theory of social action, practices, habits, creativity, and experimental action but, more importantly, because such a domestication would be a regression away from some of the greatest insights of classical pragmatism as a social philosophy. Classical pragmatism was certainly an ‘‘action philosophy,’’ but not just in the sense in which human ‘‘actors’’ act creatively, which we can observe and

176

ERIC ROYAL LYBECK

understand. It is also a philosophy of action in that philosophers and intellectuals have a moral imperative to help people maximize their creativity via social reform, democratic discussion, and education. This does not mean that theorizing is not important, for as James said, We live in a world of realities that can be infinitely useful or infinitely harmful. Ideas that tell us which of them to expect count as the true ideas in all this primary sphere of verification, and the pursuit of such ideas is a primary human duty (James, 1997, p. 115).

But leaving this truth as an end in itself would be contributing to what John Dewey called ‘‘the spectator theory of knowledge’’ or the ‘‘quest for certainty’’ (Bernstein, 2010). In other words, like Marxism, pragmatism should be understood as both a theory and a practice (Bernstein, 1971). This insight was not tangential to the project of the original pragmatists, especially John Dewey, but also Jane Addams, William James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. For example, George Herbert Mead, typically considered one of the more analytical pragmatists, wrote, Institutions are, after all, the habits of individuals in their interrelation with each other, the type of habit that is handed down from one generation to another. And we can study the growth of these habits as we can study the growth and behavior of an animal (Mead, 1964, p. 25).

However, he then, immediately continued, That is where science comes in to aid society in getting a method of progress. It understands the background of these problems, the processes out of which they have developed; and it has a method of attacking them. It states the problem in terms of checked processes; and then it has a test of the suggested solution by seeing whether those processes can continue or not (ibid., p. 25).

John Dewey, of course, framed these endeavors in terms of democracy and education, and though this insight is well outlined in Joas and Gross’ historical accounts of pragmatism in American sociology, especially in reference to the Chicago School (Gross, 2007; Joas, 1993, pp. 14–54; 1996, pp. 196–258; see also Venkatesh, 2001), there are few calls for public sociological practice of this sort – that is, one explicitly based on the principles and methods of pragmatism.2 Indeed, the best resource we have in this regard is nearly absent from the reconstructed canon of classical American pragmatism, namely the work of C. Wright Mills, whose sociological career began with a detailed theoretical analysis of Peirce, James, and Dewey (Lacey, 2008; Mills, 1964). Mills’ analysis of John Dewey provides not just a valuable resource in assessing pragmatism’s relationship to the ‘‘public,’’ but, when considered as a whole,

For Pragmatic Public Sociology: Theory and Practice after the Pragmatic Turn 177

Mills’ oeuvre, which was simultaneously oriented critically, professionally, politically, and publicly, demonstrated one way in which all four strands of Burawoy’s division of sociological labor can be synthesized through the pluralistic lens of pragmatism.

JOHN DEWEY, THE PUBLIC, AND THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION In The Public and Its Problems, Democracy and Education, Liberalism and Social Action, and other texts, Dewey outlined a philosophical and institutional vision of democracy as a ‘‘free society of free individuals,’’ which James Block described as a modern synthesis that was reflective of the United States as a ‘‘Nation of Agents’’ (Block, 2002). Block writes, Providing a virtually theological cast to the liberal processes of self-formation and institutional construction, [Dewey] gave modern form to the traditions constituting the American experience. In a ‘‘liberalized’’ language, the nation was reconstituted as a just and inclusive society of agents and the American citizen as an active agent of the collective enterprise (ibid., p. 513).

One key to this vision of democracy was a notion of moral action. Unlike authoritative or traditional visions of morality, Dewey saw morality as an open, dynamic project, which scientific discovery was a part of. He wrote, Physics, chemistry, history, statistics, engineering, science, are a part of disciplined moral knowledge so far as they enable us to understand the conditions and agencies through which man lives, and on account of which he forms and executes his plans. Moral science is not something with a separate province. It is physical, biological and historic knowledge placed in a human context where it will illuminate and guide the activities of men (Dewey, 1922, p. 296).

In Democracy and Education, Dewey titled a chapter, ‘‘Criteria for a Good Society’’ in which he asserted the undesirability of a society that sets up barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience. Dewey suggested that, in order to be democratic, a society must secure ‘‘flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life’’ (Dewey, 1916, p. 115). It was from this basis that classical progressives, such as Woodrow Wilson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, assumed their doctrine that the federal constitution is a living document, leading to the eventual creation of new institutions such as the federal income tax, public schools, social security, and so on. This is also why constitutional fundamentalists like Glenn Beck have located Woodrow

178

ERIC ROYAL LYBECK

Wilson as the arch-villain of American history, while considering progressivism a ‘‘cancer.’’ Although it is not always clear what the direct connection between old and new progressivism is, the idea that the constitution is a living document is still one basis of modern progressive legal theory, as in the work of Larry Sabato (2007). But, again, it should be highlighted that this perspective was based on a political ethic of ‘‘morality,’’ not only ‘‘justice.’’ Indeed, contemporary cognitive scientists like George Lakoff have returned to the realization that morals are what political action is based on, and that presentation of ‘‘valueneutral’’ policy recommendations falls on deaf ears when a substantial segment of the population does not subscribe to the ‘‘value’’ of valueneutrality (Lakoff, 2002). What, then, is the basis of pragmatist morality? Dewey, who was raised an evangelical Christian, sought to secularize the individual/collective vision of Protestantism, not unlike his philosophical progenitor, Georg Hegel, by positing the only definitive moral end as ‘‘growth’’ itself. For Dewey, growth was the result of a carefully selfcontrolled and ‘‘socially controlled’’ balance between authority and innovation, or, in Joasian language, habit and creativity. It was this feature of Dewey’s social philosophy that C. Wright Mills rediscovered in his dissertation, Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America (Mills, 1964, pp. 447–460). As in James’ psychology, habits become formed ‘‘creatively’’ out of previous habits, eventually forming the basis of new habits – all in a dialectical fashion. Dewey termed this the ‘‘arc-reflex’’ model of consciousness (Dewey, 1896). However, Mills identified a third component in Dewey’s psychology in addition to habit and creativity (which Mills termed ‘‘impulse’’) – namely intellect. Habit and creativity are poles on a spectrum of dialectical potentials. The degree to which individuals and society have control over these ‘‘instincts’’ is through awareness of the dialectic itself. From this definition of intelligence as a type of ‘‘governor,’’ in the electrical engineering sense, springs Dewey’s interest in education. He wrote: The object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growthyeducation is thus a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating process. All of these words mean that it implies attention to the conditions of growth y it has all the time an immediate end, and so far as activity is educative, it reaches that end – the direct transformation of the quality of experience y Growth is regarded as having an end, instead of being an end y Since in reality there is nothing to which growth is relative save more growth, there is nothing to which education is subordinate save more education (quoted in Mills, 1964, p. 457).

In this sense, education, which provides both the authoritative structure of historical wisdom and the capacity to critically evaluate the world and

For Pragmatic Public Sociology: Theory and Practice after the Pragmatic Turn 179

one’s surroundings, is the moral imperative of pragmatism (see also Rorty, 1999, pp. 114–126). With the addition of the third component of the pragmatic dialectic – intellect – one realizes that inasmuch as habit and creativity are continuously reproduced, so must intelligence be made and remade. In this sense – just as the neopragmatists would argue that actors are already involved in creative action, even if they are not fully aware of this – educators, from primary to secondary schools to higher education institutions to actors in the public sphere, including many ‘‘professional’’ sociologists, are already engaged in the pragmatic project, even if they are not fully aware of this as a moral act. And yet, the educative process, when considered in the light of the Deweyian conception of growth, becomes problematic when teleological ends contribute to barriers to the free exchange of ideas, as in the effects of the notion that education can be measured and codified according to standardized criteria; or that one becomes officially ‘‘educated’’ when they receive a certain degree; or when activists claim that climate science, unlike every other science, has been ‘‘settled.’’ As such, a functioning educational system, one that is attentive to the creation of intelligent democratic citizens, must allow for the generation of critical thought, as Martha Nussbaum recently pointed out, also drawing on Dewey’s education theory (Nussbaum, 2010). If there is any need for empirical proof of this necessity and the impact of nonreflexive education on society, one need look no further than the recent global economic collapse of 2007–2008 in relation to the radical neoclassical cult that dominates the discipline of economics in the twenty-first century to the exclusion of a plurality of alternative approaches, many of which saw the systemic weaknesses of the market far in advance (Galbraith, 2010; Harvey, 2010; Soros, 2008). The financial crisis is an especially important example in terms of justifying the need for pragmatic public sociology. The educational system is a key institutional component of modern society, and if it is allowed to become internally rigid and closed off, while remaining subject to the outside influences of political and economic ‘‘steering media’’ as Habermas suggested (Habermas, 1981, 1987), the result is a dual loss of both science and a self-governing democratic society. In order to keep the educational system sufficiently ‘‘free’’ to provide necessary individual and collective growth, the public needs to defend it. However, if the university is not sufficiently ‘‘useful’’ and if it does not provide a ‘‘cash value’’ in the Jamesian sense, then the public may become inclined to consider it a drain of resources. But, as Mills noticed in his analysis of Dewey, if we are to

180

ERIC ROYAL LYBECK

convince the public that the universities, or public schools, or an unbiased media, are worth preserving, we must not only conceive of the idea, we must also create the public. Indeed, critics of Burawoy, who speak of professional sociology as already being a ‘‘public’’ enterprise insofar as sociology is oriented to a ‘‘community of scholars’’ (Brady, 2004; Deflem, 2005; Nielsen, 2004; Tittle, 2004), assume that their intelligent insights translate into even a modicum of communicative effects within the noise of the modern mass media. As Mills pointed out in White Collar, perhaps a bit harshly, In our political literature, we do not have many attempts to explain the facts of political indifference, perhaps because neither liberalism nor Marxism raises the question to a central position. Yet, we are now in a situation in which many who are disengaged from prevailing allegiances have not acquired new ones, and so are distracted from and inattentive to political concerns of any kind. They are strangers to politics. They are not radical, not liberal, not conservative, not reactionary; they are inactionary; they are out of it. If we accept the Greek’s definition of the idiot as a privatized man, then we must conclude that the U.S. citizenry is now largely composed of idiots (Mills, 2002, p. 328).

Because of this apathy, alienation, and anomie inherent in the modern condition, coupled with what he considered the death of the discipline of sociology due the navel-gazing practices of ‘‘grand theorizing’’ and ‘‘abstract empiricism,’’ Mills wrote the Sociological Imagination for popular, that is ‘‘public’’ audiences (Mills, 2000). Although nearly all teaching sociologists are well aware of the first few pages of Mills’ text, and its effectiveness in communicating the core insights of sociology to a gathering of undergraduate neophytes, few recall that this text was designed to deliver these insights to all of the public, as Steven Dandaneau has pointed out (Dandaneau, 2001). Mills considered the sociological imagination to be something that all individuals should maintain, and like Dewey, he considered this social intelligence to be a precondition of democracy itself. In Liberalism and Social Action, Dewey termed this process ‘‘Socializing Intelligence,’’ and called on all intellectuals to organize around this idea, the result of which was the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), to which many professors owe their tenure. At the time, he wrote, A consciously directed critical consideration of the state of present society in its causes and consequences is a pre-condition of projection of constructive ideas. To be effective, the movement must be organized. But this requirement does not demand the creation of a formal organization; it does demand that a sense of the need and opportunity should possess a sufficiently large number of minds (Dewey & Ratner, 1939, p. 461).

To have the public consider intelligent insights, whether academic or nonacademic, intellectuals need to unify around the common cause of growth

For Pragmatic Public Sociology: Theory and Practice after the Pragmatic Turn 181

and the free, dynamic education that generates creative intelligence. Such an organization of intellectuals would not be restricted to the economic welfare and civil liberty functions provided by traditional unions like the AAUP or the AFT, which, if conceived too narrowly, can lead to their own barriers between academic and public education. Rather, what Dewey called ‘‘experimental’’ knowledge needs be instilled throughout the American citizenry, for only through the balance of actors’ ‘‘natural instincts’’ for habit and creativity via intelligence can we hope to address the radical challenges the United States faces in an evolved and evolving globalized world. Those dedicated to the thorough production of important theoretical and empirical insights might wonder if this means a radical change of research habits. But Dewey addressed this by stating, This point of view is sometimes represented as a virtual appeal to those primarily engaged in inquiry and reflection to desert their studies, libraries, and laboratories and engage in works of social reform. That representation is a caricature. It is not the abandonment of thinking and inquiry that is asked for, but more thinking and more significant inquiry. This ‘‘more’’ is equivalent to a conscious direction of thought and inquiry, and direction can be had only by a realization of problems in the rank of urgency y A more intimate connection [with scenes of action] would not signify, I repeat, a surrender of the business of thought, even speculative thought, for the sake of getting busy at some so-called practical matter. Rather would it signify a focusing of thought and intensifying of its quality by bringing it into relation with issues of stupendous meaning (Dewey & Ratner, 1939, p. 462).

Thus, an invigorated call for a pragmatic public sociology, in the spirit of the classical pragmatists Dewey, James, Addams, and C. Wright Mills, especially one that recognizes the critical importance of ideology, apathy, cynicism, and morality for ordinary Americans (see Celikates, 2006), should not be considered a replacement of the innovative theoretical work surrounding creative action in the work of neopragmatist sociologists like Hans Joas, Neil Gross, and others. Rather, a critical public pragmatism would build upon their insights and work toward establishing the necessary conditions for their reception in a dynamic, intelligent public sphere that is in constant need of expansion.

CONCLUSION The suggestion that pragmatism should be promoted as a form of public sociology does not imply that other conceptions of the practice are wrong, but only that they are insufficient insofar as they may be ‘‘impractical.’’

182

ERIC ROYAL LYBECK

Focusing on the idea that a critical public does not already exist, we shift our attention to the role of education as a vanishing point for sociological praxis. This should reorient efforts and resources from current public sociological efforts with existing active groups – through, for example, traditional ‘‘participatory research’’ in community organizations and social movements – toward those inactive ‘‘idiots,’’ to use Mills’ phrase. However, it is important to note that the opposite of intelligence as defined by Dewey would not be ‘‘stupidity,’’ but rather passivity (see also Etzioni, 1968; Ward, 1897, 1906). If Burawoy’s suggestion is that we sociologists should become partisans for civil society, we must face the hard truth that this requires much more effort if civil society, as such, does not presently exist. This recognition, in turn, implies that, although existing universities and educational institutions are certainly sites to encourage the expansion of creative intelligence, the proliferation of passivity throughout the twentieth century – an era that saw the highest crest of educational investment in world history – indicates that current theories and practices of education are thoroughly inadequate. From this perspective, sociologists would need to think in terms of creating the necessary educative institutions themselves, just as Dewey created laboratory schools and Jane Addams developed settlement houses. This would undoubtedly be a form of public sociology, but with the social philosophy of pragmatism behind it, sociological practice would be much more entrepreneurial, ‘‘creative,’’ and useful than ‘‘public sociology’’ as presently conceived.

NOTES 1. The epistemic turn, which examines the sociology of science, knowledge, and intellectuals, drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, Roy Bhaskar, Thomas Kuhn and others, is perhaps too recent of a development to lay a verdict of relative domestication. 2. For one recent exception see (Horowitz, 2011), which suggests a pragmatist ‘‘organic public sociology’’ from the perspective of symbolic interactionism. See also (Bakker, 2009), which examines the semiotic perspective of C.S. Peirce in terms of its public sociological potential.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Harry F. Dahms, Isaac Reed, Suzanne Kurth, Alex Stoner, Amelia Caron, and two anonymous reviewers from Current

For Pragmatic Public Sociology: Theory and Practice after the Pragmatic Turn 183

Perspectives in Social Theory for reading this paper and commenting on its various stages of development.

