Rough Theory

Theory In The Rough

Category Archives: Critical Theory

Fragments on Critical Spaces and Times

8 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on November 10, 2006

I seem to be writing a lot of posts lately that contain concepts that I’m not quite ready to express fully – this will be another of “those” posts, I’m afraid.

I wanted to pick up, in a brief and not quite adequate way, on two comments made on other blogs, because I think they each suggest important issues to be taken into account when thinking about the construction of a critical theory. The first is a comment made by belledame222 in an ongoing discussion at The Kugelmass Episodes. Belledame criticises the somewhat widespread tendency to equate “the margins” with “critical standpoint”:

One of the other main radical feminist bloggers, Heart, actually calls her space “The Margins.” i think there is this idea, you know, that freedom exists in the margins precisely because they -are- the margins.

trouble is, if you’re really making claims for revolutionary transformation, sooner or later you’re going to have to figure out a way to move from margin to center (as bell hooks once put it).

otherwise you’re just basically huddling together and licking wounds, telling comforting stories to each other, it seems to me.

To belledame’s concerns, I would add that this vision of critique – that you need somehow to be “outside” what you’re criticising in order to achieve critical distance – can:

(1) be morally underdetermined: some very undesirable movements can also be marginalised – and it may, in fact, be a very important political goal to make sure that some movements remain marginalised – and that other political movements become so… Valorising “the margins” by dint of their marginality often disguises the fact that we tacitly mean “our” margins: that we have a quite specific set of normative ideals that we assume are part of the “package” of marginality. Personally, I would rather develop critical concepts that express those normative ideals directly, rather than bundling them in with an overarching (and, for reasons discussed below, perhaps not even intrinsically connected) category like “marginality”. Otherwise, we risk getting what we asked for, rather than what we wished for – a fate suffered by many well-intentioned social and political movements…

(2) flatten the “core”: the move to margins (like the move to human nature, the appeal to theology or other ways of getting “outside” our social context) operates on the assumption that our social context is fundamentally one-dimensional: that tensions and conflicts might exist on the perimeters, or between our social context and something that we perceive as fundamentally different, but not as integral aspects of a single, conflicted social form. I appreciate that this is, to some degree, an “empirical” question, but I think it’s important not to reject out of hand the possibility of our social world as a contradictory entity – in whose contradictions we can perhaps begin to recognise some of the historical irritants that provoke us to dream that better things are possible. We may not need to be “outside” or on the “margins” to achieve critical distance.

These issues are connected, in ways I’m not sure I’m ready to express, to an issue raised by sinthome at Larval Subjects yesterday. The US election outcome leads sinthome to reflect on the need to recognise how rapidly historical transformation can sometimes be achieved:

I’m still in a bit of shock as to what happened last night. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not expecting momentous changes or for Democrats to suddenly begin acting like genuine progressives. Yet this still is a ray of hope…. it is the hope produced in discerning that rhetoric alone does not win the day or create reality. That is, occurances like this remind me that things are possible… They rescue me from my Adorno-esque pessimism.

A few months ago I would not have believed this possible and I find that this experience of change significantly calls into question a number of my theoretical axioms (I’ve been working through these shifts in theory for a number of weeks on this blog). How is it that forms of social configuration that seem like iron can so quickly dissipate like so much morning mist? The Mayans had a thriving culture that suddenly disappeared. They didn’t disappear as a result of some natural catastrophe (as far as we know) or through depleting natural resources. No doubt the Mayans believed their culture and state to be eternal. Yet it disappeared. How does such surprising and sudden change take place? It seems to me that good social theory help us to see the contingency of the present state of things, that there are other possibilities, that other collectives, subjects, and ways of feeling are possible. Just as psychonalysis allows the analysand to overcome the closure of their universe of desiring, discovering new possibilities where they never before thought they were possible, good social theory creates possibilities where before only the iron laws of historical necessity and power were discerned. Good social theory reminds us of the essential fragility and finitude of the power relations holding together a particular type of collective.

