Have you been asking yourself what comes after “the end of history” and what follows the postmodern? Well this short book attempts to hazard an answerHave you been asking yourself what comes after “the end of history” and what follows the postmodern? Well this short book attempts to hazard an answer. The proffered answer, coming at us like the global return of the repressed, is the return of geological time. The only thing is that, during the prolonged period of its disappearance from the conscious radar screen, human activity has taken a cumulative effect on nature and the surrounding environment and arguably brought an end to the Holocene, the geological period beginning after the last ice age. Although the name is still subject to contestation, the result has been the ushering in of the Anthropocene, a new proposed period in Earth’s history marked by the impact of human activity on ecosystems and the environment.
The three essays that make up this work attempt to bring the methods of philosophical analysis to the construction and critique of the concept of the Anthropocene by considering it through the lenses of time, art, and politics. A primary thread running through the three sections is that the natural world and the natural environment are increasingly impinging on human reality and our life world, whether we like it or not. This comes in the forms increasingly of natural events, storms, and natural disasters at an increasingly fast clip: be it hotter years, rivers drying up, super storms, stronger hurricanes, pandemics, and other changing conditions. Similarly the forms of living and attitudes towards the lived condition with the natural world mark a break with the romantic and other forms of consciousness that have approached nature, the human condition, and our lived world previously. The reorientation moves from the romantic consciousness which experiences nature and uses natural resources through acts of private consumption to the new shared lived experience of the Anthropocene and natural events impinging on and disrupting our postindustrial modern lives.
Credit should be given and points earned for the ambitions of the book and the boldness of the answer offered in response to the challenges of the times. With that said, as an early philosophical foray into a relatively uncharted literary space, the execution may not live up to those ambitions. As the book goes along, the author Holloway feels like he is getting over his skis and as a result repeatedly turns to other authors as authorities to keep his analysis standing upright. The effect, particularly noticeable in the final chapter, is a heavy use of quotations and citations. At one level, the last chapter reads like a string of quotations strung together; a more generous reading would say that ample help was used to stick the landing. Regardless, there is definitely something here and the argument is onto something real. We don’t need a book to tell us this, but it’s helpful when they are there as a reminder. This is something that I would like to see fleshed out further in future books and in real life. There is potential here in both spheres as the Earth and our human interactions with and within it could and should become the center for a grounded system of values for the present and future....more
Can you give us a theory of postmodernity without using the word? Coming in as a relatively late entry, almost as a coda to the debate, Liquid ModerniCan you give us a theory of postmodernity without using the word? Coming in as a relatively late entry, almost as a coda to the debate, Liquid Modernity is likely the best theory on modernity and postmodernity that I've read and recasts and reinterprets the earlier theories in its light. Much of the original debates about postmodernity, as the theories were rooted in cultural and literary criticism, were actually about art and literary works qua cultural artifacts; so, Bauman has made considerable progress by bringing his analyses back to society as first order social phenomena. Published initially in 1999, and with the exception of a lengthy section on the Kosovo War that is showing its age, this is perhaps the earliest work of social theory that still feels contemporary. Bauman's underlying contention is that original modernity, recast as the solid modern, was characterized by institutions and relations with fixed foundations and long-term horizons, such as a production economy, companies like IBM as the bellwether of that production orientation, 10 and 15 year plans, and (for the middle and working classes) careers with the same company and classic pensions at retirement. The new liquid modernity, he argues, has uprooted all of that. What has been ushered in is a new period with a consumption marketplace eclipsing the old production economy, attendant with short-term relations befitting this marketplace of consumption, and marked by companies and products becoming antiquated before they ossify, and a capital holding class that is increasingly transnational. The problem, Bauman contends, is that the working classes remain fixed in location and have increasingly become fungible to the freely moving ruling classes. We should add--and this is perhaps the biggest criticism--that underneath the liquid modern relations that have melted into the air are the old relations, peoples, and institutions of the older solid modernity. These old nations, states, cities, schools, churches and so forth are still there in all of their soild modern or even traditional concretion. It's also not clear, from this problem definition, how we solve or go about solving this dilemma. Despite these shortcomings, this work feels distinctly contemporary two decades on. If we treat it and consider it as part of the problem definition for the ongoing 21st century, then there is still much to recommend this work and the theory of the liquid modern. Much of our world is still the liquid modern world Bauman envisaged. Solving the issues and problems attendant with liquid modernity remain factors in the paramount challenges of our era....more
Have you ever had a friend leave too soon? Well, that can feel like the case when an author departs the scene. Graeber may be the latest but certainlyHave you ever had a friend leave too soon? Well, that can feel like the case when an author departs the scene. Graeber may be the latest but certainly not the last free-thinking author to leave the party too soon, following Benjamin, Camus, Mills, Adorno, Foucault, and others. Despite the feeling of intimacy some may create in the literary space, they are not our friends in real life and some may be using the intimacy as a persuasive device. In any case, when walking into the social theory party, you are well-advised to be in company with multiple authors and make sure you can navigate your way around the conversation. As one of his last works, this was excellent, as it builds upon the conversation and adds to it in a few helpful ways. Graeber's style is a bit discursive and he loops around the argument track a few times, through a series of essays, so we will try to trace some key features of his thought.