REFERENCES Agger, B. (2007). Public sociology: From social facts to literary acts. New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Archer, M. S. (2010). Routine, reflexivity, and realism. Sociological Theory, 28, 272–303. Bakker, J. L. (Hans) (2009). Peirce, pragmatism and public sociology: Translating an interpretation into praxis. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 26, 229–258. Bernstein, R. (2010). The pragmatic turn. Malden, MA: Polity. Bernstein, R. J. (1971). Praxis and action; contemporary philosophies of human activity. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Block, J. E. (2002). A nation of agents: The American path to a modern self and society. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Brady, D. (2004). Why public sociology may fail. Social Forces, 82, 1629–1638. Bryant, C. G. A. (1985). Positivism in social theory and research. New York: St. Martin’s. Burawoy, M. (2004). ASA presidential address: For public sociology. American Sociological Review, 70, 4–28. Calhoun, C. (2005). The promise of public sociology. British Journal of Sociology, 56, 355–363. Camic, C. (1992). Reputation and predecessor selection: Parsons and the institutionalists. American Sociological Review, 57, 421–445. Celikates, R. (2006). From critical social theory to a social theory of critique: On the critique of ideology after the pragmatic turn. Constellations, 13, 21–40. Clawson, D. (Ed.) (2007). Public sociology: Fifteen eminent sociologists debate politics and the profession in the twenty-first century. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Dahms, H. F. (1995). From creative action to the social rationalization of the economy – Joseph A. Schumpeter’s social theory. Sociological Theory, 13, 1–13. Dandaneau, S. P. (2001). Taking it big: Developing sociological consciousness in postmodern times. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Deflem, M. (2005). Comment [from Mathieu Deflem]. Contemporary Sociology, 34, 92–93. Dewey, J. (1896). The reflex arc concept in psychology. Psychological Review, 3, 357–370. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: The Macmillan Company. Dewey, J. (1922). Human nature and conduct; an introduction to social psychology. New York: Holt. Etzioni, A. (1968). The active society: A theory of societal and political processes. New York: Collier-Macmillan. Galbraith, J. K. (2010). Why innovation in economics should build on success: The case of the financial crisis. Journal of Innovation Economics, 1, 167–178. Gross, N. (2007). Pragmatism, phenomenology, and twentieth century American sociology. In: C. Calhoun (Ed.), Sociology in America: A History (pp. 183–224). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

184

ERIC ROYAL LYBECK

Gross, N. (2008). Richard Rorty: The making of an American philosopher. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gross, N. (2009). A pragmatist theory of social mechanisms. American Sociological Review, 74, 358–379. Habermas, J. (1971). Knowledge and human interests. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1981). The theory of communicative action, Vol. I: Reason and the rationalization of society. , Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action, Vol. II: Lifeworld and system: A critique of functionalist reason. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Harvey, D. (2010). The enigma of capital: And the crises of capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Herrigel, G. (2010). Manufacting possibilities: Creative action and industrial recomposition in the United States, Germany, and Japan. New York: Oxford University Press. Horowitz, R. (2011). Organic public sociology in the pragmatist perspective: A multifaceted approach. Symbolic Interaction, 34, 1–19. James, W. (1997). Pragmatism’s conception of truth. In: L. Menard (Ed.), Pragmatism: A reader (pp. 112–131). New York: Vintage Books. Joas, H. (1993). Pragmatism and social theory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Joas, H. (1996). The creativity of action. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Joas, H., Kno¨bl, W., & Skinner, A. (2009). Social theory: Twenty introductory lectures. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press. Lacey, R. J. (2008). American pragmatism and democratic faith. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Lakoff, G. (2002). Moral politics: How liberals and conservatives think. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lybeck, E. R. (2010). Creative action and war: A theory of the micro-foundations of organized violence. Paper presented to the American Sociological Association, Atlanta, GA. Mead, G. H. (1964). On social psychology; selected papers. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Menand, L. (1997). Pragmatism: A reader. New York: Vintage Books. Mills, C. W. (1964). Sociology and pragmatism: The higher learning in America. New York: Paine-Whitman Publishers. Mills, C. W. (2000). The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Mills, C. W. (2002). White collar: The American middle classes. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Mouzelis, N. (2008). Modern and postmodern social theorizing: Bridging the divide. New York: Cambridge University Press. Nickel, P. M. (2009). Public sociology and the governance of possibility. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 26, 207–228. Nielsen, F. (2004). The vacant ‘‘We’’: Remarks on public sociology. Social Forces, 82, 1619–1627. Nussbaum, M. (2010). Not for profit: Why democracy needs the humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Parsons, T. (1937). The structure of social action (1 and 2). New York: The Free Press. Putnam, H. (1981). Reason, truth, and history. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. (1983). Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism. The Journal of Philosophy, 80, 583–589.

For Pragmatic Public Sociology: Theory and Practice after the Pragmatic Turn 185

Rorty, R. (1999). Philosophy and social hope. New York: Penguin Books. Sabato, L. (2007). A more perfect constitution: 23 proposals to revitalize our constitution and make America a fairer country. New York: Walker & Co. Schumpeter, J. (2008). Capitalism, socialism, and democracy. New York: Harper Collins. Schumpeter, J. A., & Opie, R. (1934). The theory of economic development; an inquiry into profits, capital, credit, interest, and the business cycle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Soros, G. (2008). The new paradigm for financial markets: The credit crisis of 2008 and what it means. New York: Public Affairs. Sprague, J., & Laube, H. (2009). Institutional barriers to doing public sociology: Experiences of feminists in the academy. American Sociology, 40, 249–271. Steinmetz, G. (2005). The politics of method in the human sciences: Positivism and its epistemological others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tittle, C. R. (2004). The arrogance of public sociology. Social Forces, 82, 1639–1643. Venkatesh, S. (2001). Chicago’s pragmatic planners. Social Science History, 25, 275. Ward, L. (1897). Dynamic sociology. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Ward, L. (1906). Applied sociology; a treatise on the conscious improvement of society by society. Boston, MA: Ginn and Company. Weber, M., Gerth, H. H., & Mills, C. W. (2009). From Max Weber: Essays in sociology. New York: Routledge.

EMPIRE, GLOBAL CAPITALISM, AND THEORY: RECONSIDERING HARDT AND NEGRI Jeb Sprague ABSTRACT It has been over a decade since the publication of Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri’s widely read Empire, a book that claimed humanity had entered a qualitatively new era in the organization of power. How do critical sociological studies that also theorize global capitalism depart from or share affinities with Hardt and Negri’s Foucauldian-inspired notion of empire? The two most important shared insights is the notion of a new epoch in the history of world capitalism and the conceptualization of a global system that moves beyond the idea of U.S. imperialism solely as behind its fundamental structure. However, overpowering Hardt and Negri’s framework are some fundamental problems: the vague and nondialectical idea of multitude, the lack of the role of the state, their confusing and contradictory idea of constitutionalism, and a misapprehension of immaterial labor.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and just prior to the events of September 11, 2001, globalization was omnipresent, a seemingly uncontestable reality. At this time, philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggested that we The Diversity of Social Theories Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 29, 187–207 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-1204(2011)0000029014

187

188

JEB SPRAGUE

were in the midst of a qualitatively new era in the organization of power, as the very nature of the economic, political, and social structures of our world had transformed. All of humanity, swirling in self-subordination and resistance, was swept up in the ‘‘constitutionalization of a supranational world power’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 6) that ‘‘envelops the entire space of what it considers civilization, a boundless universal space,’’ presenting itself as ‘‘permanent, eternal, and necessary’’ (p. 11). A synoptic and unorthodox notion for understanding our world, Empire remains as hotly contested as when first published.1 Following up with two more volumes, Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009), the authors have further developed their argument, though the core ideas remain. Empire is a novel system ‘‘configured ab initio as a dynamic and flexible systemic structure’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 13). This chapter seeks to examine insights and weaknesses at the core of Hardt and Negri’s notion of empire, and consider these alongside sociological notions that likewise describe globalization as a novel era in the history of capitalism. Empire is full of brilliant insights into the way capitalism has changed. It suggests the rise of a new era in social relations, developed through huge leaps in industrial and managerial technology and through a world economy dominated by transnational corporations (TNCs). Nation-state imperialism no longer lies behind the fundamental structure of the capitalist system. They describe a new global hegemony, ‘‘a systemic totality’’ that takes on the ‘‘dominant position in the global order’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 14). Hardt and Negri’s notion of empire has been juxtaposed with other Marxian-inspired works. As sociologist of globalization, William I. Robinson explains his own work, as that of Philip McMichael (1996), Leslie Sklair (1999, 2002), and others, shares with Hardt and Negri the view that ‘‘globalization represents a new stage in the evolving world capitalist system that came into being some five centuries ago,’’ thus advancing a ‘‘global capitalism thesis or school’’ (Robinson, 2004, p. 2). Although there are many differences between these various theoretical approaches, all of them suggest that global capitalism represents a qualitatively new epoch in the history of capitalism. Thus, together these approaches are described well as the ‘‘global capitalism school.’’ Whereas the sociological- and neo-Marxian-influenced theories of most of these authors locate global capitalism as a new epoch that began during the last quarter of the twentieth century with the rise of new socioeconomic relations brought on by global capitalist expansion, Hardt and Negri in their philosophical manifesto argue that the shift occurred during the last half of the twentieth century starting in the post-World War II boom. The ‘‘U.S.

Empire, Global Capitalism, and Theory: Reconsidering Hardt and Negri

189

entry into World War II tied the New Deal indissolubly to the crisis of European imperialisms and projected the New Deal on the scene of world government as an alternative, successor model. From that point on, the effects of the New Deal reforms would be felt over the entire global terrain’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, pp. 243–244). The two authors write of a shift in power, where the center of power has shifted from the nation-state to a new relationship of power that engulfs the entire world and all aspects of humanity. Hardt and Negri are not focused on political economy then, but rather, on power in general. They seek to describe the formation and structure of a global power relation that has arisen during the second half of the twentieth century. Hardt and Negri take their inspiration from Marxian theory (Bowring, 2004), but the driving force behind their notion of empire is Foucauldian – which recognizes power relations (not material relations) at the core of historical processes. This chapter seeks to show how Hardt and Negri’s notion of empire, which claims a new era in power relations has come to exist within the age of capitalism, compares in some ways but for the most part strongly contrasts with the other sociological notions of global capitalism. In examining the huge changes taking place through globalization, this chapter argues that it is vital that we recognize the role of social forces (such as class fractions and strata) and the institutions through which they operate. Rather than plunge into the abyss of Foucauldian theory where power is ‘‘no place,’’ the main thrust of this chapter argues that Hardt and Negri’s Foucauldian-influenced approach in many ways blurs a critical understanding of our world. It lays out a theoretical and analytical framework that at its core is detached from material and social processes. The first section of this chapter lays out apparent affinities between these different approaches. It will highlight some specific insights that Hardt and Negri provide for conceptualizing global capitalism. The next section problematizes some of the core theoretical concepts of Hardt and Negri’s notion of empire, discussing how these obfuscate material and social relations. Finally, the third section discusses some sociological notions of global capitalism as a new epoch in the capitalist system, arguing that these approaches provide more nuanced and useful social analyses.

APPARENT AFFINITIES Three key claims of Empire are as following: first, a new epoch in the history of capitalism has arisen; second, the fundamental structure of our global

190

JEB SPRAGUE

system is not just driven by U.S. imperialism but rather is propelled by a much wider array of interconnected power relations; and third, utilizing Foucauldian ideas such as ‘‘normalization’’ they suggest that new ideological, technological, and other processes have developed that are bringing all of humanity into adherence with a common system. The first and second points appear to share the clearest affinity with some of the other global capitalism school writings; however, the third point may also be useful to such approaches. Next, each of these claims will be discussed in more depth and it will be considered how other studies relate with these general premises. (A) Hardt and Negri suggest that a qualitatively new era has occurred in the development of capitalism. ‘‘Over the past several decades, as colonial regimes were overthrown and then precipitously after the Soviet barriers to the capitalist world market finally collapsed, we have witnessed an irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. xi). They add, ‘‘along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule-in short, a new form of sovereignty’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. xi). Pointing out what they see as fundamental changes that our contemporary world has undergone, Hardt and Negri present a speculative manifesto on how this is constitutive of a new epoch. The novelty of global capitalism has been shown in a number of important works (Dicken, 2007; Harris, 2006; Robinson, 2004; Sklair, 2002a). Sociologist Leslie Sklair observes how in recent decades transnational practices have emerged, operating across the global system interconnected with the regional, the national, and the local in economic, political, and culture-ideological ways. Operating outside of the global system, Sklair explains, ‘‘is becoming increasingly more difficult as capitalist globalization penetrates ever more widely and deeply’’ (Sklair, 2009, p. 528). Hardt and Negri suggest that transformative processes are widespread, touching even the functions of the national state as a ‘‘crisis of political relations in the national context’’ occurs (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 307). Instead of one superpower (the United States) dominating the world, in empire a new transnational combination will be required for global order, even if the United States remains the military powerhouse. In supporting this point, Hardt and Negri quote Robinson, ‘‘‘The hegemonic baton will likely by passed,’ maintains William Robinson, with an eye to this novelty, ‘from the United States, not to a new hegemonic nation-state or even to a regional bloc, but to a transnational configuration’’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2009, p. 232). Hardt and Negri add, in their own words, ‘‘Once we focus on the

Empire, Global Capitalism, and Theory: Reconsidering Hardt and Negri

191

assemblages and authorities being formed in the context of global governance, we can see that a new imperial formation is emerging that can function only through the collaboration of a variety of national, supranational, and nonnational powers. Our future politics will have to be cast in relation to this Empire’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2009, p. 232). (B) Many have found persuasive the idea in Hardt and Negri’s Empire of moving beyond nation-state centrism and beyond the focus on U.S. imperialism as driving the fundamental structure of our global system, which will now be examined in more detail. Hardt and Negri suggest that dominant political relations are transnationalizing and becoming more diffuse, where the ‘‘unity of single governments has been disarticulated and invested in a series of separate bodies (banks, international organisms of planning, and so forth, in addition to the traditional separate bodies), which all increasingly refer for legitimacy to the transnational level of power’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 308), a process that ‘‘appears as disorderly and even [a] chaotic set of controls and representative organizations’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 309). They make here an interesting observation that national states are becoming tied to an institutionalism beyond traditional avenues of national power. For example, they explain that institutional and state ‘‘functions and constitutional elements have effectively been displaced to other levels and domains’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 307). As Hardt and Negri describe, the underlying essence of phenomena manifests itself in many ways. In this manner, they argue, we can understand many political, social, and economic phenomenon, in the era of empire, as conflictive and contradictory in different ways, while at the same time occurring as part of a fundamental global structure that has come into existence. This is an important point, but such an idea can also be understood more thoroughly through other studies of the ‘‘global capitalism school.’’ The unilateral invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States, for example, can be viewed as a conflict through the scope of global capitalism (Baker, 2009). Fractions of transnational capitalists aligned with the U.S. national state benefit from the opening of these countries to global capitalist penetration, but many other fractions do as well as time has passed. As the Financial Times reports while ‘‘the US has laid down more lives here since 2001 than any other power,’’ the most likely bidders to exploit a new host of resource deposits in Afghanistan ‘‘are Chinese or Indian companies seeking resources to fuel burgeoning economies’’ and that the Afghan government ‘‘is also seeking investors for oil and gas blocks that have drawn interest from France’s Total and Swiss-based Addax Petroleum’’ (Green, 2010).2