I reserve judgment on the Mayans ;-P, but I think that modern history does demonstrate that quite dramatic and rapid historical transformations – of institutional structures, customs, forms of thought – are possible (it is conceivable that such rapid changes are, in some ways, more possible than incrementalist ones, if we’re talking about achieving fundamental transformations – but I haven’t thought about this issue sufficiently to try to turn this into a strong claim…). And I agree that it should be a central goal for critical theory to cast light on why and how this happens – and that this goal sits in tension with approaches that emphasise “iron laws of historical necessity”.

At the same time, the significant transformations that we have witnessed within the modern era – including many transformations driven by movements that understood themselves as fundamentally revolutionary – can often, in retrospect, be interpreted as achievements that were moving with a broader “wave” of historical transformation – waves whose contours, perhaps, successful movements articulated more clearly than others, or which drove in any event toward complimentary goals… Revolutionary movements often suffer, I believe, from not adequately recognising the dynamic context in which they are operating – a context that may make certain political goals easier to achieve at certain times, that entails that very few political achievements can be regarded as permanent “advances”, and that often punishes movements by rewarding them with what they asked for (which is often the destruction of older social institutions), while depriving them of the free society for which they wished…

My goal here is not to drive toward pessimism. Modernity has constantly irritated us with dreams that more is possible, while also embedding us within an incredibly complex, dynamic, unintentional historical context that provides treacherous footing for conscious political practice. I think we need to develop better theoretical frameworks precisely to understand potentials for conscious political action within such a context – and I think that belledame and sinthome have both hit on some of the concepts we need to move beyond, if we want to work toward a better understanding of the potentials and limitations of particular forms of political practice…

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

Dissertation Scratchpad: Best Intentions

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on November 9, 2006

So yesterday’s research meeting, aside from providing a number of comments that could be taken out of context in interesting ways, also provided some opportunity to me to revisit in a public forum the most unprofound of my research findings: the notions that (1) developers can in certain circumstances like particular kinds of regulation, and that (2) developers’ need to invest capital as older development fronts close off is a major factor in creating pressures to open new development fronts. The last time I posted on these issues, my questions were, essentially: Doesn’t everyone already know this? And: Do I have anything particularly new and interesting to say about this phenomenon, whether everyone already knows about it or not? These were, essentially, the questions I posed in my (impromptu and, I must confess, somewhat involuntary) presentation to the research meeting. Read more of this post

City Planning, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy

Random Thoughts on Privilege and Critique

2 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on October 22, 2006

The changing composition of funding for academic work over the past several decades – with more funding from the private sector, and more funding potentially tied to problematic intellectual property agreements, restrictions on publication or research design, and other commercial arrangements – prompts recurrent debate over the ethical implications of linking academic work to commercial interests. Few people draw a hard line on this issue, insisting, for example, that all forms of private funding are unacceptable, or that private funding arrangements never pose problems for academic integrity. Most of us – myself included – make our own separate peaces, hoping that we can trust ourselves to be guided by some principled logic other than what is most convenient for our research needs at the time… And few of us draw lines in the same places, meaning that the issue of outside funding arrangements provides a reliable source of ongoing debate within the academy.

Every time I become involved in one of these debates, I can’t help but think of Horkheimer’s “Fable of Consistency”, from Dämmerung. I couldn’t get my hands on the original for this post, but I’ll reproduce Martin Jay’s retelling from The Dialectical Imagination:

In the fable, two poor poets are invited to accept a considerable stipend by a tyrannical king who values their work. One is disturbed by the taint on the money. “You are inconsistent,” the other answers. “If you so believe, you must continue to go hungry. He who feels one with the poor, must live like them.” Agreeing, the first poet rejects the king’s offer and proceeds to starve. Shortly thereafter, the other becomes the court poet. Horkheimer finishes his “fairy tale” by cautioning: “Both drew the consequences, and both consequences favored the tyrant. With the general moral prescription of consistency, there seems one condition: it is friendlier to tyrants than to poor poets.”