Buried in the last essay is a theory of sovereignty, an issue that has posed a bit of a thorn in the side of political and legal theory for a couple of centuries now. In the old days, sovereignty for the victorious state was viewed as something bestowed from above by god. That became problematic in the modern era for any number of reasons as such appeals became understood as rationalizations of the victors--to see the absurdity picture any sports star thanking god for the win--and as the state for an appeal for legitimation cannot coherently bestow sovereignty upon itself. For in reality, with many states, sovereignty started with violent conquering, emancipatory, or revolutionary acts. In any of these cases, the original act conferring the new government sovereignty was outside the law, i.e. the epitome of an illegal or extra-legal act. This, in turn, led to a search for an authority outside of the state to bestow sovereignty, without a direct appeal to authority from violence. The most popular classical liberal variety had settled upon "the people" as the source of the authority. This of course begs the question of who are those people? In the case of the American state, the successful war of independence inaugurated the new nation. Had the American war of independence not succeeded, we can bet that many of the founders would have been tried and convicted by the British government. However they succeeded, so they were able to create a new set of laws and as a claim for their authority were able to say that they ruled on behalf of the people. Subsequent historical analysis has shown how restricted and limited in terms of class, race, and gender the people of the original American state really were. How this worked out in the tensions between the state and these other people served as the other main subject of this book and many other contemporary works.
The hallmark of the right-wing state, says Graeber, is an underlying premise of force (violence). The state enforces its laws by the threat of force and the use of force, in large measure by way of the police as its enforcement arm. Going further, the fascist theory and practice of government does not see anything different from revolutionary acts and ordinary violence. If we follow the thread of this interpretation, this is why right-wing formations condone and support violence by police, brown shirts, and their own mobs, e.g. the insurrection at the capitol. What's more, the right-wing practice of government carries forward the threat of violence to keep the lower classes in their place; Graeber calls this "structural violence" - noting that this departs from conventional usage. The lower classes kept in their places through structural violence can be based on racial grounds like South African apartheid or the Jim Crow south, national grounds like classical imperialism, or economic somewhat porous class-based grounds as is often the case more recently. In many cases, the threat of violence is very real and can spill over into actual violence reminding the under-class to stay in their place, as was the case in the Jim Crow south.
The modern liberal state, by contrast, in its focus on growing prosperity, was historically paired with an economy focused on GDP growth. The hundred trillion-dollar question during the modern liberal era was how this prosperity was going to be distributed. At times it went unrealized, at other times realized, and at other times manipulated. The British empire was based on small family-owned local monopolists, finance capital, and free trade paired with colonial rule and administration. In a different emphasis, the modern American economy was the furthest elaboration of the use of bureaucracy into the business sector, often with protectionist policies and the expansion of American businesses overseas. The liberal and progressive economy and society are predicted upon production or, said another way, the unleashing of creative capacities into the economy. The unfinished, unrealized American liberal project is to harness the bureaucracy for an efficient effective administration of public and private functions while trying to strike a balance between the public and private spheres. While these capacities were unleashed during America's boom years, they have largely been stifled since the 1980s.
