Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique

Dialogues

Gabriel Rockhill, Alfredo Gomez-Muller

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231526364
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This book of tightly woven dialogues engages prominent thinkers in a discussion about the role of culture-broadly construed-in contemporary society and politics. Faced with the conceptual inflation of the notion of 'culture,' which now imposes itself as an indispensable issue in contemporary moral and political debates, these dynamic exchanges seek to rethink culture and critique beyond the schematic models that have often predominated, such as the opposition between "mainstream multiculturalism" and the "clash of civilizations."

Prefaced by an introduction relating current cultural debates to the critical theory tradition, this book examines the politics of culture and the spirit of critique from three different vantage points. To begin, Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller provide a stage-setting dialogue, followed by discussions with two major representatives of contemporary critical theory: Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser. Working at the horizons of this tradition, Judith Butler, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Cornel West then provide important critical perspectives on cultural politics. The book's concluding section engages with Michael Sandel and Will Kymlicka, who work out of the Rawlsian tradition yet are uniquely concerned with the issue of culture, broadly understood. The epilogue, an interview with Axel Honneth, returns to the core issue of critical theory in cultural politics. Ranging from recent developments and progressive interventions in critical theory to dialogues that incorporate its insights into larger discussions of social and political philosophy, this book sharpens old critical tools while developing new strategies for rethinking the role of 'culture' in contemporary society.

CRITICAL THEORY AND THE QUESTION OF CULTURE

1 / CRITICAL THEORY TODAY

Politics, Ethics, Culture

Opening Dialogue

Alfredo Gomez-Muller and Gabriel Rockhill

We do not attempt dogmatically to prefigure the future, but want to find the new world only through criticism of the old…. I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be.

—Karl Marx

Gabriel Rockhill: In order to introduce and discuss the fundamental stakes of the dialogues collected in this book, let us take as our starting point a shared reference: the tradition of critical theory. First of all, it is important to note, at a historical level, that the emergence of critical theory, in the broadest sense of the term, is directly linked to a series of social changes going back to the eighteenth century. In particular, these changes include the rise to power of the modern sciences, the partial secularization of culture, and the more or less definitive institutionalization of philosophical discourse, not to mention the destabilization of the traditional social structure with the collapse of the ancien régime. The “critical task” that imposed itself at the time was to establish the limits of philosophy by circumscribing its legitimate sphere of activity in relation to science and religion (within the context of a series of sociopolitical upheavals). It was necessary to relinquish to the scientists an important domain of knowledge (connaissances)—that of the natural sciences—which had formerly fallen under the general name of philosophia. And metaphysics, having already undergone numerous critiques, was no longer a reliable bracing point capable of ensuring philosophical foundations as such. Finally, with the progressive institutionalization of philosophy since the end of the eighteenth century, which largely sounded the death knell of the extrainstitutional practice of philosophia in the classical age, philosophers found themselves in an institutional battle for the legitimacy of their discipline.¹

Without wishing to accord it too much importance, we can cite the example of the works of Immanuel Kant—in particular, the Critique of Pure Reason and The Conflict of the Faculties—in which he undertakes a critique of philosophy in order to definitively establish its limits and ensure for it a legitimate domain of activity.² From this point of view, one can say that one of the most general questions investigated by Kant and several of his predecessors in the century of the Enlightenment³—a question taken up later, from different points of view, by Hegel and Marx—was the following: what role must philosophy play in this new sociohistorical configuration of knowledge (connaissances) and practices? At stake, then, is not solely a theoretical question concerning the legitimate place of philosophy in a new distribution of knowledge (savoirs) but also a thoroughly practical question: what can philosophy do in a world transformed by the evolution of the sciences, of industries, of modern institutions, of political movements, and so on? It is after the rise to power of the human and social sciences in the course of the nineteenth century that critical theory, in the strict sense of the term (the Frankfurt School), proposed to take up these same questions in a new historical context: a context marked, in particular, by the rapid evolution of capitalism and consumer society, by imperialism and colonialism, by the First World War and the Russian Revolution. As such, what one commonly calls critical theory today is the theory that responded to the general reconfiguration of philosophical practice in the modern age by calling into question the traditional vocation of philosophy in order to situate it in relation to the human and social sciences. The aim was to find a form of pluridisciplinary, critical thought capable of avoiding philosophical idealism as well as scientific positivism. It is in this way that critical theory, in the strict sense of the term, recaptured, in a new way and at another historical conjuncture, a question inherited from several of its illustrious predecessors: what can philosophy do in the contemporary world, and what can critical thinking do in our precise sociohistorical context? This question, moreover, conveys one of the major concerns of our dialogues, inasmuch as we question our interlocutors about the critical power of thought in the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is a world characterized by “globalization” and what one calls the collapse of the socialist alternative, by the supposed war between democracy and terrorism, by neoimperialism and economic colonialism, but also by “new social movements,” numerous debates on multiculturalism and postcolonialism, the crisis of the neoliberal system, and the emergence of a new socialism in Latin America.