I love this fable, although I realise that statements like this are often cited in criticisms of the Frankfurt School scholars – that they lived in too much material comfort, too distant from practical political struggles, etc. Nevertheless, I think it can be important to acknowledge that intellectual work involves a level of privilege and a level of distance – and, however disturbing it can be that similar privileges and choices may not be freely available to anyone who wishes to pursue them, access to a certain level of privilege may be integral to critique. When consistent choices “favour the tyrant”, critique may be characterised precisely by its lived inconsistency with emancipatory ideals – a complex subject position that Benjamin also seemed to regard as intrinsic to a reconfigured historical materialism:

Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

Kerim Friedman from Savage Minds has recently been writing his own series of posts about what kinds of knowledge academics produce, reflecting on whether we can regard knowledge as cumulative, on whether anthropological knowledge in particular “matters” for government policy at the present time and, most recently, on whether we hold some responsibility for how our published words might come to be used. In this final post, Kerim cites a passage from Adrienne Rich’s “North American Time” (the original poem is available in full here) relating to the ways in which published words persist, and come to be reappropriated in unanticipated – and sometimes horrific – ways when historical circumstances shift around them:

II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill

We move but our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended

and this is verbal privilege.

The poem parallels the Horkheimer fable, the author asking whether our understanding of this privilege – and of our ultimate lack of control over the impact our work will have on the world – should reduce us to silence:

I am writing this in a time
when anything we write
can be used against those we love
where the context is never given
though we try to explain, over and over
For the sake of poetry at least
I need to know these things

And decides that the need to give voice to the potential for change outweighs the costs of speaking.

Conversations, Critical Theory

Pragmatic Considerations

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on October 16, 2006

For the past several months, I’ve obviously been experimenting with vocabulary from the tradition of pragmatist philosophy – a tradition with which I have a somewhat ambivalent relationship. I’m currently working through James and Dewey, preparing for some more extensive writing on the topic, but wanted to put in a placeholder for a few of the elements of the tradition I think I’d need to disentangle, in order to make sense of what I feel comfortable appropriating, in which ways, from this tradition.

First there’s the issue of disentangling the various strands of the pragmatist approach to adjudicating truth claims. As I understand it (and I’ll readily admit my understanding may be quite flawed at this stage), pragmatism seeks to dissolve certain recurrent philosophical disputes when it is possible to argue that competing philsophical and scientific positions have no discernibly different practical consequences – a difference that makes no difference is no difference… At the same time, philosophical and scientific positions that do have differing practical outcomes can be judged according to the desirability of those outcomes.

The judgment of practical outcomes – the standards that someone would use to assess one outcome to be better, on a practical level, than another – seems, based on my current (admittedly preliminary) understanding of this tradition, to be somewhat fraught. The texts I have read seem to struggle around the issue – appealing to evolutionary notions of cumulative knowledge in some texts, and to local cultural ideals in others. To me, the concept that something becomes “true” to the extent that it has a useful practical consequence demands an examination of what conditions something to have practical consequences of a particular sort, what conditions us to prefer particular practical consequences, and, self-reflexively, why we suddenly find it plausible to look to practical consequences as a touchstone of truth… Although I suspect that I won’t find satisfactory answers to these questions within the tradition, I like the strong commitment that it should in principle be possible to adjudicate competing truth claims without an appeal to transhistorical absolutes, and am interested in finding a better way to flesh out this intuition.

At the same time, the tradition seems to me not to consider why particular philosophical and scientific debates arise: if it can in fact be demonstrated that two opposing philosophical or scientific positions cannot be differentiated in their practical effect, to me this deepens the mystery, rather than dissolves it – how should we understand the appeal (particularly, the long-term or mass appeal) of positions that, from the standpoint of pragmatist philosophy, have no “cash value”? Even where we can differentiate among philosophical positions with reference to their practical impacts, by itself the ability to make this judgment doesn’t give us much purchase on why particular kinds of philosophical or scientific concepts arise and become empirically persuasive, in particular times and places. I recognise, of course, that I think it important to understand such issues because I believe this is how we will ultimately come closer to developing a more historically-embedded understanding of how to adjudicate competing truth claims – a position that needn’t be shared by pragmatist philosophers…

Happy to take criticism on the grounds that I have fundamentally misunderstood the tradition – while I’m trying to make sense of what I’m reading, I’m painfully aware that this doesn’t mean I’m succeeding…

Critical Theory

Theoretical Fragments

5 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on October 12, 2006

I don’t quite have a complete post on either of the following points, but thought I’d toss them up as free associations for the day…

(1) Thinking What We Know

One of my recurrent struggles, in writing about social theory, is communicating how someone’s formal theoretical system often doesn’t “allow” them to think things that, in practice, they “know” are true.

