On Fugitive Politics

Praxis and Critique: On Fugitive Politics

Matthew James Hamilton

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Political Science University of Toronto

Praxis and Critique: On Fugitive Politics

Matthew James Hamilton

Doctor of Philosophy

Political Science University of Toronto

2019

Abstract

Through dialectical reflection upon the predicament of fugitive political praxis – forms of political action or claim making compelled to resist or give expression to political wrongs via the very mediums and contexts that sustain their imperceptibility and uninhabitability – this dissertation engages simultaneously in an immanent critique of the ‘primacy of [decentered/ fugitive] praxis’ and the development of a critical theory of fugitive politics. The ‘primacy of praxis’ names a constellation of contemporary political thinking that has discovered, out of both the ruins of sovereign or autonomous subjectivity (‘the decentering of the subject’) and the impasses of Critical

Theory, novel forms of (fugitive) political possibility. The challenge of the dissertation is to salvage the promise of fugitive praxis from the antinomous theoretical architecture that falsifies it by inflating its plurality, agonism and indeterminacy into the status of ontological, affirmative or axiomatic givens. To raise the question of the inhabitability of fugitive politics is to ask after the particular social and political conditions that variably obstruct or facilitate responsiveness to the fragile claims of fugitive politics. Thinking both with and against Adorno – using his own philosophical insights to exceed his philosophy’s particular, historically sedimented limitations – the dissertation aims to rethink the interpretation of fugitive praxis in the historical present by reconsidering his critical conception of mediation. Critical political interpretation, I will argue,

ii neither affirms the resistant or heterogeneous power of (de-centered) praxis, nor discloses its impossibility within the mediating context of the historical present. On the contrary, it proceeds through micrological ambivalence to elucidate political praxis amidst the world particularity of its emergence – in triumphant and transient flashes as well as in its disappointing, constrained and damaged forms – neither to celebrate nor mourn, but to disclose the conditionality of praxis and so to dis-close concrete insight as to how different form of praxis and different forms of political institutions might be realized.

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Acknowledgments

Perhaps Adorno’s most incontrovertible insight was that even the most autonomous forms of thought and action owe their possibility to the support of others who have shaped, enabled and challenged them along the way. The allure Adorno’s philosophy has held for me owes in no small part to the aptness with which this insight holds in my own case.

The individual whom has imparted the most significant impact on this project is my supervisor, Peggy Kohn. From her suggestion, years ago, that I take up Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory until the final defense, both her patience and advice have been the sine qua non of this dissertation.

Her guidance saw me through the difficult process of developing my own theoretical voice amidst a whirl of competing languages, problems and influences. She has set a lofty image of what a scholar and political theorist can be. Her example has left an indelible impression on every aspect of my professional life.

Davide Panagia has exerted an immeasurable influence upon my thinking from my first days as a graduate student at Trent University, and it would not be hyperbolic to characterize the present work as an attempt to grapple with the challenges and perplexities inaugurated by his novel approach to political theory. Additionally, his scholarly and professional guidance have help offered orientation amidst an unfamiliar world.

David Cook, Ruth Marshall and Jennifer Nedelsky have each offered immense contributions, both as members of my dissertation committee and as scholars who played decisive roles in shaping my thinking, from unforgettable seminars at the early stages of my research to penetrating and incisive challenges that gave shape and direction to my written work.

I would like to thank Robyn Marasco for agreeing to serve as the external examiner. Her penetrating insights made for an excellent discussion during the defense. The challenges she posed will offer an invaluable spur to my future thinking.

A number of friends and colleagues have made important impressions on my thinking throughout the research process, in forums such as the department’s Political Theory Research

Workshop, conference presentations, the wonderful yet seemingly interminable Hegel reading group, to simply taking the time to provide helpful feedback, including Nathan Litwin, Stephen

Trochimchuk, Simon Lambek, Stefan Dolgert, Oisin Keohane, and Yaniv Feller. Cody Trojan, in particular, has been a true friend, in the full Aristotelian sense, since the beginning.

Funding to support my research has been provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities

Research Council, the Province of Ontario, as well as the School of Graduate Studies and the

Department of Political Science.

Finally, I could not have survived traversing the dissertation desert with the warmth and support of my family. My parents, Dick and Sandra and my brother, Michael, whom I’ve seen too little for too long, have offered nothing but unconditional support.

To my wife, Stacey, who has not only made this work possible, but who has, from the beginning, been the spark of that makes life more than mere living, this is for you.

Table of Contents

Part One: Adorno, Politics and the Primacy of the Object

Chapter 1 Adorno and the Decentering of Political Theory ………………… …….. 1 1.1 Introduction: From the Primacy of Praxis to the Primacy of the Object.. 1 1.2 Foreignness of Adorno’s Philosophy: The Challenge of the Preponderance of the Object ……………………………………….. 7 1.3 The Primacy of Praxis Constellations………………………………… 15 1.3.1 On Force Fields ………………………………………………. 15 1.3.2 Nietzsche and the Aporetics of Autonomy …………………….. 20 1.3.3 The Primacy of Praxis in Contemporary Political Theory …………………………………………………………………… 30

Chapter 2 Recovering the Political Promise of Adorno’s Philosophical Constellation……………………………………………………………………… 35 2.1: Natural-Historical Interpretation as Critical Disclosure ……………… 35 2.2: Preponderance of the Object…………………………………………… 46 2.3: Conclusion: Towards a Re-configuration of the Praxis-Conditions Relation ………………………………………………. 53

Chapter 3 Rethinking Adorno’s Critical Politics: From Blocked to Damaged Praxis …………………………………………………………………………… 61 3.1: The More and Less of Mediation: Understanding Adorno's Critical account of Distance from the Object ……………………………………….. 65 3.2 Exaggeration and Resignation: Adorno’s Transgression of Micrological Critique ……………………………………………………………. 74

Chapter 4 Praxis and Wrong Life: The Uninhabitability of Fugitive Politics ……… 81 4.1 Odysseus and the Oarsmen: Dualism as Damage …………………… 84 4.2 The Contradictory Totality ………………………………………………... 89 4.2.1 The Sundering of Experience and Praxis …………………….. 91 4.3 The (mere) Promise of Reconciliation …………………………………… 95 4.4 Kompridis and the Renewal of Critical Theory: Is Adorno’s Approach to Critique Skeptical and Dualistic? ………………………………………… 97 4.4.1 Kompridis’ Critique of Odysseus and the Oarsmen: Dualism and its Discontents …………………………………………………….. 99 4.5 The Scylla and Charybdis of Negative and Affirmative Critique: Conditionality or Possibility? …………………………………………………… 105

Chapter 5 The Promise of Fugitive Politics: Reading Ibsen’s A Doll’s House …. 112 5.1 Cavell and Kompridis Reading Ibsen: The Politics of Critical Responsiveness ……………………………………………………………….. 115 5.2 Adorno on Art and Reconciliation: Bernstein’s Reading of Ibsen ……… 122 5.3 #MeToo: The Uninhabitability of the Fugitive …………………………… 131

Part Two: Adorno after the ‘Critique of Critique’: Thinking Past the Limits of Contemporary Democratic Theory

Chapter 6 Butler's Contribution to the Politics of Reconciliation ………………….. 135 6.1 Introduction …………………………………………………………………. 135 6.2 The Stakes of Critical Resistance ………………………………………… 138 6.3 Butler's Ex-Static Mediation ……………………………………………….. 143 6.4 Reconstructing the Stakes of Butler's Early Account of Resistance …. 140 6.5 Towards an Immanent Critique of Dissonant Repetition ………………. 147 6.6 (Mis)reading Butler's 'turn' …………………………………………………. 152 6.7 The Language-Character of Suffering: From Levinas to Adorno ……… 161 6.8 Butler's Inheritance of the Reconciliation Problematic ………………….. 168 6.9 The problem of Reconciliation: Inhuman Mediations …………………… 173

Chapter 7 Rancière and the Primacy of Praxis ……………………………………… 181 7.1 Chapter Outline……………………………………………………………… 188 7.2 The Formative Problem: Rancière's Critique of Critique ……………….. 191 7.3 Rancière's Response to the Problem: Equality and the Rethinking of the Moment of Subjective Mediation ………………………………………… 194

Chapter 8 An Immanent Critique of the Primacy of Praxis ………………………. 210 8.1 Rancière’s Critics: Partial Steps towards the Conditionality of Praxis … 215 8.2 Predicaments of the Politics of Conditionality ……………………………. 224 8.3 Neutralization of Conditions; Naturalization of Resistance …………….. 234 8.4 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………… 253

Chapter 9 Berlant's Lateral Agency: Towards an Outline of Conditional Political Praxis …………………………………………………………………………….. 257

Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………… 266

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Chapter 1 Adorno and the Decentering of Political Theory

"The principle or the problem of the dialectic would be not simply to insist upon the moment of discontinuity but, rather, to connect the moments of continuity and discontinuity with one another, namely to grasp the continuity and discontinuity as reciprocally mediated" – Adorno 1

“Now the philosophical need has almost imperceptibly changed from a need for reliable and substantive content….into a need to evade, in thought at least, the reification which has been brought about by society” – Adorno 2

1.1 Introduction: From the Primacy of Praxis to the Primacy of the Object

Adorno’s philosophy is undistinguished by the fact that it calls the primacy of “constitutive subjectivity” into question, or, in more recent parlance, ‘decenters subjectivity.’3 Like most other expressions of contemporary critical theory in its broadest sense, including post-structuralism, post-colonialism, feminist theory, among others, the critique and reconceptualization of the conditions for the possibility of acting, contesting and transforming the world serves as a means of rethinking both the figure of political praxis as well as of rethinking the stakes and potentiality of the process of practical activity in light of its limitations, non-sovereignty, heterogeneity or generativity. The manner in which Adorno conceives of this task, however, is not only highly unique but runs against the grain of much of what is most influential within contemporary political theorizing. It does so because, unlike, for example, Arendt’s conception of non-sovereign plural action, Rancière's “dissensus,” Laclau’s account of the antagonistic construction of “the people” as an empty signifier, Derrida’s deconstruction, or Deleuze’s “assemblages,” Adorno’s decentering of the subject does not coincide with a similar decentering of the social and political field whose open-ended and antagonistic composition would be “constitutive of the social fabric.”4 In short, insight into the limits of sovereign subjectivity, for Adorno, does not accrue to benefit of practical possibility. Adorno’s conceptions of society and history retain the dialectical notion of “totality,” and for that reason have come under the suspicion of harboring traits of a negative theodicy, on the one hand, and an purified and unattainable ‘messianic’ image of reconciliation (with nature in

1 Theodor W. Adorno, An Introduction to Negative Dialectics, ed. Christoph Ziermann (New York: Polity Press, 2017):148. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, Ontology and Dialectics (New York: Polity Press, 2019): 211. 3 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 2007): xx. 4 Ernesto Laclau, “Ideology and Post-Marxism,” Journal of Political Ideologies, 11, no. 2 (2006): 104.

1 society), on the other.5 For example, Jane Bennett in distinguishing Adorno’s approach to non- identity from her vital materialism, writes that the task is “less the acceptance of the impossibility of ‘reconcilement’ and more the recognition of human participation in a shared, vital materiality.”6 What has been little understood in contemporary receptions of Adorno is that “the object meant by the concept of society is not in itself rationally continuous. Nor is it to its elements as a universal to particulars.”7 The relationship of individuals to the social totality upon which they are dependent, in other words, operates through a logic that is neither impossible to recount nor determinative. A characteristic features of Bennett’s interpretation of Adorno is that it takes non- identity to be something like the Kantian thing-in-itself – a necessary but impossible object, that retains a regulative function but is forever beyond thought. As Brian O’Connor has persuasively demonstrated, however, non-identity, for Adorno, is neither impossible to cognize, nor is it irrationally opposed to thought, but constitutes a particular material encounter that initiates discrete processes of critical experience whereby the extant limits of the thinkable or identifiable are made to ‘point beyond themselves’ by confronting the remainders produced by the (social and intellectual) processes of identity.8 Adorno conceives of this relationship as one of mediation. Mediation is another concept that has been poorly understood in contemporary receptions of Adorno. In contemporary political theory it tends to bring to mind the notion of perspectival viewing, of ‘seeing as,’ of approaching an object through a medium, or rather, that the meaning of ‘the object’ is constituted by the indeterminate contours of the ‘language-game’.9 While this is an important dimension of Adorno’s concept it is not all that he has in mind, nor is it even the most important part. Mediation refers not

5 J.M. Bernstein in Adorno:Disenchantment and Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press: 57) notes these reproaches as among the “standard complaints” against Adorno. An example within the contemporary political theory would be Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) . She claims that Adorno honors “non-identity as the absent absolute, as a messianic promise” (16). 6 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 14. 7 Theodor W. Adorno, “Society,” Salmagundi No. 10-11, Fall 1969/Winter 1970: 145. 8 See Brian O’Connor “Adorno and the Problem of Givenness” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 1 (2004): 85- 99. 9 For example, see the work of Aletta Norval, Aversive Democracy: Inheritance and Originality in the Democratic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), or Linda Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), who, through Stanley Cavell, draw productively upon the Wittgenstenian conception of ‘seeing as.’ Wittgenstein asks the reader to “Regard the language-game as the primary thing. And regard the feelings, and so forth, as a way of looking at, interpreting, the language game” (Philosophical Investigations (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009): S 656, pg 175e, author’s emphasis). Adorno would concur with the emphasis upon the constitutive and complex character of social and linguistic mediation in the late work of Wittgenstein, but would object to premise of its primacy).

2 only to the (plural, complex, indeterminate, shifting) ways an object is viewed, received or comes to appear but also to the object’s (forgotten) historical or evolutionary genesis and to the system of natural and social interdependencies that support its ongoing possibility. Mediation, for Adorno, refers not only to an act of perceiving or cognizing, but to the series of material processes the object undergoes in order to become what it is. An object that is ‘mediated’ is an object that is not constitutive of itself, primary or absolutely independent, but one that has arisen through a particular natural and social history – as something dependent and made. The problem of the fallacy of “constitutive subjectivity” is that it misrecognizes, suppresses or forgets the intermingled dimensions of natural and social interdependency, and in viewing and re-making the world as if identity, autonomy or ‘seeing as’ were primary in relation to the substance it measures and (re)shapes its very normative foundations are marked by violence – it misunderstands what it ‘is’ and thereby fails to understand why or how it matters (or might matter or count otherwise). Like the Hegelian dialectic, Adorno’s approach is driven by the “experience” of failure, disappointment and misunderstanding. The task of this dissertation is to clarify how Adorno’s approach to the problem of reconciliation – to the interaction of subjective, social and natural processes of mediation – has been mischaracterized as depoliticizing ethical philosophy. The second task is to show how, with a little reworking, his philosophy offers the resources to disclose or illuminate democratic political possibilities without succumbing to the affirmation of what I will refer to as the primacy of (decentered) praxis. Through the dissertation I will build the difficult case that contemporary critical political theory, taken in the broad sense, has reproduced elements of ‘the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity’ in the course of criticizing the figure of autonomous subjectivity and replacing it with accounts of decentered political praxis capable of disclosing practical possibilities that exceed and challenge the scope of rational universality, identity or the existing forms of representation. The politically inflected reconstruction of Adorno’s philosophy developed in this dissertation is bound up with the immanent critique of contemporary political theory. It is only against the background of the latter that both the weaknesses and contributions of the former take on their urgency and relevance for the historical present. Adorno’s philosophy was developed out of the immanent critique of positivism and existentialism-phenomenology. The guiding premise of this project is that Adorno’s philosophy not only contains the resources to think critically about the currents of thought that have arisen since Popper and Heidegger, but that until they are made

3 to do so they fall behind themselves by failing to live up to the immanent criteria of negative dialectics: to dis-close the limitations of the historical present and thereby to think past them. What has become thematic in contemporary thought is an outgrowth of the taboo on ‘totality’: the productive disunity or lack of fitness between the performative or processual indeterminacy of political praxis and the social and political fields that establish and condition the terms of the actors mutual perceptibility, political recognizability and/or power-relations. The problems and stakes of politics tend to be focused upon the limitations and constrictions of the established social conditions, variously conceived (i.e. “distributions of sensibility”), as well as how these limitations neutralize and obscure the immanent and emergent political contestation of these boundaries. Finally, how the logic of political praxis and the prevailing accounts of political ‘community’ or relationality demand to be reconceived in light of the immanent indeterminacy, contestability and natality of the processes of political praxis. The decentering of the subject, for most variants of contemporary critical theory, functions, rather paradoxically, to disclose a political perspective that reveals political identities, structures, frames of perceptibility and institutions to be entangled with but nonetheless secondary in relation to the “primacy of [decentered] praxis,” whose differentiating processes, activities and performative contestations are shown to constitute the condition of the (im)possibility of the former. The tensions and impasses produced by what I will refer to as the ‘primacy of praxis’ – whose most radical philosophical expressions is the dissolution of the practical ‘subject’ directly into the ‘pre-individual’ “power of mutation” that both destabilizes and accounts for its ‘metastable’ conditions – have only been made increasingly indiscernible by the abandonment of any critical-dialectical perspective through which any measure of the relations of primacy or secondariness, universality and particularity, subject and object, could be acknowledged.10 The provocation pursued here will be to show how the decentering of praxis in contemporary political theory – its reconceptualization (of the traditional figures of autonomous practical action) as a differentiating operation or process whose emergence exceeds and explains its indeterminate conditions of possibility – both elides and preserves, indirectly and in novel (and often productive) ways, the problematic spectre of idealism: the old primacy of the activity of spirit coming to be replaced by the primacy of difference and the re-

10 Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012): 2. Simondon exerted a formative influence upon Gilles Deleuze and his efforts to develop a philosophy of difference in contrast to the limitations he identified with dialectical or representative thinking (See Gilles Deleuze, “On Gilbert Simondon,” Desert Islands (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004).

4 configuration of praxis as its ‘agent’ or ‘actant.’ As Peter Dews has described the matter: “post- structuralist thought takes the repressive self-enclosure of consciousness to be definitive of subjectivity as such, with the consequence that ‘emancipation’ can only take the form of a breaking open of the coercive unity of the subject in order to release the diffuseness and heterogeneity of the repressed.”11 The difficulty the dissertation confronts in attempting to make this case is that, as “historicity” has come to be “dependent on those moments that interrupt it,” and so any critical- dialectical account of the historical conditions that enable or inhibit political praxis is itself ‘always-already’ destabilized, the very means for articulating what has been lost – the critical sense of the particularity of historical mediation – have become both socially and theoretically endangered, and are in need of re-activation or recovery before the measure of that loss could become perspicuous.12 As Frederic Jameson put it, in the period of post-structuralism “Adorno’s offering may seem like a useless gift.”13 Without going through the work of reactivation the importance of putatively anachronistic critical categories (totality, historical mediation, critical experience) are dubious at best. This dissertation argues that contemporary political theory can drawn on Adorno’s philosophy, and his alternative account of the decentering of the subject, to not only recover and illuminate the concealed contradictions and “lacunae” underlying the ‘primacy of praxis’ approach, but to develop a model of critical elucidation and an account of the problem and stakes of political praxis that avoids those limitations.14 At the same time, unlike Jameson or Dews, the encounter with post-structuralism staged in this dissertation does not aim at its wholesale repudiation. Rather, the immanent critique of the primacy of praxis seeks to salvage its truth-content – the acknowledgment of the fugitive or

11 Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (New York: Verso, 2007): 280. 12 J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (New York: Polity Press, 1993): 137. 13 Frederic James, Late Marxism: Adorno, Or the Persistence of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 1990): 9. 14 Diana Coole, characterizing the extreme decentering of both the figure of political praxis and the social field, writes: “Aware of the dangers of contamination by the positive, negativity's defenders have tended to push it increasingly in a transcendental direction, where it becomes pure process: mobility, flows, the virtual. This poses a significant problem regarding the political, since in saving negativity from infection by the positive, its exponents also deny their engagement until it becomes difficult to image or enact a politics, in the course of writing the book, I indeed became aware of a certain weariness among those of us who have been fascinated by this extreme negativity; a suspicion that its political promise is irredeemable.” She continues: “As far as most recent continental philosophy is concerned, which is also where the most defiantly negative processes are invoked, it has become virtually impossible to elicit any meaningful sense of the political or any efficacious politics. This lacuna is frequently noted even among sympathetic critics” (Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism, New York: Routledge, 2000: 6-7).

5 transitory character of contemporary critical praxis – from both the theoretical architecture that falsifies it by inflating it into an ontological, affirmative or axiomatic thesis as well as Adorno’s negative dialectics, which has proven insufficiently responsive to fugitive modes of political praxis. The challenge of realizing the political promise laying dormant in Adorno’s philosophy will be to amend not only its central political categories – the withering of experience and blocked praxis – but a latent rigidity at the core of its interpretative method, that has forestalled its capacity to acknowledge minoritarian or fugitive modes of praxis as praxis, but to do so in such a way that resists ideological affirmation. Adorno continually pointed out that dialectics falsifies itself the moment when its own dialectical procedures ossify into a method, thereby committing the idealist “subreption” of positing knowledge of the object in advance of its critical experience.15 As he insists, the only “test of the turn to non-identity is its performance; if it remained declarative, it would be revoking itself.”16 The question posed in this work is if Adorno’s position on political praxis has indeed committed the idealist subreption. Thinking both with and against Adorno – using his own philosophical insights to exceed his philosophy’s particular, historically sedimented limitations – the dissertation aims to rethink the interpretation of predicaments of political praxis in the historical present. Critical political interpretation, I will argue, neither affirms the resistant or heterogeneous power of (de-centered) praxis, nor discloses its impossibility within the mediating context of the historical present. On the contrary, it proceeds through micrological ambivalence to elucidate political praxis it where it emerges – in triumphant and transient flashes as well as in its disappointing, constrained and damaged forms – neither to celebrate nor mourn, but to disclose the conditionality of praxis and so to retain the thought than another, different form of praxis might one day be possible.

In this chapter I offer a sketch of what I take be the characteristic features that constitute the ‘primacy of praxis’ approach. The subsequent chapters of part one will then move to the task of developing an account of political praxis out of the resources bequeathed by Adorno’s philosophy, which will prove challenging, however, because he explicitly and consistently ruled out the present possibility of transformative political action. Recovering the potential Adorno’s philosophy holds for political theory, therefore, will require thinking both with and against him. The first three chapters of the dissertation will analyze the elements of his philosophical constellation that, firstly,

15 Theodor W. Adorno, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (New York: Harper and Row, 1976): 26. 16 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 154.

6 remain promising for the task of rethinking the stakes of political subjectivity and praxis (chapter one and two), and secondly, those aspects of his thought that require rethinking for this to become possible (chapter three). Chapters four and five will attempt to work out how Adorno’s philosophy could be used to elucidate both the potentiality and predicament of fugitive politics. Part two of the dissertation will interrogate the ways in which contemporary thought both has embraced (chapter six) and partially developed Adorno’s oft-misunderstood approach, while also offering an immanent critique of the ‘primacy of praxis’ (chapters seven and eight), and finally concluding with a excursus on Lauren Berlant’s conception of “lateral agency,” whose critical interpretation exemplifies the style of an open dialectic – redeeming the political potential of Adorno’s philosophy – by holding fast to the ambiguity of the truth-content it wrests from the figure of damaged praxis: that the irreducibility of political praxis offers, in itself, no consolation over and against the the state of affairs it challenges and that, paradoxically, only precise acknowledgement of the limits of the irreducible (political subject) point the way towards the fulfillment of what that praxis promises (chapter nine).

1.2 The Foreignness of Adorno’s Philosophy: The Challenge of the Preponderance of the Object

“Adorno’s philosophy as a whole involves a way of making distinctions, types of distinctions, that are inimical to us; in our hearts, down home, they rub us the wrong way” - Robert Hullot-Kentor 17 There is much in the contemporary critical political theory that resonates with Adorno’s philosophy, foremost among them, the dynamic accounts of both the subject and the mediating social and political fields.18 Nevertheless his particular account of decentered subjectivity poses, I will argue, significant problems for approaches that grant primacy to praxis and its capacity for resistance, interruption, creativity, imagination and practical novelty. To be clear, the reservations that Adorno’s philosophy upholds against the ‘primacy of praxis’ are unlike the traditional criticisms that have been directed against contemporary political theory, namely, that it is dangerously irresponsible or irrational in its incompatibility or hostility to universalistic

17 Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Right Listening and a new type of human being,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 44 (2003): 191. 18 The critical concern that identity not only does not exhaust reality, but oppresses or falsifies it, and the corollary, that the non-identical processes of language and embodied nature which exceed the limits of representation require attending to, is the “zone of Adorno’s thinking in closest proximity to many of the now familiar thematics of poststructuralism” (Jameson, Late Marxism): 22.

7 aspirations or normative ideals.19 The question as to whether political praxis, its stakes and normative contours, should be approached primarily as a problem of knowing or acting20 – of searching for universal ideals or procedures upon which to ground and scrutinize political norms or of confronting the political field as a plural and dynamic field for which political meaning is necessarily indeterminate, open and subject to dispute and contestation – has been a thematic problem for contemporary problem.21 While the place of rationality and enlightenment are central to Adorno’s thinking, the critical function of his approach hinges upon the acknowledgment of the concrete damage social, historical and political processes have inflicted upon transient particularity and the question of whether or not the leap from such fugitive insights to transformative praxis are still possible in light of the limits of the constitutive conditions it challenges. In other words, Adorno’s thinking remains essentially practical – both in method and aim. It do so even as it revolves around seemingly epistemological problems such as “the concept of the concept.”22 Reconciliation, the critical-normative basis of negative dialectics, is fundamentally concerned with the actualization of the promise of rationality. A key feature of Adorno’s approach is that he holds fast to a conception of “truth” (‘truth content’) and resolutely criticizes ontology, nominalism and idealism for falsifying the promise of emphatic rationality. Emphatic rationality – the actualization of critical experience through praxis – is betrayed by such approaches because, in upholding or affirming (rational) ideals or future (practical) possibilities as the proper measure and meaning of truth (or, as Nietzsche would revise it, ‘the truth of measure and meaning’), they turn experience away from the fissures and sufferings

19 While there would be many to choose from, the classic example of this strain of criticism would be Jurgen Habermas’ Philosophical Discourses of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). 20 Of course these options have not been posed as in dichotomous fashion. An important line of debate would be whether to conceive of knowing, representation or normativity as an ideal or as a process or practice. On the other hand the question arises, should practice be measured according to ideals, or immanently, according to more fluid and changing criteria? 21 In contemporary political theory these options are rarely presented as mutually exclusive. The work of Linda Zerilli, for example, strives to elucidate the particular form of rationality – the entwinement of the fragility and subjectivity of judgment with indeterminate and revisable boundaries of the everyday forms of life that both support and constrain it – appropriate to the dynamic field of plural and non-sovereign inter-action through her work on political judgment (A Democratic Theory of Judgment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). The importance of late Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and in particular Stanley Cavell’s interpretation and novel mobilization of it, distinguishes Zerilli’s work from both deliberative democracy and post-structuralism. Along with Aletta Norval (See Aversive Democracy: Inheritance and Originality in the Democratic Tradition, Cambridge: Cambrdige University Press, 2007) and Nikolas Kompridis (See Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory Between Past and Future, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011), this small but important strain of contemporary political theory drawing inspiration from Cavell’s thought, forms the closest approximation to Adorno. In chapter four I will address what differentiates Adorno’s philosophy from these approaches. 22 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 33.

8 of the present. In turning away from the concrete sufferings of the present – from non-identity – truth becomes detached from both time and from what makes the present particular. The thrust of Adorno’s criticisms of ontology, nominalism and idealism, I will argue, can be detected, in modified form, in much of contemporary political theory. Once this link has been established, it will be possible to explain what prevents contemporary political theory from offering a satisfactory account of the stakes of the political novelty and the change it affirms as insuppressible. Adorno both acknowledges the fact of the historical diremption of knowledge and action, concept and intuition, rationality and worldliness, while, at the same time, criticizing the static and skeptical character of this separation as the irrational kernel at the core of both instrumental reason and the severing of ‘praxis’ from the possibility of social and political transformation. His turn to aesthetics is undertaken for both the sake of confronting the antinomies produced by this separation – that art remains semblance (not praxis) and hence its own guilt must be reflected in its practices (as dissonance) – while at the same time attempting to recover what the existing rationality promises but denies, that is, the possibility of a mimetic-responsive (rather than subsumptive- dominating) relation to the object.23 Emphatic rationality would not be indifferent to its object, hence, for Adorno, reason only becomes rational when it avows its entanglement with the domain of the practical. Practical reason would not only be transformative of the world, but would be self- consciously open to the self-critical disclosure of the particularity of its limits (of what action ‘counts’ as rational), and through the capacity for the experience of the non-identical – to acknowledge what falls through the net of rationality – to engage in the task of its revision and amendment. If this dissertation spends less time focusing upon this distinction (knowing-action), it is not only because the literature has thoroughly explored this issue but because I am arguing that Adorno’s philosophy offers the resources for a much needed shift in the conversation. 24 Adorno’s criticisms of the primacy of praxis, then, do not emerge from any fundamental disagreement or opposition to the dynamic and creative potentiality of praxis. After all, Adorno

23 In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno describes this double task of art in the following manner: “Through the irreconciliable renunciation of the semblance of reconciliation, art holds fast to the promise of reconciliation in the midst of the unreconciled” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): 33. 24 The work of Zerilli, Norval and Kompridis presents a comprehensive and persuasive critique of the limits of deliberative democracy advanced in the work of Rawls and Habermas in the course of their respective re-constructions of the political dimensions of judgment, aversiveness and responsiveness. The best Adornonian rejoinder to Habermas is J.M. Bernstein’s Recovering Ethical Life: Jurgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994).

9 holds that “process” is “truth itself.”25 The basis of his objection resides not with the dynamic potentiality of political practice, but with its primacy. Adorno’s argument would be that those approaches that insist upon the primacy of practice display an insufficient sensitivity to the particular social and historical dynamics through which praxis – which Adorno’s thought reconceives as simultaneously and inextricably an activity and a condition – become possible (or not). If Adorno’s objections are persuasive, the fundamental contrast would no longer be between knowing and acting – between validity and novelty – but how to conceive of the relation between praxis (the realization of critical experience) and conditionality. ‘Conditionality’ will be this dissertation’s mode of naming the constellation of concepts that Adorno’s philosophy offers to elucidate the complex series of conditions and limits that bear upon the problem of praxis: mediation, preponderance of the object, universality, natural history, resignation, negativity. As suggested above, the task of presenting (or recovering) this constellation will require thinking both with and against Adorno, hence modifying these concepts through the rethinking (immanent critique) of the terms of their inter-dependent relationality. Conditionality at once refers to the precariousness or suspended quality of praxis, its dependence and mediation by the social and historical conditions it acts upon, but also to the dynamic and provisional character of its interventions – the revocability or revisability of its condition – and so simultaneously refers to the particularity and potentiality novelty that may be released in the course of its actualization of (conditional) praxis. Adorno, like much of contemporary political theory, is also concerned with the lack of fitness between individual subjects and the terms of their constitution and emplotment into the established social and political fields, but because his decentering of subjectivity proceeds through what he refers to as the “the primacy of the object” he conceives of the stakes of this relation in a dramatically differently manner. To be sure, the “primacy” Adorno grants to the ‘object’ is conceived dialectically, and so should not be confused with a naïve materialism or realism that purports to serve as a ontological foundation or absolute ‘first’ ground. On the contrary, “critical thought does not wish to place the object on the orphaned royal throne of the subject, on which the object would be nothing but an idol, but to remove the hierarchy.”26 If there is a primacy of the object, then, it must in no way be taken to be a static or ontologically fixed relation, but instead

25 Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994): 39. 26 Adorno, Negative Dialectics: 181.

10 refers to the “qualitatively different, more radical sense” that “subject for its part is object” than the object, in turn, is subject.27 As the chapter will show in greater detail below, the claim that the subject, in part, is object does not simply refer to the ‘fact’ of the subject’s substantial, natural or material aspects but more profoundly to the inextricable entanglement of two equally dynamic temporal processes: the subject’s transitory nature as well as the dynamic and historically mutable social processes that are constitutive of individual subjectivity. The subject achieves its entwined natural and social conditions of possibility through preponderant sociality, and is in this sense “ex-centric” or decentered. That is, subjectivity is both in “permanent cognitive deficit to its conditions of possibility” while at the same time materially-socially dependent upon sociality, even as the subject engages in critique or political praxis to question or alter those conditions.28 Though the resultant subjectivity is not incapable of taking up a critical perspective on the ongoing processes of its “formativity,” its practical potentialities are nevertheless not only bound up with the latter, variously enabled and delimited by the conditions they resist, but emerge through critical responsiveness to the subject’s conditionality and dependency.29 In fact, the stakes of the subject’s exposure to preponderant sociality extends even further, in that the political and economic shaping of mediated social ‘reality’ can expose marginalized or “mismediated” populations to varying extents of social insignificance, imperceptibility, disposability or “ungrievability,” and hence to myriad forms of material suffering.30 It is this material suffering, which is simultaneously produced and disavowed by the differential processes of preponderant social formativity, that constitutes, for Adorno, temporally dynamic “truth content,” which I argue is needed if the significance of the creative-critical interventions of politics are to avoid the limitations of the ‘primacy of praxis’ approach. The limitations of the ‘primacy of praxis’ approach, which the dissertation will expand upon below, include the tendency to naturalize the capacity or potentiality for political resistance, which functions to simultaneously neutralize the relevance of social conditions as factors necessarily

27Theodor W. Adorno, “On Object and Subject,” in ed, Lawrence D. Kritzman, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005): 250. 28J.. Bernstein, Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015): 200; J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 27. 29 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997): 66. 30 Nicholas Joll, "Adorno's Negative Dialectic: Theme, Point and Methodological Status," International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 17, no. 2 (2009): 236; Judith Butler, Frames of War (New York: Verso, 2016): 38.

11 entwined with or intrinsic to political subjectivity, both enabling and limiting the latter. To be the clear, the claim advanced in this dissertation will not be that contemporary political theory lacks any account of social conditions in their entwined (and dynamic) relation with praxis, but that the very accounts it does offer of this relation prove insufficiently attentive to this relation’s particularity. The very effort to grasp the radical dynamism of this relation – to attend to the indeterminate potentialities of praxis – works against the capacity to perceive or acknowledge the conditional character of praxis. An alternative account of the conditional dynamics of political praxis informed by Adorno’s conception of the ‘preponderance of the object,’ could both illuminate and overcome these limitations. Part of the difficulty of offering such an alternative account, however, would involve combating both the misconceptions that continue to plague the reception of Adorno’s work and its relevance for political theory as well as criticizing those aspects of his work – including, most notably, his thesis that praxis is presently “blocked” – that have fallen behind his philosophy’s own critical and dialectical spirit. An essential task of the following two chapters, therefore, will entail recovery of the intelligibility of Adorno’s philosophy, which has been obscured, at least within contemporary critical theory, by the hegemony of the “primacy of praxis’ approach, for which affirmative modes of political critique and disclosure have become de rigueur.31 Confronting this state of affairs Robyn Marasco argues, “Adorno’s philosophy finds its footing in despair and that is not the problem he bequeaths to us but the value of his thinking for contemporary critical theory.”32 If Adorno’s mode of decentering the subject leads in the direction of despair, non-identical material suffering or “truth content,” this appears to Adorno’s critics as an inappropriate and desultory framework whose tendency toward quietist melancholia is inadequate to the task of elucidating the potentialities of political praxis.

31 Two of the primary figures of contemporary affirmative critique, or anti-critique, include Bruno Latour (See “Why has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004)) and Jacques Rancière (See chapter 2, “The Misadventures of Critical Thought,” in The Emancipated Spectator (New York: Verso, 2009). Benjamin Noys succinctly outlines what I refer to here as “affirmative” critique: “The common narrative of contemporary anti-critique, which ranges across the humanities and social sciences, is to chide critique for taking up a position of critical distance that presumes mastery over the material it confronts by revealing hidden depths beneath the surfaces.” This negativity and critical distance is then replaced with the “affirmative practice of adding or reconfiguring, rather than subtracting or defiguring.” This rationale for this shift is “not only that the negative is too close, too tied to what it rejects, but that this proximity is what forbids the finding or affirming of a materiality that escapes capture” (“Skimming the Surface: Critiquing Anti-Critique,” Journal for Cultural Research, 21, no. 4 (2017). 32 Robyn Marasco, The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017): 113.

Adorno’s conception of the primacy of the object not only establishes the (inter)dependent character of political subjectivity in relation to the dynamic and mutable processes that establish its ongoing social conditions of possibility, but imposes upon praxis the specific task of immanently criticizing, and potentially, amending and re-vising the terms of this constitutive relationality. To the ears of his critics, this task appears ethical, which is to say, it establishes a form of critique and a series of over-demanding material-normative conditions that are, in effect, anti-political. These conditions are anti-political to the extent that they obscure the emergent potential of political action and its capacity to effectuate transformation by insisting upon or demanding the (re)establishment of conditions ‘proper’ to politics. Adorno writes that “To the extent that the subject is, for its part, something mediated [an object], praxis rightly understood is what the object wants: praxis follows the object’s [the subject qua object] neediness. But not by the subject adapting itself, which would merely reinforce the heteronomous objectivity.”33 Adorno’s assigning of this task to political praxis cannot but appear to contemporary political theory as an extrinsic ethical injunction that unnecessarily constricts the open-ended and creative processes of politics. What is missed in this, however, is the way in which Adorno’s alternative account of the decentered subject conceives of the entwinement of that subject with the social conditions and processes that variably enable and impinge upon it, and the potential this revised account of this relation holds for political theory. The aforementioned ‘neediness,’ after all, expresses at once the material dependency of the object and the unavoidable difficulty that “need is a social category” that is “continually being formed, determined and elaborated through cultural practice.”34 The mismatch of these two interdependent and entwined needs constitute the stakes of Adorno's approach. Conceptualizing political praxis as responsiveness to the ‘object’s’ neediness, therefore, does not impose an unmediated (ethical) obligation upon politics, but, on the contrary, indexes the significance of the creative dimension of political praxis to the task of immanently criticizing the terms of its own unavoidable dependence upon preponderant sociality, and thereby to the reworking and revisioning of these constitutive social conditions in light of the material experience of their failures. Part of what undermines the contemporary reception of Adorno’s philosophy is that any critical disclosure of the obstruction or withering of praxis has tended to be

33 Theodor W. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in ed, Lawrence D. Kritzman, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005): 265, my emphasis. 34 Deborah Cook, “Adorno’s Critical Materialism,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 32, no. 16 (2006): 729.

13 associated with closure, determinacy, or a general failure of (critical) intimacy with respect to the presentation of praxis. While in chapter three I will undertake an immanent critique of Adorno’s own account of blocked praxis on precisely these grounds, I nevertheless want to call this basic association of negativity and the failure critical intimacy into question and to demonstrate, on the contrary, the blind spots, erasures and impasses generated by the affirmation of praxial creativity, novelty and in-determinacy. Adorno’s philosophy offers the resources to both illuminate and avoid uncritically positing the naturalization of resistance and, in turn, the political neutralization of the social processes that constitute political subjectivity – what I will argue constitute the twin limitations of the primacy of praxis – without sacrificing the creative-critical potential of the subject. Once Adorno’s account of this relation is made explicit, the concern that material suffering constitutes an extrinsic and ethical criteria will be assuaged, as will the worry that his concept of the decentered subject is primarily dependent, that political praxis is limited and constrained by a victimizing discourse of suffering, or that this approach precludes creative or politically generative forms of action. While Adorno’s philosophy offers a model of critical political praxis, grounded in the unending yet progressive task of critically disclosing and working to revise the “heteronomous ‘ground[s]’ of autonomy,” his interpretation of mid 20th century society, and the emphatically disoriented subjects he argued it tends to produce, lead him to doubt whether what was ‘needed’ remained practically possible.35 The aim of the following two chapters will be to engage in an analysis of Adorno's philosophical constellation that will localize the elements of his thought that remain vital and which can serve as resources for the renewal of critical political theorizing, while also engaging in a reconsideration of those others aspects that no longer (and perhaps never did) do justice to the ‘object.’ In the following chapters I will argue that three particular elements of Adorno’s constellation are essential resources for a renewed conception of political praxis : 1) the critical-interpretative approach of natural-history and the conception of “truth content” and negative world disclosure it provides; 2) the preponderance of the object; 3) the conception of reconciliation as a model of the praxis-social conditions relation. In the fourth chapter, I will claim it is also necessary to work through Adorno’s account of the withering of experience, the idea that informs his belief that praxis is (presently) ‘blocked.’

35 Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life, 83.

It is important to bear two things in mind in undertaking this re-visioning of Adorno’s philosophy. Firstly, that unlike ‘systems,’ philosophical constellations or “force fields” have no center or first principle, such that a change in one element reciprocally modifies ever other. Furthermore, the aim of a constellation is not to produce a seamless or tautly constructed deductive web that purports to captures reality without remainder, but, on the contrary, in approaching the dynamic ‘matter’ horizontally and disclosing the object’s sedimented and non-identical history, to allow what the historical mediation of that object had cast aside to become a perspicuous dimension of its present condition. Taken together, this means that it would run counter to the spirit of Adorno’s critical theory to simply excise those elements of his thinking that appear, from the present, as overly pessimistic or unsuitable to the present social and intellectual fashions, and that such cherry-picking would fundamentally alter the entire philosophical constellation. If, therefore, this dissertation is going to challenge elements of Adorno’s thought on his own terms, it will be necessary to show precisely how his account of the loss or withering of experience fails to live up to the standards this thinking establishes for itself. The immanent critique of Adorno’s thesis on the withering of experience, which will be shown to engage in the very identity-thinking it purports to resist, will constitute the means through which the dissertation arrives at its account of conditional political praxis. This approach avoids both Adorno’s obdurate refusal to recognize fugitive modes of political resistance as well as the naturalization of resistance encouraged by the ‘primacy of the praxis.’

1.3 The Primacy of Praxis Constellation 1.3.1 On Force Fields Before elaborating what it means to approach political theorizing through the lens of the “primacy of praxis,” as well as what contributions and omissions are involved in such approaches, it is necessary to consider the limitations of employing such a generalized ‘concept’ and to briefly consider the relationship between theory and the social world it aspires to elucidate. The use of the term “primacy of praxis” in this dissertation is made provisionally, in order to acknowledge certain patterns and recurring relations between concepts that are deployed by a number of disparate thinkers to unique or divergent ends, each of which calls for its own careful analysis. The subsequent chapters will engage in the analysis of the particular works of thinkers such as Nikolas Kompridis, Bonnie Honig and Jacques Rancière, among others, not in order to evaluate whether

15 or not each conforms to a given concept but to immanently discern the specific contradictions and impasses that emerge as a result of their unique approach to political theory. The “primacy of praxis,” then, will function more like a constellation than a concept in this dissertation, whose intelligibility cannot be revealed abstractly through precise definition, but will only emerge progressively and indeterminately, through the critical disclosure of the various limitations and blind spots of a series of related but particular material-philosophical approaches. Moreover, the disclosure of these limitations will have more than a merely critical or denunciatory function if each of these philosophies is approached in what Adorno refers to as a “force field.” What does it mean to approach a given work, or series of works, as a “force field”? Adorno’s reading of Kant is exemplary of such an approach. It refuses the stale alternatives of reading the text as a self-contained entity or, on the other hand, of attempting to decode its claims according to its historical determinations. Instead, Adorno argues that Kant's texts constitute a response to a series of concrete historical problems that it was to the author's greatness to have acknowledged with both such honesty and perspicuity. Adorno consistently notes his admiration for Kant’s willingness to openly admit and work through difficulties he encounters, and instead of attempting to hide these problems to preserve the impression of unimpeachable coherence, how he transforms these difficulties into the motor of his critical thinking. As he puts it “His profundity is to be found – and this is true of every great thinker, not just of Kant – in the way he follows where the argument leads, without regard to any preconceived goal. He may be said to externalize himself, to surrender to the matter at hand and to think against his own inclinations.”36 Kant's philosophy is not merely determined by his time, rather it is an articulation of the problematic state of freedom in modernity that attempts to answer this question with the limited resources that condition offers (and continues to offer). The life of Kant's problematic or ‘force field’ – its mattering to our contemporary predicament – is to be measured by the extent to which we find it (by responding to it, or not) to articulate, through its aporias and failures, what remains above all most difficult to articulate: our unfreedom, or, more precisely the promise and simultaneous unrealizability of freedom. In contrast to Heidegger's 'violent readings' which turn concepts against themselves without reflecting on the mediation of those concepts, Adorno's concern, in his metacritique of Kantian philosophy, is to re-innervate the problematic character of Kant's thought – to refuse to read its failures and incoherencies as the limitations of its ability to grapple with the

36 Theodor W. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002): 134.

16 concrete problems that incited Kant to write. Adorno writes: "What I am concerned with is what a philosophy objectively expresses, over and above its own opinion: that is what is at stake. In other words, I am concerned with the constellation of truth – and this constellation is identical with the force field I have talked about so often."37 Adorno’s dialectical approach to interpreting philosophical texts refuses to reduce works to either pure products of spirit or to passive historically determined objects. On the contrary, Adorno’s readings disclose the “unintentional truth” of a work by demonstrating how its internal intellectual configurations, in its most particular details and precisely where it purports to achieve reconciliation of its problems, bears the traces of the historical mediation that it purports to escape, transcend or criticize.38 Adorno, for example, does not object to the ‘rigorism’ of Kantian morality solely on logical-philosophical grounds. Instead, he reads Kant’s account of moral action as inextricably entangled with the limitations of modern moral experience, which Kant philosophy recognizes as one side of the antinomy of freedom, namely, the necessary reduction of all phenomenal experience to causal laws.39 At the same time, in responding to those limits, in his description of how pure practical reason is capable of promising ‘more’ than what simply is, is nevertheless repeating, in its innermost logic, the limitations Kant has recognized as threatening freedom (mechanistic causality). The compulsive universality of rigorist morality (adherence to lawful form and indifference to the object/end of action) repeats the identitarian domination of the object characteristics of the mechanistic world it purports to transcend: both proclaim that “nothing new should come into being.”40 The unintentional truth-content that Adorno’s interpretation discloses is twofold, centering on the ambivalence of Kant’s relation to its own identity-philosophy expressed by its antinomic structure: that all phenomena must be understood through causal laws, yet freedom must consist in the capacity to start a new series. On the one hand, Kant’s philosophy

37 Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 78. 38 This procedure, as Adorno always insists, requires placing Kant's philosophy into dialectical relation with history and the modern world in which he wrote. Part of Kant's insensitivity to the claims of material interest must be read as a response to the de-materialization or disenchantment of sensibility and interest as categories of moral action already in full flower in nascent modernity (See Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, ‘Chapter Three: The Instrumentality of Moral Reason,’ for a reading of Kantian moral philosophy as a salvaging response to the problem of Hobbesian moral nominalism). 39 Formally, the problem of freedom, as it is presented in the Critique of Pure Reason concerns the question as to how the “causality of appearances” (Kant's phenomenal world, the world of nature under the purview of science), which presupposes a temporal chain in which every effect has a prior cause, is simultaneously reconcilable with the causality of freedom, of “beginning a state from itself” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): A533/B561. 40 Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 26.

17 registers the ‘truth’ of unreconciled social reality. The antithesis of the third antinomy, which repudiates the existence of spontaneity gives expression to the contracting space of freedom in the face of an increasing rationalized world – of the real division of subject and object that emerges in tandem with progressive technical domination of nature. At the same time, Kant’s lingering metaphysical impulse also registers the ‘untruth’ of given social reality in “refus[ing] to regard the [phenomenal] world as identical with” rational freedom. Adorno’s interpretative procedure traces the ways in which the historical separation of the subject and object, rather than determining Kant’s philosophy from without, makes its appearance, mediately, within the “intellectual phenomena themselves,” and how, in turn, the limits and problems of the philosophy disclose in “micrological abbreviation” the ‘truth-content’ of its social context.41 What is disclosed by such a reading of Kant’s philosophy is that the self-conscious recognition of the dialectic of enlightenment – that the progressive domination of nature threatens freedom (the capacity to engage in spontaneous-receptive relation towards the particular object, i.e. the non-identical aspect of the object) – relies on a form of rationality (metaphysical impulse) that has become well- nigh obsolescent (irrational). As if in protest of its own dawning anachronism, Kant’s lingering metaphysical impulse, his desire to salvage freedom from mechanism, is itself mediated (and thereby deformed) by the rationalized reason it aspires transcend. The non-identity or ‘truth- content’ of Kant’s philosophy is the historical diminution of the possibility of rational praxis condensed in the antinomic separation of the domain of (postulated) freedom from the real and present transformation of the phenomenal world. This form of interpretation is not merely denunciatory, that “unlike Ideologiekritik which exposes the untruth of identity (ideology), Adorno was stating the converse: ‘non-identity was the locus of truth.”42 In other words, the limitations of spirit – where its pretension to universality (pure practical reason) is revealed as resolutely particular (historically mediated) – disclose the historical conditionedness of spirit as actively, if unconsciously, rendering certain aspects of material reality unthinkable or irrational (the indifference of subject and object). It is just this unthinkability, including the material toll it effectuates, that constitutes the truth-content – the objective or materialist anchor – of Adorno’s interpretation.

41 Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: The Free Press, 1977): 26. 42 Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: 77.

Similarly, this dissertation will approach contemporary political theory as material- philosophical compounds, as ‘force-fields’ that are simultaneously conditioned and creative with regard to the contours of the political world they describe, elucidate and criticize. If this form of engagement is more than merely denunciatory it is because it opens the possibility of reflecting upon the needs and aspirations that political theory discerns, as well as the figures of possibility and praxis it makes available. For example, Keith Ansell Pearson describes Gilles Deleueze’s “philosophy of difference” as a creative response to a “’moment’ in history when the most stereotypical and mechanical repetitions appear to have taken over the forces of life completely and subjected it to a law of entropy.”43 While Deleuze’s philosophy is far from determined by this history, it is nevertheless mediated by this particular need, which in turn, Deleuze’s philosophy mediates via its specific articulation of the problem, namely, as a question of acknowledging processes of differentiation that have become increasingly obscure.44 It is also necessary, therefore, to measure such creative response to the world with regard to the whether or not their theoretical articulations serve a consolatory, compensatory or critical function – distinctions that will be clarified in the following chapter’s discussion of reconciliation. There are elements of truth and moments of illumination in all substantial contributions to political theory, and even those that ultimately serve a consolatory function – by which I mean those approaches that transform various aspects of the existing (antinomous) relations between social conditions and praxis into apparent ‘solutions’ through the affirmation of ‘critical’ potentialities latent within them – can harbor significant insights and illuminations of particular aspects of politics (or political conditions). For example, while this dissertation will pose considerable objections to the thought of Jacques Rancière, his account of the impropriety of equality will provoke serious reconsideration of the limits and boundaries of what socially ‘excluded’ individuals are capable of thinking and doing. Likewise, in his recent book Peter Gordon has made the argument that although Adorno was outwardly critical of the phenomenological-existentialist tradition (Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger, among others) that he nonetheless remained “caught in a troubled yet productive bond with this tradition,” and that it was only via working through these difficulties that he “came to understand his own philosophical purposes.”45 The aim in this dissertation will be to develop a

43 Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (New York: Routledge, 1999): 4. 44 In Negative Dialectics, Adorno’s critical interpretation of Heidegger’s ontology of Being begins with an account of “the ontological need” (See Negative Dialectics, Part One, Section One: The Ontological Need). 45 Peter Gordon, Adorno and Existence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018): 2-3.

19 similar kind of critical yet productive relationship between the ‘primacy of praxis’ and the potential contribution that Adorno’s philosophy holds for renewing that approach – which will include the need to criticize and revise the limits of Adorno’s thinking. The product of this intervention will be to critically reconsider the dialectical relationship between practical need and the formulation of this problem in the practices of contemporary postfoundational political theory. Does contemporary political theory do justice to the complexity of the practical problems it confronts by disclosing novel possibilities or potentialities for political interventions, actions or modes of comportment, however ephemeral or fugitive? 1.3.2 Nietzsche and the Aporetics of Autonomy In the following, I offer a preliminary sketch of the kind of difficulties and impasses the primacy of praxis becomes embroiled in when the relations it established between activity and passivity, praxis and conditionality, are considered at their limits. While there are numerous candidates from contemporary political theory that exemplify various aspects of this multifarious tendency, this initial and provisional articulation of this approach will be best served by turning to it most emphatic exemplar: Friedrich Nietzsche. I will first offer a recapitulation of J.M. Bernstein’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy as continuing “the project of modernity as autonomy, while interrogating its limits and intriguing its dissolution.”46 Following this discussion, I will consider a number of the structural similarities and modifications that contemporary political theory has undertaken and that both alter and repeat the impasses Bernstein identifies in Nietzsche. The purpose of these latter reflections is not to offer a defensible accounting of the primacy of praxis in contemporary theory, but to articulate and establish an intelligible yet provisional conception of it and its attendant limitations, which will be further developed throughout the dissertation, yet which are necessary for establishing a clear comprehension of the arguments and its stakes in the following chapters. Without some account of the limitations of the ‘primacy of praxis’ it is unclear what Adorno’s philosophy offers contemporary political theory, and in particular why the disclosure of the conditionality of praxis – the exposure to the possibility of its withering and attenuation – demands to be included as an essential aspect of practice (and its potentiality) rather than merely an inhibition of it.

46 J.M. Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” in ed, Keith Ansell Pearson Nietzsche and Modern German Thought (New York: Routledge, 1991): 194.

Bernstein begins his reading of Nietzsche with the negative dialectical suggestion that “Autonomy, self-legislating and self-determining individuality is the foremost achievement of modernity and its despair.”47 Autonomy is the practice of self-legislation, an exercise of rational freedom whose drive to differentiate itself from heteronomy, determinations of action extraneously imposed upon the will, generates the antinomy that stifles the process of realizing freedom in the concrete world. As Bernstein puts the problem, “Unless the will can have a passive determination, an empirical, physio-historical characterization, it will lack any worldly being, any concrete actuality, and hence become a will opposed to all content – its autonomy a purity against all possible worlds.”48 It bears noting that Bernstein casting of the problem here echoes the dialectical critique of Kant inaugurated by Schiller and further developed by Hegel, which linked the problem of aesthetics (responsiveness to nature-matter) to the question of practical freedom as a means of overcoming the antinomous positing of this relation in the former.49 While Kant’s third critique goes some way towards mollifying the sharp division of “worldless freedom and dumb nature,” it nonetheless remains a subjectivist aesthetics, and “shorn of all content” and “castigating as heteronomous whatever is not born exclusively of the subject [i.e. form]” it stutters on the terrain of the troublesome antinomy, unintentionally yet brilliantly illuminating its contours.50 Dialectics, grappling with the divisions of reason and nature, in Schiller and Hegel, becomes itself “the “constitutive criterion of reason,” insofar as the process of this rational reflection aims at the incessantly self-critical normative ideal of reconciliation: reason, in order to become practical, to realize or fulfill itself, must abandon its skeptical otherworldly purity – its abstraction or transcendence from the world – and subject itself to incessant critical modification by virtue of the uncertain process of its interaction with the content it variously (mis)forms and (mis)identifies.51

47 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 192. 48 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 193. 49 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Mineola: Dover, 2004). The concept of “aufgehoben” or sublation, often associated with Hegelian dialectics, derives from Schiller’s attempt to overcome the Kantian division of rational form and heteronomous matter (and its practical expression in the third antinomy) through the mediation (cancellation and preservation) in the ‘free play’ of beauty. Schiller writes: “Beauty combines those two opposites conditions and thus removes the opposition. But since both conditions remain eternally opposed to one another, they can only be combined by cancellation” (88). 50 J.M. Bernstein. Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003): xxii.; Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 11. 51 J.M. Bernstein, "'Our Amphibian Problem': Nature in History in Adorno's Hegelian Critique of Hegel,” in eds. Rachel Zuckert and James Kreines, Hegel on Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017): 200.

Formally, the “aporia” generated by the problem of modern autonomy concerns the question of whether the “will can have a content and remain a free will; materially, this aporia concerns the changing, shifting and indeterminate, boundaries of the self or subject, where such a being can be said to begin or end.”52 It is not surprising then, that contemporary political theory has paid increasing attention to the “will’s others” generated by this aporia, namely, “the body, desire, need, feeling, history, tradition, community, other persons and their wills” in order to question and re-think the boundaries of self by reflecting on its entwinement with its constitutive social and material dimensions and so to question the kinds of action or processes appropriate to their ongoing need for (rational, political, moral) re-negotiation.53 A notable example would be Hannah Arendt, whose Life of the Mind opens with the Heideggerian epigraph, “Thinking does not endow us directly with the power to act.”54 Arendt’s work confronts the difficulty that while action and judgment “ultimately depend on the life of the mind,” that because thinking “never meets the resistance of matter,” which in her account refers to a complex and turbulent world populated by diverse others (the “a-scholia” of the world of appearances),55 taking rational freedom as model for action would be to fundamentally

52 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 193. 53An approach that provides an illuminating contrast to Adorno’s is that of Cornelius Castoriadis, who offers a similar diagnosis of the ambivalent character of modernity, but who turns to the issue of creation (imagination), rather than critical memory and dialectical responsiveness (although it should be noted that recent work on Castoriadis has thrown into question the tenability of the absolute priority of creation/creativity in his ontology, and have suggested a more heurmentical interpretation. See Suzi Adams, Castoriadis’ Ontology: Being and Creation (New York, Fordham University Press, 2011). For Castoriadis, the "project of autonomy," which began to accelerate in the 18th century, revolved around a tension between "the two core significations: individual and social autonomy, on the one hand, and unlimited expansion of 'rational mastery' on the other" ("The Retreat from Autonomy," World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997): 39). The antinomous relation of modernity to time manifests itself "as indefinite openness with regard to the future, yet the characterization makes sense only in relation to the past" (34). There is, in other words, in modernity a willingness to confront the "project of autonomy," but at the same time and inseparably, a drive to anchor this responsibility upon firm ground. The priority of mastery over autonomy – of autonomy as mastery – resulted in the tendency of "Identitary logic [to] create the illusions of self-foundation, necessity and universality" (38), which cover over the self-production of new forms of thought – that "time, properly speaking, is unthinkable without creation" (3) – by relating them back to the postulates of pre-existing foundations and the progressive determination of reason. It is this tension between creation and foundation in incipient modernity, that accounted for the strange equation of "Reason = reality," or that "reason 'realizes' itself in human history," from Kant to Condorcet, Comte, to Hegel and Marx (38-39). For Castoriadis, the failure to see past the determinacy of foundations, engenders conformism and "heteronomoy," the inability to confront the responsibility for the creation of the world. Castoriadis defines heteronomy as "thinking and acting in ways imposed (overtly or subterraneously) by the institution of the social environment" ("Imaginary and Imagination as the Crossroads", Figures of the Thinkable (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007: 87). 54 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Mariner Books, 2001), Vol 1: Thinking: 1. 55Arendt writes: “The very urgency, the a-scholia, of human affairs demands provisional judgments, the reliance on custom and habit, that is, on prejudices” (Life of the Mind, Vol 1: 71). Linda Zerilli explains that Arendt’s point here is to “call attention to the fact that the practice of judgment always makes reference to an agreement in judgments that

22 misunderstand the predicament of wordliness, which demands the recognition that “political freedom is a limited freedom.”56 In other words, the skeptical ideals of rational autonomy (certainty, rational objectivity) are inappropriate to political life, as its conditions of possibility are constitutively and unavoidably ‘heteronomous.’ This is not to say that rational reflection has no place in politics, but, on the contrary that the complexity of worldly inter-action demands more synthetic and complex forms of political normativity capable of attesting to the fragile “spiritual density of speaking and acting together.”57 For Arendt, this includes the need to acknowledge the unpredictability and natality of politics, that paraphrasing Heidegger, “to act is to err, to go astray,” and hence that judgment, responsiveness and promising demand to be understood not in terms of the skeptical-subjective criteria of epistemology but as constitutive and normative aspects of the logic appropriate to political inter-action.58 Overcoming the aporia of autonomy,59 for Arendt, means coming to accept that a certain range of the “will’s others” – most notably the conditions of plurality, natality and reflective judgment (thinking from the position of the other) – are not skeptical impediments to action but constitutive of its possibility, which forces a critical rethinking of the “boundaries” of self and others (Arendt’s critique of sovereignty).60 Arendt’s response to the aporia of autonomy is differentiated from Adorno’s not only by the selection and interpretation of the “will others” that she acknowledges as constitutive of the possibility of action (Adorno will dramatically widen the

is not available for empirical testing, but, rather is the very basis for anything that we count as empirical” (Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005)): 179. 56 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: 71, 44, 201. 57 J.M. Bernstein, "Political Modernism: The New, Revolution and Civil Disobedience in Arendt and Adorno," in eds. Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha, Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012):63. 58 Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Vol. 2: 194. It should be noted that Arendt’s draws this conception of action as errancy from Heidegger’s reading of the Anaximander fragment, which she admires for its reversal of the Being/Beings relation – of ontological difference – that characterizes much of Heidegger’s other work. Arendt admires this fragment because it suspends the usual attribution of the inauthenticity to the world of appearances, and instead proposes an alternative account of unconcealment that does not turn away from plural world (Beings) and towards the truth of Being. “Living in a world of appearances, all we know or can know is a ‘movement which lets every emerging being abandon concealment and go forward into unconcealment’” (189). 59 Arendt’s most sustained consideration of the aporia of modern autonomy, mirroring Adorno and Castoriadis accounts of rational identity and determinacy, is the concluding section of The Human Condition, “The Vita Activa and the Modern Age” (Chicago: Anchor Books, 1959). Here Arendt considers the modern historical dynamics whereby “Being and Appearance” or rationality and action are threatening to “part company,” under the social and scientific pressure for “success, industry and truthfulness” – animal laborans – that skeptically undermines the political world of appearances, emptying “human experience” of both rationality and meaning, and eventuating “world alienation” (263). 60 See: Chapter V “Action,” in Arendt, The Human Condition; Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed Ronald Beiner (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989).

23 range of action’s dependencies), but by the manner in which she held this aporia and its social and historical persistence (ideals of sovereignty, rule of expertise, blind power/violence) to obstruct (or mediate) the realization of the model of action her work proposes. In this dissertation, I propose to understand the primacy of praxis as a specific way of reconfiguring the norms, responsibilities and potentialities of political practice in light of the shifting “boundaries” it acknowledges between the self and its ‘others’ in its particular manner of envisioning the overcoming of the aporia of autonomy. Characteristic of this reconfiguration is the re-conceptualization of practice (action) as non-sovereign (the decentering of praxis) which serves, in various ways, to open, unsettle and expand both the kinds of normative accountability appropriate to such modes of practice (the decentering of normativity and its social distribution, which explains the turn to aesthetic reflection), as well as to radically extend the kind of (unpredictable) effects and (novel) actions it is capable of generating (the decentering of the temporal horizon of politics). Yet, the extent to which such approaches disclose new possibilities for the re-imagination of transformative, emancipatory or political practice cannot be the primary criteria that guides their critical evaluation, for in that case the socially mediated need to dis-close presently frustrated possibilities would already be imputed onto its disclosures. The need to see the ‘heteronomous’ conditions of practice as enabling of its possibility would then simultaneously inhibit such perspectives from critically confronting their own conditionality. Like all forms of idealism, the need to control the image of reality by affirming certain political potentialities would lead such disclosures to produce their own non-identity. The flipside of affirmation is skepticism towards conditionality – the worldly dependencies – of that which is affirmed.61 Nietzsche responds to the aporia of autonomy not by attempting to demonstrate that the rational will’s heteronomous “others” are constitutive aspects of the worldly possibility of practical action, as Arendt does, but, on the contrary, by radically extending the critique of heteronomy past the point established by Descartes and Kant. As Bernstein notes, Kant inaugurates a ‘Copernican turn’ in ethics which criticizes traditional morality for seeking a determination of the will “by some object external to it” (for example, ‘the good,’ virtue, or rationalistic perfection) and reconceives

61 The extreme model of idealist skepticism is stoicism, which strives to substitute an unlivable reality with the affirmation of the interior world of thought. See Robyn Marasco’s reading of Hegel’s “natural consciousness” in The Highway of Despair (42-56), for an excellent account of the “restlessness” or productive relation of despair (need) as the internal motor of dialectical critique.

24 autonomy as “giving the law to itself rather than the good giving the law to the will.”62 Kantian autonomy fuses self-legislation and “universal legislation,” the free determination of the will that simultaneously follows the universal law of reason. Nietzsche, however, discerns in Kant’s apparent synthesis of freedom and the moral law a structure of command (what Kant describes as the “autocratic” command to conform to the lawfulness that the rational self gives itself) and obedience (the empirical self that Kant refers to as a “rabble”) that testifies to the persistence of heteronomy. The ambiguity between giving and imposing the moral law upon the self, for Nietzsche, whose philosophical-genealogical interests lies in the worldly interpretation of the value of values (including the value of morality), are marks of the historical process of the internalization of the heteronomous “practice of estimating life against values extrinsic to it, values that devalue existence in favor of what is not susceptible to life’s tendential untenability.”63 The autocratic imposition of the moral law upon the self, which has historically shifted from an external to an internal command, does not fundamentally alter the heteronomous character of morality in Nietzsche’s reading. The static and unchanging criteria of moral ideals are the historical products of the attempt to escape from the dynamic processes of life, “riven with suffering, evil, transitoriness, strife, destruction and failure,” which are in turn imposed upon life as its ultimate, but (heteronomous) extrinsic values.64 In other words, for Nietzsche, the internalization of the moral law and the freely chosen autocratic subjection of the empirical self to it’s static form does not serve to overcome the heteronomy Kant identified with traditional “object-oriented” morality but instead consummates its singular trajectory. Nietzsche’s term for this is nihilism. The value of morality is nihilistic because it merely proposes “ideals that compensate (through interpretation, prohibition, projection, ect.) for forces that tend to undermine individuals’ capacity to have values, to engage in valuing uberhaupt.”65 For Nietzsche, “belief in moral reason becomes irrational when it excludes either self-reflection or the conditions of its employment.”66 The problem, therefore is that the conditions of “object-oriented, heteronomous moral codes and theories undermine belief in valuing since they devalue or suppress the activity of valuing, value-giving and creating, itself.”67

62 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 195. 63 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 196. 64 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 196. 65 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 197. 66 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 199. 67 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 199.