192

JEB SPRAGUE

Even as the United States remains the major military powerhouse and holds significant influence in many other ways, transnational elites around the world operating through various national and supranational institutions are able to pursue different strategies in connection to the accumulation of global capital, yet they must juggle these with policies that are often contradictory but are required to maintain their own legitimacy (in the eyes of local or national constituents for example). What is required is a recognition that conflict between states and various groups can still occur within larger systems of multi- and reciprocalcausality, meaning that within such a system, a global system, conflictive and contradictory processes can occur between groups and institutions while these same groups and institutions remain mutually developed and linked to multiple causes. For example, elites operating the U.S. national state can do something in the interest of transnational capital but also deploy tactical and strategic differences in carrying such activities out, and also maintain policies that are required to ensure their local and/or national legitimacy. While many scholars view these state activities as evidence of the influence of a U.S. national capitalist class, notions proposed by scholars of the global capitalism school force us to consider how transnational relations are at the heart of today’s political economy. The view that such processes most benefit a national capitalist class is the approach of more traditional Marxists, like Ellen Meiksins Wood, for example. In her critique of Hardt and Negri, she writes, ‘‘Capitalism’s purely ‘economic’ mode of exploitation, the growing commodification of life, the regulation of social relations by the impersonal ‘laws’ of the market, have meant the emergence of a distinct ‘economic’ sphere, formally separate from the ‘political’’’ (Wood, 2003a, p. 66). However, her approach, as with the approaches of some others, that ‘‘the national organization of capitalist economies has remained stubbornly persistent’’ (Wood, 2003b, p. 23) fails to take into consideration the empirical reality of global capitalism: that nearly all countries in the world have been brought into the global capitalist system where TNCs operate across national frontiers and investors hold and trade in trillions of dollars everyday. Capitalist state institutions, such as the national state, have a material role to play, for example, to coerce workers through laws or with armed force, to keep infrastructure purring, or to promote processes of normalization.3 But we need to understand how many state institutions and the elites who operate through them have come to become dependent on circuits of global capital accumulation, and how their activities are essential for transnational capitalists who do not have the same kind of networks or coercive power. Taking these processes under

Empire, Global Capitalism, and Theory: Reconsidering Hardt and Negri

193

consideration, scholars of the ‘‘global capitalism school’’ have presented new theories. Hardt and Negri move us toward considering the constitution of power transnationally (or how power can become functionally integrated in different ways across borders so as it cannot be reduced to processes bound to the nation-state). They move us away from reifying, what for many is a chief axiom that the deep structure of capitalism is made up of a union of realism and classical imperialism – an approach that never gets at the underlying essence of global capitalism. (C) The Foucauldian tradition, utilized by Hardt and Negri, is interesting in that it opens us to thinking about how power saturates the most secluded recesses of our cultural and social existence. For example, the idea of ‘‘normalization,’’ or how to bring people into adherence with a system, is a very useful idea that Hardt and Negri borrow from Foucault. Such a notion is useful for considering how intimate dimensions of human existence (culture, the body, and so on) are invaded by ideologies and practices associated with a larger system. This idea is useful in thinking about capitalist expansion, and more specifically those intimate processes of corporeal domination; a profound idea explored by Ju¨rgen Habermas (1991) and others. As Hardt and Negri explain, ‘‘The society of control might thus be characterized by an intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices, but in contrast to discipline, this control extends well outside the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and fluctuating networks’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 41, emphasis added). The point here is that power can widen and manifest itself in obscured ways, for example, where the ‘‘Normal is established as a principle of coercion’’ through a whole range of professions such as teaching, medicine, and industrial production (Foucault, 1977, p. 184). Even in capitalist society, where individual expression has reached new heights, huge systemic barriers of inequality exist promoting certain dominant visions. While some of these barriers are easy to spot (such as the domination of public debate by unelected elites through media monopolies), more difficult to understand is how we ourselves internalize (and, can promote) in an individualized way what is ‘‘normal.’’ ‘‘In a sense, the power of normalization imposes homogeneity; but it individualizes by making it possible to measure gaps, to determine levels, to fix specialties and to render the differences useful by fitting them one to another’’ (1977, p. 184). In his book Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes that there is a ‘‘whole series of ‘carceral mechanisms which seem distinct enough – since they are

194

JEB SPRAGUE

intended to alleviate pain, to cure, to comfort – but which all tend, like the prison, to exercise a power of normalization’’ (1977, p. 308). Insights such as these have been critically appropriated into a renewed historical materialism, for example, considering how essential parts of human existence are integrated into systems of power. Decades before Foucault, Gramsci (2010) pointed out the role of consent in hegemonic power relations, as has Harvey (1991) more recently. Nicos Poulantzas in his engagement with Foucault recognized the value of such ideas. In a similar manner, this chapter suggests that there are some valuable ideas in Hardt and Negri’s notion of empire, for example the Foucauldian idea of ‘‘normalization’’ can be reconsidered in relation to global capitalism. Clyde Barrow makes the point that many institutions, practices, and ideologies shift in relation to capitalist development, as when he explains how some Marxian schools of thought ‘‘have called attention to the fact that the historical process of capital accumulation can be sustained only to the extent that cultural values, forms of business organization, government policy, law, and educational curricula are compatible with the requirements of each phase in the accumulation process’’ (Barrow, 1993, p. 65). What is clear is that many social phenomena can be understood as developing in relation to the fundamental structure of the system in which we live. Whereas Foucault as well as Hardt and Negri inflate an unspecific and abstract nature of power as causal priori of historic processes, describing this phenomenon as biopower, it is a few ideas within this notion of biopower, such as normalization, that can be considered useful on their own. Taken as a whole, the notion of biopower is too abstract, as it describes the resistance by all (especially in Hardt and Negri’s conception of it, although, not as much as in Foucault’s) as well as the absorption of all, where all participate in their own subordination. This leads to Hardt and Negri’s idea of the multitude, an idea discussed in the second section. Having pointed out some of the most useful ideas in Hardt and Negri’s notion of empire, we can now turn to analyzing its problems.

WEAKNESSES OF EMPIRE Next, this chapter looks at what are fundamental problems in Hardt and Negri’s notion of empire: first, the vague and nondialectical idea of multitude, second, the lack of the role of the state, third, their confusing and contradictory idea of constitutionalism, and, fourth, the role they assign to

Empire, Global Capitalism, and Theory: Reconsidering Hardt and Negri

195

immaterial labor that ignores fundamental structures of material labor processes. (A) The problem with the idea of a multitude, or the multiplicity of all that is subjective, is that it misses the complexities of class structure and composition. The multitude includes everyone, all of humanity, from the Silicon Valley venture capitalist to the unemployed piquetero in Argentina. This moves us away from looking at distinct forms of production and exploitation as informing social relations and class formation, and instead places our focus on power in general (Callinicos, 2009). ‘‘The multitude is composed of innumerable internal differences that can never be reduced to a unity or a single identity,’’ in this way ‘‘the multitude is a multiplicity of all these singular differences’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2004, p. xiv). This vagueness leaves no place for class conflict, as all of humanity is lumped into multitude. Yet, for Hardt and Negri, resistance occurs everywhere; a new type of resistance, as the structures of the world are enveloped in empire and the groupings of humanity are enveloped in multitude, an unspecific speculation on the reorganization of spatiality and subjectivity. Not to be pinned down though, they stress that as resistance occurs everywhere, such struggles are disconnected (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 54). The multitude is an amorphous idea, as the authors are not crystal clear in identifying any social groups or class who wield hegemonic relations. Power occurs for power’s sake. This is the ‘‘non-place of power.’’ For example, the three-tiered pyramid power structure is a framework with which Hardt and Negri lay out what they see as the structure of global order. No one falls outside of this structure, as the bottom tier includes all of civil society and the entire social plexus. Where do popular movements and forces of resistance fit? Where is the dialectical opposition? My critique here of Hardt and Negri’s theory is similar to the critique of Foucault’s work posited by Poulantzas that it lacks an analysis of social contradictions and of a relational system. Poulantzas argued that power always attaches to certain social groups and structures; this was very different than Foucault’s understanding of a diffuse, radiating, faceless power. Poulantzas observed, for example, that for Foucault, ‘‘Power is not then a quality attached to a class ‘in-itself,’ understood as a collection of agents, but depends on, and springs from, a relational system of material places occupied by particular agents’’ (Poulantzas, 1978, p. 147). Such approaches provide a ‘‘vision which dilutes and scatters power among innumerable microsituations; they thereby seriously underestimate the importance of classes and the class struggle and ignore the central role of the State’’ (Poulantzas, 1978, p. 44). But to consider power and resistance, we need to

196

JEB SPRAGUE

accurately identify broader class and social relations. In the case of Hardt and Negri, not only is this left out, but the authors also never clearly articulate the material necessity of capitalist state institutions for the transnational reproduction of capital. (B) Another problem in Empire is that the state is poorly explained or understood. By not clarifying how power plays out institutionally, the role of the state is taken for granted and minimized in a problematic manner. For Hardt and Negri, the struggle for appropriating state power is over as the multitude seeks sudden and total emancipation. There is little need then to properly understand the vicissitudes of the state. Hardt and Negri attempting to position their understanding of the state in the historical context of capitalism hold that the development of capitalism, since its inception, has required an ‘‘imperial administration’’ of bourgeois and elites to mediate the operation of power. Citing the classical Marxian theorists Karl Kautsky, Rudolf Hilferding, and Vladimir Lenin, the authors explain that as capitalism has developed and monopolized through nationstate imperialism, boundaries have solidified, obstructing the full realization of a capitalist world market. The breaking of these obstructive barriers is brought about only through a total subsumption by power, or by what they describe as biopower. Foucault created the term biopower, as he explained, to describe ‘‘a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the 18 th century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species’’ (Foucault, 2007, p. 1). Hardt and Negri suggest that in the second half of the twentieth century, we have witnessed the ascendancy of a new biopower monolith: ‘‘Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. xi). Hardt and Negri use here Foucault’s term ‘‘biopolitical’’ to describe the style of government that regulates populations through biopower. They attempt to lay out a formal schema for the structure of a global biopolitical order, what they see as a polybius pyramid. At the top of this pyramid is a command structure of powerful states and institutions, with the goals of: (a) ‘‘political mediation with respect to the global hegemonic powers,’’(b) ‘‘bargaining with respect to the transnational corporations,’’ and (c) ‘‘redistribution of income according to biopolitical needs within their own limited territories.’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 310). In the middle tier are less powerful states and institutions, and at the bottom of this pyramid is the

Empire, Global Capitalism, and Theory: Reconsidering Hardt and Negri

197

entirety of civil society, which through their activities within the system take part in their own subordination. Empire is more a philosophical manifesto than a sociological treatise, making wide claim, for example that ‘‘government and politics come to be completely integrated into the system of transnational command’’ as ‘‘controls are articulated through a series of international bodies and function’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 307, emphasis added). They speculate that ‘‘politics does not disappear; what disappears is any notion of the autonomy of the political’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 307). These are interesting ideas as they suggest that new kinds of interconnections, practices, and ideologies are involved in the reproduction of global capitalism. But in emphasizing such transformative processes, without the nuanced empirically based analysis to back it up, the authors tend to speculate. They describe a completely formed new system, an amorphous ‘‘smooth space defined by uncoded flows, flexibility, continual modulation, and tendential equalization’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 31). The problem with this approach is that it creates a vision of power that is abstract, unlocatable, and unscientific. It moves us away from understanding how the social basis of material processes needs to be integral to any critical understanding of economic and state structures and the changes they undergo through globalization. For example, how and why are the practices and ideologies constituted that carry the spread of transnational power relations? Instead, Hardt and Negri place the reader’s focus on power detached from material reality and dispersed to tiny repositories strung out ad infinitum. (C) In their idea of constitutionalism, Hardt and Negri describe the U.S. constitution as ushering in a nominal juridical system around the planet, conflating the U.S. constitution with something that regulates global capitalism. Here they inflate a superficial U.S. juridical structure as representative of new and emerging legal frameworks encompassing the world. Hardt and Negri argue that the herald of today’s ‘‘mixed constitution’’ appeared with the Jeffersonian U.S. Constitution and the manifest destiny of U.S. imperialism, where ‘‘across the great open spaces the constituent tendency wins out over the constitutional decree, the tendency of the immanence of the principle over regulative reflection, and the initiative of the multitude over the centralization of power’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 169). It serves as a juridical legitimization of the conquest of ‘‘open space’’ for ‘‘all.’’ This is ‘‘how the constitution of empire begins to form’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 309). Hardt and Negri describe U.S. imperialism with its

198

JEB SPRAGUE

notion of open markets and indirect rule as the central historical piece leading to today’s new phase in world history: empire. Following the Wilsonian era, during the mid- to late-twentieth century, a hybridized version of this constitution spread promoted by U.S. policy makers and corporations. A countervailing force, ‘‘mixed constitution’’ provided a juridical doctrinaire against uprisings and popular movements. Worldwide governments developed amalgamating themselves with such ideas. This guaranteed a ‘‘circulation of goods, technologies, and labor power y the collective dimension of the market’’ (Hardt & Negri, 2001, p. 317). Integrated today in empire, national states across the world have adopted this ‘‘mixed constitution,’’ as an absorption of political repositories across the planet into the biopolitical system. Is it helpful to lend a philosophical notion of transcendence to U.S. expansiveness as a unique global form of empire or is this an ahistorical concept? Can the emergence of new regulatory and legal frameworks through globalization be condensed to springing from the historical blue print of Pax Americana? Another question arises: does this notion of ‘‘mixed constitution’’ serve as a back door through which empire becomes an implicitly nation-state-driven concept? (D) The idea of immaterial labor cannot be assigned the role that Hardt and Negri assign it. Hardt and Negri’s conception of immaterial labor is linked most to the changes to the mode of capitalist production during the post-Fordist era. The Italian intellectual tradition of operaismo links the notion of immaterial labor to transformative processes in contemporary capitalism, where, for example, the transformation is made from Fordist to computerized hi-tech lean production. In this type of production process, sometimes described as ‘‘Toyotism,’’ the product may already have been sold prior to its production. Down this path, Hardt and Negri describe (1) industrial production as immaterial labor, (2) analytical and symbolic tasks as immaterial labor, and (3) immaterial labor as involving the production and manipulation of affects (such as emotional labor, friendship networks, and mothership) yet still requiring management by a human agent. These are useful ideas, but Hardt and Negri place immaterial labor at the center of the multitude, the center of the empire, and the center of transformative forces. From this approach, the formal subsumption of labor under capital, where managers dominate laborers, is replaced-in-full by the real subsumption of labor, where machines and abstract processes dominate labor.4 Labor becomes simultaneously more resistant and more repressed. In this way, the nuts and bolts of the material relations are displaced by an overly deterministic view of hi-tech immaterial processes, underscoring

Empire, Global Capitalism, and Theory: Reconsidering Hardt and Negri

199

the continual material needs and linkages that immaterial processes require. On this point Timothy Brennan’s critique of Empire is relevant: ‘‘Since the ‘system’ for Hardt and Negri ‘constructs social fabrics that evacuate or render ineffective any contradiction y in an insignificant play of selfgenerating and self-regulating equilibria’, it is logical for them to conclude that the only true agency must occur within subjectivity, which is located in social fabrics but not of them’’ (Brennan, 2003, p. 110 in Balakrishnan, 2003). He adds, ‘‘The end of labor can then be announced as though it were a vast expansion of types of labour’’ (Brennan, 2003, p. 110). The idea of biopower leads to the overdetermination of immateriality as it looses focus on the tangible material relations that constitute social reproduction. Economist Georges Liodakis makes the point that as the authors overstress the impact of information technology, this leads to what they see as evidence that immaterial labor is the now-dominant trend in value production, so that ‘‘the material conditions of production are largely dismissed, and with them capitalism-specific property relations and production relation’’ (Liodakis, 2005, pp. 358–359). The human being lives and remains in a material world. How can one argue that the informality of power or immateriality of labor has so completely eclipsed material relations? Whereas Foucault would ontologize defeat (except in some rare cases) and would reject totalizing struggles, Hardt and Negri would ontologize ‘‘of being communist,’’ which for them is success. As resistance is everywhere, and power is nowhere, simply ‘‘being’’ is a success. In this way, whereas Foucault would see the defeat of the totalizing struggle as inevitable, Hardt and Negri would see in the epoch of empire success as inevitable.5 Hardt and Negri envision totalizing struggles as moribund, as something of the past and doomed to failure. Instead, they see a global explosion of diffuse incommensurate struggles. Only this can overpower the system at large. However, this conflation of politics with dissensus leads to a politics of glorified rebellion, indicative of a wider and problematic theme within some currents of the anticorporate globalization movement. This is the theme taken up by two other germinal works of the anticorporate globalization movement: Naomi Klein’s No Logo (1999) and John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power (2002). Unwilling to deal with the larger political system and the state following the fall of much of the statistvanguardist left, autonomist currents, as on display in Empire, have promoted an inflexible horizontalism that ultimately is unable to challenge capitalist states or the expansion of global capitalism.6 The key issue here is the weakness of formalistic antistatism. While horizontalism is crucial for any emancipatory project, leftists must be prepared to use different

200

JEB SPRAGUE

strategies including some vertical by nature. Otherwise, we vacate social struggle over the locations where power congeals.

