Misplaced Necessities

My latest piece on Žižek is now out in Cosmonaut. It responds to his reply to my earlier essay and continues the exchange.

🔗[Read it here]. 

Reason in Chains

A Last Look at Habermas

In an effort to read Habermas charitably – on the assumption that an immanent critique of his work remains fruitful – in my previous post I didn’t go into much detail about what is actually the most problematic aspect of his approach. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere still stands for me as his strongest work, not least because it preserves the horizon of a self-governing society. The decisive shift occurs later, when the impersonal subsystems of the market and state bureaucracy are no longer treated as historically contingent forms open to transformation, but as functional prerequisites of a rational, civilized society.

More troublingly, these domains are effectively insulated from any significant democratic intervention from below. Capital and its institutional apparatus – despite the rhetoric of “domestication” – are in the end to operate autonomously, as though on autopilot. Any attempt to extend popular control into the sphere of production is dismissed in advance as a dangerous regression. The result is a theoretical framework that preserves the language of rationality and critique while foreclosing the very possibility of a democracy of producers. What presents itself as communicative rationality becomes a closed circuit, incapable of interrogating the material foundations of power. 

In this respect, as I argue in my earlier piece, Habermas’s later framework appears less as a correction of first-generation Critical Theory than as a stabilization of the existing order under the guise of procedural reason. Yet, as Marcuse had already observed:

The slogan ‘let’s sit down and reason together’ has rightly become a joke. Can you reason with the Pentagon on any other thing than the relative effectiveness of killing machines – and their price? The Secretary of State can reason with the Secretary of the Treasury, and the latter with another Secretary and his advisers, and they all can reason with Members of the Board of the great corporations. This is incestuous reasoning; they are all in agreement about the basic issue: the strengthening of the established power structure. Reasoning ‘from without’ the power structure is a naïve idea. They will listen only to the extent to which the voices can be translated into votes, which may perhaps bring into office another set of the same power structure with the same ultimate concern.

Habermas’s faith in the redeeming force of communication thus tends to overlook how deeply communicative processes are embedded in, and constrained by, systemic imperatives. Perry Anderson, from a different angle, identifies a parallel tension internal to Habermas’s own theory:

In situations ‘where social power relations cannot be neutralized in way rational discourse presupposes’, the discourse principle can still ‘regulate bargaining from the standpoint of fairness’, by ensuring that there is an ‘equal distribution of bargaining power between the parties’. In other words, no matter how unequal the actual balance of power between [...] capital and labour, the legal outcome of a bargaining process between them will be ‘fair’, provided they are given an equal opportunity to talk to each other. With this wave of the wand, inequality becomes something like equality again after all.

Here, the problem is no longer merely that discourse is confined within power structures, but that it is credited with compensating for them without altering them. The formal symmetry of participation substitutes for substantive equality, allowing deeply asymmetrical relations – between capital and labor, in particular – to appear normatively justified. What remains then is a conception of democracy confined to the management of given structures, no longer capable of seriously imagining, let alone effecting, their needed transformation.

An Anti-Homage

Jürgen Habermas’s death prompted me to revisit his books, something I hadn’t done in many years. At a time when even thinkers of his stature risk being forgotten almost overnight, I felt he deserved something like an “anti-tribute” (just as he himself had done to Herbert Marcuse on the occasion of the latter’s seventieth birthday).

At the turn of the century, when I was an undergraduate in philosophy, Habermas was one of the major intellectual figures you had to reckon with, whether you agreed with him or not. Immersed as I was in the alter-globalization movement, his proceduralism struck me as arid and uninspiring. The (Hegelian) intuition that “the unity of reason only remains perceptible in the plurality of its voices” clearly resonated with those of us who came of age in Seattle and Porto Alegre. Yet the framing of the market and the state as inescapable “subsystems” of a modern, democratic life – pathological perhaps, but only ever to be contained by the lifeworlds they ceaselessly colonize – clashed with our conviction that another world, beyond the logic of the commodity, was truly possible.

Later, while writing my thesis on Adorno in the second half of the 2000s, I found myself rebelling against the official (and, to my mind, biased) narrative that Habermas’s so-called “communicative turn” had managed to supplant the dark, irredeemable pessimism of the first generation of the Frankfurt School by replacing the philosophy of consciousness underlying it with language-mediated intersubjective understanding.