It is at this point that Bernstein’s interpretation offers its most compelling claim, namely, that Nietzsche’s philosophy – notably, his ideas of will to power and eternal recurrence – constitutes an attempt not to dispense with but to radicalize autonomy by rejecting the static universality of the moral law as a heteronomous and extrinsic valuation of life, and by replacing it with a necessarily creative and affirmative valuation of the affective force of the will, as the process of coming to “have the will one wants to have.”68 Nietzsche complicates Kant’s account of the “inner duality” of the will and of the fiction of the unified and complete ‘subject’ upon which it rests, by instead approaching willing (indeed subjectivity) as a dynamic and pluralistic process. Nietzsche’s rethinking (or undoing) of the subject begins with a plurality of sensations, rather than an already existing hierarchy of faculties (Nietzsche mocks Kantian ‘faculties’ as uncritically given)69 each vying for command, through which an “act of will” or “ruling thought” arises through an “affect of command” which entails a “selection and conquering of one drive over others.”70 Bernstein argues that the “will to power refers to the whole complicated complex of willing under the name of just one of its parts,” namely, the ‘affect of command’, which refers to the successful (i.e. remorseless, guiltless or undivided) self-identification of the “ruling thought as mine, as a creation of my will.”71 Nietzsche’s concepts of the “will to power” and the “eternal recurrence” are his response to the problem of “how must the will regard itself if it is not to fall into heteronomy?”72 The concept of the “eternal recurrence” is Nietzsche’s mechanism for distinguishing between heteronomous and autonomous willing, between nihilism (which is “still a willing, a will to power”) and the creative will-to-power – it is the analogue for the Kantian categorial imperative in Nietzsche’s radicalized picture of autonomy.73 Bernstein’s first step toward the interpretation of the concept of the eternal return is to clarify that it does not so much offer a law for testing the selection of willing, as it is an account of the “condition of willing.” He argues : To regard all creations as creatures is to regard all meanings as meaningless (as life and nature); to regard all creatures as creations is to regard meaninglessness as constitutive of meaning giving. The thought of eternal return images, simultaneously, physis becoming nomos, and nomos becoming physis. Eternal return does not represent any, possible or actual,

68 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 204. 69 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002): S11. 70 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 203. 71 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 204. 72 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 207. 73 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 207.

state of affairs (and hence is not a metaphysical truth of any kind); it expresses the practical entanglement of creature and creator, that is, it expresses the reflective self-comprehension that the entanglement of creatureliness and creativity must have for an agent. Any thought that attempted to transcendent this entanglement would, a fortiori, be denying a condition of willing.74

The emphasis on the entanglement of creatureliness and creativity may appear surprising, given that Nietzsche’s concern is to avoid heteronomous willing, whose characteristic expression in the ‘ascetic ideal’ is to interpret creaturely suffering and imbue it with value and meaning.75 The eternal return, however, neither disavows this entanglement nor the existence of creaturely suffering, but on the contrary makes the affirmation of the meaninglessness of it the condition necessary to sustain the self-reverence and autonomy of the self-legislating and value-creating will to power. Bernstein further clarifies “if one accepts the thought of the eternal return then nothing, including the lapse of all my willingness into meaninglessness, can deprive ‘this’ act of willing of its validity and worth.”76 On the contrary “a will that routinely suffers from remorse or regret can do so only under the condition that not its willing but something else is of supreme value, something whose worth remains untouched by the worthlessness (wrongness, evil, credulity, destructiveness) of one’s acts.” It is this cold self-affirmation and “self-reverence” that explains how the creativity of the will to power is to be practically distinguished from various productive forms of nihilism, for this alone is the condition that makes valuing itself an unconditional value, in-dependent from the social and creaturely dependencies that it is necessarily entangled with. Nietzsche’s radical extension of autonomy explains how the will’s conquering drive, the ‘affect of command,’ creatively self-legislates not only the will (object of action), but whose self-affirmation of this self-legislation alone constitutes the unconditional (autonomous) value of ‘this’ value, thereby breaking out of the closed life-denying heteronomy of morality that always displaces the worth of willing onto its objects. Bernstein concludes his interpretation of Nietzsche by pointing out how the attempt to radicalize autonomy by elevating the activity of willing to an absolute value that relies upon the affirmation of its indifference to the passivity and conditionedness of its creaturely entanglements ends up extending, rather than overcoming, the aporia of autonomy. Firstly, Bernstein notes that

74 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 208. 75 Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals (New York: Vintage, 1989): part III “What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?” 76 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 209.

27 autonomy here is “primarily a self-affection, something solitary, private and beyond communication,” such that Nietzsche cannot “demonstrate why he or anyone else ought to make it supremely authoritative for themselves,” lest this unconditional value congeal into a moral ideal and repudiate itself according to his own criteria. This criticism would not trouble Nietzsche, however, who regards his radical autonomy as a rare, independent and aristocratic value. Indeed, the challenge of Nietzschean will-to-power is to radically extend the notion of responsibility (overcoming nihilistic man), which can no longer be figured through the structure of nihilistic moral obligation (acting on the basis of extrinsically imposed reasons) but requires the acknowledgment of willing as itself generative of those distinctions, hence for the very value of values, ‘beyond good and evil.’ Bernstein’s more penetrating criticism of Nietzsche, echoing Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s aporetic account of autonomy, is to show how Nietzsche’s manner of securing the unconditional value of willing is itself productive of the very impasse he proclaims to overcome: the erection of a division between valuing and the dynamism of life; in short, that Nietzsche fails to break free from his own critique of morality. Bernstein claims that the way the concept of eternal recurrence secures the unconditional value of willing is to affirm the meaninglessness of the creatureliness with which all creative willing is entangled, which in turn establishes the value of the value of willing. As such, “Autonomy is only the transgression of boundaries, valuing only transvaluation, going beyond, living beyond” and the “truth of autonomous existence is never to be found in the works or deeds of autonomous beings.”77 The value of the creation of values is predicated upon the meaninglessness of what is created, the worldly creatureliness with which it is inextricably entangled. The self-assertion of creativity turns back upon itself, instituting a self-division that forestalls the actualization of its own aspirations. Bernstein concludes: A second order aporetic incommensurability between creator and creatures becomes inevitable. It is this incommensurability, the necessity for sustaining the ‘pathos of distance’ which, finally, is a perpetual distancing of the self from itself, that enforces solitude, mask, and irony. Autonomous beings are hermits, the living dead, entombed in life because forever living beyond creatureliness, while striving for a creaturely life, a life in community that only death (posthumousness) can provide.78

77 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 212. 78 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 212.

Nietzschean autonomy is aporetic, alienating itself from the realization of its own highest values. None of this should be surprising, he claims, because the “drive for autonomy is always a refusal of community and mediation, a refusal of dependency on the will of another.”79 “Biological idealism,” Horkheimer and Adorno’s term for Nietzsche’s aporetic autonomy, gives concise formulation to the dialectic whereby the affirmation of the creative violence of life, when asserted as a value independent of its heteronomous creaturely conditions of possibility, necessarily recoils upon itself, becoming its opposite; static, ‘entombed’ and indifferent to the object (conditionality), in short, idealistic.80 While the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment credit Nietzsche with exposing the ‘life-denying’ tendencies of the dialectic of enlightenment, his response to this problem, not unlike like Kant’s effort to salvage (metaphysical) freedom, partakes in what it means to overcome.81 Nietzsche’s refrain “Bad air! Bad air!”, or, as Lukács puts it, “the charnel house of rotted interiorities,” paradoxically characterizes his own aporetic autonomy, “entombed in life.” Nietzsche’s desire to escape from the immanence of “English skepticism” outstrips Kant’s, but it is no more able to imagine the realization of its highest values than was Königsbergian.82 Adorno and Horkheimer explain: His will [Nietzsche’s Overman]is not less despotic than the categorical imperative. Both principles aim at independence from external powers, at the unconditional freedom from tutelage which defines the essence of enlightenment. However, as the fear of falsehood [heteronomy]…replaced Law with self-legislation, so that everything was made transparent as one great unmasked superstition, enlightenment itself, indeed, truth in any form, became an idol.83

Nietzsche’s radical extension of autonomy forfeits ‘truth,’ – not just identitarian truth, but the ‘truth’ of the object, and in so doing forfeits the realization of its creative values. By contrast, Adorno’s conception of reconciliation aims at the disclosure of ‘truth’ in the moment of non- identity, that is, through the critique of the existing recognitive-empirical conditions that inhibit particular objects from becoming more than they merely are (given, identical). Reconciliation does

79 Bernstein, “Autonomy and Solitude,” 214. 80 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002): 76. 81 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 36. Horkheimer and Adorno unequivocally affirm that "Like few others since Hegel, Nietzsche recognized the dialectic of enlightenment." 82 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, S12: 43; Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico- Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature cited in Theodor Adorno, "The Idea of Natural-History," Telos, no. 60 (1984): 118. 83 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 90.

29 not aim at a harmonious (or romantic/irrational) ethical suturing of the enlightenment’s “split between subject and object,” but neither does it embroil itself in the aporetics of autonomy.84 Instead, the task is to sustain the critical tension between the poles – the reciprocal mediation of praxis and the ‘heteronomous’ conditions that both enable and inhibit the former – such that both the means and ends of morality, ethics and politics (the value of values) belong inextricably to the object (empirical nature, social mediation) and the practical subject whose actions would bring about their realization. The critical normativity of reconciliation emerges as a self-conscious response to the material experience of the violence, domination and failure generated by the aporetics of autonomy. 1.3.3 The Primacy of Praxis in Contemporary Political Theory The question now emerges: what relevance does this account of Nietzsche’s aporetic autonomy have for contemporary political theory, given their considerable differences, foremost of which is Nietzsche’s embrace of aristocratic independence and his focus upon willing compared to the embrace of non-sovereign forms of political (often democratic) action? In what way could the critical interpretation of the former help illuminate the latter? Firstly, the primacy of praxis, as referred to above, functions in this dissertation as a kind of critical constellation rather than a determinate and clearly defined concept. For example, Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power, strictly speaking, does not prioritize praxis or indeed the products or deeds of the will (as, for example, Arendt does), but on the contrary, the unconditional value of autonomous willing. ‘Praxis,’ in this constellation is a particular variation on a theme. What is essential is the value or function that is affirmed in a manner that establishes an “aporetic incommensurability” with the dependencies and conditions with which it is entangled. The ‘primacy of praxis,’ then, could be understood as the ‘primacy of x’ insofar as ‘x’ is a value, effect or affirmative possibility established in-dependently of the critical disclosure of the full range of ‘x’s’ practical entanglements and conditionalities. The thesis this dissertation drives towards establishing will be that the ‘primacy of x’ – most recently within contemporary political theory the ‘primacy of praxis’ (the ‘primacy of difference’ or ‘antagonism’ are close variations) – ends up establishing, in disavowed form and in spite of itself, a relation of aporetic incommensurability with its own conditions of possibility until or unless political praxis is viewed from the perspective of the “preponderance of the object.” The inherent difficulty of establishing this interpretation is that

84 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 31.

30 because contemporary formulations of decentered subjectivity already call the primacy of autonomous subjectivity, indeed origins, meanings or values of any kind into question, the charge of primacy seems amiss. Yet, if Nietzsche’s critique of essence and truth still holds – if it belongs only to ‘backworldsmen’ – and meaning and value remains tied to the play of creation, then contemporary figures of decentered subjectivity will remain haunted by the spectre of the aporetic autonomy: irrationally indifferent to creaturely suffering and unable to realize their highest values. In order to clarify this argument I will show precisely manner in which I take Arendt’s and Nietzsche’s quite disparate approaches to be linked, namely, how the ‘primacy of x’ (non- sovereign action and will-to-power, respectively) produces the ‘aporetic incommensurability’ that undermines, divides and stifles the realization of its own highest value or purported practical effect. Recall that in the above discussion of Arendt, that the conception of non- sovereign action and judgment that she forwards as part of her effort to rethink the ‘conditions of possibility’ of politics, reorienting them away from the ideals of knowing (certainty, impartiality, independence and unchanging objectivity) and towards acting (uncertainty, partial judgment, plurality and novelty) was predicated on the selection of a limited range of the ‘will’s others.’ For example, Arendt avers plurality and aesthetic reflective judgment (partiality, thinking from the standpoint of others) as necessary and unavoidable conditions of the possibility of politics. Her argument against viewing politics through the ideal of knowing is that it disavows the particular limitations that must be confronted aright in order to comprehend the uniquely fragile dynamics and normative responsibilities suitable to the unruliness or ‘a- scholia’ of that process. However, the selection of the limiting conditions which establish the condition of the possibility of (non-sovereign) political action for Arendt are confined to those that could be affirmed as intrinsic components of her revised conception of politics, namely, as the process of grappling with the ‘problem of the new.’ As numerous commentators have pointed out, the distinction Arendt establishes between action and labour (and work), modelled on the Aristotelian division of living and living well, “forgets or refuses that action is always supported and that it is invariably bodily..[and that] the material supports for action are not only part of action, they are also what is being fought about.”85 Arendt’s selection of the range of the ‘wills others’ that she incorporates into her revised conception of non-sovereign action are laudable but incomplete, I argue, because they only go to the point of including those conditions

85 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015): 73.

31 that are commensurable with establishing creative possibility – worldly novelty – that she affirms over and against the static and depoliticizing (epistemological) ideals of knowing she aims to displace and contest. Arendt’s account of the mediatedness of praxis stops short of a critical disclosure of its object. It does so because it halts as soon as rationalist certainty has been left behind in the ascholia of the turbulent world of plural beings, but fails to proceed to the consideration of the ways novelty, action, reflective judgement and promising – the ingredients of political modernism – are themselves mediated (both enabled and endangered) by the worldly conditions they react against (nominalism, technological mastery, disenchantment, specializing, the erosion of the ‘public sphere’). She selectively acknowledges heteronomous conditions and challenges – plurality, unpredictability, risks of irrationality or unintelligibility constitutive of reflective judgment – up until the point that they are commensurable with the escape from the hegemony of the anti-political logics of modern- scientific epistemology. Arendt’s thought breaks off at precisely the place where it would be forced to acknowledge the exposure to and dependence of the space of appearances upon social and political processes that proceed, condition and exceed them. Arendt’s affirmation of ‘x’ (worldly novelty) presupposes an untenable and idealistic distinction between the non- sovereignty of political action and judgement and their material conditions of possibility (socially mediated dimensions of creatureliness or ‘life’). Arendt’s predilection for ‘making distinctions,’ despite the incisive and delicate character of her style, is anathema to dialectics and so it is unsurprising that it is precisely here where her thought most flagrantly forgets the object. Exposure to contingency and non-sovereignty is affirmed as a dimension of action, where it contributes to the unpredictability and natality of political life, but not when considering the social and material supports that sustain the conditions of access to the world of appearances, where its failure threatens to undermine the possibility of political action. As Arendt puts it, the difficulty of grapping with the predicament of human novelty, and confronting this problem encumbered by all the limitations, unruliness and tumult characteristic of worldly inter-action, finds its response in “the very fact that the human species regenerates itself constantly and forever.”86 The problem of novelty is answered, for Arendt, by the forward- looking fact there will always be another occasion to fulfill its promise, to remake and renew the binds and bonds of the fragile world of appearances and to redeem the disappointments and

86 Arendt, Life of the Mind, Vol. 2: 212.

32 failures of the past.87 Arendt’s affirmation of the potentiality of worldly politics comes eerily close to echoing, in new form, the coldness and obliviousness of the Nietzschean eternal return. It consigns all those remainders, the unacknowledged ‘will’s others’ (materiality, dependence on social supports) that obstruct and trouble the affirmation to non-identity. As Butler points out, “If (non-sovereign) action is defined as independent, implying a fundamental difference from dependency (mere life), then our self-understanding as actors is predicated upon a disavowal of those living and interdependent relations upon which our lives depend.”88 The ambivalence of Arendt’s approach is that it both serves to recall the non-sovereignty of associational life, yet this critical remainder is simultaneously for the sake of preserving novel political possibilities. Arendt’s thought enlivens the problem of political interdependency while simultaneously forgetting the object, depoliticizing the question of the heteronomous conditions that variously support and threaten political action. Her decentered account of politics cannot be said served to serve the neediness of the object, and for this reason, and this reason alone, it remains aporetically idealistic: indifferent to the political dimensions of past and present material sufferings and focused, affirmatively, on the future possibilities that will redeem them. By contrast, Adorno’s “preponderance of the object,” which has been widely interpreted as leading to an inability to perceive political potentialities, is, I want to argue, in fact more critical and responsive to the world. It is so because it subjects the need to affirm practical possibilities to critical scrutiny. It is only through the positivistic moment of suspending the need to discern affirmative possibilities that the non-identity of social and political objects – the mediation of political praxis – becomes perspicuous. It is only on the basis of the exactitude of this disclosure, which includes the refusal to engage in apologetics, that the possibility of critical transformation, of mediating the world otherwise, is sustained. The “exact fantasy” of critical theory – the spontaneous, critical and responsive relation to the object that is the condition of creatively discovering (and thereby, potentially, acting towards) the object anew – is diametrically opposed by the fantasy of praxis, a fantasy that is sustained only by the failure to

87 Stanley Cavell offers a considerable contribution to the Arendtian conception of beginning anew in his essay “Finding as Founding,” by inaugurating a subtle critical shift that awakens to the ongoing failures and disappointments of the present (rather than by turning away from them by looking toward a future that might redeem) and which conceives of receptivity to these conditions an internal dimension of worldly natality. He is able to do so, however, on condition that the reception and inheritance of the past/tradition – the everyday, a-scholia of the phenomenal world of appearances – is meet with a posture of both hopefulness and despair (This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After Emerson After Wittgenstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013): 77. 88 Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015): 44.

33 confront the full range of the conditions and dependencies with which any such practical possibilities would necessarily be entangled.89 The creative potential of critique, for Adorno, can only emerge out of a disclosive engagement with the non-identical aspects of the object – following the ‘logic of the matter’ rather than allowing the analysis to be guided by either method or the desire to affirmatively escape it. As Susan Buck-Morss puts its, this is “not subjective invention so much as the objective discovery of the new within the given, through a regrouping of its elements,” namely the dialectical disclosure of the process of historical sedimentation and social mediation as constitutive component of the (damaged state of the) particular.90 The thesis I want to pursue is that only such a radical and “sober” mode of self- critique – the preponderance of the object – is capable of overcoming the aporia of autonomy.91

89 Adorno, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, 52. 90 Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, 132. 91 The locution “sober” critique, or of “soberly re-cognizing contemporary predicaments of power” is drawn from Antonio Vasquez-Arroyo’s Political Responsibility, which, I take it, owes, in turn, to Benjamin conception of “profane illumination”(Antonio Y. Vasquez-Arroyo, Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016: 208).

Chapter Two Recovering the Political Promise of Adorno’s Philosophical Constellation

2.1 Natural-Historical Interpretation as Critical Disclosure

In this chapter and the next, I will unpack three elements of Adorno’s philosophical constellation which, I argue, hold significant potential for contemporary political theory insofar as it aspires to overcome the limitations associated with the primacy of praxis while nevertheless retaining a critical account of praxis as a creative and dynamic process. A central and re-current theme of Adorno's work, which was explicitly taken up in his 1932 essay, "The Idea of Natural-History," centers upon the task of developing a temporally dynamic account of truth. Adorno’s aspirations align with other major philosophical attempts of the early 20th century – existentialism, phenomenology, lebensphilosophie – to complete what idealism promised but failed to deliver: an “outbreak” of truth into concretion and an overcoming of aporetic autonomy. Philosophy’s task, Adorno argued, “was to think the unconditioned, to transcend positivity and the accepted existence of sciences – arbitrarily dedicated to separate objects, and which starkly isolate matter and method – and to contrast the scientific domain with the unfettered truth.”92 The difficulties, however, that had undermined previous attempts was that “philosophy [had] take[n] science as its model” in its attempted breakout, in which case the sought after concretion retreated into the abstract domain of transcendental antinomy (Husserl). Or, it opposed scientific hypostatization by way of the ‘method’ of intuitive immediacy and thereby sacrificed the possibility of critical experience (truth), upholding the dualism (dynamism of life/static concept) as a solution to the problem rather than critically confronting it (Bergson).93 The problem, for Adorno, is that neither approach sufficiently reflects on the historical character of the dualism it seeks to challenge, such that the undialectical account of concretion each offers – transcendental

92 Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013): 41. 93 Adorno, Against Epistemology, 43. Adorno offers the following account of the bind confronting modern philosophy’s attempt to ‘break out’ of the reifying shackles of scientific method and recover an account of truth grounded upon (rather than opposed to) the temporally dynamic and materially concrete world: "When thought shuts itself off from the division of labour, it falls behind the development of forces and behaves 'archaically'. If as a science, however, it integrates itself into the sciences, then it renounces its proper impulse at the very point where it most needs it" (43). These two options, which Adorno attributes to Bergson and Husserl, respectively, might apply today to the alternating trends in contemporary political theory to emphasize the insuppressible potential of praxis, on the one hand, or to strive for universal regulative ideals, on the other (45).

35 logic and ontology, respectively – repeat, rather than criticizing, the reification they would seek to challenge in their innermost intellectual configurations. Adorno’s approach, by contrast, will refuse the temptation of taking, as a philosophical point of departure, a position whose solution would be external to or unmarked by the problem it challenges. Philosophical concepts are invariably mediated by their historical context. How did Adorno characterize this historico-philosophical challenge in the 1930s? The problem, he argued, was the progressive advance of “the principle of immanence,” in other words, the process whereby thought “seals [itself] off more and more from whatever does not emanate from [it] and [its] jurisdiction.”94 The principle of immanence, which proceeds via the disenchantment or exhaustion of the particular object’s ‘auratic’ meaningfulness (the reduction of its truth-value to its ideal and repeatable identity) precipitates “the crisis of nominalism, that is to say, the tension in modern society between the realm of the general and the realities of the particular.”95 Adorno, however, does not romantically cling to the auratic individuality of the particular object as a value in-itself against the enchroachment of the principle of immanence. Quite to the contrary, for Adorno the particularity of the object, its non-identity, is only dis-closed once the material history of the object’s mediations – the innumerable series of particular historical dependencies and relations that separates every discrete object (or “I”) from itself – becomes critically perspicuous over and against the object’s identity. In Adorno’s words “Dialectic reaches the insight that the closed process [the crisis of nominalism] also includes the non-included [the unthinkability/meaninglessness of the particular object]. It thus reaches a boundary to knowledge itself.”96 By dis-closing the boundaries of knowledge as particular boundaries, non-identical with the reality they purport to measure – giving a materialist twist to the Hegelian insight that to know the boundaries of experience is to already have surpassed them – negative dialectics breaks out of the principle of immanence only to discover that the particular object [or political act], the concretion modern philosophy has aspired towards, has been damaged by the particularity of the social process itself; in grasping this damage as particular, hence revocable, it discloses the object “from the standpoint of redemption.”97 Ethically, non-identity discloses the wrongness of the

94 Adorno, Against Epistemology, 23. This concept is an integral component of Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. There they write: “The principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition, which enlightenment upholds against mythical imagination, is that of myth itself” (8). 95 Jameson, Late Marxism, 86. 96 Adorno, Against Epistemology, 39. 97 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (New York: Verso, 2006): 247.

36 inexpressibility of suffering. Extending Adorno’s argument politically, I argue, discloses the damage of the fugitive or ephemeral shape that contemporary praxis is forced into, the social uninhabitability of individuation. Immanent critique discloses what the processes of social mediation – reason, rationality, morality, politics – have done to the particular, and through the critical-somatic force of the disclosure of the “untruth of identity” open up the (as yet unredeemed) possibility of materialist truth: that praxis (more than just occasionally or exceptionally) might yet become responsive to what remains ineloquent - ‘the neediness of the object.’ Working toward this aim, the task the 1932 essay sets itself is to overcome the stubborn antithesis of nature and history or relativism and ahistorical being that had plagued positivist and ontological modes of inquiry alike. The negative dialectical mode of interpretation follows the reciprocal constitution of nature and history to the point of their closest contact in order to arrive at conception of truth – an objective and binding mode of rational claiming – that is not indifferent or separable from, but intrinsic to the "transience" of the object (in both its natural and historical dimensions). Adorno’s essay aims at developing a mode of critical disclosure capable of expressing a fragile, but nevertheless binding criteria upon praxis which, to translate it into epistemological language, would hold that "truth possess a temporal core."98 The fragility of this truth comes from the fact that its’ rational claim is bound to historical transience, and hence “philosophy must do without the consolation that truth cannot be lost.”99 Yet, the forgetting or suppression of the temporal-material genesis of the concept is virtually indistinguishable from the concept’s moment of identity-universality. The fragility of truth has more to do with the forgetting inherent to the universality of the concept – the medium through which truth must find expression in order not to be lost – than with the fleeting or ungraspable nature of temporality. While contemporary political theory is often hostile to the admixture of epistemological or ethical registers with politics, it is a perspicuous feature of Adorno’s thought, along with those that have been influenced by it, to confront the mediation (including the historical separation or compartmentalization) of these domains.100 It bears noting that Adorno adopts Hegel’s conception of spirit, which “embraces the

98Adorno, An Introduction to Negative Dialectics, 14. 99 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 34. 100 As chapter five will further explore, Judith Butler’s work, whose late phase I will argue holds significant parallels with Adorno’s thought, has notably been criticized for purported conflation of epistemological (Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, 47) and ethical (Honig, “Antigone’s Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism,” New Literary History 41, no. 1 (2010): 4) registers in order to conceive of politics. Butler, however, not unlike Adorno

37 entire realm of historical, political and economic life of mankind.”101 The life of spirit, ethical life (sittlichkeit), refers to the ways in which spirit (self-conscious human activity, which includes the ‘politics’) actualizes itself in the world through the process of the experience (phenomenology) of failure (determinate negation). Adorno’s thesis that “life does not live” can be read, in part, as claiming that ‘ethical life’ does not live (which is caused by spirit’s progressive separation from ‘first nature,’ damaging both). It does not ‘live’ because it is no longer sufficiently alive to its own failures; it has become second nature, blindly reproductive precisely where it claimed to constitute a living (spiritual) process that promised ‘more’ than mere survival. Ethics, for Adorno, does not refer to a narrow or compartmentalized (anti-political) domain of normativity, but is the name for the problem that gives rise to the compartmentalization itself (the splitting of the life of spirit from life itself, of constituens and constitutum) and that expresses itself across all domains of modern life: epistemology, art, politics. Hence, Adorno’s concern with truth – the truth-content of critical experience – is not a purely narrow epistemological matter, but expressly takes up the problem of the limits of given rationality (to ‘experience’ or encounter what is qualitatively new, non-thought) as a problem that bears, mediately, on all domains of life. Part one of this chapter is structured around two dialectical insights drawn from György Lukács and Walter Benjamin that are brought into contact and developed into a mode of immanent yet non-arbitrary or relativistic social interpretation. From Lukács, Adorno receives and reworks the Marxian-inflected concept of the reification of "second nature."102 Second nature refers to the historical dynamic through which the social mediation of first nature comes to congeal into a "law- like" process, brought about by the universal mediation of all objects through the domineering

in this respect, criticizes any attempt to firmly distinguish the political from the ethical and epistemological domains (Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013: 8-9). Adorno explicitly takes it to be a task of critical theory to criticize the historical process through which theoretical rationality (science) was separated from praxis, which involves the attempt to rescue the "rationality-potential" of what that division excluded. The epistemological question (the historical mediation of what counts as rational) and the ethical question (in the Hegelian sense of sittlichkeit, the conditions that mediate the possibility of living, dwelling, acting and so on) are, for Adorno, necessarily inextricable from politics even if neither can be proposed in a positive form or offer definitive criteria for the latter. In chapter five I forward the argument that Butler's "ethical demand" involves a specific kind of 'truth' claim that bears a strong affinity to Adorno's conception of the "truth content" of "non-identity." 101 Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008): 15. 102 As Frederic Jameson (Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 2007: 22) notes, Adorno’s use of the conception of reification is significantly reworked from Lukacs, given the former’s dialectical conception of natural-history and his distinct (negative) concept of universality/totality. Adorno’s concern, Jameson writes, is that the “concept of reification is itself reified, or at least easily reifiable. Characteristically, then, Adorno criticizes ‘reification’ in the name of the moment of truth of reification theory” (22) Adorno refuses to abstractly pose reification as a counter-concept to some static conception of humanistic nature, hence the problem of reification must be grasped in the particularity of its process, in spirit becoming second-nature.

38 process of economic exchange value. The naturalization of this mechanistic second nature works against the productive tension through which the meaning of social practices and objects are critically renewed in the course of everyday experience, which relies on the possibility of acknowledging the ‘mismediation’ of the object (precisely what the hegemony and naturalization of exchange value denies). Universal social mediation (exchange as the paradigmatic historical form of identity and objectivity) becomes both dominant (subsuming objects under pre-established categories) and inevitable or natural (non-historical) in its relation to the objects of first nature it mediates. There are two components to this process. Firstly, the Marxist account of the historical transformation of the concept of value: The concept of value is formed in the exchange relationship, a being for the other. In a society in which every relationship has become an exchange relationship, has become fungible this ‘for the other’ has been magically transformed into an ‘in itself’, into something substantial. As such, it then became false.103

In other words, the relation to the other – to social others as well as to nature – in becoming universalized (mediated by exchange), has sacrificed the crucial dimension of otherness: the possibility of discovering a value in the other that would be irreducible to its universal identity (exchange value). Exchange value, though historically substantial (and so ‘true’ according to reality), is nevertheless a false form of mediation (non-identical to the object it mis-mediates). Lukács then adds the Hegelian insight to this Marxist argument, namely, that the rigidified concept of (exchange) value comes to ‘naturally’ mediate subjectivity, which in turn, also demands historical interpretation. For Adorno, the value of this insight was that it disclosed the particular historical process that underlay the “Kantian premise of the duality of subject and object,” in short, of the hegemonic form of modern (rationalized) reason and its “amputa[tion] of the incommensurable.”104 The philosophical drive to disenchant truth, to rid (philosophical) thinking of its mythic or metaphysical tendencies, tends towards what Adorno refers to as the “residual

103 Adorno, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, 117. 104 Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, 28; Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 8. As Adorno’s biographer, Stefan Müller-Doohm points out, the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel was also important in convincing Adorno that the “’meaning’” of synthesis in a Kantian sense (i.e. as a concept of idealism) is itself social and reducible to the fact of exploitation” (Adorno and Sohn-Rethel, Briefwechsel, p. 10f cited in Adorno: A Biography, New York: Polity Press, 2009: 221). If Lukács intervention can be said to have Hegelianized the Marxist conception of commodity fetishism and exchange, by demonstrating their effects on socially mediated subjectivity, then Sohn- Rethel’s work discloses the genealogical process whereby the abstraction of commodities exerted its force on logic and epistemology, disclosing the forgotten moment of genesis in the abstraction of modern-scientific conceptions of validity. Adorno wrote the influence of Sohn-Rethel “triggered the greatest mental upheaval that I have experienced in philosophy since my first encounter with Benjamin’s work” (Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 220-21).

39 theory of truth.”105 The idea here is that “by eliminating the ephemeral, the accidental and more or less external you would then arrive at the pure concepts which would be a residue that is left behind, and you would thus become conscious of the Absolute, the truth, and the ‘authentic.”106 Like the process of exchange, rationalized truth is what remains “after one deducts its productions costs, the wages of the labour, as it were, in short, what is vulgar language of science enslaved to positivism ultimately called ‘subjective factors.’”107 The duality of the subject and object, disenchanted reason, far from serving as an ahistorical measure of objective truth, was itself mediated by the social totality. The ideological character of bourgeois philosophy – which shares a homological structure (mediated by duality of subject/object) with many other domains of modern life, from epistemology (positivism), politics (bureaucratic/instrumental reason) to art (modern art’s taboo on mimetic representation/abstraction) – owes not the fact that it is serves particular (class) interests, but because reality (the social totality) is itself contradictory. Facts, truths and experiences, far from being simply given, must be interpreted as already mediated by the contradictory social whole (by the irrational, subsumptive and dominating relation towards the object). Hence, the failure to subject truth (objectivity) to historical critique had lead to “accepting given social reality as the reality.”108 Of course, this critical interpretation of society that Adorno adopts by way of Hegel, Marx Lukács and Sohn-Rethel (‘real abstraction’) requires a conception of social totality (which, as we will see later, is also further informed, in a critical sense, by Nietzsche and Benjamin) that contemporary political theory, no less than the positivism, finds dubious. While the dissertation will offer a full clarification and partial defense of Adorno’s employment of this central concept in the following chapters, suffice it for the moment to add a few words of clarification. For Lukács the ideological disintegration of modern experience – the crisis of nominalism – was countered by the nostalgic aspiration for the restitution of what had been lost. As Buck-Morss explains, “The thrust of Lukács thought remains holisitic, moving in the direction of reconciliation, of closing the circle, just as the classicist had done in art.”109 By contrast, Adorno will retain the concept of totality only out of the need to comprehend the damage of history, never to engage in either

105 Adorno, Against Epistemology, 83. 106 Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 162. 107 Adorno, Against Epistemology, 70. 108 Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, 26. 109 Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, 46.

40 historical theodicy (which just is the ideological justification of the sacrifice of the particular for the universal) or deductive-causal explanation. The theoretical difficulty that arises here is that social totality, for Adorno, is simultaneously particular (the product of a particular, revocable historical process) and universal (mediation of all particularities), both knowable and unknowable. “Totality is a category of mediation, not one of immediate domination and subjugation.”110 Social totality is not itself a determinable fact, but rather what mediates the facts, yet, for its own part, it is also something that has come to be (is itself mediated, that is, historical and particular). Mediation, it must be stressed, is not tantamount to causal determination, quite the opposite, it operates indirectly, unevenly, and over time. Mediation is particular not only because the totality is particular – “discontinuous” and “irrational,” something that has become – but because the whole does not exist abstractly or separately from the parts. Hence, totality is also not falsifiable, as there are innumerable exceptions, enclaves and deviations from the historical tendency, which are nonetheless mediated by the very fact of their exceptionality. It is at this point that positivism and post-structuralism are united in their critique of dialectical speculation: both reject the category of totality on the grounds of its inability to do justice to the exception. Positivism rejects totality in favour of the given fact, naturalizing the universal moment as conceptual doubling of the object111; post-structuralism rejects the universal moment entirely – the premise of the coherence or knowability of historical mediation – reconceputalizing universality as the representative “husk” shrouding the endless movement of internal differentiation, and in so doing discards the value of its criticizability.112 What is missed by positivism entirely and avoided by post-structuralism is that: Totality is not an affirmative but rather a critical category. Dialectical critique seeks to salvage or help establish what does not obey totality, what opposes it or what first forms itself as the potential of a not yet existent individuation. The interpretation of facts is directed towards totality, without the interpretation itself being a fact.113

110 Adorno, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, 107. 111 See Karl Popper’s contribution to The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, “The Logic of the Social Sciences.” Popper writes: “The important methodological idea that we can learn from our mistakes cannot be understood without the regulative idea of truth: any mistake simply consists in a failure to live up to the standard of objective truth, which is our regulative idea. We term a proposition 'true' if it corresponds to the facts, or if things are as described by the proposition. This is what is called the absolute or objective concept of truth which each of us constantly uses” (99). 112 Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995) describes the “repetition of the same” (in short, representation, or what parallels Adorno’s “principle of immanence”) as the “external husk of a kernel of difference” (76). 113 Adorno, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, 11-12.

Because what is mediated is inseparable from the mediating process itself, the ostensibly discrete object is never strictly equal to itself, independent or unconditioned, on the contrary, as mediated, it “points beyond itself.”114 That the “whole is precisely not something already given, that truth is not something fixed and somehow guaranteed,” constitutes the difficulty of negative dialectics, which both requires access to the concept of totality while at the same time prohibiting definitive (traditionally metaphysical or systematic) access to totality ‘in-itself,’ apart from its appearance in particularity. Hence, dialectical speculation, the detection and critique of totality, migrates into the micrological detail. Adorno cautions that “We should not hypostatize this totality, this whole, in which we stand, should not introduce this whole dogmatically from without, but always attempt to effect this transition from individual phenomena to the whole with constant reference to the matter itself.”115 The danger internal to negative dialectics is that immanent interpretation, which follows the object and only comes to learn about totality from what that particular critical engagement discloses, becomes methodical and abstract once it presumes in advance what there is to know about the object (i.e. once totality becomes ossifies into a determinate formula, say ‘exchange’), a problem I will address further in chapter four. For Adorno, the possibility of "experience" – critical subjectivity that could serve as the basis for transformative praxis – requires the possibility of becoming aware of a tension between the inherited socio-historical categories that constitute one as a social individual and that endow objects within the world with their perceptibility and social significance, and the objects perceived in that world (without presuming any unmediated access to the latter). The historical categories that mediate the appearance and intelligibility of objects in the world (including subjects themselves) must themselves be sufficiently open to practical change so that the “mismediation” of objects – the apprehensibility of the object’s ‘bad’ particularity, the concrete experiences of suffering for which there is no recognizable concept, or which the existing normative vocabulary renders imperceptible – remains capable of provoking critical scrutiny, and potentially, the political revision of social norms, categories and institutions.116 The possibility of experience, as socially and historically shaped and supported, is itself subject to "withering."117 In naturalizing

114 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 102. 115 Adorno, Introduction to Negative Dialectics, 24. 116 Joll, "Adorno's Negative Dialectic," 236. 117 For an excellent account of the role of mediation in Adorno see Brian O'Connor Adorno's Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).

42 the annulment of first nature's mediated social eloquence, in which 'the object' or 'something' that is mediated only appears in 'rational' terms within social life when it is reduced to the equi-valence of the commodity form imposed upon it, Lukács argued that second nature had come to entrap itself in a "charnel-house of rotted interiorities."118 Adorno admired Lukács' Hegelian account of how 'second nature' petrifies and decays when it cuts itself off from the object, nature, and for grasping this de-historicizing tendency itself as a historical process, but objected to the latter's "theological" or romantic escape route of "personal re-awakening."119 Lukács' failure, for Adorno, consisted in his inability to confront the dynamism of the object, first nature, with the same critical force he had deployed with respect to second nature. Lukács' recourse to “class conscious” and the awakening of the proletariat to fact of the historical production of the bad sociality totality remains reifying for Adorno, a return to the idealist motif of the priority of spirit. The second, more important dialectical insight which would provide the framework for Adorno's "new form of critical historiography," was drawn from Benjamin's conception of the fragmentary or enciphered ruination of historical nature. The problem bequeathed by Lukács concerns the very possibility of measuring the damaged caused by the irrational petrifaction of 'second nature.' This problem is deepened once it is acknowledged that 'nature' does not possess a timeless normative significance external to or apart from this historical process, and has already lost the value it would need to possess in order to comprehend 'wrong life.' For Adorno, rejecting the possibility of the recourse to any conception of nature 'in itself,' Benjamin's allegorical reading of 'natural' history pointed the way towards a model of historical interpretation that by tracing history and nature to the point of their most intimate intersection, "transience," could provide a non-arbitrary and immanent means of measuring – and hence already pointing the way beyond – a damaged present shot through by the past. In order to disclose the damage that history has effectuated upon particular objects it is necessary to reveal that the form of mediation that has presented itself as a factual, law-like and natural has in fact emerged from a particular and mutable historical dynamic. The perspicuous presentation of the revocability and particularity of the historical dynamic, however, will prove difficult, especially if such an account is premised on the claim that

118 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (London: Merlin Press, 1971): 63. 119 Max Pensky, "Natural History: The Life and Afterlife of a Concept in Adorno," Critical Horizons, 5, no. 1 (2015): 233.

43 nothing is unmarked by the mediating influence of ‘universal history.’ It would seem that this approach wants to retain the advantages of grand speculation – a conception of ‘universal history,’ – without paying the metaphysical price by simultaneously holding that this history is contingent, open to change and unfolding according to no extra-historical logic. How does Benjamin’s approach offer Adorno a way to avoid this seeming impasse? In place of a totalizing universal history, yet far from the opposite extreme of relativizing history, Adorno draws from Benjamin the practice of decoding the ciphers of normalized historical conditions and categories in the ruins of particular, devastated nature, and in turn, of disclosing this damage as social, historically and politically induced. In order to retain a critical conception of universal history it is necessary to demonstrate two points that are seemingly opposed: that nothing escapes the influence of universal history, yet to show that this mediation is simultaneously particular or false – that its promise remains unactualized in the particular details – all without recourse to external criteria. To immanently demonstrate the falsity of universal nature, it is necessary to show how the manner in which certain particular objects are included within history, the way they ‘count’ or matter, is simultaneously an exclusion from history or return to brute nature. Spirit, which promises to raise the objects it contours out of the blind and violent repetitions of nature, is concretely revealed to perpetuate the meaninglessness of human suffering over an against spirit’s sublimation of first nature’s principle of blind, contingent power. Micrological attention to particular, worthless objects, the debris of history, whose 'worthlessness' begins to reveal itself as historically sedimented layers of the object itself, opens up the possibility of encountering such objects in their objective discontinuity, that is, as natural-material fragments whose liminal perceptibility or non- identity is simultaneously produced by and troubling for the social conditions that give rise to it. Transience constitutes the extreme dialectical point at which the following insights can be shown to coincide: 1) this particular object is suffering (undergoing material degradation); 2) this suffering has a historically mediated character (naturalization of spirit); 3) within the given conjuncture an encounter with (1) cannot be mediated through the categories available in (2) without sacrificing the normative indignation and motivation require to provoke the critical revisioning of those categories – on the contrary, (2) legitimates or justifies (1); 4) the normative significance of (1) is therefore fragmentary and fragile, incapable of pervasive social expression, yet this non-acknowledgment of loss and injury is capable of a kind of (non-subsumptive) expression, and in particular one that unsettles or troubles the limitations of the given 'field of

44 recognizability' by indexing these limits to the particular material harms they perpetuate. The performance of these fugitive claims exemplifies or offers the promise of temporal-material truth. The difficulty, of course, is encountering the object as a suffering object in the first place (1), especially since Adorno rejects the notion that philosophy or social critique is any less complicitous, guilty or unmediated by the historical conditions than any other form of knowledge or praxis. Transience is not an objective measure that belongs solely to either nature or history, but appears only in the fragments that point to the "interweaving of historical and natural being."120 As such, disclosure entails a form of social critique that exceeds itself by extending critique to the limits of what is socially perceptible, or what Adorno, following Hegel, referred to as determinate negation.121 The ‘truth’ of the disclosure neither depends solely upon spirit (existing norms, ideals or, as with Lukács, awakening to social ‘totality’), nor does it uncritically transgress its boundaries; “there is no other measure of truth than the specificity of the dissolution of illusion.”122 As Max Pensky puts it, "The normative dimension of this version of transience consists in the anti-Idealist, specifically, anti-Hegelian claim that conditions that render persons transient or unmemorable, non-recuperable in this sense are social conditions that make impossible the memory of historical suffering."123 Natural-historical interpretation is a mode of negative world disclosure, where what emerges through an immersive process of micrological dialectic is 'truth content,' which is a fragile and fragmentary yet non-arbitrary critical perspective that immanently reveals the limitations of particular social conditions by disclosing the material suffering that those limits sustain.124 It is a negative world disclosure because it brings the present meaninglessness of particularity into

120 Theodor W. Adorno, "The Idea of the Natural-Historical," Telos no. 60 (1984): 120. 121 Adorno’s deployment of the Hegelian conception of determinate negation is only intelligible once placed within the context of the former’s anti-idealist account of natural-history (rather than the latter’s universal history). Adorno’s claim that “the false, once determinately known and precisely expressed, is already an index of the what is right and better,” thereby necessarily involves the natural-material critique of historical spirit, rather than presupposing the progress of the social totality that would tendentially preclude such disclosures (Theodor Adorno, "Critique," in ed, Lawrence D. Kritzman, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005): 288. 122 Theodor Adorno, Cited in Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Polity, 2007): 211. 123 Pensky, “Natural History,”, 242. 124 Pensky elaborates upon the disclosive function of natural-history in Adorno: "It is world disclosure in a very specific sense, for the new world that is disclosed through a novel use of language is precisely a world of loss and a spectre of meaninglessness. The idea entails the corrosion, the petrification, or the freezing-up of any large harmonizing and ultimately delusive claims toward the trends of totality and meaning in the historical process, and instead an insight of the historical process itself as generating only concrete, singular, and utterly empirical facts and bodies, each 'transient,' which is to say, incapable of being incorporated into a meaning-giving conception of historical continuity and historical experience" (“Natural History,” 234).

45 perspicuous relief – the world is encountered anew, as loss. The bindingness of this disclosure is fragile because the critical perspective it opens up contests the limits of the expressible, yet it is simultaneously non-arbitrary or objective because the 'truth' of this perspective is grounded not upon the authority of an unchanging ideal (which, for Adorno, are always historical in character, and thereby limited and violent), but upon responsiveness to the 'matter itself' in its fragile temporal dynamism – what Adorno takes to the be the telos of negative dialectics, hence the temporal 'content' of dialectical 'truth'. However, the bindingness of this truth, which proceeds from the 'matter itself,' is therefore also non-coercive in the sense that it cannot 'demand' assent in all times and places but whose rational authority, indexed to the particularity of the matter, is thereby fragile in the sense of being, inapprehensible, fleeting or easily ignored or forgotten. The emphasis placed on style in Adorno’s text are directly related to the solicitous character of the fragile truth claims they set about making: the objectivity or bindingness of temporal truth-content relies on the reader entering into the density of the argument’s constellation and being moved – experiencing the material force of the argument. The material force of negative world disclosure requires perpetual renewal in order to retain its force. The material force of Adorno’s new categorical imperative, indexed to the experience of ‘Auschwitz,’ for example, will change with history. Adorno, offers models or constellations which explicitly refuse the coercive, exhaustive, and skeptical conception of determinate or identitarian truth, and instead develops 'force fields' that attempt to critically apprehend the non-identical truth of the 'matter itself' without exhausting it. The fragile objectivity of Adorno's negative dialectical mode of world disclosure does not offer timeless ideals or transcendental assurances as to the possibility of political resistance or changed futures. Instead they disclose a critical perspective – a fragile, material truth that only an engaged responsiveness to the specificity of the particularity of material-natural loss can reveal as binding – through which it becomes possible to apprehend the hitherto imperceptible damages caused by the prevailing social, historical and political conditions. Through this disclosure of the world, an inverted glimpse of the possibility that these conditions might be amended is also offered: the transformation of the conditions that sustain ineloquent damage is just what Adorno means by an immanent conception of 'transcendence.'

2.2 Preponderance of the Object

“if dependence on society is not fully perceived, it perpetuates itself” – Horkheimer 125 “The thought that the subject is constitutively mediated by the objective resists the vulgar idea that everything is seen simply through the spectacles of the beholder, coloured simply by his or her group or kind, while the subjective mediation of the objective implies a critique of the metaphysics as a view of a pure reality in itself” - Adorno 126

In Negative Dialectics Adorno writes that, "It is by passing to the object's preponderance that dialectics is rendered materialistic."127 Negative dialectics replaces the affirmative presupposition that "all experience is a matter of consciousness" with an "axial turn" toward the object.128 This concept is deeply intertwined with the natural-historical mode of interpretation analyzed above, as the 'materialism' Adorno refers to is neither static or naive, but possess a fragile, non-coercive yet binding temporal core that discloses a critical perspective that can only be accessed through the micrological analysis of particular phenomena. The critical task of "groping for the preponderance of the object," then, does not constitute a search for ‘materialist’ origins or foundations. Instead, it is a critical-reflective process of decentering the primacy not only of 'the subject' but 'spirit' or the social and political 'worlds' of appearance, and whose aim is not only to destabilize or deconstruct the pretensions of mastery, sovereignty and the skeptical need for (absolute) clarity and security (epistemologically and socially), but to open a critical perspective that discloses, in binding terms, the damage inflicted by social formations which serves simultaneously as a fragile yet obligatory demand for their re-making and re-visioning. As Adorno puts it "insight into the constitutive character of the nonconceptual in the concept would end the compulsive identification which the concept brings unless halted by such reflection."129 As with Nietzschean genealogy, then, the turn toward the object means that the "particular would be the source and measure of the universal."130 Adorno's thesis on the priority of the object is an attempt to salvage, rather than affirm, the moment of non-conceptuality – the somatic moment in judgment and the contextual, particularistic, historically-sedimented aspects of the object – as an integral but suppressed moment of conceptuality and hence of whatever will count (as rational) in practical reason. This argument has been missed by Adorno's critics, who take his critique of conceptuality (identity-thinking) for a critique of rationality as such, against

125 Max Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason (New York: Verso, 2012): 7. 126 Adorno, Ontology and Dialectics, 238. 127 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 193. 128 O'Connor, Adorno's Negative Dialectic, 37. 129 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 12. 130 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 340.

47 which Adorno is taken to posit an "aconceptual aesthetic rationality."131 What is missed by Adorno's critics and sympathetic readers alike is that this aesthetic dimension does not itself lie outside the orbit of mediated judgment, but instead refers to the fine-grained, self-critical quality of the non-reified judgment required to immanently call our hegemonic social norms into question.132 What is 'the object' in the dialectical sense if it is neither to be dualistically opposed nor in seamlessly unity with 'the subject'?133 Adorno writes that "The subject's essentiality is an existence raised to the second potency and, as Hegel did not fail to state, presupposes the first potency: factuality. Factuality is a condition of the possibility – even though negated – of essentiality."134 How 'factuality' is interpreted here is vitally important. 'Factuality' is not an invariant, abstractly given or static ground. 'Factuality' is itself dynamic, temporal and processual, caught up within, and not external to the mediations of 'second potency' [spirit or second nature]. "The idea of something which is objective," Adorno writes, refers to "something which is unfolded through the concept, of something which is dynamic in itself, and thus not simply the same as itself, of something which is not identical with itself once and for all, but rather of something which is actually a process."135 The object, factuality, far from being reducible to a bald 'fact' actually refers to the entwinement and mediation and exposure of two kinds of reciprocally conditioning processes: the dynamic and differential social processes that mediate, even constitute, what appears or counts within the social field, and the temporal processes of natural-material beings who sustain their material existence and potentially transcend mere survival in and through the availability of the material-recognitive mediations of the former. J.M. Bernstein, developing Karen Ng's "thesis of double constitution," characterizes the entanglement of these processes as an "amphibian problem" in which "human beings are living beings who are always simultaneously more than beings because their life activities can be known, comprehended and thus critically redirected and refined."136 Similarly, Butler refers to this navigation of these interdependent processes as a “co-constitution that implies the need for a reconceptualization of the ontology of

131 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 267. Bernstein is here referring to Habermas and Wellmer's interpretation of Adorno. 132 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 245; O'Connor, Adorno's Negative Dialectic, 52. 133 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 174. 134 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 176. 135 Adorno, Introduction to Dialectics, 9. 136Bernstein, "'Our Amphibian Problem'”, 201; Karen Ng, "Ideology Critique: From Hegel and Marx to Critical Theory," Constellations, 22, no. 3 (2015): 396.

48 life itself.”137 Factuality, which is the “condition of possibility” of all essentiality – of social meanings, arrived at through social and political processes that endow objects with significance and, in turn, the conditions of their ongoing material support – refers, therefore, to both aspects of these inextricably entangled processes: society, which precedes, constitutes and shapes subjectivity, as well as the material-nature dimension of subjectivity, which is exposed to and dependent upon the former. The dialectical task of groping for ‘the object,’ can never, therefore, be the straightforward attempt to become ethically responsive to the fact of suffering as such. The ‘object’ is not an existential or ontological given, but is itself inseparable from the field of differential social mediations through which it maintains (or does not) its viability, and moreover, which establishes at once its significance and perceptibility. The challenge of critical interpretation is that the capacity to recognize the reciprocal interdependence of these co-constituting processes, and the particular effects produced by the state of this relation, is itself socially mediated. As social mediation is itself a (differential) process that constitutes and enables (or impinges upon) subjectivity, in what Adorno refers to as an "objectivity heteronomous to the subject," the very perceptibility of ‘the object’ is at stake, and hence demands an immanent criticism of the social conditions that constitute and limit that perceptibility.138 The preponderance of the object, therefore, refers, in part, to the preponderance of social "formativity" in relation to the discrete individuals who are exposed and dependent upon its mediations, even as the social mediation of the object is not ‘exhaustive’ of it. Non-identity, what is both produced and excluded by the preponderance of social-historical mediation, is the “zone of Adorno’s thinking [that is] in closest proximity to many of the now familiar thematics of poststructuralism.”139 However, Adorno’s account is simultaneously differentiated from the latter, in that this excess, non-identity, because it is dependent upon the social totality that it nevertheless falls outside, its critical dis-closure points back towards those social conditions in the form of the urgent need for their amendment (rather than away from them, and towards the imperceptible or differential logic of the affirmative excess that explains the impossible totality in post-structuralism). The 'heteronomy' of the preponderance of society cannot be seen through or dissolved by theory, but refers to the "opacity [that] seems built into our formation and follows from our status as beings

137 Butler, Frames of War, 76. 138 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 170. 139 Jameson, Late Marxism, 22.

49 who are formed in relations of dependency."140 This heteronomous dependency is not accidental or parasitic in relation to a some grounding ideal of independence and autonomy, but is constitutive and essential to any actualizable conception of praxis, which make the recognition of this heteronomy a vital aspect of any critical conception of social freedom. For Adorno, then, “mediation makes no claim whatever to exhaust all things; it postulates, rather, that what it mediates is not thereby exhausted.”141 In other words, social conditions are an intrinsic component of subjectivity – simultaneously essential and factual, spiritual and material – and as intrinsic to the process that constitutes its possibility, subjectivity is therefore decentered. And yet these constitutively mediating social processes, despite their vital role in sustaining and enabling subjectivity, are fallible, riven by power-relations, and thereby often exclusionary, parochial, inegalitarian and violent in their operations. Processes of social mediation, therefore, are simultaneously necessary for the possibility of sustaining and enabling disparate forms of life, yet insufficient in their actually doing so. On the one hand, the limitations of social mediation imperils and damages those ‘ex-centric’ subjects whose exclusion or “mismediation” places them at the margins of field of social perceptibility, while, on the other hand, it is precisely because social mediation is not exhaustive, even if both necessary and unavoidable, that it is possible to critically discern liminal figures on the margins of social (im)perceptibility performing fugitive political actions and making fragile claims. Adorno argues that "the need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject; its most subjective experience, its expression, is objectively conveyed."142 In other words, it takes both an extreme effort of 'subjective' acknowledgement or attunement to the world and others along with auspicious circumstances or conditions in order to see through the conformity of the everyday in order to discern how heavily and at what cost the existing state of affairs weighs upon and marks the lives it makes possible (and those it does not) – especially when those most afflicted are attempting to resist or change the world. Indeed, as chapters four and five will explore, Adorno holds that the possibility of rescuing experience – of dis-closing the “unthinkability of despair” – can “be thought only through the rescue of semblance,” that is, through art’s (illusory, or as yet unredeemable) promise that non-identical particularity can become a source of practical

140 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005): 20. 141 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 172. Butler expresses this same thought in the form: "It does not follow that, if a life needs some narrative structure, then all of life must be rendered in narrative form" (Giving an Account of Oneself, 52). 142 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 18.

50 meaning.143 While these chapters will question Adorno’s thesis that the possibility of experience has migrated into art – that praxis is blocked – they will nonetheless seek to learn from the way this approach avows, rather than avoids, the difficulty confronting contemporary praxis: the aporia of attempting to articulate political wrongs within a world that deprives non-identity of acknowledgement. Hence, even if one does not accept Adorno’s austere thesis on the unavailability of praxis, his insights regarding the “fragility of art’s promising” – the mediation of fugitive claims by the conditions they resist – may yet offer a means of critically (non-affirmative) elucidating this aporia.144 This dramatically alters not only the conception of subjectivity but also the political stakes of social conditions and the particular manner in which they mediate their entanglement with the former. That is, both subjectivity and political praxis must be conceived as a processes and, if attained, an ongoing (temporally bound/temporary) achievement, ex-posed to the possibility of failure because dependent on a plethora of dynamic and fallible norms, structures, and material supports that, in turn, as processes, are also continually exposed to change. If it is only through the universal, the differential processes of social mediation, that the particular embodied nature of individuals can become 'more,' it is these same processes, which, in penetrating to the very core of subjectivity and thereby transforming the question of its ongoing possibilities into a social and political matter, that life and certain modes of living life are also exposed to imperceptibility, disposability, in short, to non-identity. The constituting and delimiting social processes mediating the world are no longer grasped solely or necessarily as violent, arbitrary or contingent constructions, even if this is precisely what they reveal themselves to be in a given situation. Rather, it is because social conditions are intrinsic to, inseparable from, and necessary for the emphatic realization of subjectivity, that the particular way in which social conditions mediate particular subjects matters. At the same time, both Adorno, and more recently Judith Butler, insist upon the inexhaustibility of the ‘something’ that is mediated – for example, the individual subject

143 J.M. Bernstein, “Why Rescue Semblance? Metaphysical Experience and the Possibility of Ethics,” Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds. The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997): 194-95. 144 Bernstein, “Why Rescue Semblance?” 200. Avowing the aporetic character of artworks, for Adorno, means simultaneously acknowledging both their dis-closure of possibility and the illusory, and hence ‘guilty’ character of this as a yet practically unredeemable possibility. Adorno writes that “Works of art take an advance on praxis which has not yet begun” (Aesthetic Theory, 128-29 cited in Bernstein, “Why Rescue Semblance?”, 200).

51 constituted through social formativity – yet this inexhaustibility is no longer conceived affirmatively. Adorno writes: The most enduring result of Hegelian logic is that the individual is not flatly for himself. In himself, he is his otherness and linked with others. What is, is more than it is. This 'more' is not imposed upon it but remains immanent to it, as that which has been pushed out of it. In that sense, the nonidentical would be the thing's own identity against its identifications.145

The particular texture of social mediation within any given conjuncture does not exhaust ‘the object,’ yet in falling outside of the field of recognizability the object is damaged, and it is only because this damage can be critically and politically apprehended and serve as a non-coercive yet binding ‘reason’ for the revisioning of the constituting social categories and institutions – or not - - that the particular shape and transformation of social conditions matters. The dialectical challenge concerns the dual demand that the socialized subject become ‘more’ than its mere factuality – that one is reducible neither to an empirical object, a thing, or to a given social identity – while at the same time the subject’s ‘factuality’ is not be radically divorced from the mediating processes that allow it to become ‘more’ than what it is. Quite to the contrary, Adorno's conception of this-worldy critical transcendence holds that spirit (rational and social mediations) only becomes more than mere nature (blind self-preservation) when it proves capable of placing spirit's seemingly ineluctable pretension to become autonomous, separate from or higher than 'mere' nature into question. This is an enduring trait of post-Kantian critical philosophy: the critique of reason's internal tendency to exceed its worldly or empirical boundaries, and in doing so, to become empty and antinominian, while, at the same time, the recognition that the existing state of affairs, the given limits of 'reason,' require transformation in order to realize its rational potential for freedom.146 The negative dialectical response to this problem forms the core insight of the dialectical account of the irreducible ‘co-constitution’ of life and its social mediation. This 'co-constitution' refers to the reciprocal relation of the processes of social mediation and the ‘something’ that is mediated, in which it is not only the latter that is simply dependent upon the former, but most crucially, that social mediation only comes lives up to its potential to become ‘more’ than a mere second nature when it, in turn, becomes vulnerable, open or responsive to the object. Adorno's

145 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 161. 146 Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 66.

52 conception of affinity or "freedom towards the object" refers to the capacity of thinking to think against the grain of its own tendency towards conceptual capture, and lacking any direct access to the object 'in-itself,' to nevertheless pierce the closure of static conceptuality through the attempt to allow an affinity for the object –an essayistic, non-systematic, and non-exhaustive approach – to guide the critical renewal of the object's form. As Jarvis puts it: The possibility of the experience of transcendence is at once that of the experience of freedom and that of thought's ability to think its own conditionedness. Without such a possibility thought will be unable to think what it lives off. Thought which fails to think what it lives off is not thinking.147

Yet, the cultivation or praxis of becoming responsive cannot be ‘reified’ in an abstract and depoliticizing ethical ‘openness’ precisely because it is always entangled and mediated by dynamic social and political processes – hence necessarily caught up within “predicaments of power.”148 The apprehension of this reciprocal vulnerability only becomes possible through the critical process of determinate negation, that is, through the disclosure of the damage politically inflected social processes have done to particularity, and on the basis of the reactivation of the suppressed moments of materiality (the neediness of the object) that the disclosure (re)awakens and makes available to practical transformation. If the task Adorno sets philosophy in Negative Dialectics is to “think things which differ from thought and yet make it a thought,” a politically inflected appropriation of that approach might be characterized as the attempt to apprehend damaged and suffering life that has fallen outside the limits of social perceptibility by making that loss, through critique, the object of political praxis.149

2.3 Conclusion: Towards a Re-configuration of the Praxis-Conditions Relation

The previous two sections have offered an explication of two of the central concepts within Adorno's philosophical constellation that, I argue, hold tremendous promise for the task of revitalizing a number of the central concepts and categories within contemporary political theory. The chapter now turns to the more difficult task of unpacking precisely how these ideas demand a rethinking of both the limits and boundaries of subjectivity, individuality and praxis in their

147 Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Polity, 2007): 216. 148 Antonio Y. Vasquez-Arroyo, Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 149 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 192.

53 entangled relationality with material nature and the complex series of social, historical and political mediations within which, and against which, the former takes place. In short, the aim is to show how the ideas of natural-historical interpretation as a mode of negative world disclosure and the preponderance of the object, as two vital dimensions of a critical political theory in service of the idea of reconciliation, can be used to elucidate both the limits and possibilities of political praxis, and in particular, to provide an alternative to the 'primacy of praxis' that predominates within contemporary political theory. The difficult contribution of Adorno's that I would like to recover from (and perhaps, in certain ways, against) his philosophy – which, it must be noted, addressed itself to the possibility of thinking (distinguished from praxis) dialectically – and to bring into the orbit of political theory with the same urgency and interest that animated its initial discovery, is the mode of critical world-engagement centering around the thought that "freedom itself is never given and [is] constantly menaced. The absolutely certain as such, however, is always unfreedom."150 What is most essential in Adorno's approach, I argue, is not an unduly skepticism about the prospect of political transformation, or an insuperable paradoxical structure, or impasse or, political quietism – although there is surely enough, perhaps too much, skepticism about the prospects for emancipatory change – but a willingness to confront and pursue the conditionality of freedom and political praxis and to extend this beyond where political theory has been willing to go, namely, to the point at which the withering or oblivion of praxis becomes a concrete possibility. Contemporary political theory has done a good job of deconstructing the limits of social identities and conditions, but has failed to pay similar attention to the limits of praxis. The thesis on the irreducibility of political praxis has itself become reified. The axiomatic or ontological affirmation of the possibility of exceeding the limits of conditions constitutes, as a corollary, a failure to acknowledge the essentially material-temporal and historical conditionality of praxis. Acknowledging the dependency of praxis, it bears emphasizing, is in no way in tension with an account capable of making room for its novel, creative or possibility-disclosing functions – though this is often how it has been received. On the contrary, it is my suggestion that Adorno's willingness to pursue the conditionality of praxis to the point of its potential failure, is what allows his elucidation of its predicament to critically disclose what is at stake in it – hence to better comprehend the interrelation of praxis and social conditions – and to avoid the affirmative ontological blindspots that emerge with an un-conditional interpretation of resistance. Linking the

150 Adorno, Against Epistemology, 13.

54 term conditionality to freedom would refer at once to the latter's being, at least in part, contingent upon something else – upon a complex array of conditions – hence revocable, secondary, dependant, but would also imply that praxis is temporal, dynamic and changing, and whose freedom is tied up with the capacity to respond and relate to its own conditions, and in doing so, to grasp them anew. It is the interlinking of these two dimensions – creativity and dependency – that remains perplexing or frustrating or intolerable for political theory, especially where the latter weighs upon the former. It is as if political theory has understood its task as solely one of articulating, disclosing, unsettling, provoking, or expanding new possibilities151 and cannot, for this reason, make sense of Adorno's contribution as anything other than stifling. As the following chapter will further explore, for example, Nikolas Kompridis, who in many ways develops an account of conditionality of praxis that comes close to what is being argued for here, in which inherited social conditions both "impede and facilitate the possibility of disclosing the world," nevertheless insists primarily upon the affirmative practical possibilities of the "experience of self- decentring."152 While I will aver Kompridis' reformulation of the normativity as requiring "recognition and acknowledgement of our dependence on one another that is co-extensive with the recognition and acknowledgement of our dependence on our pre-reflective understanding of the world," I will call into question his presentation of the primary problem confronting contemporary politics as one of pluralism and for the lingering romantic or Heideggerian inflection of his conception of responsiveness as "letting oneself be permeated by 'the potential of what could be different."153 However, because there is an element of truth in this charge – Adorno's claim that praxis is blocked, I will argue, oversteps his own critical spirit and therefore deserves to be rejected as an instance of the identity-thinking it purports to oppose – an issue taken up in chapter four, this

151 As the following chapter will further explore, Nikolas Kompridis in Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006) which in many ways develops an account of conditionality that comes close to what is being argued for here, in which inherited social conditions both "impede and facilitate the possibility of disclosing the world," nevertheless maintains that the "experience of self-decentring" is valuable for its capacity to "enlarge" or dis-close possibilities for practice (36). While I aver Kompridis' reformulation of the normativity as requiring "recognition and acknowledgement of our dependence on one another that is co-extensive with the recognition and acknowledgement of our dependence on our pre-reflective understanding of the world," (191) I would like to call into question his presentation of the primary problem confronting contemporary politics as one of pluralism and for the lingering romantic or Heideggerian inflection of his conception of responsiveness as "letting oneself be permeated by 'the potential of what could be different" (272). 152 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 36. 153 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 191, 272.

55 makes the recovery of Adorno's contribution all that more difficult. Nonetheless, I want to suggest that Adorno's concept of reconciliation harbors the potential to elucidate the complex inter-relation of political praxis, material-embodiment and social-historical conditionality, and in particular to reconfigure the dominant ways in which contemporary political theory has grasped the stakes of these entangled relations. The task of political theory is not merely to show that forms of non- identical praxis remain possible, if only episodically – forms of collective doing whose significance cannot be adequately captured by economic or scientific conceptions of objectivity – but to elucidate the role of social and historical conditions in their present hindering of the more widespread realization of such possibilities, to express the imperceptible price of these mediations, and finally, through the acknowledgment of the complex (inter)dependence of praxis and conditionality, to seek to transform both. Doing so will involve calling into question contemporary political theory’s hostility to ethical thinking (sittlichkeit) – the register most closely associated with the concept of reconciliation – and recovering its relevance, indeed necessity, even in its inverted form, for critical political thought.154 The claim I pursue in the following three chapters is that, read against himself, Adorno's thought does not have to lead to political impasse, or to the priority of theory over blocked praxis, but rather offers the resources for acknowledging and critically confronting the conditionality of praxis. What makes this critical elucidation both valuable and unique for political theory, is the way it grasps the entanglement of social, temporal and material dependency and political possibility. The critical disclosures it makes available internally link the stakes and limits of a given conjuncture to the potentiality of political transformation and so avoid overinflating praxis as well as turning away from or remaining silent on the politically conditioned toll and suffering induced by the prevailing conditions. What drives Adorno to his political pessimism, I will argue, is neither an unrealizable utopian picture of emancipated society and mimetic-responsive reason, nor a totalizing depiction of the historical catastrophe of rationalized society, but rather his refusal to affirm the ephemeral and "fugitive" moments of critical experience as politically adequate or

154 The hostility to ethics is so thoroughly ingrained in contemporary political thought that even the rare recent attempts to draw upon his philosophy are invariably marked by incessant qualifications and critiques intended to carefully distinguish ‘ethical’ appropriations of this thought (Marasco, The Highway of Despair, 85; Vasquez-Arroyo, Political Responsibility, 3). While I admire both of these works, which contribute significantly to the task of demonstrating the relevance of Adorno’s thought to political theory, I ultimately object to their stark opposition to ‘ethics.’ Their opposition to ethics, I will argue, explains the unwillingness of both to fully confront the conditionality of praxis, and to instead, to focus on the “restlessness” of Adorno’s critical thought.

