H14(a) - Politics and Emotions in Contemporary Critical Theory
Date: Jun 3 | Time: 03:45pm to 05:15pm | Location:
Chair/Président/Présidente : John Grant (King's University College)
Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Elaine Stavro (Trent University)
Session Abstract: This panel pursues critical theory's longstanding commitment to conducting theory with emancipatory aims. The papers do so in two ways: 1) by examining how the resources made available by past critical theorists can be brought to bear on contemporary problems; 2) by offering original diagnoses of our present conditions. We regard this historical moment as containing great risk and uncertainty; it is, as Gramsci once said, a time where the old is dying, but the panelists disagree on whether the new is capable of being born. Two of the papers make explicit interventions regarding the unexpected revival of (democratic) socialism as a viable political option in Western democracies such as the United Kingdom and United States. One paper examines how critical theory can overcome socialism’s "liberty problem" by reconceptualizing how "social freedom" can improve upon liberalism's commitments to liberty. The next paper returns to Simone de Beauvoir's work as a resource for overcoming the presumed antinomy between liberty and equality. Two more papers present diagnoses suggesting that the possibilities of a collective and emancipatory political movement are blocked. One paper locates this blockage in critical theory itself and its inability to determine a relationship between aesthetic and political modernism that allows for political action. The next paper examines our society's production of mass loneliness and how the struggle to be genuine involves deep levels of conformity. The panel will grapple with what contemporary critical theorists see today: political opportunity or blockage? Possibilities for real freedom or resignation and conformity?
Socialism’s Liberty Problem: Social Freedom Beyond Liberalism: John Grant (King's University College)
Abstract: This paper examines socialism's liberty problem from two general perspectives: the first is the persistent view that socialism necessarily diminishes the liberties people can enjoy; the second view challenges any presumptions that advocates of socialism have succeeded in producing a vision of liberty that is theoretically convincing and politically attractive. In the paper, I trace the lineage of an argument in liberal theory that separates liberty from the conditions under which it can be enjoyed. It is a move that can be found in the work of Isaiah Berlin, Friedrich Hayek, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and it is central to the misguided claim that socialism diminishes liberty because its concern for social conditions involves excessive interference in them. The necessary socialist response involves demonstrating how people's liberty is inseparable from their actual conditions in a society that must not be viewed as merely the sum all individual actions.
Because the critique of anti-socialist positions does not itself produce a socialist alternative, the paper also addresses socialism's own shortcomings in devising a distinct vision of freedom. Here I discuss Axel Honneth's attempt to reconceive socialism for the 21st Century. His account of 'social freedom' is sophisticated and promising yet commits socialism to positions that critical theory ought to avoid, such as an organic conception of society and the need for widespread community solidarity. Whereas Honneth's socialism remains deeply liberal, I elaborate a socialist vision that incorporates a commitment to liberty while transcending liberalism’s social conditions.
Ambiguities of the Democratic State: Simone de Beauvoir and 'Equaliberty': Elaine Stavro (Trent University)
Abstract: In lieu of contemporary interest in democratic socialism, and the theoretical concern that goals of equality and liberty are antinomical, I turn back to the reflections of Simone de Beauvoir and her underexplored thinking around democratic socialism. She managed to critique the communist party for its hierarchical and economistic practices, avoid the socialist humanist ideal of the individual fully realized in community, without lapsing into an anarchist position that spurns state activity wholesale. Her notion of embodied freedom presumes there are infrastructural preconditions which the state could provide: facilitating the caring of children, ensuring women's place in the workforce, and supporting women’s rights. Yet, she was equally critical of the French Republican state's abuse of power in Algeria, their heavy-handed treatment of dissent in France and the inadequacy of party politics. To leverage popular powers, she supported counter hegemonic public spaces to educate and inform oppressed groups, urging them to engage in collective action to make claims and rectify past injustices. Her ability to avoid the paradox of equality and liberty is summarized in her normative claim "in willing one's own freedom, one ought to will the freedom of all."
Towards a Critical Political Modernism: Arendt and Adorno on Aesthetics and Politics: Matthew Hamilton (University of Toronto)
Abstract: Philosophical modernism is the attempt to make the problems of artistic modernism explicitly or self-consciously problems of knowledge. It aims to rescue/discover the possibility of the rational meaningfulness of remaindered particularity (what remains of the object after conceptual subsumption) within the context of the hegemony of rationalizing reason. Central to this effort is Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, which explores the conditions under which subjective intimacy (particularity) is a necessary component of (a form of) universal knowledge. Kant's efforts deeply influenced the philosophical and political modernism of Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt. I contrast their readings of Kant's Third Critique to elucidate how Adorno arrives at his critical but politically skeptical interpretation, while Arendt, develops a political modernism that lacks critical self-consciousness of the social conditions subtending the problems of aesthetic modernism. What drives these readings in radically divergent directions is their contrasting accounts of the availability of remaindered particularity to (conceptual) expression and (practical) action: Adorno holds that the critical content of the claims of remaindered particularity are dependent on their necessarily dissonant and fragmentary form and cannot serve as exemplary for political action, whose absence they mourn; for Arendt, Kant's aesthetic reflective judgment models a form of political judgment that is not only available in everyday life but constitutes the condition of its practical intelligibility. I demonstrate why both approaches are equally self-defeating, and develop an alternative approach – a critical political modernism – that avoids both Adorno’s political skepticism and Arendt’s uncritical political modernism.
Mediating Loneliness and Genuineness in Mass Society: Hailey Murphy (University of New Brunswick)
Abstract: Mass society, especially in the digital age, functions to maintain one dimensionality so that individual difference is diluted into a market-based definition of ‘genuineness’. Individuality is marked by a simultaneous battle to be genuine while also conforming to specific societal standards. This conflict, in turn, produces a mass phenomenon of loneliness. This paper argues that loneliness is pervasive in Western society and that it manifests in a specific form of existential anxiety directly linked to the notion of the genuine. We may be more interconnected than ever, yet we find ourselves plagued by loneliness and isolation. The core of mass society depends on the precedence of appearance over being, wherein individual identity is measured by how genuine it is in its performance. We are genuine for others but without imbuing substantive meaning into our being; a process that, while done with others, is thoroughly isolating. “[W]e lose ourselves in a bottomless void, finding ourselves like the crystal ball, out of whose depths a voice speaks, whose cause however is not found there, and by wishing to grasp ourselves, we catch, with a shudder, nothing but a wandering ghost.” (Adorno, Minima Moralia) What is considered a genuine performance takes the form of atomistic competition and thus is undertaken in bad faith. As such we reflect empty images of self to one another in a manner that depicts “what it stands for, without ever being truly able to be such” (Adorno, Minima Moralia). At best, we are alone together.