Critical Theory and Political Engagement

From May 1968 to the Arab Spring

C. Pawling

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137315236
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

In this timely study, Pawling argues for a renewal of the 'politics of intellectual life', calling for an engaged critical theory written in the spirit of May 1968, as exemplified in the works of figures such as Sartre, Derrida, Badiou, Jameson and Said.

1

Critical Theory and Radical Politics in the Late Sixties

Reflecting on the relationship between critical theory and politics, Stuart Hall, the former Director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, has commented on a number of occasions about the influence of May ’68 and radical student politics on the intellectual ‘project’ of Cultural Studies. Hall argues that this indebtedness to the politics of 1968 was worked through at the level of what one might call ‘form’ and ‘content’ – the ideas which emerged at this time and the forms of intellectual practice which they engendered. Thus, ‘new kinds of questions about the “politics of culture”’ emerged in the wake of the ‘cultural revolution of May ’68’ (Hall 1997, p. 9) and the influence of radical currents of thought, especially Marxism, was marked. At the same time, there was the attempt to develop both an interdisciplinary approach to research and a more collective approach to the garnering of knowledge which would expressly oppose the ‘competitive individualism’ of traditional modes of intellectual enquiry. Consequently, as Colin MacCabe notes in a recent interview with Hall, ‘1968 transformed the Centre so that it became a national focus for politically committed students who wanted to pursue intellectual work’ (Hall 2008, p. 9).

In this chapter I want to address Hall’s argument and attempt to explore the way in which the experience of student politics at the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies helped to shape the formation of critical theory, both inside and beyond the Centre. The chapter will try to shed some light on the appeal of political commitment at this time and the underlying debates about what a ‘politics of intellectual life’ might entail. The mode of exploration will be partly autobiographical, but the rationale will not be to focus on the career of a leading student militant. Rather, I will attempt to offer some insight into what it was like to be a fairly ‘typical’ student, of a left disposition, who was interested in the socio-political implications of research and intellectual life.

In 1967 I started on a degree in English and German at Birmingham University at a moment when student politics was already gathering apace. There was a liberal agitation for a democratization of the university’s structures, with a call for student representatives on key bodies, such as the faculty board, senate, etc. In addition, we organized a sit-in to put pressure on the university to give up its investments in white-dominated Rhodesia and other suspect regimes. Outside the immediate environs of the university, I joined demonstrations against the Vietnam War, including the clash with police outside the American Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square in October 1968. Gradually, I began to realize that my individual studies of literature and culture could not be conducted in a political vacuum and that I needed to connect my own search for knowledge with a broader struggle to transform society. A first year course in English on the novel, taught by David Lodge, introduced me to the work of Marxist critics such as Arnold Kettle and Georg Lukács and a parallel unit on the German novel, led by Roy Pascal, helped to deepen my knowledge of Lukács’s work even further. Second and third year options on the English degree introduced me to Cultural Studies, which was beginning to flourish at Birmingham, and at this point I began to see how I might draw on the work of Frankfurt School thinkers, such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, to form a bridge between the critical theory I was encountering in German and radical alternatives to traditional literary analysis in English studies. However, it wasn’t necessarily obvious how these excursions into left-wing critical theory connected with what was happening beyond the groves of the academy and how the links between intellectual life and socio-political reality in general were to be forged. My wider knowledge of politics was still somewhat hazy, and my notion of ‘commitment’, as for many students at that time, was an amalgam of Labour Party politics and the libertarian stance I had picked up from publications such as Oz, International Times and Black Dwarf.

Libertarian politics was exceedingly important in the late sixties, not least because it challenged the division between politics and art through agit-prop, street theatre, etc., and in many ways the appeal of libertarian thought at this time was summed up by the slogan from Paris in May ’68: ‘All power to the imagination!’ Libertarian thought was also influential on a concrete political level, as I discovered when I spent a year abroad in Germany in 1969–70. During my time at Frankfurt University I lived in a ‘Wohngemeinschaft’, a collective composed of anarchist and socialist students. The group had links to the Anti-Vietnam Campaign and we sheltered two GIs who were deserting from the army and were attempting to escape to Sweden, where they would be safe from extradition back to the United States (US). One of the deserters, Dave, was only aged 19, as in the famous pop song about Vietnam, yet he had already gone through nightmarish experiences in combat and found it very difficult to cope with even the most simple everyday tasks. His truck had driven over a landmine in South Vietnam and he had lain for 18 hours in acute pain, waiting to be rescued. As a medical orderly, he had been carrying morphine and so he injected himself with strong doses to keep the pain at bay, but this meant that by the time he arrived in Frankfurt he was mentally and physically addicted. As a consequence, he would wander around our flat at night, unable to sleep. Eventually we were able to get the money together to buy Dave and his companion the necessary rail tickets for Sweden, although unfortunately we never discovered whether they were successful in reaching their destination, leading us to think that perhaps Dave’s emotional instability had aroused the suspicion of the border guards on the way.

