[FRA:] Totalizing critiques

[Ralph Dumain]

Just a few responses interleaved below.

At 02:06 AM 1/7/2008, matthew piscioneri wrote:
>......
>
>More or less, thinkers I would see as comprising 
>*contemporary CT* fit, however uncomfortably, 
>into this very broad category. So, alongside 
>Habermas, I’d include Rorty, a little less 
>certainly Taylor, but I’d include Zizek; 
>alongside Baumann some might include 
>Baudrillard. On the basis of several of the 
>criteria listed above, I’d also include Foucault 
>and perhaps even Derrida. On the basis of other 
>criteria, these thinkers would be placed 
>elsewhere. Certainly thinkers such as Chomsky, 
>Benhabib, Butler, Fraser, Honneth and Kellner 
>seems to rest a little more easily inside the 
>category of CT. Is Jay a brilliant historian of 
>CT and/or a practitioner? Martin Matustik 
>appears to me to successfully straddle both 
>identities. It’s a thankless task to try and 
>establish set categories in terms of any form of 
>human inquiry. I trust some of this is helpful.

Chomsky does not belong to "critical theory", 
though indeed he does have a critique.  Chomsky 
doesn't believe there is such a thing as social 
theory.  I thought "critical theory" was bounded 
in some way and does not include everyone.


>Well, if we exclude the first 100 pp of _The 
>German Ideology_ , Engels’ _Dialectic of Nature_ 
>and aspects of Timpanaro’s writing, in the 
>western critical academy just about every CTist 
>of the last 150 years displays idealistic 
>leanings. Any exaggerated emphasis in a critical 
>theorist’s work on the categories of history or 
>culture or language is a sure sign (sic) of a closet Idealist :-).

What s an exaggerated emphasis?  How about the 
elimination of history and culture?  Then you 
have Dawkins, Dennett, etc.  What you propose is 
retrogressive.  You also seem not to know what idealism is.

>  Idealistic leanings in CT mainly take two 
> forms. The first is an explicit type whereby 
> mysterious dynamics (dialectical movement of 
> history), abstract entities (class, Third 
> World) and the attribution of essences to 
> macro-subjects (the proletariat, women) 
> comprise the basis of a critical theorist’s 
> ontology. In more recent CT, this traditional 
> Idealist ontology has been replaced by the 
> “newer” Critical Idealist ontology of language 
> (or discourse) and/or culture, or more 
> generally the realm of signs, symbols and 
> significance -- an equally magical Popperian 
> world where signs float freely and endlessly, 
> utterly unattached in explanation or remedial 
> potential to anything like a biophysical realm 
> of flesh and blood human beings still yoked by 
> the neck in pitiful sweatshop labour or 
> foddered by the cannons of the flesh and blood military-industrial elite.

This is a jumble. Abstract 
entities--class--essences--the proletariat?  You 
don't get out much, do you?  In any case, 
ontology can't do the work of empirical study or politics.


>.....
>Perhaps the dominant form of idealism in 
>contemporary CT occurs via what I will term 
>“omission”. It’s not unlike the skeleton in the 
>closet no one wishes to acknowledge or the 
>bumptious uncle at the Xmas dinner everyone 
>wishes could be crossed off the invite list. 
>Again, to give Habermas his due, he at least 
>ventures to use a critical theoretical lexicon 
>that doesn’t exclude the meaningful use of such 
>elsewhere awkward terms such as “biology” or 
>“species”, for example. Try finding any such 
>direct (denotative) meaningful usage of terms 
>such as this in the vast majority of those who 
>pose as practitioners of contemporary CT. Butler 
>gets close sometimes to opening the closet door. 
>Typically, and credit where credit is due, very, 
>very deftly, a great deal of contemporary CT 
>manages to omit the flesh and the blood from its 
>brilliant, expert ruminations and we might 
>wonder why our expert, brilliant ruminations 
>fail to connect with, well, you know “them”
the 
>‘orrible Harrys and Harriets. This is idealism 
>by omission and this is one reason why I said 
>previously CT has become excessively 
>ideological. Its contemporary target audience is 
>primarily a rich (but ever so compassionate and 
>caring) and highly educated group of radical 
>subjectivities (the apotheoses of cultural 
>history no less) who have shed their biological 
>bodies (or rather inscribed them as a text of revolutionary discourse).

It's not a mystery why academic narcissism--which 
is all there is left of CT--fails to connect with 
empirical reality.  Maybe it's time to stop 
reading these people and do some real thinking.

>I think the emphasis CT fundamentally placed on 
>“self reflection” is in Horkheimer’s essay on 
>“Traditional Theory” as a founding principle of 
>what was anticipated to be an innovative 
>discipline. As Wiggerhaus’s history of the FS 
>suggests there was plenty of self-critique 
>within the FS pre-Diaspora and Habermas renews 
>what by then was I think an almost expected 
>dynamic not just in the FS but the broader 
>critical philosophy tradition of “aufhebung” 
>[spelling n apologies] (Hegel à Kant; Marx à 
>Hegel; Adorno à Benjamin; Habermas à H&A; 
>Habermas à Marcuse; Honneth à Habermas ?)

Horkheimer did his best work in the '30s and 
after that, nothing.  The concept of traditional 
vs. critical theory remains important because it 
hasn't caught on to the intellectuals at 
large.  Most of them have a vested interested in 
suppressing such awareness.  However, 
self-reflectiveness about the limitations of 
one's thinking is even rarer than recognizing the principle.

CT talks about the totality, but itself 
encompasses only one of the 'two cultures'.  If 
this is what you mean by idealism, I would 
agree.  But you don't present any clear ideas as to how they could be combined.

Which reminds me, I can't find a copy of THE 
POSITIVIST DISPUTE IN GERMAN SOCIOLOGY 
anywhere.  Can you believe that not a single 
research library in the area has it?  I need a 
photocopy of the whole thing, as it's much too 
expensive to purchase via used book services.


>Yes, but also H&A’s embrace of Nietzsche in 
>_DoE_ (cf: “Ode to Juliette). But more 
>prosaically (and perhaps polemically), I was 
>more taking aim at what I described above at 
>those contemporary CTists who as the apotheoses 
>of cultural history have shed their biological 
>bodies to romantically become transcendent 
>‘texts’
sounds suspiciously like Shelley or 
>Byron to me, or perhaps more accurately a bad 
>case of post-60s Stevie Nicks silliness
. >(4) 
>What do you mean by CT's contemporary impotence? 
>When was it >potent? Do you mean theoretically 
>potent, or politically efficacious?
>When was it potent? Certainly in the 1960s, 
>especially in West Germany
again Wiggerhaus 
>gives as good as any account of the relations 
>between H&A (and Habermas) and the revolutionary 
>student movement. Also, who doesn’t know of 
>Marcuse’s influence in the counter-cultural movement of the 60s and 70s?

DofE is the single worst text CT ever 
produced.  As for Marcuse, sure he was popular, 
and thus influential to some extent, but beyond 
name recognition, what do you mean by 
influential?  Marcuse was also a very different 
sort of person from the counterculture, and it's 
not at all clear that the lessons learned from 
him really incorporated so much of his overall framework.

There is also a rudimentary biologism in Marcuse, 
embodied in his incorporation of Freud, and 
manifested in his scurrilous attacks on Fromm.

>Lastly, I think Habermas’s more technocratic 
>understanding of the way critical social theory 
>(including CT) has been politically influential 
>via its institutionalization in the tertiary 
>sector and the training of social managers, and 
>the stimulation of critical debate within the 
>public sphere shouldn’t be ignored. It’s just another form of praxis.

This is not very commendatory of Habermas, I would think.


>