According to Graeber's argument, if we look back on the futurist dreams of Americans and Europeans from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were dreaming of traveling to the moon, exploring the depths of the seas, and creating all sorts of computers and robots. Many of those dreams were realized by mid-century; many of these mid-century accomplishments including the internet (ARPANET) and putting a man on the moon--often spurred on through competition with the USSR or outright borrowed from the politburo--were prime examples of harnessing imagination and productivity and channeling them through public bureaucracies to accomplish other instrumental goals. If we look at the futurist dreams from the 1950s and 1960s by contrast, with so many dreams of flying cars and deep space travel and fully automated homes, few of these dreams have been realized. Graeber draws out the turning point. With the fall of the USSR, the responsibility for creation was devolved and delegated from the state to private for-profit companies--Wall Street and large entrepreneurs--who have directed innovation towards greater control and profits. Rather than flying cars, travel through the outer reaches of space, fully automated homes, and the like that were imagined in science fiction in mid-century for the future, instead, we have seen basically a very sophisticated mail order catalog (Amazon), futuristic advertising and communication (social media), and very fancy entertainment (TV and sports).
As with earlier iterations of social theory, one of the main draws of Graeber's work, its narrative power, also demarcates its limit. In this work, Graeber is engaged in a descriptive analysis. If we are looking for predictive or explanatory (causal) analysis, we need to shift modes and pair social theory with its empirical social science research partners. Where we need social analysis to go--and that's where explanatory analysis kicks in--is to start to talk about the effects of one aspect of politics (dependent variable) on the lives of the citizens on the ground (independent variable). In the subject under study here, we need further analysis that links right-wing governance (or structural violence) with its impacts on people on the ground and the effects on their lives. This is the next direction for social theory and links it back to the goals of social science. That would be the point where we can start to paint a story of how one model of government and administration produces better or worse outcomes than the past or alternative models (e.g. from decades before or in other similar countries). At that point, we can get closer to saying how one model of government and administration is better or worse than another. Alas, Graeber did not have the opportunity to engage in that analysis, as his time at the party was cut short. Hopefully, future researchers will pick up the conversation and carry the thread forward, as the social theory party must continue to keep going....more
Leo Strauss was a first rate thinker. There is no denying the fact. His elucidations are clear, concise, and cut to the heart of the old ways. This isLeo Strauss was a first rate thinker. There is no denying the fact. His elucidations are clear, concise, and cut to the heart of the old ways. This is also his seduction. The problem is that he is shipwrecked. There's no going back to the pre-modern natural right. And there is no way to bring it back in the present. We can join Staruss on his shipwreck. And it can be seductive to wallow with him in the loss. However, it is not going to free him or us of his plight. It is not that there was once a unity that subsequently has come apart, only that there was once an idealization, indeed, a nationalism, that is no longer credible, and ought not to be. Now that the state of human consciousness and the state of social forces have abandoned these collective ideas, and we are fully aware of the advances, these ideas can acquire repressive and violent qualities. On to fresh air and fresher ways....more
This books responds to a need. What's been needed is a theoretical elaboration of political conservatism. There have been plenty of those but, for theThis books responds to a need. What's been needed is a theoretical elaboration of political conservatism. There have been plenty of those but, for the most part, they have been provided by conservatives so they were partisan and they were attempting to redefine the movement.
What Corey Robin provides is a survey of conservative theory and some practice. In chronological order, Robin takes his survey through Hobbes, Burke, Nietzsche, Hayek and the Austrian school, mid-century American reaction, Ayn Rand, Bush-era neocons, Scalia, and Trump. Robin posits a unifying definition of reaction throughout.
The biggest shortcoming is the episodic nature of the survey. As this plays out throughout the book, the chronology is not as clean as it should be and the consistency of the episodes changes throughout the survey. For instance, after moving on from Burke, Robin circles back to him in subsequent chapters for additional excursions. This time and space would have been better spent flushing out one of the main premises of the second half of the book, where Robin posits two strains of reactionary types, following in the lineage of Nietzsche and the militaristic type on the one hand and on the other hand the Austrian school and the captain of industry entrepreneur type.
Despite these shortcomings, it is still an enjoyable book. Robin was responding to a need and he contributed to the literature on conservatism and reaction by doing so. While he didn't write the definitive guide to conservatism and reaction, he did provide an edifying and at times stimulating tome....more
It is often an interesting proposition when lectures and other recordings meant for limited consumption are published for a broader audience. In this It is often an interesting proposition when lectures and other recordings meant for limited consumption are published for a broader audience. In this case, it is a mixed bag, but it tends towards the disappointing. There are flashes of insight towards practice, the problems of philosophy, and politics. Mostly, these lectures land squarely in the area of grand theory, with much conceptual discussion but not enough payoff for politics and human society.