THEORIZING GLOBAL CAPITALISM Scholars have theorized and shown empirically many of the novel social arrangements that have come about in the era of global capitalism (Harris, 2006; McMichael, 1996; Robinson, 2004; Rodriguez, 2010; Sassen, 2001; Sklair, 2001, 2002; Van der Pijl, 1998). As global networks of production and finance pushed through TNCs and other institutions redefine the scale of the world economy (Dicken, 2007; Porter, 2005; Schiffrin & Bisat, 2004), transnational relations form within and between different class fractions and strata, even creating distinct new social groups. One of these new social groups, the transnational capitalist class (TCC), is tied together as a conscious class, a class in and of itself whose material basis is in TNCs and the accumulation of global capital (Sklair, 2001; Robinson, 2001). However, such a class is not monolithic. Many fractions exist within this class, with different historic trajectories and tethered in different ways to one another and to various institutions, states, regions, companies, and industries. Some have begun to theorize how transnational class relations are also emerging among subaltern groups, from service sector workers and migrants to globalizing low wage labor forces (Struna, 2009). In addition, as some class fractions and strata are becoming transnationally oriented, others remain more nationally oriented; as the author has shown in another study, it is useful then to look at how such groups operate in relation to one another (Sprague, 2012b). In addition to theorizing socioeconomic change through globalization, theorists of the global capitalism school have also considered the changing dynamics of politics, and in relation to the state and institutionality. Sociologist Leslie Sklair conceptualizes a global system in which transnational processes intersect with the national state and political struggles over it occur ‘‘between globalizers and localizers and/or economic and cultural nationalists’’ (Sklair as quoted in Sprague, 2009, p. 504; see also Sklair, 2002). Robinson has theorized the analytical abstraction of a transnational state (TNS) and TNS apparatuses, suggesting that these makeup a ‘‘loose network comprised of supranational political and economic institutions together with national state apparatuses’’ as state institutions around the world are being ‘‘penetrated and transformed by transnational forces’’ (Robinson, 2007, p. 131 in Ritzer, 2007; see also Robinson, 2001, 2004). Political economist Kanishka Jayasuriya likewise suggests an ongoing

Empire, Global Capitalism, and Theory: Reconsidering Hardt and Negri

201

transformation of the state linked to socioeconomic forces that are novel to the historical present, ‘‘via complex systems of multi-level regulation, metagovernance, and systems of soft law, all of which enable the transnationalization of the state apparatus’’ (Jayasuriya as quoted in Sprague, 2010, p. 128; see also Jayasuriya, 1999, 2001a, 2001b). Innovative ideas such as these help us to analyze and explain transnational relations of social reproduction and in relation to their condensation within state and institutional apparatuses. Nuanced studies of ongoing alternatives in the epoch of global capitalism have moved the discussion on social conflicts far beyond Hardt and Negri’s abstract idea of multitude. Sociologist William K. Carroll, on the premise that the phenomena of global capitalism is dialectically related, argues that ‘‘from the nineteenth century onwards international labour organizations and left-party organizations’’ have entered the fray of global civil society, and that ‘‘since the 1990s, a wide range of subaltern groups opposed to neoliberal capitalism has begun to mount a concerted struggle for position, constituting a potentially counter-hegemonic bloc of aligned social forces’’ (2010, p. 205). He argues as well that gatherings such as the World Social Forum, first convened in January of 2001, are forming what he describes as a potential transnational springboard from below, ‘‘into an alternative discursive and organizational space’’ (Carroll, 2010, pp. 218–220). Harris points out what he describes as ‘‘alternative globalizations’’ by looking at ongoing radical alternatives, for example, from the antistatist approach (cooperatives in Argentina and the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico) to the Gramscian-inspired struggle from below to capture state and civil power (Bolivarian Venezuela and Bolivia) or the longstanding cooperatives in the Italian state of Emilia-Romagna where he suggests some may be able to develop a ‘‘democratic corporate model that is competitive on a global scale’’ (Harris, 2006, pp. 208–221). ‘‘Given the difficulties of autonomist, state and market strategies for social transformation we can see that no easy answers exist, no silver bullet, in the quest for a just society’’ (Harris, 2006, p. 221). We can also look at a host of other ongoing transformative processes, from the upsurge of popular movements in the Middle East to the rise of the counter hegemonic ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) bloc in the Caribbean and Latin America. It is important as well to understand the contradictions and problems that these alternatives face, all the while recognizing that in capitalism, especially in global capitalism, almost everyone is – by necessity – compromised and complicit in someway. So too, democratic and emancipatory left struggles can involve some ugly compromises and contradictions in order to survive,

202

JEB SPRAGUE

all the while risking defeat, co-optation, or marginalization through a number of ways. The point here though is that through studying the shifting activities and composition of social groups and the institutions and movements through which they act (including those alternatives that exist), we find a clearer picture of what is occurring in our world. The two main affinities of the neo-Marxian or neo-Marxian-influenced approaches discussed in this chapter (such as those of Harris, Jayasuriya, Robinson, Sklair, and others), with the Foucauldian–Marxian inspired approach of Hardt and Negri are (1) the conceptualization of a new epoch in the capitalist system and (2) an analysis of the structure of global capitalism that goes beyond traditional Marxist understandings of nationstate imperialism. Differences between the global capitalism school approaches abound, but the differences are most distinct when comparing Hardt and Negri alongside the others. Jayasuriya highlights one such difference, this in regard to Hardt and Negri’s description of the contours of global order: ‘‘There is no single sovereign centre within the global order; neither can the global order be reducible to our usual ‘Westphalian’ order of multiple and pluralist sovereign units,’’ yet, still, ‘‘the almost mystical nature of what they assume to be a new decentralised sovereignty obscures the transformation that is occurring y’’ (Jayasuriya, 2004, p. 3). Another important distinction is that Hardt and Negri never provide a basis for their theory to align with a Marxian conception of social relations. They continue to use Marxian ideas such as the formal subsumption and real subsumption of labor which is the prevalent idea for their understanding of immaterial labor that in turn their entire notion of multitude rests upon (Bowring, 2004). But Hardt and Negri never outline a clear idea of class, as Robinson and Sklair suggest. Robinson writes for example that the ‘‘TCC [transnational capitalist class] is the key agent of capitalist globalization, for Hardt and Negri there is no such identifiable agent,’’ adding that ‘‘In more Foucaultian fashion, an amorphous empire seems to be a ubiquitous but faceless power structure that is everywhere yet centred nowhere’’ (2007, p. 131). Some authors have missed the subtlety of the differences that exist between the approach of Hardt and Negri with more nuanced approaches for theorizing global capitalism. Sociologist Sakellaropoulos (2007) references Hardt and Negri’s notion of empire alongside Robinson’s notion of an emergent TNS. He writes, ‘‘There is a common element in all the abovementioned views: their claim is that in the present phase of globalization the state is weakened. It is not effaced; it retains some of its past prerogatives. But it ceases to be the agent par excellence of political

Empire, Global Capitalism, and Theory: Reconsidering Hardt and Negri

203

power. Modification of the functions of the state are seen to coincide with undermining of its general role through transfer of powers from the national to the international or supranational level’’ (Sakellaropoulos, 2007, p. 13). This argument misses the nuance of Robinson’s theory. Robinson in his theorizing of a nascent TNS and transnational state apparatuses never claims that the national state ‘‘has weakened,’’ or that power has been transferred. Rather, he explains that his notion provides a useful analytical abstraction for considering how the functionality of many state institutions worldwide is transforming in relation to the practices and ideologies of elites operating in and through state institutions, from ‘‘within’’ and from ‘‘without’’ (tied increasingly to circuits of global, rather than national capital accumulation) (Robinson, 2010; Sprague, 2012a in Ritzer, 2012). In another example, in which the important differences of these theoretical approaches go overlooked, Sociologist Yildiz Atasoy refers to Hardt and Negri: ‘‘They foresee a decline in the sovereign power of states, gradually giving way to ‘empire’ emerging as a new form of sovereignty expressed in ‘global constitutionalism’ under the influence of a ‘transnational capitalist ruling-class’ (Sklair, 1991[1995], 2001)’’ (Atasoy, 2009, p. 3). Atasoy cites Sklair here, suggesting that Hardt and Negri utilize Sklair’s understanding of a TCC. But Hardt and Negri never discuss such a class. They never discuss such a social basis for the changes undergone through globalization. The difference is that the approach of Harris, Jayasuriya, Robinson, Sklair, and others does not offer a speculative theory of the present, something Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri do to some extent, but rather present objective analyses of actual social processes. At its best, the global capitalism school’s theoretical enterprise pushes us to consider globalization through the ways with which it unfolds rooted in social relations. It is rare to find a book of radical theory as engaging and having such an impact as Empire, and while it might be banal to expect empirical depth to Hardt and Negri’s manifesto, it is clear that more nuanced understandings of global capitalism exist. In moving forward and looking at the changes that social groups and institutions are undergoing around the world, for example, with the growing transnationality of some class fractions and strata, it is important we analyze these processes in a clear manner. It is important we understand how social groups conflict and connect with one another and the world around them. It is important to understand more clearly the specific ways in which nationally oriented social groups converge or clash with those that have become more thoroughly transnational.7 In other areas, more work can be done as well. For example, while important studies have examined

204

JEB SPRAGUE

today’s circuits of global capitalist production (Dicken, 2007; Sprague, 2011a), more work on transnational finance and the ways in which it relates to social groups are particularly important for shining a light on the nature of the system. A diversity of social theories has emerged to describe the modern interaction of humanity with the world around it. This chapter has not sought to go over the large cluster of realist theories that are utilized for understanding this system. It has not gone over the numerous realist influenced schools of thought that exist for understanding world capitalism in its present stage. Instead, this chapter has focused in on a set of approaches that emphasize the novelty of global capitalism through its associated social relations. The rationale here is that much of the theorizing on globalization remains deeply impoverished and reflects the zombie language of Westphalian state centric analysis. As such this chapter suggests that we seek to theorize and analyze global capitalism in the context of shifting class relations alongside concomitant political and economic changes. Dominant realist modes of analysis often reflect the assumption that the world is mainly just moving toward a form of nation-state multilateralism, returning us to old-fashioned geopolitics. Some scholars see these changes as propelled by national groups that are engaging in international processes. Yet, this chapter stands upon the idea that the deep changes occurring through globalization require that we recalibrate the way in which we view our world. This chapter has sought to pull apart the ways in which some distinct theories attempt to do this. To recapitulate, this chapter has examined some insightful and problematic ideas within Empire and looked at these in relation to some sociological and neo-Marxian approaches that also seek to understand global capitalism as a novel epoch in the history of world capitalism. In contrast to other works of the ‘‘global capitalism school,’’ Hardt and Negri get caught up in a Foucalidan framework ignoring the locations and specificities of social forces through which power congeals. To take this discussion forward, finishing with the scholastic debate on the implications of the ideas deployed in Empire, we should continue with studies of transformative processes through globalization but in relation to the social forces that undergird them.

NOTES 1. Eakin (2001) for the New York Times suggested Empire was ‘‘the Next Big Idea’’; praise echoed by PBS’ Charlie Rose in his interview with Michael Hardt (Rose, 2001).

Empire, Global Capitalism, and Theory: Reconsidering Hardt and Negri

205

2. What this FT report does not explain is that financial markets and chains of production are increasingly transnational, making it more and more difficult to strictly identify these companies with a nation-state. 3. For an important study that looks in part at the role of transnational elites operating through a national state apparatus in coercing workers for global markets, see Robyn Magalit Rodriguez’s (2010) analysis of the labor brokerage activities of Philippine state strata (Sprague, 2011b). 4. See Bowring (2004) for an in-depth explanation of Negri and the Italian autonomist school’s distinct reading of Marx’s theory of formal and real subsumption of labor. 5. Foucault supported struggles that he saw as unencumbered by totalizing western ideologies. For example, he saw in the Iranian revolution of 1979 a spontaneous and organic struggle, one which he supported and promoted in its early stages (Afary & Anderson, 2005). 6. Scholars such as Sartre (1988) have made the distinction between the revolutionary and the rebel, explaining that the former looks beyond the present state of affairs with no attachment to it; the latter needs existing society as much as those empowered by it. 7. Dahms (2008) emphasizes that social scientists through theory must be able to acquire the ability to focus on specific relations and circumstances.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank Professors William I. Robinson, Kevin B. Anderson, Georgina Murray, Harry Dahms, and the anonymous reviewers at Current Perspectives in Social Theory for their feedback on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

REFERENCES Afary, J., & Anderson, K. (2005). Foucault and the Iranian revolution: Gender and the seductions of Islamism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Atasoy, Y. (2009). Hegemonic transitions, the state and crisis in neoliberal capitalism. London: Routledge. Baker, Y. K. (2009). Beyond the US Empire: The political economy of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. MA thesis. University of California, Santa Barbara. Balakrishnan, G. (Ed.) (2003). Debating Empire. London: Verso. Barrow, C. W. (1993). Critical theories of the state: Marxist, neo-Marxist, post-Marxist. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Bowring, F. (2004). From the mass worker to the multitude: A theoretical contextualisation of Hardt and Negri’s Empire. Capital & Class, 83, 101–132. Brennan, T. (2003). The Italian ideology. In: G. Balakrishnan (Ed.), Debating Empire (pp. 97–120). Callinicos, A. (2009). Imperialism and global political economy. London: Polity. Carroll, W. K. (2010). The making of a transnational capitalist class: Corporate power in the 21st century. London: Zed Books.