Alfredo Gomez-Muller: To various degrees, and in different ways, the authors with whom we have dialogued in this book all practice forms of pluridisciplinarity, a fact that has given rise to a lack of comprehension or even a certain hostility among the defenders of the established order of knowledge (savoirs). Nonetheless, they practice these forms of pluridisciplinarity without having, in any strict sense, a general critical theory at their disposal. They start from concrete problems, relative to precise situations and phenomena, which they try to understand with theoretical resources from various forms of knowledge (savoirs). In this sense their theoretical practice precedes “theory.” This fact is perhaps not without consequences for the idea one can formulate of critical theory itself, of its status and the possibility of its construction. This is even more important given that the practice in question is, for most of our interlocutors, a theoretical practice of practice. Indeed, the principal object of their research is linked to the domain of action, and it concerns ethics, morals, politics, and law. In this respect the interviews collected here can also be read as an entranceway to practical philosophy or, if one prefers, to contemporary thought relative to the principles, rules, and contents of action. The primary interest of our interlocutors is practical, and it is in the development of this practical interest that they are led to explore new paths of analysis and, for some of them, to critically question just as much the traditional methods for the production of knowledge as the established conceptions of knowledge. This was already the orientation of Kant’s undertaking, in which the question of the general conditions of knowledge (connaissance) is rooted from the start in a practical interest. To unmask the pseudoknowledge of dogmatic metaphysics and of ontotheology is also to call into question the reign of political absolutism. For Kant, it is not a matter of criticizing philosophy in order to criticize philosophy but, instead, to criticize philosophy insofar as it can participate in a system of domination not only of ideas but also of human beings. The practical interest “takes precedence” over the theoretical interest of reason. I also find this precedence in the practice of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, where the term critique always means a critique of domination and, in this way, a theoretical practice of emancipation.

This historical link between practice and critical theory is perhaps not contingent, and it might determine both its condition of possibility and its status. It probably consists in a necessary link: the necessity of a critical theory, understood as a theoretical critique of instituted theory, is not separate from the necessity of the social and political critique of domination. The possibility of a critical theory is attached, in analytic language, to the “metatheoretical” sphere of practice or, in dialectical language, to the sphere of praxis. Perhaps the most central problem of critical theory resides in this relationship between “theory” and “practice,” which dialectical rationality thinks, since Marx, with the aid of the concept of praxis. Thought dialectically, critical theory would not simply be a method for appropriately thinking the practices of emancipation but the method according to which the practices of emancipation think themselves. From this point of view, the methodology of critical theory cannot be defined a priori, or in a formal way, but only in starting from practice, in other words, from the singularity of the situations and the challenges that the latter present. Its heuristic fecundity is displayed through its effective capacity to make sense of the realities that constitute its object. Similarly, following this perspective, which is not taken up in these interviews, the task of a critical theory is perhaps not only to link the social and human sciences with philosophy (that is to say, to link theories or forms of theoretical production) but also to link theory and practice—individual and collective practices of emancipation. Every theoretical practice certainly possesses a social and political significance, but only a theoretical practice attentive to the social condition of the production of knowledge and concerned with not reproducing the alienating aspects of those conditions can have an emancipatory significance. Along these lines it would, without doubt, be appropriate to revisit the Sartrean notion of praxis as well as certain developments in the social and intellectual history of the twentieth century, such as the Gramscian conception of the organic intellectual, the late Sartre’s investigation into the new intellectual, the experience of liberation theologies in Latin America, and Orlando Fals Borda’s IAP (Investigación-Acción-Participación) sociology. How could a theory that purports to be critical exempt from critique the question of the status of the intellectual and, more generally, the question of the subject producing knowledge? By holding itself within the traditional separation between theory and practice, critical theory would leave itself open to the risk of reproducing one of the most profound forms of domination.