Mixed in with the exegesis of Kant's moral philosophy, Adorno dashes in here and there a brilliant criticism and refutation of Stalinism. Similarly, he laid bare the idea that the individual should defer gratification for the society, as the payoff never comes. At the same time, Adorno reminds us, as his audience, that he is equally not a fan or an apologist for the late capitalist West under the sway of what he called the culture industry.
However, these points were too few and far between. The argument that C Wright Mills levied against Talcott Parsons in the Sociological Imagination proves all too applicable here too. As Mills pointed out, the cause of grand theory is their choice of a level of thinking so general that they cannot logically get down to observation. Like his contemporary, Parsons, this is Adorno in a nutshell. He never, as a grand theorist, gets down from the higher generalities to problems in their historical and structural contexts. In fact, as a prototypical grand theorist, Adorno has set forth a realm of concepts from which are excluded many structural features of human society, features long and accurately recognized as fundamental to its understanding.
Adorno seems to think—and this is implicit in his logic—that if he elevates and sores up high enough to the level of thought subsuming politics and society, he can then swoop back down and reemerge with clarity and the correct engagement. This is the Hegelian in him. In this, as a grand theorist, he is mistaken. Soaring up to the clouds, he loses touch with all of the detail. The best ways to truly engage with the political is to never disengage with it in the first place....more
The argument is simple and practical enough: in short, building and maintaining working class politics is the most effective way forward for turning bThe argument is simple and practical enough: in short, building and maintaining working class politics is the most effective way forward for turning back the advances of reaction and conservatism and building the way towards democratic socialism. However, the argumentation she uses to get there is a little more tortured than necessary.
Meiksins Woods engages in a long polemic against "new true socialism" embodied in discourse theory, structuralism and the post-Marxism of Althusser, Laclau, and Mouffe. The parry in part strikes its intended target; in part it also sells short their gains and progress. The polemic, which takes up the majority of the work, argues that this bloc on the left has traded the hard and necessary task of building working class politics for a mess of pottage. In essence, she argues that they have traded a materialist political strategy for an idealist one; and in so doing, they have swapped the politico-economic struggle in capitalism between labor and capital for liberal democracy along with the attendant means of coalition building and the ends of winning electoral success.
The more recent battles with the Democratic Party and the Labor Party between Clintonism and the Third Way on the one hand and the Democratic Socialism of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn on the other, mirror the debate played out in these pages. For many years, Meiksins Woods was out in the political wilderness with the Democratic Socialists. Paradoxically, the success of the Right more recently has been gained by capturing the loyalties of large swaths of the working class. The way out of the wilderness will, in part, be earned by fighting for the working class and gaining ground in the economic, social, and political fronts....more
A quick and, for Adorno and Horkenheimer, a surprisingly light read.
It’s not really a book per se. More of a notebook: an outline, a prologue, or a sA quick and, for Adorno and Horkenheimer, a surprisingly light read.
It’s not really a book per se. More of a notebook: an outline, a prologue, or a sketch for a book that they would have written and did not get around to. It is accessible, if too brief. It would have benefitted from them fleshing it out in the full book they were planning.
With that said, it is helpful--like Adorno’s lectures--to peer into the content of his thought without the protective layer of his written form. The candid nature of the dialogue supposes on the part of the reader, as eavesdropper, familiarity with Adorno, Horkenheimer, and their respective places within the Left. This work depicts them navigating that landscape of the Left, Old Left, and the then nascent New Left.
On various points Horkenheimer calls Adorno out on the less than practical aspects of his theory and approach to practice. This is a standing criticism of Adorno, and was evident in his approach to the 1960s student movements in campuses across Germany, France, and the US - Marcuse became a godfather and guru for students in the New Left, Adorno remained standoffish to student protests.
This is not the work to get acquainted with Adorno or to gain access to his system. However if you are already versed in his thought and the Frankfurt school it is a fine place to gain candid insight into his notoriously rigorous system.
The material covered is much that Marcuse would later cover in One Dimensional Man. It pairs well with it, as Adorno’s system was more elaborate and stands the test of time better than Marcuse’s....more
I really enjoyed this an antidote to the pluralist and identity politics camps, who are now rebranded as so many social movements, that are predominanI really enjoyed this an antidote to the pluralist and identity politics camps, who are now rebranded as so many social movements, that are predominant today. Nancy Fraser said it well. It’s as if we’ve gone straight from the critique of the Leninist party to neo-anarchist spontaneism. I don’t think the latter is at all serious, if you really want to change the world in a fundamental way. So I’m very interested in exploring the huge middle ground between those extremes.