206

JEB SPRAGUE

Dahms, H. F. (2008). How social science is impossible without critical theory: The immersion of mainstream approaches in time and space. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 25, 3–61. Dicken, P. (2007). Global shift: Mapping the changing contours of the world economy. London: The Guilford Press. Eakin, E. (2001). What is the next big idea? The buzz is growing. New York Times. Retrieved from http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res¼9F03E5D91538F934A35754C0A9679C8 B63]. Accessed on September 20, 2010. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Random House, Inc. Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population (Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gramsci, A. (2010). Prison notebooks: Three volume set., New York: Columbia University Press. Green, M. (2010). Kabul pins hopes on vast iron deposits. Financial Times. Retrieved from http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ae530ac6-d562-11df-8e86-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid¼9c33700c4c86-11da-89df-0000779e2340.html Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2001). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Harris, J. (2006). The dialectics of globalization: Economic and political conflict in a transnational world. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press. Harvey, D. (1991). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc. Holloway, J. (2002). Change the world without taking power: The meaning of revolution today. London: Pluto Press. Jayasuriya, K. (1999). Globalization, law, and the transformation of sovereignty: The emergence of global regulatory governance. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 6(2), 425–455. Jayasuriya, K. (2001a). Globalisation and the changing architecture of the state: Regulatory state and the politics of negative coordination. Journal of European Public Policy, 8(1), 101–123. Jayasuriya, K. (2001b). Globalisation, sovereignty, and the rule of law: From political to economic constitutionalism. Constellations, 8(4), 442–460. Jayasuriya, K. (2004). Neoliberalism, securitisation and the new transnational regulatory governance. Asia Research Centre, 108. Retrieved from http://wwwarc.murdoch.edu.au/ wp/wp108.pdf Klein, N. (1999). No logo. New York: Picador. Liodakis, G. (2005). The new stage of capitalist development and the prospects of globalization. Science & Society, 69(3), 341–366. McMichael, P. (1996). Development and social change: A global perspective. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge. Porter, T. (2005). Globalization and finance. Cambridge: Polity. Poulantzas, N. (1978). State, power, socialism. London: NLB. Ritzer, G. (Ed.) (2007). Blackwell companion to globalization. Oxford: Blackwell.

Empire, Global Capitalism, and Theory: Reconsidering Hardt and Negri

207

Ritzer, G. (Ed.) (2012). Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of globalization. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell (Forthcoming). Robinson, W. I. (2001). Social theory and globalization: The rise of a transnational state. Theory and Society, 30(2), 157–200. Robinson, W. I. (2004). A theory of global capitalism: Production class, and state in a transnational world. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Robinson, W. I. (2007). Theories of globalization. In: G. Ritzer (Ed.), Blackwell companion to globalization (pp. 125–143). Robinson, W.I. (2010). Global capitalism theory and the emergence of transnational elite. Working Paper no. 2010/02. United Nations University, World Institute for Development Economics Research. Rodriguez, R. M. (2010). Migrants for export: How the Philippine state brokers labor to the world. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rose, C. (2001). A conversation with author Michael Hardt about globalization. Charlie Rose. Retrieved from http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/2596 Sakellaropoulos, S. (2007). Towards a declining state? The rise of the headquarters state. Science and Society, 71(1), 7–32. Sartre, J. P. (1988). ‘‘What is literature?’’ and other essays. London: Harvard University Press. Sassen, S. (2001). The global city: New York, London, Tokyo (2nd ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schiffrin, A., & Bisat, A. (Eds.). (2004). Covering globalization: A handbook for reporters. Sklair, L. (1991[1995]). Sociology of the global system. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Sklair, L. (1999). Competing conceptions of globalization. Journal of World-System Research, 5(2), 141–159. Sklair, L. (2001). The transnational capitalist class. Oxford: Blackwell. Sklair, L. (2002). Globalization: Capitalism and its alternatives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sklair, L. (2009). The emancipatory potential of generic globalization. Globalizations, 6(4), 525–539. Sprague, J. (2009). Transnational capitalist class in the global financial crisis: A discussion with Leslie Sklair. Globalizations, 6(4), 499–507. Sprague, J. (2010). Statecraft in the global financial crisis: A discussion with Kanishka Jayasuriya. Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, 3, 127–138. Sprague, J. (2011a). Review of Peter Dicken, global shift: Mapping the changing contours of the world economy. Journal of Sociology, 47(2), 219–221 (5th edn (2007)). Sprague, J. (2011b). Review of robyn magalit rodriguez, migrants for export: How the philippine state brokers labor to the world. Science & Society, 75(3), 442–444. Sprague, J. (2012a). Transnational State. In: Ritzer, G. (Ed.), Wiley-Blackwell encyclopedia of globalization (forthcoming). Sprague, J. (2012b). Paramilitarism and the demise of Haiti’s democracy. New York: Monthly Review Press (forthcoming). Struna, J. (2009). Toward a theory of global proletarian fractions. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, 8, 230–260. Van der Pijl, K. (1998). Transnational classes and international relations. London: Routledge. Wood, E. M. (2003a). A manifesto for global capital?. In: G. Balakrishnan (Ed.), Debating Empire (pp. 61–82). Wood, E. M. (2003b). Empire of capital. London: Verso.

ZˇIZˇEK’S NEGATIVE (POSITIVE) PROJECT OR, NEGATIVITY AS POSITIVE POSSIBILITY Geoff Pfeifer ABSTRACT Zˇizˇek has become both one of the dominant voices in current leftist cultural, social, and political critique and one of the most maligned. His work can be obscure, difficult to understand, and at times hyperbolic. Of particular difficulty is the attempt to discern a ‘‘positive’’ project in his work, as it seems that he is very good at offering us a sustained discussion of the difficulties of finding an oppositional stance to what he describes as our ‘‘current situation.’’ In fact, he is so good at this, that if we take him seriously it becomes hard to see a way out. Despite such appearances, Zˇizˇek’s work offers us a radical insight into the twin processes of the creation of the social and the creation of the subject (and their mutual interdependence) as well as a novel conception of the possibility of resistance and social change based on this process. Furthermore, we can best make sense of this theory of resistance as founded in what Zˇizˇek identifies as the ‘‘negative’’ moment. This moment brings with it the possibility of something which is not determined by the existing power structure, thus it brings with it the possibility of a universalist stance that is unconditioned by our ‘‘current situation.’’ It is not then, as some have argued, that Zˇizˇek’s privileging of the negative moment leads to a theory The Diversity of Social Theories Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Volume 29, 209–235 Copyright r 2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0278-1204/doi:10.1108/S0278-1204(2011)0000029015

209

210

GEOFF PFEIFER

of social change that cannot sustain a positive project, nor is it the case that Zˇizˇek’s theory of the negative serves as the first move upon which a positive project can be built. Zˇizˇek’s radical insight is that the negative moment can itself be a positive phenomenon. The proper negative act then is one which lays the foundation for social change by creating a radical form of subjectivity that serves as the basis for such change. In trying to explicate Zˇizˇek’s claims, what he is suggesting can be best understood by reference to Zˇizˇek’s Lacanian reading of Hegel’s theory of subjective freedom: freedom arising in the necessity that first defines (and confines) the subject. Keywords: Zˇizˇek; Hegel; Lacan; Marx; negativity; symbolic order; capitalism

And the sad thing is that, in a way, this is our situation today: today, after the breakdown of the Marxist notion that capitalism itself generates the force that will destroy it in the guise of the proletariat, none of the critics of capitalism, none of those who describe so convincingly the deadly vortex into which the so-called process of globalization is drawing us, has any well-defined notion of how we can get rid of capitalism. In short, I am not preaching a simple return to the old notions of class struggle and socialist revolution: the question of how it is really possible to undermine the global capitalist system is not a rhetorical one – maybe it is not really possible, at least not in the foreseeable future. (Zˇizˇek, 2000, p. 352)

Herbert Marcuse’s 1969 Essay on Liberation can help us illuminate Zˇizˇek’s point in the above quotation. In the introduction to that text, Marcuse rebukes the critical social theory of his era for ‘‘refraining from what might reasonably be called utopian speculation’’ and argues that ‘‘what is denounced as ‘‘utopian’’ is no longer that which has ‘‘no place’’ and cannot have any place in the historical universe, but rather that which is blocked from coming about by the power of the established societies’’ (Marcuse, 1969, pp. 3–4). The word ‘‘utopian’’ has come to signify any thinking that seeks to challenge the existing social structures and institutions. When the term is applied to such efforts to challenge existing conditions, the goal is to silence the challenge. A similar point underlies Zˇizˇek’s claims when he states that it is ‘‘impossible’’ to see how one might challenge capitalist globalism today. Such a challenge is not ‘‘foreseeable’’ precisely because the existing system of power and its structures exclude any real challenges from the realm of possibility, making them appear ‘‘utopian’’ in the Marcusian sense elaborated above.

Zˇizˇek’s Negative (Positive) Project

211

According to Zˇizˇek, any opposition that we now recognize as such is not really oppositional, it is rather that which is already sanctioned – and even constructed by – the existing social order. This process is described as a ‘‘forced choice,’’ in that we only appear to be given the choice between prescribed ways of protest or compliance. For Zˇizˇek, both of these choices really amount to the latter (2006, p. 331). This is, as Zˇizˇek describes it, akin to the Amish practice of the rumspringa. When Amish kids leave their communities and go out into the ‘‘world’’ for the rumspringa, they are faced with a forced choice: live in a world that appears to have no rules, or return to the well-ordered Amish community that they know so well. As Zˇizˇek points out, this is very effective; most kids generally decide to return after a year or two of transgressive activity. This happens precisely because most have made the (forced) choice to return prior to their beginning the rumspringa. Amish life is ingrained in them; it is the particular social and cultural structure in which they come to consciousness of themselves and their world. The period of the rumspringa always already appears to them as a temporary and limited suspension of the structure of the normal world (as defined by their Amish upbringing). This suspension of the structure itself, however, is that which is conditioned by, and thus a part of the normal world that they find themselves in. The effect of the rumspringa, then, is to provide for a kind of outlet for resistance, a time and place to resist, but one that reinforces – and is structured by – the existing order of the community itself (a kind of Amish ‘‘free speech zone’’ both temporally limited and spatially circumscribed). Zˇizˇek contends that if the rumspringa were to offer a real choice between the life of the Amish and the life of the modern world, the kids would ‘‘have to be properly informed about all of their options, educated in them – the only way to do this however, would be to extricate them from their embeddedness in the Amish community y that is, to make them ‘english’’’ (2006, p. 331). Even the postmodern attempt at asserting an oppositional stance (in the form of a politics of identity) has a similar structure to that of the rumspringa, according to Zˇizˇek, as it is always already co-opted by the existing order (and thus, not truly oppositional). This is because, it is ‘‘only against the background of capitalist globalization’’ that identity politics gains any traction to begin with. The concept of identity politics itself is the product of ‘‘the very way capitalist globalization affects our sense of ethnic and other forms of community belonging’’ (Zˇizˇek 2000, p. 210). The identities that we find ourselves with – and the ways that we understand those identities – are largely the products of the power-systemic

212

GEOFF PFEIFER

structures that exist at a given historical time and place. These structures interact with, and influence other historical and cultural norms, practices, and institutions in such a way as to transform and shape our relationships with them (and ultimately our relationship to our own identities). Insofar as it affects our understanding and relation to those identities that emerge in history, culture, tradition, capitalist globalization is the overarching power structure, or the ‘‘order,’’ within which we come to awareness of our identities, traditions, norms, and institutions and it has a decisive effect on them. For example – and we will have ample time below to discuss further problems with the existing order – it commodifies them, turning them into things to be bought and sold, and further, it places a kind of ‘‘market’’ value on them, making some identities and cultures ‘‘worth more’’ than others. Returning to the problem of identity politics, premise upon which it is predicated is that the existing order excludes those who claim this or that ‘‘identity’’ in some way, and that what is sought is a remedy to this exclusion by asserting a set of rights for those who lay claim to that identity. But based on the available evidence, the granting of such rights, when successful, merely appears to work to further integrate such identities back into the existing order – without engendering any kind of qualitative change. The paradoxical situation is that the identity of those seeking inclusion is both conditioned by the existing order – as this ‘‘identity’’ itself is shaped by the hypercapitalist world we live in – and at the same time, produced as that which is excluded by it. They are already structurally part of the system itself so not really excluded by it. As Zˇizˇek points out, this entire process is ‘‘negotiated within the ‘‘rational’’ global order allocating its particular component its proper place’’ (2000, p. 209). Zˇizˇek suggests that, ‘‘[w]hat we need today is the gesture that would undermine capitalist globalization from the standpoint of universal Truth’’ (2000, 211). Rather than an identity politics, which asserts a kind of positive claim to some set of ‘‘rights’’ within the existing social order for a particular oppressed identity, ‘‘the political gesture par excellence is y to question the concrete existing universal order on behalf of its symptom, of the part which, although inherent to the existing universal order, has no ‘‘proper place’’ within it’’ (Zˇizˇek 2000, p. 224). What is needed is precisely not a traditional ‘‘positive’’ political project in the sense of creating a (positive) space for the multiplicity of identities that exist at a given time, through the process of fighting for the extension of ‘‘rights’’ to those that do not have them. Rather, what is needed is a project that identifies that which is made ‘‘impossible’’ (the symptom) – or ‘‘utopian’’ in Marcuse’s sense – as the

Zˇizˇek’s Negative (Positive) Project

213

proper location from which to view the existing order. Consequently, it is not the positive properties of the symptom that we seek to promote, but rather its inherent negativity, as an exemplar of that which the order lacks the ability to synthesize and bring under its sway. This lack serves as a marker of the order’s non-totalizing nature as it is a site of exclusion, which the order seeks to cover over by making it impossible. What this points to is that any given order carries within it a lack as a necessary component of the order’s existence. Thus, to be able to view the order from the position of its symptom (that which is impossible) is to be able to see that it is not, so to speak, ‘‘the only game in town,’’ as it is from this viewpoint that one is able to see that it is incomplete and unstable. One of Zˇizˇek’s most conspicuous examples of such a symptom is the one that he (following Lacan) attributes to Marx: the recognition that the freedom to sell one’s labor in the market under capitalism is the symptomatic element of capitalism’s construction of the concept of ‘‘freedom’’ (1989, pp. 21–22). This ‘‘freedom’’ is precisely not a freedom; as it is in selling one’s labor on the market that one enslaves oneself (one loses one’s freedom). This is, nonetheless, precisely the (traumatic) thing that makes the capitalist system and its ‘‘freedoms’’ possible. Viewed from the position of the symptom then, the order itself – and all of the other ‘‘freedoms’’ that it lays claim to can be seen to be both problematic and unnecessary. This insight allows Marx to see the capitalism of his day as non-totalizing, as not the only social option, and thus to attempt to envision a social order that is oppositional to the existing order. In focusing on the impossible, along such lines, brings to light, in Hegelian terms, the ‘‘Truth’’ of the existing order, which is the recognition that it is not-all, and that it fails to totalize the social (the ‘‘truth’’ of the capitalist order’s notion of freedom is that it is purchased with the enslavement to capital, for example). This type of recognition offers the possibility of the order’s destabilization and the opening of the possibility of change. Furthermore, this insight is itself the ‘‘True’’ universal – that is, it is universally the case that no social order is ever closed and totalized, it always (and necessarily) includes an element that both serves as guarantee of its stability and possibility of its negation. So, the claim above, that there is no alternative to the existing capitalist global order appears to be valid. We are in a position of having to search for opposition from within the order itself – as its symptom, or in Hegelian terms, that which mediates it. In what follows I will attempt take seriously Zˇizˇek’s related claims. My goal is to show how, if we push Zˇizˇek’s conception of the revolutionary potential of the ‘‘symptom,’’ or the negative moment of a given social order,

214

GEOFF PFEIFER

to its limits, we can gain access to an understanding of the positive potential of such negativity. Rather than seeing the negative moment (or negation as such) as a purely destructive act (though we will have to confront this aspect of it also), we should regard it as constructive in that it is only in the space of negative moment that one becomes able to view the possibility of the new. In making this argument I will provide a kind of Hegelian reading of what I will call Zˇizˇek’s ‘‘positive’’ project, which can be best grasped if we attempt to think through Zˇizˇek’s privileging of the negative – or symptomatic – moment as this positive phenomena, as it is here that a truly oppositional stance can be founded. This requires the creation of a truly oppositional subject who will serve as the foundation upon which the oppositional stance is based and who will, in the end, create her own possibility. This will also lead us into a brief discussion of Zˇizˇek’s other main influence – Lacanian psychoanalytic theory – as it is against this background that I believe a proper understanding of Zˇizˇek’s reading of Hegel can be founded.