GR: You are entirely right to insist on the centrality of practice in critical theory. I would specify, for my part, that there exist at least three dimensions of the interconnection between theory and practice. First of all, it is important to emphasize that philosophy itself, like every theoretical endeavor, is in effect a theoretical practice and that the thinking of philosophers is anchored in activities and institutions that largely determine the parameters of thinking. A philosophical doing (faire philosophique), with all of the “natural” dispositions that result from it, predisposes philosophical thinking to certain tracks of reflection. Secondly, we can speak of practical theories insofar as certain ideas have a genuine effective power. As a case in point, one can cite several dominant conservative ideas that purport to describe “what there is” while actually creating and recreating “what there is”: globalization, the struggle between democracy and terrorism, the “veil problem,” etc. Thirdly, practice in the traditional sense of the term—meaning the activity that aims at transforming the world—is directly linked to a general conception of the field of possibility, to an implicit theory of practices.

In these diverse interconnections of theory and practice, it seems to me that this third aspect constitutes one of the important stakes of critical theory today. As Nancy Fraser has emphasized, critical theory—at least in the Euro-American world—is faced with the social delegitimation of a certain form of emancipatory politics. As such, one of the tasks that imposes itself—and several authors in this collection grapple with it—is to rethink the very nature of emancipatory praxis outside of the logic of temporal utopia (where the end of history would coincide with a generalized emancipation). Instead of quite simply abandoning utopian thought, I would say that it is necessary to move from a political practice centered on temporal utopia—where this is conceived of as a moment in the future (l’avenir) (or, perhaps, a moment that is always to come [à venir] according to the messianic historical logic of an author like Derrida)—to a praxis founded on a conception of utopia as a concrete and circumstantial process of transformation. This is not to say that it is henceforth impossible to generalize from specific situations, or to link common struggles, but rather that it is necessary to break with the idea of a final solution in the form of a temporal “nonplace.” Emancipation, if we can employ this term without essentializing it, is a process that always needs to be renewed through concrete struggles, including the struggle over the very definition of the concept of emancipation. Among the resources that would help us work in this direction, you have already highlighted one of the most fecund reference points: the situationalist praxis of Sartre and others for whom action emerges from precise circumstances and practice develops against the backdrop of specific problems, whether it be racism, plutocratic imperialism, consumer society, or punditocracy. In line with the transatlantic spirit of our interlocutors in this collection—all of whom are a testament to an intellectual dynamic between Europe and North America—I would also add the pragmatist tradition from William James to Robert Brandom and Cornel West. In the best part of this tradition, essentialist philosophy and metaphysics are set aside in the name of a contextualist approach founded on fallibilism, absolute principles are called into question, and radical historicism is advocated in conjunction with holistic analyses of practice. Such a methodological orientation, which is far from being equivalent to a simple “instrumentalization” of theory, can surely contribute to the objectives of a critical theory for the contemporary world.

At a methodological level, would you agree in saying that critical theory today must be transversal with regard to its resources (linking philosophy with the social and human sciences), effective with regard to its ends (and thus centered on the practical transformation of the world), and situationalist or pragmatist with regard to its realization?