My recent conference paper, for example, gestured at some of the problems that derive from trying to define capitalism in terms of the institutions of the market and private property: my argument is that, once you accept this definition, you lose the ability to explain theoretically certain things about capitalism that many people assume are true – e.g., that capitalism is global in scope, or that the rise of capitalism and the rise of “modernity” are intrinsically bound together in some meaningful way. The market and private property are not appropriate concepts to enable us to ground these sorts of insights or intuitions into capitalism – they are simultaneously too expansive in their historical scope (“markets” of various kinds have existed well back into history) and too narrow (private property has been suspended or diminished in importance at various points in recent history without this undermining other trends that we would regard as “capitalist”).

It may, of course, be the case that the definition is correct – that capitalism should be defined in terms of the market and private property – and that it is our historical intuitions that are wrong: perhaps we shouldn’t be trying to capture the “globalness” of our contemporary history, or the distinctiveness of modernity, via a concept such as capitalism.

I am interested, though, in the issue of how we could ground these sorts of historical intuitions – what kinds of theoretical concepts might make it possible to grasp and make sense of these sorts of historical insights. I am also interested in preventing the sorts of conceptual mistakes that I think sometimes occur when people move, often without realising it, from what their theoretical categories logically allow them to say, into broader claims that are grounded on historical intuitions that cannot be grasped within their theoretical system.

I find it very difficult, though, in practice to convince someone that a theoretical system in fact does not ground insights that are historically plausible for other reasons. I find myself in situations where, for example, I will note that the common definition of capitalism can’t really make sense of the mid-20th century as capitalist, where my interlocutor will respond, e.g., that of course they know that the mid-20th century is capitalist – what gives me the impression they aren’t aware of this, etc. I’m trying to work out a better vocabulary for expressing that my critical target is the logical implications of the theoretical categories, rather than the historical awareness of the theorist…

(2) How Do We Value Labour?

I’ve recently been playing with alternative definitions of capitalism, trying to stumble across a good vocabulary for describing what I suspect is best understood in terms of a long-term, unintended pattern of social practice – a pattern that can be (and, historically, has been) replicated via a range of concrete social institutions, and that therefore should not be defined in terms of any specific configuration of concrete social institutions.

In recent papers, I’ve been toying with describing this long-term pattern of social practice in terms of “growth”. For many reasons, though, I’m not particularly enamoured of this term – among other things, it troubles me to use a “fashionable” term of critique (not because I have some principled objection to fashionable concepts, but because fashionable concepts tend to become freighted with a blurry range of meanings, increasing the chances for someone to read extraneous content into what I’m trying to communicate – and my concepts are fuzzy enough as it is, without loading them with a range of unintended meanings…), and I’m finding that, in practice, some readers are inclined (not unreasonably) to interpret my references to “growth” in terms of quantitative expansion – of stuff, of population – and thus to assume that I’m making some kind of argument about the psychological consequences of exposing humans to quantitatively more and more, e.g., wealth, population, etc. – when what I’m actually after are the qualitative dimensions of the pattern: a better understanding of how our perceptions and thoughts are shaped in specific qualitative directions through our practical exposure to this dimension of our historical experience.

Ironically, I’ve gotten myself into this situation by trying to avoid speaking in terms that I thought would be even more freighted – specifically, to avoid what might otherwise be a tempting move to reappropriate and reinterpret the phrase “labour theory of value”. This move would be tempting because, I suspect, one useful way to describe the long-term pattern of social practice that characterises capitalism would be in terms of social pressures and incentives to reconstitute the expenditure of human labour, regardless of how high productivity or material wealth becomes. From this standpoint, one can then examine particular institutional configurations of capitalism to, e.g., identify the feedback loops and incentives that, in a particular context, help to perpetuate this pattern – but one can also abstract from concrete feedback loops and incentives, recognising that it is theoretically possible to transform a wide range of social institutions and practices while retaining “capitalism” – as long as capitalism is understood in terms of the underlying pattern of practice…

I’m by no means the only person who has suggested that the “labour theory of value” might mean something like this. But the overwhelmingly more common interpretation of the phrase “labour theory of value” sees the term as a claim about how, in spite of appearances, labour inputs have some determining role in the creation of material wealth or in setting the prices of goods – and that then sees critique as a process of “unmasking” these misleading appearances, in order to reveal the true social centrality of the working classes. It would be something of an understatement to say that I find such claims empirically problematic and, in any event, I am not generally trying to construct an “unmasking” or debunking critique – I therefore regard this conventional vision of the labour theory of value as beside the point for my work, and have avoided using the term to prevent my claims from being distorted by the conceptual gravitational field exerted by this much older and better known theoretical tradition.