HEGEL: NEGATION, MEDIATION, AND CONTEXTUALIZATION For Hegel, the negative moment in the dialectical process is critical and the point where mediation occurs, and where what is properly ‘‘true’’ about the previous moment comes into view. It is here that we begin to discern that which before was not mediated (immediate, and not fully understood), in its fully expressed actuality, as the moment that is through the exclusion of that which it negates. In the mode of the immediate, one is under the illusion of having a kind of complete understanding, of knowledge being complete, closed, and whole. In the space of the negative moment, this understanding and the perceived whole – and its explanations – becomes inadequate and fall apart. What appeared to be complete, whole, and universal turns out not to apply, there is a lack – an inherent ‘‘not-all’’ in one’s knowledge – that is covered over by the perceived totality which is in the negative moment, laid bare in its incompleteness and which calls into question the previously experienced universality of knowledge. In order to better grasp this point we can look briefly at the opening sections of ‘‘Sense Certainty’’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology. On Hegel’s account, consciousness’s first attempts to understand its world are founded in taking that which comes to it through the senses for what is true. According to Hegel, what consciousness finds is that ‘‘the thing,’’

Zˇizˇek’s Negative (Positive) Project

215

namely, the object (or set of objects) that it receives through its senses, ‘‘is’’ (Hegel, 1977, p. 58). This is to say that the thing has a kind of abstract existence and that ‘‘it is merely because it is’’ (1977, p. 58). The multiplicity of things that are found in the world, appear to consciousness as necessarily fixed, determined, and differentiated in certain ways. Thus, what is true for consciousness at this stage is ‘‘this’’ thing, in its abstract existence, that is ‘‘here,’’ displayed in front of consciousness ‘‘now.’’ What is further revealed to consciousness in this moment is that the structure of the thing (the ‘‘This’’) is both ‘‘Now’’ and ‘‘Here’’ which then become the new determinations (or concepts) that need to be understood (1977, p. 60). Thus we could ask – as Hegel did – about the ‘‘Now’’ (the question is: what is the ‘‘Now?’’) and say, for instance, that the ‘‘Now is night’’ (this thing, that is here now, is night) but as we will quickly notice, that definition is only a fleeting one for it is the case that at some point the ‘‘Now’’ will not be night but it will be day (1977, p. 60). What this realization brings with it is a further determination and differentiation of the ‘‘now.’’ This is also – as is well known – Hegel’s description of how consciousness comes to discover universal concepts like ‘‘This,’’ ‘‘Now,’’ and ‘‘Here’’ out of the particulars to which they are initially applied in consciousness’ everyday dealings with the world. These universal concepts arise in and come to be known as a result of the experience of them as nonuniversal, fleeting, and contingent. The concept is brought to light in the negation of its particular (and contingent) determinations. In the negation of particular ‘‘nows’’ we come to understand the concept of ‘‘Now’’ itself, but this concept is not strictly identical with any of its particular instantiations, it is rather ‘‘not’’ any one of them. Thus what is also revealed in this is the primacy of the negative moment as Hegel shows us: The Now that is night is preserved, i.e. it is treated as what it professes to be, as something that is; but it proves itself to be on the contrary, something that is not. The Now does indeed preserve itself, but as something that is not night; equally it preserves itself in the face of the day that it now is, as something that is also not Day, in other words, as a negative in general (1977, p. 60).

What was first posited by the moment of sense certainty as the ‘‘Now’’ has become distinguished from its particulars, as it is not properly any one of them but rather a universal, which is at the same time all of its particular moments and none of them. This is, as we have seen, discovered through the negation of attempting to identify the universal ‘‘Now’’ with one of its particular instantiations, but this knowledge only comes after or as a result of a distancing of the starting point in which the universal is not universal

216

GEOFF PFEIFER

but rather particular and determined, but that which is particular and determined is perceived to be universal. Hegel conceives of knowledge as always being mediated by the negative moment. As we have seen in the example of consciousness’s coming to understand the concept of ‘‘Now’’ it first took what was immediately given as the truth of the ‘‘Now’’ (now is night) but then found that the negation of that idea (that the ‘‘Now’’ was not only to be identified with ‘‘night’’ but with ‘‘day’’ as well) exhibited the real ‘‘truth’’ of the first understanding of the term, namely that it was false, that is did not offer a completed definition – because now the ‘‘Now’’ is day, but this also becomes mediated in the recognition that the universal ‘‘Now’’ cannot be strictly identified with either of these particular instantiations of it, and is in fact radically different then, and not determined by, the particularity with which these instantiations appear. It is only in the negative moment, as that moment in which we come to see what is left out by our current knowledge of things, that we come to see what is universal and hence ‘‘True’’ about the nature of our current mode of knowing (that it is always inadequate, that it always leaves something out, that it is what it is based on this exclusion). Furthermore, consciousness itself is what it is at any given moment as a product of such inadequacies – its own determinations are only what they are as a result of a kind of foundational exclusion that only shows itself in existence in the moment of negation. We should briefly recall that for Hegel, like Kant before him, the ‘‘objective’’ world in which we live is the product of the interaction between consciousness (as that which organizes, imposes meaning, and ‘‘knows’’) and what is affected by it. Recall the Kantian idea of consciousness as a ‘‘receptive spontaneity’’; consciousness receives information and then spontaneously organizes it (according to the structures it imposes on this information) so that it can be understood, or ‘‘known.’’ It is not, on Kant’s accounting of things, the objects of experience that modify our consciousness but rather our consciousness that modifies the objects of experience so that they can be comprehended (Kant, 1998). Hegel wishes to accept a portion of the Kantian claim. He does think, along with Kant, that the subjective conditions of experience cannot be changed by objects and that objects are in fact determined by consciousness and are grounded in such determinations. However, Hegel wants to argue that the subjective conditions of experience do in fact change, even though they are not affected by the object. They change historically, as people and cultures change.

Zˇizˇek’s Negative (Positive) Project

217

Hegel reconceives of the ground of both the objective world and the individual self as being found in the struggle for recognition and the movement from individual desire to a communally agreed upon set of ‘‘truths’’ that form and shape our experiences of our world and our understanding of ourselves. Knowledge – and the knower – is determined by our pragmatic concerns and our active dealings with one another in the community. What is true is, in fact, determined by self-consciousness but is so in reference to what self-consciousness is concerned with, and this is primarily determined by the concerns of the historically located community. Thus, self-consciousness is conditioned by the social. Objects in the world are conditioned by self-consciousness’s desire, or lack of desire, for them. However, this also is not merely the desire of a single self-consciousness, but that of a historical community. It is Hegel’s description of self-consciousness as founded in the struggle for recognition that gives us a conception of identity in which identities are determined and understood in relation to a historically contingent and changing communal consciousness – ‘‘Spirit’’ in Hegel’s terminology – of what is to be desired. To be sure, individual consciousness still exists, but it is grounded in a pre-existent communal consciousness, that is already meaning-laden and unfolds according to a certain historical-communal understanding what is valued and meaningful. It is out of the already meaning-laden world that the individual consciousness arises and thus that world reflects back to the individual those things which make up its self-understanding. Thus, self-consciousness always begins as, or finds itself, determined and differentiated. The crucial aspect of this to see is that this determinism is historical, the identity of individual self-consciousness is the product of the communal modes of knowing (in the same way that knowledge itself is). In commenting on this Zˇizˇek notes that: Hegel of course learned the lesson of Kant’s transcendental idealism (there is no reality prior to a subject’s positing activity); however, he refused to elevate the subject into a neutral-universal agent who directly constitutes reality. To put it in Kantian terms: while he admitted there is no reality without the subject, Hegel insisted that subjectivity is inherently pathological (biased, limited to a distorting, unbalanced perspective of the whole). (Zˇizˇek, 2000, p. 78)

Zˇizˇek’s point is that the Hegelian subject both organizes and is organized by its world. In order for any world to show up, it must be organized by a conscious subject. The reality that such subjects posit, however, is always limited by the context within which they are found. There is (at least initially) no non-pathological subject. If all subjects are pathological in this

218

GEOFF PFEIFER

sense, then all are contingently constructed in their subjecthood. Subjectivity is a product of the various differences and modes of knowledge that exist at a given time, so subjectivity itself (and all of its differences) is the contingent product of history. As such, it serves to ground and sustain those differences. This is ground, however, is so only so on the condition that it excludes that which it negates (i.e., universality itself). In some versions of the Hegelian story, the dialectic – and thus history itself – comes to an end in ‘‘Absolute Knowing’’ where the subject and its object coincide completely in higher level which takes both out of the realm of the historical (finite) existence and into the ahistorical (infinite), at this moment, there is no longer anything left out in knowledge and existence and, in turn, there is no longer any negativity but rather an infinite ‘‘whole’’ (Kojeve, 1980). This, however, is not Zˇizˇek’s version of the story. Zˇizˇek explains the moment of ‘‘Absolute Knowing’’ not as a grasping of the Absolute in which we gain a way out of the historical process through an understanding that becomes infinite and thus ends negation, but rather ‘‘ y we fail to grasp the Absolute precisely insofar as we continue to presuppose that, above and beyond the domain of our finite reflected reasoning, there is an Absolute to be grasped’’ (2000, p. 84). It is precisely within the confines of our finite reasoning that we come to know the Absolute Truth, which is simply that ‘‘there is no Absolute beyond or above the reflexive oppositions and contradictions of the Finite – the Absolute is nothing but the movement of self-sublation of these finite determinations’’ (2000, p. 84). This is the source of Zˇizˇek’s materialist reading of Hegel. For Zˇizˇek’s Hegel there is no outside, we are always already included in the world that we construct in our modes of coming to know it. Furthermore, this world is as it is on the condition of the modes of understanding that are employed by us, which are not constructed ex nihilo but rather are themselves found – that is, the results of the historical, embodied activity of humans. These modes themselves become what they are by being embodied, in both individuals and the material practices in which they engage. Thus, what is ‘‘Absolute’’ is precisely the historicity of systems of knowing (founded on the dialectic of negation and mediation), the contingent and historical world that these create (and reflexively creates it), and the contingent, differentiated subjects that are born out of this. The Hegelian Absolute is nothing other than this process itself and ‘‘absolute knowing’’ is nothing more than the awareness of this fact. Zˇizˇek’s appropriation of Hegel can be further clarified by his reading of this through the eyes of Lacan.

Zˇizˇek’s Negative (Positive) Project

219

LACAN, ORDER IN LANGUAGE (THE SYMBOLIC) AND THE REAL AS NEGATION What I wish to focus on are two key ingredients of Lacan’s thought, namely the ‘‘symbolic’’ as that which structures and organizes, and the ‘‘real’’ to be read here (Following Zˇizˇek’s reading of Lacan) as that which is the symptom of the symbolic in the sense described above (i.e., both inherent to and generated by the symbolic, but also that which acts to disrupt its continuity and universality). Seen in this way, the ‘‘real’’ can be viewed as the properly negative moment of the symbolic. For Lacan, like Hegel, we come to understand the world and ourselves through a kind of interaction in which both become organized, ordered and meaning-laden. One of the ways that we can understand this is through Lacan’s analysis of the foundational nature of language. Language functions as the primary mode through which this ordering happens. Here he writes, ‘‘through the word y there is born the world of meaning of a particular language in which the world of things will come to be arranged’’ (Lacan, 1977, p. 65). The arranging of the world through language, however, immediately takes on a more foundational tone as Lacan goes on to claim that it is not merely through language that the world gets organized but that in fact it is ‘‘the world of words that create the world of things’’ and this means that the world is what it is as the product of language (1977, p. 65). As Lacan sees it, the structures of language and the meanings that these structures create impose organization not only on the world, but on us also and this process happens in an altogether unconscious fashion. We do not recognize this imposition of structure as such because it is inscribed in, and the foundation of, our very conscious awareness of both ourselves and the world in which we find ourselves. We only come to consciousness within the world that exists as result of language; and language and meaning is the result of an ongoing material and historical process. Thus, it is language and its historically located structures and meanings that are constitutive of our very experience (and our very world). This process is, according to Lacan, the process that Freud is metaphorically describing when he discusses the foundational nature of the Taboo against incest in his Totem and Taboo. Here Lacan writes, ‘‘the primordial Law [prohibition of incest] is therefore that which in regulating marriage ties, superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of a nature abandoned to the law of mating y This law then, is revealed clearly enough as identical with an order of language’’ (1977, p. 67). It is with language, in its unconscious (constitutive imaginary) imposition of order through its

220

GEOFF PFEIFER

creation of the world of things, that humans are, to speak metaphorically, raised out of an animal-like existence in which the world exhibits itself as unorganized and capricious and we merely act on instincts (as in the case of killing the father out the desire for the mother in Freud’s story). This is because the order of language imposes an order on this instinct and caprice such that it becomes regulated. Speaking nonmetaphorically, it is language which orders and constitutes both consciousness itself – and the multiple and different identities that particular consciousness take on – and allows for the differentiation and categorization of consciousness’s objects. Lacan continues: Symbols [words, languages, grammars] in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender him by ‘‘flesh and blood’’; so total that they bring to his birth, along with the gift of the stars, if not the gifts of the fairies, the shape of his destiny. (1977, p. 68)

This is similar to the point that Hegel makes about the nature of knowledge being determined by the community. It is within the order and the meanings that are present in a sociohistorical situation that the subject comes to self-awareness and awareness of his world as ordered, categorized, and differentiated in a particular way. Thus, this awareness, while productive of both the subject and the object, is always conditioned by this preexisting social and historical situation. Nevertheless, all of this is only possible in the mode of the symbolic, through the positing of a subject who, in the use of linguistic utterances to refer, is himself established as a particular kind of subject within a communal context in which those linguistic utterances refer to something that is recognizable by others in that community. I become such a subject when I enter into the network of the symbolic, when I begin to learn the language of my community and come to understand myself in relation to it. It calls me into existence in a particular way through its structures, which are imposed on me whenever I respond to the linguistic call of others in my community who use these structures to refer to me. The call is what in Lacanian terms structures and is structured by the symbolic. I become a unified being in my relation to the ‘‘Other’’ of the symbolic, which calls on me to perform certain actions that interpellate (or draw me together) as its subject.1 When my students address me as a teacher it is to their call that I am subordinated. Here I am ‘‘subjectivized’’ as a teacher and along with that, come all of the trappings of the position of authority. The power that I seem to hold in such a position is not something which I do in fact hold, rather I am held by it, that is to say I only ‘‘have’’

Zˇizˇek’s Negative (Positive) Project

221

such power in virtue of the social recognition that I am accorded and it is this recognition that constructs my very subjectivity as one who has such power. In the same way, when I am called out to by someone else who holds a position of power, my advisor for example, not only does my subjective position become cemented, but so does his (and all of the power that comes along with it for him, and for me, all the lack of power that comes along with my recognition of his call). It is this interpellative mechanism that, writ large, structures one’s world and the meanings that are possible for one by designating the symbolic coordinates of her understanding of both herself and her world. However, as we should be able to see, even though language (and the symbolic order) and its processes of differentiation and meaning giving, appear as totalizing (in the same way that the coordinated desires of a community attempt to totally determine what is meaningful for Hegel), the ordering/structuring move itself generates its own obstruction, its symptom, as that which signifies its failure to totalize. Here Lacan describes an opposition between speech and language and reminds us of some conditions under which language (as the imposed order/ordering act) fails in its attempted totalizing structuring. One of these is found in what are taken by the symbolic structures of a given language to be incomprehensible utterances (speech) of the insane, where ‘‘speech has given up trying to make itself recognized’’ (1977, p. 70). Speech, then, is not exhaustively structured by language. Speech can be unstructured and point to something that is excluded by the structures of any given linguistic system. It is precisely these incomprehensible utterances that form the inherent borders of that system itself. Nevertheless this ‘‘exclusion’’ is also the condition upon which a given language comes to signify, so it is also a part of it. In Zˇizˇek’s terms, it is ‘‘the part which, although inherent to the existing universal order, has no ‘proper place’ within it’’ (Zˇizˇek, 2000, p. 224). This is how Zˇizˇek understands the Lacanian notion of the Real: as that which is both generated by the symbolic, and that which forms its immanent limitation or, as Zˇizˇek in a recent discussion of this point puts it, ‘‘The Real is not the transcendent substantial reality which from outside disturbs the Symbolic balance, but the immanent obstacle, stumbling block, of the order itself’’ (ZˇiZˇek, 2008a, p. 319). Recall again the example given at the outset of this chapter of the symptom of capitalist freedom (the enslavement to capital and wage labor). This is effectively the immanently generated real of capitalist freedom, it is its inherent obstacle, it is that which lies at the foundation of the system and that which threatens its stability and must be covered over by ideology and its attempted assertion of closure.

