The Poverty of Criticism
"A philosophy that begins in radical doubt ends in radical despair."
-Abraham J Heschel, Man Is Not Alone
The more I speak with other radicals the more I am convinced that radicalism in our times too often degenerates from a creative philosophy and profound encounter with and in the world to a mere method of critique. From proposing a revolutionary vision of society and a more dignified vision of what it means (and could mean) to be human, radicalism falls into a fetishism of "critical thinking" characterized more by cynicism than question posing.
"Radicalization,"writes Paulo Freire, "involves increasing commitment to the position that one has taken, and thus ever greater engagement in the effort to transform concrete, objective reality." But what position do today's critical critics take? To what transformation of concrete reality are they committed? They are more concerned with debunking ideas than transforming conditions. They are more opposed to the Enlightenment than they are to the exploitation of labor which is the true essence of modernity.
Today's critical critics, who fancy themselves to be revolutionaries who have "overthrown" modernism with the power of their criticisms, are really "sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves"The German Ideology. Intoxicated by their own intellectual capacity to doubt they fancy that criticism has achieved what social revolution could not: a "post-modern" era. Armed with the great thunderbolt of disbelief they have stormed the fortresses of intellect and laid low Truth, History, and Rationality with unyielding blows of critique. But the end result has not been the emergence of a new freedom, only more criticism, endless criticism.
Immobilized by their own inability to believe in anything criticalists find it impossible to commit to anything or anyone, besides their own pristine skepticism. They cannot think, which would require them to create hypotheses about the world which they are willing to stand by; they can only criticize. Consumed by the fetishization of the 'negative dialectic' they have abandoned the project of the 'negation of the negation', i.e. of creation as an act which transcends the negative critique and resolves the contradiction of the old system by establishing new principles that we may live by.
Under the influence of the 'critical' revolution radicalism has become nothing so much as a philosophy of doubt and, ultimately, despair. One can identify the so-called radicals of this tradition by their overdeveloped skills of intellectual interrogation and their underdeveloped creativity, by their inability to pose questions that frame paths to solutions, and by the self-devouring sense of emptiness that overwhelms them when there is no "enemy" to critque and the moment calls for acts of construction. Cut off from a radical commitment, critique loses its greatest strength: the ability to pose solutions in the form of questions. As Marx wrote, a question is a "new way of formulating the problem [which] already contains its solution" 1844 Manuscripts. But criticalism forgets this fact and this has resulted in the posing of questions that fail to unveil opportunities for intervention in the world.
There are those who believe that criticalism is an affair of academics, of armchair revolutionaries and post-modern philosophers. They oppose to theory and "intellectualism" the "down to earth", "concrete" immediacy of activity. Yet they have not escaped criticalism, they merely put into political practice the criticalist philosophy which others "only" theorize. Activism is the critique of the policies of those in power through action. Activism does not proceed from the critique of power to the re-creation of new forms of democratic power. It stops short of re-making the organization of society and limits itself to protesting particular aspects. As such it is only a particular form of criticalism, and is, in the end, constantly haunted by a sense of despair.
A return to radicalism means moving from critique to analysis. It means putting forward our own conception(s) of the organization of society as it is, as how it could be, and how we might get there. A return to radicalism means moving from analysis to a political program. It means creating a revolutionary project in which the broad popular classes can participate in the transformation and governance of society.
But we can only accomplish this movement from criticalism to radicalism if we return to what defines radicals: the commitment to the liberation of human labor--of praxis, of the power to transform the world--from a social order which sees in that labor only the means of accumulating private wealth. I do not mean by this the emancipation of wage-labor. I mean a radical conception of the total liberation of the ways that human beings create and recreate from the dominance and exploitation of capital.
We must see (again) that labor is how a mother and a neighbor raise children, the way queer people create pleasure from touch and from love. Labor is the way that a song electrifies the air and makes tears and laughter bubble up from our hearts. It is the struggle of white companer@s against being swallowed by a system that isolates and destroys them. Labor is the culture of resistance passed down in Black families. It is the refusal of a woman who will no longer be an object. It is finger paints and a good meal shared between those who nourish one another and change the world. Labor is the creation of new things and new relations; of new structures and new meanings. Only when we return to labor radicalism of this sort, a philosophy of praxis, will we find ourselves, once again, motivated and committed.
As papa Paulo writes:
"the power to create and transform, even when thwarted in concrete situations, tends to be reborn. And that rebirth can occur — not gratuitously, but in and through the struggle for liberation — in the supersedence of slave labor by emancipated labor which gives zest to life."
"A philosophy that begins in radical doubt ends in radical despair."