Still, the question remains as to whether, in trying to avoid the particular historical freighting of terms like “labour theory of value”, I’ve fallen into an even more loaded terrain by invoking the fashionable, but fuzzy and ill-defined, notion of “growth”…

Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Writing

What Am I Trying to Do?

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on September 28, 2006

I received an email query about my conference paper which, among other things, asked:

can I ask what problem did you think you were addressing. is it the problem foundationalists worry about ie., how do we reliably/certainly ground our critique and/or our transformative practice??

I thought it was worth reproducing the question and part of my answer here (I’ll leave aside for the moment that it’s probably not a fantastic sign if my paper didn’t communicate what problem I was addressing… ;-P This isn’t the reader’s fault, but mine…). I took the question – perhaps incorrectly – as a question not solely about what I was trying to do in this specific paper, but about what I am trying to do overall – how this and other bits of work fit into a broader intellectual framework. I don’t think the answer I gave was complete, and I’m not going to expand it further here at the present time, but I thought it was still worth posting my response:

I’ve sort of shoe-horned the piece into the conference framework, which means that the introduction doesn’t provide the best way “in” to the topics I’m discussing. To step back from the paper in a life-project sort of way:

(1) I do have an interest in the issue of how we “ground” knowledge, but my intuition – if I can figure out a good language for discussing this, which is what I’m trying to play with a bit in the paper – is that this doesn’t require a move to foundationalism. My sense is that, if we think a bit more seriously about certain dimensions of recent historical experience, we’ll find that – at least at the Kantian/Habermasian level of very abstract categories of perception and experience – we can identify widely-shared historical experiences that handily explain why certain forms of perception and thought are so widespread now – even when the historical record suggests to us that earlier societies did not perceive the world in the same way.

Some historical theories, of course, try to do this sort of thing – but my sense is that they tend simultaneously to be too concrete – focussing on kinds of practices that empirically just do vary more widely than the forms of perception and thought the theories are trying to explain – and, at the same time, try to explain far more than can be explained through this kind of theory. I do think we have a level of quite broadly distributed historical experience that exerts a noticeable influence over what we do, and that getting a handle on this level of historical experience might be useful in a Habermasian/understanding-why-certain-political-ideals-resonate-widely kind of way – but theorising this (although I think it’s an important thing to do, and will cast light on specific dimensions of contemporary experience) also leaves an enormous amount unexplained – and this limitation needs to be explicitly acknowledged within the theory…

(2) I also have an interest in intellectual and social “fads” – these historical moments where certain topics suddenly become very exciting, and where the flaws of earlier forms of thought suddenly become very visible and easy to perceive. Again, my intuition – and here, too, I’m searching for a good vocabulary to describe what I’m after – is that these fads often have something to do with very tacit shifts in social practice which, since we don’t “think” with part of ourselves and “do” with another part, also involve small shifts in our concepts and perceptions. Concepts and perceptions, though, are portable – once we stumble across them, we tend to have a go at applying them to a whole range of other practices and experiences – and the more we do this sort of thing, the more plausible the new concepts and forms of perception become – because we’re effectively terraforming our social environment in their image…

(3) I have an interest in the way in which these sorts of issues make it easier for us to make certain kinds of fundamental mistakes (the sorts of mistakes we find so easy to perceive in the works of previous generations – missing obvious empirical and analytical objections to particular bodies of thought).

