First the things I can say quickly: yes, we need better ontological and phenomenological accounts – and yes, these relate directly to the issue of how we can conceptualise that immanent critique need not be “paradoxical” or self-contradictory. And: yes, I think the metaphors we choose to visualise these things do affect our work – particularly because I think we’re trying to grasp things that are actually quite difficult to conceptualise, so our metaphors don’t have as many immediate checks and balances from experience as would be ideal. This isn’t even getting into the problems that arise from trying to communicate through metaphors that have intuitively different meanings to other people…

In terms of more complex issues: I also agree that grasping different scales of social experience is important – although I don’t think that scale is the only way to think about what I tend to think of as complex layers of historical causation. The metaphor of scale tends to be mapped onto the notion of abstraction – such that we think of the local as being concrete, and then we think of achieving more abstract concepts as we aggregate and “cumulate” these local experiences.

This process will capture certain things (among other issues, some patterns of social practice will become visible only at a level that can be perceived via statistical analysis, for example, but may not be visible to local lived experience in any way), but this isn’t the only way to think of abstraction. I think it is also possible for certain kinds of very local practices – individual practices – also to have a qualitatively abstract character – the sort of thing Marx kept trying to articulate, I think, when he talked endlessly about how the specific products of a particular moment in history come to present themselves, in alienated form, as universal attributes of humankind… This isn’t the kind of abstraction you reach via quantitative aggregation: it’s a qualitative characteristic of a concrete practice… (I know I’m not explaining this very well – it’s another one of these things that I’m just on the verge of grasping, but can’t quite articulate – and, as always, once I can articulate it clearly, I may well find that it’s a rubbish concept… ;-P)

Then you have to work out how this alternative concept of abstraction might itself play out in different spatial and temporal scales. I’ve occasionally played with fractal metaphors for this, although I’m far from wedded to them (and, of course, again I’m using the concept only metaphorically – not making any claim for mathematical rigour). But, again, I suspect this is the status that Marx’s category of the “commodity” holds – if you get away from thinking of this term as a thing that happens to be traded on a market, and begin thinking of it as a qualitative description of a structure of social practice that tends to generate a specific historical pattern, then you can potentially talk about very local, concrete, everyday interactions – as well as very large-scale historical dynamics – as both being describable in terms of a similar homologous structure. I’m not suggesting here we necessarily lean on Marx’s notion of what this structure would be – only that I think the underlying theoretical intention might have been similar.

I’ve also occasionally used probabilistic metaphors – here to compensate for problems in what you’ve called “philosophies of social-as-absolute” – trying to grasp the ways in which a particular social context can make certain choices more plausible, more likely to occur, than others, without however predetermining that specific choices must necessarily be made…

But this is all probably just a jumble… It’s also an area, obviously, that I want to pursue – and that is much more easily pursued, I think, with some skilled and thoughtful interlocutors…

It seems to me that we will eventually need broader ontological or phenomenological accounts of consciousness to supplement the excellent social mapping of Foucault and his kin, since he is a cipher on the reasons for these continual small wars.

So, this work overlaps greatly with an area I want to pursue further: the supposed “paradox” of critique (i.e. the problem of where one stands to make a critique), and the philosophies of the social-as-absolute that make critique appear impossible.

I wonder how our metaphors affect this work. I am using a fabric metaphor; Foucault uses metaphors taken from “micro-physics”; and Adorno is using a fleshly metaphor.