56 redemptive of the conditions they resist. While Adorno's dismissal of fragmentary and episodic resistance as "pseudo-action" is over-stated and in conflict with his own critical style, it nevertheless testifies to the unrelenting importance of dialectically grasping the mediacy or conditionality of praxis, even that which seeks to break from or amend the existing conditions. My intervention here will be to show how Adorno's inability to acknowledge what J.M. Bernstein refers to as "political modernism," namely a form of praxis that "affirms human particularity against the universal" and that "proceeds from human doing rather than unchanging reason,"155 constitutes a momentary lapsing of his negative dialectical rigor. In contrast with Adorno’s unrelenting drive to grasp the contextualizing conditions of particularity, his pronouncement of the blockage of praxis betrays his micrological approach. Adorno's critical- interpretative approach, far from precluding any account of political praxis, offers the resources for the development of style of political interpretation that could bring the particularity of fugitive modes of praxis, along with their material-conditional dependencies, into sharper relief. Following Adorno's insight that the practical actualization of reconciling reason is tied up with its conditionality, that is, its responsiveness to the world and its conditional place within it, the following will attempt to demonstrate how the life of praxis, too, demands to be reconceptualized as impressionable in two inter-related senses. Like reconciling reason, praxis, dialectically construed, must be burdened with the responsibility of natality – of acting and thinking in ways that cannot rely on given rules or methodological procedures in order to rationally meet the challenges of the particular conditions it confronts – but also, and this is the hitherto unappreciated dimension of the problem that Adorno's thought discloses, that the conditions for taking on this responsibility cannot be abstractly (ethically) or individually (politically affirmed) assumed and, as such, are exposed to politically induced failure, diminution and withering. Creativity, potentiality or natality, on one hand, and conditionality, are internally and inextricably entwined. The attempt to escape or disavow this dual exposure, to both the responsibility of natality and the politics of conditionality, constitutes an idealizing ossification of the life of praxis. From Adorno's perspective, the affirmative refrain that 'change is always possible,' therefore, is as culpable of falling back upon a de-historicizing and de-politicizing abstraction as are those that have naturalized the impossibility of change. Ironically, this idealist or ideological moment makes its re-appearance in contemporary political theory most often through the

155 Bernstein, "Political Modernism," 56.

57 apparently anti-idealist gesture of grasping both political praxis and social conditions alike as contingent, an-arkhic, metastatic or in flux, yet in doing so betray their own pretension to dynamism by ontologizing the possibility of de-centered praxis, separating it off from and making it invulnerable to changes in the constituting conditions it would resist. Avoiding the dualist antinomies of the primacy of praxis requires, as the previous sections have suggested, a turn 'toward the object.' The following chapters will attempt to unpack what this might mean for political theory in three broad stages. Firstly, I will offer an overview of the place of the concept of reconciliation in Adorno's negative dialectics. The purpose of this discussion will be: to unpack the account of reconciling reason and the dialectical relation it envisages between individuals and society, or, particularity and universality, to link the history and normative content of this concept to the critique of dualism, and finally, to clarify the role of universality (negative universal history) in Adorno's negative dialectics, namely, in his account of why reconciling reason, under present conditions, is not pervasively available. In addition to addressing a number of prevailing misconceptions that continue to plague the reception of Adorno's thought, this section will set the ground for what follows by provisionally distinguishing between two elements that are practically inseparable in Adorno: the model of critical experience – reconciliation as simultaneously process and goal – and his historical account of what has frustrated the wider social realization of reconciling reason, call it the blockage of critical experience (the historical institution of antagonistic society, instrumental reason and its deformation of subjectivity, individuality and praxis). The abiding thought here is that the 'truth content' of reconciliation is unthinkable divorced from the historical and material particularity of the conditions that mediate its possibility. As Adorno puts it, "Freedom is solely to be grasped in determinate negation, in accordance to the concrete form of a specific unfreedom. Positively, it becomes an 'as if.'"156 Because of this, the model of reconciliation will be approached through the figure of its blockage, articulated most directly in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Alongside this task, I will also analyze the most prominent critical objections that have been directed against this approach, which purport to explain why Adorno's philosophy has been unable to "translate the promises borne by artistic practice into political praxis."157 The task of

156 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 231. 157Bernstein, "Political Modernism," 57.

58 salvaging the practical kernel of Adorno's thought for political theory, as I see it, involves the attempt to acknowledge fragmentary or fugitive modes of praxis, hence of rejecting Adorno's blockage, without thereby reverting, positively, to an unmediated model of praxis. In other words, the challenge consists in grasping the mediacy, or what I have called the conditionality of praxis. While some of these critical objections are not wholly off-target, and though some show more promise than others, I argue that none of the existing approaches have fully taken onboard the full extent of this challenge, and despite their claims to the contrary, each shirks the responsibility of confronting the stakes of this conditionality. Finally, I will also pursue the claim that in order to realize the political potential of Adorno's negative dialectic, it is not sufficient merely to remove his account of the blockage, which risks betraying the normative content of reconciliation and relapsing into idealism, but requires, on the contrary, a more precise (mimetic) account of the conditionality of praxis than Adorno was either willing or able to provide. Adorno exaggerated the extent to which praxis is dependent on its social-historical conditions, and so betrayed its fragmentary potential, the dialectical insight into the reciprocal constitution of subject (activity) and object (dependency). Fidelity to Adorno, against himself, would demand the recognition that even praxis, in part, is object – dependent, conditional, finite, temporal, and material – and hence that the forms it takes (or does not, or fails to) and the effectuality of its interventions are as variable and conditional as the particular injustices it contests. This entails, in turn, the necessity of reconsidering the multifarious ways through which social conditions mediate praxis, not simply blocking or enabling, but fundamentally conditioning, even as critical experience or praxis exceeds, revises and amends those conditions. If this is so, the role of political theory cannot be exhausted in the task of articulating what critical or democratic forms of resistance might take, or ought to take, or of defining what constitutes 'politics' or 'the political,' but, on the contrary, must strive to acknowledge the full breadth of the complexity of the conditionality of political praxis – its inseparability and dependency upon conditions it resists – which would include attending as much to its disappointments, failures, compromises, deformations, and absences as to those fugitive and ephemeral moments or events where the determinate negation of injustice or suffering promises the possibility of transformed world. In other words, Adorno's negative world disclosures are not merely tools available to given political actors to "re-cognize" the political sedimentations that mediate any given state of affairs, but critically illuminates what the compound of praxis-social

59 conditions amounts to in any given conjuncture, without ever presupposing that political action is adequate to problems it confronts.

Chapter Three Rethinking Adorno’s Critical Politics: From Blocked to Damaged Praxis

The previous chapter has argued that the concepts addressed above – negative world disclosure, the preponderance of the object – begin to provide the resources for a renewed approach to the conceptualization of political praxis that avoids the difficulties associated with positing the primacy of praxis, and that fundamentally reconsiders both its challenges and stakes. Before turning to what this revised conception of politics might look like in the following chapter, however, the following will first address the question of the plausibility of politics in Adorno’s philosophy. It is his unique critical-interpretative model that lead Adorno to pronounce that praxis, at least for the historical present, was effectively “blocked.” Undoubtedly, it is Adorno’s pessimistic stance with regard to politics that, by comparison, allowed the affirmative and possibility-disclosing tenor of the ‘primacy of praxis’ approach to appear not only preferable to critique, but virtually obligatory for political theory models that sought to avoid similar impasses. It is the task of this chapter to develop an immanent critique of Adorno that shows this position to have been overstated, and out of this critique to begin to move towards an modified account of conditional political praxis that remains concordant with the rest of his philosophical constellation, in short, that avoids the temptation to re-establish the primacy or un-conditional potentiality of praxis vis-à-vis the conditions its aims to resist or transform. At the same time, the chapter refuses any outright dismissal of Adorno's controversial thesis on the blockage of praxis, and in elucidating the precise point in which this thesis becomes over-extended, will attempt to recover the intelligibility of his critical approach from the skepticism that now shrouds its reception. In order to begin unpacking this problem it is first necessary to understand what is behind Adorno’s thesis that genuinely critical and transformative forms of political praxis are presently blocked. Adorno writes: What since then [Shakespeare’s Hamlet158] has been called the problem of praxis and today culminates in the question of the relation between theory and praxis coincides with

158 Adorno reads Shakespeare’s Hamlet as marking the dawning self-consciousness of the diremption of modernity’s rationality, the “divergence of insight and action,” whose criticism of tradition and increasing extra-contextual formality renders it indifferent to the content/context it acts upon, thereby leading to the disenchantment of experience, or, nihilism (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 228. See also: Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 126; Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001): 112-113; Adorno, History and Freedom, 231-235)

the loss of experience caused by the rationality of the eternally same. Where experience is blocked or absent altogether, praxis is damaged and therefore longed for, distorted and desperately overvalued. Thus what is called the problem of praxis is interwoven with the problem of knowledge.159

The concept of “experience,” as the above sections have demonstrated, refers to the socially and historically mutable potential of individual subjects to come to critically reflect upon the constitutive, normatively saturated social forms that unavoidably mediate access to the world and structure the terms of social and political inter-relationality. Importantly, for Adorno, experience must ‘refer beyond itself,’ which means that the critical re-mediation of constitutive sociality cannot be solely an expression of the sheer creative power of the subject but, on the contrary, that seeing past the naturalized limits of the social and political domain requires responsiveness to what these domains have done to the ‘object.’ In this way, even though Adorno refuses the possibility of unmediated access to what lies beyond the present state of the social and political fields, critical subjectivity is nevertheless capable of ‘encounters’ – forms of experience that are non-identical with the way preponderant sociality mediates reality – that serves as the particularistic material anchors of political critique and action, giving it a binding or objective significance. The stakes of political praxis are intimately bound up with the social conditions that mediate the political field and constitute the limits of what is perceptible within it, as it is through these constitutive social processes that not only critical subjectivity, but the material life of the subject are constituted and maintained. Yet, it is also necessary, through critical experience, to see past these limits if preponderant sociality is to maintain a living relation with the ‘objects’ it constitutes. As the capacity for critical experience is, in part, dependent on the inherited and preponderant social conditions it resists, the stakes this relation go beyond the possibility of critical social autonomy; its failure threatens the material survival of those the mediating social conditions render disposable, ungrievable or superfluous. The ossification of this relation is what the dialectic of enlightenment attempts to recover as a perspicuous loss, over and against its increasing social oblivion. As is familiar by now, in this account, subjectivity emerges as a historical product that is constituted through a dynamic socializing process that entails the systematic and

159 Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” 260.

62 compulsory renunciation and repression of the material dimensions and mimetic capacities of the subject, that are progressively eroded and separated from the subject's identical rational core, whose mutilating self-discipline serves its self-preservation. This process is needlessly perpetuated, in ever new forms, in modern social life long after the initial threat of natural scarcity had long since been overcome. The “rationalization of reason” and the “disenchantment of experience” undermine the capacity for critical experience by not only rigorously delimiting what constitutes (practical) ‘reason’ (i.e. by rendering ‘reason’ synonymous with theoretical or scientific reason, namely, the determinate and repeatable ‘form’ of context-independent laws whose indifference Adorno associates with economic exchange value160) but also by damaging the capacity of material objects to emerge or become apprehensible within the social and political field as something ‘more’ than mere material to be indifferently manipulated. The social institution of this form of object-relation, indeed the compulsory adaptation to such logic, insofar as it is necessary for modern subjects to satisfy their material needs through the mediations of economic necessity, Adorno thinks, works against the prospect of the widespread possibility of critical experience. The question is, to what extent? In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno use the concept of “universal mediation” to express the emerging diremption between preponderant society and the ‘fate’ of individuals, who do not seem capable of steering society, and moreover, confront an increasingly difficult challenge in ‘leading’ individual, self-directed lives.161 “Universal mediation" is intended to strike the reader as a deliberate oxymoron because, for Adorno, having "experience" at all requires the potential to apprehend a tension between the inherited socio-historical categories that constitute one as a social individual and that make the world perceptible and the ‘mismediated’ objects perceived in that world. If mediation, for Adorno, proceeds via the reciprocal tension or non-identity of subject-object relation, its'

160 In the Dialectic of Enlightenment the mythic dynamic of enlightenment is referred to as the "principle of immanence," for which "the explanation of every event as repetition" – what Bernstein refers to as encompassing the scientific ideal of experimental repeatability in a process of "cognitive ascent" leading to increasingly context- independent laws that enable the instrumental mastery of nature (Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 88) – "is that of myth itself" (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: 8). 161 Heteronomous adaptation, for Adorno, refers to the dwindling possibility for participating in the narrative unfolding of one’s own life and society. He writes: “Almost everyone knows from his own personal experience that his social existence can scarcely be said to have resulted from his own personal initiative; rather he has had to search for gaps, ‘openings’, jobs from which to making a living, irrespective of what seem to him his own human possibilities or talents, should he indeed still have any kind of vague inkling of the latter” (“Society,” 150).

63 universalization – the hegemony and uni-directional character preponderant sociality's mediation of the object – threatens to diminish or cancel the dynamic or living quality of that relation, or more precisely, to relegate the possibility of 'experience' to confined, restricted fields (art, family life) or to exceptional, non-generalizable and merely promissory exemplars. The capacity for making "progressive qualitative distinctions between things which in themselves are mediated," relies upon both the ability to recognize that our given social norms and frames do not “exhaust” what they mediate, and that thinking is capable of being directed by an “affinity for the object.”162 If mediation is "the term Adorno uses to capture the meaning- producing qualities of the reciprocatory and nonidentical dimensions of the subject-object relationship," then the compulsory subjection to its social prefabrication, along with an attendant loss of the affinity for the object would constitute a fundamental impairment of that relation.163 It is for these reasons that Adorno holds that decentered subjectivity, constituted within such a social context, is “losing the ability to make the exertion of reflection required by a concept of truth that does not stand in abstract and reified contraposition to mere subjectivity but rather develops itself through critique, by means of the reciprocal mediation of subject and object.”164 If critical experience is a necessary component, without which, transformative political praxis is impossible or empty, it remains to be clarified exactly to what extent and in what sense Adorno thinks “experience is withered,” what potentials remain open for it, and whether his account of “universal mediation” as closing off those possibilities requires rethinking or remains adequate to the present historical context. In the Philosophical Discourses of Modernity Habermas (in)famously argues that the dialectic of enlightenment “recoils upon [itself]” because its “totalizing critique deprives the critique of modernity of any possible rational foundation.”165 Just as this criticism rests on a fundamental misreading of Adorno’s conception of rationality – it is not that, for Adorno, reason is irrational tout court, but rather that the “positivistic and rationalistic conceptions of enlightenment are not enlightened enough” – it would be equally prudent to resist the conclusion that the “withering of experience” and its corollary, the blockage of praxis, is

162Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 184 cited in Cook, “Adorno’s Critical Materialism,” 723. 163 O'Connor, Adorno's Negative Dialectic, 48. 164 Theodor Adorno, “Opinion Delusional Society,” in ed, Lawrence D. Kritzman, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005):114. 165 Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life, 197.

64 totalizing or absolute. In fact, as suggested above, the very intelligibility of the dialectic of enlightenment presupposes the persistence of some level of critical ‘experience.’ If the withering of experience is not totalizing, and if, therefore critical experience still emerges in accidental, occasional, and fragmentary forms – or even, as in the case of modern art, as an institutionalized, albeit compartmentalized (or ‘autonomized’) social sphere – then it is necessary to consider why Adorno would hold such episodic experience to be inadequate, especially given his predilection for the particular, and to follow upon this with a reassessment of his criteria of what constitutes transformative political praxis.

3.2 The More and Less of Mediation: Understanding Adorno's Critical account of Distance from the Object

In order to make sense of Adorno’s dissatisfaction with episodic experience it is necessary to comprehend both the ambiguous status of distance or transcendence in his negative dialectics, as well his similarly ambivalent attitude towards universality or totality. In his lectures on Metaphysics, Adorno writes: It is almost as if philosophy – and most of all the great, deep, constructive philosophy – obeyed a single impulse: to get away from the place of carrion, stench and putrefaction. And just because of this distance, which gains its depth from that most wretched place, philosophy is in danger of becoming something just as thin, untrue and wretched.166

Philosophy’s task, Adorno argues, following Hegel, is to critically reflect upon the (in)adequacy of thought-forms in relation to the ‘something’ they (mis)mediate. The history of philosophy has shown itself to have been, in turn, thoroughly mediated by the social totality it ought to resist by the fact that it has turned its back on the non-identity its own rigid thought forms have continually (re)produced. All social forms entail mediation, and hence a certain ‘distance’ with regard to the object, and philosophy is supposed to be a domain where reflection upon how objects are mediated becomes thematic. If distance, however, devolves into opposition or separation from what is material, particular and non-identical – from what is time-bound, dynamic and contextual in the object – such that rational form comes to be predicated on the ideals of context-independent universality and lawful reproducibility, this means, Adorno argues, that the kind of distance philosophy offers, vis-à-vis the world it

166 Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001): 117.

65 mediates, has become 'untrue and wretched' as it has sacrificed its living relation to the object. As Adorno puts it, "The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously it is delivered up to the [existing] world."167 When rational objectivity comes to be defined by a thought-form's distance from the non-identical object, what Kant referred to as subsumptive judgment – upon the internal consistency, non-contradictory, and the timeless and remainderless determinability of the concept – the resultant mediations damage the object by closing off the reciprocal tension of concept and object as a potential source of the object's rationality (and also, viewed critically, this problem's social and political perceptibility).168 Notably, Adorno describes this distanciating temptation internal not just to constructive, universalist or rationalist thought but to all critical philosophy which in "dissolving everything, dissolves even the dissolvent."169 Extrapolating this thought to the concerns of political theory, this suggests that approaches to 'decentering of the subject,' if they go so far as to undermine accountability for the ways in which such subjects are supported, enabled but also constricted, limited or damaged by their social and political conditions, they are just as capable of producing a kind of indifference or uncritical distance with respect to the 'neediness' of the object as traditional idealist or universalist philosophy has been. Political theory can be a way not only to open up new perspectives and problems, but also a means of distancing, occluding or ignoring what has become non-identical. The affirmation that political praxis is always possible or that political and social fields are always or necessarily vulnerable to re-configuration or political contestation, while true in principle, comes to partake in the rationalist form of distancing that Adorno criticizes and that these approaches claim to oppose, a danger that will be further explored in subsequent chapters. As noted in chapter one, the affirmation of the primacy of praxis is entwined with the repudiation of the category of totality. As Simon Jarvis summarizes the Derridean critique of dialectics, and its presupposition of the totality: Any dialectic must implicitly depend on some notion of processual totality. Such a totality is always set in motion by some donative moment, a ‘gift’ outside this totality, which gives rise to it and which it cannot think.170

167 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 247. 168 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998: A137/B176). 169 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 245. 170 Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, 223.

This thought bears resemblance to a central premise of negative dialectics, the preponderance of the object, which dis-closes the way in which “concepts depend on the objects they are about while disavowing that dependency.”171 The difference between these approaches is that, for Adorno, the critical task consists not in the rejection of totality, but in recovering its historical intelligibility, that is, in revivifying the experience of particular objects as socially and historically mediated.172 The difficulty confronting Adorno’s negative dialectics is that intelligibility of totality is speculative (‘more’ that what merely exists) – relying upon the dis-closure of truth-content or experience – and hence is neither falsifiable nor “verifiable according to the criterion of facts.”173 Hence, fugitive exceptions do not falsify negative dialectical totality, because, like the positivistic facts that claimed to refute speculative metaphysics, they are already mediated by that totality. How, then, does Adorno’s materialist micrology garner access to this speculative totality? While there can be no unmediated access to the object, and so no way of avoiding 'distance,' a critical approach to mediation, for Adorno, only ceases to do violence to the object when it begins to explicitly reflect on what these mediations, conceived as historical processes, have done to the object in delimiting the terms of its social perceptibility or rationality. In becoming aware of what these mediating processes have excluded or rendered unintelligible and irrational in the object, the "distanced nearness" of negative dialectics discloses a perspective on the object that makes the need to immanently revise its mediations perspicuous and exigent.174 Importantly, because Adorno holds that modern society is irrational and antagonistic, or, stated otherwise, that he is skeptical of the enlightenment promise that rationalization works in tandem with social progress, it is impossible for negative dialectics to presume to have access to an adequate conception of universality or social totality, though it requires just this if it is to make sense of the particular object as a historical phenomenon. Adorno's solution to this dialectical paradox constitutes the key to understanding his approach to both the damages and promises of mediation as well as the role

171 Bernstein, “Why Rescue Semblance?”, 188. 172 For Adornonian responses to the Derridean critique of totality see: J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (New York, Polity Press, 1992): 136-186; Vasquez-Arroyo, Political Responsibility (151-180). 173 Adorno, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, 12. 174 Michael Marder, "Minima Patientia: Reflections on the Subject of Suffering," New German Critique, no. 97 (2006): 67.

67 of universality or the social totality. Once again, he insists: "We should not hypostatize this totality, this whole, in which we stand, should not introduce this whole dogmatically from without, but always attempt to effect this transition from the individual phenomena to the whole with constant reference to the matter itself."175 How society mediates the object cannot be determined other than with respect to the how its sedimentations appear through the critical and genealogical interpretation of individual phenomenon. Hence, comprehending the effects of the social totality's mediation of the object – of the socially instituted and historically sedimented forms of distancing – only proceeds through the extreme proximity to the object characteristic of micrological critique, that is, in fragments. "Universal history," Adorno writes, "must be construed and denied."176 What is denied is both the necessity of the historical present as well the adequacy of the existing, historically shaped social mediations to do justice to what they mediate. To 'construe' this history as a history whose necessity must be denied is not to simply expose the contingency or open-endedness of history or society nor to purport to offer a seamless metaphysical narrative that perfectly captures or adequately acknowledges every empirical detail that falls under it, but to disclose it as a process that is simultaneously damaging, comprehensive, insufficient, inert and yet not inevitable, and to do so through a series of fragments that begin to approach the matter as a constellation. In place of an abstract and subsumptive conception of totality, this critical-inductive approach works, in the words of Benjamin, by “penetrating so deeply into everything real as to reveal thereby an objective interpretation of the world.”177 For Adorno, Benjamin’s interpretative method was able to “redeem induction” – the possibility of dis-closing truth through intimate engagement with empirical particularities – not by arriving at generalities or averages but by apprehending the presence of the social totality directly on the surface of particular objects.178 The articulability of history as the "unity of continuity and discontinuity" is vitally important for Adorno because its particular shape is inseparable and entwined with the condition and possibilities available to individual subjects; it is what both makes human social life 'less' than what it could be, and whose transformation promises to make it 'more' than mere

175 Adorno, Introduction to Dialectics, 24 176 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 320. 177 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (New York: Verso, 2009): 48. 178 Letter from Adorno to Benjamin (December 5th, 1934) cited in Buck-Morrss, The Origin of the Negative Dialectic, 93.

68 socially sublimated self-preservation. As Adorno puts it puts it, "Only mediation, in which the insignificant sense datum raises thought to the fullest productivity of which it is capable, and in which, conversely, thought gives itself up without reservation to the overwhelming impression – only mediation can overcome the isolation which ails the whole of nature…only their self-reflective antithesis contains the possibility of reconciliation."179 This promise of critical transcendence can only to be realized once the socially mediated distance toward the object is transformed into responsiveness to the object. Responsiveness can never proceed directly, but can only through a micrological approach to critical reflection on existing social conditions. Hence critical responsiveness to the object proceeds through a "distanced nearness" to particular phenomena that articulate, in fragmentary form, the denials, losses and damages that the existing social and historical conditions impose, and whose very articulability already constitutes a critical achievement and a promise that things could be different. The concluding sentences of Minima Moralia, one of which has already been referred to above, reveal a close link between Adorno's extreme commitment to micrological critique, or what has also been called "genealogical particularism" and his similarly extreme aversion to allowing critical thinking to exalt its partial achievements at the price of perpetuating blind spots, and of casting a blind eye on historically induced material suffering. He writes: The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible. But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.180

On first reading, this sentence can appear to express a crass indifference on Adorno's part for the political transformation of the world, and a rather unpalatable reminder of his untenable position that, in the face of "blocked" praxis, only the quietistic concern with theory really matters. This reading, however, would ignore what this section has sought to emphasize, namely, the extreme sense in which Adorno holds the responsiveness of thinking towards the conditionality of the object to be the immanent measure of the adequacy of the that thinking. The texture of mediation, for Adorno, determines whether its distance damages the object by

179 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 156 180 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 247.

69 reducing it to its concept, or, through the work of critically suspending its pretension to exhaust the object and disclosing the what its previous mediations had excluded, allows it to become 'more' than it is. Perceived aright, the last sentence no longer reads as registering a cold indifference to praxis. Quite conversely, it holds that an integral element of the critical responsiveness to the object's conditionality includes the necessity of confronting, head on, what the existing social conditions have done to the object – the dependent aspects of the practical subject – of registering this material-suffering as historical and politically induced and as inseparable from what the object has become, and thereby disclosing the possibility or promise that these conditions could be 'otherwise.' However, and this is the key insight relevant to this chapter, to "gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects – this alone is the task of thought."181 The modality of Adorno's "otherwise" is indexed to the disclosure of condition(ality) of the object, and this is what makes this thought so difficult. The disclosure that the object could be mediated otherwise, but is not, constitutes the immanent "standpoint of redemption." If the achievement of a standpoint of redemption is not to inflict violence on the object by degenerating into the sacrificial logic that redeems, justifies or turns away from the object's present condition on the basis of imagined or potential future possibilities, then 'felt contact with the object' must register the actuality of the condition of the object; the actuality of the object's damaging mediation must be registered as emphatically real – as material endured – and for that reason the neediness of the object is disclosed anew. That this disclosure is to emerge "without velleity" means that it is the recovery of lost, forgotten or suppressed sense of the wrongness of the present that revivifies the impetus to critique and, if possible, transform the world. A thought or impression that does not, or cannot, lead to action is damaged – in Hegel’s language it is abstract or untrue because it fails to understand how either itself or the world must change for it to become actual. Critical experience – thought that is materially provoked into self reflection upon its conditionality, or entwinement with the object – is so damaged because its claims are indexed to their material particularity and their routine institution impracticable. The claim that ‘even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible,’ refers to need to acknowledge the bind of two competing demands: to recover a materialist mode of thinking that proceeds ‘in felt contact

181 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 247.

70 with objects,’ and to reflect on the social and political limitations of both expressing and acting upon such fugitive thoughts. The shocking claim that the actualization of redemption ‘hardly matters’ in comparison with the demand placed on thought does not, then, express a priority for theory over praxis. On the contrary, it makes a claim about the aporia of affirmative modes of thought and praxis. If the ‘reality of redemption’ becomes more important than whether or not it emerges out of the ‘felt contact with objects’ then the ‘possibilities’ realized by such approaches will remain self-defeating because immanent to what they seek to escape. Adorno recognized that this risk applies even to (negative) dialectical thinking. If it ossifies into a ‘method’ it would no longer give genuine priority to the object, allowing itself to guided by the open affinity for the non-identical that is dis-closed anew on the surface of particularity. Without this moment of objectivity, thought and praxis devolves into “apologetics,” the “principle of constantly and successfully turning the tables.”182 Hence, for Adorno, what is disclosed is not possibility as such, but the damaged character of the thought that expresses, in its fragile form, the need and motivation to transform the actuality of the present. There is, to be sure, for Adorno, a significant difference between the philosophical or artistic expression of non-identity and the capacity for engaging in the practical transformation of the social and political world, in short, between critique and praxis. It is in this sense, then, that when Adorno concludes with the claim that the "reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters" in comparison with immanent task of critically confronting the object "in face of despair," he is not expressing an indifference to practical change, but rather insisting that if things are to genuinely change this will only emerge out of responsiveness to the conditionality of the object not from the neutralizing or indeed resigned assurance that change is emphatically 'possible,' here and now. As Vasquez-Arroyo puts it, “the primacy of the particular is only attainable by ‘changing the universal.’”183 The issue is not whether political change is possible, but how practical transformation emerges out of the encounter with the historical present. His point is that without critical experience – both 'felt contact with its objects' and self-reflection on the (im)possibility of such insight to become concretely realized

182 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 245. 183 Antonio Y. Vasquez-Arroyo, “Universal History Disavowed: On Critical Theory and Postcolonialism,” Postcolonial Studies 11:4, 2008: 462.

– the possibilities made available by praxis will be missing the crucial dimension that allows them to materially transcend the limitations of the present. While figures of radical democratic praxis in contemporary political theory bear little resemblance to the “actionism” Adorno criticized for its conformist need to ‘join in,’ there is a sense in which his critique may continue to resonant. Actionism was repudiated by Adorno because in prioritizing the need to act, it failed to critically confront the articulation of the social and political problems of the present. Contemporary political theory, of course, does not make this mistake. As the following discussion of Nikolas Kompridis will demonstrate, for example, such approaches intimately attend to the discrete and particular failures of the ‘everyday’ – to the ways in which our constitutive and pre-reflective disclosure of the world limits our ability to perceive novel or unprecedent normative demands and the new possibilities they portend. Yet, in acceding to the claim that democratic politics “should be the art of the disclosing new possibilities,” the tension Adorno insisted upon, between disclosing the material failure of everyday life (‘felt contact with the object’) and reflecting on the limits to express or act upon on this failure is glossed over. Kompridis avoids this tension because he does not rigorously acknowledge the extent to which political praxis is unavoidably supported and dependent, in short, the extent to which the practical subject is simultaneously an object. This, of course, should not entail an uncritical acceptance of Adorno’s thesis that politics is blocked. Instead, it opens the question of whether or not the critical disclosure of the limitations of the present are able to achieve concrete realization, or what that would even mean. Adorno’s reservations force us to consider if a new possibility is really dis-closed if it only emerges in a fleeting or fugitive form, or if it fails to alter the material-recognitive conditions that would support its exemplary repetition. Do such episodic possibilities redeem the material toll of the ongoing failure of the everyday – or does the affirmation of such possibility merely unable us to survive our condition, like the stoic ‘freedom’ of the slave? As will be argued in the following chapter, both the affirmation and negation of the fugitive event are insufficient to the standard of the open dialectic – allowing the ‘matter at hand’ to guide analysis. Hence, the question of what fugitive praxis amounts cannot be answer definitively or unequivocally, as either an exemplary act to be affirmed or an exception to be dismissed as insignificant – as Adorno insists, “someone who cannot state what she means

72 without ambiguity is not worth wasting time on.”184 Instead, such an act must be confronted as an ambi-valent phenomena if its unreduced particularity, both its individuated achievement and its mediating conditions, are to genuinely serve as its immanent measure. Unmoored from the question of its realizability, if the affirmation of fugitive politics precedes critical confrontation with limitations of the present, such possibilities become as abstract and reified as the world they would aim to resist. Adorno's negativist conception of reconciliation takes the existing state of the socially mediated world as its point of departure and attempts to disclose how this configuration: effectively blocks what the object might yet be, i.e. what it is possible for it to become and, more specifically, what it ought to become, given the tensions in which it is enmeshed. However, notwithstanding the screen of images we call actuality, there is no metaphysical hinterworld that we are blocked from reaching…Only diagnosis is prognosis. This is the kernel of Adorno's dialectic.185

Adorno's "genealogical particularism," by insisting that critical transformation only emerges out of "felt contact" with presently existing actuality, runs against the grain of much of contemporary political theory, which, on the contrary, more closely resembles Heidegger's (quasi)transcendental approach, for which the "possible" has priority over the actual.186 The possibility that is disclosed is a negative one: that the naturalized suffering that constitutes the actuality of world does not have to be. Yet, this critical modality is not an abstract or floating possibility, but a precise or "concrete" one that emerges directly out of the encounter with actuality and in rebuke of the constrained and reified array of 'possibilities' it makes available. This makes new sense of the opening citation, where Adorno claimed that "Where experience is blocked or absent altogether, praxis is damaged and therefore longed for, distorted and desperately overvalued."187 Adorno's thesis that praxis is blocked, is not a pessimistic critical description of its totalizing impossibility, but, quite conversely, a desperate concern to resist allowing the fleeting promise of episodic, intermittent and minoritarian political events and the possibilities promised by these exceptional moments to, even for a

184 Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 95. 185 Ian McDonald, "'What Is, Is More than It Is': Adorno and Heidegger on the Priority of Possibility," International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 19 no. 1 (2011): 41-42. In this article MacDonald attempts to demonstrate the way in which Adorno's conception of possibility "intersects with Heidegger's, while building in a concreteness that is no doubt lacking in the latter." It is the attempt of this section to elucidate how Adorno's negative world disclosure of the object precedes and makes available Adorno's conception of practical possibility. 186 McDonald, "'What Is, Is More than It Is,'" 39. 187 Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” 260.

73 moment, appear to redeem the present and thereby to uncouple the link from its critical responsiveness to the object. Doing so, for Adorno would be to suppress, obscure, forget or redeem the ineloquent suffering that continues unabated by affirming a form of praxis whose fugitive quality is not only a mark of its radicality, but of its entwinement with the damaged conditions that render its claims marginal, inaudible, and insufficient.

3.2 Exaggeration and Resignation: Adorno’s Transgression of Micrological Critique

Adorno will argue that the true form of political resignation consists in the affirmation of the presently existing possibilities, and hence of forms of praxis that are damaged, insufficient and unable to transform the social dynamics that renders them such. Adorno writes that "Nowadays, especially because decisive activity is blocked and because, as I have already explained often enough, thinking itself has become paralyzed and impotent, chance practice has become a substitute for the things that do not happen."188 Without entirely rejecting the concerns that motivate Adorno's account, it is necessary to call this extreme thesis into serious question. Referring to such modes of praxis as "actionist," "pseudo-activity," or as the "forced primacy of praxis" Adorno conceives of their function primarily as consolatory, compensatory and as emerging from an unwillingness or incapability to confront the "full and undiminished awareness [experience] of the blockage of practice," or, as I would modify this interpretation, a failure to attend to the conditionality of praxis. The salvageable insight underwriting Adorno's extreme position here is the thought that praxis, if it is to be confronted as a temporal and historically bound phenomenon and not an ontological invariant, it must be composed of dimensions that are inseparably active and dependent, and is, therefore, fundamentally mutable in both form and effectiveness, and, in the extreme, exposed to the possibility of (temporary, non-totalizing) closure where the conditions it both resists and that make it possible breakdown.189 In the face of tendency towards closure, Adorno insists upon a style of critical thinking that is able, out an engagement with the limitations of the social and political world, to refuse the presently existing constrained horizons as constituting the only

188 Theodor Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics (New York: Polity, 2008): 53. 189 Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, 54; Theodor Adorno, "Resignation," in ed, Lawrence D. Kritzman, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005): 290.

74 shape for how the world must be. The ability to see past these limitations, even in the face of the impossibility of changing them, constitutes the radical and promissory quality of critical thinking, or as he often puts it, that “open thinking points beyond itself.”190 On the contrary, the primacy of praxis, in obscuring its own dependent aspects – that it relies upon and is conditioned and constituted, in part, upon the social conditions it would resist – proves unresponsive to the 'neediness' of the object, its own disavowed conditionality, from the start in postulating the in-finite or in-determinate capacity of the subject to change or remake its world. The question emerges here, does Adorno’s account of the withering of experience along with his concern to avoid having episodic political resistance undermine critical responsiveness to the damaged condition of political life itself prove unresponsive, not to the object, but to the critical potentialities of minoritarian modes of praxis? Put another way, does Adorno have a preconceived and limited conception of what constitutes political praxis or political transformation – a conception of total social revolution – whose particular, historically sedimented concept functions to close off regard for modes of minoritarian or fugitive praxis that do not necessarily have the blindly affirmative and uncritical traits he refers to as “pseudo-activity”? In order to approach this problem within Adorno’s work a careful reassessment of his accounts of mediation, critical distance and micrological insight is required. As we have seen, for Adorno, all mediation “harbors the potential for delusion as well as for truth.”191 For Adorno, in order for something to become ‘more’ than what it factually ‘is’ necessarily requires mediation, but this, in turn, implies the possibility of fixing or determining the object, and so falsifying it. As we saw above, critical experience proceeds through a dialectical process that engages the object through “distanced nearness,” where it is not the aim of rigorously determining the object but critical recovering or dis-closing what previous mediations have excluded, through which mediation, ‘pointing beyond itself,’ becomes ‘more.’ The extreme point at which the empirical and normative components of micrological critique touch, the disclosure of non-identitical particularity, involves, for Adorno, a moment of exaggeration. Adorno insists that “All thinking is exaggeration, in so far as every thought

190 Adorno, “Resignation” 293. 191 Adorno, “Opinion Delusional Society,” 118.

75 that is one at all goes beyond confirmation by the given facts.”192 To be clear, if this exaggeration emanates from what the subject imputes onto the object, rather than the reverse, namely, what reflective critique is able to disclose about the object, the thinking degenerates into the arbitrariness of nominalism. Despite the risk of relapsing into idealism, Adorno holds exaggeration a necessary condition of critical experience. He writes: “I have exaggerated the sombre side [of critique], following the maxim that only exaggeration per se today can be the medium of truth.”193 Adorno’s exaggeration of the ‘sombre side’ of critique, the withering of experience, is often confused with conservative cultural criticism – for example, Spengler’s Decline of the West – yet the aim of this exaggeration is to both take this ‘decline’ more seriously than purportedly ‘progressive’ critique and at the same time, to unsettle, or to disclose as a perspicuous historical wrong what the conservative approaches naturalizes, namely, the presence of domination in both human nature and society.194 In exaggerating the sombre side of critique, however, Adorno has unwittingly perpetuated a form of identity thinking with regard to critically disclosing the potential for political praxis, which, I argue, is out of step and against the spirit of his critical theory. My claim is that Adorno’s exaggeration of the withering of experience and the blockage of praxis transgresses against the critical spirit of his own negative dialectical approach, namely, that the element of exaggeration is here in tension with fundamental commitment to a critical and responsive relation to the object – in this case, the object of praxis. My objection concerns the way in which Adorno generalizes his thesis on the withering of experience, yet this should not be taken as a rejection of “grand narratives” überhaupt. I do not object to the concept of negative universal history, but the way in which Adorno’s particular deployment of it, in this respect, fails to live up to this concept’s own immanent standard. As J.M. Bernstein notes, “grand narratives,” such as universal history, have become deeply unfashionable, primarily because they are subject to the twin suspicions of not being “subject to empirical confirmation,” and, on the other hand, because of their tendency to articulate historical experience through metaphysical concepts, such as salvation, truth and human nature, that outstrip the particularity of (spatio-temporal bounded) history.

192 Adorno, “Opinion Delusional Society,” 108. 193 Theodor Adorno, "The Meaning of Working Through the Past" in ed. Rolph Tiedemann, Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader (Stanford: Stanford University Press): 14. 194 Theodor Adorno, “Spengler After the Decline,” Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983): 61.

“And yet the point,” Bernstein responds, “the grounding purpose of the practice of grand narratives, has been overlooked, namely, grand narratives requirement that its object be articulated historically, and that it is only through history that human things can be formed and understood.”195 In short, these “second-order narratives which seek to narratively articulate and legitimate some concrete first-order practice or narratives,” must themselves arise immanently to history, and reflective of this, attempt to make sense of that history, historically, that is, as something not only time-bound but essentially temporal, hence subject to change and not discernable from a standpoint external to time, say metaphysically.196 If the construal (and denial) of these second order narratives arises historically, the “excess” or “exaggeration” need not belong to a form of metaphysical thinking that is no longer permitted for the violence it inflicts on empirical history, but will emerge, instead, out of responsive to the latter and, at the risk of reifying what it attempts to save, will aim to make that particular history perceptible and perspicuous and so available to praxis as a worthy object and as an incitement to action. Bernstein, drawing Adorno’s conception of universal history into contact with Paul Ricoeur’s conception of narrative repetition, claims: “To prohibit grand narration is to prohibit narrative repetition, and to prohibit narrative repetition is to prohibit us from ‘living’ historically. Without repetition history is something that we might live within and suffer, it can happen to us and condition our lives, but it cannot be approached as such.”197 Seen from this perspective, the rejection of grand narration, a position virtually hegemonic within contemporary political theory, is one “whose very ‘openness’” threatens to “make the questions and the problem of time/history/community invisible.”198 Adorno’s grand narratives, at their best, are excessive, exaggerated historical interpretations that arise within history and attempt to disclose particular dimensions of that history that allow its fractures and interstices to become problems for it. As Jarvis reminds us, the Dialectic of Enlightenment is not “an attempt to write a single ‘grand narrative’ of historical progress or decline,” but is, on the contrary, subtitled “philosophical fragments.”199 The book offers a series of fragmentary perspectives, each circulating around discrete

195 J.M. Bernstein, “Grand Narratives,” in ed. David Wood, On Paul Ricoeur (New York: Routledge, 1992): 102. 196Bernstein, “Grand Narratives,”102. 197 Bernstein, “Grand Narratives,” 119. 198 Bernstein, “Grand Narratives,”119. 199 Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, 21.

77 historical problems and cultural objects, that, taken together, form a constellation that illuminates its problem – “how knowledge might become the dissolution of domination” – in a mimetic, non-totalizing and explicitly non-exhaustive manner. The fragments revolving around the “culture industry” and anti-Semitism are exemplary historical interpretations that each attempt to illuminate the problem of the withering of experience. The question that emerges here, then, is whether or not Adorno’s thesis that praxis is blocked betrays, in part, the history it attempts to negatively illuminate? It is one thing to make the claim that, with regard to their particular analysis of the anti-Semitism fragment, that critical experience proved, historically, to be an insufficient bulwark against the prefabricated, stereotyped thinking that allowed the genocide of the second world war to become possible. It is quite another, however, to extend this analysis beyond the domain of its historically applicability and to make claims such as the following: If society’s nexus of complicity and with it the prospect for catastrophe has become truly total – and there is nothing that permits any doubt about this – then there is nothing to oppose it other than what denounces that nexus of blindness, rather than each in his own fashion participating in it.200

Adorno comes to insist upon the historical separation of critical experience and political praxis, of theory and praxis. However, what sustains his claim for the ‘truly total’ character of this progressive historical separation, is no longer a form of critique that is grounded on the responsiveness to the object, but a grand narrative in the condemnable speculative sense. Adorno is not unaware of this, and explicitly assumes it as a “risk” – as a call to arms – but it is one, I argue, that does not pay off. He claims that: “If, to make an exception for once, one risks what is called a grand perspective, beyond the historical differences in which the concepts of theory and praxis have their life, one discovers the infinitely progressive aspect of the separation of theory and praxis.”201 In extending this grand narrative of the break between theory and praxis past the point of his own immanent, historical critique, Adorno blinds himself to forms of praxis that are neither conformist, actionist and uncritical nor, on the other hand, revolutionary and capable of fundamentally transforming the social and political world. In claiming that, “If praxis obscures its own present impossibility,” it “becomes in its turn ideology,” Adorno believes that he is

200 Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” 268. 201Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” 266.

78 guarding against the tendency of affirmative theory to turn a blind eye to suffering and to redeem the entire history of forgotten and repressed domination by pointing to the exceptional instance of a fleeting action or ephemeral outburst of resistance has escaped the general trend. While there is an element of truth in this – the stubborn opposition to forgotten and repressed suffering to which all life, as in part dependent, is exposed – it nevertheless arrests the logic of the complex processes through which life, subjectivity, social and political fields are bound together, and against its own immanent standards, blocks off acknowledgement of an important dimension of the conditionality of political praxis. By conceptualizing political praxis as composed of both active and dependent dimensions, both subject and object, Adorno avers that political action requires fundamental support from the conditions it nevertheless resists, and that with the historical breakdown of these conditions the possibility for the routinized realization of praxis becomes endangered. However, the opposite insight, which Adorno neglects, also follows. Namely, that the potentiality of critical experience – the active process of critical reflecting on the socially mediated and dependent dimension of the subject and its relation to others – always emerges conditionally, in particular historical contexts. Out of the contingency of conditionality, emerges fragile and fugitive forms of praxis that the social and political fields – in their ‘bad ‘ particularity – would like to conceal, ignore or exclude. Adorno’s thinking, in this respect, falls on the side of the ‘universal history’ it claims to resist unless it acknowledges non-identical praxis. In his own words, Adorno accepts that “there are no discretely conclusive, absolutely reliable, independent criteria,” and that the possibility of critical experience is always immersed in a “structure of complex mediations.”202 Contra popular opinion, Adorno’s philosophy offers the resources to renew contemporary theory and to overcome the limitations – the naturalization of resistance and the neutralization of political conditions – associated with the ‘primacy of praxis.’ Negative world disclosure, transience, mediation, and the preponderance of the object are some of the resources Adorno’s philosophical constellation offers to political theory for rethinking the meaning and stakes of decentering political subjectivity. However, these ideas must be extricated from Adorno’s overall emphatic disavowal of the possibility of political praxis. Doing so requires turning Adorno’s own

202 Adorno, “Opinion Delusional Society,”108.

79 account of the withering of experience against himself, which demands, I argue, the possibility of acknowledging damaged forms of political praxis. Political praxis is neither primary, insuppressible or ontologically assured, nor however, is it sufficient to claim that it ‘blocked’ because only episodically possible. On the contrary, as a social practice that is simultaneously enabled and inhibited by the conditions it resists, it is fundamentally mutable and conditional. Its capacity to critically disclose this conditionality, moreover, is what gives fugitive and episodic forms of political praxis the ability simultaneously take on the responsibility for transforming the world while avowing the damaged and impaired social conditions that make the prospects for realizing these aims, in turn, in need of amendment.

Chapter Four Praxis and Wrong Life: The Uninhabitability of Fugitive Politics “Dialectics serves the end of reconcilement”203 – Theodor Adorno Adorno's negative dialectical philosophy is concerned foremost with the reciprocal constitution and inter-determination of particularity and universality. However, his pessimistic political positions have, understandably, produced a reception of his thought that has largely failed to acknowledge or engage with the complexity of his dialectic. In his lectures "History and Freedom," he claims that "The human subject could be liberated only where it had achieved reconciliation."204 In his lectures on the "Problems of Moral Philosophy", he further argues that "The individual could only become free in a just society, but hitherto he has constantly experienced the social constitution as something opposed, antagonistic to himself; he has experienced it as heteronomous."205 Elsewhere, Adorno has turned to a Kantian conception to describe what he sees as a historically emergent antinomy that has arisen between society and autonomous individuality, writing "Fate, the complicity of myth with nature, comes from the total political immaturity of society."206 Clearly Adorno is concerned with the relation between individuals and their social context, but the precise way in which he conceives of this relationship, as well as the way he figures both the problem (political immaturity, heteronomy, antagonism) and its potential overcoming (reconciliation), have been poorly understood. It is easy to come to the impression that the concept of reconciliation serves as a utopian model that is presently blocked by heteronomous or ‘false’ society and that only an unlikely revolution in society could cleave open the possibility of meaningful political interaction. Undoubtedly, there is some truth to this reading but it is my contention that this reading does not do justice to Adorno’s philosophy and that it offers the resources for a more nuanced account of the relationship between individuality, society and political possibility. Unsurprisingly, the value of Adorno's philosophy for political theory has been largely dismissed on the basis of what appears to be its unacceptable level of generalization, its recourse to grand historical narrativizing, to the seeming dualism of society and individual, as well as for its unsatisfying political pessimism.

203 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 6. 204 Adorno, History and Freedom, 265. 205 Theodor Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001): 144. 206 Theodor Adorno, "On Subject and Object," in ed, Lawrence D. Kritzman, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005): 247.

The figure that has come to stand-in for Adorno's failed political dialectic is Odysseus, and the impasse he along with his crew face in their fateful escape from mythic nature, as presented in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Contemporary receptions of this infamous reading largely focus on the dualistic account of reason it ostensibly envisions, the implausible philosophy of history it relies upon to diagnosis the purported "fate" of enlightenment, and the political impasses and insuperable divisions (bourgeois/proletariat or high/low art) this approach necessarily and inextricably embroils itself within. These failures and impasses, his critics charge, are endemic to dialectical thinking, whose critique of antagonistic society is incompatible with the disclosure or illumination of political possibility. The first section of this chapter will address each of these problems through a reading of the figure of Odysseus and the oarsmen in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Building on the previous chapter’s account of blocked praxis, the purpose of this discussion will be to clarify what motivates Adorno’s position that the possibility of critical experience has migrated into art.207 This section analyzes the way in which Adorno’s political skepticism is tied up with his account of wrong life and the way in which it stifles the possibility of emphatic individuality. Individuality, for Adorno, refers to the possibility that experience – the ability to bring the limits of the existing social mediation of objects into question – could become more than a fugitive promise, or a non- conformist resistance of the social totality, and might become an explicit aspiration of society, not unlike what Cornelius Castoriadis has referred to as “social autonomy.”208 Individuality is the partner concept of reconciled society. Without the enabling conditions of reconciled society, the possibility of emphatic individuality withers, retreating into localized zones of family life where it appears fragmentary and damaged, or into art, where the claim of particularly is promissory and unactualized, as semblance (schein). Here I argue both with and against Adorno, accepting his critical argument regarding the division of modern society (and reason) into isolated compartments but calling his exaggeration of the blockage of critical experience in everyday life into question. Adorno’s political skepticism is overextended but not entirely wrongheaded. A corrective to his position requires making room for a conception of individuality and praxis that emerges in the face of the unreconciled world, contingently, and without support: drawing on Bernstein’s conception

207 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 18. 208 Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998): 107.

82 of “fugitive ethical experience,” I refer to this as fugitive political praxis.209 Fugitive politics are paradoxical. They emerge in contestation of the conditions that undermine their capacity to work and act, hence they cannot be affirmed as an adequate response to the social and historical problems they address. Fugitive politics are damaged and limited by the heteronomous conditions they work against. Fugitive claims or actions promise individuality, but lack the social support necessary to actualize their contestations. Yet, it is just the fugitive character of political praxis that has been affirmed in contemporary political theory (the corollary of this is the rejection of the idea of individuality/reconciliation as ethical and anti-political). Revealingly, two contemporary thinkers, Nikolas Kompridis and Jacques Rancière, who would seem to share much in common with Adorno, including an concern with the aesthetic dimensions of political rationality or praxis as well as an emphasis on its irreducible novelty and particularity, each strongly object to his interpretation of the dilemma confronting modern politics. The chapter will then turn to analyzing their respective criticisms of Adorno’s philosophy and its political skepticism. I argue that while their rejection of Adorno’s account of blocked praxis is warranted, they nevertheless do not grasp the full implications of the paradoxical character of fugitive politics. In affirming the possibility of these minoritarian forms of political responsiveness and action, they fall back behind Adorno’s conception of reconciliation, which envisions that fugitive politics could become ‘more’ by changing the heteronomous conditions. In Kantian fashion, Adorno’s critics naturalize the antinominian character of politics. Both the concrete or objective stakes of politics – its truth-content – as well as the possibility of the transformation of the society are abandoned. In their thinking the antinomian character of Kant’s two worlds are compressed into the immanent plane of appearances where the excessive possibility of democratic action is ceaselessly frustrated by the ontological impossibility of its realization. The salvaging of fugitive political possibility converges with resignation. Fugitive politics becomes, at once, an incessant demand and an insuppressible possibility; the conditions politics contests, on the other hand, are no longer revocable historical ‘wrongs’, but perennial problems regarding the ontological limits of representation. Against the naturalization of aporetic politics, I develop the claim that Adorno’s concepts of individuality and reconciliation do not present a picture of a static, ethical or anti-political ‘harmonious’ relation. Instead, they offer the resources to engage in a form of immanent critique that avoids the twin pitfalls of Adorno’s excessive negativism and Kompridis’

209 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 419.

83 and Rancière’s aporetic affirmatism. In their place, it becomes possible to discern both the promise and damage of fugitive political praxis – to acknowledge the possibility of non-identical politics, and through the immanent measure of the inability of such forms of politics to realize the change they promise, to negatively illuminate new forms of autonomous society in localized and particularistic detail. This constitutes, I argue, the political promise of Adorno’s conception of reconciliation. In the following chapter, “Fugitive Political Claim: Reading Ibsen’s A Doll’s House”, I flesh out the details of this approach. I begin by offering an overview of the Stanley Cavell’s reading of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and following him, Nikolas Kompridis. I trace how their respective accounts of critical responsiveness envision forms of politics that would respond to the fugitive claims of the female protagonist, Nora. I then compare these accounts with an Adornian critique of A Doll’s House, which I use to illuminate how Kompridis’ critical responsiveness, in avoiding a full exploration of the question of the social conditions of possibility of ‘enlarged reason’ salvages the promise of novel political possibility but at the price of embroiling his account in a problematic ontological antinomy. Finally, I use this comparison to exemplify how my interpretation of Adorno can be used to interpret political phenomenon. Extrapolating the readings of Ibsen to consider how these approaches would evaluate the #MeToo movement, I show how fugitive forms of political practice are limited by an unreconciled world, consider how changing the social conditions to support and enable fugitive claims materially- normatively matters and explore how such achievements are sustained or forgotten. Reconciliation does not refer to the stable achievement of the recognition of particularities under appropriate generalities, but to the particular manner in which particular individuals or actions are mediated or enabled by the preponderant but always particular shape of the social totality. Disclosing the limitations of praxis points to the particular ways in which society can and needs to be changed in order for fugitive forms of life and praxis to become ‘more’ – to ‘count’ or matter in new ways.

4.1 Odysseus and the Oarsmen: Dualism as Damage

The three main prongs of the critique intended to show the unsuitability of Adorno’s thought for political theory are: that it involves a dualistic conception of reason (separation of praxis and experience) that is a product of an untenable philosophy of history; that the possibility of critical

84 praxis remains merely promissory as the receptive relation to nature is only capable of revealing the sedimented traces of barbarism rather than disclosing novel possibilities; and finally, that relation between receptivity and practical rationality is fundamentally askew in Adorno because it fails to account for how critique is capable of envisioning an “enlarged conception of reason” and of inducing practical transformations.210 Before evaluating the adequacy of these charges in the subsequent section, it is necessary to briefly consider what the Dialectic of Enlightenment was attempting to disclose, by what means, and how the account of Odysseus figures into this attempt. J.M. Bernstein characterizes the Dialectic of Enlightenment as "an attempt to provide a conceptual analysis of how it was possible that the rational process of enlightenment which was intended to secure freedom from fear and human sovereignty could turn into forms of political, social and cultural domination in which humans are deprived of their individuality and society is generally emptied of human meaning.”211 The opening chapter or ‘fragment’, "The Concept of Enlightenment" provides an account of how disenchanted rationality, emerging from the progressive process of humanity’s attempt to achieve independence from nature, rather than fulfilling its promise – realizing freedom in the social world – inhibits the realization of its immanent potential by tendentially precluding the rational acknowledgment of its own (historical, spatial, material, social) dependence. In this account, the process of rationality's disenchantment – the progressive attempt to separate rationality from what is natural, time-bound and conditional by substituting subjective or contextual modes of knowing with an epistemic ideal of context- transcendent universality – is entwined with the formation of the modern, bourgeois subject(ivity). The animating impulse of the dialectic of enlightenment is what Adorno and Horkheimer refer to as the "principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition."212 The rational mastery of nature and the extirpation of myth requires the institution or achievement of a mode of object-relation that discards or abstracts from the rational identity of a particular object all that is not relevant to that object's classification or conceptualization, that is, what renders like cases useful for future manipulation. What Nietzsche calls the nihilism of 'value-in-itself,' is, via a detour through Weber, for Adorno the outcome of rationalized reason having attempted to systematically

210 Nikolas Kompridis, “Amidst the Plurality of Voices: Philosophy of Music After Adorno,” Angelaki 8:3, 2003: 174. 211 J.M. Bernstein, "Negative Dialectic as Fate: Adorno and Hegel," in ed. Tom Huhn, Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 21. 212 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 8.

85 expunged truth of all traces of its empiricity or conditionedness.213 The diremption of an increasingly rationalized reason's capacity to source value from worldly matters – the splitting apart of truth and meaning, objectivity and subjectivity – damages the rationality potential of empirical particularity, leaving it on the wrong side of a chasm separating disenchanted reason from mythic nature.214 The paradox of rationalization is that the pervasive use of knowledge as an instrument of control and domination – inwardly in the form of self-control, and outwardly, over nature and social others – tendentially closes knowledge off from the possibility of finding, in the particularity of objects, rational meaningfulness. The achievement of a systematic and universalizing approach to knowledge is reflected in the process Odyssey undergoes in the course of his travels in which the imperative of self-preservation and the necessity of overcoming both the temptations and threats of nature produces the gradual effect of a unified subjectivity. The knowledge and mastery of external nature demands, in each case, the control, subsumption and repression of the chaos of internal nature to the imperative of a unified ego. The world of the unified subject is disenchanted because shorn of the ‘irrationality’ of novelty, particularity and aura, as each encounter within that world becomes progressively knowable as an instance of concept or as an 'event [of] repetition.' Hence Odysseus, through the deployment of his rational cunning is able to overcome the threat of mythical nature, the Cyclops, but only at the price of separating himself from his own nature and completing his own self- rationalization, becoming an "anyone" or "Nobody."215 As Horkheimer and Adorno put it, "He declares allegiance to himself by disowning himself as Nobody; he saves his life by making himself disappear. This adaptation to death through language contains the schema of modern mathematics."216 The achievement of disenchanted rationality, which renders nature scientifically knowable and practically manipulable, is simultaneously a loss for practical reason and an impairment of individuality if the identitarain form of object-relation has become both compulsory and exhaustive of what is able to counts as the rational experience of an object.

213 The bones of this idea go back to Horkhiemer's early 1937 essay "Traditional and Critical Theory," in which he concludes that "Conformism in thought and the insistence that thinking is a fixed vocation, a self-enclosed realm within society as a whole, betrays the very essence of thought" (243) 214 As Bernstein notes, Adorno's concepts of the rationalization of reason and the disenchantment of experience are heavily indebted to Weber's reading of Nietzsche, in particular the notion that the theoretical unity of concepts converges with the social tendency towards institutional rationality (Adorno, 10). 215 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 47. 216 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 48.

The achievement of the rationalized self is in tension with rational individuality and the capacity to critically experience the world. The universalist aspirations of reason and the unification of the subject remain within the domain of myth they seek to escape because the historical institution of division – between nature and reason, concept and sign, universal and particular, transcendental and empirical ego – encloses rationality within its own unchanging domain.217 For Adorno, the critique of idealism’s self-enclosure is relevant to the problem of potential praxis because the ‘truth’ of idealism, its pretension to a systematic and remainderless account of universality, describes the historical tendency of the relation between society and individuality. If spirit only recognizes its own products – what is identical, equivalent, and lawfully consistent – then particularity is either reducible to an instance of a general case or is unintelligible. This historically contingent process thereby gives rise to the impression of fate or the eternal repetition of the same. While this skeptical mode of object-relation opens up the possibility of manipulating nature, it inhibits rationality from realizing or fulfilling its own concept, which conceived dialectically, would refuse given standards and demand thought to “move beyond itself.”218 Unlike the rationalized reason of unified bourgeois subjectivity, practical reason would participate in the world rather than impose its criteria of self-consistency upon it. Dialectical participation would entail both responding to the world, freely or self-critically, and on the basis of these critical experiences, acting to transform those worldly conditions. Practical reason is not action undertaken for the sake of changing the world in order to make it conform to a pre-given or static conception of rationality, but for the sake creating a world that becomes rational by becoming capable of acknowledging the conditionality of its own criteria and the dependence of particular living beings, both their lives and their freedom, upon those materially

217 Adorno in this respect follows Nietzsche, who he regards as one of the first to discern the dialectic of enlightenment in his genealogical critique of the timeless ideal of truth. Horkheimer and Adorno exclaim: "Like few others since Hegel, Nietzsche recognized the dialectic of enlightenment" (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 36). Nietzsche, like Hegel, is alert to the ways in which rational identification entombs its object, robbing thought of its dynamism and lifeblood by tautologically establishing unconditionality and unchanging identity – what belongs to the conceptual way of looking at the world – as the measure of the truth of that world. Adorno admiringly quotes Nietzsche remark from the Twilight of the Idols, who writes: "All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept- mummies: nothing real escaped their grasp alive" (cited in Against Epistemology, 19). 218 Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, 5. Adorno’s ambivalence towards Hegel derives from the fact that the latter both elaborates and betrays the dialectical principle central to Adorno’s conception of materialist critique. On the one hand, the “unresolved and vulnerable quality” (13) of the a self-critical and incessantly dynamic form of thinking that attempts grasp the objectivity of spirit in “the matter itself,” in particularity, serves as the “mainspring of Hegel’s” contribution to the “criticism of grim reality and his critique of static aprioirism” (3). However, Hegel’s systematic consistency betrays the necessarily unresolved and non-identical relation of universality and particularity, and in pronouncing this as achieved, “renders himself vulnerable to the critique of idealism: an immanent criticism” (14).

87 instituted criteria. Adorno, drawing upon both Hegel's critique of Kant and Marx's critique of Hegel, conceives the promise of reason’s emphatic actualization – of reason becoming practical, and praxis becoming rational – to consist in the potential to become more than the manipulation of nature and to become capable of critically and self-reflectively participating in the transformation of the world.219 Conversely, the unfulfilling character of rationalized reason is expressed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment as the "fraud" of "sacrifice."220 The repressive self-domination of internal nature that allows Odysseus to master his external world – to ignore temptation, desire, hardship, emotion and his affinity for the non-identical – and whose sacrifice of present happiness promises the future reward, is perennially deferred. This is because the "formation of the [unified] self severs the fluctuating connection with nature which the sacrifice of the self is supposed to establish."221 Without the capacity to engage dynamically with the object, the promised future will never arrive, as the individuality and particularity of the object – just what makes such fluctuating engagement possible – have already been sacrificed, and so historical time becomes empty and homogeneous, an unending history of unredeemed sacrifice. Instrumental reason is certainly capable of altering the world, but this form of functional activity does not change the world, on the contrary, it institutes a homogenizing experience of it by requiring that all objects be encountered as representatives or specimens of a general concept. This is what links rationalized reason to myth for Horkheimer and Adorno: it leaves the world practically intact and perpetuates, through a variety of new forms, an unchanging, fated, or, to use the Marxist locution, naturalized history. It does so because disenchanted rationality remains thoroughly entwined with the necessity or imperative of natural self-preservation, such that the ideal of neutral, disinterested, skeptical knowledge, in emerging out of humanity's power-struggle with nature, remains the rationalized echo of the law of the strongest, and hence of the continuity of blind (self)domination. This is not to claim that rationalized reason is reducible to domination. Without identity there is no reason. In certain domains of social life, or at stages within an

219 It bears noting here that Hegel referred to his philosophy of spirit as a "theory of freedom," and that the substance of his critique of Kant involves his opposition to any "strict separation between theoretical and practical reason" (Robert Pippin, Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008: 4). While Adorno reads Kant and Hegel against each other, it is this aspect of Hegel that he avers (he objects to Hegel's philosophy of history, which claims the already-existing realization of freedom). 220 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 40. 221 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 41.

88 individual’s psychological development, the coercive synthesis of manifold particularities is appropriate. The problem emerges when this particular form of rationality is taken for the whole of reason. In describing the logic of disenchanted rationality as progressively instituting a "principle of immanence," Horkheimer and Adorno are not only arguing the self-enclosing ideal of universal subsumability homogenizes the experience of the natural and the social world by reducing objects to their "universal fungibility" and thereby "amputate[ing] the incommensurable," but that the hegemony of this historically instituted mode of object-relation (and self-constitution) entraps humanity within its own idealized re-creation of nature's blind striving for survival. In short, that civilization is barbarism, or that culture – transcendence from the state of mere nature – does not yet exist.

4.2 The Contradictory Totality

As Adorno would later claim in Negative Dialectics, "universal history must be construed and denied," in order to elucidate the actuality of society as the "unity that cements the discontinuous, chaotically splintered moments and phases of history."222 As Horkheimer and Adorno maintain, the "logical necessity" of the dialectic of enlightenment, its 'fated' or 'permanent' character, "is not conclusive." That is to say, the separation of praxis and experience is both historical – a particular dynamic that has unfolded, contingently, in time – and is not thereby irrevocable or inevitable, and the very narrativizability of this tendency, however fragmentary, testifies to the possibility of resistance against it. A common misreading of the dialectic of enlightenment is to interpret the historical unfolding of this process as one that is irrevocably fated by a speculative or metaphysical (trans-historical) reading of (the problem of) universal spirit. These readings conflate Adorno’s critical-historical interpretation (an attempt to salvage the forgetting and naturalization of history) for a speculative-explanatory one (a transhistorical explanation of history) and thereby miss the critical claim that history has become myth; as this process is historical it is thereby also revocable. Acknowledging this distinction, however, requires the increasingly rare ability to approach history as a neither reducible to sheer fact nor as embroiled in the attempt to locate its telos outside history, as metaphysical narrative. As Bernstein puts it, “Adorno takes the positivist (and now postmodern) critique of the very idea of philosophy of history as simply the blind denial that there are patterns

222 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 320.

89 and trends in history that go beyond particular facts, that some of these trends are more widespread and historically insistent than others.”223 Further, any insight into the nature of universal history is only available through the critical deciphering of particular objects – the experience of finding them damaged, and that this damaged is a product of historical society – not through the universal subsumption of all of history to a single narrative, an option repudiated by the outstripping of redemptive or apologetic ideals by the magnitude of the material catastrophes undergone in the 20th century. On the other hand, however, catastrophe does appear as inevitable and bears a certain objectivity or social necessity insofar as this damaging diremption forestalls precisely what spirit should and promises to be: establishing the conditions for a "co-constituting relation" between particularity (individuals) and a responsive-time bound universal that would mediate and recognize individuality in its difference, in short, reconciliation. Reconciliation is defined by Adorno as simultaneously a conditional achievement and a process, in which society ceases to impose its static (unchanging, uni-direction, non-responsive, non-living) demand of self-preservation upon individuals and attempts to establish the conditions through which the "differentiated" – particular societies reflective of their own particular histories and determinate individuals – are able to "participate in each other."224 To refer to spirit as "permanent catastrophe" means that this historical relation has not become a truly co-constituting relation – that the universal imperative remains subsumptive, compulsive and repressive in its relation to particularity. The semblance of individuality that presently subsists does so within the gaps or crevices of adapting to the compulsory logic of universal spirit. The imperative of blind self-preservation that was at work in the formation of unified subjectivity persists, imbuing the mediating relations through which modern individuals interact, to the effect society has largely come to appear as an independent, heteronomous force that imposes itself upon individuals, who in turn do not shape its trajectory but are force to adapt to its dictates. The normative distinction is between the possibility of a 'co-constituting’ relation with society – the process of immanently criticizing and responding to the shape and conditionality through which socialized individuals are constituted – and of being subjected to heteronomous adaptation. In the case of the latter, instead of employing critical experience to participate in the shaping of one's

223 Bernstein, "'Our Amphibian Problem,'" 204. 224 Adorno, "On Subject and Object," 247.

90 society and their differentiated place within it, individuals are compelled – under pain of social preservation – to use their critical faculties to find ways to adapt to its blind instrumentalizing imperatives, in short, to use their capacity for experience against itself, to perpetuate spirit's static shape. The problem this negative history attempts to express is characterized by Bernstein as one in which "we have socially suppressed and deformed to the point of practical invisibility our binding relations to nature and one another and have no obvious path through which those relations may be retrieved."225 If there are pockets of freedom within such conditions, they are exceptional, inimitable in their exemplarity, and doubtlessly, mediated by their exceptionality. This does not mean that individuality or critical experience, or, by extension fugitive modes of political praxis are impossible, but that insofar as historical spirit demands the separation of thought and experience, that both are "damaged" or "mutilated." Praxis informed by critical experience is damaged in the sense that it necessarily entails reflecting upon and potentially severing the binds that have ensured Odysseus survival – put plainly, transformative praxis puts itself in tension with not only the way of the world, but with what ensures its own survival.

