In any event, I appreciate the comments – especially as I’m now having my standard sheepish reaction that always follows whenever I write something sweeping like this – time passes, you think of all the things you left out, etc.

I’m ambivalent on Habermas too… ;-)

immanence posits that there is no “outside” to context, and therefore logically rules out the existence of “objective” grounds from which other trusted propositions can then be derived; self-reflexivity follows from immanence, and posits that the theorist remains embedded within the context they are analysing.

That’s very helpful.

Cheers

My own understanding of capitalism is far more decentred from the market as an institution, than the vision offered by first generation Frankfurt School theorists – my understanding is both: more Weberian (in the sense that I think that one of the historically distinctive elements of capitalism is actually its need for forward planning and predictability – the Frankfurt School folks both know this, and can never quite get around the idea in their basic theoretical categories) – and that capitalism is therefore quite compatible with strong states; and far more abstract (in that I see the basic structure to have something to do with the replication of a pattern of practice through time, rather than with the expression of that pattern in some particular configuration of concrete social institutions).

I regard the restless, “virtual” slice of our context as an unintentionally-generated “structure” or “logic of practice” – and therefore as a distinctive form of (impersonal) domination. I am therefore also leery of attempts to identify this “counter-factual” with liberation. To me, this kind of identification is similar, in some respects, to late-19th and early-20th century movements that believed that the locus of emancipation would lie in centring society more closely around production and labour… I think both are perhaps confusing a direction that society is trending, with an emancipatory potential, and movements that do this in a naive and unqualified way may then struggle to defend against objectionable movements inflecting these same trends to very different normative ends…

I also, though, think that it is possible to explore the potentials of a context characterised by such a practical counter-factual – that some liberatory potentials and normative ideals are suggested by living in and experiencing such a world. In exploring the determinate relationship between critical forms of subjectivity, and the context whose potentials those critical forms of subjectivity express, I would hope we could perhaps make it more likely to avoid a trap into which movements sometimes have fallen in the past, of a one-sided and non-critical embrace of elements of the current context – confusing an element that already exists in our current context, with emancipation – if only that element could be more fully realised, etc. My impulses – with Benjamin – lay in the prospect of brushing history against the grain – viewing some of the spoils of “progress” with appropriate scepticism – while also realising that we might still be able to appropriate potentials that were thereby generated in alienated form…

Apologies that I am expressing this very crudely – I’m extremely tired today. But I very much like the line introduced in your comment, and hope the discussion can continue, or that I can take the issue up in a much more adequate way when I’m a bit less shell-shocked from too much teaching…

Lovely blog title, by the way – speaks to two of my main interests – I might have wished for such a space… :-)

Such positive theories have suffered over the course of the 20th century for many reasons – not least of which is the historical disappointment that set in, as it was recognised that the targets of early Marxist theory could be overcome, without the result being emancipatory – that the institutions of private property and the market could be superceded by conscious planning, without greater freedom resulting as the intrinsic and inevitable counterpart of this transformation. The concept of critical theory in its Frankfurt School sense emerged through these theorists’ confrontation with this historical experience, as they began to wrestle with the notion of what immanent and self-reflexive critique might mean, if it did not entail the alignment of critical ideals with some existent or trending element within the context.

In general, the history of the problem of immanence as it is written here is not so much the sociological problem of objectivity with respect to other cultures, as it is the political problem of finding the proper grounds from which to lob bombs at the existing state of oppression. Since the determinate grounds of an early Marxism prove insufficient, one begins looking for the determinateness (almost in a physical sense of “solidity”) of a pure negativity, experienced affectively as restlessness, and formally as akin to the scientific method.

However, leaving aside for a moment the question of daily immanent determinations (about the United States engaging in torture, for example, or about the lack of adequate childcare and parental leave), I’m not sure that I can immediately assent to the proposition that the 20th Century “proved” anything about the viability of 19th Century projects of liberation (notably the project of Marx and Engels).

This is because I don’t think that the free market, or private property, were ever superseded under conditions sufficient to the planned radicality of the experiment. Instead, such experiments as the Soviet state and the Chinese state represented isolated and incomplete trials of Marxist social change. The Soviet experiment was directed by Lenin and then Stalin, the Chinese experiment by Mao, and there are good reasons to consider Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism as distinct from Marxism.

If anything, the success of the Chinese state (where all of our blogs are, sad to say, banned) illustrates that conscious planning and commodity markets are perfectly compatible, a fact already proven by Fascist states and by the remarkably conscious rapacity of all multinational corporations.

This is why, ultimately, I am far more sympathetic to efforts (by Zizek and others) to decisively articulate the radical core of Marxism, than I am to the identification of liberation with a restless negative dialectics. Even assuming that pure negation has a determinate content, one would be hard-pressed to claim that its content was identical with liberation; to do so would be to steal from liberation the accompaniment of joy.