222

GEOFF PFEIFER

This is the further foundations of Zˇizˇek’s understanding of the negative moment in the Hegelian dialectic. That which forms the negative moment of any given historical mode of understanding is identified by Zˇizˇek with the Lacanian ‘‘real,’’ and this is, as described above, nothing other than the symptom of that given moment’s perceived universality. Now that we can see the ways in which Zˇizˇek’s readings of Hegel and Lacan interpenetrate and inform his particular theoretical position, we can turn back to the project at hand, namely, the attempt to make sense of, take seriously, and push forward Zˇizˇek’s conception of the grounds for possibility of social change.

THE REVOLUTION OF PRIVILEGING THE NEGATIVE As noted at the outset, Zˇizˇek claims that there is not an existing alternative or oppositional possibility to the global (i.e., capitalist) order that exists now, and that because of this, we must find an oppositional stance within the order itself. We can now further understand this claim against the theoretical background that I have just described. The order that is imposed on the world (within which we also come to understand ourselves, what is deemed meaningful by inter-subjective desire in Hegel, and the order of the symbolic in Lacan) contains within it, the moment of negativity (as that through which it comes to be what it is) and this moment is the part of the order which has no place in it. This is the ‘‘impossible’’ truth that can serve as the ground for real resistance. It is in the space of the negative moment that we are able to grasp the non-universality of the system itself through the recognition of its failure to totalize. Further, identification with the negative moment can found a kind of Universal Truth that is unconditioned by the existing order. This is to say, that because it is not conditioned by the differentiation and categorization inherent to the symbolic order, as it is here that that very differentiation breaks down, fails and finds its limit, this ‘‘Truth’’ simply cannot be relative because there is nothing for it to be relative to. Thus, in the space provided by the negative moment, the order itself is divested of its ordering activity. On Zˇizˇek’s account, the negative moment (or Real of the system) finds its material expression in those things (and people) that are produced as ‘‘left out’’ by the global capitalist system as the particular symptomatic expressions of the Order’s universal failure to totalize – that is, any given

Zˇizˇek’s Negative (Positive) Project

223

historical order is going to be universally unable to be wholly closed – there are always gaps that can be exploited in favor of change. We should recall, however, that Zˇizˇek does not think that what should be done about the moment of negativity, is to act on behalf of those particular identities or possibilities that are constructed as oppressed in an attempt to include them, as not only are they already included in their very construction as the particular and determined identities that they are, but further, to do this merely leads to a means through which the system can further co-opt and re-inscribe the negative moment within itself. Here Zˇizˇek writes: I am therefore tempted to reverse Marx’s thesis 11: the first task of today is precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act, to intervene directly and change things y If today we follow the direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space – it will be an act within the hegemonic ideological coordinates. (Zˇizˇek 2002, p. 170)

The problem is not only with identity politics in its seeking to gain rights for those excluded by the system within the system (thus reintegrating them), but that any attempt to subvert the system by acting in this way, is to act in the ways the system already allows for (ways that are already inscribed within the symbolic order). This is because the point from which such action takes its leave is a point that is created and sustained by the symbolic coordinates themselves. So, movements like Greenpeace, feminism, and the anti-globalization movement, though the intent is ‘‘honorable’’ according to Zˇizˇek, all end up acting in ways that system itself supports (or can easily come to support) and thus merely exhibit what Zˇizˇek calls ‘‘interpassivity’’ (2002, p. 170). He explains that this kind of activity is really: doing things not in order to achieve something, but to prevent something from really happening, really changing. All this frenetic humanitarian, Politically Correct, etc., activity fits the formula of ‘‘lets go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same.’’ (2002, p. 170)

When we recognize the negative moment, when we see that there is something left out of the system and thus grab on to it and raise that particular thing up as what needs to change we remain within the coordinates of the system and really operate in its service – recall Zˇizˇek’s analogy to the rumspringa – what we do is attempt to make a space within the system for that thing which the system itself has produced as excluded, oppressed, or repressed; and we do this in the ways that the system itself prescribes, thereby not really changing the overall landscape. It might be useful at this point to think through the implications of the above argument against what has been termed ‘‘interpassivity.’’ What

224

GEOFF PFEIFER

exactly is it that is wrong with existing modes of protest or attempts at the modification of the current system so as to make it less repressive/ exclusionary? Why shouldn’t we just give up on the belief that radical revolutionary change is possible or necessary? Why shouldn’t we simply reject Zˇizˇek’s call for revolutionary change? I think the best response to this can be given in reference to what Zˇizˇek calls ‘‘systemic violence’’ (Zˇizˇek, 2008b, p. 22). The reason that we should not content ourselves with acting in the prescribed ways of protest, or doing what the system allows in our attempts at modification is that, as pointed out above, it will really change nothing to do this. The system as it stands now brings with it (as a part of its structure) certain forms of violence that cannot be done away with without radical change. For instance, we might take the example of the ‘‘fair trade’’ movement. Many in the developed world pride themselves on buying ‘‘fair trade’’ goods (from coffee to clothing) and see this as a form of progressive activism. The fair trade movement promises that those who produce items that are marked ‘‘fair trade’’ are paid just wages and are taught to build business models that are sustainable and help their communities raise themselves out of poverty and disadvantage and so forth. Thus, buying ‘‘fair trade’’ is a form of advocating for the rights of those that are oppressed that is sanctioned by the current capitalist system. The problem here is that, though this does contribute to the improvement of living conditions of those that produce fair trade products, the act of buying fair trade does not really confront the underlying cause of the poverty/oppression in the first place. It is a band-aid like activity in which those in the developed world avoid the fact that the poverty/exploitation/ oppression that exists in places that the fair trade movement seeks to benefit is the direct result of the capitalist exploitation that is the backbone of the developed world itself. This is true of other forms of ‘‘humanitarian’’ intervention as well, such as charity, as Zˇizˇek nicely points out: Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation. In a superego blackmail of gigantic proportions, the developed countries ‘‘help’’ the undeveloped with aid, credits, and so on, and thereby avoid the key issue, namely their complicity, and co-responsibility for the miserable situation of the undeveloped. (2008b, p. 22)

To be sure, it is not as if each individual in developed countries that contributes to charities, or buys fair trade products is personally responsible for the exploitation of those in the undeveloped world. It is not as if the average person in the developed world intentionally sets out to exploit

Zˇizˇek’s Negative (Positive) Project

225

others, this exploitation is built into the system itself (hence the term systemic violence). Here again Zˇizˇek is helpful: It is the self-propelling metaphysical dance of capital that runs the show, that provides the key to real life developments and catastrophes. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than any direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable concrete individuals and their ‘‘evil’’ intentions, but is purely ‘‘objective,’’ systemic, anonymous. (2008b, pp. 12–13)

This type of violence cannot be combated through the prescribed modes and attempts at modification – these exist as inherent to the system. What is needed is a position outside the constellation of possibilities for action granted by the system itself if one is to find a truly oppositional position; one that can bring with it the possibility of ending the systemic violence. This, as I have been arguing (in concert with Zˇizˇek) requires thought and action that is removed from the everyday quotidian modes of thinking and action, and can only come from a kind of radical privileging of the moment of absolute negativity. Instead of seeking inclusion and hence, a ‘‘positive’’ position within the pathological ‘‘universal’’ order of difference, we should locate ‘‘the point of inherent exception/exclusion, the ‘‘abject,’’ of the concrete positive order as the only point of true universality’’ (Zˇizˇek 2000, p. 84). Instead of seeking rights, or space within the system (seen as the universal from this perspective) what we must do is reverse the claim to universality and instead of looking at the point of negation as a particular thing which the universal system leaves out. This requires a shift in our understanding of what is universal from the system as the site of universality – the universal order of existing particular determination – to the negative moment as the proper site of the universal. It is only in this moment that the order is divested of its structure and hence what is in the moment of negativity, is that which is universally unstructured. This would mean, however, giving up the particular content found within that moment (and all of the particularity that is founded by the order more generally) and instead staking out a claim to a continual, (universal) oppositional stance that finds itself emptied of its particular content. But how could such a thing be accomplished in the realm of the political? We might look to what Zˇizˇek has to say about this in relation to the example of the Hindu protests against McDonalds in India. These protests were organized against McDonalds because they had neglected to reveal the fact that the potato chips that they sold in India had been fried in beef fat. In response to these protests McDonalds changed its policies and the protesters

226

GEOFF PFEIFER

were satisfied. Zˇizˇek writes that this satisfaction on the protester’s part shows that: Far from undermining globalization, this protest against McDonalds, and the company’s quick answer, embody the Hindus’ perfect integration into the diversified global order y on a purely formal level, the Hindu’s defense of their tradition is already inscribed in the logic of modernity, that it is already a ‘‘reflected’’ gesture: the Hindu’s have chosen (to remain faithful to) their tradition, thereby transforming this tradition into one of the many options available to them. (Zˇizˇek 2002, p. 172)

What initially looks like a point of opposition – the rallying point provided by the omission of the traditional Hindu belief in the sacredness of the cow and thus an abstention from eating beef – has been easily reincorporated into the existing order by simply succumbing to the particular demands being made and thus pacifying (and further incorporating) those that were left out. Zˇizˇek imagines another scenario in which McDonalds still gives the Hindu protestors what they want and stops using the beef fat, but instead of feeling vindicated by this action, the protestors ‘‘somehow felt frustrated’’ because ‘‘by complying with their literal demands, McDonalds prevented them from articulating their more fundamental protest against Western cultural imperialism’’ and perpetuated a lie that the company was still using the beef fat which ended in ‘‘a popular revolt against cultural imperialism with some actual emancipatory results’’ (2002, pp. 172–173). The lie serves as the means through which a larger truth finds expression. This requires identifying not with the particular things that are left out by the existing order (as in the case of the Hindu’s particular claim above) but rather an identification of that particular claim with a more universal claim that asks not for reintegration, but a standing opposition, an identification not with the system and a seeking of rights within it, but rather an identification of that particular thing that is excluded (in this case the recognition of the Hindu’s tradition as something which matters) as a particular instantiation of a much more universal phenomenon, namely the symptomatic moment itself, the moment of universal exclusion and one in which we want to remain in the place of exclusion. Again Zˇizˇek writes: leftist universalism proper does not involve any kind of return to some neutral universal content (a common notion of humanity, etc.); rather it refers to a universal which comes to exist only in a particular element which is structurally displaced, ‘‘out of joint’’: within a given social Whole, it is precisely the element which is prevented from actualizing its full particular identity that stands for its universal dimension. (Zˇizˇek 2000, p. 224)

Zˇizˇek’s Negative (Positive) Project

227

The point is again, that the particular thing that gets left out, that is ‘‘prevented from actualizing its full particular identity’’ within a given order, is merely a particular expression of a more universal event – or rather nonevent – it is an expression of the universal excluding power of the global order itself. This ‘‘comes into existence’’ as it is created by the excluding power that the order exerts as it continues to propagate itself. What this means is that the possibility of universality itself, is produced by the historically contingent ordering process as I have described it in both Hegelian and Lacanian terms (as the negative moment of the dialectic, or the ‘‘real’’ which is produced as excluded). It is here that we should locate resistance proper. So what is needed is not an oppositional focus on each particular determinate expression of the exclusion, but rather a focus on the (indeterminate) universal event of exclusion itself. One sides with exclusion itself not in its particular forms, but rather in its universal form as that which opens up a contradiction in the order by the very nature of its existence as a lack, and then attempts to stake out an opposition based on this. As Zˇizˇek helps to point out, we can reintroduce a split in the existing order which will ultimately lead to a reinvention of ‘‘politics proper’’ by setting up a true opposition between ‘‘Us’’ and ‘‘Them’’ through a radical identification with the symptom. This means, as we have seen, that what cannot be done is to seek to create a space for this opposition within the existing order (as that would be to merely seek a positive solution, to cling to the determinate content of the symptom and not to the negative moment itself) but rather to avoid doing this at every opportunity and instead adhering to the negative universality of that which is excluded. This would then be the ‘‘empty universality’’ that is the true opposition to all positive content found in the existing order and can serve as the ground of an opposition that is truly universal in nature because of its emptying of all determination (Zˇizˇek 2000, p. 244). Zˇizˇek calls this position the ‘‘impossible/real demand of abstract universality’’ simultaneously referring here to the Lacanian ‘‘real’’ which as we have seen is that which is the repressed, covered over, and not integratable ‘‘impossibility’’ of the symbolic order and the Hegelian notion of an abstract universality which is one that is without content and thus empty (2000, pp. 223–224). This, of course, identifies clearly what Zˇizˇek is after but it also clearly identifies the problems that we are faced with in attempting to implement the kind of oppositional project that Zˇizˇek wants.