4.2.1 The Sundering of Experience and Praxis

Adorno insists upon distinguishing between theory and praxis – a separation that he argues is itself a product of the ‘universal’ history he criticizes in the dialectic of enlightenment – and so would object to what he would perceive as the historically unmediated (i.e. un-conditional) character of the transition Kompridis establishes between the “weak power of illumination” and the possibility of undergoing practical transformation. Adorno’s own historically mediated account of this relation leads him to conclude that resistant praxis may no longer be possible as both the condition of the receptive subject and the particular object are damaged by the sedimented history of their separation and the series of adaptations, exclusions and distortions they resultantly undergo. The subject becoming internally less capable of a mimetic-responsive relation to the world as the social conditions enabling such a posture erode, while, in turn, the world and the objects that populate it are deprived of their capacity to unsettle. What Kompridis refers to as the “consciousness of crisis,” the inability of the social and cultural resources of the present to continue to serve as a guide or orientation for future action and which is supposed to prompt a responsive relation to the past, for

225 Bernstein, "'Our Amphibian Problem,'" 207.

Adorno, on the contrary, has become a naturalized feature of late modernity, the “unity that cements the discontinuous.”226 Crisis, for Kompridis, can serve as a catalyst for recognizing the need for an alternative, more receptive relation to the world, while, for Adorno, it is precisely the imperceptibility of the “wrong state of things” that constitutes the historical crisis of modernity. The compromise of Odysseus, his self-binding, represents the damaged condition of aesthetic- mimetic rationality in modernity, the sundering of (instrumental) praxis and (critical, mimetic) experience reflected in the social compartmentalization of the autonomous sphere of modern art in both its complicity and opposition to the dominant mode of social practice (instrumental reason). Odysseus and his crew, for Adorno, are “torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.”227 Odysseus is able to experience nature but unable to transform what is disclosed through his mimetic relation to the object into a practical action – hence Adorno’s reference to the unactualized promise of art – while the crew are practical but blind to the object and the possibilities its mimetic dis-closure could open. The Dialectic of Enlightenment attempts to give expression to the natural-historical character of this diremption by detecting precise symptoms of rationalization and domination in The Odyssey as if they already described the predicaments of modern individuals. The point is not that history is intractable, unchangeable or fated, but precisely the contrary, to disclose the naturalization of the ongoing present – its’ archaism – right down to the experiences of inner life, and to make them perspicuous as historically wrong. The problem, as the discussion of the preponderance of the object has demonstrated, is that individuality and critical experience, as much as they contest the 'way of the world,' they are nevertheless thoroughly dependent upon and mediated by that which they would resist. It is precisely this historical conundrum that Horkheimer and Adorno's reading of Odysseus and the Sirens attempts to gives expression to – to reveal the diremption of reason and critical praxis as a contingent historical process that damages both – and that has been received with such opprobrium from contemporary political theory, for whom the disclosure and affirmation of novel political possibilities is the sine qua non of 'critical' political theorizing.228

226 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 320. 227 Theodor W. Adorno, “Letters to Walter Benjamin,” Aesthetics and Politics (New York: Verso, 2007): 123. 228 Morton Schoolman’s Reason and Horror: Critical Theory, Democracy and Aesthetic Individuality (New York: Routledge, 2001), for example, rejects the thought The Dialectic of Enlightenment attempts to disclose, namely, that the possibility of “aesthetic individuality” has been effectively eroded, migrating, to art in the form of (mere) illusion. The work is an attempt to recover Adorno’s conception of aesthetic individuality for democratic political

The account of Odysseus and the Sirens which comes at the conclusion of the opening fragment, "The Concept of Enlightenment," condenses each of the themes discussed above into a single image. Odysseus, tying himself to the mast of his ship while his sailors, ears plugged, labour on blindly and endlessly, expresses the repressive and self-sacrificing price of the achievement of his subjective unity and independence from nature. The achievement of his mastery over nature and its corollary, the avoidance of succumbing to the threatening temptation to indulge his non- identical desire for happiness in the present, demands from Odysseus that he bind himself to his ship on its voyage through the functional-instrumental escape from nature. This self-alienating independence fatefully renounces the fulfillment of its own promise of freedom and happiness, in short, of reconciliation with the object. The contrasting relations to both nature and labour of Odysseus and his crew presage the modern fragmentation of rationality into separate and compartmentalized spheres. The entire ship, carrying both Odysseus and his crew – the bourgeois and proletariat alike – are together escaping the dangerous, chaotic and tempting world of myth, having proceeded through a process that has inflicted “terrible injuries”229 in constituting the hardened unified selves that are, in the words of Nietzsche “calculable, regular, necessary.”230 While no one is spared from having to undergo the painful process of rationalization, the dissatisfying alternatives – "equally inimical to death and to happiness" – represented by Odysseus and his crew signal the sundering of praxis and experience, in short, the dialectic of enlightenment.231 It is vital to grasp that these dissatisfying alternatives are already conditioned by the compulsory process of rationalization – a relation to nature established by the brute imperative of power or sheer self-preservation, that is, under un-free or irrational conditions. The emergence of independent subjectivity is inextricably entwined with its hardening or self-repression, hence as something damaged by its (forgotten, repressed) historical genesis. On the one hand, the "workers

praxis. While the attempt is admirable it is undermined by insufficient regard to the way in which individuality is, for Adorno, always mediated. Schoolman defines aesthetic individuality as “thinking’s recognition of the opacity and mystery of being, thinking’s intuition that the darkness of the world may conceal some fathomless meaning lying forever beyond the boundaries of thought” (85). Accepting the Kantian “block” on experience, Schoolman ponders why Horkheimer and Adorno do “not explicitly endorse the notion of the ‘thing-in-itself,’ which they adopt implicitly in the idea of the unknown?” (113). In the eagerness to affirm the possibility of non-identity – of what is beyond the concept – Schoolman naturalizes the aporia Adorno is critically confronting: namely, that non-identity is not structural or transcendental like the Kantian ‘thing-in-itself’ – not ‘forever beyond thought’ – but is a “social product.” As Adorno claims of Kant’s block, “its truth content is by no means an ontological one, but, on the contrary, the historically manifested block between subject and object” (“On Subject and Object,” 255). 229 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 26. 230 Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, S1: 58. 231 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 26.

93 are made practical."232 The manipulation and mastery of nature demands a deafness and blindness to its possibilities – the promise that there is something new or rational to be discovered in what is conditional, natural or passive is overcome by the process of disenchantment – as each encounter comes to offer only equivalent and indifferent content ready to be reshaped and made usable. Becoming practical requires the hardening or callousing over of the faculty of experience – the “organ of freedom” that makes the perception of non-identity possibility – in order to effectively, efficiently and repetitively handle objects whose pre-established rational intelligibility is the condition of their (equivalent, exchange) value. Horkheimer and Adorno attribute this "new form of blindness" to the crew or proletariat, who are alienated by their dehumanizing working conditions and reflect this conformity, in turn, in their practical dispositions.233 This Marxist-inflected reading is one that is not particularity satisfying to contemporary political theorists, who would rightly object to its crass anti-political sociology. Moreover, changes within contemporary capitalism and society demand an revised account of the way in which individuals are compelled to adapt to heteronomous social imperatives, which clearly no longer functions through a logic of social homogenization and conformity that Horkheimer and Adorno, among others, identified in late-industrial society. Rather than conformity, today it is much more the case that individuals confront neo-liberal imperatives that require them to prove their flexibility, adaptability, capacity for self-innovation, re-invention and incessant improvisation.234 While the acrobatics necessary to adapt and survive within conditions of neo-liberal precarity, characterized by the increasing fluidity and uncertainty of contemporary social norms and enabling social conditions, does not necessarily speak against Adorno’s insight that society confronts individuals as something foreign, antagonistic and heteronomous, it does call into question the accompanying anti-democratic argument concerning the passivity or incapacity of the majority. Indeed, Adorno’s later work will already call these divisions into question.235 Paradoxically, under contemporary conditions, what Adorno has refered to as experience, is demanded of individuals, though not in order to negate, criticize or transform the world, but merely in order to survive it

232 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 26. 233 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 28. 234 See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (New York: Polity Press, 2000); Pierre Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 235 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society? The Fundamental Question of the Present Structure of Society,” ed. Rolf Tiedemann Can One Live after Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003): 111-125.

94 through continual adaptation. The concluding chapter of this dissertation, which turns to the work of Lauren Berlant to work through this need to update and amend Adorno’s thought. For Adorno, critical experience is the capacity to engage in a responsive and self-critical relation to the object as well as to be moved to act on the basis of this materially inflected insight, all of which constitutes a necessary condition for the possibility of genuinely transformative political praxis. Praxis without experience is instrumental reason, that is, the manipulation and mastery of the object, rather than responsiveness to its conditionality. Experience without praxis, however, is semblance. The gesture of this fugitive possibility is the self-binding of Odysseus, and the migration of the possibility of experience into art.

4.3 The (mere) Promise of Reconciliation

What would it mean for reason to realize its own concept and become practical? While within the Dialectic of Enlightenment this account remains largely implicit, there are glimpses of a competing conception of rationality distinct from the instrumental logic of rationalized reason: rationality that does not dominate its object but which seeks dialectical reconciliation with it. Reconciling reason, or what I have referred to above as reason that participates in the world, rather than seeking to manipulate or dominate its objects, consists in the attempt to learn from the object (experience, particularity) and, in light of this, to criticize the existing (worldly, universal) frames of rationality in light of that (dissatisfying, damaged) experience. This practical-dialectical relation to the world can only emerge in the context of an antagonistic and un-reconciled world in the form of determinate negation – the freedom of critically tarrying with damaged particularity to the point of denying existing reality, its mismediation of the object, to be the final arbitrar of its potential. Determinate negation is not abstract imagination, but a simultaneously intimate and critical engagement with particular objects or phenomena that grounds the demand for their political remediation directly upon the critical disclosure of how social and historical conditions have misconstituted objects that are essentially conditional. As Adorno argues in Negative Dialectics, what suggests “the idea of freedom” is neither imagination or pure reason, but the determinate negation of “nature-controlling sovereignty and its social form, dominion over people,” which opens up the possibility of encountering “the evanescent itself as essential.”236

236 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 220; Adorno, Minima Moralia, 16.

Unreconciled conditions, what limits the potential for reconciliation to momentary acts of determinate negation, are those in which critical experience is systematically discouraged (though by no means impossible) by the coercive relationship that emerges, historically, between society and individuals. As individuality is historically constituted and conditional, the “potential organ for freedom” – the fusion of particular experience and reason to criticize existing reality and to inform political action aimed at amending ‘universality’ – hardens into a “dominating principle” that individuals must subject upon themselves, and in turn upon others, in order to adapt to the static imperatives of rationalized Society.237 Subsumptive or coercive syntheses are irrational, according to Adorno, because universality, in such cases – in both the entwined forms identitarian reason and the subordination of individuality to the social-economic imperatives of exchange – is false. Universality is false, or “the whole is the false,” because it does not achieve or actualize what it claims, namely, the reconciliation of universality and particularity, or, in political terms, the actualization of individuality in and through society. In failing to actualize universality, coercive syntheses are revealed as the products of particular historical geneses serving particular interests (the status quo), hence blocking the social realization of what they purport to accomplish. Both Kompridis and Rancière fail to grasp that Adorno’s conception of universal history does not purport to grasp the whole, but on the contrary, approaches history in its mediated particularity. As Adorno insists, “this universal factor is itself mediated, through the specific situation in which we exist and, in a sense, manifests only in specific form.”238 If there is some account of the ‘universal’ dimension of history – the unity of its discontinuity – this is only because Adorno’s acknowledges of the need to dis-close its particularity, not because any abstract account of its trajectory could even begin to explain or redeem what falls under it. Determinate negation, for Adorno, is the exercise of practical rationality to criticize what exists, which includes, importantly, the ability to call into question the boundaries of 'rationality' itself. The 'transcendent' power of reason, for Adorno as for Hegel, does not consist in a special form of spontaneous causality or free will that is in tension or contrast with the empirical world (that is un-conditional), but hinges on the immanent capacity to deny existing reality and the rationality it makes available to have the last word. Immanent critique is the practical use of reason, the ability to find the current entwinement of "reason" and experience, in its current shapes,

237 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 216. 238 Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics, 142.

96 disappointing, omitting from its picture of reality precisely what would demand acknowledgement if the rational experience of the world where to become the source its practical transformation. Horkheimer and Adorno contrast classificatory rationality with its (increasingly absent) critical alternative in writing: To grasp existing things as such, not merely to note their abstract spatial-temporal relationships, by which they can then be seized, but, on the contrary, to think of them as surface, as mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their social, historical and human meaning – this whole aspiration of knowledge is abandoned. Knowledge does not consist in mere perception, classification and calculation but precisely in the determining negation of whatever is directly at hand…[lacking determinate negation] the actual is validated, knowledge confines itself to repeating it, thought makes itself mere tautology.239

Determinate negation, the abbreviated or promissory form of reconciling reason, aims to "grasp existing things as such," at concrete or objective knowledge, but not by "seiz[ing]" hold of the object and freezing it into clear and distinct identitarian form. On the contrary, this mode of knowledge proceeds through the attempt to engage the object, its mediated materiality, as a dynamic plurality, illuminating it's multiple, often contradictory, aspects. The constellation of these "mediated conceptual moments," as the previous discussion of natural-history has shown, illuminates the entwinement the object's natural dynamism – its transience and conditionality – with the dynamic character of its social-historical mediation, in order to develop an imminent and fragile yet materially binding critical perspective on the latter. The aim of reconciling reason, then, is to take the immanent measure of the historical object and to use this critical experience in order to envision a transformed relation between subject and world, universal and particular, that is, to imagine the possibility of their mutual determination. The freedom inherent in this conception of practical rationality – critical responsiveness to the object – is not less but more rigorous and demanding than the traditional determination of freedom or independence as agreement with the universal law. But is the dis-closure of this possibility enough?

4.4 Kompridis and the Renewal of Critical Theory: Is Adorno’s Approach to Critique Skeptical and Dualistic?

239 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 20.

Kompridis’ project draws upon Heidegger, and more recently Cavell, in order to “renew” critical theory, whose communicative turn under Jurgen Habermas was argued to abandon “modernity’s time consciousness.”240 The turn away from the self-reflexive task of engaging critical theory’s own “provinciality” – its replacement by a “fallibilistic” conception of universality – compromised the ability of critique to disclose novel possibilities through reflection on the limits of the present, and thereby failing to confront the demand any future-oriented philosophy must meet: grappling with the dilemma of how “thinking anew can be thinking responsibly.”241 Kompridis argues that through the difficult work of cultivating a practical posture of "critical intimacy" towards how our passive and pre-reflective disclosures of the world “impede” our reception of hitherto unintelligible normative demands made upon us, it is possible to enlarge the scope of our political acknowledgements. While it is impossible to fully and transparently master the terms of our own pre-reflective world disclosures, as it is only through the medium of these shared and inherited world disclosures that critical and reflective perspectives becomes available, the difficult practice of responding to crises or breakdowns – in which we do not know how to go on in the world and its continuity becomes a practical problem – opens up opportunities to engage in such receptive and critical engagements. Exposure to crisis can instigate an unsettling world defamiliarization – not unlike Adorno’s negative world disclosure – that enables the possibility of reflective consideration upon the limitations of our normative outlooks. If we are receptive to this challenge we may find that it reveals an unflattering picture of our present selves and social institutions, whose unresponsiveness to the normative claims of others can now be seen as a complicit attachment to a given state of the world (or reason, or politics) that now appears in need of redress. This process of finding oneself, which is inextricable from the task of finding how the world discloses oneself with others, can be one in which one finds oneself in rebuke, which in turn, provides the reflective (reason) and affective (motivation) conditions to revise our 'present' selves and institutions, and to undergo the practical transformation required to respond to the world, anew. This work upon the self is what Cavell, following Emerson, calls aversion and what Kompridis refers to as the "weak power of illumination."242 As Kompridis puts it "while our possibilities

240 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 26. 241 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 12. 242 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 165.

98 cannot be fixed, we can become transfixed by a certain set of already disclosed possibilities," and similar to Adorno, it is through a receptive and self-critical form of reflection on our own dependencies and inherited normative frames that it becomes possible to question or revise the configuration or scope of what would be rationally perceptible in the future.243 Kompridis affirms that the “acuity of Adorno’s characterization of reason’s encounter with its ‘other’ remains undiminished.”244 In other words, the limits of what is rationally perceptible and practically possible are historically entwined with the particular social contouring of the world (and the subject), so that responsiveness to the limits of the former reveals exclusions in the latter. Praxis does not become more responsible or ‘rational’ by becoming more in-dependent from its historical provinciality, but only by critically reflecting on this entwinement, the blind spots this (inter)dependence necessarily entails, and the novel possibilities disclosed by re-cognition of what was hitherto normatively imperceptible (non-identical). What distinguishes Kompridis and Adorno is not so much their conceptions of reflective dis-closure, but the availability and adequacy of these forms of cognitive praxis to politics.

4.4.1 Kompridis’ Critique of Odysseus and the Oarsmen: Dualism and its Discontents “As there are many insights into the general failure, so there are many exceptions for one’s own sphere of action place of residence, and moment of time. A blind determination to save the prestige of personal existence, rather than, through an impartial disdain for its impotence and entanglement, at least to detach it from the background of universal delusion, is triumphing almost everywhere” – Walter Benjamin, One-Way-Street (1928)245

The objections Kompridis makes to Adorno’s account are exemplary of the reception he has received in the political theory literature, which criticizes the apparently dualistic relation the latter establishes between individuals and society, praxis and historical conditions, and his purportedly unacceptable and unsatisfying skepticism with regard to political possibility. In order to both provide a response to these objections and to clarify the conception of conditionality I am forwarding here, which I argue is essential to understanding Adorno’s account of (ir)reconciliation and the relevance it holds to contemporary political theory, the chapter will now turn to the task of unpacking these charges and evaluating whether or not they are warranted.

243 Nikolas Kompridis, "Receptivity, Possibility and Democratic Politics," Ethics and Global Politics 4:4, 2001: 256. 244 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 232. 245 Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorism, Autobiographical Writings Peter Demtz (ed.) New York: Shocken Books, 2007: 74.

Despite the fact that Kompridis and Adorno both take the necessarily socially (inter)dependent and historically particular process of critical disclosure as their point of departure, they differ regarding the availability of the practice of disclosure to realize its “utopian” potential in the here and now. Kompridis embraces Adorno’s critique of the “disunity” of practical rationality, namely, that the idealist, universalist or theoreticist tendency to separate rationality from its entwinement or interpenetration with the particularity of the historical world prevents or stifles reason from realizing its critical potential of disclosing new possibilities and transforming the world. However, he objects to Adorno’s “skepticism” concerning the practical availability of engaging in a process of self-critical illumination and transformation, and regards this pessimism as a betrayal or misinterpretation of his fundamental insight.246 In short, Kompridis affirms Adorno’s general account of the problem, but objects to the overly demanding account of its overcoming – Adorno’s conception of reconciliation. He thinks Adorno exaggerates the extent of the “disunity” they both call into question which, in turn, unduly restricts critique’s practical potential. Kompridis argues that the possibility disclosing function of critique must come from the receptive and self-critical process of acknowledging anew the limitations of the currently existing normative horizons. Though Adorno would largely assent to this, he thinks that political praxis, forms of collective action that arise in response to worldly dis-closure, are more radically conditional than Kompridis is willing to acknowledge – political praxis is dependent on conditions (both internal and external) that can, and indeed have, largely withered. Kompridis views Adorno’s critical theory as composed of a series of mutually reinforcing dualisms, that though intended to serve as a critique of the fractured relation between nature and culture or praxis and reason, ends up establishing the inevitability and insuperability of those divisions and thereby blocks any recognition of possibilities for political transformation. Kompridis identifies three dualisms in Adorno’s thought, each of which is reflected in the latter’s account of Odysseus and his crew in their attempt to escape from the Sirens in the Dialectic of Enlightenments. Kompridis claims that he is “convinced that Adorno tried to make the connection between aesthetic norms and norms of rationality the wrong way.”247 This problem is exemplified by Horkheimer and Adorno’s interpretation of “bound, tormented Odysseus” who is the “image of repressive reason, sacrificing precisely what it is meant to preserve – a life free from fear, free

246 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 106. 247 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 168.

100 from internal and external domination.”248 In binding himself to the mast of his ship Odysseus is able to escape from both the temptation and threat of non-identical nature, but at the price of affixing himself to a preponderant social trajectory propelled by blind labour (simultaneously the achievement of a ‘unified’ self, unmoved by what the muse of nature promises: happiness) and hence of a cold and distanced relation (i.e. unpractical) to both internal and external nature. Kompridis, turning the antinomy that Horkheimer and Adorno have attempted to foreground into an argument against them, complains that, “thus the very conditions that make it possible for Odysseus to hear the Siren’s song make him incapable of being transfigured by it.”249 Kompridis objects, quite literally, to the entanglement of Odysseus. It is not that he is incapable of experience – of responsiveness to the object – but that he is bounded by his condition. He is unmoved by the song of nature. His coldness is not ignorance, but an achievement of self- possession. Hence, Kompridis objects to the mere promissory status of art – its separation from praxis – and takes this to be a failure of Adorno’s conception of aesthetic-mimetic cognition as such. While he avers “the ideal that mimesis express,” which is “an ideal of receptivity” that “consists in ‘educating subjectivity to be receptive to impulses of whatever is not subject,’” he thinks Adorno’s approach is flawed because it does not “point towards an enlarged conception of [practical] reason” but instead “rests content with clever but ultimately fruitless dialectical paradoxes.”250 Kompridis’ rethinking of mimesis is revealing. The problem with Adorno’s conception of mimesis, Kompridis argues, is that it receptively oriented towards a “emphatically prescriptive meaning of the concept of material.”251 What is dis-closed in the object is always suffering, wrong life, the inadequacy of political resistance. Adorno’s account of “material” is “uncritical and unreflective” because lacking “any conceptual or normative means for distinguishing the phenomena of cultural homogenization [barbarism] and leveling from the phenomena of cultural pluralism” he imputes the negativity of his “untenable” philosophy of history onto the object and thereby deprives mimetic receptivity of the potential of dis-closing practical possibilities lying dormant or sedimented within non-identical object – resulting in what Kompridis refers to as Adorno’s “skeptical” dialectic.

248 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 169. 249 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 169. 250 Kompridis, “Amidst the Plurality of Voices,” 173-4. 251 Kompridis, “Amidst the Plurality of Voices,” 172.

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Kompridis avoidance of skepticism relies upon his more narrow conception of the object – its limits, stakes and dependencies – or what I have referred to as the conditionality of praxis. For Kompridis, the ‘object’ refers only to the pre-reflective or ‘background’ conditions constitutive of the individual’s world disclosure, which can never be ‘exposed as a whole.’ What is dis-closed, therefore, is a blindness, conformity or indifference that can be amended by the transformation of that specific (mis)relation. This contrasts with Adorno’s account of the “preponderance of the object,” which acknowledges both these opaque and inherited social conditions along as well as their entwinement with the (non-identical) natural and material dimensions. What is dis-closed, in this case, is the incommunicability or speechlessness of sedimented suffering that has been instituted by preponderant society. As Benjamin puts it, “Fate shows itself, therefore, in the view of life, as condemned.”252 The path from this dis-closure of the “speechless” of the object to the transformation of ‘fate’ – the constituting social conditions – is much more difficult. It is more difficult because the moment of disclosure and decentering requires not only the courage of self- critique, but the social institution of a new name or possibility that interrupts homogeneous recurrence of fate. For Adorno, modern art, like Odysseus, can only discern the promise of a mimetic relation to nature (and to social others), one whose disclosive potential remains unpracticable and irredeemable so long as it remains bound and confined to a ship whose trajectory is one of a blind and incessant escape from nature. This impasse is produced, Kompridis argues, by the dualistic division between high art (Odysseus and the fate of aesthetic modernism) and the blindness of the cultural industry (the crew, with their ears plugged), mirroring the social and political divisions between the bourgeois and the proletariat, that taken together “produces an unjustifiable narrowness about what reason can mean” and which owes, ultimately to Adorno’s “untenable philosophy of history that undermines its own modernism.”253 If Adorno’s conception of mimesis is unable to “grasp as reason the capacity to change our beliefs, actions and judgments in light of valid criticism and new experiences, which supposes a prior openness to criticism and new experiences,” it is because of his dualistic conception of history which takes reason to be fatefully

252 Walter Benjamin, “Fate and Character,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorism, Autobiographical Writings Peter Demtz (ed.) New York: Shocken Books, 2007: 309. 253 Kompridis, “Amidst the Plurality of Voices,” 169-70.

102 divided and thereby incapable of the disclosive transformations that are the conditions of its practical realization.254 Adorno’s philosophy of history, Kompridis seems to think, is insufficiently historical – that is, defined independently and inattentively to history’s empirical, plural and particular temporal processes – and by insisting that the historical tendency occurs behind the backs of individuals, preponderantly and fatefully, it imputes its presupposed skepticism onto the both objects (damaged nature) and subjects (crass sociological divisions). Unlike Kompridis pre-reflective background conditions which cannot be ‘exposed as a whole,’ Adorno’s skepticism, it appears, must presume to know or comprehend the ‘universal history’ it denounces and which it uses to explain the series of dualisms (instrumental and mimetic reason; high and low culture; bourgeois and proletariat; praxis and experience) that stand in the way of mimetic cognition becoming practical. It bears noting that Jacques Rancière, coming from his own highly unique angle, ends up with a similar explanation of the “missing political conception of emancipation” in Adorno’s thought.255 Like Kompridis, Rancière discerns both a problematically dualistic conception of rationality and class division that stifles the possibility of political transformation and that owes, in the end, to the historical diagnosis of the problem. Rancière claims that the Dialectic of Enlightenment “endeavours to contrast the perverted, instrumental and mediatizing reason of domination with an authentic reason, with a relation of intimacy between reason and the lived world which develops into a power of emancipation.”256 The problem is that because “this gap is made against the background of a common presupposition: that of a grand historical destiny of Western reason, construed as the accomplishment of original sin,” the promise of emancipation – the “reconciliation of the sensory world” and realization of a “common sensible humanity” – remains stifled by the very anti-political or skeptical presuppositions of the historical diagnosis that brings the problem into relief. Kompridis and Rancière, both object to Adorno’s attempt to show how the promise of critical experience has been historically damaged by its separation from praxis and its compartmentalized restriction to the autonomous sphere of art. They each insist, contrariwise, upon the need for “re-establishing the theoretical and practical connections between art and

254 Kompridis, “Amidst the Plurality of Voices,” 174. 255 Jacques Rancière, “Dialectic in the Dialectic” Chronicles of Consensual Times (New York: Continuum, 2010): 27. 256 Rancière, “Dialectic in the Dialectic,” 26.

103 everyday life, between art’s reason and reason outside art,” or, as Rancière puts its, of acknowledging that art’s egalitarian “power of deception” is precisely what prevents it from remaining within the well-defined bounds of art, and whose aesthetic dimensions are the key for a “political conception of emancipation.”257 If this focus upon the connections between aesthetics (or aesthetically oriented modes of object-relation, knowledge or practice) and reason and political practice make Kompridis and Rancière’s approaches more attractive, it is not only because they provide for the possibility of political transformation, but because they make Adorno’s ‘skeptical’ approach seem as if it is grounded upon a form of critical history that is unresponsive or closed off to the particularity, pluralism and creative potentialities of political action. But does this reading of the dialectic of enlightenment, under closer scrutiny, really hold up? Interrogating Kompridis and Rancière ’s reading of the dialectic of enlightenment reveals not only a more complex picture of the mediation of history, society, individuality, rationality and praxis, it also serves as a means of elucidating the difficult and highly misunderstood normative aspirations that underlie this account – reconciliation, or the actualization of freedom. Once Adorno’s concept of reconciliation has been clarified, it becomes possible to see that far from serving as a unhistorical or uncritical presupposition that precludes political transformation, the conception of ‘universality’ (universal history) that both Kompridis and Rancière object to is necessary in order to avoid becoming embroiled in antinomy. Adorno’s conception of negative totality and its relation to political praxis, however, is in need subtle rethinking, if it is to avoid both the aporia of affirming fugitive politics and the undialectical generality of the thesis that political praxis is ‘blocked. There is an ambiguity to Kompridis’ charge that Adorno’s disclosure of the object is uncritically ‘prescriptive’: it is unclear whether Adorno’s apparent inability to ‘distinguish’ barbarism from pluralism, and the attendant inability to discern practical possibilities amidst damage life is inbuilt into his disclosive interpretations (owing to his ‘untenable’ philosophy of history), or whether his approach does possess the resources to acknowledge such possibilities but nevertheless finds them lacking under present conditions. Against both Kompridis and Adorno, I argue that both of these interpretations hold an element of truth. Kompridis insistence upon critique’s capacity to disclose novel possibilities, to “see more” than what appears – to reveal not only suffering but ‘fugitive’ forms of political praxis – not only can, but must be adopted by an

257 Rancière, “Dialectic in the Dialectic,” 27.

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Adornonian approach to political theory if it is to live up to the immanent criteria of negative dialectics. At the same time, fugitive political praxis is mediated, constituted and dependent upon the conditions (both internal and external) it simultaneously attempts to not only resist but transform. The link (or ‘leap’) between critical disclosure and political praxis is not im-mediate, but fraught. But fraught does not mean ‘blocked.’ The requirement of a critical political theory, I will argue, requires doing justice to the ambiguous, uncertain, damaging, and unpredictable ways in which critical experience (the responsive resistance of thought to the given) meets the resistance of the world.

4.5 The Scylla and Charybdis of Negative and Affirmative Critique: Conditionality or Possibility?

Kompridis criticizes Adorno for failing to conceive of how a mimetic-responsive relation to the world could effect practical or political transformation. Adorno would respond that, under the given social and historical conditions – which may permit (weak) reflective illumination insofar as it remains separate from the dominant (instrumental) logic of practice – the “leap into praxis does not cure thought of resignation.”258 While will I argue that it is impossible to fully defend Adorno here, I also maintain that his arguments regarding the limited and conditional character of individuality – including both the power of critical reflection and political praxis – offer contemporary political theory much needed resources to question some of its deepest (and most problematic commitments (namely, the primacy of praxis). The core of the disagreement concerns the differing ways in which each approaches the question of limits – of world disclosure, normative responsiveness, rationality – and how these differing interpretations produce differing accounts of what is both possible and at stake. For Kompridis, the problem is “cultural pluralism” and the normative crises it produces, and stakes of this problem, likewise, refer to the limits of world disclosure, and the ongoing need to “enlarge” reason through critical reception of novel demands. For Adorno, however, the problem of limits – of the limitations of responsiveness, and of the limits of translating insight into political action – runs deeper. The challenge of his approach is not only to become receptive to the contingent limits of our socially sedimented pre-reflective disclosure of the world in order to acknowledge novel normative possibilities, because for him these limits – of what is rational, perceptible, practically possible – thoroughly mediate not only the process of

258 Adorno, “Resignation,” 291.

105 individual world disclosure but the social and political conditions that establish, in turn, the receptivity of the existing world to dis-closure and transformation. The task then, cannot be straightforwardly concerned with ‘enlarging’ reason and acknowledging novel possibilities, but must rather pursue the more modest aim of disclosing the stakes of these limits through a process of negative world disclosure that demonstrates dependence and conditionality of particular individuals upon their social conditions, which extends from their basic biological survival all the way to their capacity to inter-act, participate politically and resist or transform the conditions that constitute them into (at least partially) social existence. If Adorno thinks that individuality and praxis are more fundamentally limited than Kompridis, he thinks that what critical theory is warranted in offering is also more meagre: it is not the role of critique to demonstrate novel practical possibilities but merely to elucidate the present conditions in such a way their limits are perceived as both damaging and historically and politically constituted (and so revocable). As Adorno writes in Against Epistemology: “Dialectic reaches the insight that the closed process [particular limits of reason and society] also includes the non- included. It thus reaches a boundary [limit] to knowledge itself. Dialectics itself would only be surpassed by a transformed praxis.”259 Negative dialectics is the process of reflecting on the particularity of limits – of the entwinement of historical reason and the normative contours of the existing world – and of opening up the possibility of acknowledging the conditionality of life, thought and praxis, in their unavoidably dependent and (potentially) damaging exposure to them. Adorno’s account of the process of engaging in (negative) world disclosure and acting to transform the self and world in light of those dis-closures, cannot simply be regarded as a failure due to its purported skepticism, because it approaches the problem in a fundamentally different way and with a distinctly different aspiration than Kompridis takes for granted. Namely, as one which attempts to elucidate the essentially dependent and conditional, social and historical dimensions of both thought and (the possibility of) praxis, not in order to provide an answer, in theory, but only to dis-close, anew, the particular cost of our exposure to these particular conditions and hence to re-cognize the political stakes of this unavoidable social (inter)dependence. Whether or not such disclosures lead to political transformation “surpasses” the ambit of critical theory, which possess the capacity to provoke re-cognition of our social and political relations but cannot ensure the power to effectuate the transformations such critique calls out for.

259 Adorno, Against Epistemology, 39.

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At the conclusion of Critique and Disclosure Kompridis gestures towards this difficulty, conceding that “the times in which we live [have] become inhospitable to the practice of critique,” and that “we are living under conditions that thwart our efforts to mark a difference in time.”260 However, Kompridis simultaneously cleaves to a historicized Romanticism for which novel possibility is the promised reward of a transformed relation – a relation of “critical intimacy” – to the past, or to everyday. “Successful critique,” Kompridis insists, “depends on the practical ability to see more in things than they are.”261 If Kompridis account appears preferable to Adorno’s because it offers a ‘way out’ of the dilemma, the question that should arise is whether or not Kompridis is able to do so because he insists on maintaining a certain separation (or lack of mediation) between the problem (the conditions of the historical inhospitality to critique) and his response to it (the practice of critical intimacy) and which is connected to the affirmative presuppositions underlying this approaches avowed “primacy of the practical.”262 If the response to the historical problem is to be developed in a manner that is genuinely critical and immanent, as Kompridis hopes, then isn’t it necessary to relinquish the Romantic-Utopian insistence upon the un-conditional possibility of critique, as if such a possibility was not subject to historical damage or attenuation? Un-conditional here does not imply that this account pays no attention to conditions, which Kompridis clearly and explicitly does, but that the possibility of practicing critique is itself assumed to be always possible, which is just a way of ignoring or bracketing out the limits or conditionality of practice, and of turning away from its social, historical and material dependencies (what Adorno’s preponderance of the object does not allow). The other side of the same coin, which is reflected where Kompridis concedes the weakness or “modesty” of critique263 is an all too easy acceptance that critical praxis will always remain inadequate to the problems it finds itself confronting.264 If this inadequacy lacks the practical urgency and stakes that Adorno

260 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 245, 277. 261 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 258. 262 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 182. 263 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 165. 264 In Problems of Moral Philosophy Adorno argues that philosophical “modesty” has “become the true heir to what used to be called moral-categories” (169). However, despite the undeniable overlap between Kompridis and Adorno’s recourse to modesty as a virtue of critique, their use of this idea points in different directions. Modesty, for Adorno, is what drives the critical process, and which requires, foremostly, resolute resistance to the given heteronomous state of affairs and the various rationalizations, moralities and political justifications that support its untransformed perpetuation. Adorno refers to the “power of resistance to all the things imposed on us, to everything the world has made of us, and intends to make of us” (168). While Kompridis’ appropriation of Heideggerian receptivity and Cavellian aversiveness entails a similar demand for self-reflection, which includes a similar willingness to confront one’s own unreflective commitments and the political and ethical contradicts sedimented throughout them, his use of

107 associates with critique it is because Kompridis defines the problem in a manner that is familiar, yet fundamentally less demanding than Adorno’s construal of it. Kompridis writes: Reconceptualizing critique as a practice of reflective disclosure corrects the tendency of immanent critique to aim at (or to presuppose its own) ‘truth,’ for it precludes the idea of a final unmasking. To reiterate, the background understanding on which we pre-reflectively rely is not something that can be exposed as a whole, not something that we can render fully explicit. Nietzsche, no slouch at unmasking, was well aware that truth did not remain truth when, per impossibile, all the veils are lifted. The background is an ontological condition of the possibility of any human sense-making practice.265

Not unlike Linda Zerilli’s interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s political thought, Kompridis’ goal is to rehabilitate the “primacy of the practical, giving priority to speaking and acting rather than knowing,” which entails a fundamental reconsideration of the (uncertain but disclosable, particular, novel) contours of political normativity.266 If critique aims not at certain, timeless or universal ideals but at the disclosure of possibilities lying dormant and unrealized in our own past and present (‘background’) self-understandings it is because both the means and object of critique are themselves fundamentally and irrecoverably historical and particular – ‘not something that can

“modesty” refers to declining or marginal the role of philosophy or critical self-reflection in modern life. Kompridis argues that critique “must give up its aspirations to cultural authority in favor of a more modest aspiration: to play a vital role in clarifying and criticizing everyday life and practices in partnership with those whose life and practices they are" (Critique and Disclosure, 170). While both Kompridis and Adorno accept the basic premise of immanent critique – that the normative ground of critique cannot be situated in an abstract universal or ideal that is transcendent, separate from, or outside of historical society but must emerge out of the latter’s critical self-reflection – Adorno’s conception of modesty, unlike Kompridis, does not accept that critique can engage in a cooperative relationship with “everyday life” or the “lifeworld” (169). While Adorno agrees with Kompridis on the need for the “acknowledgement of our dependence upon one another that is co-extensive with the recognition of our dependence on our pre-reflective understanding of the world” – which translates Adorno’s thesis on the “preponderance of the object” into the “preponderance of interdependent sociality” – he fails to see the current social conditions of this (inter)dependence as “mutually enabling.” As a result, Kompridis’ claim that “reflective disclosure is always an act of co-disclosure, a matter of cooperative activity,” while true for Adorno, is nevertheless also ‘abstract’ in the Hegelian sense, a possibility unsupported by the existing social conditions, and so inadequately particular and insufficient (195) The problem is not that Kompridis’ critical theory calls for modes of reflection and action in tension with “the way of the world,” but that he accepts this marginal position as the necessary price of avoiding the resignation of “working within ‘a contracting space of possibility’” (199). What Kompridis fails to consider, however, is that a ‘contracting space of possibility’ is not only an error that emerges from the (universalist, skeptical) desire to ground normative ideals disconnected “from modernity’s relation to time,” but that, as it is for Adorno, contraction of the space of possibility is itself a social and historical possibility. Seen from this angle, Kompridis recourse to “modesty” seems to make a rather immodest presupposition: that our historically sedimented social conditions always allow for the affirmative potential of achieving a “freer relation them” (202). This idealistic presupposition, which does not emerge out of critical engagement with particular social and political objects or phenomenon, constitutes the limit and contradictory core of Kompridis critical account of receptivity, predicated on “the primacy of the practical”: that because it already claims to knows there is something worth becoming receptive to, it cannot perceive the ugly particularity of heteronomous society which would constitute the ‘modest’ ‘power of resistance to all things imposed on us.’ 265 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 255. 266 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 182.

108 be exposed as a whole.’ Critique becomes disclosive once its particularity and partiality is an avowed condition of its intelligibility, in which case the ‘intimacy’ of its contact no longer appears as mere subjectivism, but on the contrary, can reveal the particularity of the object, the conditions of our pre-reflective plurality, anew. It is only once the skepticism of universalism is overcome – the refusal to perceive the possibility of normative accountability in that which is particular or non- generalizable – that the uncertainty and novelty of reflective disclosure can be appreciated as necessary to confront the challenge of historical experience. If this account bears a certain familiarity to Adorno’s philosophy it is because the priority of acting to knowing in the above account reiterates many of the key components of Adorno’s critique of idealism (the critique of skeptical implications of universalism and the call for the recognition of excluded particularity through a mode of mimetic cognition that aims at “felt contact with its objects”).267 The difference, however, is that in Kompridis’ formulation of the problem, he contrasts the skeptical aspirations of knowing (which conditions the modern inhospitality to critique) with a picture of reflective disclosure that, in Adorno’s thought, could only emerge subsequent to the realization of reconciled social conditions. Kompridis approach conceives of critique as a practice, while Adorno seems to conceive of the possibilities of critique and critical praxis as not only practical (in contrast to knowing) but also conditional (practice is not only indeterminate, but dependent). Reconciliation is Adorno’s code-word for the actualization of the conditions in which the practice of critique, and the disclosures and possibilities it opens, would not be systematically marginalized within the existing spectrum of practical possibility (within the existing world, where ‘praxis’ is in tension with critical experience). Reconciliation would not be a static ethical state of harmony between fully recognized social beings – a completed identity – but the actualization of social processes that would self-consciously facilitate, rather than impede, the possibility of undertaking political discourse and praxis that aims at the re-visioning of political society in light of the critical disclosure of the conditionality of freedom. Of course, the abstract formulation of this relation of reciprocity “does not entail that we know what so being comes to or demands,” in other words, that “consciousness of freedom is not actualization in substantive political freedom.”268

267 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 247. 268 Bernstein, “Our Amphibian Problem,” 206-207.

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If Kompridis’ account of reflective disclosure resembles Adorno’s model of reconciliation – understood as a dynamic and reciprocal process of the mutual determination of individuals and the social conditions that constitute, sustain and enable (or inhibit) them in turn – then the question emerges, why didn’t Adorno think that this model of the critical process was an adequate response to the problem, which at least in outline, he understood in similar terms (skeptical universalism leading to the “exhaustion of utopian” and cultural pluralism for Kompridis, and cultural barbarism/nihilism for Adorno)? He refused this tempting option because he holds that any potential response, or even recognition of a problem is already mediated by the limitations of the conditions it would negate, in short, that the limits of practice consist not only in the opacity of their inhibiting/enabling pre-reflective background, but in their inhibiting/enabling social and material conditions themselves. Kompridis’ response to skeptical universalism would be a unmediated one in Adorno eyes, not because the response is abstract – as is clear from the quote above, pre-reflective background conditions are the unavoidable and indispensable element of his account of the critical process – but because the practical transition from skepticism to reflective disclosure provides no account of how the former condition is to be overcome, the counterposition of “critical intimacy” as a response to the “distanced” reason of modernity remains an empty or ‘abstract’ opposition. Kompridis does not see this as a problem because while he recognizes that practice is conditioned – following both Heidegger and Cavell, he rightly recognizes that pre-reflective background conditions are both particular (socially constituted and historically sedimented) and impossible to fully disclose or transparently recover, in short, that they are ‘not something that can be exposed as whole’ – he takes the indeterminacy or unclosedness of these conditions as the warrant for affirming his Romanticism, namely, that practice can always unleash a new future through intimate engagement with the past.269 It is the presence of this ‘always’ – this “ontological condition” – however, that is in tension with Kompridis pretension to do justice to the process and objects of critique, that which is essentially historically particular. What he avoids, in other words, is what Adorno’s “preponderance of the object” makes clear: practice is not only conditioned (by the past, others), but is itself conditional, that is, fundamentally dependent on limited an array of social and material conditions, even as practice engages in political resistance against them. It is

269 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 267.

110 not only the responsiveness of practice, but its possibility, that must confronted in its (social- historical) particularity. The key difference here is that, for Adorno, if practice is not primary, but dependent on an array of conditions – what we have unpacked in the discussion of the preponderance of the object – it is exposed to the possibility of social and historical attenuation, but this is precisely what Kompridis formulation, which conflates the “primacy of practice” for an “ontological condition,” renders unthinkable; the limit point of what is dis-closable. The importance of confronting, rather than fleeing from despair and hopelessness in Adorno’s philosophy, translated (and transfigured) into the domain of political theory, I argue, emerges as the radical demand to acknowledge or disclose the conditional limits of praxis. It is only by dis-closing the extent of the fragility and conditionality of the network of social and material interdependencies, that the demand for the radical revisioning of those conditions will become socially eloquent. To twist one of Adorno’s most famous phrases: ‘it is for the sake of political possibility that we can no longer recognize the present socio-historical conditions as enabling them.’270

270 The phrase I allude to here is from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: “it is for the sake of the beautiful that there is no longer beauty: because it is no longer beautiful" (53).

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Chapter Five The Promise of Fugitive Politics: Reading Ibsen’s A Doll’s House “For language is in every case not only communication of the communicable but also, at the same time, a symbol of the noncommunicable” –Benjamin271

“Why is it that democracy is reduced, even devitalized by form? Why is its presence occasional and fugitive?” - Wolin272

The previous section established the need to carve out a new form of critical interpretation by reflecting upon the limitations of both Adorno’s political skepticism and Kompridis’ aporetic affirmation of new possibilities. This section will substantiate this approach by considering how these limitations manifest with regard to the analysis of specific phenomena. Firstly, I will offer brief overviews of Cavell’s and Kompridis’ reading of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, paying specific attention to how they attend to the problem of fugitivity. Fugitive political acts or claims arise because of the unavailability of routine practice to support or enable individuality, in which case it becomes necessary to undertake the difficult challenge of dis-closing such wrongs with the damaged resources and limited practical vocabularies one is contesting. This reading will show how the forms of critical responsiveness that Cavell and Kompridis propose, precisely because they do not acknowledge the radical consequences of the mediation of fugitive politics by the conditions it resists, are riven by antinomy. The figure of this antinomy in their respective readings is Torvald, who fails to becomes responsive or responsible for his inability to perceive the fugitive claims of his wife. Torvald is unmoved by the non-identity of his wife’s position and her attempts to give expression to it, that she is thinking for herself and making autonomous judgments despite occupying the social ‘roles’ of woman and wife. The political potentiality of critical responsiveness, Cavell and Kompridis argue, hinges upon whether or not the Torvalds of the world – those in positions of authority – take responsibility for their conformity. This requires the democratic and anti-skeptical commitment of ‘going on’ after the breakdown of mutual intelligibility has been reached and “opening” oneself to the challenge a self-decentering form a listening. While there is much to admire and learn from in these accounts, I argue the forms of novel practical possibility or “enlarged reason” disclosed by critical responsiveness (or

271 Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorism, Autobiographical Writings Peter Demtz (ed.) New York: Shocken Books, 2007: 331. 272 Sheldon S. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” ed. Nicolas Xenos Fugitive Democracy and Other Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016): 108.

112 aversiveness) amount to only abstract negations of the social conditions they contest. This is because critical responsiveness runs directly up against the pervasive indifference and callousness of the social and political conformity it immanently contests. This does not mean that critical responsiveness is impossible or futile, but rather that it is a fugitive or marginal possibility. Fugitive listening promises to redeem the speechlessness of fugitive claims, but not the falsity of the social totality – yet without the latter, the former remains a mere promise. Insofar as critical responsiveness fails to reflect upon its own fugitive status – what Adorno refers to as the ‘guilt’ of art – its promise of transforming the social totality will remain abstract in the precise Hegelian sense of a commitment that fails to comprehend the practical entanglements that prohibit its realization or fulfillment. The claim that aporetic affirmatism constitutes an abstract negation does not just mean that the practical change it calls for is ‘not enough,’ but contains the structure of o what Pippin, reading Hegel, refers to as the ‘pathology of self-deceit.’ The affirmation of practices of critical responsiveness sustains a “self-deceit about its own coherence,” whereby “we sincerely believe ourselves committed to fundamental principles and maxims [or practices] we are in no real sense committed to, given what we [society] do.”273 Secondly, I undertake a reading of J.M. Bernstein’s “Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life: ‘The Truth of Hedda Gabler.’”274 In this piece Bernstein offers an exemplary Adornonian reading of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The interpretation that leads Bernstein to pronounce that the play ‘fails’ both adumbrates the limitations of critical responsiveness and Adorno’s political skepticism. Namely, that in order to disclose the predicament of Nora’s socially uninhabitable position the play dramatizes her resistance in a way that undoes the tension that it would be the play’s achievement to disclose: the unsayability of wrong life (by having Nora say it). In response, the interpretation I offer of A Doll’s House takes the radical challenge of Bernstein’s (and Adorno’s) reading onboard: fugitive forms of claiming (and listening), even if they are not impossible, are nevertheless not sufficient to the problems they address and unless or until the particular routinized conditions they contest are changed. Reflection upon this inadequacy is demanded in order to comprehend the damaged (rather than blocked) character of fugitive action. On the other hand, I argue against both Adorno and Bernstein with respect to their categorical

273 Robert Pippin, “Hegel on Social Pathology: The Actuality of Unreason,” Crisis and Critique 4 no. 1 (2017): 347. 274 J.M. Bernstein, “Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life: ‘The Truth of Hedda Gabler,’” Max Pensky, ed. The Actuality of Adorno: Critical Essays on Adorno and the Postmodern (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).

113 refusal to acknowledge non-identical forms of praxis. Bernstein, following Adorno, interprets the ending of A Doll’s House as affirming Nora’s “beautiful death” – her fugitive resistance undoing the play’s attempt to say the unsayability of the damaged condition of womanhood in wrong life – and in doing so offering the consolation of ‘beauty’ precisely where only dissonance and ugliness could articulate the truth-content of her condition. While this interpretation is defensible aesthetically, it is untenable politically. Giving expression to Nora’s fugitive claim, Bernstein argues, undoes the tension that would have allowed the play to ‘say the unsayable’ – to dis-close the particular damage effectuated upon women that wrong life makes imperceptible. Practically, however, it is necessarily such forms of action or claiming-making, no matter how contingent or inadequate, that are alone capable of inaugurating wider political change in contemporary society. The aesthetic critique of Ibsen cannot model political disclosing critique. The foreclosure of the possibility of emphatic individuality (reconciliation) means if political change is to take place at all, it must begin in fugitive form. The categorical repudiation of fugitive praxis rules out the possibility of political change altogether – political transformation is blocked in advance of micrological engagement with the object. Yet, unexpected minoritarian political movements such as black lives matter or #MeToo continuously emerge to challenge the unsayability of political wrongs. I argue that acknowledgement of fugitive political praxis is not only possible within the framework of Adorno’s philosophy, it is necessary if his micrology is to live up to its own immanent criteria of allowing affinity for the object – in this case the non-identity of praxis – to openly guide the texture of the interpretation. The qualification to this acknowledgment is that these fugitive forms of praxis should not be uncritically affirmed. The fugitive character of politics does not belong to some structural, invariant or ontological character of the political field or democratic practice as such, but to the inability to achieve and sustain individuation within the limitations of the existing and revocable social conditions. Hence, fugitive politics are simultaneously promissory, and potentially transformative, and yet damaged. Adorno’s philosophy must become capable of grappling with this ambi-valence – which should replace the totalizing conception of contradictory society – in order to meet the challenge of critically disclosing political phenomena. In the final section I use this alternative approach to the problem of fugitive politics to interpret the fragile, partial and limited political achievements of the #MeToo movement. This movement has instigated the transformation of social norms as well as, in many places, the legal

114 rights and protections of women. This discourse retrospectively reveals the non-identical character of women suffering from sexual abuse. Recognizing and attempting to express that an injury or wrong has been committed would often fail because, like Nora’s situation, the existing normative and political vocabularies were often already suffused with the misogynistic assumptions the claim would attempt to call into question. Even where misconduct would have been uncovered, it would prove difficult to link specific cases to the larger social tendencies (the totality) out of which they emerged – each fugitive claim would be painted as an exception to an otherwise benign totality. The empathic gesture of claiming ‘me too’ constitutes a rejection of the benign character of the social totality by contesting the contingent character of the social wrong. Routine practices of social interaction, often involving power asymmetry, are dis-closed – seen anew – as tendentially misogynistic. The suffering of sexual abuse transcends its isolated contingency, its inconsequentiality, once it is acknowledged that these damaging forms of material encounter are socially mediated, namely, that the possibility of treating another like an object already belongs to the social fabric that determines whose bodies matter. The truth-content of #MeToo is predicated upon the disclosure of the bodily suffering of women as socially induced, and the determinate negation of this wrong is only actualized to the extent it produces concrete change.

5.1 Cavell and Kompridis Reading Ibsen: The Politics of Critical Responsiveness

Stanley Cavell’s reading of A Doll’s House in his Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, both establishes the dilemma of fugitive claims and develops a conception of “moral perfectionism” that, he argues, illuminates the predicament of democratic politics. Before preceding further it is necessary to establish the details of the play relevant to the subsequent readings. Set in 19th century Norway, the play addresses the dilemma of bourgeois family life amidst the unravelling and contradictory pressures of modern individuality, masculinity and traditional obligations. Nora is introduced as a women who has moved from the protective care of her father’s home to the role of the comfortably kept bourgeois wife, struggling with her inability to be taken seriously. During a conversation with her friend, Mrs. Linde, who questions if Nora has ever “know much trouble or hardship in [her] life,” Nora responds that indeed she has something to be “proud of.”275 She claims

275 Henrik Ibsen, “A Doll’s House,” Four Major Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 12.

115 that she “saved Torvald’s life.”276 While initially she reveals that it was her surreptitious success in business – a fact she need hide from Torvald to preserve his precious pride in his independence, and in particular, his good credit (his debtlessness to others) – later it becomes revealed that she forged her father’s signature in order to take out a loan she is working to pay back, a practice that women were excluded from. The money was used so that the family could travel to Italy, where Torvald could recover from a serious and long-persisting illness. Later, when one of Torvald’s struggling employee’s uses knowledge of Nora’s illegal action to blackmail him, threatening the dutiful husband’s career and independence, he berates his wife for failing to understand the consequences of her actions and how her unwitting perpetration of a criminal act has imperiled the family. He can’t fathom the reasons Nora, his frivolous “little sky-lark,” at home in her cage, would carry out such an act. He chastises himself for failing to better nurture and reform his hopelessly dependent wife, shaped in the image of her “irresponsible” father.277 He proclaims that he has lost all trust in her and that he can no longer love her, that their marriage will be now for the sake of appearances, the empty occupation of social roles. Yet, once he becomes aware that he will no longer be pursued for blackmail, that he is ‘saved’ – which entails, for him, that ‘we’ will be saved – he forgives her and states that he now acknowledges her actions, however misguided, came from a place of love. But now Tora finally sees that her marriage has been one of empty social roles from the beginning, and that neither her father nor Torvald ever really loved her as an individual, that instead they cherished her as a possession or object. The bond of their marriage was never really predicated upon the horizontal interdependence of a loving regard for the other in their otherness, but upon the vertical relation of independent and dependent that Torvald has internalized from his bourgeois context – from his social role. In love, like Adorno’s concept of experience, the “toils of fate involve an agent becoming sensitive to what [s]/he has done, so coming to feel differently about it, and as a consequence coming to redescribe the nexus of self and context differently.”278 Love is the paradigmatic of experience because the intimacy of acknowledgement is here intricately entangled with the transformation of self and world. Torvald’s bourgeois autonomy, his drive to preserve his independence from the heteronomous

276 Ibsen, “A Doll’s House,” 13. 277 Ibsen, “A Doll’s House,” 76. 278 J.M. Bernstein, “Love and Law: Hegel’s Critique of Morality,” Social Research 70:2, 2003: 425. I draw the image of vertical (Abrahamic, Kantian moral law) and horizontal (ethical life) forms of ethical authority from Bernstein (408).

116 exposure to dependence – to maintain his good standing, his credit, his appearance or identity – have marred his capacity to love, that is, to be moved or changed by his wife. Like Odysseus, he hears the claim of the other from a safe distance, beyond the risk of losing himself, of undergoing change. It is only the threat of the loss of his possession that drives Torvald to pleads his case, proclaiming that he will change – learn to see her differently – that the time of role-playing is over, but Nora remains steadfast, and insists she must leave in order to “educate [herself]” so that she can “stand alone.”279 The final lines of the play stage the paradoxical tension of Nora’s fugitive claims. Torvald accuses Nora of “betraying [her] most sacred duty,” while Nora responds that her role as wife has come into contradiction with her duty to herself, her individuality, and that she must “try to discover who is right, society or me.”280 The “miracle” reconciliation of her individuality and society – the union of the horizontal relationality of sittlichkeit and the vertical relationality of bourgeois society – has gone unrealized. The play ends with Nora’s departure and her confession that she no longer “believes in miracles any more.”281 The difficulty of Nora’s situation, Cavell relates, is that while “she senses herself to be violated,” she has “no reasons that are acceptable” to express this violation to her husband.282 Her violation is unsayable, yet real. Cavell takes Nora’s predicament as exemplary of the task of moral perfectionism. In such cases, a: specific wrong may not be claimable; yet misery is such that, on the other side [Torvald, the vertical law], right is not assertible; instead something must be shown. This is the field of moral perfectionism, with its peculiar economy of power and impotence.283

Cavell’s formulation here comes close to Adorno’s conception of non-identity. The existing laws, rules or conception of justice – what Adorno calls the universal and Cavell ‘the everyday’ – give rise to suffering or misery, which if acknowledged, instigates the search for a new way to acknowledge the claim of injustice after the existing laws and norms have proven to be unsure guides. Unlike Cavell’s ‘scene of instruction,’ in the context of ‘moral encounter,’ the sense that something unacceptable must be shown is first encountered by Nora, the “one out of authority.”284

279 Ibsen, “A Doll’s House,” 81. 280 Ibsen, “A Doll’s House,” 82-83. 281 Ibsen, “A Doll’s House,” 86. 282 Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 191): 109. 283 Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 112. 284 Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 112.

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That there is something ‘more’ to be shown than is sayable within the limits of the everyday – of existing justice – places Nora in an “intolerable” or uninhabitable moral space. The misery of her situation is that the terms of her “consent” to society – how her participation in her world is received and acknowledged – “compromise” her, and she cannot show or express this contradiction unless or until her claims are received or acknowledged differently. Hence, both Cavell and Kompridis, insofar as they conceive of the practice of moral perfectionism as form of critical responsiveness – of engaging in an aversion to conformity in receiving claims of social others – their focus turns to Torvald and the response-ability of the one in authority. What emphatically differentiates Cavell’s position from Adorno’s, and what I want to here call into question, is the way in which the former establishes the possibility of the ‘showing’ or acknowledging of Nora’s contradiction. Cavell writes, “I must also show, on pain of self- corruption worse than compromise, that I continue to consent to the way things are, without reason, with only my intuition that our collective distance from perfect justice is, though in moments painful to the point of intolerable, still habitable, even necessary as a stage for continued change.”285 Cavell is here making an argument against the isolating indifference and skepticism of the vertical model of inter-relationality – against both the pride and necessity of Torvald’s bourgeois autonomy (we might add, Odysseus). The aspiration towards “perfect justice,” to be “beyond reproach,” in short, in-dependent, is precisely the ‘human’ temptation towards the inhuman, that is, the skeptical drive to reach a position beyond the need for skepticism. It is this temptation, for Cavell, that stifles the possibility of engaging in an aversive relation to existing justice – to the everyday – and so of acknowledging and being moved or de-centered by those in the intolerable positions such as Nora’s. Vertical inter-relationality and the corrosive skepticism that follows from it is a real and practical problem in Cavell’s philosophy. Rather than reject this model as illusory, he argues that it betokens conformity within the very fabric of the everyday, which makes the task one of “recovering” the lost intimacy and responsiveness to the horizontal relations of everyday life.286 Hence, Cavell argues that an integral task of moral perfectionism consists in perdurance, that is, the unreasoned commitment to continue to love the world even in

285 Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 112. 286 As with Adorno, the concept of mourning is important to Cavell. However, more directly and perhaps unmediatedly, mourning, for Cavell, promises a new dawn or morning. Cavell’s philosophy takes the ordinary or everyday as both its point of departure and aim. He writes: “the ordinariness in question speaks of an intimacy with the existence, and of an intimacy lost, that matches skepticism’s despair of the world” (In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988: 4)

118 the face of injustice, as the condition of the possibility of change. This is, for Cavell, the necessity of ‘going on’ in the absence of knowledge, surety or even hope. Response-ability begins with the commitment to inhabit the uninhabitable world, and in being moved by the injustice of this uninhabitability, of renewing and revising the world and what counts or matters within it. Kompridis elaborates upon the Cavellian argument for the need to ‘go on’ with the world and others in the face of injustice. He argues that it constitutes the basis of a form of receptive practical agency, beyond mastery. “In responding freely to such a call,” he writes, “which means becoming answerable to it, we allow ourselves to be unsettled, decentered, thereby making it possible to occupy a potentially critical and illuminating stance.”287 But what does it mean to “make room for the call of an other”? What risks are involved in the demand for inhabiting uninhabitable social spaces and ‘going on’? Does the commitment to ‘going on’ with injustice that forms the condition for possibility of critical responsiveness presuppose the very conditions whose withering it contests? If not, then to what extent is critical responsiveness an exemplary form of practice? What kind of change does it promise? Like Adorno, Cavell is sensitive to the moral and politics problems that arise when modes of vertical relationality become pervasive, what the former construes as the dialectic of enlightenment and the latter as the ‘human’ temptation to inhuman moral skepticism. Moreover, both treat this problem immanently, not as mutually exclusive options between horizontal inter-relationality and the intimacy of aversive response-ability – the “lover’s knowledge” that Nora and Torvald never really shared – but as breakdowns of the practical possibilities of the latter and the ongoing need for its recovery, dis-closure or reinnervation. Yet, there is a fundamental difference. Cavell, I argue, effectively condenses the Kantian third antinomy – the phenomenal conformity of the existing world with its identitarian laws and certainties and the noumenal possibility of instigating novel moral possibilities – from a two-world problem into a single dynamic tension of the practical world.288 Both the promise and difficulty of this approach is tied up, then, with the way in which it preserves, in modified form, the antinominian character of Kant’s two-world philosophy.

287 Kompridis, “Receptivity, Possibility and Democratic Politics,” 264. 288 Cavell reads Emersion as transmuting the Kantian ‘ought’ from a transcendental to an immanent problem. He speaks of “turning the Critique of Pure Reason on itself, taking its fundamental term ‘condition’ in its etymological significance as speaking together, so suggesting that the condition of possibility of there being a world of objects for us is the condition of our speaking together; and that is not a matter of sharing twelve categories of the understanding but of our sharing a language, hence the task of philosophy is not the deriving of privileged categories but of announcing the terms on the basis of which we use each term of the language” (Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995:33)

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Torvald’s response-ability is the figure of this antinomy. Cavell reflects that Torvald’s skepticism of Nora leaves him a “moral shipwreck,” but that “how he picks up these pieces is a morally fateful for him as Nora’s leaving is for her.”289 Whether or not they choose to “go on” after the breakdown of the terms of their mutual intelligibility, in the presence of misery, betokens their commitment to their shared world and their response-ability to it, the only possibility of its amendment or transformation. In other words, Cavell’s conception of aversive practices of acknowledgment hinge upon the unreasoned commitment to ‘going on,’ in which the (unreasonable) “bond to the other [serves] as a function of [realizing] the further self.”290 I find Cavell’s exhortation to engage in aversive forms of self-reflection, for the most part, admirable and aver that this ‘unreasoned’ commitment or what Arendt would call amor mundi is a necessary and unavoidable dimension of critical responsiveness – Adorno, too, with his conception of ‘affinity’ (for the object) would have to agree. Intimacy – horizontal forms of inter-relationality and object-relation – are central to both Adorno and Cavell. As Bernstein summarizes Adorno’s micrology: “Adorno's thesis comes down to the claim that all knowing that can take on the complexity of singular objects, events, and states of affairs is lover's knowledge, knowledge as guided by loving attention."291 The difference between Adorno and Cavell is that singular objects – including practical subjects themselves – are subject to damage, withering and attenuation in ways unacknowledged by the latter, and hence what is recovered or recuperable is often nothing a remainder, a promise rather than an emphatic possibility. Hence Kompridis’ criticism that “by becoming reflectively receptive, Torvald would have been in a position to disclose the presence of the pre-reflective stance of receptivity by which he had previously understood the woman as his wife,” risks imposing an extrinsic or impossible ethical criteria, insofar as the possibility of fugitive listening is construed as an unconditional demand for response-ability.292 Cavell and Kompridis read Torvald as skeptical and conformist, while Adorno would read him as damaged. The difference is significant because overcoming the former requires only the transformation of the individual (a turning), while the latter requires transformation of the conditions of that constitute (mediate) individuality. Consequently, each read the possibility of the “road back” from the ravages of vertical inter- relationality differently. For Cavell it “begins in recognizing that his former valuing of Nora was

289 Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 117. 290 Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 117. 291 Bernstein, “Love and Law,” 401. 292 Kompridis, “Receptivity, Possibility and Democratic Politics,” 266.

120 not based on his judging for himself, and bearing responsiveness to his judgment, but on the imagination of rules that, as it were, replaced his judgment.”293 Responsiveness, the “overcoming of the divorce” of vertical inter-relationality, becomes possible once Torvald relinquishes his emphatically human or “natural” temptation to avoid responsibility by relying on the existing social norms for ethical orientation. While relinquishing guidance from existing justice entails vulnerability and risk, it is the condition for the possibility of aversive response-ability and novel possibility it promises, what Cavell call’s the “condition of democratic morality”: the further, unattained human as the goal of the existing one.294 Cavell’s perfectionism immanentizes antinomy: “not denying unhappiness, not accepting it either.”295 Critical responsiveness dwells on the interstice that divides wrong life and possibility of emphatic individuality – and in doing so helps itself to both without fully confronting either. The criticisms that Kompridis launches at Adorno – dualism, totalizing history and political skepticism – all redound as limitations of their own antinominian reading, which avoids these problems by placing the moral or political subject in two worlds at once. Firstly, the charge of dualism in Adorno – the division of experience and praxis, Odysseus and the oarsmen into ‘shorn halves that do not add up’ – returns to haunt Cavell’s reading of Torvald. Cavell’s reading of A Doll’s House concludes on an affirmative note, with the promise that the couple might overcome their divorce and recover a lover’s intimacy they perhaps never shared. This reading refuses to acknowledge that Torvald, too, has been marred by living in a doll’s world, namely, that his social role, which demands independence and debtlessness, mediates his capacity for experiencing the world. As Adorno notes, there is an affinity between bourgeois morality and the Kantian “block” on experience (the anti-thesis of the third antinomy), which in its emphasis on remainderless identity, on debtlessness, insists: “Don’t incur any excessive expenses (the ‘risk’ of responsiveness), otherwise you’ll run up debts that you are unwilling to pay off and will end up in bankruptcy.”296 Even the most intimate domain of all, marriage, is mediated by wrong life. It is instructive that the figure of ‘re-marriage’ – the last refuge of horizontal relationality in wrong life – is Cavell’s model for overcoming the conformity and callousness of pervasive vertical

293 Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 117. 294 Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 125. 295 Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 126. 296 Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 59.

121 relationality, precisely what has made family life a ‘refuge’ in the first place.297 This is not to say that Adorno’s conception of mediation – the preponderance of the object – leaves no space for contingency or spontaneity (the thesis of the antinomy). It means, instead, that Torvald’s responsiveness will always be a fugitive listening – a possibility that is non-routine and exceptional as long as the emphasis on self-preservation and independence vertically contours the social world. That Cavell accepts this as natural – that he explicitly naturalizes conformity as an essentially ‘human’ tendency298 – against which the “price of liberty is our subjection to eternal vigilance,” literally transcodes the resignation of the Kantian antinomy, the effective impossibility of realizing freedom in this world, into his account of critical responsiveness. The practical possibilities of critical responsiveness are purchased at the price of naturalizing antinomy, hence of an aversion to the possibility of an emphatic transformation of the universal, to reconciliation. The flipside of this aversion, is that Cavell is blind to the conditionality of responsiveness, to the way in which its routinized possibility depends on the critique and reform of institutionalized forms of vertical relationality, and the way these conditions permeate and damage the capacity for experience on the part of individuals. Just as, for Kant, the possibility of overcoming the antinomy and realizing his practical postulates presupposes faith and eternity, Cavell’s responsiveness presupposes the endless practice of inhabiting the uninhabitable (‘going on’). Adorno’s conception of universal history or totality – the other side of his concept of reconciliation – is precisely what is needed in order to avoid naturalizing the moral and political consequences of the vertical model of inter- relationality, and for discerning the figure of fugitive praxis without consolatory aura that it has realized freedom in the here and now.

5.2 Adorno on Art and Reconciliation: Bernstein’s Reading of Ibsen

“Today the only works that really count are those which are no longer works at all” – Adorno 299

297 See Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). In Minima Moralia Adorno questions whether ethical refuges such as love and family life are models of emphatic possibility, or if they only betoken fragments and remainders. “Dwelling,” that is, inhabiting the uninhabitable, “in the proper [horizontal] sense, is now impossible” (38). 298 Cavell writes: “risk and error are inherent in the human, part of what we conceive human life to be, part of our unsurveyable responsibilities in speech and in evil; and this condemnation to an unsurveyable freedom is not well described by saying that we can never, or can only in a certain class of cases , be certain” (In Quest of the Ordinary, 52). 299 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music (New York: Continuum, 2004): 30.