AGM: As for the general content of these three conditions of critical theory, I would indeed agree. Concerning the second condition or characteristic of a critical theory, which is related to its aim for the practical transformation of the world, I nonetheless wonder about the signification of the adjective effective. Is not this term, here, quite simply equivalent to ethics or to ethico-political praxis? Saying that critical theory must be effective, in the sense of its practical goals of the transformation of the world, amounts to saying that it must be ethical and political. However, from the point of view of a certain instituted knowledge, this would suffice to discount critical theory as an error of thought—a confusion of the “is” and the “ought”—or as an ideology. Are we not confusing the descriptive and the prescriptive? How can theory, which pertains to the general and the necessary, be ethical or political when the orientations of practice are purely particular and contingent? Against these “objections,” I believe that critical theory does not need to erase its ethical aspect (éthicité) in order to save its theoretical aspect (théoricité). The whole venture of critical theory resides precisely in the affirmation of the correlative double exigency of the theoretical (théoricité) and the ethical (éthicité). It is in starting from this affirmation that it can establish, for example, the ideological status of these purported objections from instituted knowledge, which rest on specific social, economic, and cultural presuppositions. The pretense of this knowledge to pure practical neutrality, like the practical thesis about the dichotomous separation between the “just” and the “good,” secure for the established systems of domination a function of legitimation. The Rawlsian subject analyzed by Michael Sandel, just like the individualist and possessive subject studied by C. B. Macpherson, is attached to a certain conception of politics and social relations that underlies the Western liberal project of instituting a “universal” theory of justice or democracy.

However, the affirmation of the theoretical (théoricité) or the ethical aspect (éthicité) of critical theory supposes the possibility of establishing a dividing line between ethics and theory, on the one hand, and ideology, on the other. I believe that one of the most important tasks of critical theory today is to recapture, in a new way, the distinction between “science” (or theoretical knowledge) and ideology. For my part, I think that we should take up the initial determination of the Marxian concept of ideology, which allows us to characterize ideology as an inverted or reverse image of the real, having each time as its function the legitimation of given relationships of domination. From this point of view, I would not say that the conservative ideas that you mentioned are practical theories, properly speaking. The discourse on the opposition between “democracy” and “terrorism” or on the threat of the Islamic “veil” are, rather, ideological configurations produced by specific modes of domination (Western neocolonialism, for example). Inversely, and keeping a distance from certain Marxists like Lenin, I find very problematic the idea according to which there would be a “proletarian ideology.” We cannot characterize in the same fashion a configuration of domination and a thinking of emancipation, that is to say, a critical theory. The distinction between theoretical knowledge and ideological representations does not rest simply on the procedures of knowledge production but also, and inseparably, on the practical (emancipatory) significance of this knowledge. However, this practical significance perpetually rebuilds itself through social interaction, and, in this sense, emancipation is always, as you say, a process to be renewed, a utopia that is not temporal but present, i.e. in the process of being verified in concrete practices of transformation. From this point of view, the relationship of critical theory to practice differs essentially from the relationship to the practice proper to the old “scientific socialism.” There, the future, understood according to a mechanistic and deterministic logic, presented itself in the mode of the necessary and not of the possible (thus legitimizing dogmatism and political domination). Today it seems to me that what is important, from the “practical” point of view just as much as from the “theoretical” point of view, is to learn to think of the future as possible and not as necessary. We are rediscovering utopia as the field of possibles and, by the same token, the idea that socialism, in one sense, can only be utopian. Perhaps this opens up the prospect of a new metaphysics, which someone like Derrida, for example, attempted to think with the idea of the messianicity of justice. Centered, as it is, on the practical transformation of the world, can critical theory do without this “metaphysical” questioning or, if you prefer, a reflection on the sources of utopia and the being of the possible, in the sense found in the philosophies of existence?

GR: Critical theory is in...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique
• Critical Theory and the Question of Culture
• Critical Perspectives on Cultural Politics
• Culture as Critique: The Limits of Liberalism?
• Epilogue: Critical Theory and Recognition
• Notes
• List of Contributors