-Abraham J Heschel, Man Is Not Alone
The more I speak with other radicals the more I am convinced that radicalism in our times too often degenerates from a creative philosophy and profound encounter with and in the world to a mere method of critique. From proposing a revolutionary vision of society and a more dignified vision of what it means (and could mean) to be human, radicalism falls into a fetishism of "critical thinking" characterized more by cynicism than question posing.
"Radicalization,"writes Paulo Freire, "involves increasing commitment to the position that one has taken, and thus ever greater engagement in the effort to transform concrete, objective reality." But what position do today's critical critics take? To what transformation of concrete reality are they committed? They are more concerned with debunking ideas than transforming conditions. They are more opposed to the Enlightenment than they are to the exploitation of labor which is the true essence of modernity.
Today's critical critics, who fancy themselves to be revolutionaries who have "overthrown" modernism with the power of their criticisms, are really "sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves"The German Ideology. Intoxicated by their own intellectual capacity to doubt they fancy that criticism has achieved what social revolution could not: a "post-modern" era. Armed with the great thunderbolt of disbelief they have stormed the fortresses of intellect and laid low Truth, History, and Rationality with unyielding blows of critique. But the end result has not been the emergence of a new freedom, only more criticism, endless criticism.
Immobilized by their own inability to believe in anything criticalists find it impossible to commit to anything or anyone, besides their own pristine skepticism. They cannot think, which would require them to create hypotheses about the world which they are willing to stand by; they can only criticize. Consumed by the fetishization of the 'negative dialectic' they have abandoned the project of the 'negation of the negation', i.e. of creation as an act which transcends the negative critique and resolves the contradiction of the old system by establishing new principles that we may live by.
Under the influence of the 'critical' revolution radicalism has become nothing so much as a philosophy of doubt and, ultimately, despair. One can identify the so-called radicals of this tradition by their overdeveloped skills of intellectual interrogation and their underdeveloped creativity, by their inability to pose questions that frame paths to solutions, and by the self-devouring sense of emptiness that overwhelms them when there is no "enemy" to critque and the moment calls for acts of construction. Cut off from a radical commitment, critique loses its greatest strength: the ability to pose solutions in the form of questions. As Marx wrote, a question is a "new way of formulating the problem [which] already contains its solution" 1844 Manuscripts. But criticalism forgets this fact and this has resulted in the posing of questions that fail to unveil opportunities for intervention in the world.
There are those who believe that criticalism is an affair of academics, of armchair revolutionaries and post-modern philosophers. They oppose to theory and "intellectualism" the "down to earth", "concrete" immediacy of activity. Yet they have not escaped criticalism, they merely put into political practice the criticalist philosophy which others "only" theorize. Activism is the critique of the policies of those in power through action. Activism does not proceed from the critique of power to the re-creation of new forms of democratic power. It stops short of re-making the organization of society and limits itself to protesting particular aspects. As such it is only a particular form of criticalism, and is, in the end, constantly haunted by a sense of despair.
A return to radicalism means moving from critique to analysis. It means putting forward our own conception(s) of the organization of society as it is, as how it could be, and how we might get there. A return to radicalism means moving from analysis to a political program. It means creating a revolutionary project in which the broad popular classes can participate in the transformation and governance of society.
But we can only accomplish this movement from criticalism to radicalism if we return to what defines radicals: the commitment to the liberation of human labor--of praxis, of the power to transform the world--from a social order which sees in that labor only the means of accumulating private wealth. I do not mean by this the emancipation of wage-labor. I mean a radical conception of the total liberation of the ways that human beings create and recreate from the dominance and exploitation of capital.
We must see (again) that labor is how a mother and a neighbor raise children, the way queer people create pleasure from touch and from love. Labor is the way that a song electrifies the air and makes tears and laughter bubble up from our hearts. It is the struggle of white companer@s against being swallowed by a system that isolates and destroys them. Labor is the culture of resistance passed down in Black families. It is the refusal of a woman who will no longer be an object. It is finger paints and a good meal shared between those who nourish one another and change the world. Labor is the creation of new things and new relations; of new structures and new meanings. Only when we return to labor radicalism of this sort, a philosophy of praxis, will we find ourselves, once again, motivated and committed.
As papa Paulo writes:
"the power to create and transform, even when thwarted in concrete situations, tends to be reborn. And that rebirth can occur — not gratuitously, but in and through the struggle for liberation — in the supersedence of slave labor by emancipated labor which gives zest to life."
3 comments:
ok damn.
thanks.
keep spilling lessons son. the world listens.
Thank you for your thoughts and feelings; the paragraph on reclaiming the definition of labor, in addition to being accurate, is touching. Joy & peace to you.
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