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As discussed above, for Adorno, the only place in modernity where critical experience is routinely available is in modern art.300 Bernstein’s reading of Ibsen in “Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life: ‘The Truth of Hedda Gabler,’” by bringing Adorno’s position on the damaged condition of fugitive claiming into relief, demonstrates the limitations of both Cavell and Kompridis’ critical responsiveness as well as, I will argue, Adorno’s political skepticism. Bernstein begins his article by offering an elucidation of the animating tension of Adorno’s philosophical modernism. This tension has often been interpreted as a paradox, or performative contradiction.301 As Morton Schoolman explains of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, “At one level it presupposes the existence of a reader who at another level, that of the text’s linear historical narrative, is shown to have vanished without a trace in the wake of the enlightenment.”302 Bernstein’s argument is that in order to understand the nature of Adorno’s critical interventions aright, and in particular his account of modern art, it is imperative to recognize that this tension becomes self-conscious in Adorno’s philosophical modernism. Hence, the thesis that the ‘whole is the false’ is not a descriptive statement that falls into performative contradiction, but forms part of the constellation of thought that attempt to make the revocable damage of universal history – the loss of the possibility of routinized horizontal forms of object relation and inter-relationality – perspicuous. Yet, the assertion of this experience as a general thesis is a performative contradiction. The concrete particularity of this loss is not expressible by abstract theses. As Adorno puts the problem “suffering remains foreign to knowledge.”303 So, in order to make this claim of wrong life materially binding, to say what has become unsayable, it is necessary to turn

300 See Espen Hammer, Adorno and the Political (New York, Routledge, 2006) for a compelling account of how the praxis of philosophy and the demanding engagement with art are political. Hammer argues, for example, that “even in works of art, such as Kafka’s novels, that seem to revel in pain and dissatisfaction, there must be, for a successful and adequate experience of them to be possible, an engagement with repressed and unsatisfied needs that, by being expressed, point to their possible overcoming under different social conditions (“Happiness and Pleasure in Adorno’s Aesthetics, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 90:4, 2015: 254). Hammer`s account of fugitive praxis, then, accepts and works within the constraints of Adorno’s thesis on blocked praxis, and is distinguished from my account in this respect. For a clarifying account and defense of what subtends Adorno’s thesis on blocked praxis, see Fabian Freyenhagen, “Adorno’s Politics: Theory and Praxis in Germany’s 1960s,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 40 no. 9, 2014. 301 Habermas, Philosophical Discourses of Modernity, 186; Kompridis, “Amidst the Plurality of Voices,” 169; Rancière, “Dialectic in the Dialectic,” 25. 302 Schoolman, Reason and Horror, 6. 303 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 18.

123 to the domain of modernist art, where the horizontal mode of object relation – finding meaning in the particular through intimate engagement with it – persists, albeit in negative, fragmented form. Adorno claims, in the concluding section of Aesthetic Theory, that “it would preferable that some find day art vanish altogether than that it forget the suffering that is its expression and in which form has its substance.”304 Suffering is central to Adorno because it is the paradigmatic form of being moved, displaced or decentered by the object – precisely what becomes thematic in contemporary thought in neutralized form, that is, from a position of safety (i.e. fascination, difference, novelty, advenience). The self-binding of Odysseus names this neutralization – that intimate object-relation is possible only from a safe distance. Kant’s conception of the sublime expresses this neutraulization of suffering in aesthetics: the condition of being moved by the sublimity of nature, of what is beyond the control of the subject, is that “we must see ourselves as safe in order to be sensible of this inspiring satisfaction.”305 The expression of suffering, finding it to harbor a claim over and against its neutralization, then, holds the potential for breaking out of the immanence of existing possibilities of thought and praxis, of acknowledging the non-identical and dis-covering the world anew. Modern art is self-conscious of the performative contradiction of false universality. Its attempt to “say the unsayable” proceeds through the “ruins of empirical speech and action” – the inability to be moved by the particular – and out of these ruins, in fragmentary form, to “point to a meaning that is not fully commensurable with” what is sayable within the universal.306 Hence, the claims of modern art are always fragile or fugitive. Bernstein notes that there is a homology between the fugitive practice of modernist art and Ibsen’s figuring of women. As he puts it “in becoming conscious of themselves within the morally repressive social whole, [they] become points of resistance to the blind or unconscious perpetuation of society,” in short, they are both “non-identical within the identitarian whole.”307 Unsurprisingly, then, the focus of Bernstein’s Adornonian analysis of A Doll’s House, unlike Cavell, focuses primarily on Nora. Bernstein objects to the presentation of Nora, the embodiment of both the fragility and promise of non-identity, for precisely the reason that lead Cavell to read the conclusion affirmatively, as hope for the promise of ‘overcoming divorce.’ The basis of Bernstein’s objection is that the “radical gesture of the final conversation” – Nora’s refusal of

304 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 260. 305 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 5:262. 306 Bernstein, “Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life,” 165. 307 Bernstein, “Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life,” 165.

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Torvald and her demand to search out conditions where she might realize her individuality – is, he claims “exorbitant with respect to the events precipitating it,” namely, her life in a ‘doll’s house,’ which was characterized precisely by (damaged) conditions (both external and internal) inhibiting the practice of individuality that such a refusal seems to presuppose.308 Bernstein elaborates that “Ibsen’s dramaturgy has no choice but to present the self of non-identity as both fully self- possessed and as fully disposed,” in short, to occupy the impossible interstice that separates wrong life from reconciliation – precisely where Cavell situates his perfectionism. It is obvious, then, what attracts Cavell to this play: the antinominian character of Nora’s fugitive individuality and Torvald’s fugitive listening. For Bernstein, it is the insufficient attention of both Ibsen and Cavell to the mediating entanglements of attempting to ‘say the unsayable’ that leads their respective attempts at the ‘overcoming of divorce’ to take the form of a ‘miracle’. The miracle, as Kompridis puts, of “respon[ding] to the call of conscience as an activation of our capacity for self- decentering.”309 It bears noting, however, that while Cavell affirms hope for the miracle of fugitive listening, Ibsen concludes the play with the onset of Nora’s disenchantment, her disbelief in miracles. Implicitly, then, the play answers its own question, namely, that it is society, not Nora, that is wrong. Nora’s ‘exorbitant’ gesture, the miracle of her fugitive assertion of her individuality, nevertheless, remains incomplete and unactualized – a miracle even she cannot believe in. This wholeness, the play’s ability to ‘say the unsayable’ and give resolution to the problem it intrigues, constitutes the beauty of “A Doll’s House.” To be clear, Bernstein’s objection is not a ‘realist’ complaint as to the plausibility of Nora’s gesture, given the play’s preceding presentation of Nora’s character, though his philosophy, too, is disenchanted of faith in miracles. Rather, Bernstein writes that “What I am claiming are the aesthetic faults of the play are just the consequences of Ibsen not paying sufficient attention to the performative and epistemological difficulties of totalizing critique.”310 In other words, Ibsen’s presentation of Nora – whose ‘radical gesture’ of refusing Torvald, and so recognizing the impossibility of achieving her individuality within the constraints of wrong life – fails in its task

308 Bernstein, “Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life,” 167. 309 Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 59. Kompridis, later, explicitly affirms the disclosure of fugitive praxis in “insisting on the possibility of another kind of reason, another way of living reason in practice, which is not merely an abstraction or something impossibly utopian but an actual possibility that we can locate in existing, if marginalized, practices of reason" (237). My suggestion in this chapter is that fugitive praxis, according to the criteria of Adorno’s conception of reconciliation, are not ‘actual possibilities,’ – though neither are they ‘blocked’ – rather, they demand to be acknowledged as damaged possibilities. 310 Bernstein, “Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life,” 167.

125 of rendering the ‘unsayability’ of the wrongness of society materially eloquent. The play sacrifices its truth-content by allowing Nora to perform her objection to ‘society.’ This performance seems to presuppose the individuality it contests, and so undermines the play’s attempt to express the non-identical character of women’s suffering in universal society. Nora’s fugitive individuality, precisely what gives Cavell hope, is not objected to by Bernstein (or Adorno) because, strictly speaking, it is impossible or unrealistic. Rather, it is because of his account of the preponderance of the object – that the practical subject is preceded and constituted by social and material conditions that render her essentially mediated, and that the truth-content of praxis always acts in response to the ‘neediness of the object’ – that Adorno’s critique is directed towards the universal conditions. Hence, for Adorno, unlike Cavell, the universal is not simply an (eternal) source of conformity. Rather, it is what, under the existing yet revocable conditions, forces individuality to take fugitive form in order to exist at all – and it is precisely this that Adorno wants to make perspicuous. Recall that when Adorno writes that “praxis follows the object’s neediness,” he qualifies this claim by insisting “but not by the subject adapting itself, which would merely reinforce the heteronomous objectivity.”311 Fugitive resistance, insofar, as it does not transform the universal conditions that it contests, can become a form of adaptation, of merely ‘going on’ or ‘inhabiting the uninhabitable.’ Adorno does not reject the possibility of fugitive acts, only their adequacy to the problem. If Ibsen’s play is to express, in particularistic detail, forms of representative suffering – suffering induced by the shape of society – that would make a fragile yet binding (truth) claim, then “being for self [Nora’s ‘radical gesture’] can only appear as dissonance, unbeautiful, workless, as taking one’s leave of society altogether.”312 To affirm Nora’s fugitive individuality is to affirm the possibility of a “beautiful death.” The idea of a beautiful death, however, just expresses the “incoherence” of the affirmation of fugitive resistance, both “wholly negative and wholly self-affirming,” in short, an abstract negation or ‘pathological self-deception.’313 Bernstein’s reading of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, in contrast to A Doll’s House, applauds the work for its rigorous handling of the fugitive tensions surrounding the play’s “anti-heroine,” Hedda. Like Nora, Hedda is situated in an uninhabitable social space, unable to realize her individuality within the rigid emplotment of her narrow social role and its systematic

311 Adorno, “Marganalia to Theory and Praxis,” 265. 312 Bernstein, “Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life,” 169. 313 Bernstein, “Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life,”173.

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(mis)recognition of her attempts to resist. Yet, unlike Nora, Hedda is a “an ugly heroine, a horror and a grotesque, full of ennui and spleen.”314 Her attempts to resist wrong society, unlike Nora’s “exorbitant” gesture of refusal, exemplify the dilemma of fugitive resistance: the negativity of Hedda’s taking leave of society, mediated by the conditions that render her miserable, renders her act a mere “semblance of individuation and particularity, fleeting and evanescent.”315 The actuality of Hedda’s damaged resistance – her suicide – far from signalling the possibility of ‘going on’ amidst uninhabitable conditions, gives expression to the nullity of fragmented beauty – the necessity of its coming to appear as dissonance. It is precisely the expression of this nullity that constitutes the achievement of the play. “If Hedda cannot have a beautiful death, the failure of her death becomes the play’s meaning, its moment of dissonance whereby it transcends both the morality Hedda opposes and the illusory unity and wholeness of the beautiful aesthetic object.”316 The ‘meaning’ that is salvaged from the dissonance of Hedda’s death, is a perspective on the damage and material toll of wrong society – the truth-content that dis-closes the totality of society as a failed totality. Yet, this meaning remains guilty, it prohibits the affirmation of this recovery because it self- consciously falls short of the realization of the redemption it promises by naming the problem. The play discloses the damage of the self-binding of Odysseus (experience without praxis) but remains self-conscious that this disclosure does not, in fact, undo the knot, and hence the play renounces the affirmation of Hedda’s death. Hedda’s death, like the dis-closures of modern art, is semblance. It is a “semblance of meaning because true meaning requires generality, the possibility of ‘going on.’”317 The life of particularity, dependent on the universal, requires support in order to transcend the contingency of mere abstract resistance; “there is no emancipation without that of society.”318 In rebuke of Cavell’s affirmative conception of ‘going on,’ Bernstein gives expression to the meaning of Adorno’s conceptions of individuality and reconciliation. The achievement of individuality rests on preponderant social conditions that would allow the particularistic claims of individuals more than fugitive expression; such claims, in reconciled society, would stand the chance of becoming general (not identical), that is, of succession. Elsewhere, Bernstein argues that

314 Bernstein, “Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life,”172. 315 Bernstein, “Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life,”173. 316 Bernstein, “Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life,”176. 317 Bernstein, “Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life,”180. 318 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 173.

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“what demonstrates that an item has authority is succession, that is, the production of further instances that do not imitate but rather ‘create from the same source of which the former created.”319 Praxis is not self-sufficient, but requires the conditions under which the authority of individuality is supported by the possibility of its ongoing succession – precisely what enables praxis to criticize and renew the society upon which it is dependent. The achievements of #MeToo, I will argue, exemplify the way in which the authority of succession constitutes the actualization of fugitive resistance, without which the latter is “deformed affirmation.”320 Before turning to #MeToo, however, I will analyze how the fidelity of Bernstein’s thought to Adorno’s philosophy renders the reading of Ibsen an occasion to also criticize the limitations of Adorno’s political skepticism. The intensity of Adorno’s aversion to the affirmation of fugitive forms of resistance, both practically and within modern art, derives from his account of the practical subject – that it is essentially mediated, dependent on both material and social conditions that precede, constitute and variously enable and inhibit its potentialities – and the necessity of maintaining these tensions (rather than allowing an exceptional figure like Nora to annul them) in order to dis-close the truth-content of the particular conjunctures (the dependence of fugitive resistance on the conditions it resists, and the material toll of their non-actualization). The task of the previous four chapters has been to salvage the resources within Adorno’s philosophy that would be needed in order to develop a critical account of fugitive forms of political praxis. The contribution of this chapter has been to elucidate Adorno’s critical conception of reconciliation, and to demonstrate the ways in which it could be drawn upon by political theory (and to disabuse the common premise that it is an ethical and anti-political ‘model’ of harmonious interdependence). The promise of individuality, I have argued, hinges on the availability of transforming fugitive forms of resistance into socially instituted (and instituting) forms that enable the possibility of succession and creative renewal. In both art and practice, fugitive resistance, unto itself, without establishing the conditions for its succession, can amount to only abstract negation. Hence, the failure of A Doll’s House, from an Adornonian perspective, is that it “looks too much as if Nora’s protest against society presupposes the transfigured one that she is about to quest after.”321 The critical responsiveness of Cavell and Kompridis, I argue, affirms the practice of

319 Bernstein, “Political Modernism,” 69. 320 Bernsetin, “Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life,” 180. 321 Bernstein, “Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life,” 168.

128 occupying the interstice of wrong life and individuality in order to transform, as if by miracle, the problem Adorno confronts – the mediation of praxis by wrong life – into solutions and possibilities. Moreover, I have suggested that Adorno’s argument does not rule out the impossibility of resistance amidst uninhabitable social space, but refers instead to the priority of rendering the conditionality of praxis perspicuous over and above the more familiar task of contemporary political theory: identifying fugitive resistance as politically exemplary. Without giving up either Adorno’s conceptions of the preponderance of the object, individuality and the necessity for fugitive claims to become socially instituted (succession), I want to argue, with Kompridis and against Adorno, that this approach is politically compromised by its generalizing hostility to fugitive forms of praxis. As we have seen in previous discussion, the immanent criteria of negative dialectics is that it allows ‘the matter itself,’ in its non-identity, to direct the course of the analysis, rather than allowing either the compromised presuppositions of existing society to enclose or circumscribe what might be dis-closed in the analysis or for faith in “miracles” to offer consolation for their failure to materialize. However, insofar as Adorno’s analysis establishes, in advance, the nullity of the affirmation of fugitive forms of political praxis it transgresses its own immanent criteria. Kant used the concept of “subreption” to refer to the illusory or transgressive extension of a subjective or conceptual representation to empirical existence.322 Adorno’s rejection of fugitive forms of resistance is premised on the notion of a kind of reverse subreption – a form of empirically existing praxis that because of its contingency and isolation, its inability to achieve succession, is rendered meaningless. The resistant force of non-identity, in such cases, is abstract or empty – hence unworthy of affirmation. Adorno is here at most Hegelian.323 For Adorno, the routinized possibility of critical experience migrates, in late modernity, into modern art. The conditions for political praxis, as we have seen, are, for Adorno, blocked. The dualism of experience and praxis, their compartmentalization into spheres, is the mark of the damage condition of reason and action in modernity – their sacrificial and contradictory character. Yet, it is precisely with regard to the dualism of experience and praxis, art and politics, that Kompridis’ and Rancière’s objections to

322 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A390. 323 It is at this point that Vasquez-Arroyo’s analysis breaks definitively with Adorno and establishes the need for “political responsibility” (Political Responsibility, 199). I cannot see, however, how criticism of Adorno here does not imply a rejection of the concept of the preponderance of the object and the conditionality of praxis. Without working out precisely how fugitive forms of resistance are possible in Adorno’s thinking, it remains unclear how or where responsibility might be emerge.

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Adorno have an element of truth. As Kompridis insist, it is only by “re-establishing the theoretical and practical connections between art and everyday life, between art’s [non-identical] reason and reason outside art, the emancipatory potential of modernity can be regained – or at the very least come into view again.”324 They argue that the ability to discern the fragile connections of art and life, or of experience and praxis, precisely what Adorno denies, holds the key to discerning new political possibility. The problem with Adorno’s position that art becomes the stand-in for blocked political possibility, is that the disclosure of truth-content in art is always semblance, always an unactualized promise. Concrete forms of fugitive practice, however, unlike the protests of art, do not always end up as abstract negations – sometimes, if only very rarely, the contingency of unpredictable circumstances conspires to give momentum or amplification to a claim such that its successive articulation leads to consequent political transformation. The fugitive claims of critical experience are at the basis of the limited and fragmentary social achievements of modernity, and though they can be forgotten and distorted, they do not, strictly speaking, always go unheralded or unactualized. To rule out the possibility of fugitive praxis as a source of political change is effectively to blind oneself to the possibility of praxis as such. Adorno’s failure to live up to his own immanent criteria, his open dialectic, appears here in the form of his hostility to the contingency of damaged political beginnings. While I have argued his resistance to the affirmation of contingency is well-founded, I now want to pry open the necessity of conceiving of a space between Cavell’s affirmation and Adorno’s exaggerated negativity. Fugitive experience is the “bridge connecting world [actuality] and art [possibility/experience].”325 For Adorno, this bridging is merely promissory. “It is semblance, something more and less than what is factual, more because it is not mere fact [but a non-identical claim, the possibility of material meaning or truth-content] and less because its factuality is untethered from both social generalizability and reproducibility,” namely from the authority of succession.326 Cavell, Kompridis and Rancière affirm the bridge – the promise of the fugitive – because they do not acknowledge the conditionality of praxis, the possibility of the emphatic transformation of wrong society and the political aspiration of achieving individuality. Hence, ‘No Man’s Land’ coincides, paradoxically, with Utopia: it is a bridge to nowhere. Adorno, by contrast,

324 Kompridis, “Amidst the Plurality of Voices,” 176. 325 Bernstein, Adorno, 438. 326 Bernstein, Adorno, 439.

130 acknowledges the possibility of escape only as semblance or promise, in order to hold to the possibility that one day it might be a journey that is routinely made. What is missed, between these two positions are different ways of reflecting upon the dilemma of fugitive praxis. The Transgression of bounds of conformist bounds of wrong life has, and will continued to be made in contingent and unpredictable ways. The dualism of Odysseus and the oarsmen, art and praxis, has been shown by thinkers like Kompridis and Rancière to be not only untenable, but anti- politically opposed to the disclosure of new possibility. On the other hand, one cannot affirm this connection because, at the same time, the bridge, though crossable, is nevertheless damaged. The bridge is not only withered, riven with obstacles, “bombed out,” moreover, those that might risk such a crossing are themselves internally hindered by the sedimented history of the ‘self-binding’ of Odysseus.327 That politics only emerges in rare and fleeting forms – that fugitive claims go unheeded, without instituting the possibility of their succession, passing out of memory or sayability – is the mark of the ongoing degradation of contemporary experience. The micrological interpretation of particular phenomena, lest it rigidify into prima dialectica, therefore, must guard against the exaggeration of ‘wrong life.’ The task of political critique is not to denounce the pretensions of ‘radical gestures’ – to show the nullity of fugitive political resistance – but to attend to the complex mediations of political praxis and to dis-close both the enabling and inhibiting role of the conditions that allow some forms of resistance to achieve succession while others are forgotten, or stifled. I turn now to the discussion of #MeToo in order to exemplify how this alternative approach opens itself critically, rather than affirmatively, to the acknowledgment of fugitive practice and stakes of their social institution.

5.3 #MeToo: The Uninhabitability of the Fugitive

The ‘Me Too’ movement, began in 2006 by Tarana Burke, a survivor of sexual assault, as an way to express solidarity and empathy with women who have endured sexual harassment or violence. In October of 2017, the movement garnered international attention when Hollywood film producer, Harvey Weinstein, was accused of sexual violence by Ashley Judd, spurring a number

327 Adorno, in Negative Dialectics, refers to the attempt to occupy the interstice as a “no man’s land,” namely as the “bombed out” space between warring or antagonistic forces (78).

131 of others to respond with #MeToo.328 While the role played by contemporary media in the shaping and dissemination of this identification, in particular the role of Twitter, demands serious attention, in the following I want to focus on what the institution of this claim as an avowedly empathetic and successive gesture betokens about the risks and achievements of fugitive claim-making. Like Ibsen’s women, the #MeToo movement shares a homological structure with non-identity. The truth-content of the movement is grounded upon the fragile claim of the non-identical – the material toll of sexual violence and the social unihabitability or misery of being unable to express the wrongness of this experience, that violence against women is not an isolated or contingent event but a consequence of the way wrong society (mis)mediates the meaning of bodily integrity.329 The achievement of the movement consists in the transformation of this fragile, materially binding claim into an mode of identification whose succession gives social realization – meaning – to particularity. Retrospectively, the existence of the movement dis-closes the recognition that sexual violence against women has been, and continues to be, ‘unsayable’ in our society. That the institution of this identification emboldened survivors who had otherwise kept their experience quiet, testifies to the damage of undergoing fugitive wrongs. Hence, the successful articulation of a fugitive claim can never be affirmed – it is always and necessarily laden with guilt. The disclosure of guilt gives rise to the recognition that “there is something else to think, namely, what is thought in those surrounding experiences in which the fugitive [claim] either does not appear or appears only in its degraded form.”330 The authority of #MeToo, then, does not redeem the unsayability of women’s suffering in the past or present. Rather, its claims are grounded on the dis-closure of society as implicated in the process that rendered this suffering meaninglessness, inarticulate, contingent, nauralized – ‘boys being boys.’ The claim ‘Me Too’ expressly rejects the contingency of this suffering – hence, this very rejection is predicated upon the fugitive possibility that the material and particular could source social meaning and identification: that the universal, rather than always perpetuating damage upon the non-identical, could in fact serve the particular. The identification that this suffering is pervasive – that it includes particular others with whom one shares a social experience that is dis-closed, anew, as wrong – grants the potential for rendering the wrong of

328 Christopher A. Johnson and KT Hawbaker , “#Metoo: a timeline of events,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 11/18 https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct-me-too-timeline-20171208-htmlstory.html 329 Bernstein, Torture and Dignity, 60. 330 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 454.

132 damaging forms of sexual violence sayable. The identification indexes the dis-closure of particularity – material suffering – directly to the meaning of the claim. Hence, the ‘pervasiveness’ of the violence against women is not capturable by raw empirical statistics, not only because the collection of such data is implicated by the normative (non)recognition of this violence as wrong, but because ‘pervasive’ here points to meaning that is simultaneously immanent to the facts, yet points beyond them: what is wrong is not this act, but the universal conditions whose mediation both gives and denies the particular facts their sayability. The trajectory of the #MeToo movement, and in particular the social institution of an iterable identification, I want to argue, is exemplary of how a fugitive claim can serve as a ‘bridge’ between experience and praxis, transforming fugitive particularity (the unsayability of material suffering) into social actuality by carving out a new mode of inhabiting political space. In 2006, the claim would have amounted to little more than an ‘abstract negation’ of wrong society. Yet, at some point – unpredictably and contingently – what began as a fugitive claim became the source for the institution of novel forms of social identification, whose succession establishes the condition for the possibility of the routinized sayability of violence against women as wrong. #MeToo, it bears emphasizing, does not establish the possibility of emphatic individuality, nor does it even offer a satisfactory response to the myriad forms of misogyny and violence against women in contemporary society. Nor is their any guarantee that the #MeToo identification will be able, in the course of its successive iterations, to continue to connect the authority of its claim with non-identical particularity, that is, upon recognition of socially induced suffering. The forgetting of the geneaological-particular grounds of fragile social achievements is not, as Cavell claims, a natural human tendency – though it might appear that way – but an inbuilt tendency of rationalized modernity, of ‘wrong’ society. The achievement of the #MeToo identification, like all democratic achievements, will require perpetual renewal and reactivation. Discussions whether #MeToo has “gone too far,” whether the ability to discriminate between different levels of violence or wrong already point to the nominalizing of the identification and the attrition of binding this connection upon the authority of non-identical suffering.331 Yet, that social conditions are in need of perpetual renewal does not require abandoning the critically inflected aspiration to reconciliation (nor does it entail acceptance of Cavell’s antinominian position). The ‘model’ of reconciliation never

331 Bret Stephens, “When #MeToo goes too far,” NY Times, Dec, 20/17. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/opinion/metoo-damon-too-far.html

133 envisioned the achievement of a perfect or utopian society. On the contrary, the promise of individuality betokens a society whose institutions might avow their conditionality, hence its imperfection, and strives to enable and support the forms of individuality needed to contest, revise and remake it. In fragmentary and limited form, #MeToo – by instituting a novel mode of identification that emerges from the critical dis-closure of the social totality’s damaging mediation of particularity – models both the promise of and vulnerability of fugitive political praxis. Moreover, it offers a glimpse of what the ‘bridge’ to reconciled society looks like: it will be slowly and painstakingly erected through the process of transforming the truth-content of fugitive claims, in every aspect of society, into successive, instituted forms in perpetual need of refurbishment and always exposed to disintegration.

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Chapter Six Butler's Contribution to the Politics of Reconciliation

6.1 Introduction

This dissertation has argued that what is normatively marked in praxis is neither agency, nor social conditions, nor mediating frames on their own, but the reciprocally permeating relations that obtain between them. If an intrinsic element of agency includes its mediating context, then the normative mattering of agency is not loaded entirely onto the difference that it makes in the world but refers, in part, to the way in which the material-natural body as well as the (historically sedimented) context limits, frames, and mediates the very agency that seeks to amend those conditions, and which in turn relies on those conditions in order to change them. In attending closely to this question Judith Butler's most recent phase of work contributes to the effort to grasp the problem of politics in its entanglement with inherited norms, mediating conditions, and inextricable from the problem of livable life.332 As Diana Coole argues, Butler's turn to the question of "livable life" marks a shift away from an account of politics characterized by the "more formal Deleuzian- Foucauldian account of dissonant repetition," whose marked anti-humanism foreclosed any possibility of anchoring the meaningfulness or stakes of politics upon some 'originary' ground, such as that of a (suffering, vulnerable, human-animal, practical) subject. The more recent work, however, is centered on the question of "livable life" and is "saturated" with phenomenological- existentialist themes, which, Coole explains, entails reference to: 1) "lived experience within an intersubjective world"; 2) "material meaning," or the "irreducible entwining of matter and meaning"; 3) historical becoming, or an "emphasis on the contingent emergence or becoming of phenomena over time"; 4) the body and its "corporeal engagement with the world"; and finally, 5) dialectics, where "corporeal actors and anonymous structures are inseparable and mutually engendering processes."333 Coole argues that an unthematized frustration with the "lacunae" of

332 Diana Coole's chapter "Butler's Phenomenological Existentialism" in Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters provides a compelling and critical periodization of Butler's work (Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers, eds. New York: Routledge, 2008). She argues that an implicit tension between Butler's post-structuralist and phenomenological-existential inheritances is at play in her work, and that it continues to haunt her more recent shift towards the latter. Coole argues that Butler cannot "sustain the radical politics she espouses later without questioning her avowed poststructuralist commitments and acknowledging the importance of phenomenological concepts for avoiding their shortcomings" (12). 333 Coole, "Butler's Phenomenological Existentialism," 24.

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‘dissonant repetition,’ its incessant displacement of the stakes and mattering of politics out of and away from the present existing conditions, motivates Butler's shift "back into her existential and dialectical approach."334 Building on Coole, I offer a reconstructive analysis of the latest shift in Butler's work, which I read as a rethinking of political resistance along the lines of Adorno's problem of reconciliation, that is, as a problem of how transient and vulnerable life is differentially valued in its entwinement with its social, historical and political mediations. As I have argued of Adorno in the previous chapter, the stakes and aspiration of reconciliation are not grounded upon a static ethical humanism, but upon a dynamic conception of socio-political autonomy. This reconstruction offers an opportunity to critically consider what motivates Butler's theoretical transformation. Specifically, it provides a testing-ground for the dissertation's task of developing an immanent critique of the ‘primacy of praxis’ in contemporary political theory that does not aim at the simple repudiation of that program, but instead aims to rework its core insights in a direction that elucidates (rather than confuses) the stakes of contemporary political practice. What are these stakes for contemporary politics? Doesn't the attempt to circumscribe what is at stake in practice risk enclosing or limiting what can appear as political, or worse, doesn't it risk reintroducing an essentialist (moral or ethical) ground? For Adorno's idea of reconciliation, the aim is not to impose a transhistorical or extrinsic value of life in opposition to culture or spirit, but to immanently critique both the particular manner in which the object – in its non-identity with the concept (the speechless suffering of the subject qua object) – is mediated by socio-historical norms, and to recover the normative significance of non-identity in disclosing the unsayable damage inflicted upon the object as politically induced. The aim of reconciliation is not the identity of subject and object, culture and nature, but the instigation of an indefinite and inconclusive process of reciprocal criticism leading toward the amendment of the social conditions sustaining and enabling the (neediness) of the (political) subject. In order to set the stage for the arguments that follow I will begin by offering a broad account of what distinguishes Butler's initial orientation, with its affirmation of ‘dissonant repetition,’ and Adorno's critical theory, which though related in many ways, conceive of the stakes of critical resistance along differing lines, and how the latter presents a largely misunderstood, though more satisfying account of this problem. I will then begin the work of substantiating this claim, firstly, by providing a critical re-construction of Butler's early depiction of the problem of critical resistance that she articulates in her reading

334 Coole, "Butler's Phenomenological Existentialism," 24.

136 of Nietzsche in The Psychic Life of Power. In the third section of the chapter I will trace Butler's implicit turn to the problem of reconciliation. I will compare Butler's new concern for "livable life" to Adorno's account of natural-history, demonstrating how the critical theory problem that Karen Ng refers to as "double constitution," is taken up by Butler, that is, how human beings are confronted with having to achieve and sustain the natural-material integrity of their life through its socio-historical mediation, that is, politically. I will show how Butler, following Adorno, is able to link the problem of critical resistance to the historical-material stakes of "life" without recourse to an originary, foundational or trans-contextual concept, and, on the other hand, also avoids the relativistic and ideological conceptions of 'life' that obtain in the presently given historical situation. Next, the discussion will analyze three objections to Butler's "new humanism," advanced on, roughly speaking, Rancierian, Arendtian and Marxist grounds. That Butler's later work has been criticized for its ethical de-politicizing of resistance, and for its purported prioritization of finitude, responsiveness and tolerance over polemical and contestatory modes of political engagement is, I will show, a mis-reading of the difficult yet exigent problem that Butler is attempting to elucidate. Butler's turn to the question of "livable life" is not, as her critics claim, a problematic attempt to sidestep the generative, agonistic and natal character of politics by anchoring it upon some "extra-political" originary, moral or ethical ground, or upon some 'fact' of existence, and that to see her project in these terms is to miss the essence of her claim. If the meaningfulness and stakes of politics exceed and go beyond the practice of politics and concern the conditions that support not only the persistence of life but the political possibility of changing them, it does not follow that the latter is somehow prior or outside the political fray – what constitutes a livable life is a resolutely social and political problem. The livability of life is not a qualitatively distinct problem from the conditionality of the political subject: both are mediated, that is, dependent on conditions that precede and exceed them, ex-statically, and so are exposed to the possibility of withering. In Bernstein's word's "being human is a social accomplishment," such that what makes human life 'more' than mere biological survival is not the transcendence of that problem but a way of socially negotiating that constitutive vulnerability and exposure.335 These misreading, I claim, offer a privileged opportunity to consider not only what differentiates the

335 Bernstein, Torture and Dignity, 311.

137 various incarnation of the ‘primacy of praxis’ from Adorno, but also to consider why the former have (unjustly) held greater appeal within political theory.

6.2 The Stakes of Critical Resistance

While the idea that subjection to power is constitutive of subjectivity has been central to Butler's work from the beginning, the sense and political significance of the paradoxical structure of "founding dependency" begins to change, I argue, as Butler relinquishes the Derridean framing of the problem and turns towards the problem of reconciliation. Initially, Butler's aim is to consider how the subject that power "enacts into being" can, in the course of re-iterating this power, marginally alter the conditions of its own "formativity," in order to "gesture towards a less regular freedom."336 Assiduously avoiding any 'proper' or originary conception of the subject, or any universalist normative grounding, as well as refusing to figure freedom in terms of the fantasy of sovereign control, Butler envisions critical freedom through the conception of "dissonant repetition." In such instances, the subject does not aim to escape power but rather exploits its unintentional, productive or 'queer' re-iterations, in order to re-direct and alter its subjugating effects.337 What is most important, at this stage, is to show that while agency is "radically conditioned," that subjects can nevertheless exploit the "vulnerability" of power to become deployed in unintended and contingent directions in the course of re-iteration. The aim is to show that resistance can exploit the tendency of power to marginally deviate from its intended effects, and to capitalize on these deviations by channelling them toward emancipatory effect, even in the absence of possessing effective 'control' over it, or possessing any extrinsic normative evaluation of it. In the early framing of the problem the stakes of this critical resistance are, I argue, not yet fully worked out; there is an account of immanent resistance to power, but whether or not this account is critical remains unclear. On the one hand, the task cannot be to escape subjection to power, since power is constitutive of critical agency itself and is only a contaminate from the perspective of the idealist/masculine fantasy of sovereign control or pure agency which envisions complete domination over what lies outside of an originary, invulnerable subject. Nor can the task,

336 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 13, 82. 337 Coole, "Butler's Phenomenological Existentialism," 25

138 with Nietzsche, be one of overcoming morality and the guilty subject (self)formed historically by the labour of bad conscience. For, as well will see below, Butler's Derridean proclivities will lead her, rightly, to deconstruct the distinction Nietzsche establishes between creative life and the bad conscience of all "ideal and imaginative phenomenon." With Derrida, then, and contra Nietzsche, Butler conceives of resistance neither as escaping nor overcoming the paradoxical subjection to formative power. Instead, drawing upon her theoretical inheritances, Butler affirms the collapsing of the problem – the relation of resistance and subjugation – into a single, insuperable dynamic whereby the very deployment of power offers opportunities (via its unpredictable but unavoidable production of unintentional and contingent effects) for creative-critical resistance. Hence, Butler writes that "Power is never merely a condition external or prior to the subject, nor can it be exclusively identified with the subject. If conditions of power are to persist, they must be reiterated; the subject is precisely the site of such reiteration, a repetition that is never merely mechanical"338 The difficulty with this solution to the problem of immanent resistance, I argue, is that it freezes the problem into an insuperable dynamic. While from one angle, it offers an account of the insuppressible potential for resistance, on the other, it also holds that each performative act of resistance is necessarily re-absorbed by the power it resists. The formal, asymptomatic and historically unreflective character of this dynamic threatens to undermine any appreciation for its historically mutability – and hence undermines the possibility of its critical-historical transformation in the same moment it seemingly opens up the possibility of change. It is only through the historically mutable constellation of power and resistance that the stakes of critical practices are to be found. The immanent critique of Butler’s early account of critical resistance will reveal it to culminate in an insuperable dynamic that proves to be uncritical because its promise of critical transformation is simultaneously a blockage of the emphatic realization of that promise. Butler has salvaged a conception of resistance that remains immanent to power, which merits admiration, but what has been lost sight of is: firstly, the larger task, whose recognition requires a critical-reflective historical perspective, of calling into question the naturalization of the dynamic that consigns resistance to the errant repetition of power; secondly, of clarifying the stakes of resistance. The meaningfulness of resistance remains under-theorized at this early stage. While Butler acknowledges that agency is radically conditioned, the affirmation that resistance is insuppressible

338 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 16

139 blocks the full appreciation of the conditionality, mutability and interdependent character of it (not to mention of life), and therefore the stakes of resistance do not refer beyond themselves. If resistance fails, it is not the conditions that support life and plural action that are imperiled, as the capacity for resistance (dissonance, errancy, productivity of norms) retains an insuppressible ontological priority over what it ceaselessly transforms. In short, in her early phase, Butler already recognizes that critical agency is conditioned, but she has yet to see that, more fundamentally, it is conditional. It is not only riven by power, and de-centered by the processes that bring it into being, it is also something whose exercise necessarily relies upon a fragile constellation of social and historical conditions and supports, whose disappearance threatens not only to withdraw the possibility of resistance but to imperil life itself.

6.3 Butler's Ex-Static Mediation

Of the numerous sources that Butler draws upon in her late work, the influence of Levinas and Foucault are perhaps most pronounced. Despite their significant differences, what these thinkers have in common is an acute sensitivity to the ways in which relations of dependency mark the inauguration of subjectivity, and the way this appreciation of the limits of subjectivity normatively frames the question of what it means to act as well as what is at stake not only in acting, but in confronting others. In the Pyschic Life of Power, drawing on Foucault's concept of assujetissement (subjectivation), Butler accounts for the process of subject formation as a paradoxical kind of folding in of relations of power in which "the very 'conditions of existence,' the possibility of continuing as a recognizable social being, requires the formation and maintenance of the subject in subordination."339 For Butler, to be "subjected" to mediating social conditions is not to be determined but to be constitutively decentered. Mediation, in this case, is not anchored in the (transcendental) subject, but comes about through a socio-historically dynamic process of subjection to norms that de-center subjectivity in the course of constituting it. This means that even self-relationality, including the possibility of sustaining one's material body in the social world, is "ex-static" or "ex-centrically" mediated.340 Each self is socially riven. As Butler puts it "one finds

339 Butler, The Pyschic Life of Power, 27 340 This conception of ex-static mediation is at work throughout Bernstein’s interpretation of Adorno. In Torture and Dignity this formulation is explicitly adopted where he writes that “one’s relation to one’s own body becomes something that is [socially, politically] mediated” (211).

140 that the only way to know oneself is through a mediation that takes place outside of oneself, exterior to oneself, by virtue of a convention or a norm that one did not make, in which one cannot discern oneself as author or an agent of one's making."341 Adorno, in Negative Dialectics, expresses a very similar idea in claiming that "Because there is no entity that does not have need of another entity which is not itself, through which it is determined and determines itself – since it could not be determined through itself alone – it points beyond itself. Mediation is just another name for this."342 Both reject the idea that agency is a purely active and self-constituting power. The historically sedimented conditions that are constitutive (though not determinative) of agency are inextricably entwined with the ongoing possibility of exercising agency. Just as socio- historically shaped norms that precede us, and that bring us into existence as social subjects place us 'outside ourselves,' the possibility of amending the norms that constitute us requires that we go outside ourselves, that is, that we engage with and against others in order to carve out an inhabitable – or livable – social existence. The transformation of value, in which something or someone becomes 'more' than what factually exists, does not require recourse to a higher or separate plane but comes about (if it does) through the uneven and contentious processes of social recognition, what Adorno refers to as 'mediation.' Butler's "radically conditioned form of agency" repudiates the divisions of Kantian autonomy, which seeks to separate out the transcendental ground of the (practical) 'self' in (pure) reason from the contaminating influences of (empirical) desire and external power. As Butler puts it, "power not only acts on a subject but, in a transitive sense, enacts the subject into being."343 This does not mean, however, that agency is an epiphenomenon of power relations that constitute it into being. Rather, it points towards the ambivalent status of the constitutive and constituting mediating conditions. The task of mediated praxis cannot be the impossible one of escaping its entanglement with power relations, but consists in the search to find ways, from within this entanglement, of unsettling, exceeding, and reworking the limitations of the opaque and dynamic norms that bring one into existence. In Butler's first formulations, the attempt to carve out a critical space of resistance from within this entanglement with power is possible only through a process of experimentation with the limits of that power, which is figured as the dissonant deployment of those norms or power

341 Butler, Giving An Account of Oneself, 28. 342 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 102. I have followed the translation used by Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (205). 343 Butler, The Pyschic Life of Power, 14.

141 relations. Following Foucault, power is not static or homogeneous, but exerts its effects in the course of deployment or reiteration. So, Butler reasons, if subjects are dependent on power relations and norms for their constitution, in turn, those relations and norms do not exist independently of those processes, which are themselves vulnerable to the dissonant, creative, and unpredictable change in the course of their reiteration. 'Agency,' for Butler at this stage, occupies the narrow space of the dissonant, nonmechanical repetition or performativity of norms, caught between the ambivalent and paradoxical role of power [mediation] as producing "modes of reflexivity at the same time as it limits forms of sociality," which is to say, "circumscrib[ing] the domain of a livable sociality."344 Even in the Psychic Life of Power, written in 1997, prior to her shift away from the affirmation of dissonant repetitions and hence before offering sustained attention to the normative weight of the variable mediations of conditional existence, she insists that "exceeding is not escaping, and the subject exceeds precisely that to which it is bound."345 While Butler acknowledges that the problem of agency must be firmly situated within the context of de-centering social mediatedness, at this point she has not yet strongly connected the vulnerability of the subject to power and the vulnerability of norms to dissonant reiteration with the material and corporeal stakes of bodies and populations that are vulnerable to mediating frames calibrating whether and to what extent they are worthy of 'livable life.' With Precarious Life (2004) and Giving and Account of Oneself (2005), Butler's work addresses itself to the task of making sense of the concrete stakes of counter-normative agency. Reflecting back on her account of the reiterative constitution of subjectivity in the Psychic Life of Power, Butler questions whether she overestimated the "punitive scene" of this constitution. She suggest that her assiduous attention to the subordinating aspects of power blinded her from registering that the stakes of this scene concern not only an "inaugurative" violence – the violence of being constituted in and through norms that limit and constrain possible modes of existence346 – but also one an originary vulnerability. This is not to suggest that Butler turns away from the constitutive role of power in constituting subjectivity, but that she begins to interpret the stakes of

344 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 22. 345 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 17. 346 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 28. At this stage, Butler treats the vulnerability of the subject to extrinsic norms primarily in terms of violence. She writes: "Vulnerable to terms that one never made, one persists always, to some degree, through categories, names, terms and classifications that mark a primary and inaugurative alienation in sociality. If such terms institute a primary subordination or, indeed, a primary violence, then a subject emerges against itself in order, paradoxically, to be for itself" (my emphasis).

142 this problem from a new angle. The terms regulating social recognition are no longer viewed as necessary but violent impositions that both open and constrain the boundaries of sociality, but are also viewed as the ex-static, decentering forms of (inter)relationality to which vulnerable life is necessarily and originarily exposed and dependent upon. My reading of Butler's 'turn' argues that she forfeits none of the insights from her early phases regarding the inherently differentiated, power-riven and contestable contours of ex-statically mediated social experience. The turn to vulnerable life, far from relinquishing these insights regarding the inherently contestable character of social formativity, in fact constitutes a response to a dissatisfaction with the way her early approaches construe the stakes of resistance. In order to substantiate this claim, the next section will analyze Butler's earlier work, in particular her account of Nietzsche in The Psychic Life of Power (PLP), in order to exhibit these stakes.

6.4 Reconstructing the Stakes of Butler's Early Account of Resistance

Reflecting back on the approach taken in the PLP, Butler suggests that she may have followed too closely to Nietzsche's account of the emergence of subjectivity – the historical fabrication of the 'soul' – which arose from the turning inward of the will-to-power and the formation of the circuit of 'bad conscience.' In the PLP what Butler keys on is the insight that "there is no formation of the subject without a passionate attachment to subjection."347 Bad conscience, for Nietzsche, refers to the historical process whereby the will to power, the "essence of life," subordinates its creative, forgetful, remorseless and "form-giving" expressions, and in re-directing this energy inward produces the 'fiction' of a selfsame or idealized self.348 Paradoxically, the emergence of subjectivity is simultaneously a self-immolation because the interiority and "burning in" of memory that constitutes 'bad conscience' functionalizes life, measuring its multiplicity and rich affectivity against a fabricated and 'fixed' standard such that the price of man's survival, his becoming "calculable, regular, necessary," is that "life itself becomes repugnant to him."349 Of course, Nietzsche does not simply oppose the cruelty and creativity of the affirmative will-to-power with the life-denying "negative ideals" that emerge with bad conscience. The latter, harbors its own

347 Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 67. 348 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 79. 349 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 58 and 67.

143 productivity in what Nietzsche refers to as "artist's cruelty," such that in the course of "imposing a form upon oneself," this "active 'bad conscience'" as the womb of all ideal and imaginative phenomena," is creative despite itself, occupying the place of both torturer and victim, taking delight in fabricating new expressions of self-cruelty.350 The fabrication of interiority, which was achieved through the slow and painful historical labour of imposing an ascetic and punitive memory, a life-denying fixed form, upon the multiplicitious series of drives and affects of creative life, was nonetheless a creative act opening up and refining the faculty for taste, subtlety, distinction and distance. Nietzsche's genealogical account of the origin of the "value of the unegoistic," of the morality that underwrites the emergence of the 'self', is intended to reveal the forgotten dimensions of power, self-preservation, violence and narcissism responsible for the transvaluation of weakness and ressentiment into ruling ideals. Butler admires Nietzsche's manner of grasping the problematic of subjectivity as a nexus of affectivity, desire, history, sociality, memory and forgetfulness, and in particular, for elucidating the dynamic whereby the self is constituted in the processing of desiring the power to which it is subjected. However, Butler criticizes Nietzsche for his failure to acknowledge the implications of his philosophy's own inextricable entwinement with the ideality he impugns for its life-denying morality. As Butler emphasizes, Nietzsche defines 'bad conscience …as the womb of all ideal and imaginative phenomena." Both the memory of bad conscience as well as the language that genealogically re-counts it, are of course, ideal and imaginative repetitions. The difficulty is that bad conscience – the imposition of a (self)subjugating form that brings the self into existence – is both itself something fabricated, but is also itself the condition of all fabrication.351 If this is so, Butler contends, the mediacy of Nietzsche's own genealogy, its narrative re-counting of the emergence of the possibility of (interior) narrative, collaborates with what it means to resist or expose (just as the internalization of cruelty that constitutes subjectivity, collaborates with the instincts that it comes to define itself against by taking satisfaction from self-renunciation).352 In genealogically narrativizing the violent historical transition from the 'clear conscience' of unregulated and creative life to the bad conscience of a fixed subjectivity "cut off once and for all

350 Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, 87. 351 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 76. 352 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 76-78.

144

[from] his own exit from this labyrinth of 'fixed ideas,' "Nietzsche's narrative 'unmasking' is simultaneously its 'remasking.'" For Butler, therefore, this disentanglement cannot be figured as a reversal or overcoming of the sedimented 'illness' of bad conscience [ideality] as such, much less as an overcoming undertaken by a singular figure. In this respect, Butler’s objection to Nietzsche echoes Bernstein’s charge of the aporetic incommensurability of autonomous creativity and existing, socially mediated life and community from chapter one: the drive to outstrip mediation renders Nietzsche’s aspirations incoherent, empty and unactualizable. Butler, foregrounding the mediacy of power and counter-normative (social) agency, speaks instead of "passionate de-regulation:" I want to suggest that, although there is no final undoing of the reflexive bind, that posture of the self bent against itself, a passionate de-regulation of the subject may perhaps precipitate a tenuous unravelling of that constitutive knot. What emerges is not the unshackled will or a 'beyond' to power, but another direction for what is most formative in passion, a formative power which is at once the condition of its violence against itself, its status as a necessary fiction, and the site of its enabling possibilities.353

Butler is critical of the socially and historically mediated violence that underwrites the morality of the 'will,' but not simply because the static and 'fixed' form of morality constricts the creativity of life. For Butler, breaking with Nietzsche, creativity is inextricably mediated by the life-denying ideality it resists. This does not mean that the critical and genealogical task of self- knowledge that Nietzsche sets himself at the outset of the Genealogy of Morals is futile, but that what is at stake is not a project of extrication from ideality, bad conscience or from subjection to inhibiting desires, but what we might refer to as the patient, difficult, and often fraught labour of working on the mediating conditions that constitute individuals and separate them from themselves. Creativity, beyond good and evil, can no longer serve as the criterion of autonomous praxis, rather, novel possibilities will have to be developed through immanent critique of the conditions stifling them. The attempt to (re)shape the conditions of one's own formativity, clearly, cannot be undertaken im-mediately, but requires entering into and engaging with the social circuitry of 'bad conscience', with the measure of sociality that divides the self from itself, and which acts not only as an impingement but as an enabling condition. This also means that the affects will harbour a different kind of counter-normative significance for Butler than they do for Nietzsche. When Butler speaks of "another direction for what is most formative in passion," she

353 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 66.

145 is not celebrating the sheer creativity of affective life, but is taking the points at which affective life and social formativity, despite their reciprocal conditioning, are found to (creatively) sustain socially riven subjectivity as a as a site of disabling subjection. Like Nietzsche, then, Butler seeks to "call into question the values of morality," yet not via a genealogical unmasking that seeks to extricate itself from the distorting or stultifying effects of constitutive mediation, but precisely by attempting to exploit the dissonant potential that inheres in all mediacy – the distance separating intention and effect – by experimenting with the creative (re)iteration of the constitutive norms of subjection in search of "a less regular freedom."354 At the stage of The Psychic Life of Power, then, Butler's position remains ambivalent or transitional. On the one hand, in attending to the socially riven scene of formativity she is opening up a framework for approaching the problem of critical praxis not as problem of stifled creativity, but as a problem of immanently (re)working the terms of one's social mediation. At this point, however, Butler has not yet made the structure of (inter)dependency – the preponderance of the object – a thematic element of the stakes of political praxis. Consequently, she falls back onto her account of dissonant (re)iteration in order to answer the following questions: 1) how it is possible to immanently rework the terms of mediacy? Butler's response, at this point, follows Derridean deconstruction which holds that mediacy is always already excessive, that is, the constitutive possibility of missing the mark (polyvalence) is the condition for the possibility of meaning hitting at all; 2) What is the meaning or stakes of counter-normative praxis? The inextricable entanglement of the impinging and enabling aspects of mediacy is such that a critical telos for praxis could not be towards the extrication from power or movement towards an ideal of transparent self- knowledge, but would involve a continual process of creatively experimenting with limits of formativity, not in order to gain sovereign control over them, but in order to engender the process formativity with a degree of pliability, which is to say, with a kind and latitude of freedom possible for socially mediated subjectivity. What remains ambivalent at this stage is: if (1) holds that mediacy is 'always already' excessive, then it becomes difficult to make sense of (2), the counter- normative significance of praxis. If the present conditions already contain the potential for their transformation, then does this not undermine the sense of what is wrong with the present, in other words, does his not already undermine what is at stake? Butler’s approach to politics thereby resembles Cavell’s perfectionism, discussed in the previous chapter, in that it situates itself upon

354 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 82.

146 the impossible and antominian interstice of possibility/impossibility, and thereby evades fully confronting the stakes (and conditions) of both. Somehow damaged life and praxial individuality, impossibly, are made to coincide. Butler’s early phase evades the problem of mediation in the opposite way as Nietzsche: rather than searching for a value beyond the ‘bad conscience’ of mediation, its non-identical structure is turned into its own solution. In the preface to The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche figures the problem of the value of values as one in which the "present was possibility living at the expense of the future."355 If, however, as her early account of dissonant repetition holds, that a measure of the future necessarily inheres in the present, separating it from itself (the differential structure of absent-presence), then the question arises, is this account of the future able to promise the transformation of the present or is it already part of what is blocking its realization (the perennial presence of what is absent, to-come)? Butler will only be able to offer a more precise sense to the counter-normative significance of praxis, to which she only implicitly gestures at this point, once she significantly qualifies her response to (1) in her later work. In the later work mediacy remains open to creative (re)visioning, with the difference that the political significance of this revisioning is explicitly put at stake, and where the (inter)dependent structure of that mediation – the exposure and reliance of ephemeral life upon differentially distributed social recognition – is what makes sense of its counter-normative significance.

6.5 Towards an Immanent Critique of Dissonant Repetition

The value of the immanent critique of accounts of political resistance predicated upon dissonant repetition, sketched out in the previous section, is not wholly negative. As with case of Adorno's reading of the phenomenological-existential philosophy of Husserl and Heidegger, the aim is to recover the historical experience sedimented in failed concepts of resistance, or what Adorno referred as failed "outbreaks," in order to inform an immanent account of resistance that would avoid running into similar difficulties.356 Sedimented in such conceptions of resistance is the expression of both the need for emancipatory social transformation and the hope for its possibility. However, this promise is simultaneously marked by resignation because of the way it links

355 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Preface (S6): 20. 356 Peter Gordon, Adorno and Existence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).

147 resistance to "dissonant repetition" and therefore closes off the possibility of that promise's emphatic or concrete realization in the socio-historical transformation of the very relation of resistance-subjection. The mediation of post-structuralist thought by its historical-political context shows through in the fact that, from one side, it criticizes the mechanical and reified reproduction of norms, concepts and forms of socially mediated subjectivity by exhibiting the (constitutive) possibility of errancy, deviance and dissonance internal to those processes. However, from the other side, by insisting on the insuperability of this dynamic and hence by concealing the historically variable character of the problem, reveals itself to be complacent and uncritical with regard to the patterns of social reproduction that it nonetheless claims to exceed. The immanent- critique of dissonant repetition, then, will reveal that the stakes of critical resistance cannot consist entirely in the preservation of an idea of practical novelty or spontaneity in the face of its declining social possibility. The resolute insistence upon the insuppressible possibility of dissonant, emergent, or novel practical effects, while sustaining the promise of change, betrays the realization of socio-historical change the moment it turns away from that context and by grounding possibility upon an ontological, quasi-transcendental or axiomatic conception of (trans)historical change or difference. It does not follow from the impossibility of grounding meaning upon some determinate standard or criteria that the 'insuppressible' performative excess – fugitive forms of praxis – will not be swallowed up, recuperated or ignored, in short, that it's claim will not remain socially ineloquent or non-identical. This is not to dispute the central discovery of dissonant repetition regarding the indeterminacy or contingency of praxis, but to make the point that foregrounding the open-ended possibility of reconfiguring the terms through which social appearance and significance is distributed is in no way incompatible with the socio-historical suppression and disavowal of the rationality potential of ephemeral life. Fugitive, ‘exorbitant’ claims, like Nora’s, do emerge, but they are mediated by the conditions they resist, damaged by their ineloquence or muteness, until the possibility of their being made successively is socially instituted – until the damaged social conditions are transformed. Indeterminacy, plurality and heterogeneity are integral elements to critical-creative praxis, but if these forces are celebrated as ends in themselves or are opposed to socio-historical mediation, rather than approached as one dimension of the praxial reworking of the terms of social mediacy, they threaten to degenerate into "anti-narrative device(s) prohibiting us from speaking our social identities, or their loss, by insisting that the social space

148 we share with others is no space at all, or, at least, there is nothing essential to our engagements with others that is intrinsically social."357 The task incumbent upon an account of critical resistance that would avoid this impasse, then, would be to offer a critical-historical narrative of the present that avoids automatic recourse to either fateful historical dynamics as well as to ontological sureties as the impossibility of historical closure. It should be recalled from chapter four that contemporary political theory largely objects to the use of historical narrativization as an key element of critique because history is itself constituted by the "moments that interrupt it."358 This constitutes, perhaps, the central distinction separating the primacy of praxis constellation from Adorno: where the former most often follows the Kantian path of (quasi)transcendental philosophy (the task being to show the conditions for the possibility of creative experience), and grounds both meaning and the possibility of politics upon the immanent force of (self)difference (dissonant repetition), but lacks (indeed actively resists) self-reflection on the historical experience sedimented in this philosophy, the latter "explicitly gives up the transcendental."359 What has been poorly understood is Adorno's reason for doing so. For Adorno, the trouble with (quasi)transcendental approaches, is that they address themselves to the question of how experience (or meaning, or politics) is possible. Adorno, by contrast, takes up a different problem from a different vantage. His approach is not transcendental but critical- reflective, and so he does not ask how experience is possible, but instead, how it has become damaged. One is bound to misunderstand Adorno's gesture unless this difference between (quasi)transcendental and self-reflective approaches is acknowledged; Adorno cannot answer the question as to conditions of the possibility of creative-differential experience. The claim that experience is damaged – and importantly for political theory, that praxis is impaired – is not an ontological thesis (and hence not predictive), but a (historically) self-reflective and ethical one. This is why Adorno openly concedes his philosophy of history harbors an "affinity to barbarism", insofar as it imposes a unifying narrative on the multifarious contents of history, and why the "acknowledgment of [this] complicity and guilt is the ethical gesture that makes critique possible"360 Adorno is not making a descriptive-predictive claim that critical-transformative experience is impossible, rather, he is attempting to bring into relief opaque yet exigent social

357 Bernstein, "Grand Narratives," 109. 358 Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 137. 359 Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 16. 360 Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 11.

149 problems through a series of models that invite us to acknowledge the social ineloquence of particularity, and to see this damage as inflicted historically. Adorno's critical-realism is often confused for pessimism. What I am suggesting here is that the impression of pessimism only arises if one already enters with the presupposition that it is the role of theory to demonstrate the possibility of substantive transformative praxis irrespective of the socio-historical conditions both supporting and calling for change. Adorno's critical project is centered upon the problem of how the sensible-particular yet rational claims of ephemeral life, as well as the conditions inhibiting and enabling (successive or routinized) political praxis, are socio-historically mediated. Much of Adorno's analyses focuses upon the systematic and institutional suppression of the rationality potential of the claims of particularity. If this is so, it is not because he denies the indeterminacy of history (i.e., that political or ethical claims grounded on particularity are impossible, for Adorno they are not impossible, but marginal or what Bernstein refers to as 'fugitive'), or that he "ascribes a fundamental essence to human beings," as Foucault mistakenly held.361 Rather, it is because Adorno, in order to properly elucidate the stakes of socio-historical mediation, held that it was necessary to acknowledge that the mediations of preponderant society can undermine the critical friction of subject and object – what he termed, oxymoronically, "universal mediation" – which can lead to the devastation and destruction of the value of human life on a massive scale. Adorno's work is a reminder that confronting historical indeterminacy requires not only attending to the creative potentiality of praxis, but also acknowledging the accompanying exposure of mediated social existence to damage and loss. In order to avoid succumbing to the impotent and resigned position of affirming nonconceptual particularity amidst its endangerment in rationalized modernity (which is a way of avoiding the problem of this entanglement362), as Adorno read in the philosophies of Bergson and Heidegger,363 it is necessary to resist the temptation to oppose difference or particularity to socio- historical mediation – to locate it in a secure and inviolable place outside or beyond mediation, in

361 Deborah Cook, "Adorno, Foucault and Critique," Philosophy and Social Criticism 39:10, 2013: 970. 362 As Freyenhagen notes, "Adorno was fond of saying, 'For nothing but despair can save us." By which Adorno meant that hope affirmed in the face of its withdrawal "makes us overlook the real despair of our social world and remain in the burning house because things are bound to get better. It is the latter hope that saps the motivation to resist, not negativism" (Living Less Wrongly, 224-225). 363 The basis of Adorno’s argument, reiterated throughout various works (Against Epistemology, Jargon of Authenticity, and Negative Dialectics), against early 20th century existentialism and ontology, is that the attempt to salvage concrete particularity only arises in the context of its pervasive historical decline – amidst wrong life – and that subsequent recourse to purportedly concrete-transcendent notions such as ‘being,’ ‘intuition,’ and ‘authenticity,’ as a result, “is itself [are themselves] reified” (Jargon of Authenticity, 6).

150 the vitality of life, in the essence of being, in the dissensual equality of speaking beings, or even in the quasi-transcendental structure of the (im)possibility of ideality itself – and instead to approach them as historically entwined. If particularity and socio-historical mediation are an entwined problematic, the meaning and stakes of their entwinement can neither be measured by the extrication of one from the other or by the collapse of one into the other (as post-structuralism attempts), but only upon the degree to which the creative-critical claims of the former can be made to bear on the latter, and where the real possibility of the blockage of this relation threatens destruction. If the promise of emancipatory transformation is to be linked directly to its responsiveness to the social-historical conditions that support (or damage) human life, among other things, the work of engaging in a critical-historical relation to the present must do so without any assurances that substantive ethical and political action will prove possible in the moments it is needed. This thought does not ignore or betray the central critical theory insight that 'things could be different'. Instead, it makes ethical (rather than ontological or transcendental) use of that thought in order to open up the space from which it becomes possible to acknowledge the present situation as exigently wrong (which is precisely what the affirmation that transformative change is possible covers over). This acknowledgement contains the promise of concrete transformation, insofar as it establishes the possibility of directly linking responsiveness to particularity (to the mattering of mute suffering), to a reason for acting in the world. It shows that other modes of attending to the world, and other motivations for acting are possible, but it falls short of demonstrating the ability of this promise to substantively challenge and transform existing hegemonic norms. It is not enough to uphold such singular and ephemeral 'models' of transformative action as adequate responses to the situation they aim to remake, unless critique resigns itself to its present rearguard and minoritarian position. Naturalizing the historical dynamic that continues to tear asunder the abstraction and universality of social and political norms from the non-identical particularities they conceal and disavow, the primacy of praxis constellation, in various ways, unreflectively discerns in this gap an affirmative thesis on the impossibility of (universalist) identities and narratives to enclose or represent without remainder. The detection of these remainders provides an important critique to political and ethical universalist approaches, yet the promise of this 'break out' is self- cancelling as soon as it is figured in (quasi)transcendental-ontological terms that happily vouchsafe the possibility of resistance by identifying it with the (false) universal's unavoidable production of

151 errancy, misrecognition and difference. The primacy of praxis occupies an impossible double stance, approaching the question of social mediation with both an overabundant skepticism – where norms and socio-historical representations are reduced to a reifying, constraining and representative roles – and an overabundant optimism, that confidently insists upon the "impossibility of closure."364 The problem with both positions is that in failing to regard the moments of dependency at play in social mediation as integral enabling components of plural agency (ephemeral life dependent on social recognition; social recognition dependent on the decentering norms) which when lacking not only undermine agency but life itself, the immanent stakes of mediacy are missed altogether, and the question of praxis is displaced onto the ancillary problem of (impossible, unactualizable, aporetic) change and creativity. The point, on the contrary, is to grasp these remainders both as damaged, and moreover, to grasp this damaged relation as socially and historically mutable. The affirmation of resistance loses sight of the stakes of this historical mutability, and thereby freezes the historical dynamic in the same moment it offers the possibility of change. The meta-critique of the primacy of praxis constellation, therefore, aims at restarting and restoring resistance that has come to a standstill. It is for the sake of what is marred and damaged, in ways that are inextricably corporeal and spiritual, but which nevertheless fail to stand our as normatively wronged, that critical political praxis cannot be solely predicated upon the episodic, creative, evental or performative moment of resistance, but must include a supplementary reflexive-critical gesture at the threshold of praxis.

6.6 (Mis)reading Butler's 'turn'

So far this chapter has attempted to elucidate Butler's (partial) turn to the problem of reconciliation through a reconstruction of the limitations of her early approach, by arguing, contra most interpretations, that this late turn renders her account more, not less, critical and better able to explain the stakes of political praxis. This section contributes to these dual aims through an analysis of three objections to Butler's latest work. Bonnie Honig, Ella Myers and Jodi Dean each offer unique criticisms of Butler's work, however their objections share the thought that the turn to the

364 As Aletta Norval puts it: “The centrality given to disagreement in the post-structural theorization of democracy arises directly from one of its basic ontological presuppositions, namely, the ‘impossibility of closure,’ of identity or structure” (Aversive Democracy, 39).

152 question of "livable life" is a misguided attempt to anchor politics upon a universalizing "extra- political" ethical "fact", and thereby seeks to evade the inherently unstable, agonistic and creative dimensions of politics. Butler's foregrounding of vulnerability, finitude and precarity, so the charge goes, constitutes a tearful and depoliticizing attempt to short-circuit the contestability of political appearances, and thereby amounts to a materialist-inflected liberal plea for tolerance. I take it that these readings reveal more about the critics than about Butler's late work, if, as I am claiming, her work is best thought of as taking up and developing Adorno's problem of reconciliation. What is missed by her critics, I argue, is Butler's reworking of the scope, complexity, and most importantly, conditionality of socially mediated existence. Where Butler's critics see her turn to "livable life" as reaching outside of the political fray for a universalizing ethical anchor, I argue, on the contrary, that far from having recourse to an extra-political value, Butler is in fact attending more closely and more critically to the contestable, differentially distributed field of social and political appearances. "Life" for Butler does not possess any intrinsic value or dignity outside of its dynamic and mutable social and political mediations. Lacking the material and recognitive supports necessary to sustain its (contestable) value, it is subject to withering, devastation, in short, to worthlessness. Life is not a banal, value-neutral, universal 'fact,' it is dynamic stake of politics. Furthermore, Butler's emphasis on the essentially ec-static, interdependent and supported character of life, and of the conditional or revocable character of these contestable and differentially distributed supports, in turn, contributes to revised conceptualizations of political agency. Butler's critics emphasize the plural, agonistic and generative character of political praxis – in other words, they each belong, uniquely, to what I have referred to in chapter one as the ‘primacy of praxis’ constellation. However, these elements constitute only a part of what Butler means in referring to the conditionality of political praxis. Acknowledgment of the fundamentally supported character of praxis, its' essential dependence and exposure to what lies outside of itself, leads Butler to consider the inextricable entanglement of agency with the conditions that both bring it into existence and which, in turn, demand transformation. Agency, for Butler, is neither reducible nor simply opposable to the conditions that both support and constrain its exercise. Political agency is conditional, therefore, in the further sense that the possibility of engaging in critical and transformative praxis is itself at stake. The refusal to acknowledge the revocable character of political praxis, that is, to accept the entanglement of agency and conditionality, necessarily results in the unwarranted presumption that

153 resistance is "always" possible, that it is 'insuppressible,' which is nothing other than the naturalization of resistance. Butler's critics object to the use of "life" in her work because it purportedly pierces the immanence of the cultural-political (dynamic and contestable) space of appearances in referring to a value that is extra-political. While the following will show that Butler in fact does not make recourse to any 'extra-political' values, it is a central claim of this project to demonstrate that political critique must nevertheless rely on something (a form of recognizing value or meaning) that is "not made" – what Adorno referred to as 'truth content.' The inability to recognize any form of political value or meaning aside from what culture imputes onto objects is what links the primacy of praxis to the dialectic of enlightenment, irrespective of the insistence that meaning is contingently produced, contestable and necessarily incomplete. On the contrary, for Butler and Adorno, life, its actual worldly value, is not separate or unaffected by the dynamic processes of social and political mediation, but it becomes irreducible to them if the damage these processes do to it become the measure of the change that is needed. Life for Butler, like non-identity for Adorno, is not a positive, extra-political value, but a critical measure of the present. That Butler's critics refer to life as a bald empirical 'fact' rather than a value saturated material stake testifies to the nominalistic separation of things and values that characterizes all cultural idealisms – the charge that Butler is imputing a value onto an essentially meaningless fact – which the primacy of praxis purports to overcome through its insistence on the instability, incompleteness and contestability of all appearances. Life is not an extra-political value, however, because it does not possess any intrinsic meaning outside of its socially-politically mediated appearance. Life can only become a critical measure of the present if its ineloquence – the non-recognition of suffering – provokes the recognition that when the source of all political valuation is socially-agonistically produced that such cultural-political formations, no matter how dynamic or 'open,' have mutilated precisely what would make them 'more' than mere socially mediated self-preservation: responsiveness to the material-particular dimension of both objects and others. In this way, 'life' is both an immanent concept, non-detachable from its present social- political valuation, and also transcendent or 'more' than what is present. Without what is non- identical to the political play of political appearances, the stakes of resistance are confined to an

154 agonism that never escapes its own skeptical-nominalistic force-field.365 This is what Butler means when she claims that "To think critically about how the norm of the human is constructed and maintained requires we take up a position outside of its terms...that cannot be adequately addressed by any obligatory definition of human nature."366 The 'outside' is not, as her critics will charge, extra-political, ethically de-politicizing, factual, or universal-ideal, but constitutes an immanent measure of the present that breaks through the closed immanence of existing meanings of the human on the strength of the recognition of the damage done to it. The inability of Butler's critics to grasp her problematic demonstrates, I argue, a fundamental critical flaw of political theories predicated upon the idea of the primacy of (contestable) appearances. Butler's turn to the problem of livable life, on the other hand, follows Adorno's turn to the 'priority of the object.' The failure to take account of the conditionality of life and praxis, to acknowledge the limits and dependencies of what aspires to creative-critical change, is to confine the stakes and meaning of politics exclusively to the problem of differential mediation of political power and appearances, and to fall prey to the naturalization of resistance. Before proceeding to substantiate the claims laid out so far in this section, I will turn to collecting the objections directed at Butler's late work. Honig launches two central criticisms at Butler's "new humanism." Firstly, she claims that Butler starts out from the "ontological fact of mortality," and aspires to have the ethical acknowledgment of this fact serve as a means of "bypassing the intractable divisions of politics" and so to arrive safely on the ground of a "mortalist humanist" universalism.367 Honig objects to the separation of natural 'fact' and cultural value in Butler's reading. She argues that "we need to deconstruct the binary of death and burial in which death is said to be the univocal, natural and universal fact that undergirds burial, which varies by culture and is constructed."368 This first objection, the separation of fact and value, is linked to her next objection in a way that Honig fails to fully appreciate. Honig rightly claims that Butler's purported extra-political ethics is "implicated in the political divisions it aims to transcend."369 In rejecting the extrinsic universalism of finitude and in insisting upon the necessarily immanent and

365 The dynamic or differential antagonism/agonism of post-foundational political theory, whereby socially constructed identities or representations are performatively contested by the irreducible subjects of practice they purport (but nevertheless fail) to delimit, in this way repeats the nominalism (that there is no objective content/reality to which concepts refer) for which Adorno criticized positivism. 366 Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, 42 367 Honig, "Antigone's Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism," 1. 368 Honig, "Antigone's Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism," 9. 369 Honig, "Antigone's Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism," 1.