In that version of the story, what was partly a strategic overstatement in Dialectic of Enlightenment – namely, that the demythologization of nature through calculation ultimately produces new mythologies (fascism, the culture industry) – is elevated into the key to interpreting early Critical Theory’s take on modernity. This reading overlooks the extent to which Adorno himself (as well as Marcuse) continuously qualified that claim: Enlightenment harbors contradictory potentials; its authoritarian forms are historically mediated, not metaphysically necessary; bourgeois society – or rather, the bourgeoisie – generates emancipatory ideals (liberty, equality, fraternity) while simultaneously blocking their realization, a blockage political and social in nature, not logical. Not to mention this contradiction also fuels struggles aimed at expanding the scope of those ideals. Despite the customary readings of his work, Adorno never lost sight of the fact that capitalist society produces tendencies – reification, instrumental reason, colonial structures – that remain open to contestation; he firmly believed in the possibility of freedom, that it could break out at any moment, and therefore that things could come right (richtig) in the end, however far-fetched that may seem at times and however thoroughly administered the world appeared in his own time.

Habermas’s critique of Heidegger is, in this respect, deeply consonant with Adorno’s own dialectical thinking of the 1950s and 60s. It represents a decisive attempt to rescue modernity from its reduction to a single, monolithic logic of domination. Against Heidegger’s diagnosis of technological rationality as an all-encompassing “enframing” (Gestell), Habermas insists on a differentiation internal to modern reason itself: alongside instrumental calculation, there persists an orientation toward meaning and mutual understanding, and this dialectical structure is what allows modern thought to avoid a one-sided identification with domination and instead grounds its claim to reason (“legitimacy”, in Habermas’s terms) in its own reflexive openness.

Yet this very openness introduces a tension that runs throughout Habermas’s work. In distancing himself from the more “expressivist” currents of the 1960s – above all the legacy of Marcuse – Habermas draws a sharp distinction between protest and critique. Protest, he argues, sharpens experience but does not yet amount to knowledge; critique alone provides the conceptual tools required to grasp social reality. While analytically useful, this distinction risks obscuring the mediated character of experience itself. Expression and analysis are not identical, but neither are they separable in any strict sense: critique emerges from historically formed experience, and experience is already structured by contradictions that demand interpretation.

A similar difficulty appears in Habermas’s treatment of ideology critique. By shifting the focus from historically specific forms of domination to the procedural conditions of undistorted communication, ideology becomes a quasi-transhistorical phenomenon. To be sure, one must not confuse the unmasking of the objective spirit through Ideologiekritik with a theory of society in advanced (or post-industrial) capitalism; yet detached from a substantive critical account of the latter, the critique of ideologies loses its historical sharpness. Here, in any case, the contrast with Adorno is stark, for whom ideology is inseparable from the social totality that produces it.

This divergence becomes most visible in Habermas’s accusation that Adorno’s aphoristic claims – “there can be no right life in the wrong one”, “the whole is the untrue” – amount to performative contradictions. Habermas’s argument is that if one can assert something universally, one already presupposes the validity conditions one denies. Yet consciousness of living within a false totality does not amount to resolving that falsity; on the contrary, it reveals the gap between conceptual totalization and the irreducible “non-identical” that resists it. The “whole” is untrue not because universality as such is impossible, but because actually existing universality – the universality of capital – falsely presents itself as complete.

Adorno once remarked that historical dialectics sometimes grants greater actuality to what appears anachronistic than to what claims contemporaneity through its smooth functioning within existing apparatuses. Few observations better capture the fate of Critical Theory after its classical moment. What is conventionally presented as an advance – a gain in normative clarity, a refinement of moral grammar, an adaptation to democratic institutions, an escape from the aporias of radical negativity – coincides, in crucial respects, with a theoretical regression.

What recedes in Habermas’s recasting of the first generation’s insights is precisely capitalism grasped as a historical totality. In its place emerges a moralized social theory increasingly attuned to the self-descriptions of liberal modernity. The first generation’s stubborn refusal of normative closure – so often dismissed as pessimistic, elitist, or obsolete – appears today in a different light: Adorno’s insistence on non-identity, Marcuse’s wager on historical rupture, even their speculative excesses, read less like relics of a bygone Fordist epoch than like oblique anticipations of a world in which systemic (dis)integration has outpaced the reconciliatory discourses that absorb its contradictions into the grammar of legitimacy. What is now labeled anachronistic is precisely what resists translation into the operational vocabularies of governance, law, and moral consensus.

At this point, however, the very tension within Habermas’s own theory – partly obscured by this historical shift – comes into view. As Peter Dews has argued, communicative action contains an “anarchistic” core: in principle, every truth claim is open to challenge, no authority is beyond question, no consensus is final. This radical openness threatens any attempt at stabilization. Habermas’s later turn to law, civil society, and deliberative institutions can thus be read as an effort to render this radical openness socially sustainable, to translate critique into procedures and norms capable of maintaining integration in complex societies.

This translation, however, comes at a cost. By privileging consensus-oriented forms of institutionalization, Habermas ends up domesticating the critical potential his own theory unleashes. The problem, of course, is not institutionalization as such: large-scale oligarchic structures like the European Union tend toward lobbyist mediation, bureaucratic stabilization, and general depoliticization, even when they preserve formal channels of participation, but workers’ organizations (unions, councils, grassroots formations) can, by contrast, function as vehicles of conflict, sites where antagonism is articulated and organized.