My experience of student politics through the Wohngemeinschaft was important, but the inherent limitations of a libertarian/anarchist philosophy also became clear at this time. I had chosen to study in Frankfurt because of the reputation of scholars such as Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (commonly known as the Frankfurt School) and the intellectual debate there was stimulating, introducing me to a blend of critical Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis. However, my encounter with the student politics at Frankfurt University and the internal debates of the SDS (the German Socialist Student Organization) proved to be somewhat disillusioning. The students union was dominated by the figure of Hans Jürgen Krahl, a charismatic but rather narcissistic individual who was leading a series of sit-ins at the university and the Institute for Social Research. Krahl was a brilliant but tortured Marxist-Anarchist who was able to take the lead in attacking Horkheimer and Adorno after the latter had called in the police when the SDS had occupied the institute in the Autumn of 1968. (The justification for the original occupation had been Horkheimer’s refusal to condemn US policy in Vietnam.) Whilst one could see why Krahl and his comrades were frustrated with the cautious approach of the institute and the way it seemed to be endorsing the political conformism of intellectual life in the Bundesrepublik, Krahl sometimes seemed to be more interested in using student politics to wage an Oedipal struggle against his former supervisor, Adorno, than in developing a broad popular alliance against the Vietnam War.

Although Krahl was an important figure at that moment, perhaps more significant was the arrival of Danny Cohn-Bendit, who had just moved across to Frankfurt from Paris after acting as one of the leaders of the Événements. Like Krahl, Cohn-Bendit was fired by an anarchist politics of ‘direct action’. He was a persuasive orator who offered a Marcusian analysis of the ‘authoritarian state’ and the role of the university in disseminating ‘instrumental reason’, an analysis which was convincing to a young 20-year-old, searching for signposts in a confusing political and intellectual environment. However, Cohn-Bendit’s version of political engagement seemed to be limited to igniting acts of provocation against the state (what one might describe as a politics of, or by, the ‘deed’). Hence, I have vivid memories of escaping from the Frankfurt police and their water cannons after having participated in an action against the city’s ‘bourgeois’ department stores, which involved smashing windows and ‘liberating’ their contents. Some of these actions were inspired by a politics of humour and the imagination – for example, I recall one suggestion that we dress up as Santa Claus, go into the plusher apartment stores and give out presents which had been ‘liberated’ beforehand. However, it seemed to me that for Cohn-Bendit and his allies, actions like this were primarily designed to provoke the state into a violent response which would demonstrate to innocent bystanders, and the populace at large, that their ‘liberal’, ‘democratic’ society was actually only a thin veneer of ‘repressive tolerance’, beneath which lay hidden a totalitarian regime in waiting. To put it harshly, one might say that radical commitment was largely restricted to street demonstrations where an ‘enlightened’ left intelligentsia exhorted the people to throw off the shackles of their existence as consumers and ‘dupes’ of the system and join the impending revolution.

The limitations of the politics of Cohn-Bendit and the German SDS led me to search for another, more disciplined way of engaging with sections of society beyond the university. The Communist Party seemed staid, living on memories of past struggles and ambivalent about the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, which to any internationalist was the equivalent to American action in Vietnam. Thus, on my return to England I joined the Trotskyist International Socialists (later the Socialist Workers Party [SWP]), who offered an analysis of both class struggles in Britain and the wider impact of Western capitalism on the rest of the world. Moreover, if handing out leaflets to car workers outside the Austin-Morris factory in Longbridge on a wet Friday morning might seem miles away from the more ‘glamorous’ struggles on the streets of Frankfurt or Paris, it did bring a sense of responsibility to what was otherwise a rather inward-looking intellectual politics of the university.

Thus, to be a ‘committed’ intellectual was not to belong to an academic elite, but to be a member of a party with an ‘organic’ link to the working-class. We were servants in the wider battle for social and political emancipation and knowledge was a tool to be used, not for self-aggrandizement, but for furthering the ‘struggle’. Hence, instead of seeking personal reputation and status through individual research in the academic ‘machine’, one was involved as a much more anonymous figure in the party, working collectively on the party-authored leaflet or pamphlet. In retrospect this might be seen as a suppression of individual self-expression and the development of a personal voice, but it was a mode of working whose positive attributes are sometimes forgotten. As Fredric Jameson has noted,

In the 1960s many people came to realize that in a truly revolutionary collective experience what comes into being is not a faceless and anonymous crowd or ‘mass’ but, rather, a new level of being .... in which individuality is not effaced but completed by collectivity. It is an experience that has now slowly been forgotten, its traces systematically effaced by the return of desperate individualisms of all kinds.