155 contestable quality of political appearances, Honig aims to displace Butler's "mortalist humanism" with an "agonistic humanism." The latter, Honig explains, is "not centered on mortality and suffering" but upon" natality and pleasure," and thereby "points in the direction of generative action rather than ruminative reflection or ethical orientation."370 Honig's second objection is that the attempt to foreground the material-dependent aspects of existence fails because it is unable to account for perhaps the essential element of politics: the creative generation, contestation and revision of political meaning. In developing this line of criticism, Honig contrasts Butler's reading of Levinas with Rancière's account of political appearances. In Precarious Life, Butler provides an interpretation of Levinas' account of the face of the other. There, Butler writes that: "there is a 'face' which no face can fully exhaust, the face understood as human suffering, as the cry of human suffering, which can take no direct representation. Here the 'face' is always a figure for something that is not literally a face."371 Honig, following Rancière, objects to what she interprets as the positing of the exposed face of the other as an inexhaustible source of ethical meaning situated outside and prior to the political (immanent, contestable) space of appearances. She questions, rhetorically, "what is this preceding and limiting substratum of sonorisity?" For Honig, following Rancière's repudiation of ideology critique, there can be no substratum, foundation or sphere outside of the dynamic and immanent play of appearances, and therefore "rejects the idea that there is any external, common or private referent for language."372 The repudiation of any 'outside' to political appearances does not lead in the direction of positivist stagnation because Honig, once again following Rancière, cites the "excessiveness of language, what Rancière calls its 'literarity.'" The present distribution of political values and meanings is open to change because these distributions are arrayed in contingent and inegalitarian manners, and therefore are subject to contestation where dissidents do not refer mournfully to their dependencies and vulnerabilities, but performatively change their political condition by making "a new kind of sense," in short, by creatively and dissensually appropriating and making use of the forms of political speech that the dominant order had identified as impossible. To summarize Honig's objections, then, she claims that Butler problematically invokes a separation between natural fact and cultural and political meaning, and

370 Honig, "Antigone's Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism," 4, 9. 371 Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2006): 144. 372 Honig, "Antigone's Two Laws: Greek Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism," 4.

156 that this, secondly, precludes her from offering an account of the generative dimension of political praxis, which Honig, following Rancière, claims is immanent to the ('excessnessiveness') of political appearances in the form of the performative appropriation of language. In her Worldly Ethics Ella Myers casts a similar set of criticisms at Butler's late work, though her arguments are informed by a neo-Arendtian perspective. Like Honig, Myers detects a problematic separation of natural fact and cultural value in Butler's ethics, which aims at side- stepping the contestable sphere of politics through the ethical call to recognize the universality and commonality inherent in the "fact" of finitude and vulnerability. Myer's critique of Butler focuses upon what she refers to as the "is-ought" problem whereby the latter purportedly shifts from fact to meaning, in short, that an "unjustified assertion that a specific truth about the world compels the pursuit of a particular normative end: injurability 'imposes an obligation on us.'"373 Myer's reading, premised on the notion of the separation of materiality and meaning, is then able to claim that this illegitimate slippage from fact to norm is neither as materialist nor 'open to otherness' as it claims to be, but is "tied to recognition of the indisputable fact about human experience, in all times and places."374 In other words, Myers claims that, contrary to appearances, Butler's ethics relies on the link between the banal fact of the universality of human finitude and the normative universality of the ideal of injurability. By tethering fact to normative ideal, Butler not only illegitimately sidesteps the contestability of political appearances, following Levinas she "erases particularity, turning the other into the representative of a general case."375 The attempt to ground the meaning of politics upon something 'outside' the worldly space of appearances, Myers contends, backfires because it is inherently de-politicizing in that it sidesteps the associative, plural, disputative, contingent and open character of worldly politics by imposing an extrinsically derived (universal and therefore supposedly uncontestable) values whose authority is premised on its purported ability to close or fix the gap separating appearances (finitude) from meanings (vulnerability) upon which all genuinely political action relies (in the form of making 'judgments' on disputable common objects). Myers does not object to Butler's interest in the precariousness of socially mediated existence but to her "assigning humankind a political project" on the basis of this 'fact.' Myers momentarily acknowledges that, unlike Levinas, Butler does emphasize the "social

373 Myers, Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013): 79. 374 Myers, Worldly Ethics, 79. 375 Myers, Worldly Ethics, 78.

157 conditions that shape relations between subjects," and therefore does not entirely avoid the issue of the historically and politically contestable worldly space of appearances. To this extent, Myer's seems to implicitly recognize that the category of ethical deliberation in Butler, drawing in this respect upon Adorno, is "bound up with the operation of (social and political) critique," which "establishes a critical point of departure for an analysis of the social conditions under which the human is constituted and deconstituted."376 This acknowledgment, which would seem to call into question her initial charge that Butler's ethics is premised upon the separation of fact and meaning, is not seriously pursued. Instead, Myer's concludes that despite the ostensible aim to "reconcile ethics and politics," that Butler, out of her "despair" with democracy ultimately grounds her ideal of political community upon the "extra-political" ethical truth of injurability. Like Honig, for Myers there can be no 'outside' to the political space of appearances. What differentiates Myer's account from Honig's, however, is the way in which she affirms the openness and generativity of the space of appearances. While the latter referred to Rancière's conception of the excessiveness of egalitarian literarity, Myer's offers a reworked Arendtianism in which "common and disputed object(s) inspire democratic projects and draw citizens into relations of support and contestation with one another."377 Finally, Jodi Dean, from a perspective that may be described as post-structurally inflected Marxism, too claims that Butler's "ethical sensitivity is purchased at the cost of politics."378 Like Honig and Myers, Dean reads Butler's "ethical turn" as an attempt to sidestep the "condemnation and conviction" requisite for committed and partisan political action. Butler's account of the "structure of address", which points up the constitutively decentred, dependent and ex-posed character of subjectivity, is intended to open up the acknowledgment of the "way we are given over to others" in order to provide "new bases for 're-imagining the possibility of community.'"379 Butler's account of the structure of address attempts to combat conceptions of subjectivity that foreground activity, agency and sovereignty while disavowing (inter)dependency, a process which she claims underlies the legitimitization of the differential distribution of the exposure to precarity characteristic of most modern liberal-capitalist societies.

376 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 8, 105. 377 Myers, Worldly Ethics, 14. 378 Dean, "Change of Address: Butler's Ethical Sovereignty's Deadlock," Judith Butler's Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers, eds. New York: Routledge, 2008:109. 379 Dean, "Change of Address: Butler's Ethical Sovereignty's Deadlock," 113.

158

In analyzing the structure of address, Butler is attempting to acknowledge the constitutive character of the moments of (inter)dependency that are often suppressed, forgotten or rendered tangential or accidental in the accounts of subjectivity that come to shape and inform the dominant social and political norms. Butler argues that subjectivity is neither individual nor self-sufficient, but is rather a social achievement, whereby the subject emerges through the normatively saturated process of being subjected to the address or call of the other. The recognition of oneself as a subject, and as possessing normative worth bound up inextricably with other's recognition of one's own material boundaries, is a process that decenters subjectivity by placing social mediation, the political and historical sedimentation of norms, and embodied materiality at the center of the meaning of 'agency.'380 The problem with Butler's ethical turn, Dean urges, is that while it purports to be grounded upon responsiveness to (material) otherness, in the sense of the subject's constitutive and vulnerable exposure to the other, that it nevertheless imposes an idealizing ethical frame upon the de-centering movement of the 'structure of address" that emphasizes an abstract and depoliticizing depiction of "our common place, our common risks, our common limits" that undercuts the necessarily antagonistic, committed and partisan qualities required for genuinely transformative forms of political action.381 Dean advanced this line of criticism prior to Butler's more recent work, which more explicitly emphasizes the political dimensions or "differential distribution" of precarity than is present in Giving an Account of Oneself (2003). Despite that works substantial, though ambivalent, treatment of Adorno, Butler admittedly courts the charge of an idealizing ethical frame by flirting with formulations of the ec-static and constitutively dependent character of subjectivity that stray too far from Adorno's negativism – which uses immanent critique to recognize material-particular sources of meaning that have become ineloquent – and thereby risks becoming conflated for positive ideals. In Precarious Life, for example, Butler writes: "Mindfulness of this vulnerability can become the basis of claims for non-military political solutions, just as denial of this vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery can fuel the instruments of war."382 Such formulations invite the charges that we have seen from Butler's critics, by presenting the structure of constitutive (inter)dependence as if it is either fact capable of being transparently recognized, or as if it

380 Butler, Precarious Life, 26. 381 Dean, "Change of Address: Butler's Ethical Sovereignty's Deadlock,"125. 382 Butler, Precarious Life, 29.

159 possessed a positive critical value or meaning, apart from the existing terms of social mediation, upon which it would be possible to criticize those norms and practices. As I argued in chapter four, there can be no ‘mindfulness’ of the problem of reconciliation as such – hence the failure of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. There can only be determinate negations of wrong life – fugitive actions whose truth-content is grounded upon the objectivity of damaged particularity, not general ideals, that change the social conditions in specific ways, by transforming speechless suffering into determinate norms – as detailed in the chapter five’s discussion of #MeToo. In order to respond to these objections, it is not sufficient to point to the numerous places in her work where Butler explicitly claims that vulnerable life is not an invariable ontological or existential condition, is not a 'fact,' but, on the contrary, is a stake of politics, is entangled and inextricable from its social-historically mediating conditions, and therefore is not in any way separable or prior to them. For example, the clear statements that "we are already within the political when we think about transience and mortality,"383 or "the capacity to respond to a face as a human face is conditioned and mediated by frames of reference that are variably humanizing and dehumanizing," 384 or most directly, "we cannot posit vulnerability prior to recognition."385 It is not sufficient because her critics may allow that Butler attends to specific social-historical contexts in her analysis, but the substance of their objection concerns how she endows her concept of "life" with the meaning and importance she claims for it, and they all suspect that she does so not through immanent analysis of social-historically specific contexts but through a problematic form of existential generalization.386 In order to effectively counter these objections, therefore, it will be necessary to demonstrate that Butler's use of the concept of vulnerable life does not rely upon the generalizability of an existential condition, but instead, as with Adorno's conception of natural- historical experience, links the particularity of mutable social and political mediations to the particularity and transience of forms of (human animal) life that maintain themselves through such social-political forms. In the remainder of this section I will return to a moment in Butler's argument that all of the three critics identified as problematic, namely, her discussion of Levinas and his account of "the face of the other." I will show that, contra her critics, Butler's discussion

383 Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, 42. 384 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 29 385 Butler, Precarious Life, 42. 386 In addition to the author’s treated in this chapter, this is also the position of Vasquez-Arroyo, who argues that Butler’s conception of responsibility is “embedded in ethics as first philosophy, thus prior to political life” (Political Responsibility, 145).

160 of the Levinasin face of the other does not gesture towards a substratum of ethical meaning prior or separable from political appearances, nor one based upon generalization, but, like Adorno's discussion of the "language-character" of art aims at the critical recovery of the rationality potentiality of material particularity – the social eloquence of suffering – in the face of mediations that obscure and damage such claims. The subsequent two sections will conclude the chapter by developing the link between Butler's conception of vulnerable life and Adorno's approach to the problem of reconciliation.

6.7 The Language-Character of Suffering: From Levinas to Adorno “it is no longer conceivable, as the bourgeois view of language maintains, that the word has an accidental relation to its object, that it is a sign for things (or knowledge of them) agreed by some convention” “the language of things...insofar as it communicates itself, communicates itself in language” – Walter Benjamin 387

In claiming that she illegitimately transmutes an invariable existential fact into an universalizing ethical-normative value, Butler's critics are not only misreading the way in which she conceives of the link between life and social-political recognition, they are in fact reproducing the style of thought she is contesting. First of all, if Butler's argument was grounded on the universal and invariable qualities of vulnerability, which are to be taken as prior to politics and therefore beyond contestation, and which could then be held up as a positive and identifiable value prior to engaging in concrete worldly praxis, then the question arises: why would Butler take such care to discuss the difficulty of recognizing and responding to such an easily identifiable ethical norm? She does, I argue, precisely because vulnerable life is not a invariable and positive normative ideal in her work, but is inextricably entangled with social-politically mediated appearances – it is non- identical or speechless. If I am correct in my claim that Butler's late work takes up Adorno's problem of reconciliation, then in response to being charged with grounding the critical-normative authority of vulnerable life on its common 'factual' quality it is necessary to recall latter's aphorism "the barbaric is the literal." To be clear, entanglement does not refer to the mixing up of two separable things, nature and culture, in a way that merely prohibits clear delineation. Beyond this, entanglement refers to the fact that what is natural in human beings – their animal-material embodiment – can only maintain itself through the mediation of social-political norms of

387 Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” 324, 318.

161 recognition, and more importantly, the latter can only rise above self-preservation in recognizing its dependency and entanglement with nature. The subject, qua object, is constitutively mediated, beyond all im-mediacy. The question of responsiveness to vulnerability is presented as an important and challenging issue in Butler's work precisely because vulnerability is for her not reducible to a positive universalizing ideal or common fact – an immediacy – because both of these modes of recognition (universal ideal, bald empirical fact) are already mediated in such a way that they discount or abstract from the material-particularity of the specific case and therefore miss out on the kind of responsiveness Butler is gesturing towards. Responsiveness to non-identity cannot be predicated on generalization, because generalization is already a form of mediation that annuls the intrinsic claim of what is particular in it. Such receptivity, therefore, must be entangled with vulnerability in the dual sense that requires establishing a tenuous link between the fragility of the objectivity of the fugitive claim – its bindingness upon another – to the social and material vulnerability of the object – the capacity for transient truth to make an impression – without which both life and social recognition wither. She writes: "All responsiveness to what happens is a function and effect of vulnerability – of being open to a history, registering an impression, or having something impressed upon one's understanding."388 It is not the cultural (normative) recognition of a meaningless empirical fact, in which case the division between culture (meaning) and nature (fact) is maintained, but a form of recognition that acknowledges the limitations and dependencies of culture by acknowledging that not all normative value comes from what is active, independent, in short, from pure culture but that mute nature can become eloquent so long as the claim of material particularity can make its way into our social norms – by way of the dis-closure of damaged particularity. Critical responsiveness to vulnerability cannot, however, directly perceive this as a fact without re-introducing the very division of nature-culture it aspires to reconcile (which is not the same as identify, equalize or harmonize), or, as chapter four demonstrated, without occupying the antinomian interstice of perfectionism. Therefore, it must proceed through the critique of the existing society and its politically mediated recognition of vulnerability, in short, by dis-closing the ways in which the existing differential distribution of norms, institutions and social resources are complicit with the production of speechless suffering and the unsayable stifling of political possibilities. Butler writes that "By insisting on a 'common' corporeal vulnerability, I may seem to

388 Butler, Notes Towards a Theory of Performative Theory of Assembly, 149.

162 be positing a new basis for humanism...but I am prone to consider this differently. A vulnerability must be perceived and recognized in order to come into play in an ethical encounter, and there is no guarantee that this will happen." She continues, "if vulnerability is one precondition for humanization, and humanization takes place differently through variable norms of recognition, then it follows that vulnerability is fundamentally dependent on existing norms of recognition if it is to be attributed to any human subject."389 Recognition of the impressibility and vulnerability of others – that subjectivity is constitutively decentered by its dependence on others, on the opaque and irrecoverable sedimentation of inherited norms, and on the recognition of their material vulnerability – all of this is fragile and revocable because reliant on the social, historical and politically diverse distribution of norms Vulnerability cannot function as a either a positive ideal or fact in Butler because it is dependent upon variable and historically given norms of recognition. It neither transcends cultural context nor refers to an indifferent fact. It is, on the contrary, at stake in concrete practice – meaningless outside or beyond this context – and without any assurance of its coming to be recognized. The vulnerability to which Butler refers is non-identical: ineloquent, fugitive, and transient – its claim is binding but fragile, reliant on the particularity of the disclosure it betokens. The particular texture of the disclosure – what Adorno referred to as ‘style’ – is inseparably entwined with the authority of its claim: it is this link between the dis-closure of non- identical particularity and the acknowledgment of the need for change that makes this variant of critique, paradoxically, simultaneously a discovery and a creation, both receptive and spontaneous. Butler links the variability of cultural norms, open to change and political contestation, to the transiency and ephemerality of life in order to develop a critical and "non-relativistic evaluation of something which has come to be historically."390 Diverse, heterogenous and contested cultural and political norms are not meaningful on account of their universality, nor, as the model of dissonant repetition implies, is this meaning ineluctably subject to alter-ation and change at each iteration. Rather, it is through the institution (or reactivation) of norms constructed out of the achievements of fugitive politics – the transformation of speechless suffering into successive sayability – that life becomes livable, and however marginally, individuality is enabled. While there is no positive set of norms by which to

389 Butler, Precarious Life, 42. 390 These are the terms Simon Jarvis uses to describe Adorno's conception of natural-historical experience in Adorno (109).

163 measure what constitutes a livable life, it is possible to criticize the failure of such recognition, which threatens to expose life to (physical) devastation and (normative) worthlessness, or to condemn fugitive politics to oblivion. Failing to recognize the vulnerability of life and praxis, its dependence and entanglement with norms that are all too often unresponsive to what is non- identical (non-generalizable), the meaning of cultural and political activities remains entrapped in their own immanent sphere; life that lacks the material and recognitive supports withers, becomes unlivable, decays and perishes. For Butler, the entanglement of nature (life) and culture (politically mediated appearances) does not refer to the mixing up of two separate and distinct elements, but the (vulnerable, fallible, revocable) acknowledgment of the preponderance of the object – of society as the mode through which transient life is sustained and perpetuated – in what has too often understood itself as self through the disavowal of this dependency. Both the subject and the terms that variably regulate political interpedendency are historical achievements, that simultaneously (though often not deliberately) recognize, suppress, respect, forget and disavow the material-natural moment which does not exist independently of these supports. Hence Adorno writes: "Nature itself is transitory. Thus it includes the element of history. Whenever an historical element appears it refers to the natural element that passes away within it."391 The passage of Butler's that has attracted the most scorn from her critics centers on her interpretation of Levinas's account of "the face of the other". In many ways this passage, with its oblique reference to what lies beyond representation, courts the misunderstandings it has prompted. The discussion of Levinas occurs in the context of Butler's account of the "structure of address." Butler opens the chapter by claiming that "The structure of address is important for understanding how moral authority is introduced and sustained if we accept not just that we address others when we speak, but that in some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being addressed, and something about our existence proves precarious when that address fails."392 Once again we see Butler referring to the problematic and revocable character of vulnerability not as an ideal or fact, but as the fragile but meaning-constituting (or revoking) stake of praxis. Butler then turns to an interpretation of Levinas's account of the face of the other in order to "explain how it is that others make moral claims upon us, address moral demands to us, ones that we do not ask

391 Adorno, "The Idea of the Natural-History," 120. 392 Butler, Precarious Life, 130.

164 for, ones that we are not free to refuse."393 At this point Butler offers a characterization of the structure of address that leads many of her critics to erroneously conclude that ethics is extrinsic to the contestable sphere of socially-politically mediated appearances. Levinas writes: "The face says to me you shall not kill. In relation to the face I am exposed as an usurper of the place of the other."394 Butler notes that the "face, strictly speaking, does not speak," and that if it manages to serve as the basis for signification, that it is "a speech that does not come from a mouth."395 Struggling to express the route through which the fragile significance of vulnerable life comes to pierce the immanence of socially mediated appearances, Butler writes: "The face, if we are to put words to its meaning, will be that for which no words really work; the face seems to be a kind of sound, the sound of language evacuating its sense, the sonorous substratum of vocalization that precedes and limits the delivery of any semantic sense."396 It is not difficult to see why Honig, Myers and Dean get the impression that vulnerability is prior and extrinsic to the sphere of contestable political appearances – Butler here explicitly refers to a ‘substratum’ beyond discursive signification. If it "precedes and limits" the social sphere of "semantic sense," as Butler suggests, it is difficult to understand what kind of relation this vulnerability holds with respect to politics other than as a bald empirical fact or an ideal extrinsic to the whirl of political life. The manner in which Butler links the empirical ("injurability") and the normative ("prohibition against killing") remains unclear in this passage. The indexing of empirical and normative remains opaque until Butler clarifies that what links them is the dis-closure of the failure of existing norms – the Hegelian insistence that the ‘essence must appear’ – which reveals or exposes the precarity and dependence of in-essential life upon its politically mediated recognition. Butler argues that "there is a 'face' which no face can fully exhaust, the face understood as human suffering, as the cry of human suffering, which can take no direct representation." She continues, "For Levinas, then, the human is not represented by the face. Rather the human is indirectly affirmed in that very disjunction that makes representation impossible."397 What remains opaque in Butler's account, and is only gestured toward, is the status of this disjunction between vulnerability and social- politically mediated appearances, and in particular the manner in which vulnerability is

393 Butler, Precarious Life, 131. 394 Butler, Precarious Life, 132. 395 Butler, Precarious Life, 133. 396 Butler, Precarious Life, 134. 397 Butler, Precarious Life, 144.

165 unrepresentable or inexhaustible. Butler's critics can be forgiven for assuming that "the face of the other" constitutes an unrepresentable ethical positivity lying beyond or outside the contestable and profane sphere of culture and politics considering the emphasis she places on the "limits" and "failure" of the face to be represented, but there are good reasons for avoiding this conclusion, and an alternative interpretation that makes sense of this "disjunction." The "disjunction" that Butler identifies in Levinas between vulnerability and its mediated representation is far less substantial than her critics seem to suppose, such that it would be possible to ground ethical authority upon its priority or separability from its mediated appearance. If there is a disjunction between vulnerability and its socially mediated representation, it does not follow that this vulnerability cannot be expressed in an objectively binding manner and serve as a motivation for praxis. In order to understand how this is possible one might look to what Adorno referred to as the "language character" of art, a concept he borrows and modifies from Benjamin’s notion of the “language of things.”398 The transition here from Levinas to Adorno is not obvious, but makes sense given that the both are concerned with addressing both the socially damaged capacity of non-identical nature to become expressible at the level of social norms, and in this way with the difficulty of recovering acknowledgment of mute suffering. Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory that "If the language of nature is mute, art seeks to make this muteness eloquent."399 The ineloquence of damaged nature is not structural, but a condition that has become socially and historically. Furthermore, Adorno sees the task of aesthetics – the domain that links materiality and rationality – not as representing or identifying nature, or even making nature eloquent, but as making its muteness eloquent. This is because Adorno, like Butler, does not hold that nature or suffering harbors any positive normative value in-itself apart from its social-historical mediation, and hence aims to make what has become of nature (its muteness or normative irrelevance), not 'nature' itself, eloquent. How do artwork's make their own muteness eloquent? Jarvis explains that "Materialist aesthetics insists that works of art add up to 'more' than their production or reception by a human subject. Yet it can hardly present them as objects entirely independent of such subjects."400 This entanglement of the materiality of the artwork and mediation of it by subjects

398 Adorno, in Aesthetic Theory writes: “Artworks move toward a language of things only by way of their own language, through the organization of their disparate elements; the more they are syntactically articulated in themselves, the more eloquent they become in all their elements,” (140). Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” 318. 399 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 78. 400 Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, 102.

166 offers a clue to discerning the puzzle of Butler's interpretation of Levinas. What makes an artwork 'more' than mere empirical object – a 'fact' – is the artwork's "language character," that is, that the "empirical elements are cast into a meaningful configuration."401 What makes this configuration meaningful is not the intentions of either the artist nor those imposed on the work by the spectator, rather, for Adorno, the "rationality" of the artwork consists in the possibility that the material components of the artwork are able to offer a form of rationality – a non-subsumable claim – that is non-detachable and intrinsic to their sensual particularity. This rationality is not amenable to positive identification or representation, hence the non-narrative and abstract quality of modern art, but consists in the determinate negation of what has become of particularity: its muteness or meaninglessness in everyday social and political life. The "truth content" of artworks, for Adorno, "cannot be something made," despite the fact that artworks are cultural products. The 'truth' of an artwork does not refer to a higher essence or timeless ideal and "is not outside history, but is history's [negative] crystallization in the works." This illuminates Butler's account of unrepresentability in Levinas and her remark that "for representation to convey the human, representation must not only fail, but it must show its failure."402 It is not, as her critics presume, that representation must fail because the ethical call of otherness is inexhaustible and prior to politics, but on the contrary, that because of their entanglement that vulnerability, as with the truth- content of artworks, is "subject to obsolescence, decay and death like anything else historical," and hence its fragile meaningfulness can only appear in the moments when social-politically mediated appearances demonstrably fail to support it.403 The 'unrepresentability' of the face of the other does not, therefore, suggest that ethics is grounded in a domain outside or beyond the fray of political life, but merely that this exposure and vulnerability cannot be "represented" as a positive and remainder-less identity. Butler keys on the moment of the "disjunction" or "failure" of the human to appear because, lacking any positive or representative ideal, the sensual-material particularity of life can only appear from under its heavily mediated social appearances in those moments where its social mattering – the way human animal lives count – leaves such life exposed to violence, in and decay. Butler refers to this failure, what Adorno calls non-identity, as the "de-realization of loss." She writes that "the insensitivity to human suffering and death – becomes the mechanism

401 Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, 102. 402 Butler, Precarious Life, 144. 403 Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, 105.

167 through which dehumanization is accomplished. The derealization takes place neither inside nor outside the image, but through the very framing by which the image is contained."404 What is important in this linkage in not primarily the 'fact' of life's vulnerability and transiency. Rather, it is the demonstration that our norms and values are themselves subject to 'obsolescence' and decay, that they are not timeless. On the contrary, norms become lifeless the moment they are detached and unresponsive to the life they cannot help but mortify in the very moment of its 'representation'. Without the acknowledgment that such "dis-identification is part of the common practice of identification itself," social and political norms will 'naturally' forget this materialist moment, and mattering will come to be identified solely with what cultural and political contestation impute to things and people.405 To address the second objection that its launched at Butler, namely, that her turn to ethical life is unable to account for the generative and creative elements of politics, we can see from the previous discussion that far from stagnating in 'ruminative reflection' her approach places the materialist moment of normativity at the basis of creative-critical political change. On the contrary, where political change that is not intrinsically linked to such materialist moments – where the failure of norms exhibits their suppressed and forgotten materialist dimensions in the suffering they occasion – and where it expresses the 'pleasurable' natality and generativity of human praxis, as this dissertation has argued, the meaningfulness of such change becomes inscrutable, valuable 'in-itself' or for its own sake, and hence detached from the historical conditions such change seeks to transform.

6.8 Butler's Inheritance of the Reconciliation Problematic

Butler's work, as Coole notes, does not explicitly undertake any such immanent critique of her post-structuralist inheritances – in fact, as we will see, the shift in her late work only partially works out these problems. However, the trajectory of her work is marked by an attempt to re-think the ontological residues of dissonant repetition as they would appear from the perspective of their socio-historical mutability. In other words, Butler's later work has married the conception of performativity, with its emphasis on the conditioned yet productive iteration of power, with an

404 Butler, Precarious Life, 148. 405 Butler, Precarious Life, 146.

168 increasing appreciation for the conditional character not only of resistance but of life, that is, on the differential distribution of material supports and social mediations that sustain and make possible the continuing social-material valuation of life. This shift changes the meaning of performativity. As Butler moves further away from her early framing of the problem of resistance, and towards the problem of reconciliation, there is, to be sure, no less of an emphasis on the dynamic, contestable, and socially differentiated operations of power. What begins to change is how Butler conceives of the stakes of critical resistance. The problem is no longer how to salvage a figure of critical resistance from within the constitutive matrix of power relations, that is, to find "a less regular freedom."406 The emphasis becomes less on demonstrating how the operation of power necessarily and inevitably produces opportunities for immanent resistance, and more upon thinking through how and why counter-normative or critical praxis matters. Her analyses includes an additional moment, no longer only consisting of the disclosure of the unintentional effects of power, the crevices or interstices through which new possibilities may be breached, but also now explicitly reflecting upon the truth-content of the fugitive, marginal and ex-posed. In attending more closely to the question of why politics matters – what difference fugitive practice makes – Butler simultaneously becomes more sensitive to the damage effectuated by its absence, failure or forgetting, hence her concern with the purportedly ethical/anti-political questions of mourning, precarity and vulnerability. It is not surprising, then, that Butler's later work is informed by more concrete analyses of social and political phenomena, and that the negativity of these analyses becomes less abstract ("a less regular freedom,") and that the articulation of critical resistance comes to be intrinsically and substantively linked to the particularity of phenomena they analyze (i.e., the linking of performativity to situations of mounting precarity). Samuel Chambers would dispute this characterization of the shift in Butler's work, as he argues that the turn to "what Honig calls Butler's 'mortalist humanism' serves as a general (Hegelian) philosophical position," that sacrifices the immanent analysis of social formation in favour of a benign and politically complacent emphasis on finitude and a liberal call for the egalitarian recognition of that condition. While there are moments in Butler's later work, where, straying too from the negativism that Adorno rigorously held to, this critique may hold some truth, it largely misses the mark, as the final section will

406 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 7, 82.

169 argue.407 Complaints such as those lodged by Chambers are problematic because they impute to Butler's position precisely what she is calling into question: that there is a universal condition of (natural) finitude that exists prior to the social-political mediation, and whose proper recognition would serve to combat unnecessary violence and antagonism. Failing to grasp the inextricable entwinement of nature and history – that human life must reproduce itself via a network of socially distributed supports and recognitions – and so overlooking that Butler's recourse to finitude or life is not a determinable condition or value outside of its given mediations, Chambers misses both the inherently contestable and conditional quality Butler grants it. What is missed, is that for Butler, following Adorno, life is non-identical, which means that life is neither a bare empirical fact nor an positive ideal upon which we could ground just ethical and political practices. To reduce "life" to the form of a universal amenable to a liberal political theory, as Chambers claims Butler does, is already to cleanse this concept of its affinity with its object; it mortifies the concept. This, however, misses the sense of Butler’s use of vulnerable life as non-identical. Non-identity does not appear directly, but only in the form of remainders. Life, therefore, does not appear directly, either as fact or positive norm, because its meaningfulness is not to be had outside of its immanent usage, yet as these presently degrade life, for example, rendering certain populations expendable, what remains of life as a critical value is merely the potential of these concrete degraded particulars to stick out as perspicuously wrong and therefore to call into question the value of this value. Vulnerable life is not a positive ideal for Butler. Instead, it is a concept that is simultaneously material, normative and critical. Critical engagement with way existing society – the way its iteration of power (mis)manage what they seek to control – allows for the dis-closure of the suppressed or non-identical state of material particularity, whose non-count can be used to call into question the cultural and political mediations of those particulars. As Butler writes, "Only once we have suffered [that] violence are we compelled, ethically, to ask how we will respond to violent injury."408 There is no positive principle that precedes a given situation and tells us how to act, rather, the critical-material meaning of phenomena is lodged in its non-identity, what Adorno

407 Simon Jarvis expressing reconciliation in positive terms, a practice scrupulously avoided by Adorno, sounds very close to Butler in writing "that a change for the better would depend upon the possibility that the spirit could come to accept its own finitude, its own conditionedness" (Adorno, 32). Bernstein, arguing that Adorno's conception of suffering essentially amounts to the claim of injustice, qualifies that Adorno avoided the language of ‘justice’ because he sought to place the body (nature) and its material integrity at the forefront of such questions, and moreover, that doing so might signal "regression from known positive conception of justice" (Bernstein, "Suffering Injustice: Misrecognition as Moral Injury in Critical Theory," 304). 408 Butler, Precarious Life, 16.

170 argues only comes to light through the determinate negation of the phenomena’s givenness and dis-closure suppressed conditionality. Life is not only vulnerable to devastation in the sense of being factually finite, in which case this factual finitude would serve as the basis for equal recognition. Rather, for Butler life is vulnerable in that it requires, as a condition of persisting, much less becoming 'livable,' the support and recognition of the vey sociality for which it often only appears as fungible, ungrievable, and insignificant. Chambers charge that Butler's late work is reducible to a generalized call for equality rings false because it imputes to her theory an aspiration towards the positive achievement of reconciliation – the complete recognition of the non-identical (following Hegel, the identity of identity and non-identity). Instead, as I suggest, Butler follows Adorno, conceiving of reconciliation, the affinity for the object, as inspiring collective processes of critique oriented towards amending the damaged and fallible mediations that structure our self-understanding, our interactions with others, and our social and political spaces. What distinguishes Butler’s approach from Adorno’s is that she objects to his untenable thesis concerning the blockage of praxis (indeed, to what she takes to be totalizing conception of the dialectic of enlightenment). Like both Kompridis and Rancière, Butler questions whether “social relations are structured by contradiction [wrong life], and that the divergence between abstract principle, on the one side, and practical action, on the other, is constitutive of the times.”409 In short, she moves away from Adorno because she cannot see how his philosophy could make space for even fugitive praxis – the paradoxical possibility of action that contests the withering of the conditions to live and act, precisely the theme of her recent work, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly.410 In order to avoid the impasse of Adorno’s extreme negativity, yet to do so without succumbing to the blind affirmation of antinomy – to affirm the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of performative resistance – requires a more nuanced account of both fugitive politics (as both potentially the spark of political transformation, but also as damaged and dependent) and the mediating conditions (not only as contradictory, but as simultaneously enabling and inhibiting of both life and praxis). Butler’s recent work, I argue, begins the work of dis-closing the polyvalent character of fugitive praxis. In the previous chapter I argued the demand for these

409 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 107. 410 Butler writes: "The thesis of this book is that none of us acts without the conditions to act, even though sometimes we must act to install and preserve those very conditions. The paradox is obvious, and yet what we can see when the precarious assemble is a form of action that demands the conditions for acting and living" (Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, 16).

171 more nuanced accounts follows from the criteria of negative (materialist) dialectics: to allow the object of praxis to immanently guide critical interpretation. Hence, Butler’s reluctance to draw substantively upon Adorno, it might be put, is out of fidelity to the realization of the political promise of his philosophy. Butler comes to acknowledge that the power-ridden conditions mediating critical agency are not only (ineradicable) obstacles to creative (re)iteration, but that any meaning that such creative transformation might have is inextricably and intrinsically tied up with the historical variable, socially differentiated and interdependent character of those contingently arrayed yet necessary supporting conditions. As Butler sees mediating conditions less as obstacles and more as supports, the problem of critical resistance itself begins to change fundamentally. If agency is itself essentially dependent on a variety of social, technological and political supports, not to mention upon its link with the dimensions of natural-material embodied life that the classical philosophical conceptions of agency and autonomy have attempted to suppress, then any attempt to demonstrate the recalcitrance and insuppressibility of resistant agency comes to appear deeply problematic (indeed it appears as simultaneously resigned and compensatory). Hence, when Butler poses the question "what does it mean to act together when the conditions for acting together are devastated or falling away"411? she is calling into question the ontological residue of her own early approach that would vouchsafe resistance by making its possibility independent (or more euphemistically 'indeterminate') with respect to the conditions it would resist. At the same time, Butler does not concede the priority or determinism of these conditions, even if, moving (implicitly) closer to Adorno by way of (explicit) criticism, she is willing to grant them preponderance over creative-critical agency. In contrast to these alternatives, Butler links the problem of critical resistance to the historically mutable and socially differentiated distribution of the supports that are constitutive not only of agency, but of transient life. It is this distinguishing feature of Butler's late work, the emphasis on (livable) life, that mostly clearly exemplifies her shift toward the problem of reconciliation, and which has attracted the most criticisms. Butler's critics take her late turn to the question of life as a depoliticizing attempt to 'ground' practice upon the ethical contours of a worn-out humanist-existentialism, whose tearful veneration of finitude would offer an extrinsic critical perspective with which to criticize the complex, pluralistic and agonistic state of contemporary politics. While there is a

411 Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, 23

172 modicum of truth to this charge, as we saw above, it redounds with greater vengeance back upon the critics. The important but minimal difference that differentiates Butler from her critics, is that, for the latter, any recourse to some originary (normative, ontological) ground that would be prior to the differential operations of power is problematic, while, for Adorno and problem of reconciliation, "there is no origin save in ephemeral life."412 It would appear, then, that 'life' for Butler and Adorno constitutes the "last undigested log in the stomach,"; the un-deconstructed kernel holding together their anti-political ethics.413 However, this critique proves too hasty. The eagerness to denounce a purportedly essentialist core and the reflexive denunciation of anything that would claim to transcend, be beyond, or outside the worldly-political contest of 'appearances' is precisely what constitutes the forcefield of idealism holding together the primacy of praxis constellation. It is precisely this exclusion of anything that does not fall within what Arendt referred to as the "primacy of appearances" that Adorno's notion of reconciliation, with its turn toward the "preponderance of the object," intended to express as historically problematic. This does not mean, however, that Adorno inverts the idealistic domination of nature by simple recourse to the essential substratum to the noumenal object. As he writes in Negative Dialectics, "critical thought does not wish to place the object on the orphaned royal throne of the subject, on which the object would be nothing but an idol, but to remove the hierarchy."414 The modicum of truth that inheres in the criticisms of Butler's late work, then, is that "life" does refer to something "essential" over and above the agonistic socially mediated world of appearances. The problem with this criticism is that for Butler, as for Adorno (who in this regard follows Hegel), the "essence must appear."415 While the meaning of transient life is the key to the (self)critique of the irrational self- enclosure of the world of appearances – a problem that reappears in differing forms from positivism, to Nietzsche, to liberalism, to post-structuralism – it would be a mistake to read either Butler or Adorno as positing this value as somehow separable our independent from its historically dynamic, socially mediated and politically contestable figuration.

6.9 The problem of Reconciliation: Inhuman Mediations

412 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 156. 413 This is the phrase Hegel used in his criticism of Kant's doctrine of the "fact of reason." Cited in Henrich, The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994): 69. 414 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 181. 415 Hegel, Science of Logic, 479 cited in Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, 67.

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Adorno's conception of 'essence,' and his association of this concept with life, is easily misunderstood because it seems to point in two incompatible directions at once: on the one hand, it gestures towards transcendence – and hence garners the suspicion from her critics of being 'extra- political’. More precisely, however, it is a negative form of transcendence or break from the given distribution of social-political mediations through which objects, others and the world become intelligible. In such breaks, the present state of socially mediated appearance is encounter as not exhaustive of the object – that, at present, socially mediated life is "mismediated."416 On the other hand, in claiming that the essence must appear, Adorno is also rejecting all otherworldly conceptions of transcendence – including, I am arguing, accounts of immanent-transcendence which collapse the otherworldly (difference) into the world – which always defer, postpone and separate the transcendent-utopian moment from its realization in concrete (present) actuality. Adorno's conception of practical transcendence or the emergence of critical novelty in the world of appearances is much more demanding than competing philosophical accounts. It requires that the motivation of transformative action not derive from some ontological capacity or timeless characteristic of the 'human condition,' but that it be a response to particular social-historical conditions and the way those conditions (mis)shape and dominate individuals (and in such a way that the very possibility of this responsiveness is itself social-historically mediated). In this case political action cannot be said to derive from the pure spontaneity (or for post-structuralism, the resistance of the recalcitrant or uncounted subject) of the subject, but will involve the social criticism of existing social forms with the aim of making room for the social and political recognition of what is non-identical with the subject and its products, that is, to acknowledge the mattering of nature in subjects without imputing a value to nature outside of its social appearance. There are two things worth stressing about Adorno's account of the recovery of critical responsiveness. Firstly, the aim is to become responsive not only to cultural difference, or to the 'other', but to what lies outside of 'spirit’ by virtue of its very inclusion, namely, to the object or nature, whose rationality potential has been damaged as its meaningfulness has historically become dissociated from its sensuous particularity. This does not mean that cultural differences or social inequalities are ignored, as, secondly, the task of recovering this responsiveness is necessarily a social task. What this means, for Adorno, is that responsiveness remains merely critical – a

416 Joll, "Adorno's Negative Dialectic: Theme, Point and Methodological Status," 236.

174 testament to the possibility that things might be different -- unless and until such critical responsiveness breaks out beyond the boundaries that the present historical condition has limited it to, namely, individual or marginalized pockets resistance. The temptation to celebrate marginalized and exceptional examples of resistance can serve to obstruct critical recognition of the ineloquent suffering that takes place in the rest of society, unless these exemplary moments of resistance reflexively register their own insufficiency. Resistance degenerates into soteriology if the pervasive injustice against which a singular instance of political resistance acts is forgotten. Butler acknowledges this problem in her discussion of grievable lives where she argues that "violence against those who are already not quite living, that is, living in a state of suspension between life and death, leaves a mark that is no mark."417 She further specifies, setting this erasure of particularity in juxtaposition with post-structuralism, that "none of this takes place on the order of the event. None of this takes place."418 It is because of this tendency for possibility to uncritically separate from its realization that critique must take a negativistic form. If it is only via social (self)critique that the transcendent-utopian 'more' might be concretely realized this is because it is the historically sedimented mediation of the object that has caused nature – in the external world, in the self, and in others – to be worth less than it might have been. The problem of reconciliation can be expressed as the mediation of life, insofar as one recognizes that mediation, for Adorno and Butler, does not belong solely to the subject (as with Kant) or even to the socially sedimented history of rationality (Hegel), but following Nietzschean genealogy, points beyond its own subjective and historical intentions, such that mediation can be said to contains traces of the object it reflects. Mediation is misunderstood if it is interpreted as a profanation or levelling of all experience down to the perspective of subjective or universal- historical appearance (as Chambers implied).419 As Brian O'Connor writes, mediation "contains the interdetermination of both subject and object (though obviously in different ways)."420 It is not only that the case that all experience is socially and historically mediated – which as Butler

417 Butler, Precarious Life, 36. 418 Butler, Precarious Life, 36. 419 Adorno’s complex relation to the thought of Kierkegaard testifies to this. Adorno at once reproaches Kierkegaard for failing to recognize that his desire for ‘otherworldly’ (imageless) transcendence is already reflected in the emptiness and abstraction of the transcendental/bourgeois subject (the bourgeois interior), but simultaneously points out the ‘truth-content’ of his critique of the immanence of modernity (See: Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic; “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 8 no. 413 (1939); “Kierkegaard Once More” Telos 174 (2016): 57-74. 420 O'Connor, Adorno's Negative Dialectic, 18.

175 notes, produces the effect that subjectivity is always-already ex-statically structured, outside-of- itself, and hence fundamentally inter-dependent – but that this historical sedimentation contains traces of what these social processes (though often forgotten and concealed) have done to the object (the nature of socialized subjectivity). It is for this reason that genealogy cannot be thought to simply reveal the contingency of historical mediations and the valuations they make possible, that, as Arendt argues, the condition of freedom is that things might have happened differently.421 This possibility is clearly a necessary condition of critique, but put in such abstract terms it immediately undermines the concrete-particularistic dimension of practice it sets out to recover. It is much more the case, for Adorno, that genealogy, by unfolding the memory of the historical sedimentation of concepts, by opening up the concealed and forgotten material sufferings, and in presenting conceptuality (including the conceptually contours of the self and social world) in the form of a historical constellation, offers a (negative) eloquence and a rational force to the particularity and ephemeral life that fixed identitarian concepts suppress (the ideal of identitarian conceptuality being the timeless repetition of a concept across time and space). What is at stake in the critical-genealogical recovery of particularity is not the abstract recognition that things might be different, which offers a merely palliative, not critical form of hope. Rather, what is at stake is life devoid of any intrinsic value, dignity or protection of its integrity, but which is exposed and dependent upon the social-historical mediation of its particularity as the condition of the realization of its existence, and potentially, its' becoming 'more' than what merely exists. In Butler's later work, she explicitly refuses, as Adorno put it in Minima Moralia, to throw out the "baby with the bathwater." As Adorno cautions, the "notion of culture as ideology," has "a suspicious tendency to become itself ideology."422 In a similar way, Butler does not figure critical praxis as an attempt to 'escape' or overcome the 'bind' of power, but points instead to the 'tenuous

421 Arendt writes that the "touchstone of a free act is always our awareness that we could also have left undone what we actually did" (Life of the Mind, Vol. 2, Willing, 5). 422 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 43. In his lecture course History and Freedom Adorno notes that "normally, I am very critical of the entire concept of ideology. But if it has any truth it lies in the suspicion that, precisely because spirit is in general dependent on the course of the world and its constellation, no isolated instance of spirit, no embodiment of spirit that sets out to oppose the course of the world, can be true or false in and for itself – or, rather, independently of its relation to that reality" (58). Bob Hellot-Kentor's introduction to Adorno's important early essay "The Idea of Natural-History" likewise insists that "Immanent critique, the critique of illusion, could not be the rejection of illusion. Its strength lies nowhere else: immanent critique breaks illusion by the strength of illusion, by the strength of the concept's claim to identity" (108). The point being made by both is that while there is no fundamental substratum or reality structuring upon which could ground critique, it does not follow that all of reality is spirit or socially constructed. Instead, nature, that which spirit is dependent upon and which it remains a part of, is only perceptible as it is mediated by historical concepts.

176 unravelling' of this knot that not only subjugates but enables. The immanent unravelling of constitutive mediacy cannot, therefore, fall prey to the tendency to treat all mediating frames as suspicious as to "act radically in accordance with this principle would be extirpate, with the false, all that was true."423 The point, for both Adorno and Butler, is neither to concede to the idealism of a certain style of constructivism for which there is no meaning outside of historically produced mediating frames, nor to fall back on some standard or criteria that supposedly lies outside of them, whether it be transcendent reason or objective nature. For both, the difficulty of praxis centers on the problem that while there is no outside to mediation it does not follow that meaningfulness is either reducible to the subjective, relativistic or nihilistic aspects of mediation nor that there must be some context-transcendent standard to ensure the validity of the mediating frame. Mediation is not a subjective or distorting framing of pre-existing material reality. It is not an effect that external social conditions unilaterally impose upon helpless individuals. To be mediated means to be 'between.' But between what? Mediation is an iterative social process that occurs not only between individuals, through the constitution of the dynamic norms through which social recognition is made possible, but also 'between' the self and its formativity, the originary decentering of the social constitution of (psychic, desiring) subjectivity. These are not, however, the only senses in which mediation is medial, divided, or 'between.' What remains implicit in Butler's early work and which becomes thematic in the latter work is that mediation is also structured around what Bernstein, using a Kantian locution, has referred to as the 'amphibian problem' of human social life: that human are both nature and 'more' than nature. In what sense are humans 'more' than nature? What kind of relation does nature have with what is 'more' than nature? For Adorno, and those who strive to inherit his approach to critique, the problem of mediation refers to the imbrications and entanglements of nature and the dynamically mediated socio- historical conceptualizations and valuations of it. The fundamental problems of philosophy, social life and politics, for Adorno, center upon the way in which humans and the social forms they created have avoided acknowledgment of the imbrications of this relation. When the ethical and political stakes are loaded entirely onto what

423Adorno, Minima Moralia, 44. This is the basis of both Adorno's and Butler's uneasiness with Nietzsche, who figures "life" as prior to the idealizing mediations of bad conscience. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer refer to this as Nietzsche's "biological idealism," according to which it is the "weak who are guilty" because "they use cunning to circumvent the natural law" (78). Horkheimer and Adorno, however, applaud the "honesty" of Nietzsche's account which does not shrink from acknowledging the "identity of power and reason," unlike the bourgeois apologetics which refuse to see anything other than "consoling affirmation" (93).

177 makes human beings 'more' than nature – onto action, reason, culture as separate and higher than ephemeral life – the attempted transcendence out of nature degenerates into back into the contingency and blindness it sought to escape. The problem with these approaches is the way in which they presuppose what there is to know about particularity in advance – or, extrapolating Adorno's criticisms to the case of the indeterminate productivity of dissonant repetition, the way in which excessive potentiality is presupposed. In each case, these presuppositions serve as obstacles to acknowledging that while life can only appear through the prism of socio-historical mediation, it is nevertheless fundamentally dependent upon this differentially distributed and decentering form of recognition for its existence. Negative dialectics replaces the affirmative presupposition that "all experience is a matter of consciousness" with an "axial turn" toward the object.424 Butler's turn to the problem of livable life, likewise, must be read as a turn towards "the object." As Adorno puts it "insight into the constitutive character of the nonconceptual in the concept would end the compulsive identification which the concept brings unless halted by such reflection."425 As with Nietzschean genealogy, then, the turn toward the object means that the "particular would be the source and measure of the universal."426 Adorno's thesis on the priority of the object is an attempt to salvage, rather than affirm, the moment of non-conceptuality – the somatic moment in judgment and the contextual, particularistic, historically-sedimented aspects of the object – as an integral but suppressed moment of conceptuality and hence of whatever will count (as rational) in practical judgment. This argument has been missed by Adorno's critics, who take his critique of conceptuality (identity- thinking) for a critique of rationality as such, just as now Butler's critics accuse her of holding up a aestheticized empirical condition as new ground for universalist humanism. Butler’s achievement, her implicit reworking of Adorno’s philosophy and her response to the critics, is to disclose the non-identity of political mediation, and to begin to show how non-identity could become eloquent beyond the domain of modern art, in fugitive forms of political resistance aimed at the transformation of the conditions that support and inhibit both life and praxis. When Adorno refers to the primacy of the 'object,' nonconceptuality or particularity he is not referring to something standing outside (socio-historical) mediation, nor is he emphasizing, as

424 O'Connor, Adorno's Negative Dialectic, 37. 425 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 12. 426 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 340.

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Morton Schoolman puts it, the "unbridgeable divide between our knowledge of the world and the world."427 He is, rather, attempting to genealogically recover acknowledgment for the formative role of particularity, nature, dependency and socially-sedimented meaning as essential components of a rational 'objectivity' that has suppressed these moments in grounding rationality upon independence from them. There can be no direct access to non-conceptuality. "Mediation," writes O'Connor, is "the term Adorno uses to capture the meaning-producing qualities of the reciprocatory and nonidentical dimensions of the subject-object relationship."428 Mediation, therefore, does not attempt to "exhaust" (identify, classify) what the object means but refers to the process whereby the entwined moments of mediation, the corporeal or objective moment of judgment, the affective experience of an object, is not discarded but harnessed in the task of making "progressive qualitative distinctions between things which in themselves are mediated." The task, then, is to amend the mediacy of the object, without ever presuming to access the object 'in itself,' by turning the telos of mediation away from determinacy and by entering into a mimetic relation to the object, of attempting to revise and repair the damage that the sedimented history of identity- mediation has done to the objects capacity to appear.429 Adorno presents his genealogical critique of the fixity and identitarian grounds of morality and reason, of their reifying self-enclosure, as a critical recovery, because, unlike Nietzsche, he takes the withering of experience (critical mediation) not as an inhibition of the noble 'pathos of distance,' but as the failure of rationality to live up to its own promise by exceeding its own bounds and becoming practical (and in doing so undergoing change). The difference is that while Nietzsche takes morality to be a stultifying and fixed structure that turns life against itself and must be 'overcome,' Adorno regards identitarian morality as insufficiently rational, and that the pathway to realizing its self-inhibiting promise of transcendence is to turn back toward what it sought escape from: recovery of the rationality potential of ephemeral life.430 This is what differentiates Adorno's reading of Nietzsche from Butler's in The Psychic Life of Power. Whereas the early Butler collapsed the structure of creativity and domination into a single insuperable dynamic and thereby seemed to close off the possibility of reflecting upon and changing that dynamic, Adorno's critical-reflective approach confronts the

427 Schoolman, Reason and Horror, 47. 428 O'Connor, Adorno's Negative Dialecitc, 48. 429 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 184 cited in Cook, "Adorno's Critical Materialism", 723. 430 Christoph Menke, "Genealogy and Critique: Two Forms of Ethical Questioning of Morality" The Cambridge Companion to Adorno Tom Huhn (ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004: 322.

179 entanglement of rationality and domination in order to make perspicuous the reduction of nature to remainders and uses this acknowledgement as a means to immanently criticize the present. This critique, to use a keyword of Butler's, is performative. The very capacity of critique to attend to the damage inflicted on nature (and in particular the damage inflicted by humans upon living others) testifies to possibility that particular-material nature, rather than being subsumed by its identity, can itself become eloquent in the process of its social recognition. If so, nature becomes 'more' than it merely is, a meaningless fact, while culture ceases to reproduce (or affirm) what merely is, and demonstrates the potential to transform the value of its values. Life does not possess, for Adorno, a value or meaningfulness outside of its socio-historical mediation, and contra Nietzsche, while this is not a problem that can be overcome, it is a problem because of what this mediation has done to nature. As Bernstein writes "What faces us, calls to us, are nothing but remainders, but remainders created by our own doing, hence demanding restitution and remorse. It is with this [withering of] experience that Critical Theory begins."431 Butler’s contribution, both with and against Adorno, has been to begin to explore what these remainders – in the form of political actors – might be capable of, and to dis-close how the stakes of praxis point beyond themselves.

431 Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, 186. 180

Chapter Seven Rancière and the Primacy of Praxis

A number of interrelated questions impose themselves on contemporary political theory's ongoing attempt to articulate and elucidate a picture of critical political praxis: how to conceive of both the potentiality and limits of the capacity of political praxis to transform itself and its worldly conditions? If the possibilities of praxis cannot be said to be determinately limited by their context without foreclosing its creative-critical dimension, then in what ways is it possible to critically evaluate, in turn, the influence these conditions have on political agents? In what ways, on the basis of what capacities or powers does political praxis alter, criticize, or remake both itself and the worldly conditions that nurture, form, support and yet also inhibit, normalize, frustrated and oppress such practical possibilities? Jacques Rancière's response to this set of questions has prompted renewed attention as to how the relation between political praxis and the conditions it calls into question might be figured. This chapter begins from an immanent critique of the relation Rancière's thought establishes between political praxis and those conditions by probing the tension between his claim to realize emancipation in the "here and now" and the indifference to conditionality (both externally and within political subjects) that this approach necessarily establishes.432 This critique resonates, to varying degrees, for other post-structuralist or radical democratic theories, and specifically those approaches engaging in "affirmative critique" or "anti- critique" through the employment of a flat or egalitarian aesthetic to characterize the dynamics of political mediation.433 The term political mediation will be used to refer to the way the relation between political praxis and the mediating conditions or identities it calls into question are figured, that is, the manner and extent to which praxis is in/separable from the various ways of understanding conditions.434 It is from the immanent critique of Rancière's account of political

432Jacques Rancière, "The Method of Equality: Politics and Poetics," in eds. Katia Genel and Jean-Philippe Deranty, Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on Politics, Freedom, Equality and Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017): 146. 433 Ruth Sonderegger, "Negative versus Affirmative Critique: On Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Rancière", in eds, Ruth Sonderegger and Karin de Boer, Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 254; Benjamin Noys, "Skimming the surface: critiquing anti-critique," Journal for Cultural Research 21, no. 4 (2017): 296. 434 This chapter’s task of confronting the complexity of political mediation necessitates recourse to the dialectical language of praxis and conditions, despite its uneasy fit with Rancière’s concepts of politics and police. Rancière’s conception of police is a relational category which refers to linking social conditions to political capacities. The critical relationality of this category establishes that the stakes of Rancierian politics center squarely upon the play or

181 mediation – a critique that aims to salvage the promise of 'excessive' equality from the affirmative framework that leads his conception of emancipation to fall short of itself – that the challenge of elucidating a conditional conception of political praxis crystallizes. The subsequent chapter turns to the work of Lauren Berlant, in particular the conception of "lateral agency," to begin to unpack the logic of an account of political mediation capable of meeting this challenge.435 Much recent work on Rancière focuses on the issue of whether or not (or to what extent) Rancière's account of democratic praxis is capable of instituting a meaningful and critical account of political change.436 At issue is the question of whether or not Rancière radically de-couples political agency from the "socio-historical"437 conditions, and what his proposed "untangling" of 'politics' from 'police' means for thinking about the possibilities of political emancipation and its relation to political transformation.438 Each of these accounts accept, to varying extents, that

(contestation) of political appearances. While these matters are fundamental to any critical conception of politics, the alternative approach taken in this chapter, which seeks to extend the stakes of political praxis, requires recourse to a conception of conditions that is simultaneously relational and empirical: conditions do not just establish the quasi- transcendental background to politics, but are themselves fundamentally temporal-historical and therefore subject to withering (a form of damage or loss that cannot be separated from the possibilities of praxis). 435 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011): 95-120. The argument advanced in this chapter necessitates a deliberate oscillation between the language of praxis and agency. The emphatic conception of praxis includes within itself the idea of the practical transformation of the world. Reference in this chapter to agency, particularly as it is developed in the second portion of the chapter with regard to Berlant's concept of "lateral agency," retains the critical and imaginary potentiality characteristic of emphatic praxis, but attends to the forms this necessarily excessive and creative potentiality takes under damaging, depressive, and constraining conditions, where the realization of such potentiality is repeatedly frustrated, diverted, or disappointed and where, as a result, agential forms of adaptation become necessary for mere survival or maintenance of an inhabitable form of life. I read Berlant's conception of lateral agency as a critical expression of the distinction Lois McNay establishes between "orders of agency"in The Misguided Search for the Political: Social Weightlessness in Radical Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014): 37-38. 436 See Clare Woodford, Disorienting Democracy: Politics of Emancipation (New York: Routledge, 2017); Kevin Inston, "Inscribing the Egalitarian Event: Jacques Rancière and the Politics of Iterability," Constellations 24, no. 1 (2017) 15-26; Ayten Gündoğdu, "Disagreeing with Rancière: Speech, Violence, and the Ambiguous Subjects of Politics," Polity 49, no. 2 (2017): 188-219; Ella Myers, "Presupposing Equality: The Trouble with Rancière's Axiomatic Approach," Philosophy and Social Criticism 42 no. 1 (2016): 45-69; Lois McNay, The Misguided Search for the Political (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014); Samuel A. Chambers, The Lesson of Rancière (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Aletta Norval, "Writing a Name in the Sky: Rancière, Cavell and the Possibility of Egalitarian Inscription," American Political Science Review 106 no. 4 (2012): 810-826; Jodi Dean, "Politics without Politics," Parallax 15 no. 3 (2009):20-36. Jean-Phillippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault, "Democratic Agon: Striving for Distinction or Struggle against Domination and Injustice?", in ed. Andrew Schapp, Law and Agonistic Politics (New York: Routledge, 2009): 43-56; and Aletta Norval, Aversive Democracy: Inheritance and Originality in the Democratic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 437 The concept of the "socio-historical" derives from the work of Cornelius Castoridias (The Imaginary Institution of Society, 37-38). It is preferable to referring plainly to social conditions because it brings to mind that these conditions are the sedimented (or, magmatic) product of a dynamic historical process that is constitutive of the subjects that, in turn, may attempt to (autonomously) alter them. 438Woodford, Disorienting Democracy, 45. Woodford notes that while the politics/police relation remains "impure" and that "we can never unlock the two completely," that the operation of politics consists in the "untangling" of the "logic of equality" from that of the inegalitarian distributions of the police (45).

182

Rancière's egalitarian conception of political praxis provokes serious reconsideration of the tradition of ‘critique’ whose purported criticality is tied up with the operation of re-tracing and criticizing the constitution of political subjectivity in contexts of inequality, oppression and domination. However, each also finds it necessary to carefully scrutinize whether or not this radically democratic account of agency is capable of producing a satisfactory account of political transformation, given that it is predicated on the de-coupling of agency from its social conditions. The existing debates have questioned whether or not Rancière's politics is capable of producing lasting change and whether the critical spirit of dissensus could insinuate itself into the fabric of everyday life, norms, and institutions. In short, they have revolved around the issue of to what extent and in what ways the performative and polemical account of political praxis relates to the conditions it resists. This literature has taken the form of either: defending Rancière, by showing how his account of politics overcomes this apparent problem and in fact is capable of relating meaningfully to the police (Woodford, Inston, Chambers); have admired the emancipatory potential of Rancière's account of politics but sought to overcome its stark separation from the police by revising and supplementing his account in order to broaden the range of acts considered political (Gündoğdu); sought to inscribe an ethic of dissensus into everyday life (Norval); or, finally, have criticized Rancière for ignoring or downplaying the structural conditions and obstacles that support and inhibit the emphatic or concrete exercise of political agency (Myers, McNay, Dean). My approach, on the contrary, begins by immanently criticizing how Rancière comes to conceive of the relation between political praxis and social conditions, in order to both appreciate and isolate what constitutes the critical force of equality and at the same time to call into question the limits of this approach that are simultaneously suppressed in it, and in doing so to point the way forward to an alternative account of this relation. Rancière himself, not unaware of the dissatisfactions with his account of this relation, has stated: "I've often been reproached for the fact that politics for me is only insurrection, so that, when no insurrection is taking place there is no politics, everything is lost, and so on. But I think we can easily escape this presentation of the dilemma: it's not a question of uprising – or spontaneity – on the one side, and slow process on the other. The question is: how do we identify

183 the motor behind the process of spreading the power of equality."439 It would seem, however, that the dilemma is not so easily avoided, as Rancière's formulation provokes two questions which the secondary literature has hitherto circulated around without yet clearly confronting. The first question asks after Rancière's conceptualization of equality as a capacity, and whether or not this capacity is envisioned as subsisting within subjectivity (not as a possession or substantive property of sovereign agency, but in the form of a positive potentiality of all subjects) or whether it is a capacity whose exercise requires an intrinsic and positive relation to supporting social conditions, even as it calls them into question (both as they are internalized by socialized subjectivity, and externally, in the form of supporting social infrastructures and inter-dependencies)? This question arises because Rancière's conceptions of emancipation and political subjectivation rely on the "impropriety" of equality, that is, on the common potential of all speaking beings to differentiate themselves, to engage in a process of "dis-identification" from the inegalitarian social conditions that mediate the terms of their appear-ability through the linking of "ways of feeling, saying and doing" to "the fact of being in a specific time and place" or "practicing particular occupations."440 In predicating the dissensual force of equality upon the performative excess of political subjectivity beyond its socially mediated identity, Rancière seems to link the critical core of radical democratic agency – equality – to its quality of irreducibility and thereby seems to close off the possibility that his account of political agency is intrinsically and positively related to its social conditionality.441 The problem with this is not that Rancière's division of political (agency) and social (conditionality), or politics and police is statically dualistic, as Arendt's account of 'the political' has rightfully been criticized for.442 It is, after all, the impropriety of egalitarian politics to contest any such settled divisions of who counts as a political being. Rather, the concern of this chapter is that the impurity of politics, or what Rancière characterizes as the unavoidable

439 Jacques Rancière, “Critical Questions on the Theory of Recognition,” in eds. Katia Genel and Jean-Philippe Deranty, Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on Politics, Freedom, Equality and Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, ): 94. 440 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 42. 441 While many critics of Rancière emphasize the abstract or negative quality of his account of politics (See Peter Hallward, "Staging Equality: On Rancière's Theatrocrcay," New Left Review 37 (2006): 109-129; Dean, 2009; McNay, 2014), he himself argues that the concept of equality gives "figure in both positive and non-substantial ways to what appeared previously [in his early work] only in the negative form of dis-identification"("Work, Identity, Subject," in eds. Jean-Philippe Deranty and Allison Ross, Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene (New York: Continuum, 2012): 211. 442 Jacques Rancière, "Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?" South Atlantic Quarterly 103 no. 2-3 (2004): 297- 310.