(4) Finally, I have an interest – which I’m currently trying to explore through a piece on Adorno – in the psychological consequences of the tension between potentials suggested by a very abstract level of historical experience, and more concrete restrictions on practice…

Critical Theory, Philosophy of History

The Order of Things

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on September 27, 2006

Just wanted to post a few quick thoughts about my reactions to the Governments and Communities in Partnership conference thus far. The conference is divided between refereed academic papers and practitioner presentations (often combined in the same panel, but still distinct presentation types) and, because I’m using the conference to learn about regional issues that reflect trends at my own field site, I’m generally choosing workshop sessions that tilt heavily toward the practitioner side. I have therefore managed to miss many academic papers that would have interested me – but that I can also easily track down post-conference, when the papers are published… I may comment on some of these papers at a later point…

Still, I’m finding myself reacting to the academic dimensions in the practitioner presentations (which isn’t completely surprising, since many of the practitioners also have a substantial academic background, or are working in tandem with research academics). One striking thing, to me, is how many papers view “theory” as a synonym for a sort of classificatory device – so your “theory” is something that allows you make definitions that then make it possible to draw grids, or sketch points along continua, in order to classify and organise various empirical observations. So, for example, a presentation might offer definitions of a “network” and of a “bureaucracy”, and then report back on which dimensions of particular organisations fit into the “network” box, and which fit into the “bureaucracy” box…

When I say that this is striking, I don’t mean that it’s surprising – theory-as-classification-system is, I suspect, a far more common understanding of sociological theory than, say, the kind of theory that I do. I find it striking, I think, because I often find myself personally confused about what these gridlike classifications systems illuminate, that thick description wouldn’t illuminate more effectively… I have a very similar reaction to social scientific work that takes what are essentially everyday observations and writes them in an “algebraic” style, when there is no actual math taking place: I’m happy for people to use equations to model human behaviour, but I’m not sold on the value of taking something that could just as easily be described in ordinary language, and translating that language into something that “looks mathematical”, but can’t actually be manipulated mathematically. To me, this has all the disadvantages of mathematical modelling (that someone has to learn your specific symbolic system to understand what you’re talking about), with none of the power…

And yet, gridlike classification systems (and, to some audiences at least, “mathlike” renderings of essentially non-mathematical observational data) do have a visible power when they’re presented: people do empirically – you can watch the effect cascade through the room – seem to find it clarifying to be told that government agency x falls closer to the “network” side of the continuum, while private company y falls more toward the “bureaucratic” side… I suspect the power has something to do with the “collective effervescence” of the experience – with the shock of recognition that something that you might have noticed about your own organisation, or other organisations, but had regarded as an essentially private and idiosyncratic interpretation, in actuality connects up with experiences that resonate far more broadly.

This recognition of shared experiences is valuable – although, by itself, I’m not sure it helps us orient ourselves better, so that we can choose better actions… Among other things, I’m concerned that the widespread recognition that, e.g., lots of people are thinking about networks – lots of people share an aesthetic that experiences networks as energetic and flexible and creative and marvelous in all dimensions – without an analysis that helps us understand why this experience is so common now, can contribute to the juggernaut of unreflexive transformation… But, of course, I would think that… ;-P

I am genuinely curious, though, about the “cash value” of this classificatory approach to social science research – which I acknowledge is far more common than the kind of theory I like to do. (I also recognise, of course, that refining definitions and abstraction from thick description is also important for the kind of theory that I do – I’m not trying to claim that my approach to theoretical work shares nothing with more conventional approaches.) I understand the value from a corporate or management perspective: once you’ve decided, for example, that you want to decentralise decision-making, it can be handy to know where decision-making remains highly centralised. But from an academic analytical perspective – from the perspective of grasping a phenomenon, understanding it, making sense of it: are we actually any closer to achieving these goals, when we’ve decided how we want to classify a phenomenon?