The concept of an “oppositional public sphere”, developed by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge in critical engagement with Habermas’s work, foregrounds fragmented, experience-based counter-publics rooted in labor and everyday life; arenas that do not aim at immediate consensus but organize and sustain conflict, and within which the working class finds the means to translate its interests, existential aspirations, and insurgent energies into political form. The decisive question then is not whether critique becomes institutionalized, but how: which forms of organization preserve the antagonistic energy of critique, and which absorb it into existing structures of domination.

To sum up: read against the grain, Habermas’s work retains a certain actuality. Communicative rationality produces a standing surplus of critique over any institutional form that seeks to contain it. Yet a “will to stabilization” runs through his thought and surfaces in a number of unfortunate political positions: support for the first Gulf War as a means of consolidating an international rule of law; endorsement of NATO’s intervention in the Balkans not only to halt genocide but to stabilize the Euro-Atlantic alliance; and, finally, a strong defense of Israel’s right to self-defense. In the latter case, Habermas grounds his stance in Germany’s historically constituted responsibility for the singular crime of the Shoah, which, he argues, entails a special obligation to secure Israel’s existence, elevating its right to defense beyond a matter of international law to a morally charged commitment bound up with the preservation of the postwar normative order.

While it is not entirely unfair to say that the refusal of stabilization – let us say, in Adorno’s negative dialectics – threatens to dissolve critique into ineffectual negativity, it should by now also be clear that attempts to stabilize meaning and secure consensus risk blunting critique altogether. The task, then, is not to choose between openness and order, but to sustain forms of social organization in which critique remains both effective and uncompromisingly sharp.

Going Awry

My latest piece, on Žižek, is out now on Cosmonaut.

Slavoj was once a major reference for me while I was writing my thesis on Adorno, back in 2004-2008. Yet his post-2015 turn on immigration (one he hasn’t meaningfully revised) remains a hard pill to swallow. I felt I owed it to him to put the dots on the i’s.

🔗[Read it here]. 

Deception Theory

Adorno vs. Jauss: Aesthetic Value in the Face of Commodification

Explicitly or implicitly, reception theories of literature often position themselves against Marxist aesthetics, which they claim reduces art to a mere epiphenomenon of the superstructure – a passive reflection of society’s underlying economic forces. 

Hans Robert Jauss has engaged explicitly and willingly in that dispute. Already in his famous German inaugural address of 1967, titled "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory", he generalizes what he imagines the above mentioned aesthetics to be by hand-picking some of the worse pieces written by Lukács (while pretending they were not already thoroughly contested by other renowned ambassadors of that same critical tradition, such as Brecht and Adorno), which he mixes up with concepts taken from Goldmann, whom he misreads, and ends up highlighting a major contradiction in that line of thought. The "contradiction" he identifies is the following: if there really is, as Marxists claim, a homology between a pre-existing basic social structure and artistic phenomena, then the result can only be the complete identity of form and content, which is impossible given that their reciprocal influence is denied once one posits, as Marxists themselves generally do, economics as the determinant factor (cf. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005, pp. 13-14). 

A literary critic should pay more carefully attention to the words he uses. "Homology", for a start, does not mean "identity". Secondly, what in preeminent Marxist criticism is structurally homologous are not form and content; it is on the contrary the form of the social and the fundamental forms worked out by the artist in order to organize the material he chooses to work upon that are homologous, which is completely different from what Jauss is making out of the position he elected to bout by identifying all Marxist critique with the infamous "theory of reflection". But who really in the Marxist camp sustained such a rudimentary model at the end of the sixties apart from some (to employ a Joycean expression) "reptrograd leanins"? 

Now let’s shift, for a contrast, to the position put forward by Adorno in his philosophical testament, published posthumously three years later. Already in the very first pages of Aesthetic Theory (London/New York: Continuum, 2004, pp. 6-7), it becomes clear that, in the best versions of Marxist aesthetics, things are not as black and white as Jauss had claimed (and it is not as if the ideas of the Frankfurt School philosopher on art and society were unknown at the time he made his public address, notably in Germany). It is worth quoting:

If art opposes the empirical through the element of form – and the mediation of form and content is not to be grasped without their differentiation – the mediation is to be sought in the recognition of aesthetic form as sedimented content. [...] They [artworks] are real as answers to the puzzle externally posed to them. Their own tension is binding in relation to the tension external to them. The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world from which they recoil. The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective elements, defines the relation of art to society. The complex of tensions in artworks crystallizes undisturbed in these problems of form and through emancipation from the external world’s factual façade converges with the real essence. [...] The moment a limit is posited [resuming Hegel’s argument against Kant], it is overstepped and that against which the limit was established is absorbed. Only this, not moralizing, is the critique of l’art pour l’art, which by abstract negation posits the χωρισμός of art as absolute. [trans. R. Hullot-Kentor]