184 antagonism or "contradiction" between competing distributions of sensibility, does not necessarily offer any appreciation of the mediated quality of this relation other than as relation of a non- relation, that is to say, a dis-identification. If it becomes impossible to grant even a porous or punctuated unity between these moments, if politics is figured as "extraneous" and emergent in relation to the social conditions it contests, and if politics cannot be conceived as the continual, self-critical project of re-visioning and re-fashioning the shared (yet unequally distributed) worldly conditions that simultaneously constitute political subjectivity, inhibiting and supporting it, then something fundamental, call it the conditionality of political praxis, is lost. Such conditionality refers to the limited, conditional or provisional character of the praxis that is both constituted and mediated by the same world it attempts to alter. It is just this conditionality that gives political praxis its meaning, for if these conditions do not fundamentally shape what individuals and collectives can do, express and act to change – if, as Rancière affirms, political praxis is always capable of exceeding its conditionality – then it becomes unclear what constitutes the stakes of praxis. Part of the difficulty of comprehending the limits of Rancière's work is that it is, paradoxically, his egalitarian aesthetics or "poetics" that precludes and shuts down consideration of this important dimension of political mediation. Yet, Rancière's contribution here should not be overlooked nor over-hastily discarded. He offers a powerful analytic lens for resisting the tendency to obscure or diminish the political agency of marginalized actors by calling into question ostensibly 'critical' readings that seek to 'contextualize' or explain their words or actions by relating their meaning back to their social location. While resisting this tendency is paramount for any critical account of political agency, I claim that Rancière's "poetics" overshoots the mark. The difficulty is that there is no way, within such an egalitarian aesthetics, to articulate the intrinsic and positive mediation of political agency by its social conditions, irrespective of whether this mediation is presented as a form of domination or support. Any attempt to articulate such a relation would be in tension with Rancière's conception of equality, which is defined precisely by the affirmation of the 'excessiveness' of performative agency in relation to its conditions or socially mediated identity. As a result, Rancière's approach leaves critical political theory with a heavy price for affirming the impropriety of an unruly egalitarian political subjectivity that emerges through the contestation of its socially mediated appearance, namely, that all regard for the impact that social conditions (and their breakdown, or withering, or differential distribution) have on subjectivity is relegated to the meaningless and tautological circle of stultifying explanation, that

185 either relies on an unnecessarily divided picture of humanity or presents as 'critique' what everyone already knows.443 If it can be show that social conditions are not merely negatively related to political agency, but that in fact they constitute an integral and internal dimension of that agency, then an alternative account of political mediation will be required along with an alternative account of what is at stake in politics. This leads directly to the second question that arises from Rancière's attempt to avoid the dualistic dilemma, namely, to what extent the question of equality is exhaustive of politics? If political agency, contra Rancière, proves to be intrinsically related to social conditions – mediated, enabled, supported but also then potentially inhibited, damaged, and exposed – it must therefore be something mutable and revocable. If so, political praxis is not a capacity that can be affirmed and verified, as Rancière implores, laying latent in even the most damaged conditions, but, on the contrary, must be fundamentally conditional, and exposed to damaged or unworkable forms of life. However, if political agency is fundamentally conditional doesn't this just re-introduce the problems Rancière's identifies in his "critique of critique" in which every attempt to link the role of social conditions, ways of being, or infrastructural supports to the problem of political agency ends up occluding the emancipatory logic of democracy, and hence threatens to render the agency of the marginalized invisible or impossible?444 The challenge, therefore, for a revised account of political mediation will be to find a way to acknowledge the conditionality of agency – to mark the inter-dependence of agency with the conditions that constitute it into existence and yet that it comes to resists, and to be open to the possibility that this capacity, as (inter)dependent, may prove precarious – that does not suppress and diminish that agency by the same turn. This chapter, therefore, seeks to preserve's the radical and promissory dimension of Rancière's thought, that is, the conception of egalitarian performative excess which holds that individuals do not fit seamlessly into the social spaces and identities that they come to occupy, and that the condition of 'belonging' to social space involves subjects in a process of appropriating or 'taking' up of mediated identities

443 While this argument runs through Rancière's work, see in particular: Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (New York: Verso, 2009): 25-49 Rancière, "The Method of Equality," 135-139; Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004): 81-89; Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004): 165-202; Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991): 15-18; 75-99). Rancière's egalitarian thought, marked by its emphatic break from the "theory of ideology," is reluctant to acknowledge any constraining or non-transparent influence social conditions might be thought to exert on political praxis. Refusing even to concede the opacity of these conditions, Rancière, describing the police order, writes: "the hidden secret is nothing but the obvious functioning of the machine" (The Emancipated Spectator, 44). 444 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 25.

186 that promises (or threatens) the political re-configuration of that space. However, refusing to allow this important but limited and partial account to forestall further critical attention to the ways in social conditions interact with praxis, this chapter also aims to re-situate Rancière conception of political equality within a space that refuses the stark alternatives of emancipation-stultification, or politics-police. I argue that the ambivalent nature of this relationality will preclude any simple affirmation of the power of political equality. A critical, rather than affirmative approach, will preserve acknowledgment of the irreducibility of political equality to its conditions without slipping into the presumption that equality will necessarily take the form of a polemical and transformational mode of resistance. It will, on the contrary, simultaneously preserve a critical regard for the way in which those conditions support, inhibit, and internally mediate the possibility of praxis by opening itself up to the possibility that what is to be effectuated by the 'more' of equality can range dramatically, and that under certain conditions it is appropriate or even necessary to be disappointed by shape that ‘excessive’ equality takes, where survival, let alone change, constitutes a considerable achievement.445 Rancière’s collapse of the distinction between performances of equality and the fulfillment of the promise of political praxis pierces the static enclosure of political theory, which has always domesticated the unruliness of democratic equality – its fugitivity – by relating the intelligibility of its performance back to its proper conditions. It does not follow from this, however, that all mediation will necessarily entail the domestication of political dissensus – of fugitive claims – just because existing history (including the history of political theory) has largely taken the form of a history of inequality. Consequently, the potential of Rancière’s egalitarian politics are predicated expressly on the repudiation of the promise of reconciliation: that political society might be transformed in such ways as to materially acknowledge fugitive claims non-violently. Rancière, it might be said, naturalizes the link between political representation and the forgetting of equality. Consequently, the problem of the succession of fugitive politics – the mediation of non-identity – is undeveloped. If Rancière’s task of escaping from the enclosure of political theory – from critique – is to avoid becoming an “escape into the mirror,” the fugitive potential (and stakes) of democratic politics must be reconceptualized: the

445 See Robyn Marasco's The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory after Hegel (New York: Columbia University Press) for excellent account of the role of both negativity and affect in the unsettling process of fostering and motivating politically inflected forms of critique. Her study is motivated by a Benjaminian-Adornonian insight that also animates this dissertation, namely, that the "urge to rescue philosophical critique from despair reproduces the very conditions it abhors," and that only out of the unsettling "disquietude" that emerges from critically confronting the despair of the present does the potential for the situation to 'point beyond itself' stand a chance (10).

187 excessive potential of equality to exceed its given identities and conditions is not un-conditional but mediated (non-originary, social and dependent on the conditions it resists). This means that while equality can emerge anywhere that the potential of political resistance is nevertheless subject to damage, withering and attenuation. In the subsequent chapter, I will argue that the rudiments of an alternative account of the praxis-conditions relation is found in the work Lauren Berlant. Reading Cruel Optimism as an important reworking of Adorno's social negativism,446 I find in her work the resources for acknowledging the conditionality of agency – the ways in which agency is supported and inhibited, and hence essentially (inter)dependent – without fixing or covering over its excessive capacity. A political theory informed by Berlant's approach to political mediation, therefore dispenses with the need for the affirmation of insuppressible equality and instead opens up the critical space for reflecting on the social and political conditions intrinsic to conditional praxis, which would be reconceived as a mutable and socially (inter)dependent capacity in which the excessive 'more' of equality can, under certain (i.e. damaging) conditions, be reduced to an incessant process of finding creative ways to adapt, make due, and survive. This re-situates the critical question confronting radical democratic theory from one of interruption-continuity, which distorts the stakes of critical praxis by blinding itself to all that which runs against affirmation, to the question of how the prevailing socio-historical conditions inhibit and enable the forms of critical experience that are irreducible yet inseparable from them.

7.1 Chapter Outline

In order to separate out the critical elements of Rancière's conception of the praxis-conditions relation from its dogmatic residues, this section develops a three part argument. The first section retraces the genesis of Rancière's account of politics in order to elucidate the problems that

446 What ties Berlant's analysis to Adorno, perhaps even more significantly, is the way the former develops an approach to questions of praxis and agency that coheres with the latter's conception of the "preponderance of the object" (Negative Dialectics, 183). The thought here is that subject is simultaneously an 'object,' that is, not an original ground or fund of consciousness but constituted and dependent upon the particular conjunction of natural-historical processes that have given rise to it. This does not mean that subjectivity is impotent in its power to change itself or its world, nor that this dimension of objectivity is 'given' or unmediated, but precisely that any critical change will not occur by turning away from or disavowing these historically sedimented and politically mediated relations of dependency but only via critical reflection upon them. Adorno, however, did not articulate any political theory and was often too cavalier in his dismissal of minoritarian or fugitive forms of resistance. Berlant's dialectical sensitivity proffers an important modification of Adorno's thought in this respect.

188 necessitated its rethinking, which, in the subsequent two sections will be used to immanently measure whether Rancière fully overcomes the problems that motivated his project. Rancière's discovery that the impropriety of equality constitutes the condition upon which performative politics proves irreducible to its socially mediated identity is not developed out of thin air, but arises in the course of his break the Althusserian 'theory of ideology.' His conception of political praxis, what he refers to as "subjectivation," constitutes a response to a fatal weakness that he came to identify with certain political and critical theories. From classical political philosophy, Marxist ideology, to Bourdieu's reflexive sociology the various ways of indexing the significance of political appearance (praxis) to social location (conditions),whether for purposes of criticism or legitimization, had the effect of keeping everyone in their 'proper' place." This linking of praxis to social location pre-empts politics by delineating in advance the terms of inclusion and exclusion, thereby obscuring, rather than elucidating, the intelligibility of agents and practices who would challenge that division. The ‘lesson’ that is repeated over and again by political theory, Rancière argues, is that, despite appearances, things will always remain the same. Rancière's conception of dissensual political agency arises, therefore, out of a frustration with the way in which the prevailing conceptualizations of the praxis-conditions relation ceaselessly displace praxis from its immanent and performative operations and onto its context or conditions by filtering its meaning and intelligibility through various critical screens that reveal its words and actions to be illusory, ideological, and marked by domination. The ‘critical’ displacement of equality, Rancière argues, constitutes the contradictory core of critique, which purports to criticize inequality and domination, but which in fact incessantly and repeatedly verifies inequality by circumscribing its operations, and hence lacks the resources, indeed actively precludes, apprehension of the paradoxical logic of egalitarian politics in the here and now. The second section of the chapter re-traces Rancière's early work, where he develops his egalitarian, "aesthetic" or affirmative mode of critique as a means of addressing the problematic tendency of both the practical and theoretical "distributions of sensibility" to displace political equality away from its performances. What Rancière will later come to define as "police," in his early work corresponds to a “distribution of sensibility” whose characteristic model of subjectivity implies a passive internalization of social conditions, such that the intelligibility of one's words and actions are defined in relation to what is appropriate to one's social position. Such accounts of the formation and mediation of individual capacities by social conditions deny or suppress the

189 element of impropriety that is necessarily involved in the process of 'taking up' (the subjective moment of mediation) and participating in any social order.447 Through a reading that traces the development of the concept of subjectivation back to early formulations of equality and emancipation, I argue that the fulcrum of Rancière's (re)conceptualization of politics lies with his aggrandizement of the (equality of the) subjective moment of the mediation of social appearances as the condition of the possibility of its meaning, in particular, the demonstration of the individual's necessarily appropriating or part-taking role in all sense-making. The aggrandizement of the subjective moment of mediation, in turn, leaves no space for the non-identical, the ineloquence of the ‘object,’ of silent suffering and fugitive claims – disabused of the fallacy of the passive object, any acknowledgment of the objective moment of mediation – the preponderance of the object – necessarily becomes evidence of anti-political or ‘closed’ approach. Having established the way in which Rancière's mature conception of political agency depends on a rethinking of the excessive process of the subjective moment of mediation, the next chapter assess whether Rancière's account of politics has adequately addressed and overcame the problem it originally identified and which served as the impetus for the rethinking of politics. Here I argue that Rancière's mature work does not fully overcome the problem he originally sets for himself. The task implied by the repudiation of critique was to avoid installing a critical perspective that ceaselessly separated or displaced equality from the words and actions of political subjects. The egalitarian aesthetics underlying Rancière's conception of subjectivation returns the potential of political equality to any and all by affirming, on the basis of his dissensual account of the mediation of the world, the possibility that the meaning of one's words and actions is not intrinsically or positively related to their position in social space or of the their (disadvantaged, unequal) experience of social conditions. This response to the problem of critique does not overcome, however, a problematic separation his approach ceaselessly reproduces: the separation of political praxis from a positive and intrinsic relation to its social conditions which continues to limit the critical imaginary of what constitutes emancipatory change in the here and now. In the final section, without dismissing Rancière's insights regarding the irreducibility of political praxis to its social conditions, I identify a number of problems which follow from this separation including the way in which it naturalizes resistance,

447 Bonnie Honig aptly characterizes the impropriety of Rancière's conception of appropriation as "takings" in her Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001): 99. See also: Woodford, Disorienting Democracy, 31.

190 actively deprives theories of critical praxis of a language to articulate both the damage that impaired conditions impose upon withering forms of agency and life, and undermines acknowledgement of the role of the (inter)dependent, supported and embodied character of political agency, in short, I show how this incomplete account of the agency-conditions relation distorts what is at stake in any critical account of politics praxis.

7.2 The Formative Problem: Rancière's Critique of Critique

Rancière's political thought emerges against the background of a dawning awareness of a contradiction plaguing the critical theories that had exerted a formative influence on his thinking.448 What Rancière will later refer to as the "critique of critique," begins to take form in his early work when he questions whether theoretical approaches predicated on the critique of domination are compatible with their express aim of bringing about emancipatory change. The aim of the analyses of Althusser's anti-humanist Marxism, or Bourdieu's sociology, was to comprehend the ideological mechanisms or structures of symbolic violence responsible for the largely static reproduction of social and political relations, and to use this critical knowledge, an 'epistemological break' or reflexive turn, to inform the process of emancipatory transformation. The critical force of these procedures, their critical distance, is tied to an operation of ideological critique or reflexivity which decodes the illusory surface appearances of actions and words of subjects by relating them back to the conditions of their emergence (to 'truth' of their position in the class division, or in social space). The de-valuation of appearances entailed by the installation of a 'critical' perspective, Rancière came to argue, shifted the "problematic" from one of political exclusion to one of illusion, that is, from a practical to an epistemological problem.449 Such projects of criticizing the external and internal structures of domination inhibiting the deployment of resistant political agency had failed, however, because the 'critical distance' required to discern domination already relied on the presupposed and un-crossable division separating the theorist from the ideological haze of political appearances. In this way, Rancière reasoned, the very

448 See Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Machery and Jacques Rancière, Reading Capital: The Complete Edition (New York: Verso, 2016). 449 Althusser’s privileging of the theorist derives from and is evidenced by his argument that Marx’s thought represented an “epistemological break” away from existing problematics. This argument effectively shifted thinking away from the theoretical separation of subject and object, and replaced it with the more comprehensive (‘scientific’) epistemology of historical materialism (See Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson, New York: Continuum, 2011).

191 success of critique – the act of "producing the distances” – would rely on the ceaseless disavowal and displacement of political agency out of and away from its immanent or performative operations.450 The success of critique, therefore, would consist, paradoxically, in the displacement and deferral of its goal of equality in the course of the repeated act of verifying what the critical perspective necessarily presupposes: the real and operative presence of inequality. The attempt to articulate and criticize the conditions responsible for the reproduction of social inequalities closes off the possibility of accounting for the paradoxical logic of politics. Politics, Rancière proposed, is not a form of praxis that occurs after its conditions have been (equally or adequately) established (or criticized and reformed), but that consists in a (part)taking – appropriating of ways of speaking and acting – that performatively contests the distributions of sensibility (the social 'conditioning' of appearances) that had previously marked and limited one's place or role within the existing social order. Rancière's early engagements with Bourdieu's sociology can be used to re-trace the former's dissatisfaction with critique and its problematic construal of the agency-conditions relation, and which informs the direction of his polemical-performative rethinking of political agency. In the interests of brevity, the main contours of Rancière's critical engagement with Bourdieu can be succinctly recapitulated by focusing on their competing interpretations of the socio-political dynamics of working class cultural appropriations of 'high' culture. Bourdieu's concept of "allodoxia" aims at the elucidation of how social domination inheres at the micrological level of the loosely structured practical dispositions he refers to as a bodily habitus. Bourdieu defines allodoxia as an "error of perception and of appreciation which consists in recognizing one thing for another," as when an amateur or autodidact unknowingly or unintentionally reveals their relatively disadvantageous social location or educational genesis in the course of 'improperly' expressing a judgment or utilizing a knowledge that exposes them for having only partially, incompletely or haphazardly appropriated it.451 The concept functions in Bourdieu's thought to account for the hidden logic of the reproduction of social hierarchies in the face of the ostensible democratization of cultural practices – as when working or middle class individuals had taken up interests in photography or art. Rancière views the function of this concept differently. The critique of domination cannot serve the end of effectively contesting inequality because it already

450 Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, 188. 451 Bourdieu, Practical Reason, 18.

192 presupposes the perspective of critical distance that is required in order to make the invisible structures of domination visible and intelligible. It thereby appropriates to itself the capacity to discern the meaning of actions and words, and hence precludes the possibility of acknowledging dissensual or improper appropriations – the performative crossing of the boundaries of social distances – as instances of polemical agency that challenge social order. The presupposition at the core of critique, critical distance, and the operation of criticizing domination through the verification of inequality, is a way of recuperating every impropriety or challenge to social order by assiduously marking each attempted crossing or in-distinction as a failure, as irreparably marked by inequality, in short by a process of "the expulsion of everything not reducible to an effect of distinction.”452 Hence, just where critique aims to contest the inequality of conditions by finding processes of domination at work, Rancière argues, it proves to be complicit with the inequality it aims to negate. The critique of domination does not open the space in which emancipation might subsequently follow because the presuppositions subtending the former perspective are already a way of abnegating the possibility of the latter. Rancière's reading of Bourdieu, and the contrast it produces between two ways of reading the meaning of working class attempts to appropriate what does not belong to them – seeing such appropriations as either belonging to the "traps of allodoxia" or as the "performative efficacy of utopian or heretical discourse" – sets the ground for what in his mature political thought will come to constitute the competing and contestable interplay of the logics of police and police.453 As a consequence of this ceaseless displacement of political agency out of its immanent operations, Rancière will come to hold that such forms of critique are not only unable to account for emancipatory transformation, they insist on a political vision of the world in which 'nothing changes' by actively precluding acknowledgement of the performative agency of the words and acts of subjects who speak and act in ways 'improper' to their social position. Resignation, for Rancière, is defined by the inability, refusal or disavowal of the immanent and egalitarian operations of politics that not only unsettle any and every social order, but which constitute every orders’ condition of possibility. For Rancière, resignation consists in the refusal to affirm the excessive and unruly potential of egalitarian political subjectivity which cannot be kept in its place. This conception of resignation, it must be noted, is particular, formed directly against the background of Rancière's account of the

452 Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, 191. 453 Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, 199.

193 shortcomings of traditional critique. Resignation is not modelled, for example, as it is in Benjamin or Adorno, on the critique of theodicy, namely, as mode of disclosing the damaged induced by the historical instantiation of forms of rationality and social sedimented forms of relationality that mimic and repeat the structure of religion's otherworldly justification of suffering, which undermine and impair the possibility of forms of critical agency motivated by and responsive to that damage. In short, Rancière subverts the meaning of resignation from its critical theory heritage: it is not disregard (forgetting, suppression) of the historically sedimented conditions that characterizes a resigned and uncritical relation to the word, but the persistent linking of these conditions to political agency that forecloses the possibility of re-configuration. Critique, the logic of allodoxia, makes politics, the performative force of heterodoxy, invisible. The closed "theoretical circle" of critique, premised on an account of critical distance that always leaves it "one step ahead," transforms the effect of the critique of domination into the "science of the verification of inequality."454 The task Rancière has set himself then is to rethink the approach to the problem of fugitive praxis in order to break out of the closed circle of inequality which functions by displacing it away from the sites of its immanent performances, and in this way to overcome the political resignation that critical models, in spite of their intentions, continue to perpetuate.

7.3 Rancière's Response to the Problem: Equality and the Rethinking of the Moment of Subjective Mediation

This section reads Rancière's early archival works The Nights of Labour and The Ignorant Schoolmaster in order to analyze the connections between the development of the conceptions of equality, emancipation and the flat or egalitarian aesthetic that subtends them and the specific dissatisfactions that he identifies in Althusser's and Bourdieu's 'critical' approaches to political agency. By attending to the way in which Rancière's "critique of critique" informs and shapes his positive (re)conceptualization of political agency as "subjectivation" and in particular re-tracing precisely how the problems identified in the former are addressed and overcome in the latter, the chapter establishes the framework for an immanent critique of this revisioning of the problem of praxis. Specifically, Rancière responds to what he identifies as the problematic separation of praxis

454 Jacques Rancière, "The Method of Equality” 135-137.

194 from the site of its performance in 'critique' with a reconceptualization of the process of the subjective mediation of the social order. The previous section demonstrated that Rancière's dissatisfaction with "critique" centers on the way in which it displaces the question of political agency away from the words and actions of subjects by claiming the need to invoke a 'critical distance' which would reinterpret their meaning by relating them back to the social and historical contexts that make them possible. Rancière's response to this problematic displacement, the development of his "poetics of knowledge," would lead him to reformulate the conception of political praxis as the common capacity of individuals to "separate" themselves from the historically sedimented identities and modes of appearances that had previously conditioned their social and political intelligibility. In fact, he would go so far as to claim that the very premises of critique, the 'critical distance' required to decode the illusory words and actions of ideologically conditioned subjects, were themselves "the invention of literature."455 The mistake of critique was its failure to recognize that its capacity to separate and re-configure the meaning of social appearances in the process of taking them up – "taking the power of speaking away from the speakers to give it back to mute things" – was not a privilege of science, theoretical reflexivity or 'critical distance,' but a common capacity, available to everyone and anyone part-taking in the social order. But how precisely does Rancière develop the link between aesthetics (literature) and equality, and how does this new nexus function to support a re-definition of political praxis as the common potential to dis-identify or performatively contest the given "distribution of sensibility" delimiting how one socially appears, counts or matters? Rancière's Nights of Labour performs a mode of historical interpretation that is developed in explicit contrast to the models of critique he had felt compelled to break from and repudiate, and from which emerge the rudiments of his reconceptualization of the problem of political agency. The account of Louis Gabriel Gauny in this work will be used to re-trace precisely how the new approach, turning from the problem of unequal conditions (the damage and suffering the wretched working conditions inflicted on the bodies and minds of the proletariat) to the "question

455 Rancière "From Politics to Aesthetics?" Paragraph Vol. 28 No. 1 (2005): 211.

195 of proletarian dignity," is able to offer a rethinking of the capacities and limits of political agency that breaks out of the closed circle of critique.456 In the chapter " Circuit Rounds and Spirals" Rancière poses a transvaluative reading of Gauny's precarious position as a contract floor-layer which forces him to take on an onerous workload, of the temporality that this work-intensive life gives rise to, and of his propensity for daydreaming. In contrast to the way "critique" had tethered political agency to social location, Rancière describes the self-consciously recognized "ordeal" faced by Gauny as one of "hiring out one's body without alienating one's thinking."457 Returning home after a long day of labour, Gauny writes of the need to escape the suffocating surveilling presence of a master tends that closes off the opportunity for stealing a moment to think or to dream. Gauny, therefore, searches out an intermediary space foregoing the security of factory work for the precarity of contract floor-laying. How does Rancière interpret the meaning of Gauny's words and actions, in short, of this proletarian's pretensions to belong to the (bourgeois) world of those that think and write? In opposition to the category of ideology which retreats from its own discovery of the detachability of meaning and appearances by retaining this privilege for itself, Rancière turns to aesthetics – Rousseau's "reverie," Schiller's "free play," and Kant's account of the disinterested judgment of beauty – in order rethink the logics at play (and in tension) in the mediation of worker's words and actions. Rancière's turn to aesthetics, inspired in part by the need to respond to Bourdieu's 'demystifying' critique of Kantian 'disinterested' judgment, is at work in the reading of Gauny and central to its reconceptualization of the process of mediation and the political potential inhering in it. What Rancière keys on is a connection between the aesthetic suspension of a series of determinate or hierarchical relations, such as those between meaning (truth) and appearance, form and matter, activity and passivity, and a way of rethinking equality and the political processes entailed by the sharing of that equality. The suspension of the system of hierarchies that sustain both the order of everyday perception as well as the closed circle of critique, that allows for the taking up of an aesthetic relation to the world, is extracted from the domain of philosophical aesthetics by Rancière and used in order to rethink the politics of equality. The aesthetic relation,

456 Cited in Deranty, J.P. "Between Honneth and Rancière," in eds. Katia Genel and Jean-Philippe Deranty, Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on Politics, Freedom, Equality and Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016): 37. 457 Rancière, J. The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981): 76.

196 affirmed in both Rancière's interpretation of Gauny and in the words and actions of the latter, "signals the abolition of the division of the world into two kinds of sensible humanity."458 For Rancière, Gauny's daydreams break the circle that entraps the possibility of freedom within the terms of the incessant and brutalizing logic of economic reproduction, even as the price of this appropriation subjects him to more and more work. What is at stake in Gauny's struggle to appropriate a margin of liberty, Rancière suggests, is missed if it is construed in terms of a logic which insists that the richness of spiritual life is tied to one's distance from economic necessity. Gauny breaks from this "circle" of mastery not by refusing to work, or through revolt or hatred of his masters, but by appropriating the leisure denied to him as a worker, and by exhibiting his undiminished capacity for thought and imagination. This appropriation requires "reversing the relationship to time" that binds him to needs of his class, the static reproductive cycle (circle) of labour and rest, and thereby "reverses the relationship of dependence" of his intelligence to his social role of worker and the time he does not have to think. These reversals are part of Gauny's struggle to "possess oneself," where self-possession is not simply the self-disciplining required to transform oneself into an instrument, internalizing the ascetic spirit of capitalism, but entails the appropriation of what the instrumentalizing system denies one to be capable of possessing. Rancière refuses to read Gauny's desire to work longer and harder in order to purchase a few moments to daydream against the grain of what the worker explicitly claims. His method of reading utilizes the "naiveté" of aesthetic equality in order to call into question the critical and historiographical presuppositions that refuse to grant "weight" to the scattered poems and writings of the proletariat, by burying them under the voluminous archive detailing the "masses" oppressive conditions.459 In direct contrast to Adorno’s “preponderance of the object” which attempts to follow the ‘matter itself,’ Rancière’s interpretation aims to restore the potentiality of the subject. He resists all forms of everyday, historical or critical narratives that would interpret the meaning of Gauny's actions as illusory or romantic symptoms of proletariat false consciousness, or as resigned, stoic form of escape precipitated by the intolerably oppressive conditions of capital. Notably, with this approach, the damage or loss inflicted on the proletariat by their conditions is not and cannot be figured in terms of material hardship and toil, and the way in which such experiences shape, limit and constrain the subjectivities of those who undergo them. Rancière's

458 Rancière, "Work, Identity, Subject," 216. 459 Rancière, The Nights of Labor, viii-ix.

197 egalitarian reading of Gauny – his refusal to place himself in a privileged position to decipher the 'true' meaning of the worker's actions and words – effectuates a radical de-contextualization or process of de-familiarization which functions as the condition that makes it possible to perceive the previously suppressed and disavowed democratic eqaulity inhering in his words and actions. Rancière resists critical readings because they distrust the meaning of Gauny's words and in call into question his capacity to take up a relation to the world that departs, however slightly, from the one appropriate to his condition. In doing so, they usurp all vestige of agency inhering in his words and appropriate it to the critical framework used to decipher its meaning. Once critical distance is suspended – the suspicion that Gauny's daydreams, aesthetic judgments and literary interests are mere allodoxia – what becomes visible is that his words and actions are not misuses, errors, or illusions, but appropriations of ways of inhabiting and relating to the world that was thought to belong only to those with the requisite conditions of time, leisure, wealth and education. Describing Gauny's willingness to exchange hours of toil for the freedom of a few moments to think, Rancière insists, "there is no illusion in the sense meant by philosophers and politicians – that is, something opposed to conscious awareness of a destiny endured or of the right conditions for transforming it. For this 'illusion' is completely transparent."460 As a proletarian, Gauny's condition does not opaquely and ideologically constitute the framework mediating his experience of the world. Though he remains dependent on "exploited work" he proves himself to be "something more" than an exploited worker "belonging" to a "history of mastery."461 What Rancière discovers is that with the decontextualizating suspension of critical distance one does not necessarily fall back into an uncritical immediacy or illusory subjectivity, but paradoxically, by rendering all actions and words equal – available to anyone and everyone – one opens up the space in which it becomes possible to perceive actions and words that hold the potential to make a difference. Importantly, this difference does not rely on an extraneous or 'critical' perspective. Their potential to make a difference is inscribed in the tension between the circular logic that aims to return their proper meaning to them by relating them back to their proper contexutalization, and the performative force of Gauny's appropriation of these words and actions which "break the circle" linking equality to conditionality. Rancière does not want to suggest that subjective reverie can stand in for the political-dissensual conflict over the meaning of equality, nor that such disputes

460 Rancière, The Nights of Labor, 81. 461 Rancière. The Nights of Labor, 82.

198 should "stand in the way of the 'objective transformation of the conditions of exploitation.'"462 Without a staging of a wrong between two parties, Gauny's appropriation of a "form of existence" that exceeds his place within the system of "class divisions" is a mere private attestation to the equality subtending social differentiation. The purpose of this discussion has been to foreground the relation that Rancière establishes between the democratic aesthetics of self-possession and the conditions mediating this possibility (the tension between the ‘circle of mastery’ and the excess of democratic literarity). Gauny's "self- possession," his demonstration of his capacity to break with what it means to be a worker, in short, his "ascent in the hierarchy of beings and social forms," reveals that the social order is not a closed circle and that emancipation is possible in the here and now. But what, then, is the pathway of emancipation and what does such change amount to? In what sense does the "spiral" of equality constitute a disruption, break or alternative to the closed circle of inequality, and in what ways does this conception of emancipatory agency relate to the conditions in which and against which it is enacted? Rancière works out more cogent responses to these questions in his subsequent study, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, to which we now turn. In the Nights of Labour Rancière developed the germinal components of what would become his mature conception of political agency out of his attempt to avoid reproducing a reading of proletariat workers that would empty their words and actions (not to mention their daydreams and literary pretensions) of the latent power of equality by relating their 'true' meaning back to their social context. The style of interpretation practiced in this work not only conceptualizes, but performs the egalitarian aesthetics through which Rancière polemically restores emancipatory agency to the "few dozen 'nonrepresentative'" proletarians addressed in the study.463 The insight developed here and which is preserved in the mature works is that social conditions do not determinately or exhaustively structure the ways in which subjects mediate their world. Those living in proletarian conditions, the work shows again and again, have appropriated ways of acting, thinking, speaking and dreaming that the social order stipulates only properly emanate from bourgeois social conditions. Attempts to qualify the veracity or authenticity of these 'appropriations' are self-defeating, however, because they rely on a presupposition – that agency is a product of its social conditions – that undermines the very premise of performative equality

462 Rancière, The Nights of Labor, 85. 463 Rancière, The Nights of Labor, x.

199 existing in the here and now. Rancière's 'flat' reading of Gauny rests on the premise that the distinction between authentic and inauthentic appropriations presupposes the a logic of order that makes all crossings, transgressing or mixing of it impossible. A new critical logic of emancipation would have to break with such a fundamentally conservative conception of critical distance. If the new conception of emancipation offered in this early work remains somewhat amorphous or underdeveloped, The Ignorant Schoolmaster sets out to clearly articulate the logic of equality that makes appropriation possible, and in and particular the manner (the stakes or tensions) in which this agential capacity is shared. The Ignorant Schoolmaster, because it constitutes the clearest expression of his innovative and unorthodox conception of equality, and whose importance extends throughout his work on politics and aesthetics, has received an increasing share of attention in the secondary literature. Rancière's study of Jacotot's radically egalitarian pedagogy, because it plainly articulates the conditions in which the emancipation is affirmed, has most often approached as "an attempt to put into perspective his theory of the contextless and heroic subject of resistance."464 Clare Woodford, for example, draws on this work in order to argue against the standard interpretation that Rancière's work necessarily requires radical democrats to turn their attention away from social conditions on account of his overly negativist and ephemeral conception of interruptive political agency. She claims, on the contrary, that an important dimension of politics concerns the creation of conditions that encourage others "to interpret for themselves and to no longer accept the thoughts of others."465 Indeed, as Kevin Inston has shown, and as Rancière has explicitly claimed, sedimented social orders and institutions do not only inhibit or constrain politics, but also serve as sites for the "inscription" of inequality, which can be taken up, reiterated and revived.466 To be sure, the reading proposed in this chapter does not dispute such interpretations. As Rancière has repeatedly emphasized, there is no 'pure' conception of 'the political,' and consequently, the practice of politics is always caught up with the prevailing conditions and the ways they limit who can appear and in what ways, as well as with the existing inscriptions of equality that await performative (re)verification. What is under consideration, rather, is the precise

464 Sonderegger, “Negative versus Affirmative Critique,” 256. 465 Woodford, Disorienting Democracy, 95. 466 Inston, "Inscribing the Egalitarian Event,”; Rancière, J., Blechman, M., Chari, A., Hasan, R. "Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics of Class struggle: An Exchange with Jacques Rancière,” Historical Materialism Vol. 13, 4 (2005): 297.

200 way in which Rancière figures the praxis-conditions relation, and whether or not this account proves capable of satisfying his own criteria, that is, of providing a non-resigned, open-ended and critical account of agency that does not defer emancipation endlessly onto an indefinite (ethical, progressive, regulative) horizon. In the following reading, I trace how Rancière's novel account of how equality is shared- out constitutes a fundamental reworking of standard theories of mediation and the conceptions of political agency they make available. A theory of mediation articulates the interlocking manner in which subjects are mediated, shaped or formed by the world, and in turn, the ways in which those subjects are able to relate to themselves, others and the world. Whether equality has been conceived of as a fact, as an ideal, or, as critical theory as attempted to do, begun from the existing conditions of inequality in order to immanently work towards a more egalitarian world, Rancière faults each approach for its failure to appreciate that the site of the struggle must pertain to the question of whether equality exists here and now if the response to that question is to have emancipatory potential. The Ignorant Schoolmaster opens with the radical premise underlying Jacotot's egalitarian pedagogy, namely, "that all sentences, and consequently all the intelligences that produce them, are of the same nature."467 Importantly, Rancière not only claims that all intelligences are the same, but expressly states that the worldly materials – words, ideas, books and other mediating social forms – that compose the social world, separating and uniting individuals, are also 'of the same nature.' This, of course, does not mean that certain ideas or social forms are more or less difficult to comprehend or navigate than others, but merely that if something is harder to understand, it is neither impossible nor closed off from anyone doing so. Increasingly complex ideas do not require more sophisticated intelligences for there is only one kind of intelligence, which always proceeds "by observing and retaining, repeating and verifying, by relating what they were trying to know to what they already knew."468 What is required is only ever more application of "will," and it is in this aspect of learning – persistence – that one can aid another. Crucially, there can be no firm distinction between authentic or inauthentic, passive or active forms of (re)interpreting and engaging with the social forms that mediate the terms and condition of one's political appearance. Jacotot could teach what he himself did not know by encouraging his students

467 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 9, my emphasis. 468 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 10. 201 to learn for themselves, because that is what learning always necessarily amounts to. The flat or egalitarian conception of language and, indeed, of all of the social forms that mediate the terms of political relationality, which emerges in this reading of Jacotot, will remain at the core of Rancière's mature political theory. Equality harbors an unsettling potential because "intelligence does not follow the laws of matter," that is, the capacity for thought is not determined by the external conditions acting upon it, nor does it derive from the "community" whose inherited or established mediations shape and contour how individuals appear to one another, but "belong[s] to the individual."469 It does so because the efficacy of all mediating social forms – even those holding together inegalitarian or contingent social orders – relies on the capacity of individuals to "take" them up or appropriate them.470 Reproduction of the existing inegalitarian social order, therefore, relies upon the very equality that is at the basis of political mésententes.471 Jacotot could teach what he himself did not know by encouraging his students to learn for themselves, because that is condition upon which all learning and mediation necessarily relies. The contention that not only all intelligences, but all sentences, are "of the same nature," constitutes a fundamental rethinking of the way in which social forms – ideas, perceptions, words – mediate individuals, both separating and uniting them. Rancière repudiates the approach to political mediation that would attend to the differential ways in which distinct and unequal social-historical conditions constitute, shape and constrain the capacities of individuals. Through his engagement with Jactotot, Rancière comes to argue, that if an emancipatory account of agency is to be possible, it is necessary to comprehend the equal availability of all words and social forms to the appropriation of anyone and everyone. The assertion of the equality of intelligences is not a claim that points to the secure possession of equality. In his mature political thought, Rancière will claim that equality is not a fact, but an act that is performed, and hence which can be held axiomatically in the face of contingent social hierarchy, but which would require repeated verification. The equality of intelligences refers, therefore, less to any positive ability than it does to the absence of any firm border that would separate one class or group from another, and it is the equality of social forms – their equal amenability to being appropriated by anyone and everyone – what Rancière will refer

469 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 76. 470Bonnie Honig aptly characterizes the impropriety of Rancière's conception of appropriation as "takings" in her Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001): 99. See also: Woodford, Disorienting Democracy, 31. 471 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 15-16; Rancière, Dis-agreement, 16.

202 to as impropriety of democratic "literarity", that forms the keystone of this approach. This thought is condensed in a formulation: "The book is the equality of intelligence."472 The book, or the "materiality that "keeps two minds at an equal distance," is what both links and separates individuals from one another. What will later become for Rancière the impropriety of equality, its 'excessiveness' owes to not only to the egalitarian ability of any individual's to 'take' or appropriate the words and actions that do not properly belong to them, but to the egalitarian quality, the literarity, of the words and actions themselves – the social forms – that are available to be taken or appropriated. It is from the equality of social forms that Rancière will arrive at his conception of the distribution of sensibility that contours how an individual and their actions appears to others in social space, and importantly, his conception of the ways in which this order is open to contestation. The meaning of actions and words only holds together to the extent they do because each individual, in 'taking up' or mediating the world around them is necessarily already 'equal' to that world, through a process that cannot but require their part-taking, and it is this that thereby also exposes that order to the possibility of its de/re-configuation. The 'order' of social appearances is not and cannot be exhaustive of an individual's capacity to (politically) appear, because the excessive capacity of subjective mediation is required in order to account for a social order in the first place. Individuals are kept at a distance because it is only through the mediation of social forms that a social order functions at all, but individuals are kept at an equal distance because everyone possess the equal capacity to take up these social forms, to use or appropriate them, and in doing so to re-write by whom and how certain words, ideas, or actions can be used. The keystone of Rancière’s account of politics – the equality of intelligences – is predicated on a one-sided inference: that because the intelligibility of social life necessarily and unavoidably includes a moment of participation by the individual (‘taking up’ social forms), that the potentiality of individuals is thereby irreducible to objectivity (the ‘laws of matter’). It does not follow, however, that just because the subject is irreducible to its objectivity (the subject’s form or identity) that the subject, for its own part, is not also an object (materially constituted, whose positive capacities are themselves socially mediated) and that this dimension is not the proper concern of politics (that such concerns are inevitably those of the ‘police’). The idealist kernel of Rancière’s political theory owes to the fact that the stakes and concerns of politics only ever center upon the agonistic and egalitarian play of spirit – of equal subjects dissensually contesting the distributions

472 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 38.

203 of their political appearances – and proves systematically incapable of addressing the political question of the subject qua object (interdependency, social mediation, suffering are all rendered anti-political). The blindspot of Rancière’s poetics is the object. This fact is covered up, however, by Rancière’s nominalism – by his insistence that the object is not an essential substratum hiding behind the play of political appearances, but that flat plane of appearances themselves are the essence of politics. As the earlier discussions of both Nietzsche’s aporetic autonomy and Adorno’s critique of idealism have shown however, this is to reduce all political meanings to what the spirit makes of the object. To do so is to succumb to the crisis of nominalism, to accept that the object – which never appears immediately or beyond politics (Hegel’s dictum that the ‘essence must appear’ is relevant here) – can make no claim on spirit. It is precisely this blindspot, I am arguing, that sustains Rancière’s affirmative approach to politics (the endless process of dissensus). Once this blindspot – the subject qua object – is revealed as the non-identical price paid for the affirmation of equality Rancière’s poetics are disclosed as partaking in natural-history. None of these objections repudiate Rancière’s fundamental insight – that the subject is irreducible to the object – they only object to the affirmation of this logic. Rancière's flat or egalitarian aesthetic emerges with the thought that the material forms that mediate social and political space are all "of the same nature." This not only turns the reconceptualization of political agency in an egalitarian direction, it does so by linking this equality to a similar rethinking of social conditions, and the way in which these conditions can be thought to structure, influence or mediate that subjectivity.473 The inequality of social conditions, for Rancière, cannot be used to positively account for the differential agential capacity of political subjects if such an approach is to harbor an emancipatory potential capable of accounting for and acknowledging transformations of that order in the here and now. Rancière has often been characterized as offering a negativist or highly abstracted conception of political agency, as his

473 It is for this reason that the attempt by Gündoğdu to broaden the account of political subjectification, to include forms of protest and interruption that fall below Rancière's threshold of politics, while admirable, remains problematic. While I aver her claim that "Attending to the systematic obstacles that can complicate and derail attempts at verifying equality does not have to result in a structuralist, determinist or inegalitarian account," (203) to attempt to do so within Rancière's conceptual framework would require a more dramatic reworking of the "police" than she acknowledges. She aims to rethink political subjectification in order to place it in a more dialectical relation with the conditions that mediate its emergence and which it reacts against, so that politics is less interruptive and more an "uncertain process that is continuously shaped, constrained, and at times frustrated by the dominant frameworks, institutions, and norms that reinforce inequality" (194). The problem is that this approach fails to pay proper attention to Rancière's conception of political subjectification, and how it structures not only his account of politics as the appropriation or taking up of social forms, but his account of amenability of these social conditions and forms as well.

204 mature work characterizes political subjectivation as a polemical "dis-identification" with the contingent and inegalitarian presuppositions of existing social orders. However, this reading misses the precise way in which Rancière reconceptualizes the political significance of social conditions. It is not the case, as it appears, that social conditions are unrelated or merely negatively related to excessive and polemical force of the political agency that performatively contests them. Rather, the conditions mediating individuals are re-figured by Rancière as fictive or poetic. By this Rancière does not mean that society is merely fiction, in the sense of a groundless fabrication that may be re-imagined at will. That "Society is a fiction" refers to the way the 'script' of social order is both followed and reproduced, and, on the other hand, read and re-read, taken up and re-written, in short, the manner in which it is shared. When Rancière contends that "what brings people together, what unites them is nonaggregation," he is pointing up the paradoxical logic of equality, which characterizes not only his rethinking of political agency but refers also to his rethinking of social appearances. The mediation of social space, the terms through which it becomes possible to distinguish the shapes, contours and distinctions of that space, which brings to it the minimal sense of 'order' through which each is united, is simultaneously a principle of separation. It is so because it is only the capacity of each to take up the social script, to learn its meaning, that allows order to function – along with the openness or the equality of all social forms to be read, that is, appropriated. However, the double structure of equal capacities along with the equal amenability of social forms to appropriation also threatens that order, since anyone can take up and appropriate ways of being, acting and speaking that threaten the social arkhe. Rancière redefines the praxis-condition relation by repudiating the traditional account of social conditions – the claim of the object – and then redefining this problem as an issue of social appearances. The "social order," Rancière claims, offers nothing more "than the superiority of order over disorder."474 Social order is contingent. It is a "fiction." Yet, this is not a skeptical thesis, but an attempt to point up the provisional yet structuring role of the social forms and the ways in which they mediate inter-relationality, as well as a way to link the democratic character of politics to the incessant work of individuals in taking up and translating the meaning of these forms for themselves, and hence of the ever-recurrent potential of re-visioning them. Social forms, like a book of fiction, irrespective of what they intend, can be taken up by anyone and read, and it is the democratic or "literarity" character of their condition, their amenability to appropriation, that

474 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 91.

205 constitutes the form of inter-relationality through which Rancière conceives of politics. Rancière elaborates: "People are united because they are people, that is to say, distant beings. Language doesn't unite them. On the contrary, it is the arbitrariness of language that makes them try to communicate by forcing them to translate – but also puts them in a community of intelligence."475 In The Emancipated Spectator, a mature work that explicitly develops and builds on The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière, in seeking to demonstrate the at stake and necessarily indeterminate nature of the relation between social location and political capacity, offers a re- interpretation of the function of spectatorship. This reading of spectatorship can be seen as following out of this early conceptualization of subjective mediation as a process of the active "translation" of social forms, and works towards unpacking the theory of mediation at work in his account of equality. In this work, Rancière considers what is at stake in the relation between spectatorship and the drama on stage. For both the Platonic critique of theatre as well as the Romantic idea of the theatre as the sensible constitution of the community, Rancière argues, the problem has been taken to be that "to be a spectator is to be separated from both the capacity to know and the power to act."476 These two position are roughly homologous with what Rancière would characterize as, respectively, epistemological and ethical approaches to politics and their vision of political community. Theatre is either treated as something to be censored, or as form of political instruction or civic education of the sentiments, but in both cases as a social form that is absorbed, imbibed and suffered (to dangerous or valuable effects) but not taken up. As we have seen, the passive transmission or mediation of social forms is repudiated by Rancière as politically self-defeating. In both cases the "theatre is presented as a mediation striving for its own abolition," but the difficulty is that, as long as the separation of the meaning of the drama and its reception by the spectator is upheld, one can "only reduce the distance on condition [of] constantly re-creat[ing] it."477 This purported passivity of spectatorship which relies on the indexing of social positionality to receptive competence fails to grasp that the "poetic labour of translation is at the heart of all learning," as well as the "crucial point" that "spectators see, feel and understand something in as much as they compose their own poem, as, in their way, do actors or playwrights, directors, dancers or performers."478 Rancière repudiates the stultifying presupposition that the "what the spectator

475 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 58. 476 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 2. 477 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 8. 478 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 13, my emphasis.

206 must see is what the director makes her see."479 The work involved in deciphering the sense of social forms, the productive poetic labour of translation, necessarily involves the agent and cannot function behind its back. The purportedly passive labour of spectatorship, for Rancière, cannot but include the active poetic labour of translation. Without the work of translation, social forms are mute. The reproduction of their social eloquence necessarily requires repeated acts of translation, each of which risks destabilizing its inherited or prevailing meaning or interpretation. Such interruptions or destabilization of the meaning of social forms, is not, once again, an irrational fabrication. Rather, it comes from the paradoxical logic of the situation in which the political perceptibility of individuals is socially mediated, but where this perceptibility cannot be exhaustive of those individuals precisely because the social forms that mediate their appearability possess the openness and amenability to appropriation. In turn the individuals themselves possess the capacity to act and speak in ways that contest and challenge the constraints of the given perceptive frames. Rancière's repudiates the anti-democratic theory of mediation underlying epistemological and ethical approaches to politics, which in presupposing ideals, spaces or relations that would constitutes truthful, just or ethically ordered political communities, fail to appreciate that the site of politics is not so settled and that it is at stake, rather, in each individual act of taking up a social form and translating its meaning. Rancière's politics is predicated, therefore, on an explicitly democratic and egalitarian rethinking of the dissensual interlocking relation of individual and social mediation. The police distribution of sensibility does not constitute, constrain, impinge or differentially structure the individual’s capacity to engage in practices of counter-mediation. Rather, the "shared power of the equality of intelligence links individuals, makes them exchange their intellectual adventures, in so far as it keeps them separate from one another, equally capable of using the power everyone has to plot her own path."480 For Rancière, the political question of how to regulate social inter-relationality cannot be answered by 'abolishing the distance of mediation' – whether that means organizing these relations by recourse to Platonic 'truth,' or by suturing the divisions of mediation through the "Romantic vision of truth as non-separation." It cannot be answered in these ways because the terms of political inter-relationality are fundamentally fictive or poetic. The poetics of inter-relationality points up the political tensions inaugurated by its constitutive aesthetic equality, namely, that the unmanageable availability of

479 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 14, Rancière's emphasis. 480 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 17.

207 being (re)read by others – and so the possibility of finding oneself emplotted – is simultaneously and inextricably the possibility of re-writing one's own plot. For Rancière, what undoes a social order (as well as what holds it together, however temporarily) is the possibility of finding the weave that holds it together to be fictive – a social form amenable to appropriation by anyone – and in having read this fiction, to (potentially) recognize that one is already equal to the writer, and so capable of re-writing and re-taking their part in it. If, The Nights of Labour, with the concept of appropriation had offered a key component in the development of his political thought, it is the generalization of this idea in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, onwards that accounts for its the paradoxical logic through which equality is shared. Here Rancière discovers how the subjective moment of mediation – the taking up of social forms that are all 'of the same nature' – constitutes an unavoidably active and egalitarian process of translating, that imbues this idea with a potent political potential. In fact, looking back retrospectively on his own theoretical genesis, Rancière will claim that the conception of "equal intelligence" found in Jacotot forms the cornerstone of his rethinking of supplementary or polemical potential of the democratic political agency.481 The "equal distance" that separates each individual from the social forms they must take up in order to part-take in the social order is what allows individuals, in appropriating forms of acting and speaking that do not belong to them, to differ from themselves, that is, to performatively and politically contest their social identities. Non- identity, in Rancière, is wholly confined to the plane of appearances, to the (decentered) and dissensual play of spirit. This is the basis of Rancière's shift from ideological critique to the practice of equality. The 'universal' stakes of politics, which for Rancière can only refer to the verification of equality in the 'here and now', are thereby installed as invariant and indifferent to the particularity of the conjuncture, problematic or conflict and to the changing and variable ways that the mediating conditions support or inhibit democratic praxis. The ‘universal’ stakes of Rancière’s politics – the repetitious interplay of non-identical spirit – is the product of the disappearance of the object. Not only does this disappearance do away with the possibility of linking political meaning to transient materiality, the affirmation of this condition testifies to the forgetfulness that the disappearance of the object is the product of revocable, hence political, history. The question pursued in the remaining discussing of Rancière is whether or not something is lost in the course of the redefinition of what is at stake in politics. Does the shift from the

481 Rancière, "Work, Identity, Subject", 213.

208 problematic of critique, with its close attention to domination and the conditioning of political agency, to Rancière's metapositional view, which approaches the very question of the divisions separating the dominated from those capable of political speech as the defining stake of politics (and which therefore repudiates recourse to any 'outside' or 'critical distance'), overcome the shortcomings it identifies in the former? Or does Rancière's re-definition of the political praxis- conditions relation, what is at stake in it, and what constitutes resignation – despite its important contribution to rethinking the (excessiveness of the) moment of the subjective mediation of social conditions – continue to limit and constrain the critical imaginary of emancipatory change in the here and now?

209

Chapter Eight An Immanent Critique of the Primacy of Praxis The previous chapter established how Rancière's mature work has been shaped by the attempt to overcome a problem he identified with critique in his early work, namely, the way in which 'critical distance' ceaselessly separated political agency from the words and actions of political subjects by relating their meaning back to the subjects’ social and historical constitution. In order to break free from the 'closed circle' of critique that endlessly deferred the realization of political equality onto an indefinite futural horizon, Rancière's early archival work lead to a rethinking of the logic of social mediation, that is, the way in which social conditions mediate an individual's relation to oneself, others and the world. For Rancière, social conditions do not condition the practice of political equality. Social conditions are not prior to or constitutive of political praxis, and they cannot be said to internally mediate or structure one's relation to oneself and others. Rather, it is the case that a social order only functions to the extent it does because individuals are equally able to appropriate social forms, rules, norms, ideas, and ways of acting that do not properly belong to them. This is the basis of Rancière's Copernican turn, shifting away from the dead-end of critique and opening up a new perspective in which the polemical enactment of equality in the "here and now" would become possible. This rethinking entailed not only a reconceptualization of political praxis, in particular the development of a conception of equality predicated on the common capacity to appropriate social forms, but an attendant rethinking of the social order out of which, and against which the performative process of politics stages its polemical scenes or "wrongs." Through carefully analyzing the implications of how this relation is reconceptualized, this next chapter of the dissertation assesses the extent to which Rancière's mature conception of politics lives up to its own criteria, and proves capable of overcoming the problems that were shown to have necessitated its development. Many of Rancière's critics have focused on the issue of the emphatic discontinuity between the moment of politics and the instituted order, in particular complaining that this division closes off the possibility of "creating lasting relations of equality."482 While the following critique is closely related to this set of concerns, in particular focusing on the theme of the separation of political agency from social condition, it proceeds differently. Rather than criticizing Rancière's politics on the basis of extrinsic criteria or expectations of what politics ought to be, which in many

482 Myers, "Presupposing Equality,” 55.

210 cases simply involves turning Rancière's arguments around and stating them in the form of criticisms, the following critique aims to challenge Rancière's thought on its own terms.483 The benefit of this is that by paying attention to the specific problems that animated Rancière's approach, and how they have shaped his concepts, it allows the critique to identify and separate out the promising and critical elements from those that lead to problematic impasses. In light of this immanent critique, the attempt to formulate an alternative way forward will not be based solely on a vague sense of what a critical theory of politics ought to include, but can emerge from and be informed by both the critical insights as well as the failures and impasses of Rancière's thought. Social conditions, whether in the inegalitarian form of the "police distribution of the sensible" or in the form of institutional inscriptions of equality that are open to re-enactment, cannot be said to structure or even mediate the way an individual takes up the social forms that organize the world. As has been demonstrated, for Rancière an interval or gap must always separate the conditions that establish one's social perceptibility from the way in which they are taken up by individuals. Consequently, any acknowledgment of the formative influence of social conditions on agency, or any recognition of the way social conditions internally mediate or pre- structure political agency, threatens to cover over the gap upon which Rancière's predicates his theory of equality, which in turn supports his dissensual account of political subjectivation. While Rancière is sensitive to the imbrications of social conditions and political agency, his specific way of doing so is by setting them into a relation of insuperable tension – which functions to maintain their separation or separability even as they are entangled – in which the nexus of the 'proper' distribution of sensibility and the excessive impropriety of politics form an inexhaustible, implacable, mutually-repelling affinity. As Woodford notes, the politics/police relation in Rancière is best conceived as "tangled," in the sense that while equality can be momentarily separated out from the logic of police, it cannot be permanently instituted, and that the two logics cannot therefore be conceived as either reciprocally mediated nor permanently separated.484 The tension between the performative logic of equality and the representative logic of inequality, for Rancière, is inescapable and constitutive of politics. That politics is "always a partial

483 Lois McNay (2014) acknowledges this in her criticisms of Rancière: "There is an obvious circularity to the argument in this chapter, in so far as to criticize Rancière for socially weightless thinking is, in some sense, no criticism at all since he himself would claim that this is the very point of his idea of the political” (166). 484 Woodford, Disorienting Democracy, 45.

211 achievement," and that it "doesn't open straightaway into a stable egalitarian achievement," or permanent global revolution, for Rancière is "not such a tragedy."485 The meta-aesthetic perspective that takes the competing logics of equality and inequality to be in constant tension is a way of addressing the problems he originally identified in his reading of "critique," and which prevented it from realizing its emancipatory aims. The immanent tension of these orders avoids recourse to the "critical distance" of critique, which Rancière identified as responsible for its anti-political and resigned effects brought about by the ceaseless separation of political agency from words and actions of political subjects. While this tension itself is insuperable, and hence cannot be definitively overcome, it does open a critical perspective in which it is possible to discern the critical-creative operations of egalitarian political agency in the here and now, something that "critique" could not do. The previous chapter traced out how Rancière's mature political thought has been shaped in response to the problem of critique and the particular failures or impasses it leads into. However, given the particularity of the genesis of Rancière's own thought, that as Deranty has argued it constitutes a "generalization from proletarian examples to all egalitarian politics," he has proven to be less reflexive about the potential limitations, impasses or abnegations associated with this perspective.486 In other words, Rancière's approach to politics is inseparable from and constituted out of a particular problem (critique) and a particular conception of resignation (political equality impossible in the here and now), which his account offers a means of avoiding. Consequently, there are a number of presuppositions built into Rancière's thought that are specific to this particular conjuncture, and that are obscured when this account is presented not only as relevant to a specific and limited range of scenarios, but as a generalized account of what is at stake in 'politics.' What are these presuppositions, and what are their implications (non-identities)? Are there other ways than those that Rancière identifies for an account of politics to produce resigned and uncritical effects, in spite of itself? For Rancière, the equality of agency relies on the equality of social forms, their necessary openness to appropriation/translation by anyone and everyone, despite the fact that social forms are simultaneously the means through which the social order is distinguished and arrayed into discrete and unequal parts. This tension is insuperable. There is no getting around it, outside it or beyond it, and attempts to 'undo' this knot are read as attempts to avoid the 'stakes' of politics. It is

485 Rancière, "Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics of Class struggle," 297-298. 486 Deranty, Disagreement or Recognition?, 74.

212 because he insists on the unavoidability of this tension, I claim, that Rancière's political thought fails to live up to its own criteria, that is, of avoiding and overcoming the anti-political and resigned relation to politics that occurs when a theory presupposes in advance what is to count as politics. Of course, Rancière does not offer a normatively contoured image of a future political community nor does he argue for an ethos or way of being which would serve as a guide for directing of political practice, as a basis to criticize existing social forms, or even to open up or foster responsiveness to the presently imperceptible or inaudible claims of others. This is his criticism of the ethical 'turn', which establishes a "kind of thinking, in which an identity is established between an environment, a way of being and a principle of action,” and hence patches over or denies what Rancière takes as necessary to politics: the interval or separation between a way of being or social location and the words and actions of political subjects.487 Rancière's account of politics, it would seem, predicated on the impropriety or indistinctions of egalitarian politics, resists presupposing who is capable of political speech and action, or what is to count as politics.488 In what sense, then, is Rancière guilty of making a presupposition about politics that somehow obscures its real stakes here and now? Rancière's presupposition about politics does not refer to the content of politics, and hence refrains from any 'ethical' theorizing that would link politics to a particular ethos or way of being, but is made, as we have seen in throughout the previous two sections, at a structural level in terms of a rethinking of the political agency-conditions relation itself. Rancière's criticism of "critique" was that it evacuated all sense of political agency from the words and actions of 'dominated' subjects through the installation of a "critical distance" that would decipher their true meaning by re-reading them in relation to ('proper'/appropriate) position in the social order. In short, critique translated or appropriated the meaning of these social forms – the poetry and prose of proleterians such as Gauny – and in the name of science purported to distill their objective political significance, hence displacing the site of agency away from its immanent performances and

487 Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004): 110. 488 Deranty and Renault in "Democratic Agon: Striving for Distinction or Struggle Against Domination and Injustice," argue that because Rancière's politics does not presuppose in advance what is to count as politics, unlike Arendtian approaches, that it could prove useful in redefining democratic agonism to include the "effort to realize equality in conditions of social inequality, through the transformation of institutions and the confrontation with the law" (44). What they fail to realize, however, is how Rancière's aversion to defining what 'counts' as politics is itself founded on an account of social conditions that precludes acknowledgment of the role of social inequality in conditioning, mediating or even "excluding" political subjects from political participation that Deranty and Renault rightly suggest is problematically skirted in the Arendtian approach.

213 thereby short-circuiting its own emancipatory aspirations. Rancière does not object to the fact that critique undertook to translate or interpret these social forms. As the reading of The Ignorant Schoolmaster had demonstrated, this is how all social forms are necessarily taken up. Rather, he objects to the unfounded pretension of critique to reserve this privileged capacity for translation to itself, as a matter of science, and its failure to recognize that the 'literarity' of this operation belongs, potentially, to anyone and everyone. In this way, Rancière's egalitarian conception of both agency and the appropriability of social forms rewrites the agency-conditions relation in order to open up modes of speaking and acting that confirm, in the here and now, their real and operative political- dissensual force. There are no specific social conditions, institutions, supports or relations of (inter)dependency that are required or presupposed by Rancière's politics. In one sense, this is a strength of Rancière's account because it opens an affirmative critical perspective, that cancels the critical distances that socially (and hence distinctively, or hierarchically) encode the meaning of the actions and words of others, and that, in so doing, prohibit the acknowledgment of the dissensual political agency that potentially inheres in them. Yet, the operators of political processes, what he refers to as the "part of no part," constitute an ineliminable and unavoidable dimension of the political community. The existence of this excessive part of the political body is characterized, in (quasi)transcendental fashion, as "a kind of structural law: the count of the uncounted is the difference that which opens the field of politics as such."489 As Alex Honneth has noted, this self-divided conception of the political community is predicated on an "inbuilt tension."490 Rancière, however, proclaims to reject both ontological and anthropologically grounded accounts of politics, which would undermine the specifically political stakes of mésentente by either vouchsafing the difference of politics in a pre-political ontological structure or by producing a "general theory of the subject" that would ethically-normatively ground the criticism of the institutions that are held to materially and recognitively support and enable political agency.491 Rancière sidesteps the charge that his own account is ontological, and therefore pre-politically

489 Rancière, "Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics of Class struggle" 296. 490 Honneth, Disagreement or Recognition?, 114. 491 Rancière makes this argument in a number of places. See for example: Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (New York: Continuum, 2010): 94, 217.

214 structured, by stipulating that while equality may be the condition of the possibility of all social order in his thought, specific operations of politics are not in any way assured in advance.492 If the equality of speaking beings and the indifferent appropriability of social forms are generalized features of his account, the process of politics, on the contrary, is defined as a temporary, provisional, and local operation that actualizes or "verifies" a specific capacity, performatively and polemically appropriating a way of speaking or acting that the social order held to be impossible for 'x' subjects. Rancière's "axiomatic" conception of equality, what he also refers to as "a method of equality," at first presupposes equality, though neither as ideal nor fact, but as an operative process capable of contesting and transforming social relations, and then calls for actual confirmation of equality in real practices, in what he refers to as the "verification" of equality.493 It is important to recall that the concept of verification extends back to Rancière’s early engagement with the pedagogy of Jacotot. There, Rancière had encountered the discovery that the possibility of learning, indeed all socially mediated interaction, “can be explained by the equality of intelligence.”494 However, because “what stultifies the common people is not the lack of instruction, but the belief in the inferiority of their intelligence,” emancipation, “the consciousness of that equality,” requires repeated verification.495 Rancière states: "If equality is axiomatic, a given, it is clear that this axiom is entirely undetermined in its principle – that it is anterior to the constitution of a determined political field, since it makes the latter possible in the first place."496 It is because the axiom of equality is without content – undetermined – that Rancière is able to contend that it is not an “ontological principle but a condition that only functions when it is put into action,” that, as Chambers elaborates, “equality only makes sense in the historical happening of politics.”497 Equality is axiomatically presupposed, because, as our previous discussion of The Ignorant Schoolmaster demonstrated, it is both what separates and links individuals. Equality is the

492 Rancière consistently rejects the notion that political dissensus could be ontologically grounded, as he holds that “such a requirement leads to the dissolution of politics on behalf of some historic-ontological destinary process” (“The Thinking of Dissensus: Aesthetics and Politics, in eds. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, Reading Rancière (London: Bloomsbury, 2011): 12.. 493 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 10. 494 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 46. 495 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 39. 496 Rancière, J., Guenoun, S., and Kavanagh, J. “Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic Disagreement,” Substance 29.2: 6 cited in Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière, 25, my emphasis. 497 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (New York: Continuum, 2006): 52 cited in Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière, 29.

215 condition of possibility of the “political field,” though this by no means that its logic will be acknowledged in any given conjuncture, hence the constitutive tension or ‘entanglement’ of inequality/equality. That equality constitutes the condition of possibility of the social field means that Rancière’s egalitarian ‘method’ is nevertheless constructed upon the ‘preponderance of the (decentered: separated and linked by equality) subject.’ The problem with predicating his method upon the preponderance of the subject is that the latter, while essential to the (dissensual) constituting of the political field, is also necessarily something constituted – something that has came to be, in inextricable relations of dependency and mediation. The methodological basis of Rancière’s poetics thereby unavoidably relies on a disavowal of the politics of the subject’s constitutedness, a disavowal that is, in turn, sustained by the idealism of those poetics, namely, the rejection of ‘essences’ (the claim of the object) and the nominalistic embrace of the flat plane of appearances. Between the undetermined axiom of equality – the preponderance of the contentless subject – and its ‘verification’ in a determinate historical conjuncture, “forever in need of reiteration,” resounds the idealist-positivistic kernal of the method, its natural-historical blindspot: if one begins from the premise that all meaning is constructed, from the preponderance of the subject – from what Adorno referred to as the “principle of immanence” – then one is condemned to the repetitive (re)discovery (or not) of what is posited from the start, that is, to the impossibility of the historical transformation of the global dynamic itself (not, of course, to a ‘beyond’ of politics, but towards the establishment of autonomous society). Performative verification, I argue, does not fully exculpate Rancière of all ontological charges. Nonetheless, the entanglement, on the one hand, of the "structural law" or ontologically "inbuilt tension" and, on the other, his recourse to the performativity of equality, complicates the attempt to make sense how the ontological residues of former limit and constrain what is at stake in politics. The question that arises in relation to this entanglement is: does the contingent and unpredictable emergence of politics – its performative character – make up for the fixed structure of Rancière's praxis-conditions relation, that is, its ontological residues (that the stakes of politics always and necessarily refer to the question of whether or not political subjects show themselves to separable, apart, or in excess of their social conditions and identities)? An ontological residue, drawing on Rancière's own criteria, would refer to presuppositions that structure in advance of what is to counts as politics and which function to foreclose both possibilities and problems related to the question 'what is at stake in political praxis'? For Rancière, issues of domination and political

216 exclusion, the locus classicus of critique, are anti-political problems and therefore turning away, aversively, from these questions is not only unproblematic but necessarily required. The moment of ‘truth’ inherent to critique was that it acknowledged the constitutedness of praxis, but in in the course of naturalizing and codifying this dependency into rigid laws, reified its insight. Rancière rightly criticizes this reifying dimension of critique, but instead of correcting it, inaugurates his Copernican turn towards equality, and thereby rendered the issue of the constitutedness of praxis politically non-identical. It is in this way that equality – the preponderance of the subject, which contains its own moment of truth, the irreducibility of the subject to the object – is the ontological residue in Rancière's thought. In what way, then, does equality problematically structure in advance what is to count as politics? As we have seen, this affirmative or aesthetic approach, in which the relation between political agency and conditions is figured solely in terms of the question of identity or excess, has been developed in response to a particular problem: the displacement of political agency from the words and actions of political subjects in 'critique'. It is not surprising, then, that there is a rigidity to the way Rancière's approach configures this relation, as, after all, it has been formed as a response to a specific problem and does not, therefore, account for other kinds of problems, or, indeed, for the political and historical mutability of the relation itself. Without accounting for constitutedness of praxis the moment of truth inherent to Rancière’s method, equality, is hypostatized – a hypostatization that reveals itself most clearly in the endless and repetitive dynamic of its movement (the endless tension of equality/inequality). Rancière's affirmative or aesthetic reconceptualization of critique, which links political agency to the force of egalitarian indistinction as well as to a 'flat' account of social conditions, also comes at a price once it is acknowledged how the universal moment – the axiomatic presupposition of equality – is structurally fixed and indifferent to the particular moment: the historical domain where the particular contestations of equality/inequality are played out. Idealism appears in Rancière’s method precisely in the preponderance of the universal over the particular. Hence, the failure of equality to emerge in the particular historical context in no way modifies or alters the universal axiomatics, which remain indifferently affirmative. It is here, in the non-identity of the particular and the universal, that Rancière’s ‘method,’ lest it natural-historically repeat Hegel’s condemnation of the particular as “lazy existence” (foule Existenz) requires a turn toward the

217 object, that is, a means of acknowledging the constitutedness of praxis.498 As Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics: The matters of true philosophical interests at this point in history are those in which Hegel, agreeing with tradition, expressed his disinterest. They are nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity – things which ever since Plato used to be dismissed as transitory and insignificant, and which Hegel labeled ‘lazy Existenz.’499

Rancière’s egalitarian poetics, which are intimately responsive to the relation between the efficacy of ‘fatherless’ words and actions and their non-identity with the “the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience," nevertheless harbors its reifying moment in the static and indifferent relation it establishes between universality (the undetermined axiom of equality) and the particular (the specific locus of political mésentente). Despite the ceaseless tension and stakes of political equality, it nevertheless perpetuates political non-identity by presenting issues related to the constitutedness of praxis as non-political or ‘given.’ What kind of political problems are obscured or rendered inarticulable by the structural fixity of this relation? What does it mean to think of this relation as politically and historically mutable and what kind of new problems or tensions are opened up by doing so?