The real problem with identity politics has been the near total abrogation of the economic base, where Americans make their livings and is the only place to win over service sector, gig economy, and blue collar voters. Those identity politics camps have fundamentally ignored the realities of the economic base to focus on subjectivist elements and carving a role for themselves in the cultural superstructure. Unfortunately they have also done so at their own long-term political peril; and the chickens from the 1990s have come home to roost in the political realities manifested since 2016.
Particularly troublesome is the alliance and marriage of convenience between identity politics and neo-liberalism (including Third-Way Democrats). What is problematic is the dominant party in this relationship -- the neoliberal forces who have post-recession relaunched Wall Street speculation from the value created on Main Street and who have moved overseas production and formerly Main Street jobs -- who have co-opted that marriage for the sake of cultural cache and a culturally progressive message. Hilary Clinton's pandering to the various identity camps at the expense of an economic platform was the culmination of this. This just does not speak to the majority of Americans, foremost at the expense of answering how they are going to make their livings. Only an economic platform speaks to that.
And that's the rub. The economic base has been ignored by liberals and progressives since the end of the New Deal, ending with the programs of the Great Society. Fraser's short piece and interview frame this in a nice way that captures the challenges that come from the powers that be and ruling strata in American society - they are part of the difficulties and challenges to establishing a platform that returns with an emphasis on the economic base. A mature political strategy will have to do this by accounting for both the objective and the subjective aspects. Meaning, it is necessary to do this without selling the gains of the social movements down the river. What's needed, as anticipated in this work, is a political stance on the issue, doing so in a re-imagined working class bloc that includes the youth and large segments of the middle class and professional managerial class, and a plausible organizational policy for pursuing it. In borrowing Gramsci's turn of phrase, that is the new that cannot be born yet....more
This was okay. Very Žižekian, if we may coin a new style. The great thing about a Žižekian work is that you get the fireworks. There is no shortage ofThis was okay. Very Žižekian, if we may coin a new style. The great thing about a Žižekian work is that you get the fireworks. There is no shortage of insights, zingers, and bon mots to go around. In the audio version, Russell Brand lets out an audible laugh when he reads the line that Blair had little trouble adjusting to neoliberalism because he had no previous beliefs to dispose of. And the show is fun for the whole Oedipal family, if you are already versed in the inside baseball of cultural criticism running from Deleuze & Guattari to Fredric Jameson to Žižek. In a sense, it's a late entry into the old debates about postmodernism and the "end of history." One main thrust of the argument is levied against the "end of history" and the saying that neoliberal capitalism represents the only way with "no alternative" (Thatcher) as were the common refrains right after the Berlin Wall fell. Perhaps the most interesting analysis is on the logic of postmodernism. Combining Adorno and Jameson, Fisher sees the once revolutionary formal energies of modernism turning in on themselves (Adorno) and now becoming subject to the almost immediate cooption by capital (Jameson) rather than projecting out towards discovery and the future, as was their (once believed) potential. As compared to the student and civil rights protests of the 60s, the purveyors of modern culture and their products serve as revenue streams and pose no real threat to the people and companies promoting them: think of Live Aid, rap music at its most Darwinian and opportunistic moments, and much of modern art becoming big money, with their underlying protests (if they have any) being embraced and receiving a bearhug by the system. The problem with this work, though, as with Žižekian works at their weakest, is that Fisher goes for the fireworks displays at the expense of analysis and depth. The depth of the arguments where it enters into the picture comes from Adorno, Deleuze & Guattari, and Jameson. Fisher digests them, popularizes their critiques, and updates their insights to the 2010s in England, France, and the US. Like structuralism, poststructuralism seemed to run into a dead-end methodologically. While there continues to be value added from their arguments, it seems necessary to recognize agency at a lower level of generality than the structures or systems. Fisher in the last analysis was not able to depict an alternative to postmodernism, late-stage capitalism, or capitalist realism as he calls it. Perhaps though we should not just be looking for alternatives, but also ways to ameliorate and mitigate the most deleterious effects, for example by learning from and adapting and adopting Scandinavian style social reforms; anyway that is food for thought....more
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