1,720,972 research outputs found
Becoming-Critical with/out Deleuze and Guattari: Three Anarchies Beyond Post-Critique
Full text linkUsually, Deleuze and Guattari's philosophies are understood as an alternative to allegedly “ressentiment”-laden approaches of Critical Theory. The present essay, however, seeks to distil Deleuze and Guattari's critical potential from an angle critical of post-critical endeavours. By bringing them together with two of their main influences, Nietzsche and Kafka, their concept of becoming gets connected to that of becoming-critical. The essay's orienting questions thus are (a) what understanding of critique is involved in Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming, and (b) how useful is it to address the political-economic dynamics of the 21st century? After “three anarchies” are traced as the critical potential in Deleuze and Guattari, Manfredo Tafuri helps to problematise their relationship with anarcho-capitalist ideologies, and to show how to differentiate them from each other. In between, affirmative immanence gets subverted in a Geistergespräch with the main philosopher of affirmation and anti-transcendental thought, Friedrich Nietzsche. Finally, the essay argues that, due to the world's state, affirmation can only be upheld if reconciled with critique: especially in times of crises, critique becomes necessary. At least if re-read together with Nietzsche and Kafka, a critique of what is murderous follows from the Deleuzian affirmation of life; as much as embracing the earth in a Guattarian manner necessitates to transcend the plane of (political) immanence. All in all, to whole-heartedly affirm singularity, as Deleuze and Guattari do, one needs to go beyond post-critique's resentments against utopia
Critical Marxist Theory. Political Autonomy and the Radicalising Project of Modernity
No full textCritical Theory was conceived of as a transdisciplinary Marxist totality analysis by Horkheimer and colleagues throughout their exile. Ever since – especially with the death of Adorno in 1969 and the latest with the death of Marcuse ten years later – there happened what has been called the ‘domestication’ of the main strands of the Frankfurt School. My PhD traces this domestication in its two affirmative turns, that is, in a liberal turn in the second and in a postmodern turn in the third and fourth generations to better understand and overcome the domesticating impasse. As an alternative to both the liberal and the postmodern turn, then, it proposes to follow Habermas’ defence of a project of modernity instead, yet only by disentangling it, in Marxian fashion, from the capitalist modernisation process. That is needed because the normative ideals of the project of modernity can only be realised beyond the framework of capital: as long as they remain embedded within it, they dialectically invert themselves into their opposites. The PhD thus excavates political autonomy as the core not only of a radicalising project of modernity (pushed forward from below) but also as a possible criterion for the critiques of Critical Theory. Along this line, the thesis further updates the most important concepts of the Frankfurt School for today, namely materialised ideology, objective alienation, and liquid reification. It shows not only why political autonomy is the necessary condition for an open and pluralist Critical Marxist Theory faithful to early Horkheimer’s original conception but also in which sense political autonomy is needed to alleviate the main threats societies are facing today, namely ecological collapse and the rising alt-right
The Dialectics of Facticity and Post-Truth as an Ideological Mirror of Present-Day Capitalism
No full textPresent-day debates on science are polarised between two official anti-theses. The
respective competing positions can be read as a radicalisation of postmodern relativism
in the direction of a post-truth framework, and defences of facticity based on
the assumption of the abstract neutrality of objective facts. These two epistemological
positions are only apparently independent from each other. Post-truth epistemology
and facticity have complementary ideological functions despite their apparent contradictions:
both exclude the possibility to address and transform the societal framework
in which they are inserted. A critical theory – more precisely, a Marxist political
epistemology – is necessary to address and to comprehend the ideological role of
today’s epistemological dichotomies. These dichotomies jointly monopolise the cultural
arena and hinder emancipatory imagination, thought and action
Kritik an Kunst vs. Künstlerkritik
Full text linkSammelband des Q-Tutoriums gleichen Namens im Sommersemester 2019 an der HU Berli
L’aut aut di fatticità scientista e relativismo postmoderno quale semplificazione ideologica del problema epistemologico di expertise e populismo post-veritativo
No full textI dibattiti sulla scienza si trovano oggi polarizzati tra due posizioni antitetiche: (a) una radicalizzazione del relativismo postmoderno in direzione di un regime di post-verità, e (b) la reazione scientista, sorta di eco neo-positivistica, che si richiama alla neutralità di fatti posti come oggettivi in maniera assoluta. In questo saggio sosteniamo che queste due posizioni epistemologiche sono solo apparentemente indipendenti e slegate l’una dall’altra, perché in realtà si sostengono a vicenda dal punto di vista ideologico. Riteniamo infatti che l'epistemologia postmoderna (alle radici della post-verità) e il positivismo (alla base dello scientismo) assolvano alla stessa funzione sociale, nonostante la loro apparente irreconciliabilità, poiché in linea di principio escludono la possibilità di affrontare e trasformare il quadro sociale in cui si inseriscono. Oltre a ciò, una teoria critica e, più precisamente, un’epistemologia politica si rendono necessarie per affrontare e comprendere il ruolo ideologico delle dicotomie epistemologiche odierne come false alternative dialettiche che, di fatto, monopolizzano assieme l’arena culturale e quindi ostacolano slanci liberatori e politiche emancipatorie. In questo saggio ci rifaremo in particolar modo a temi e critiche derivate dalla Scuola di Francoforte delle origini per suggerire, in conclusione, che la soluzione alla dialettica ideologica che sintetizza le presunte antitesi del positivismo e del postmodernismo risiede in una prospettiva teorico-pratica che medi tra soggettività e oggettività, ovvero riconcili prassi e realtà grazie ad una soggettività collettiva che trascenda i limiti del dato