(Jameson 1998a, p. 10)

Creating the ‘Organic’ intellectual

The experience of working within a collective was also crucial in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, where I began postgraduate research in the early seventies. In a manner somewhat similar to the Frankfurt School, the Centre fostered interdisciplinary research into contemporary culture which was informed by an amalgam of sophisticated Marxism, semiotics and feminist theory. The Centre was a university research department, but it also operated as a ‘utopian enclave’, to use the term coined by its then director, Stuart Hall. One might say that it was, in some ways, an attempt to create a ‘red base’, offering a workspace for left-wing intellectuals who were committed to the creation of ‘really useful knowledge’, which would help to forward the struggle for a socialist society.

The Centre provided a forum for debating issues which also engaged me as a committed ‘party’ intellectual outside the university. For example, if the ‘classical intellectual’ had been transformed by May ’68 into a ‘radicalized companion of the masses’, as Sartre maintained, how was he/she to relate to the left-wing party? Was it absolutely necessary for committed left intellectuals to join a Marxist party or could they operate alongside it, as Sartre did himself, defending left ideas through a critical stance of ‘anti anti-Communism’? Was the role of the radical intellectual to remain ‘unassimilable’, as an ‘unhappy consciousness’ of the left, with ‘a mandate from no-one’? (Sartre 2008 [1972], pp. 227, 247, 264).

One way of thinking the role of the radical intellectual through a Marxist framework had been suggested by the pre-War Italian Marxist, Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks had just been made available in the Lawrence & Wishart imprint. Stuart Hall summarized Gramsci’s work for the Centre, and then for a wider audience, in an extremely illuminating fashion and it is worth returning to him for an elaboration of the Italian philosopher’s famous distinction between the ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’ intellectual:

Our aim ... could be defined as the struggle to form a more ‘organic’ kind of intellectual. Gramsci spoke of the distinction between those ‘traditional’ intellectuals who set themselves the task of developing and sophisticating the existing paradigms of knowledge and those who, in their critical role, aim to become more ‘organic’ to new and emergent tendencies in society, who seek to become more integral with those forces, linked to them, capable of reflecting what Gramsci called the ‘intellectual function’ in its wider, non-specialist and non-elitist sense. He also designated two tasks for those aiming to become ‘organic’ intellectuals: to challenge modern ideologies ‘in their most refined form’, and to enter into the task of popular education.

(Hall et al. 1980, p. 46)

In later years, Stuart Hall has tended to question the optimism of this commitment to the notion of an ‘organic’ intellectual, sutured to the labour movement and a wider ‘historic bloc’ of progressive popular-democratic forces. In a recent interview in the Critical Quarterly Hall has argued that, not only was there ‘no political party’ in the early seventies to which radical intellectuals could affiliate, but there was ‘hardly a class we could address’ either (Hall 2008, pp. 9–10). Hence he has been largely critical of those party-affiliated members of the Centre, in groups such as the International Socialists or the International Marxist Group, who were attempting to close the gap between their theoretical work at the Centre and their political activity outside the university. In a cryptic but revealing footnote to Culture, Media, Language, he admonishes those who were attempting to reinvent a mythical ‘age of innocence’ of left politics (the thirties, perhaps?) when theory and practice were ‘inextricably united’ (Hall et al. 1980, p. 287). Those politically active students at the Centre who were seemingly attempting to will a fusion of theory and practice were engaging in a voluntaristic politics and, therefore, invoking an ‘empty slogan’ in calling for the ‘unity’ of theory and practice (ibid., p. 45). Moreover, for Hall the more politically engaged Centre members were in danger of simply dismissing their non-organized counterparts for having fallen prey to ‘theoreticism’. This inevitably led to a naïve ‘workerism’, in which practice was ‘everything’. Hence, the politically active individuals at the Centre were wont to deny their Gramscian ‘intellectual function’, in ‘an effort to pass themselves off as “something else” (workers, agitators, urban guerrillas)’ (Hall et al. 1980, p. 288).

