Toward the end of 2019, I received a call for papers regarding a special journal issue dedicated to problems facing contemporary critical theory. The proposed topics covered gender, feminism, communications and recognition theory, psychoanalysis, capitalist pathologies, alienation, ideologies, mass culture, power, democracy, and emancipation. The ‘call’ indicated that social research should be directed at the problem, inherited from Hegel and Marx, of realizing historical reason via critique. Of course, the rubrics were broad enough to cover just about anything, I suppose, but it is revealing that ‘revolution’ was all but forgotten, presumably subsumable under the notion of ‘emancipation.’ But more conspicuously absent were the commodity form, the proletariat, class, unions, party, socialism, communism, and so on. Presumably, a lot can be jammed into the “capitalist pathologies” box.
Naturally, we should not expect much from an academic vitae-stuffing exercise but what these abstract indicators veil is the background problem of a vacuum of critical research on what might be called the ‘engines’ of social effervescence and the sacred energies that can animate the critical spirit, and the renewal of democratic social organization. But where critical academics are gathered we should not expect sustained concern for ‘the sacred’ or, really, even a concern for genuine social solidarity. I discovered years ago, to my own satisfaction, that ‘critical’ academics are among the least-solidified people on earth. The resignation baked into the special issue is, one has to admit, probably realistic and therefore warranted since we gave up on the proletariat by the middle of the 20th Century as a mass of ignorant reactionaries; where one has capitulated to the positivity of “capitalist society” (blissfully unaware of the contradiction built into such a phrase) we should infer that the game is truly up. Where there had been a faith in revolution 1 (for a while it was even inevitable) we now have the revolving door of academic conferences and journal symposiums. I guess it was inevitable.
The current global turmoil is being driven not by the classical ‘proletariat’ but by the aspiring, petit bourgeoise urban middle classes in opposition to rural and suburban authoritarian populists, and there is no real indication that a genuine socialism holds any special charm for these liberal aspirants over the prospects of a freshly-regulated free-market consumer utopia and the kinds
Resignation and Ecstasy represents the third volume of Sacrifice and Self-Defeat, a project which has three broad goals: to articulate the terms and conditions (Volume One) 2 under which we may explicate the moral geometry 3 of collective consciousness (combined here with the second volume, Disintegration) 4 in a social system dominated by the commodity (the final phase of the project). Presently, as with Disintegration, we are interested in the antinomies of the moral economy of neoliberalism, but we are equally interested in the deep structures that persist across time and space as a run-up to the concluding volume that examines the puritanical logic of ascetic labor in a calling as a “vanishing medium” (Karl Rosenkranz, in Hegel 2002: 264), opening the way for the modern epoch. Volume Four will extend the concept of a moral geometry in an effort to reconstruct and expand Marx’s general formula for capital.
In the syllogism of society, individual love manifests itself as a universal faith only through mediating secondary associations and institutions. Lacking those middle fortifications, faith and love are essentially hopeless.
The Sociogony (Volume 128 in the Studies in Critical Social Sciences series, Brill, 2019).
By ‘geometry’ I am playing off the original meaning of the word: the measuring and surveying of a ground with an eye toward pulling various, disconnected determinations into formal relations with one another. Where there is rationalism and universal thought there is a “geometry” even though it remains, “simple,” abstract and untrue (Durkheim 1961: 279). There is a danger in associating this ‘geometry’ with the “abstract sensuousness” of materialism: “In its further development materialism became one-sided. Hobbes was the one who systematized Bacon’s materialism. Sensuousness lost its bloom and became the abstract sensuousness of the geometrician. Physical motion was sacrificed to the mechanical or mathematical, geometry was proclaimed the principal science. Materialism became hostile to humanity. In order to overcome the anti-human incorporeal spirit in its own field, materialism itself was obliged to mortify its flesh and become an ascetic. It appeared as a being of reason, but it also developed the implacable logic of reason” (Marx and Engels 2008: 66). For us, ‘geometry’ is the teleological work of the concept in giving a form or shape to things such that they stand out as moments within an integrated constellation of synthetic a priori judgments. Further, whenever we are in the presence of the untrue representations of the sacred we are also encounter geometry: lines, circles, spirals, cubes, and so on (Durkheim [1912] 1915: 148–49). The bare minimum seems to be the straight line (e.g., the gospels of the New Testament). Galileo is famous for making geometry a prerequisite for comprehending the universe (see Hodgkin 2005: 133) but the triangle, for example, is a concept projected into nature, not nature directly imposing itself upon the intellect. Moreover, we follow Durkheim’s sense of ‘organicism’ as an organicism of ideas, representations, and concepts in opposition to classical organicism. Treated ‘geometrically’ things “cannot be treated biologically” (McGilvery 1898: 238).
Disintegration: Bad Love, Collective Suicide, and the Idols of Imperial Twilight (Volume 163 in the Studies in Critical Social Sciences series, Brill, 2020).