Day 16: The Command to Control Praxis
“… In Galileo’s mathematization of nature, nature itself is idealized on the model of the new mathematics. In modern terms, it becomes a mathematical manifold” [Horkheimer and Adorno are here quoting from (Husserl 1970)]. Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine. Enlightenment pushed aside the classical demand to “think thinking” … because it distracted philosophers from the command to control praxis. Mathematical procedure became a kind of ritual of thought. Despite its axiomatic self-limitation, it installed itself as necessary and objective: mathematics made thought into a thing – a tool, to use its own term.
I spent most of the day prepping for a non-technical talk on Critical Theory. However, I bailed on giving the presentation, because I didn’t feel capable of doing the topic justice. I’m also unsure that the non-technical talks are an appropriate forum for the topic.
Spending the day reading critical theory meant reconnecting with the weighty and all important question of whether the enlightenment can realize its promise of emancipated human communities and a reconciliation with (and redemption of) nature, or whether it will tend towards ever more exacting exploitation and perfected systems of control. With this concern rekindled, I found it difficult to get excited about the minutia of wonky technical puzzles.
Still, I managed to identify the root cause of the 1ML bug I’ve been investigating.
(I’m currently questioning the value of the daily check-in posts I’ve been writing. Perhaps I’ll have an idea of how to improve or adjust this tomorrow.)
Here are notes I collected in preparation for the aborted presentation:
Notes around critical theory
Motive
We are contributing to a massive, incredibly complex machine. We have virtually no idea of how our contributions will be used or what they will lead to. This is dangerous. Probably more dangerous than we can comprehend.
Early modern figures important for the foundations of critical theory
Spinoza
- Committed to egalitarian and emancipatory politics.
- Advanced an outlook that unified theory and praxis.
- Helped develop a science of the affects.
- Huge influence on Hegel.
- Remarkably (for his time): Not imperialist. Not racist.
Unfortunately (as I learned today): Misogynist. Classist. Adultist.
Yet if nature had made women equal to men, and had given them equal strength of mind and intellectual ability, in which human power and therefore human right mainly consists, surely among so many different nations some would be found where both sexes ruled on equal terms, and others where the men were ruled by the women and brought up in such a manner that they had less ability. But since this has nowhere happened, I am fully entitled to assert that women have not the same right as men by nature, but are necessarily inferior to them
(Spinoza in A Political Treatise Taken from Margret Gullan-Whur’s Spinoza and the Equality of Women)
It is tempting to say that Spinoza deformed the emancipatory essence of his theoretical insights by bowing them to “fact” inferred from history:
However, Gullan-Whur dispels this easy accommodation
a closer look at the argument reveals that Spinoza could in fact be proceeding typically. For, in claiming that women re necessarily mentally weaker than men, he invokes the logical and causal necessity which are for him equivalent, and which dictate the laws of nature. … Used by Spinoza the cause/reason equation constitutes a principle of sufficient reason.
For the purpose of this short reflection on critical theory, the key move noted by Gullan-Whur is “his metaphysical equivalence of human power with human right.” This equivalence opens the way for the nightmare of purely instrumental reason to crush all tenderness and caring out of social relations and rights.
Gullan-Whur ends up arguing that this regressive view is not consistent with his metaphysical and ethical positions in the Ethics. I’m not entirely convinced, however. That bit about equating power with right and allowing an avenue for deducing reason from causation is all a bit troubling.
Kant
- Articulated the key methodological notions of critical philosophy.
- Innovated dialectical critique as a way of diagnosing untenable ideas.
- At least racist, imperialist, and misogynist.
Hegel
- Radicalized critical philosophy by emphasizing the genetic and historical aspects of reason.
- Advanced dialectic reason as a way of generating new ideas
- At least racist and imperialist.
Modern Figures
Weber
Marx
Nietzsche
Freud
Lukacs
Frankfurt School
Contemporary figures and traditions
The Frankfurt School championed the term “Critical Theory”, but what they practiced and refined and reworked is only the legacy of a critical, reflective reason which was common to a broad trend in European philosophical thought. The preceding genealogical sketch is stupidly male and partial. But it is easier to find more representative and diverse contemporary figures and schools of thought that are practicing critical theory. Some examples:
Angela Davis
Student of Marcuse in the US and studied with Adorno in Germany.
Critical Pedagogy
Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education and social movement that has developed and applied concepts from critical theory and related traditions to the field of education and the study of culture.
Critical race theory
uses critical theory to examine society and culture as they relate to categorizations of race, law, and power
Social Reproduction Theory
Key to social reproduction theory (SRT) is an understanding of the ‘production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process’, or in other words: acknowledging that race and gender oppression occur capitalistically.
Queer Theory
a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of queer studies and women’s studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorization of ’queerness’ itself. … queer theory builds both upon feminist challenges to the idea that gender is part of the essential self and upon gay/lesbian studies’ close examination of the socially constructed nature of sexual acts and identities.
Notes from The Dialectic of Enlightenment
The dialectic of enlightenment is culminating in objective madness.
The increase in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population. … In the unjust state of society the powerlessness and pliability of the masses increase with the quantity of goods allocated to them. The materially considerable and socially paltry rise in the standard of living of the lower classes is reflected in the hypocritical propagation of intellect. Intellect’s true concern is a negation of reification. It must perish when it is solidified into a cultural asset and handed out for consumption purposes. The flood of precise information and brand-new amusements make people smarter and more stupid at once.
What is at issue here is not culture as a value … but the necessity for enlightenment to reflect on itself if humanity is not to be totally betrayed. What is at stake is not conservation of the past but the fulfillment of past hopes.
Traditional and Critical Theory
My aim was to elucidate this point, but I didn’t make it….
Children are the most oppressed humans
In general, there is no accepted or reliable technique for parenting which does not make recourse to oppressive and authoritarian measures. We cannot help propagating oppression, because we don’t know how to propagate without oppressing.
We may have had loving parents and caring teachers. However, in our culture and society, the dominant paradigm is one of adults controlling the lives of children. Even if done with love, this control and domination fundamentally disempowers children.
Our paradigm teaches children to question themselves and rely on authority figures to make decisions for them and to tell them what is right. The need for autonomy and self-determination is sacrificed to the need for order and productivity. Indoctrination into this kind of world-view is easier if the power of children is dismissed and disregarded.
Exhaustion
I imagine that I am nostalgic today because so few people seem to believe that anybody has any revolutionary potential left.