History has a danger of becoming a matter of perception as much as fact, but nevertheless, I would want to draw on my own memories of this political moment in challenging Stuart Hall’s interpretation of the early seventies. First, on the issue of the absence of a class to relate to, this was, after all, the period when politically conscious sections of the working-class were engaged in momentous struggles against the Conservative government of Edward Heath over the imprisonment of trade unionists by the Government Solicitor, the first Miners’ strike of 1972 (which led to the closing of the gates at the Saltley coke depot on our own doorstep in Birmingham), etc. So, this was different from the moment of the late seventies and Eric Hobsbawm’s thesis of ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted’, when one could no longer assume a simple teleology of working-class and socialist advance in the economic and political arenas. In the early seventies we were more optimistic and I do not recall anyone raising these kinds of doubts at the Centre. Of course, we were aware of the debate initiated by André Gorz, Serge Mallet and others about the changing political consciousness of the ‘new working-class’ of white-collar and technical-scientific workers and these discussions impacted on our collective Theory Seminar at the Centre (see esp. A. Gorz, Strategy for Labour, 1967 [1964] and S. Mallet, The New Working Class, 1975 [1963]). However, even those calling for a more sophisticated and nuanced theory of the working-class as a stratified entity did not go so far as to claim that there was ‘no class’ at all for the organic intellectual to relate to.

Second, on the issue of the theory–praxis nexus and workerist dismissals of ‘theoreticism’, if there was ‘a widespread inability to develop a proper understanding of the role of intellectuals’ at the Birmingham Centre, as Stuart Hall argues, then it was not for the want of trying. My own recollection of this moment is that a number of key questions were raised about the necessarily mediated relationship between theory and practice, even if they were couched in the rather simplistic terminology of the times (e.g. the need for political intellectuals to ‘relate to the class’). Thus, there were sophisticated debates about the ‘politics of intellectual life’ and the preconditions for linking up theoretical work with concrete political struggles, both inside and beyond the university. For example, we were asking questions about the ‘representative’ role of the party in relationship to the ‘class’ or ‘masses’. Was the party necessarily a ‘vanguard’ organization – the ‘historical consciousness’ of the working-class – and did radical intellectuals have a key role in shaping that consciousness? Where did engaged intellectuals stand in relation to the decisions of the party? Were they completely tied to the ‘party line’ or should they preserve a certain measure of autonomy, ‘speaking truth to power’, even the power centres of the left, and living out what Sartre saw as their historic role as ‘monsters’ and ‘meddlers’?

Moreover, I recall that for the party political members of the Centre, mainstream Marxist figures such as Lenin were not necessarily taken as the last word on these issues, but that we looked to Sartre, Marcuse, Poulantzas and, of course, Gramsci for inspiration. So, we discussed whether radical intellectuals represented a ‘determinate negation’ of the ‘prevailing system’, as Marcuse maintained, because they were a grouping which was constitutionally ‘permeated with a deep distrust of ideology’ (Marcuse, in Cockburn et al., Student Power, 1969, p. 372). As the debate about the political function of the intellectual gathered pace in the seventies, we noted that other theoreticians such as Poulantzas were wary about seeing the intelligentsia as a separate grouping because they had ‘no specific role of their own’ in the production process (Poulantzas 2008, p. 202). Nevertheless, even if a more orthodox Marxist (albeit of an Althusserian stripe), such as Poulantzas, might initially assign the intelligentsia to the ‘petit-bourgeoisie’, with all its political instability and contradictions, he was, like Marcuse, also aware that the question of political consciousness was crucial and that intellectuals were ‘breaking free from the grip of bourgeois ideology’ as a result of crises such as the Vietnam War (Poulantzas, p. 205). Moreover, even Gramsci’s ‘traditional’ intellectuals constituted a particular ‘social category’ in Poulantzas’s terms, and hence were able to exert a political unity of their own at moments of crisis in history, based on the expression of particular ‘needs’, such as the freedom of intellectual production and expression. These demands could then be addressed by left groupings as the basis for an alliance between progressive intellectuals and the broader working-class movement. Thus, one could form a wider movement in which non-aligned intellectuals could play their own part on two fronts: (a) as a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Critical Theory and Radical Politics in the Late Sixties
• 2. Marxism and Artistic Commitment
• 3. Humanism and Post-Humanism: The Antinomies of Critical Theory, Post-May ’68
• 4. Rediscovering Commitment: Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx
• 5. Reviving the Critical Spirit of May ’68: Alain Badiou and the Cultural Politics of the ‘Event’
• 6. Badiou and the Search for an Anti-Humanist Aesthetic
• 7. Totality and the Dialectic in the Critical Theory of Fredric Jameson
• 8. Back to the Future? From Postmodernism to the ‘Communist Idea’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index