But this question is probably asked from a fairly idiosyncratic viewpoint – it could equally be asked whether we’ve really understood something when, as in the kind of theory I prefer, we’ve understood its contingency: how it came into being, and how it is currently being sustained. To me, of course, a knowledge of historical contingency provides a means of orienting ourselves to action – a means of knowing something about the possibilities and constraints open to us at a particular point in time. On the field of historical action, however, grids and definitions – as articulations that help to ossify interpretations of our historical moment – have dramatic practical effect by channeling perceptions of the current moment into deeper and more precisely defined grooves… So maybe the question is more what the “cash value” is of a form of theory that constantly tries to swim upstream against this kind of historical current…

Critical Theory, Events, Math and Science, Philosophy of History

Talking the Talk

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on September 25, 2006

I won’t blog today about the other papers at the Governments and Communities in Partnership conference – I’ve sketched some notes on some interesting convergent themes, but I’ll try to sum those up in a post tomorrow. I did want to post a copy of the talk I delivered below the fold – the talk is significantly shorter than the paper, but also significantly longer than a standard blog post, so be warned…

Some funny things from the session where I delivered my paper: first, the members of my reading group, evidently put out that my paper prevented our regular Monday lunchtime meeting, invaded the session (if by “invaded” you understand “slipped into the back and sat in the most shadowy corner of the conference room, from which they promptly slipped back out once I had finished speaking”).

A technical glitch meant that the session began ten minutes late, which ordinarily wouldn’t have had much of an effect. This conference has been designed, though, to allow people to swap and change between concurrent sessions – so people could, for example, attend paper 1 from one session, and leave when that paper was done, being reasonably sure that paper 2 from another session would begin promptly on time. This meant that the entirety of the ten-minute delay had to come out of the first presentation, which, as luck would have it, was mine.

This had two impacts on my presentation: first, there was no time for questions afterward (this was likely a good thing, as my piece was so abstract, compared to the other papers I saw at the conference, that I’m reasonably certain no one would have had any questions to ask…) – instead, people were directed by the facilitator to my blog. The facilitator had evidently followed a footnote in the paper back here, and found it very striking that I would post work online – particularly work that I have specifically posted because I believe it needs additional revision. Before, during and after the panel session, she made a point of telling me how surprised she was at the “openness” of it all.

The second impact was that, contrary to my normal practice, I actually had to read the talk I had written, to make sure that I kept strictly to an allocated time substantially shorter than what I had expected. I hate reading talks, and I generally feel strongest and most comfortable giving ad-lib presentations. But, given the complexity of what I was trying to cover, the fundamental strangeness of my talk for this venue, and the time constraints, it seemed the best thing to do at the time…

The side effect is that the talk below is reasonably close to what I actually said, and provides a decent simplified and potted version of the full-length paper. I’ll give advance warning that this talk contains no footnotes or literature references, as the talk was not distributed at the conference, and I would expect readers to consult the published version of the paper for this purpose. Read more of this post

Blogging, Critical Theory, Drafts, Events, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Reading Group

The First Taste of Freedom

2 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on September 9, 2006

I’ve just been reading a post over at A White Bear’s blog Is there no sin in it? titled “How Do You Measure Sexism?”, analysing, among other things, the process of internalisation of abuse and of gender stereotype. The post is complex, and worth a direct read – I won’t try to summarise it here. Two lines, though, particularly caught my emotions and my thoughts:

It’s not experiencing sexism that hurts. It’s the first taste of freedom from the pressures of sexism that hurts, because suddenly you realize you’ve allowed yourself to be betrayed.

For purposes of comment here, I hope that A White Bear won’t object if I extrapolate from her insight into experiences that extend beyond gender relations. What I want to explore is her notion that the psychological consequence of the first taste of freedom may actually be pain. This point resonates with me, and also reminds me of the dimensions of Adorno’s work I’ve always liked – particularly Adorno’s attempt to demonstrate that transformative political practice was never the inevitable result of the recognition of unfreedom, but that other consequences – including denial and even rage against the prospect of freedom itself – are also psychologically plausible.

Adorno’s work is concerned, among many other things, with understanding why central political expectations of early Marxist theory were never realised. Marxism had predicted a quasi-automatic drive to political emancipation, as the development of technology made possible the conquest of material nature, and as market crises increasingly pushed the development of centralised political institutions for the management of the economy. The Frankfurt School theorists quickly abandoned any faith in such an automatic historical process – the experience of Nazism, Stalinism and “state capitalism” provided, from their standpoint, a fully adequate historical refutation of the notion that centralised economic planning would inevitably be mobilised for political freedom.