228

GEOFF PFEIFER

POSITIVE NEGATIVITY: THE REVOLUTIONARY SUBJECT The problem with this account is that it becomes hard to envision what this kind of opposition might look like. If the universality that one is supposed to identify with cannot have any particular content, then one can never definitively say, ‘‘it is on these particular things which I stand’’ because whatever those things are will always be able to be brought back into the system. Furthermore, to give a particular content to one’s oppositional claim is to already participate in the existing order and thus to already allow the possibility of reintegration. What such an oppositional position requires then, is a subject that is removed from the order itself. Zˇizˇek struggles throughout his works to articulate the conditions of existence for such a subject. He knows very well (given his Lacanian/ Hegelian analysis) all of the ways in which our very subjectivity is first and foremost the product of the particular order in which we find ourselves and how that order presents itself to us as completed and whole. I wish to focus on one of the many figures that Zˇizˇek attempts to use to offer a description of what he has is mind in attempting to make sense of a truly oppositional subject. This is his analysis of the figure of Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener in the short story that bears his name. As the story goes, Bartleby, when asked to do just about anything responds with the phrase ‘‘I prefer not to’’ (Melville, 2000, pp. 639–678). Through its repetition, this act can come to negating the order that gives rise to it, as it literally becomes an unconditional refusal that stops making sense from within the symbolic/ ideological space of reasons. Such a refusal, as Zˇizˇek puts it, ‘‘ y is a signifier turned object, a signifier reduced to an inert stain that stands for the collapse of the symbolic order’’ (2006, p. 383). He continues: The withdrawal expressed by ‘‘I would prefer not to’’ is not to be reduced to the attitude of ‘‘saying no to empire’’ but, first and foremost, to all the wealth of what I have called the rumspringa of resistance, all the forms of resistance which help the system reproduce itself by insuring our participation in it. (2006, p. 383)

What Bartleby’s move does, according to Zˇizˇek, is call the perceived universality of the system into question not simply by ‘‘saying no to empire,’’ but by saying no to the structure itself through a refusal to participate in the forms of action that are sanctioned by it. The motivation for this action is first found within the existing symbolic order; one is called upon to act in a certain manner that is fitting of a certain kind of subject but

Zˇizˇek’s Negative (Positive) Project

229

the response (the ‘‘I would prefer not to’’) acts as a rejection of both that call and the subjectivity that it addresses. What I wish to do in this last section is to try to read the Hegelian background back into Zˇizˇek’s analysis here in an attempt to clarify a position that both Zˇizˇek himself, and many of his commentators have struggled to articulate. The problem has been that in describing Bartleby (and other similar characters such as Tyler of the movie Fight Club) as Zˇizˇek’s ideal of a revolutionary subject who is able to come to identify with and sustain the Real of the Order, what most commentators – and sometimes even Zˇizˇek himself – tend to focus on is the inherent negative, violent, and destructive action of these figures. In doing this many claim that Zˇizˇek’s solution remains at worst, mired in a simple destructive – or suicidal – act that seems incapable of supporting a positive political project or alternatively at best, favors the destructive act as the necessary first move in creating a new oppositional possibility. For example, Jodi Dean in her excellent book Zˇizˇek’s Politics, writes of Zˇizˇek’s reading of Bartleby, ‘‘I confess that it is difficult for me to see how such a preference is not, in fact, the provocation of a catastrophe in hope that the act will somehow occur y In a way, Bartleby is less an alternative than he is a realization, an acknowledgement of the contemporary political impasse’’ (2006, pp. 130–131). Another example of such a reading is the one that Adrian Johnston offers in his most recent book, Badiou, Zˇizˇek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change.2 Here Johnston offers a reading of the second kind described above. He argues that, ‘‘Zˇizˇek believes that the current ideological slate must first be wiped clean through a thorough theoretical critique, through critical thinking rather than uncritical doing, before anything genuinely transformative in a radical sense is possible. In short, negativity must precede positivity’’ (2009, p. 158). Both of these readings, in different ways, fail to recognize that the negation affected in the move that is described by Zˇizˇek (like of Bartleby) is not a simple suicidal or destructive act that clears the way for a positive project. Johnston gets it partially correct but misses the simultaneous coming into being of the positive possibility. As my reading of this through the eyes of Zˇizˇek’s (Lacanian) Hegel makes clear, Bartleby’s is itself an act that supplies its own content and is thus not purely negative, or to put this a different way, the negativity inherent in the refusal, is also at the same moment the creation of a new possibility and is in this way, simultaneously positive in its negation. Thus, it is not really a suicidal act at all, it is a recognition of the power that comes with the rejection of the perceived externality (and completeness) of the order in which the subject finds herself.

230

GEOFF PFEIFER

Recall that according to Lacan, we become the kinds of beings that we are in relation to the Symbolic, which both call us into existence (interpellates us) and makes up the background of meaning for the world which we experience. In Bartleby’s case this interpellative process begins when he is called upon by his boss to perform a certain task that fits his position, namely to look over, and transcribe some documents to which he responds for the first time with the famous phrase. It is within the world of structured and ordered meanings that appear to Bartleby as being fixed and external to him, that Bartleby first commits himself to his cause: to respond to the interpellative call with a refusal. In the commitment to (repetitious) refusal, however, the destitution of the particular contents (and meanings) of the order/ordering mechanism is secured. The key point to see here is that through its repetition, the refusal itself, has the same interpellative effect as the initial call, but this time it is Bartleby’s own commitment to the cause that acts as the thing which constitutes him as a subject and not the call issuing from the symbolic. Thus it is his own act that interpellates him. Here we find ourselves not only in Lacan’s territory but also in Hegelian waters. The act that Bartleby brings about is akin to the action effected by consciousness’s move to skepticism in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Recall skepticism as: a moment of self-consciousness, to which it does not happen that its truth and reality vanish without its knowing how, but which in the certainty of its freedom, makes this ‘‘other’’ which claims to be real, vanish. What skepticism causes to vanish is not only objective reality as such, but its own relationship to it. (Hegel 1977, p. 124)

Self-consciousness recognizes the contingent nature of what it once took to be necessary – the necessity that is destroyed is nothing other than selfconsciousness’s relationship to the external Other, in the form of the Lord, who has determined its existence up to this point. The same holds true for Bartleby’s refusal to do what he is asked. Zˇizˇek writes: His ‘‘I would prefer not to’’ is to be taken literally: it says ‘‘I would prefer not to,’’ not ‘‘I don’t prefer (or care) to’’ y In his refusal of the Master’s order, Bartleby does not negate the predicate, rather he affirms the non-predicate: he does not say that he doesn’t want to do it, he says that he prefers (wants) not to do it. This is how we pass from the politics of ‘‘resistance’’ or ‘‘protestation,’’ which parasites on what it negates, to a politics which opens up a new space outside the hegemonic position and its negation. (2006, pp. 381–382)

Returning to Hegel, we can see the relationship between what Zˇizˇek is pointing out and the moment of skepticism. In the active negation of the Master’s world (the world in which the skeptic was once immersed and

Zˇizˇek’s Negative (Positive) Project

231

presented itself as a necessary and transcendent world) the skeptic finds himself to have a minimal freedom: necessity disappears for self-consciousness – not as it did in past moments, without its knowledge of how or why – but rather selfconsciousness recognizes that it is the one who has made this necessity disappear, that this change issues from it. It accomplishes this by negating all positive content that comes to it from without. As with Bartleby, who says ‘‘I would prefer not to’’ in response to any attempt to get him to act, in his own negative activity, the skeptic frees himself from the earlier relationship he had to the master. Freedom is thus tied directly to this act as Hegel notes, ‘‘through this self-conscious negation it [self-consciousness] procures for its own self the certainty of its freedom, generates the experience of that freedom, and thereby raises it to truth’’ (Hegel 1977, p. 124). It is only in the practice of active negation of all seemingly external positive content that freedom from the enslavement to the other is realized. It is critical that we recognize that this freedom is not something that existed prior to this action (and just needs to be realized). For Hegel, freedom can only appear on the scene in this activity, self-consciousness was not free at all until its own action gave it that possibility. This freedom is immanently generated in the act of negation. To be sure, initially, the negative action of the skeptic, is tied to the positive order as Hegel notes: It [self-consciousness] pronounces an absolute vanishing, but the pronouncement is, and this consciousness is the vanishing that is pronounced. It affirms the nullity of seeing, hearing etc., yet it itself is seeing, hearing etc., It affirms the nullity of ethical principles and lets its conduct be governed by these principles y it has itself the doubly contradictory consciousness of changeableness and sameness, and of utter contingency and non-identity with itself. (1977, 124)

The upshot of this, however, is that here consciousness experiences this split (the split between its activity of negation and the positive content which the negation is tied to) not as a split external to itself but rather one that cuts across the very center of its being: both the positive order and its negation are found to be (through this action) within self-consciousness, within it as a subject. Hegel continues: Skepticism’s lack of thought about itself must vanish, because it is in fact one consciousness which contains within itself these two modes. This new form is, therefore, one which knows that it is the dual consciousness of itself, as self-liberating, unchangeable, and self-identical, and as self-bewildering and self-perverting, and it is the awareness of this self-contradictory nature of itself. (1977, 126)

232

GEOFF PFEIFER

What propels the forward movement of the dialectic here (for Hegel) is the new found awareness of the split as not one of external imposition/ internal negation but rather that both of these sides are inherent in the subject. The subject is both that which acts to negate the order and that which, through this negation becomes (for itself) unchangeable and stable – it enacts its own stability in its continued negative activity. The subject recognizes his own inherent potential in this. The same is true for Bartleby: he becomes the thing that he is through the continued negation of commands that come from without. In doing this, he founds himself – in an enacted freedom from the externality of the inerpellative call – as a stable being in the process of that negation (the stability offered in the activity of negation). The importance of this is not to be missed. As Hegel points out, what we find here is the production of the positive freedom of the subject in and out of the moment of negation. It is through this activity that the subject comes to be a being who is split, who is both free from external constraint in his ability to actively negate external reality – as that which was immediately seen as this ‘‘external constraint,’’ now comes to be viewed as internally posited – and at the same time founds himself as the source of stability. So what we are faced with is precisely the traumatic product of the rejection of the symbolic produced by the refusal: the internally contradictory nature of subjectivity itself. The subject is nothing other than the ‘‘gap’’ between the positive content of the symbolic order and its negation (both of which are internal to its activity). It is both the foundation and source of all stability and determination and at the same time the recognition of the lack of absolute determination. Zˇizˇek writes: This brings us back to the central theme y Bartleby’s attitude is not merely the first, preparatory, stage for the second, more ‘‘constructive’’ work of forming a new alternative order; it is the very source and background of this order, its permanent foundation y The very frantic and engaged activity of constructing a new order is sustained by an underlying ‘‘I would prefer not to’’ which forever reverberates in it – or as Hegel might have put it, the new post-revolutionary order does not negate its founding gesture, the explosion of the destructive fury that wipes away the Old; it merely gives body to this negativity. (2006, p. 382)

That is, Bartleby’s act of negation which is the ‘‘source’’ of the ‘‘new’’ remains its ‘‘foundation’’ because it is this act that, as we have seen, first makes us aware of the illusory nature of the externality and externally necessity of the authority of the old order. Recall here the Hegelian claim that the skeptic’s action makes external reality ‘‘vanish.’’ This is nothing other than the realization that what one once took to be externally (and

Zˇizˇek’s Negative (Positive) Project

233

necessarily) imposed is rather only so as long as one acts based on this belief, which points to the fact that what was thought to be externally imposed was rather imposed on the subject by himself all along. This action then is not suicidal, but rather a positive recognition that it is the subject herself who acts to sustain the order and thus it is also the subject herself who can challenge its assertion of authority. We confront here again the claim that in order to bring about the proper ‘‘positive’’ solution to the existing systemic violence we must not succumb to the injunction to act in the standard ways. We might be better off taking Zˇizˇek’s advice via Bartleby and refrain from the call to act immediately and in the ways that are immediately presented to us as possibilities. In order to find the proper solution and create the proper (positive) space within which true subjective opposition becomes possible we should rather refuse to act. This does of course come at a cost, in the midst of the refusal, in removing oneself from the prescribed modes of action, one runs the risk of allowing the very thing that one is trying to overcome to get worse or at least it might allow for the unchallenged continuation of it (i.e., in the moment of negating the call to act the very thing one might want to make better, might get worse). Take the example given above of the practice of buying fair trade. If those in developed nations who sought to act in such a way as to better the immediate situation of those in undeveloped nations simply stopped buying fair trade then it seems that the old (and worse) working conditions and exploitation would return. This is likely true, but it might also lay bare the underlying systemic violence that is carefully covered over by such practices and force a confrontation with them. This could create a situation in which all involved could address the systemic violence rather than its outcomes. This is to be sure, no easy process. The point is, however, that we remain tied to the existing order (and thus under its domination) insofar as we remain unable to question it and its standard practices, and we remain unable to question such things insofar as we continue to act in quotidian ways. As Zˇizˇek points out elsewhere: A critical analysis of the present global constellation- one which offers no clear solution, no practical advice on what to do, and provides no light at the end of the tunnel, since one is well aware that this light might belong to the train crashing towards us – usually meets with reproach: ‘‘Do you mean we should do nothing? Just sit and wait?’’ one should gather the courage to answer: ‘‘YES, precisely that!’’ There are situations when the only truly practical thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and ‘‘wait and see’’ by means of patient critical analysis. (2008b, p. 7)

This negation of the temptation to act is as we have seen, more than simple suicidal and destructive activity. It is in this negative activity itself

234

GEOFF PFEIFER

that one becomes able – in a Hegelian fashion – to enact one’s freedom from the constraints of this imposed external reality, To be sure, the freedom that is founded here is nothing more than the freedom from the imposed/ imposing demand of the old order as viewed as external to the subject, it is not an absolute freedom. There is still subjection, it is simply that subjection is now recognized for what it is: as something which is internally imposed on the subject by himself. What is then built out of this is, in this way, founded on the stability that is produced in the continued negation (the gap that is internal to the subject – the experience of the subject as both that which negates and is free and that which founds itself as a stable being in this negation). We should, moreover take literally the Hegelian claim that Zˇizˇek makes at the end of this remark, namely that ‘‘body’’ is given this negativity. It is literally materially the case that in acting in fidelity to Bartleby’s statement, we give (material) body to a new possibility: it is in such action alone – the proper dimension of action that is, namely an act of inaction – that the possibility of a ‘‘new’’ order becomes viable. Just as for Hegel it is the case that freedom first appears to self-consciousness in its own ‘‘generating’’ of the experience of that freedom through its negative activity. It is only in the actual negation of the current order and the possibilities that exist within it that we are able to ‘‘give body’’ to a new possibility – the possibility that was once deemed a ‘‘utopian’’ impossibility – through the new moment of stability that is found in the (metaphorical) continued pronouncement of the words ‘‘I would prefer not to.’’ It is in this way that we become, or have the possibility of becoming un-embedded from the current order through the careful analysis of the current order that is made possible by the existence of the subject who is freed from the interpellative call to action issuing from the order. It is also the case that this subjectivity that founds itself in its refusal to answer the call is not a creation out of nothing, this (im)possibility is, as we have seen, always already included in the symbolic order as its symptom – it is just that one has to look past the particular nature of its expression and see this particular expression as a species of the Hegelian universal truth of any given order itself, that it is always incomplete, unstable, and includes within it the (im)possibility of its own overcoming.

NOTES 1. This is a self-consciously Althusserian inflected reading of the Lacanian trope of the mirror stage as the foundation of both subjectivity and the symbolic order

Zˇizˇek’s Negative (Positive) Project

235

in which the subject finds herself. For Lacan’s own famous discussion of this see, Jacques Lacan, ‘‘the Mirror Stage as Formative of the I function as Revealed in Psychoanalysis’’ and ‘‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’’ in Ecrits (2006) 2. To be sure, Johnston’s reading of this portion of Zˇizˇek’s work is quite close the one offered here and owe my understanding of it – both the similarities and differences – to Johnston’s own brilliant work.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the editor of Current Perspectives in Social Theory for his suggestions and corrections of my prose and the three blind reviewers for their invaluable critical and constructive commentary on earlier versions of this chapter.

REFERENCES Dean, J. (2006). Zˇizˇek’s politics. New York, NY: Routledge. Hegel, G. W. F. (1977). In A. V. Miller (Trans.), The phenomenology of spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnston, A. (2009). Badiou, Zˇizˇek, and political transformations: The cadence of change. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Kant, I. (1998). In P. Guyer & A. Wood (Ed. & Trans.), The critique of pure reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kojeve, A. (1980). In: Bloom, A. (Ed.), Introduction to the reading of Hegel: Lectures on the phenomenology of spirit (J. H. Nichols, Trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lacan, J. (1977). In A. Sheridan (Trans.), Ecrits: A selection. New York: Norton. Lacan, J. (2006). In B. Fink (Trans.), Ecrits. New York: Norton. Marcuse, H. (1969). An essay on liberation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Melville, H. (2000). In G. Thomas Transelle (Ed.), Herman Melville: Moby Dicky, Billy Budd and Other writings. New York: Penguin. Zˇizˇek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. London: Verso. Zˇizˇek, S. (2000). The ticklish subject: The absent centre of political ontology. London: Verso. Zˇizˇek, S. (2002). Revolution at the gates: Zˇizˇek on Lenin, the 1917 writings. London: Verso. Zˇizˇek, S. (2006). The parallax view. Cambridge: MIT Press. Zˇizˇek, S. (2008a). In defense of lost causes. London: Verso. Zˇizˇek, S. (2008b). Violence. New York, NY: Picador.