Well, a moralizing alternative solution to Adorno’s "somber" approach is exactly what Jauss preached a couple of years after the publication of Aesthetic Theory, except that, to put it mildly, he completely misses the bull’s eye in his discussion of the latter. Artworks according to his normative aesthetic of reception must lead to symbolic practices geared towards solidarity, reason why he attacks the Frankfurt School thinker, for not searching to build a bridge between the solitary contemplative artistic experience and engagement in dialogical practices; instead of focusing on negation, art should seek to create an objective binding meaning (cf. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008, pp. 13-21). To say the least, the whole question is poorly formulated, since such a bridge, the adequacy of artistic products to an ideal would mean sacrificing quality from the start (not to mention the fact that nothing guarantees that dialogical practices in the present conditions, in which social language is constantly penetrated by commoditized mediations that ossify and devitalize significations, would by themselves lead to qualitative social change or even to solidarity). 

Taking the reasoning to the end, a work such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin would stand, according to such highly noble criterion, as superior to, say, The Castle, for, even though literarily speaking Stowe’s novel is awful, it "communicates better" and usually rouse empathetic feelings, whereas Kafka’s book might lead to incomprehension and eventually leave the reader indifferent, if not more confused than ever. In that optic, if I’m allowed to caricaturize a bit, we would be better off without books like Finnegans Wake or The Unnamable, as they do not contribute an inch in creating the objective binding meaning Jauss nostalgically dreams of, whereas a cheesy Paulo Coelho novel might just fit in perfectly. Jokes aside, and to state it plainly, the problem is not in the moral intention itself, as intentions are not the decisive factor in the composition (or, for that matter, the reception) of a work of art. What is crucial is the work’s formal coherence and the truth content it expresses (Flaubert already, in a famous letter to Louise Colet, sustains exactly the same). As Terry Eagleton puts it in The Event of Literature (New Haven/London: Yale University, 2012, p. 69): "Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not an embarrassingly second-rate novel because it has a specific moral purpose – so does Swift’s A Modest Proposal, Tolstoy’s Resurrection and Orwell’s Animal Farm – but because of the way it executes it. One might contrast it in this respect with The Grapes of Wrath, The Crucible or Ibsen’s Pillars of Community." 

Moreover, let’s not forget that for Adorno art cannot move within the circle of mutual understanding rooted in the ordinary uses of language in everyday communication, for the simple reason that the kernel of our most significant experiences – personal as well as social – cannot be apprehended except as the very inadequacy between language (not only ordinary language, but also in its theoretical or scientific uses) and that which it intends to designate or describe. There is where the mimetic language of art, operating at the objective level of form, may express that which cannot be expressed in direct dialogical or communicative fashion: "Though discursive knowledge is adequate to reality, and even to its irrationalities, which originate in its laws of motion, something in reality rebuffs rational knowledge. [...] Suffering conceptualized remains mute." (Aesthetic Theory, p. 24) 

That’s what distinguishes consequent works of art from most pop narcotics, what separates, let’s say, Spielberg’s maudlin Schindler’s List, the multiple Oscar awarded worldwide box office success, from a generally execrated movie like Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. By sticking to historical reality (or to what we know of it) and pretending to portray the events as faithfully as possible from the point of view of those who took part in them, the former ultimately falsifies the whole thing by turning the barely imaginable horror of the holocaust into a commodity fit to the Hollywood melodramatic frame (which comprises blind sympathetic identification, heroic exemplarity, clear consensus over what is good and what is evil) and its over-stereotyping standards (the Jew is but a grotesque caricature of the Jew, and the same goes for the Nazi), with its cheap symbolism and implausible moral absolutes (so that you can watch it in the evening after work, eventually get moved by the story, and go right back to your ordinary life, which in any case gets away confirmed and legitimized). As dreadful as it really is, Pasolini’s last movie, on the other hand, by being almost unbearable (even if one manages to watch it to the end, it is a considerably indigestive experience), to the point of being to this day and age still banned in several countries (not much for its extremely graphic scenes of violence, I suspect, but above all for depicting fascism as the latest flower of the enlightened and highly refined European civilization), does way more justice to the intolerable truth of what took place during WWII, as well as to actual victims of fascism anywhere. 

All that is not to say, as some rather poor reading of Adorno might suggest, that only nearly excruciating works are legitimate – reading Huckleberry Finn remains a very pleasant experience, which does not change the fact that it is a novel way superior to the much less amusing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as it articulates incomparably better than this latter the deep truth of Antebellum American society –, for what is decisive is precisely the "feeling of truth" (as Antonio Candido would have it) conveyed by the work, wherein resides its true moral dimension.