This interpretation of historical developments, however, posed some challenges for the Frankfurt School’s early commitment to “critical theory”. Critical theory as a concept relies on the tension between what is possible, and what we actually do. The critical theorist speaks with the voice of this possibility, arguing that a greater range of freedom, of political choice, is possible than our current practice admits. It can be tempting, from this perspective, to treat awareness of the potential for specific kinds of freedom as an unmitigated good – as though this awareness will immediately and automatically result in transformative political practice. The Frankfurt School come to reject the notion that transformative practice results in any automatic way from the knowledge that specific kinds of freedoms are possible. Adorno, however, goes one step farther: he asks whether, under certain historical circumstances, a recognition that certain forms of unfreedom are unncessary, might actually fuel active political mobilisations against emancipatory potentials.

Adorno argues, in effect, that a deep psychological tension can result from the recognition that our actions have involved unnecessary sacrifices – that we can be scarred specifically by our recognition that potentials for greater freedom lie within reach. Adorno argues that this scarring has been constitutive of the “ego”, and offers a multi-faceted critique of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts of the ego in particular, arguing that much psychological theory confuses a psychology scarred by unnecessary sacrifice, with human nature. Adorno suggests that, in the right historical circumstances, this scarring would not prevent transformative political mobilisation. He also argues, however, that, as long as the social and psychological costs of mobilisation remain high, the tension between an awareness of potential freedom, and the reality of sacrifice, can provoke intense rage – rage expressed as a rigid denial of the potential for freedom, and rage directed into mass mobilisations, focussed particularly against those (often marginalised and socially disempowered) groups who seem to have escaped the rigid self-discipline and self-denial required to perpetuate existing forms of unfreedom.

For Adorno, interestingly, it is the intense power of state-mediated forms of capitalism that specifically overwhelms the delicate balancing act required for persons to attain the psychological resources to recognise and tolerate the pain of their recognition that they have engaged in unnecessary self-sacrifice, so that they can then engage in some kind of transformative political practice. His account thus reflects back on the Marxist critique of market capitalism with a sense of painful historical irony – that the institutional organisation of capitalism fought so hard by an earlier generation of Marxist critique, may have held more potential for emancipatory transformation than the institutional organisation of centrally planned production for which Marxists advocated.

At some point soon (it might have to wait for the end of the term), I’ll try to post a draft paper that explores these issues in more detail and provides a clearer grounding in Adorno’s writings.

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Political Economy, Psychology

On Branching Out

Leave a comment Posted by N Pepperell on September 9, 2006

Kerim from Savage Minds has made an interesting post on the need to preserve a space within the academy for “large questions in their entirety”. Among other points, Kerim draws attention to the common advice given to graduate students to focus on narrow specialisations until they are well-established in their academic careers, at which point they can “branch out”. I’ve posted at greater length over at Savage Minds, but I thought I would reproduce part of the exchange here, since I’ve been meaning to mention some of these same issues on this blog. Within my initial response, I commented:

Weber’s view is fairly commonly expressed in advice to graduate students, in my experience – often accompanied with a kind of historical just-so story about how it used to be possible to theorise large issues, but the world has now sadly become too complex… I’ve always felt it contradictory, at best, for academics to say things like this, while continuing to assign classic theory to graduate students: if the world is now too complex for us to develop our own grand theories, surely the ones from the 19th century should now appear hopelessly naive…

I’ve also personally always questioned the notion that students should be apprenticed to narrow specialisation in the theory that, at some later point, they can “branch out”: surely it is more common for us to develop into deeper and more refined versions of what we actually practice, so that an exclusive focus on narrow specialisation will predictably generate experienced and practiced specialists – not big picture theorists… If the “big questions” aren’t somehow there from the beginning, I’m not sure how a lifetime of attention to small questions is supposed to generate them…

Kerim picks up on this, and comments critically on the tendency to teach graduates brief critiques of the principal “big picture” theoretical traditions, a position I second:

What I always think when I hear one of those one-line critiques is something along the lines of “false consciousness is also true”: the really interesting aspect of any critique is precisely that it casts into clear relief how very strange it is, that we have managed to make sense of the world through the theories we create, in spite of their (occasionally large) empirical weaknesses. Critique should be the beginning of the puzzle, not the end – the real trick is to uncover why the theories were plausible, not just to tick off why they are wrong.

Conversations, Critical Theory, Philosophy of History, Professional Life, Teaching

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