Beyond capitalism as religion: Disenchanting modernization for a radicalized project of modernity
No full textAGAINST THE CLASSICAL LIBERALIST trope of modernity as rational, disenchanted, and enlightened, this article argues to reconstruct it as spell-bound by religion – namely, by capitalism as religion.[2] The argument is drawn from combining a line of thinkers starting with Karl Marx and ranging from Max Weber via Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin to Lucien Goldmann and Marshall Berman. At the latest since the Marxian twist, any consequent emancipatory critique of religion incorporates a critique of capitalism as well — any project of modernity that is not self-contradictory can no longer be identified with capitalist modernization. More succinctly, the former, conceived of as a political project, must precisely be about overcoming the latter. This is because, if capitalism is to be grasped as a religion, any humanist or enlightened society would have to be postcapitalist. Accordingly, since we are not postcapitalist today, we are not humanist or enlightened either. The article will deliver the foundation of that argument by demonstrating why capitalism must be deciphered as an immanent material cult religion whose worldview is tragic, if not bleakly apocalyptic
Review of Douglas Spencer's 'Critique of Architecture'
No full textBeing a ‘critique of architecture’, Douglas Spencer’s new essay collection is ‘necessarily part and parcel of the critique of capitalism’ (190) as well. This is because architecture provides exemplary material for a critique of capital’s material(-ised) ideology – a critique that sets ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ not as two separate units unilaterally determined but as a fundamentally reciprocal relationship. As David Cunningham writes in his foreword: ‘Positioned in complex ways between the “infrastructural” and “superstructural”, and consequently mediating between them, architecture is, it may be argued, a privileged site for an interrogation of the productive operations of capital.’ (15) Understanding architecture in this way, Spencer questions not only the positivist, affirmative or immersive takes of his discipline but also its alternatives – like Fredric Jameson’s neo-Althusserian quasi-mystification of the economic sphere as something theoretically impenetrable yet allegorically catchable. Hence, with its persistent counter-hegemonic sensitivities, Spencer’s book is an excellent specimen of critical theory. With it, he is seated between the early Frankfurt School, highly complex Marxisms and critical architectural theory. Accordingly, the essays in the volume are historically finetuned to the developments of the present and its continuities with the past: from the (late) Fordist ‘production of the producer’ (203) to the neoliberal ‘politics of depoliticization’ (101)
Keine Zeit für Zukunft? Ein Zwischenruf Kassandras
No full textEinst bedeutete Apokalypse nicht nur verheerenden Unter-
gang, sondern: Bühne frei für Gerechtigkeit; Vorhang auf
fürs Weltgericht; und Hoffnung auf Himmel. Dergleichen
eschatologischen Optimismus hat man uns systematisch
wegkonditioniert mit einer eigens hierfür konsolidierten
Norm der Normalität. Darin wurde Apokalypse so lange
als Totalkatastrophe eingebürgert, bis der bürgerlichen
Gesellschaft keine andere Reaktion mehr auf sie einfiel
als die Fratze gelangweilten Gähnens. Hinter diesem zyni-
schen Gähnen als Fassade aber herrscht der Imperativ der
Akzeleration
Political Economy of Postmodernism & the Spirit of Post-Bourgeois Capitalism
Full text linkIf there still is a hegemony of postmodernism in today’s leftist academia, and if it can be analysed as the spirit of contemporary capitalism, then this poses a problem for nowadays’ leftist academia itself. I start with the premise that the just mentioned hegemony exists and present its analysis in neo-Marxist historical-materialist fashion. The argument runs as follows. Throughout the 20th century, there happened a shift from bourgeois to what I call “post-bourgeois” capitalism. This led into the agony of the radical kernel of modern-bourgeois values, ranging from humanism’s autonomy via enlightenment’s rationality to romanticism’s individuality or non-identity – ending in the 21st century’s “new spirit” of capitalism as the “cultural logic” of post-bourgeois capital. That shift towards the post-bourgeois commenced at the threshold from the 19th to the 20th century as a period which moved from terrestrial imperialism (or exo-colonisation) to the colonisation on the plane of culture (or endo-colonisation). Whereas both exo- and endocolonisation are caused by capital’s logic to further disembed beyond the confines of its differentiated economic sphere in order to accumulate itself, the shift was necessitated by the saturation of exocolonisation in the late 19th century. Yet, for capital to disembed into the cultural dimension, a collapse of the superstructure into the base was enforced, or the collapse of culture into the economy. In this post-dualising process of the economisation of culture and the culturalisation of the economy, culturalised capital-value itself became the prime new cultural meta-value. Now, since the radical kernel of bourgeois-modern values remains of prime relevance to resist and tackle the further colonisations by capital, it needs to be defended against a self-fashioned progressive postmodernism that simply mimics the blind progressions of post-bourgeois capitalism
Die Radikalisierung des politischen Projekts der Moderne: Marcuses emanzipatorische Vernunft für eine rationale Gesellschaft
Full text linkThe essay delves into the concept of the radicalising project of modernity by spelling out Marcuse's philosophy with a particular stress on his theorisation of emancipatory reason
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