8.1 Rancière’s Critics: Partial Steps towards the Conditionality of Praxis

The common complaint directed at Rancière, that he seems to foreclose the possibility of enduring change, hints at but does not quite express the difficulty or problematic character of the ontological residue of Rancière's politics.500 Norval and Gündoğdu have recently expressed qualified dissatisfaction with Rancière's account of the praxis-conditions relation.501 They share the concern that Rancière's conceptualization of this relation stifles the possibility of accounting for the mutual mediation of these terms, despite their recognition of the need for an account of democratic praxis capable of avoiding reductive accounts that obscure its creative-critical potential.502 They claim

498 Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic (Cambridge: Hackett, 1991): S6, 29 cited in Buck-Morss, Hegel Haiti and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009): 115. Buck-Morss, in turn, draws explicitly on Adorno’s citation of “lazy existenz’ in Negative Dialectics (8). 499 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 8. 500 Myers, in “Presupposing Equality,” argues that Rancière's account of equality as a "presupposition" functions to "restrict equality to two, not especially satisfying possibilities: a temporary revelation or a hidden secret" (45). 501 Norval, "Writing a Name in the Sky," and Aversive Democracy; Gündoğdu, "Disagreeing with Rancière". 502 The locution creative-critical is used to emphasize the inseparability of the creative potential of praxis from the critical re-cognition or disclosure of how the constituting socio-historical conditions have shaped the possibilities of

218 that the inability to account for how democratic praxis not only exceeds and disrupts, but also more positively and enduring alters the conditions it acts upon – and how transformation of those conditions, in turn, would enable or inhibit further political action or livability – severely limits the kinds of achievements or gains, problems, stakes, and forms of action that can be taken to be political.503 However, the proposals they offer in response to these limitations, I will argue, demonstrate that neither has adequately confronted the full extent of this challenge. Norval argues that the excessively antagonistic relation in Rancière's thought between political praxis and the conditions it resists, in ruling out the mediation of these polarities, sacrifices the ability to account for the significance of transformative political action and what it might mean for the future, in short, to conceive of politics as "world making."504 Norval, drawing on Wittengenstein and Cavell, goes on to offer an account of how the democratic energy and critical spirit of Rancière's political interruptions might be "inscribed" in the conditions that, she argues, must be acknowledged as positively and enduringly mediating political life. This attempted synthesis ignores, however, the way the very interruptions Norval finds so promising in Rancière's account necessarily rely on the flat and indifferent literarity or appropriability of all social forms. As a result, Norval's account of political mediation embroils itself in an inescapable antinomy. If Norval is to grant such importance to the mediation of political praxis, then such an approach necessarily opens itself to the differential manner in which particular conditions not only support, but also potentially inhibit praxis, in which case the indifferent appropriability of all social forms that was shown to sustain Rancière's egalitarian conception of subjectivation would no longer hold. Norval, undaunted, defines the challenge of overcoming this impasse in terms that, from the perspective of the present analysis, cannot but appear as antinominian:

the present, and hence point towards how the future might be re-shaped through the re-making of these conditions. The creativity of political praxis does not thereby emerge from the pure spontaneity, creativity or in-dependence of a subject that exceeds its conditionality, but via a process of Bernstein refers to as the praxial recognition – and hence modification – of the "heteronomous 'ground' of autonomy" (Recovering Ethical Life: Jurgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory, New York: Routledge, 1995: 83). 503 Woodford (Disorienting Democracy) and Inston ("Inscribing the Egalitarian Event"), who both undertake to demonstrate that the politics-police relation is more supple and dynamic than critics suggest, end up echoing Rancière's affirmation , rather than problematizing, the gap that separates agency from conditionality. Both argue that existing "inscriptions" of equality as well as work on social conditions (for example, organizing social movements or protesting inequality) are necessarily separated from the moment of political subjectivation, as the former is never sufficient to account for the excessive equality exhibited. What these approaches miss is that the question is not whether social conditions matter to politics, but how they matter (namely, as this paper argues, that the significance of conditions is intrinsic and inextricably entwined with the question of praxis, or whether, as Rancière asserts, they hold a merely negative significance). 504 Norval, Aversive Democracy, 141.

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Is there a way to conceive of egalitarian inscription that would do the work of disruption and distancing that Rancière has in mind, but that would also, further, be capable of inscribing such distancing into a way of being, an ethos, yet in a manner that would not by definition fall prey to the order of the police?505

Without a means of acknowledging both the enabling (and limiting) influence of social conditions upon political praxis, and hence of registering the worldly difference that politics makes in altering them, Norval rightfully calls into question the meaningfulness of radical political interruptions. However, if social-historical conditions mediate the possibility of political praxis, then the "division" of politics cannot be between excessive political performances of equality and policing social orders as Rancière holds, but must be thought of as "running through the self and through society, between a given, attained self or state of society, and a next of future state of the self and society."506 Social conditions, in this case, would interpenetrate subjectivity, and hence would already (partially) constitute the political subjects that, in acting, seek to resist and change them. Consequently, what would be called into question would not just be extrinsically imposed social identities, but the sedimented social-historical conditions that inhere in the self and that have rendered it unresponsive, indifferent, and differentially enabled and constricted in the capacity to both appropriate as well as to respond to the (dissensual, polemical and egalitarian) political words and actions of others. In this way, despite her avowal of the basic structure of the reciprocal mediation of political praxis and social conditionality, Norval nonetheless avoids confronting the full implications that follow from it because she conceives of this mediation abstractly and affirmatively. What drives her analysis is theoretical need, rather than allowing her thought to follow the micrological immersion in the content of problematic itself, which would require acknowledgment of the non-identity of universal (presupposition of equality) and particularity (failed praxis).507 Critically delving into the perplexities of this relation, would require, among

505 Norval, "Writing a Name in the Sky," 819. 506 Norval, "Writing a Name in the Sky," 821. 507 In what follows I will argue that Berlant's ambivalent critique, which involves the suspension of the need for an affirmative solution to the problem, emerges out of a novel deployment of Adorno's micrological approach to dialectics. For Adorno, micrology attempts to do justice to the mimetic dimension of cognition, and instead of merely identifying objects, attempts to unreservedly immerse itself in that "which is heterogeneous to it." However, this dialectical process of immersion is not exhausted in sheer immediacy – which is nevertheless a form of mediation – and requires not only a lingering engagement with the object but also critical reflection that would release the objects' "immanent generality," namely the "sedimented history" that is "stored in the object" and which can be released through "cognition of the object in its constellation" (Negative Dialectics, 13, 163). This conception of critical micrology, unlike Rancière's egalitarian poetics, presupposes the (dialectical) dependency of the (subject)-object upon its sedimented mediations, even as its grants the possibility of their transformation.

220 other things: attending to socially and historically specific constellations within which the mutable relation of praxis-conditions takes shape, acknowledging problems of political exclusion that follow from the politically induced unequal distribution of the conditions that enable and support political participation, and, in turn, consideration of the different forms or strategies that resistant political praxis takes in the face of the withering these conditions. Instead, Norval, in tension with her avowal of mediation, attempts a forced synthesis, retaining Rancière's affirmative presupposition that performative political agency is always in excess of its social identity within a framework that also attempts to acknowledge the mediating entanglement of praxis and its social conditions. The price of this resolution is that only those aspects of the mediating process that support and sustain the possibility of egalitarian political praxis are perceptible, while the constricting tendencies are rendered unthinkable or non-identical.508 Moreover, the equality of social forms, for Rancière, is predicated on their indifference, or their openness to appropriation by anyone and everyone, which means that they cannot be identified with a specific ethos or way of being, as Norval's Cavellian recasting demands.509 Despite the soundness of her recognition of the problematically dualistic structure of Rancière's politics, Norval's attempted solution is short- circuited by her haste to construct a positive solution to it and the attendant failure to critically explore the full panoply of problems implied by the reciprocal mediation of this relation. Norval, then, despite her apparent concern for social conditions and the ways in which they mediate political praxis, fails to break free from the limits of Rancière's affirmationist approach. Out of a similar set of concerns, Gündoğdu attempts to broaden Rancière's concept of political subjectivation to include forms of protest and interruption that fall below Rancière's threshold of "politics". Like Norval, she attempts to make room for acknowledging the ways in which democratic praxis is limited and constrained by the conditions it resists, while preserving Rancière's non-reductive account of political praxis. "Attending to the systematic obstacles that can complicate and derail attempts at verifying equality," she writes, "does not have to result in a structuralist, determinist or inegalitarian account."510 She aims to broaden the account of political subjectification by placing it in a more dialectical relation with the conditions that mediate its

508 The predetermined need to affirm political possibility functions to produce what Adorno refers to as "non-identity," that is, to render myriad forms of damage and suffering inarticulable and ineloquent within such a theoretical mediation of the process of political practice. 509 Woodford criticizes Norval on these grounds (Disorienting Democracy, 97-112). 510 Gündoğdu, "Disagreeing with Rancière", 203.

221 emergence, in which case politics would no longer be conceived primarily as interruptive but as an "uncertain process that is continuously shaped, constrained, and at times frustrated by the dominant frameworks, institutions, and norms that reinforce inequality."511 Her account surpasses Norval in that it begins to confront the fact that conditionality runs in multiple directions: that it is not only the 'gains' of struggle that need to be 'preserved,' but that political praxis, if emphatically conditional, takes varying forms, some of which will be highly limited and, in many cases, exposed to an array of damaging mediations, recognitive and material, that will inhibit, frustrate and exhaust resistance. In recognizing that the distinction between politics-police cannot always be figured as a tension between two entangled but separable logics, Gündoğdu's refiguring of this relation as opaque and internally mediated reveals the blindspot produced by Rancière's approach. Namely, that once the problem of the conditionality of political praxis is genuinely confronted the political stakes and problems – such as the frustration, suppression or violent opposition to equality that minimizes or distorts the latter’s effectual impact – that were (paradoxically) inarticulable within Rancière's framework are given a renewed urgency and eloquence. Arguing that "not every police order is equally open" to the kinds of polemical encounters defined by Rancière's conception of political subjectification, Gündoğdu draws attention to political practices and forms of claim making – her examples are the Scythian slaves and the 2005 French uprising in the banlieue youth – that are predicated on less "clear-cut" performative contradictions. In such 'ambiguous' cases, political practices and claim-making are grounded not on the verification of equality but through various forms of indicting and highlighting the politically-induced hierarchies, inequalities and limitations that frustrate and inhibit emphatic realizations of equality. Recourse to violent forms of protest express the 'wrong' of the present order in constrained form, objecting to political invisibility and unequal social conditions. Political praxis, under such constraints, does not take the form of performatively exceeding the 'contingent' limits of the inegalitarian order, rather, conditional political subjectification is compelled to resort to contesting the existing distribution of political roles and places through limited attempts at "rendering visible persistent forms of injustice."512

511Gündoğdu, "Disagreeing with Rancière", 194. 512 Gündoğdu, "Disagreeing with Rancière", 218; Juliet Hooker, in "Black Lives Matter and the Paradoxes of US Black Politics,"Political Theory 44 (2016) questions whether it is appropriate to ask the excluded, suffering and mis- recognized to "enact 'appropriate' democratic politics." While the target of her critique is neither Rancière nor postfoundational accounts of praxis in general, her critique resonants for any approach that would place the responsibilityof action on the backs of those a society marginalizes.

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Gündoğdu's efforts to "rethink political subjectifivation beyond dissensus" are valuable for exhibiting the limitations of Rancière's framework while attempting to preserve its critical potential, and take some initial steps towards elucidating the stakes and contours of a non-reductive yet conditional account of political praxis.513 In "rethinking political subjectivation as an indeterminate process associated with a much wider range of phenomena, including violent revolts, that seem to fall short of politics," she begins to extricate her approach from Rancière's affirmative framework.514 Gündoğdu, however, underestimates the extent to which her reworking of Rancière's conception of "impurity" – by pushing it in a direction that acknowledges the mutual mediation of praxis and conditions – demands a fundamental rethinking of the stakes of political equality and praxis. If political subjectivation often appears in attenuated form, such that the 'excessive' equality of political actors is compelled to express itself in partial, limited and politically constrained ways, then what is at stake in such a rethinking of democratic politics goes well beyond acknowledging a "wider range of phenomena" that can be counted as political in Rancière's affirmative-performative sense. Gündoğdu’s corrective remains focused upon what practical subjects can do – their irreducibility. If, pace Rancière, the verification of political equality cannot always emerge in the "here and now," then social conditions are no mere foil to dissensual performances of egalitarian politics but are themselves, as partially constitutive of the possibility of (interdependent) praxis, inseparable from the question of equality. The question that then emerges, and which remains unaddressed by Gündoğdu, is if the shape and effectuality of political subjectivation is subject to limitations – to forms of attenuation and wearing out that threaten to render it imperceptible – then on what basis is it possible to re-conceive of its creative- critical potential and its relation to the conditions it resists? The politics of conditions – the variable and political dimension of the constitutedness of praxis (the subject as object) – must become an overt aspect of any approach confronting the conditionality of praxis. Gündoğdu fundamentally problematizes Rancière's affirmative account of politics, yet without extricating her insights from limitations of the former. She conceives of her intervention as one of extending Rancière's conception of political subjectification to include less emphatic or constrained practices of equality, rather than as fundamentally challenging its most internal premise: the primacy of praxis.

513 Gündoğdu, "Disagreeing with Rancière", 216. 514 Gündoğdu, "Disagreeing with Rancière", 196.

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Yet, in extending the logic of political subjectification to the point of its dissolution or failure, Gündoğdu has done more than unsettle the “clear-cut distinction between identification and disidentification in processes of political subjectivation", she has, on the contrary, exploded Rancière’s problematic (politics as the incessant problem of verifying equality) without realizing so.515 Its core premise – the irreducibility of praxis – no longer remains blissfully unproblematic. What had sustained this affirmation, the static indifference of the moment of universality (presupposition of equality) to its particular instantiations in history (the staging of dissensus), has been revealed as itself both contingent and particular (as producing non-identity of the particular). The egalitarian process of ‘taking up’ social forms has itself been shown to be conditional, a power or potentiality that can fail or misfire, and cannot be safely preserved or isolated from the conditions it resists. Acknowledging the mediation of praxis by the conditions it resists, does not automatically lead, as Rancière fears, to the foreclosure of the capacity to perceive political equality in the here and now. On the contrary, the figure of conditional praxis – mediated by processes, structures and conditions that damage and inhibit or frustrated effective and transformative modes of praxis – can retain the gesture of performative refusal that reveals political subjects to be irreducible to their social conditions. Gündoğdu’s work illustrates this without acknowledging its corollary, namely, that the conditionality of praxis also discloses the politics of conditions. Failed, inaudible or compromised forms of political subjectification testify to the limits of egalitarian praxis here and now – not their absence – and in doing so point beyond themselves (and beyond Rancière), reflecting not the limits or inequality of the actors, but the particularity of the conditions mediating them. Rancière was right to maintain that critique remains anti-political insofar as it focuses on what political actors can’t do. Yet it’s not what political actors can’t do, but what they can that discloses the particular limits of praxis in the here and now.

8.2 Predicaments of the Politics of Conditionality

The remaining discussion of Rancière, building on Norval and Gündoğdu, demonstrates why the political potential of the this account will remain self-cancelling as long as it fails to acknowledge the paradoxical conditionality of irreducible praxis. Rancière's account of the egalitarian mediation

515 Gündoğdu, “Disagreeing with Rancière,” 218.

224 of social forms does not allow for recognition of the ways in which subjectivity is constituted, shaped, mediated and limited by the social world that precedes it, because, in part, he always conceives of the extant conditions as inegalitarian, that is, predicated upon a "miscount."516 Rancière's account of the agency-conditions relations effects a two-fold neutralization- naturalization that, I argue, fundamentally obscures the stakes of emancipatory praxis. Firstly, the recasting of social conditions as 'flat' effectuates a neutralization or de-differentiation of the historically sedimented and socially variable conditions that constitute and structure political praxis, politically neutralizing problems related to social domination and political exclusion (the constitutedness of the object). Secondly, the manner of linking political praxis to the impropriety of equality, without recognition of the conditional character of this potentially, effectuates a naturalization of resistance (preponderance of the equal-irreducible subject). The critical core of Rancière's thought consists in the historically specific analysis of the early work archival work that attested to the potential of purportedly marginalized, dominated or determined workers to exhibit modes of acting and speaking that exceeded their socially mediated identities, and which thereby called into question the historically limited character of the extant distributions of sensibility. 517Almost immediately, however, this critical core was ensconced in a framework that hypostatized both the poles of praxis-conditionality, through the persistent refusal to acknowledge their reciprocal mediation and mutual constitution by recasting this relation as one of ‘tangled separation.’518 Rather than acknowledging the constellation of conditions that enabled figures such as Gauny and Jacotot to appropriate what did not properly belong to them, Rancière, "formalizing" these proletarian experiences in his mature political theory, de-linked them from their historical constellation and established the structural law of ‘supplementary’ equality.519 The insuperable tension between police-politics, which appears as an avenue to affirmatively-critically open horizon of politics, of what or who might count as political, is in fact predicated on a prior rigidity that undermines the emancipatory potential of this approach: namely, that the praxis- conditions relation is itself unchangeable in that it is always and necessarily at stake in the same way. The constitutive tension between the two competing logics of politics-police, freezes this relation into a structured dynamic that actively prevents acknowledgement of the historical and

516 Rancière, Dis-agreement, 6. 517 See: Rancière, The Nights of Labour. 518 Woodford, Disorienting Democracy, 45. 519 Deranty, "Between Honneth and Rancière,”37.

225 political non-identity of this relation – and hence occludes recognition of the need for the political- historical revision of the relation itself. By non-identity, I mean the acknowledgment that particular episodes of political praxis are neither always nor necessarily fully possible – that the capacity to resist takes varying forms, some of which fall below the threshold of effective or transformative resistance – because it is not an ontological power nor is it independent from the social conditions that simultaneously enable, constrain, damage, exhaust and necessitate political action. Rancière's affirmative account of political equality fails to outrun his own critique of the ontologization of politics.520 The problem with Rancière's approach, then, is not simply that it frustrates any attempt to articulate how the "gains of struggle" are sustained. As the previous discussion demonstrated, one can articulate how these gains might be sustained and still end up with a hypostatized account of praxis-conditions relation. That political praxis is a process that is local, provisional and performative, and that there is no final stabilizing or harmonious endpoint is not, in and of itself, the charge being made against Rancière. On the contrary, Rancière's conception of the impropriety of equality and the irreducibility of subjectivity to its mediating conditions constitutes an indispensable contribution to radical democratic thought and offers an important corrective to historically inflected modes of critical theorizing that can come perilously close to losing sight of the fragile eloquence of resistant or minoritarian modes of political praxis in relation to the preponderance of dominating social structures. There is a significant difference between repudiating, as Rancière rightfully does, the role of utopian ideals or visions of harmonious or emancipated social conditions that serve as the telos toward which present praxis (indefinitely) strives, and the reverse formulation which Rancière avers, "that emancipation is a process rather than a goal," which driven to the extreme point where this process becomes a static and inescapable horizon, hypostatizes. The insuperable tension between police-politics, which appears as an avenue to affirmatively-critically open the horizon of politics, of what or who counts as political, is in fact predicated on a prior structural fixity that undermines the emancipatory potential of this approach: namely, that the praxis-conditions relation is itself fundamentally unchangeable and therefore structurally incapable of fulfilling what it episodically promises. The constitutive tension between the two competing logics of politics- police, freezes this relation into a dynamic that actively prevents acknowledgement of the

520 See Rancière. Dissensus, 217.

226 historical and political non-identity of this relation – and hence occludes recognition of the need for the political-historical revision of the relation itself. By non-identity, I mean the acknowledgment that particular episodes of political praxis are neither always nor necessarily fully possible as the universal moment presupposes – that the capacity to resist takes varying forms, some of which fall below the threshold of effective or transformative resistance – because politics is not an ontological power nor is it independent from the social conditions that simultaneously enable, constrain, damage, exhaust and necessitate it. Rancière's affirmative account of political equality fails to outrun his own critique of the ontologization of politics. Yet, in order to break out of the closed critical of critique by demonstrating how political subjectivity is irreducible to the ‘laws of matter,’ Rancière's recasting of the praxis-conditions relation – which installs the ‘excess’ of praxis into both the account of egalitarian equality as well the flat and indifferent account of social forms – is purchased at the price of denying the mutability of relation. Pace Rancière, the politics of equality is only able to realize its radical potential when it is acknowledged as fundamentally conditional. Only then can the 'more,' or polemical and transformative potential of egalitarian political praxis, be intimately linked to its social conditions even as it undertakes to transform and re-make them. Without acknowledging the historical specificity and hence mutability of the agency-conditions relation there can be no critical account of emancipation. What Rancière sought to overcome – political resignation, which he affirmatively redefined as the inability to perceive equality in the here and now – reappears in his work when he recasts the praxis-conditions relation in accordance with the preponderance of the subject (primacy of praxis). By structuring in advance what is to count as politics (the verification of equality) it forecloses critical acknowledgment of the damaging sedimentations that constitute the ‘here and now’ and that would be necessary to disclose failed or withering modes of praxis as a political problem. The characteristic forgetfulness of idealism – the disavowal of the constitutedeness of the subject, whose processes are temporally extended (and hence often suppressed or forgotten in the ‘here and now’) – makes its appearance at precisely this place in Rancière’s thinking. The universal moment (the presupposition of equality, the ‘as if’ moment), is the aesthetic condition that enables both the participant, the part-taker as well as the acknowledgment of equality (equal appropriability of the word) to become condensed into a particular and punctual moment of praxis. The particular, in turn, verifies the axiomatic universal (the staging of dissensus here and now as

227 a “wrong” as “polemical universal”). 521 Particularity that is non-identical with universality – failed or withering forms of praxis that testify not to inequality, but the constitutedness (mediation) of praxis – are inexpressible within the grammar of Rancière’s political aesthetics. Hence Rancière’s conception of emancipation converges with unfreedom insofar as the acknowledgement of the former (non-identity) is in tension with the acknowledgment of the latter (presupposition of equality). The risk here is that “unfreedom [the non-identity of the particular] is consummated in its invisible totality that tolerates no ‘outside’ [the hypostatization of the dynamic possibilities of the universal-particular in Rancière] any more from which it might be broken.”522 “Without affinity,” Adorno argues – the acknowledgment of the particular in its non-identity with the universal – “there is no truth.”523 The problem does not emerge from the presupposition of equality as such or from the insight that praxis is potentially irreducible to its context, but from making this insight universal – from the establishment of the primacy of praxis. The universal moment of politics thereby ossifies into something static and unchangeable, and the material conditions – the real universal – fade, non-identically, into the contingency of the background. The idealist dialectic of universality and particularity in Rancière’s account of politics closes off the possibility of a host of problems related to the reciprocal mediation of political praxis and social conditions, not the least of which includes the corrigibility of the social order, or what Adorno conceived of as the promise of the transformation of totality (system) into reconciliation. The universal moment, within reconciled society, would no longer remain a presupposition but would become something actual, open and enabling of the particular individuals and their mediated modes of inhabiting and part-taking/participating in society, including their incessant endeavour to continually modify and amend the terms of its habitability. Reconciliation should not be conceived of as a stable harmony, but, in the absence of this utopian relation, approached negatively and critically, opens up a different set of political stakes: that the withering of these conditions threatens not only the possibility of political praxis, but material suffering and loss of life, and that these conditions are politically induced and changeable. Rancière's failed outbreak owes, then, to his haste to demonstrate how emancipation can become realized in the here and now, which, in establishing a relation of verification towards the particular, rather than one of open

521 Rancière, Dis-agreement, 40. 522 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 274. 523 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 270.

228 interpretation or following the ‘matter itself,’ hypostatizes the particular. This construal of the stakes of politics is too narrow and rigid. Political acts, which performatively contest the limits, constraints and wrongs of social conditions matter not just because these conditions establish external identities – what both separates and links individuals – but because these conditions constitute individuals, inhere within them, and mediate the terms of both self and inter- relationality. If it is possible to describe Rancière’s thought in terms of the “preponderance of the subject,” or the “primacy of praxis” it is because, as we have seen, he establishes equality – both the equality of speaking beings and the equal appropriability of words (‘the book’) – as the condition of the possibility of “the political field” (which includes both the entangled logics of equality/inequality). Within Rancière’s poetics, the mediation of practical agents – the social, economic, historical and political forces that precede, constitute and condition (support and inhibit) the entwined material and recognitive dimensions of social individuality – forms an inextricable dimension of the ‘impurity’ of politics. The police “distribution of sensibility” looks towards these mediating processes in order to place the words of political subjects into their ‘proper’ context, where the dissensual force of their utterances or acts (the performative force of equality as the ‘part of no part’) can be ‘explained’ according to the established social and political (anti-political) divisions or categorizations. From the beginning, Rancière’s meta-aesthetic perspective is interested in the problem of whether singular acts or performances are narrated in a contextual frame (police), or allowed to stand for themselves (equality). The modern development of critical historiographical narratives, according to Rancière “invents the art of making the poor speak by keeping them silent, of making them speak as silent people.”524 The ‘critical’ interpretation of the meaning of actions introduces a “gap between words and things, or, more precisely [a] gap between nominations and classifications” that undermines, a priori, the force of the egalitarian performance to stand out, ecstatically, from its proper place or meaning.525 For Rancière, the political problem of mediation is that ‘critical’ recourse to it inevitably tends to situate the meaning of words or actions into their proper place. While Rancière hits upon an important problem here, the reductionist reading of mediation – the drive to establish propriety – is only sustainable if the role such processes necessarily play constituting and maintaining individuals is ignored (meta-

524 Rancière, The Names of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994): xvi. 525 Rancière, The Names of History, 34.

229 aesthetically), in short, by framing the problem in terms of the ‘primacy of praxis.’ Once the question of the (variable) constitutedness of praxis is bracket out, and hence the question of their failure or withering is repudiated as anti-political, the irreducibility of praxis to its conditions becomes the problem of Rancière’s democratic politics. The material dimension of social mediation – the processes that sustain the physical (and recognitive) integrity of individuals (or not) – is eluded by this meta-aesthetic problematization. Social mediation, for Rancière, remains secondary, in political terms, to the question of equality. It is re-coded as a problem of inequality, as a mode of eluding or ignoring the egalitarian (hence dissensual force) of praxis. However, it is important to note that Rancière’s interpretation of mediation runs directly counter to Adorno’s dialectical conception because of the latter’s refusal to accept the ‘primacy of praxis.’ For Adorno, mediation does not aim to set the object in its proper place. As Adorno puts it, “Cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object.”526 The critical interpretation of sedimented layers of mediation that constitute the (subject qua) object aims at the acknowledgment of its non-identity, that is, the system of relations, dependencies, inheritances as well as the forgotten history of suffering, adaptation and deformation, that in the process of constituting subjectivity, making it possible, also separates it from itself. Mediation discloses the plurality of histories and conditions inhering in the constitutedness of subject, whose practical transformation (transformability) would allow the subject to become ‘more’ than it currently is. Political praxis is not only something constituting (contesting and re-constituting the social order), but is also unavoidably something constituted. As something constituted, the potential of praxis is separated from itself, not a possession that ‘properly’ belongs to the practical subject (or even to the punctual or immediate domain of political praxis) – even for a critical subject enable to critical reflect on its conditionality. If, then, the political potentiality of praxis is irreducible to its constituting conditions it would not be because it exceeds them, as Rancière holds – that praxis is capable of the impossible – but because it would be capable of criticizing them, and if sufficiently supported, of transforming or revising its conditionality (and so transforming itself, and its potential for inhabiting the social). Rancière’s nominalism – his anti-speculative rejection of any meaning or ‘essences’ hiding behind appearances527 – coincides with his refusal

526 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 163. 527 Rancière writes: “There is no science, we have learned, but that of the hidden. And the production of this hidden is a poetic operation essential to the construction of knowledge in historical study” (The Names of History, 52). Hidden essences, for Rancière, are themselves the product of a poetic construction rather than an operation of knowledge.

230 to acknowledge the preponderance of the object (the constitutedness of praxis) as a source or problem of political meaning, which shifts the burden of political significance onto the terrain of decentered subjectivity. Once the stakes of politics are set entirely upon the ground of the endless contestation of meaning, nominalism is not only plausible but virtually unavoidable. The affirmation of nominalism – the indifference of Rancière’s poetics to the claim of the object (the constitutedness of the subject) – covers over the fact that nominalism (the meaningless of constitutedness) is itself a historical condition. As Adorno puts it, “the autonomy of the social process is itself not an ‘in itself’ but is rather grounded in reification [in particular historical and political processes]; even the processes estranged from human beings remain human.”528 The historical estrangement of individuals from society, or of political praxis from the conditions that would enable or foster their capacity to amend them in turn, is forgotten the in very act of Rancière’s affirmation of the irreducible separation of individuals from their social mediation. Once forgotten, the fugitive interruptions of dissensus come to appear as the only form of politics available within the context of pervasive nominalism. Unlike in dialectics, the universal moment in Rancière’s poetics does not refer to the social totality that conditions and mediates the particular or individual (the constitutedness of praxis), but to the starting point of his egalitarian poetics: the equality of intelligences, the equal appropriability words and the equal inhabitability of social roles. The social mediation of individuals along with the logic of inequality is rendered emphatically contingent and particular once severed from its role in constituting and sustaining the entwined material and recognitive integrity of individuals. The capacity to express or narrativize the damage inflicted upon individuals as politically exigent is undermined by the failure to attribute this significant function and meaning to the differentially distributed processes of social mediation. This importance of these mediation processes – what Adorno referred to by the ‘preponderance of the object’ – is in no way diminished by the acknowledgment that practical subjects are nevertheless irreducible to their social constitutedness, as Butler’s recent work has demonstrated. As chapter three has shown, to give expression to the

Instead of finding essences beneath appearances, Rancière argues that the “essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus as the presence of two-words in one” (“Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory and Event 5.3, 2001), that is, “of a production, within a determined sensible world, of a given that is heterogeneous to it” (The Philosopher and His Poor, 226). The heterogeneity of equality does not emerge from elsewhere (from a hidden substratum or ontological reserve), but is immanent to the tension governing the distribution of sensibility, and emerges only in the course of the dissensual contestation of appearance. 528 Adorno, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, 119.

231 meaning of constitutedness, to the damage that the social totality – mediation – inflicts on the particular, the totality must be perceived as integral to the possibility of the individuation that would deviate from and challenge it in turn, precisely what Rancière (along with post-structuralism in general) rejects (the ‘count’ or totality for Rancière emphatically contingent, always a miscount). As Jameson insists “totality is not celebrated in Adorno, even though the critical use of its concept is: the much-quoted dictum that, as against Hegel, ‘the whole is the untrue’ does not imply that we ought to stop talking about it – quite the contrary.”529 Rancière’s opposition to the category of totality is revealed in his criticisms of the historical narratiavization of the particular (of the words and actions of the poor, which are made eloquent only by ‘keeping them silent’). The misunderstanding here is the presumption that totality is a coherent or fully knowable category, an ‘in itself’ which could be applied to interpret individual cases in order to see them aright, in their proper place. Negative dialectics, however, takes its point of departure from the fact that, “after Hegel,” dialectics has “forfeited the former, profoundly questionable, consciousness of philosophical certainty [truth of the whole].”530 On the contrary, because the totality is neither a simple fact nor above the facts, but the (irrational, uneven) principle of their mediation (facts are not simply neutral, ahistorical givens), it is only disclosable on the surface of the particular itself (as non-identity, the damaged caused by the universal that is latter simultaneously makes inexpressible). Dialectical critique is not directed towards what Adorno refers to as the “intentio recta,” the substratum or concept of reality that would explain the illusion of appearances. Rather, it is direct towards the “intentio obliqua,” namely, the appearance of the totality – never the totality ‘in itself’ – and which is only perceptible on the surface of particularity.531 The ‘falsity’ of the whole is not the expression of an abstract global judgment which would imply a determinate (negative) history, but the attempt to allow the expression of a particular and material wrong to become meaningful – ‘more’ than a mere accident or contingency – by allowing the irrationality (particularity) of its historical constellation to become a perspicuous dimension of the discrete object’s condition. As Buck-Morss explains, contrasting Adorno’s speculative history with that of Lukács ‘metaphysics of history’, for Adorno: History formed ‘no structural whole.’ Instead it was ‘discontinuous,’ unfolding within a multiplicity of divisions of human praxis through a dialectical processes which was

529 Jameson, Late Marxism, 232. 530 Adorno, “Society,” 9. 531 Adorno, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, 31; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 69.

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open-ended. History did not guarantee the identity of reason and reality. Rather, history unfolded in the spaces between subjects and objects, men and nature, whose very non-identity was history’s motor force.532

For Adorno, the “interpretation” of the object does not come about by setting it into context, domesticating its dissensual singularity, and establishing the object’s proper meaning. On the contrary, it emerges from “micrological immersion in the smallest detail” which allows the object’s sedimented mediations – the innumerable dimension of constitutedness (both material- natural and social) that separates the object from itself – to become perspicuous, allowing the object to be perceived anew or as non-identical with it universal concept. Far from establishing the reduction of the subject to the ‘laws of matter’ – to its sociological context – for Adorno, “freedom is so entangled with unfreedom [damaged to the subject qua object] that unfreedom is not merely an impediment but also a premise of freedom’s concept.”533 Rather than establishing the object’s proper meaning, Adorno’s open-ended materialist mode of interpretation recovers fugitive acknowledgment [non-generalizable] of the plurality of non-identical dimensions composing the object’s condition. By making these dimensions perspicuous, the object is disclosed anew, and the material damage effectuated upon the object becomes the material reason (fragile truth) for seeking to change the prevailing social conditions. Interpretation alone, however, cannot guarantee or accomplish this transformation, a task that can only be carried out by political praxis.534 If political action cannot be understood as altering, changing or criticizing the social conditions and the ways in which they inhibit and enable the formation of individual subjectivities and their potentiality for acting political, part-taking in the shaping of the conditions through which they are formed, the stakes of emancipatory praxis ossify. What is at stake in emancipatory politics cannot be specified in advance of engagement with historically specific constellations unless the particularity of those conjunctures and the forms of praxis that respond to them are indifferent repetitions of an unchanging 'political' dynamic – but this conclusion would deprive politics of its lifeblood, that is, of its historical mutability and the way the possibility of modifying the contours of socially mediated life both threatens and promises new modes of living together. Rancière

532 Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, 47. 533 Jameson, Late Marxism, 81. 534 Susan Buck-Morss rightly notes that “Adorno’s talk of the mediation between intellectual praxis [interpretation/experience] and political praxis remained abstract and vague” (The Origin of the Negative Dialectic, 42). The aim of this dissertation is to both preserve the critical kernel of Adorno’s critique of the separation of critique and praxis, while calling into question the uncritical thesis that praxis is blocked wholesale.

233 offers a promising conception for thinking about the excessive character of political subjectivity – and hence contributes to a critical account of political mediation – but his invariant installation of this capacity and his recasting of mediating conditions as 'flat' undermines the stakes of his approach to politics.

8.3 Neutralization of Conditions; Naturalization of Resistance

This section unpacks how Rancière's recasting of the praxis-conditions relations effects a two-fold neutralization-naturalization that, I argue, fundamentally obscures the stakes of emancipatory praxis. The interpretation of mediating social forms and conditions as 'flat' – without an essence beyond the context of immanence – effectuates a nominalistic neutralization or de-differentiation of the historically sedimented and socially variable conditions that constitute and structure political praxis, depoliticizing the politics of conditions. Secondly, by establishing equality as the condition of the possibility of the social order, and by disqualifying consideration of the conditional character of political praxis, Rancière effectuates a naturalization of resistance. Rancière's recasting of social conditions as "fictive," as we have seen, is predicated on the flatness or equal appropriability or part-taking of the meaning of social forms. The claim that Rancière's account of social conditions effects a neutralization of inequality, in and of itself, is not sufficient to demonstrate a weakness in his approach as he openly avows this effect as an integral element of politics. Indeed, Rancière writes: Neutralization is not at all tantamount to pacification. On the contrary, the neutralization of the opposition between the faculties, the parts of the soul, or the classes of the population is the staging of an excess, a supplement that brings about a more radical way of seeing the conflict.535

In order to show how this recasting of the role of social conditions, which constitutes the condition of the possibility of Rancière's affirmative-critical egalitarian politics, results in a hypostatization it is necessary to demonstrate the ways in which the purportedly emancipatory effects of this neutralization in fact fail to live up to their own highest criteria – openness, or refusing to define the figure of political praxis in advance – and exhibit elements of the political resignation they proclaim to have overcome.

535 Rancière, "The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge," Critical Inquiry 36 no.1 (2009): 3.

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The flipside of Rancière's claim that the meaning of all mediating words and identities (‘the book’) are equally appropriable, that there are no ways of being, acting or speaking and no technical or political competencies that cannot be taken up by anyone and everyone, is that the given distribution of sensibility, which institutes a semblance of 'order' by linking political identities to determinate ways of being and acting, is itself fundamentally contingent. The stability of the social identities and political representations constituting a given "distribution of sensibility," is provisional because, as we have seen, the differentiations and distinctions an order makes perceptible do not belong inherently or substantially to those composing it. On the contrary, an order – what both unites and separates a body politic – is sustained only on the condition that the representations constituting that order can be taken up and translated by anyone and everyone and it is this amenability to appropriation that effectuates a de/re-composition of the political count. For Rancière there is always a gap between social representation and the taking up of those representations by subjects, irrespective of whether the latter confirms or contests the former. Identity is not thereby repudiated, rather the aesthetic interval that separates the performative from the representative means that egalitarian subjectivity is irreducible to its socially mediated appearances. In other words, for Rancière, even an unequal social order is sustained because of equality, in both the sense of the equality capacity of individuals to translate the meaning of social forms and the indifferent or 'flat' appropriability of social forms to being (re)translated. This constitutes Rancière's radical suspension of the mediation of social inequality and political equality. There is nothing in social conditions that prevents them from being taken up and appropriated by anyone and everyone. On the other hand, there are no necessary ways in which conditions enable or support political praxis. There is no proper mode of cultivating political competency or literacy, and hence there is nothing in the unequal distribution of social conditions that determinately bears on the distribution of political equality. How, then, does Rancière account for the existence and reproduction of inequality and domination given his account of the flatness of social conditions? Already in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, speaking of what sustains the closed "circle of powerlessness" and the potential breaches that lead from it to the egalitarian "circle of power," he writes, "Those excluded from the world of intelligence themselves subscribe to the verdict of their exclusion. In short, the circle of emancipation must be begun."536 He continues, "The problem is to reveal an intelligence to itself."

536 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 15, author’s emphasis.

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Rancière , as has been shown, rules out the possibility that social conditions constitute individual subjectivities in such a way that they opaquely, and potentially ideologically, internally structure the ways in which individuals take up or mediate their social world. Inequality, therefore, is not a function of unequal social structures but a social and political problem whose critical site is, strangely, self-relationality. Rancière writes: The ordering of social 'occupations' works in the mode of this as if. Inequality works to the extent that one 'believes' it, that one goes on using one's arms, eyes and brains according to the distribution of the positions. This is what consensus means. And this is the way domination works.537

Inequality and domination, for Rancière, do not and cannot foreclose or suture the "intervals" that render subjectivity – and the potential construction of political subjects in the mode of 'subjectification' – irreducible to its socially mediated identities, but merely "patch over" and obscure the equality subtending the social order. This 'patching over' is itself described as a problem, in the last instance, of self-relationality irreducible and separate from how social conditions constitute, mediate and constrain an individual's relation to oneself and the possibilities of its re-visioning. Inequality may be fostered from without, but it only functions on condition the individual continues to believe in it, and therefore is irreducible to the former.538 The contingency of the social order, which Rancière uses to emphasize the possibility of its egalitarian transformation, therefore, is mirrored by the radical contingency of an individual's belief in their own equality, in the sense that this self-acknowledgment is radically de-linked from social mediation, in other words, that "only chance is strong enough to overturn the instituted and incarnated belief in inequality."539 The heteronomy of society is bracketed out and pushed back onto the political subject where it can be re-read as a virtue. In order to avoid describing the self- relational structure responsible for the acknowledge of one's own equality in terms of ideology or illusion, Rancière overshoots the mark, and in order to preserve the 'excess' of political agency in relation to social conditions, closes off all possibility of accounting for the mediated character of this relation. The problem is not that, for Rancière, political praxis performatively exceeds the given terms of its social mediation – this is, as he shows contra "critique," the sine qua non for an

537 Rancière, Disagreement or Recognition?, pg 137. 538 This logic would seem to echo that which Adorno criticizes in Kierkegaard’s conception of the authenticity of empty subjectivity (See especially, chapter 2 “The Constitution of Inwardness” in Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 539 Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 133.

236 emancipatory account of praxis – but that this creative-critical 'excess' of praxis is rendered unconditional and immutable by the fact that the possibility of its actualization is de-linked from the conditional, differential and mutable aspects of real social conditions. Equality, as has been demonstrated, is intimately connected to Rancière's account of the individual’s active part-taking in the process of social mediation, which is inextricable from his rethinking of social conditions as 'flat' or indifferently available to 'appropriation.' Without accounting for the variable constitutedness of political praxis (that subjectivity, in its various shapes and conditions, is always an achievement, much less the innumerable conditions necessary for plural praxis, made possible by conditions that precede and exceed the subject’s control, that are differentially realized, and thereby fundamentally political in character), however, his account hypostatizes into an ontological residue (affirmatively and pre-politically forestructured). In order to maintain the ‘gap’ essential to Rancière’s poetics, praxis is posited as irreducible to conditionality, that is, as a potentiality that held in reserve, a-part from and indifferent to the worldly conditions and their changing historical shape. In order to more fully unpack this claim, it is necessary to first show how Rancière's construal of the stakes of politics in terms of the insuperable tension of inequality/equality in fact relies upon a depoliticizing account of the contingency of social conditions, and how this necessitates a rethinking of what is meant by political resignation as well by 'politically contested site.' Woodford and Inston, who both undertake to demonstrate that the politics-police relation is more supple and dynamic than critics suggest, end up affirming the gap that separates agency from conditionality.540 Both argue that existing "inscriptions" of equality as well as work on social conditions (for example, organizing social movements or protesting inequality) are necessarily separated from the moment of political subjectivation – the emergence of a novel form of political subject that takes place through the performative of dis-identification – as the former are never sufficient to account for the excessive equality exhibited. What this approach misses is that the question is not whether social conditions matter to politics, but how they matter. Woodford's demonstration that social conditions matter to praxis is in perfect fidelity to Rancière's "method of equality" when she concludes that "we are emancipated if we reject the representations of the world that we inherit, are given or told about by others, and instead listen to our own thoughts."541 In this

540 Woodford, Disorienting Democracy; Inston “Inscribing the Egalitarian Event.” 541 Woodford, Disorienting Democracy, 111.

237 case, work on social conditions matters in much the same way as the ignorant schoolmaster matters to his pupils: shaping conditions that are likely to be conducive to the uptake of equality despite the fact that the "barriers…exist in the individuals themselves," and that "people need to emancipate themselves."542 Both affirm that work on social conditions matters in Rancière, so long as there is no way to connect the enabling and constraining effects of these conditions to political praxis. In attempting to exhibit the political meaningfulness of social conditions in Rancière's account of politics both Inston and Woodford, despite themselves, end up foregrounding the fate of emancipatory praxis when the fount of that praxis is dirempted from its social conditionality: it becomes radically 'contingent.' Contingency, however, does not promise political transformation nor is it in any way incompatible with a social status quo that maintains itself through perpetual self-modulation; rather, it is the only way to configure the link between political praxis and its social conditions once the possibility of their reciprocal mediation has been ruled out. Thus, Rancière openly avers that politics is the "twist that ties together the contingency of equality to the contingency of inequality."543 The question remains, however, does this insuperable tension or 'twisting' produce an emancipatory account of politics, as it claims, or does it produce the very blindspots that render its own brand of political resignations imperceptible? In order to pursue this question, it is instructive to consider how Rancière handles, in the rare places it is addressed at all, the kind of political problem that the reverse excess makes perceptible: the dependency of individuals upon constitutive sociality and possibilities that follow from the failures and fractures of that relation, ranging from political exclusion, marginalization to imperceptible forms of materiality and recognitive suffering. It is in the Figures of History that Rancière turns to the question of suffering and to those who "have endured a life decided by others, dispossessed as they have been of any personal capacity for making history."544 He writes, "suffering lies in seeing the pact speaking imposes go unacknowledged."545 Suffering, for Rancière, is not something that the social-historical conditions impose upon unfortunate, passive or dependent subjects, nor is it, remarkably, considered in its material-somatic dimension. It consists, quite to the contrary, in the mute claim for equality going unrecognized and therefore failing to disrupt and revise the prevailing distribution of socially mediated identities. In fact, in

542 Woodford, Disorienting Democracy, 93. 543 Rancière, "The Thinking of Dissensus," 12. 544 Rancière, Figures of History (New York: Polity Press, 2014): 34. 545 Rancière, Figures of History, 38.

238 the example Rancière supplies this equality is so fragile and mute that it isn't even recognized by those same speaking-beings who exhibit it. Rancière, in describing Daniele Segre's documentrary Dynamite about Sardinian miners, writes "it is impossible not to be gripped by their mastery of the language and the implacable lucidity with which they analyze the situation, arguing the case for their struggle and demolishing the official sophisms, but also retreating in the face of the very capacity they manifest and condemning themselves to suffer the false necessity whose ruse they demonstrate so perfectly."546 Rancière, as always, is attentive to the way these miners have appropriated the language that is used within the prevailing political discourse to 'critically' account for their social domination and political inequality, and hence offers a way of discerning the fragile contours of agency from amidst the consensus of its disappearance. He proves much less perceptible, however, with regard to how this egalitarian appropriation is limited by the complexities and opacities of its socially mediated context, including how the miner's self-relationality is itself socially mediated, and hence how what is at stake goes far beyond the problem of the political count of speaking beings. Notice how Rancière presents the stakes and meaning of this failure. Firstly, the dimensions of social mediation that register the (objective and subjective) limitations and constraints of speaking and acting from marginalized social locations are separated out as transparent and extrinsically imposed (mis)representations of equality or "official sophisms." Rancière's 'flat' account of social conditions, in the effort to definitively refute the theory of ideology, produces a poetics of mediation that presents all domination as if it were necessarily plainly recognized as such, operative only at the external level of the social 'miscount,' and neatly separated from the individual's egalitarian potentiality to take up the social word. Or, as Rancière succinctly puts it, "the hidden secret is nothing but the obvious functioning of the machine" – even where it isn’t.547 The argument advanced in the subsequent chapter, which turns to the work of Lauren Berlant, is that failure of emphatic and transformational praxis to become manifest in is a complex matter, where the indeterminacy, opacity, and uncertainty of the context often necessitate strategies of creative adaptation and survival, both complicating the problem (beyond the issue of equality/inqueality) and demanding new ways of thinking about the withering or stuttering of praxis even where it proves irreducible to its context.

546 Rancière, Figures of History, 37, my emphasis. 547 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 44.

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On the other hand, as social conditions are not taken as mutable historical achievements that support, enable and constitute the possibility of individuality, what is left of the social order is only the "absurdity of the so-called sensible and natural orderings that regulate our social existence."548 This "neutralization" of social conditions, however, goes beyond the suspension of the logic underpinning the theory of ideology, that is, the identification of political capacity with a proper place or way of being. More significantly, it precludes comprehension of the differential processes and dynamics through which subjectivity is constituted, formed and mediated that do not necessarily arrive at the conclusion of "false consciousness," but explore the implications of the predicament of being socially constituted, and hence opaque to oneself and to any border that would divide the 'self' from the social exterior (which, as has been demonstrated, Rancière's approach must preserve).549 Subtending the openness of Rancière's politics, which refuses to delineate a proper sphere, way of being, or ethos to politics, is a clear separation between the practical process of 'taking up' the representations that mediate individuals (equality) and the social order itself, what both separates and links those practical subjects. This separation, however, implies an order of priority that speaks against the purported openness of Rancière’s egalitarian ‘method:’ what is at stake in such a poetics is the verification of the power of what is constituting (equality, praxis); the non-identity of the constituted is its price. Acknowledgement of the constitutedness of praxis, of the exposure of material-nature to the uncertain and uneven processes of mediated (inter)dependence in no way entails that individuals or groups are not able to exceed, transform or amend the conditions that constitute them. However, it does call into question the affirmation of political equality – the so-called constituting element in Rancière’s thought – which hypostatizes both poles, depoliticizing social conditions and naturalizing political praxis, and instead calls for approaching the agency-conditions relation as a predicament. To approach the praxis-conditions relation as a predicament is to recognize the reciprocal mediation of these terms, that is, as a historically specific nexus of institutions, relations of power, sedimented and differentiated mediations that together simultaneously enable and constrain the exercise of political praxis, its shape, scope and effectiveness. Predicaments call for the recognition that what is at stake in politics cannot be given in advance – cannot be fixed into a tension between

548 Woodford, Clare. “’Reinveting modes of ‘dreaming' and doing: Jacques Rancière and Strategies for a New Left” Philosophy and Social Criticism 41.8, 2014: 828. 549 See Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power, discussed in chapter six, for an account of the unavoidability of the self- opacity of the subject as a political problem.

240 equality/inequality – because it is this relation itself, indeed the possibility of transformative or emancipatory praxis, that proves itself to be radically mutable. In place of confronting the complexity, opacity, and particularity of the sedimented field of mediations composing this conjuncture, and hence in place of confronting the range of political problems that arise from this level of engagement, Rancière establishes a stark tension between the logics of equality/inequality that turns on the separability of praxis from its conditions, and hence purposefully ignores how the latter inheres within and constitutes the former. The limitations of Rancière's inability to confront the praxis-conditions relation as a predicament shows up in his reading of Arendt's account of the "right to have rights."550 There Arendt considers how the Nuremberg laws that systematically deprived Jews of their German citizenship and the mass wave of Refugees produced by Second World War – events not dissimilar to the contemporary oppression and forced removal of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar – provoke reconsideration of the limitations of the political sphere.551 These historical events demonstrated that the concrete legal protections supposedly given to men in general were not, after all, inalienable, and could not be said to emanate from any sheer biological fact or any abstract universal. Arendt writes that "We become aware of the existence of a right to have rights...only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain these rights because of the new global political situation."552 This denaturalization of rights, the historical discovery that they do not belong to 'men' in general but to 'citizens' of specific nation-states, gives rise to the need to recognize that there are mutable worldly conditions – politically constructed and maintained legal mediations – that establish the 'right to have rights.' Or, to put the matter another way, that the condition of falling outside the sphere of politics, in which one's words and actions, not to mention one's standing or mattering as a being worthy of dignity and life, is itself historically and politically induced. This leads Arendt to make the claim that with this "new situation" the "right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself," though she immediately qualifies this by stating that "it is by no means certain whether this is possible."553 What kind of claim is being made here? That the entire preceding discussion has centered on how the both the factual and the abstract formulation of human rights has suppressed

550 Rancière, "Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?" 551 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest Books, 1976): 290-302. 552 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 297. 553 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 298.

241 recognition of their concrete and historical stakes should rule out the possibility that Arendt is making an ideal-normative claim whose legitimacy would hold "independent of history."554 Near the close of the chapter Arendt offers the following passage to help clarify what is at issue: Our political life rests on the assumption that we can produce equality through organization, because man can act in and change and build a common world, together with his equals and only with his equals. The dark background of mere givenness, the background formed by our unchangeable and unique nature, breaks into the political scene as the alien which in its all too obvious difference reminds us of the limitations of human activity – which are identical with the limitations of human equality."555

Rancière , as might be expected, attends to Arendt's arguments with an eye toward how this "critique of modern democracy" handles the question of how political space is demarcated. He rightfully objects to Arendt's 'archi-political' dualism, that establishes the public realm or 'space of appearances' not as a division that is immanently at stake in politics, but as a "specific sphere," that presupposes the existence of concrete social conditions necessary for the "life of public action, speech and appearance" distinguished from the private, non-political "realm of necessity."556 The basis of Rancière's criticism of Arendt is that by making political praxis dependent upon a determinate set of conditions that make possible what she refers to as the 'space of appearances,' she establishes the division of who and what counts as political in advance, effectively silencing the political claims and capacities of those who fall outside these pre-determined margins. Rancière complains that for Arendt those who fall outside of the political sphere, and who lack access to the concrete conditions in which their words, actions, and even their material bodies are mediated by the 'rights' that grant them worldly significance, become incapable of performatively appropriating the equality that does not belong to them. Deprived of access to the conditions that constitute one's belonging to a concrete political sphere, the bare "rights of man," Rancière argues, amount to the "paradoxical rights of the private, poor, unpoliticized individual."557 In order to escape the "quandry" that Arendt establishes by pre-determining the (im)/possibility of political praxis by making it dependent on determinate conditions, Rancière claims that the "rights of man are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not."558 This reformulation of the "subject" of the rights of man

554 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 298. 555 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 301, my emphasis. 556 Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”, 298. 557 Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”, 298. 558 Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”, 302.

242 undoes the link that Arendt's account establishes between the access to social and political conditions that enable and support the historically mutable worldly significance of one's words, actions and bodily integrity and the possibility of intervening in the redistribution of political appearances. The motivation for loosening the bindings that establish how existing conditions bear on the possibility of political praxis is justifiable. Without the possibility of crossing the "interval between two forms of the existence of those rights," that is, between the "inscriptions" that proclaim the equality and freedom of all amidst conditions of real inequality and the performative "verification of the power of equality," it is difficult to comprehend how those who find themselves excluded from the political sphere could possibly act to contest, and potentially transform, the given distributions of the political.559 Hence, the 'subject' of the 'rights of man' is desubstantialized and de-contextualizd and reformulated as a polemical and processual operation. This 'subject' is no longer a substantial and determinate figure either lacking or possessing the requisite conditions to act politically. Rather, Rancière's "political subjectivation" is a polemical process of "self- construction" that occurs when those excluded from the political sphere call into question the importance of having access to the social and political conditions presently mediating the distribution worldly significance. Enacting a process of part-taking in the modes of acting and speaking that performatively contradict the contingent naturalizations holding together and justifying the given social arkhe, political subjectivation effectuates a re-writing of the 'fictive' social order. Rancière's insistence on the need to make room for processes of dissensus – the potentiality of crossing the 'interval' that both links and separates the terms of access to social conditions from the potentiality for political praxis – is a necessary corrective to any approach or perspective that would fix or ossify the terms of this relation and hence effectively rule out in advance the possibility of emancipatory transformation. As Rancière claims, the "border separating bare life and political life could not be so clearly drawn."560 While the de-politicizing purity of this distinction constitutes an important and serious criticism of Arendt's political thought, does her specific consideration of the 'rights to have rights' conform to this tendency of her thought, as Rancière claims? Or, is it an occasion where this relation, perceived through the prism of its historical specificity of its predicament, leads, perhaps only implicitly, in the opposite direction and towards an unsettling of this dualism? If it is the latter, what does Rancière's failure to

559 Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”, 302-303. 560 Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”, 303.

243 acknowledge this possibility reveal about his affirmative aesthetics and the political limitations of the readings they make available? To agree with Rancière that acknowledgment of the 'interval' of dissensus is essential for any political conception of praxis, and to concede that access to enabling social conditions does not predetermine one's potentiality for engaging in political praxis, does not necessarily entail accepting Rancière's specific reformulation of that relation. How does Rancière's reformulation of the "subject" of political praxis open up the agency-conditions relation and avoid the 'quandary' that Arendt's approach had lead into? How does this 'opening up' alter the question of the political significance of (enabling/constricting) conditions and the damaged caused by their politically induced absence? Does Rancière's reformulation of this relation presuppose what is at stake in politics, or does it allow for grasping this relation as a predicament, hence 'opening up' the possibility of attending to a range of problems and questions whose significance only become perceptible when the changeable and historically particular character of this relation is acknowledged? In Rancière's reading of Arendt, the archi-political interlinking of social conditions and political capacity had lead into an impasse in which politics was either "void," as those dispossessed of access to the conditions necessary to engage in politics rendered them "unpoliticized" subjects in desperate need of 'humanity's' protection, or "tautological," in which case subjects engage in politics by making use of the rights and conditions they already possess as 'citizens.' Rancière reads in Arendt's account of the 'right to have rights' the expression of a false problem. It is a false problem because it's attempt to articulate how the absence of enabling social and political conditions that threaten the lives and welfare of the mass populations of post-war refugees necessarily renders them passive, in need of protection from others, and therefore incapable of resistant, minoritarian or dissensual forms of political praxis. In principle, this objection is legitimate and calls attention to the need to carefully and reflexively attend to how both theoretical and practical ways of looking at the world entail implicit configurations of the agency-condition relation that pre-shape what forms political praxis can take. While this reading of Arendt's raises a legitimate and urgent problem related to any generalized account of the praxis- conditions relation, it is also strikingly indifferent and inattentive to the historically particular contours of the problem raised, and how these contours bear on the kind of claim being raised about that relation. Rancière's "method of equality," because of the way it establishes the invariant

244 tension between the logics of inequality/equality that purport to 'open' the field of politically possibilities, paradoxically blinds itself to historically variable nature of this relation – to the mutability of the universal – and hence to consideration of the range of political problems and tensions at play in a given conjuncture. Rancière fails, despite Arendt's explicit recommendation, to read her account of the "limitations of human equality" – of the border that divides the political and the non-political – as a political problem that emerges historically when the conditions supporting the political space of appearances that were previously taken for granted, have fallen away on a massive scale and thereby revealed hitherto unacknowledged dimensions of social and political dependency or conditionality. Twentieth century historical experience, Arendt argues, has revealed the inadequacies and presuppositions in the always limited and provisional understandings of how historically instituted conditions such as rights support, but also in cases where access to these conditions is curtailed or changed, expose entire populations to the deprivations and material harms accompanied by the politically induced exposure to insignificance.561 In other words, Arendt is attempting to show that if the question of the division of political action and the conditions supporting its possibility (as well as those conducing to political exclusion and insignificance) only emerges through historical experience, it is because this relation is itself historically sedimented. As unavoidably something constituted the practical subject is reliant on conditions that precede, constitute and exceed it in ways that are fundamental opaque, and that only reveal themselves through the experience of crisis or failure. This opacity makes the question of their recognition a highly fraught and political matter. The opacity of constitutedness can only appear to Rancière as a problematic ideological illusion because he takes, as his point of departure, the primacy of praxis. Once this primacy has been subject to critique, the historically specific conditions that constitute and limit subjects, shaping both how they take up the world as well as

561 Arendt notes that prior to the Second World War, the Nuremberg laws established the "condition of the rightlessness,” which “was created before the right to live was challenged" (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 375). J.M. Bernstein, in Torture and Dignity, claims that this illuminates the problem of the co-constitution of life and social recognition, which would also constitute a historical refutation of the metaphysics of human worth, namely, that there is no “magical property, say the possession of the power of reason, whose simple possession by and individual suddenly gives her the standing of having intrinsic and inviolable worth” (264). On the contrary, the condition for the possibility of material harm is entwined with the withering of the recognitive conditions that sustain the possibility of inhabiting society as a individual (connected, as Bernstein notes, to “lovability,” precisely what the Nuremberg laws systematically undermined, making the Jew, in principle, “unlovable”, 273). Human worth can be lost, and if constitutively exposed to the possibility of “devastation,” worth is then intrinsically and necessarily connected to the empirical/material. 245 establishing access to the conditions that variably enable and inhibit (which is not to say determining) can be grasped as the stakes of politics. Put in dialectical language, the particular state of the universal – the social conditions that constitute, sustain but also threaten, dominate and oppress individuals – becomes the stake of politics, not because it is what is most important, but, on the contrary, because it is what sustains and enables the particular and the individual. The implication of Arendt's chapter is not only that the conditions that make political praxis possible and the distribution of worldly significances that follow from it are historically sedimented and mutable, that they are, in Rancière's sense, 'contingent.' It is, on the contrary, that the failure to acknowledge the limitations of the "common world" that follow from its historical sedimented mutability – the temptation to assume that because all worldly values and conditions are politically produced that the power of "human activity" is unlimited, infinite or in-dependent in relation to them – threatens to conceal that the conditions that rendered millions politically insignificant, and ultimately disposable, were politically induced. Rancière reads Arendt's attempt to express the political stakes of the historically constituted conditions establishing the division between the political and the non-political, not as a historically-inflected political interrogation of the limits of 'politics' – as a problematization of the universal discovered at the moment of its withering – but, on the contrary, as a suppression of politics. Arendt's "suspension of politics in the exception of bare life" functions, Rancière argues, to "depopulate the political stage by sweeping aside its always-ambiguous actors."562 But this reading relies on a fundamental presupposition of Rancière's that Arendt's reading is calling into question, or rather, considering the limitations of: namely, that "human activity" and "equality," despite its capacity to exceed the conditional terms of its worldly existence through the introduction of novel forms, is nevertheless not radically in-dependent of those worldly conditions, but whose possibility in numerous ways (impossible to discern before their disappearance) relies on historically mutable conditions. Call it the dark side of human plurality. Not only are political actions unpredictable and creative, but conditions can be too: they can both wither and improve, and though these changes are politically induced they are not ultimately controllable by discrete individuals or practical agents. Hence, the recognition of non-identity becomes an exigent political concern. The "paradox" confronted by Arendt is that the 'excess' of politics works in two directions at once: on the one hand, there is the creative and indeterminate potential of political praxis to

562 Rancière, "Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?", 310.

246 shape and re-shape the world, but, paradoxically, this potential is limited by the fact that, in turn, these worldly conditions 'exceed' the political actors in the two-fold sense that they themselves are historically constituted, and that the conditions that (differentially and inequitably) enable but also inhibit them from acting and appearing to others in socially significant ways are not in their control. The problem Arendt is attempting to elucidate here is non-detachable from the particular historical conjecture that occasions the reflection. What is at issue is not a generalizable thesis on the (in)capacity of the politically marginalized or excluded, but a reflection attempting to elucidate the stakes of one dimension of the 'perplexity' of the historical-contoured agency-conditions relation in light of a series of events that provoke reconsideration of its always provisional and incomplete comprehension. As J.M. Bernstein puts it, "Arendt's thought here is that unless human rights are transformed into positive rights that have the force of law behind them, they are idle, useless, at the very moment when they would matter most."563 The historical confirmation of the fallibility of these rights, and of the concrete stakes of what can happen when entire populations are exposed to a condition of rightlessness, attests to previously unacknowledged (opaque) forms of dependency, and hence to the political problem of non-identity (the exposure of the particular to the false universal). If this account is correct, the problem or conflict of politics cannot center squarely on the capacity of subjects to exceed their mediated socially identities or to introduce novel forms and judgments into the space of appearances, but must also attend – paradoxically – to the historically variable conditions that constitute either the unacknowledged conditions of possibility of such action, or in their disappearance, threaten to expose subjects to political insignificance. Without acknowledgment of how the 'excess' of politics works in both direction simultaneously, the claim that political praxis 'exceeds' its conditionality forfeits the emancipatory potential it aims at, hypostatizing into a naturalized resistance acting upon a social order whose 'contingent' character functions to dehistoricize and depoliticize its enabling and inhibiting mediations. Rancière, as the previous discussion has shown, only considers this excess from first perspective, and hence cannot see how Arendt's attempt to acknowledge the "limitation" of political praxis could constitute a political claim. Rancière's deconstruction of the political/non- political dualism constitutes a necessary component of any critical conception of emancipatory praxis and therefore serves as an important corrective to Arendt's general tendency toward the

563 Bernstein, Torture and Dignity, 286.

247

"practice of historical phenomenology, which always tends to purify elements she seeks to celebrate" – to detach concepts or ‘make distinctions’ (action, labour, work) at a remove from their historical constellation – and hence to "rob her theory" of its "own intrinsic radicality."564 However, Rancière too thinks past his goal by hypostatizing this indeterminacy or impurity, effectively refusing that political praxis presupposes any social conditions of possibility, and hence naturalizing the capacity for resistance by rendering them, in principle, in-dependent from the 'neutralized' conditions it seeks to contest. Rancière's meta-aesthetic perspective, by making the verification of the 'interval' that separates conditions from political capacity the immanent stake of politics, is unable to discern the "paradoxical" claim at the basis of Arendt's discussion of the "right to have rights." This non-responsiveness to the texture of Arendt's argument is instructive, given the centrality of historically particular events to her claims in this discussion, and the way in which this attendance to particularity leads her to make an acknowledgment of the "limitation of human activity" that unsettles and works against her tendency to purify the political/non-political distinction. Why is it that Rancière is only able to discern the impasse of a void/tautology in Arendt precisely in the place where she is making the claim that the access to the conditions that establish the political/non-political distinction are themselves historically and politically constituted? It is because his "method of equality" precludes him from attending to it as a predicament.565 A predicament, unlike a method, cannot be separated from the historically specific constellation of forces that both enable and work against the possibility of their amendment or revisioning – its universal moment is not only contestable but subject to history (and hence withering and decay). Rancière's presupposition of an immanent and insuperable tension draws him perilously close to precisely what Arendt's was urgently warning against: that the failure to acknowledge the limitations of the capacity of political subjects to construct their own world threatens to generate an aversion or resentment to anything not politically made or "self-construct[ed].”566 Developing this insight, Adorno similarly demonstrated how disregard for the natural, historical and political dependencies of creative spirit can develop into “rage at non-identity,” that is, a hatred or suspicion at what has come to appear dependent, natural, weak, or defenseless.567 Rancière’s thought

564 Bernstein, “Political Modernism”, 71. 565 Rancière, Recognition or Disagreement?, 139. 566 Rancière, Recognition or Disagreement?, 122. 567 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 23; Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 88.

248 reduplicates this idealist rage against all reminders of its own conditionality in claiming: “A political subject is not a suffering subject. A political subject is an invention.”568 The blindspot produced by this categorial distinction is that social suffering is itself a political invention, and that damaged conditions are more than capable of exceeding or overwhelming political praxis to the point at which action falls short of transformative change. Ignorance of the limitations of political self-construction and the conditions they rely upon, Arendt warned, had gone hand-in-hand with the depoliticization and naturalization of the social conditions actively producing political exclusion. The excess or 'more' of political subjectification in Rancière derives from its separability from its socially mediated identities, rather than from the transformation of the historically mutable relation of political praxis to its enabling and constraining social conditions. In fact, Rancière explicitly "propose[s] the model of the subject as self-constructed in a process of 'subjectivation,'" and moreover, that such polemical self-construction is "not merely a response to something already existing."569 In failing to acknowledge the possibility of accounting for both the critical-creative 'excess' of political praxis while at the same time acknowledging that this possibility is mediated by its social conditionality – simultaneously enabled and constrained – Rancière sets up a dichotomy between the "affirmation of the capacity of the un-qualified, on the one hand, and the demonstration of the omnipotence of the machine of domination, on the other."570 It is just this historically mediated refusal to acknowledge the limitations of the "self-construction" of political appearances that Arendt warned was most pronounced in the predicament she analyzed. Ignorance of the limitations of political self-construction and the conditions they rely upon, she demonstrated, had gone hand-in-hand with the depoliticization and naturalization of social conditions actively producing political exclusion, which in its most radical form culminated in the diremption of entire populations from political significance. In such conditions, Arendt warned, "a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man."571

568 Rancière, Recognition or Disagreement?, 122. 569 Rancière, Disagreement or Recognition?, 92, 90. 570 Jacques Rancière "What does it mean to be Un?" Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 21 no. 4 (2007): 565. 571 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 300.

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Not surprisingly then, the primacy of self-construction in Rancière, read through the lens of Arendt's warning, can be shown to a produce a similar indifference, even aversion, to that which does not actively construct its own political appearance. This indifference to what is not made manifests in an inability to perceive the political stakes of a wide range of problems, from the failure to recognize that political subjectivity is socially and historically constituted and non- transparent to itself to the refusal to acknowledge political exclusion and material suffering as political wrongs. With regard to the first of these blindspots, recall how Rancière's attributes responsibility for the miner's failure to recognize their own equality solely to them as individuals, and moreover how he reduces the real conditions constituting the miner's subjectivity and constraining the political efficacy of their words and actions to an illusion or "false necessity."572 Likewise, in his reading of Arendt, notice how his reformulation of the 'subject' of the "rights of man" abstracts from the particular cases at hand, namely, the German Jews deprived of their rights by the Nuremberg Laws and the politically induced wave of post-war stateless refugees. Relieved of the burden having to revise the contours of the political problem in light of the particularity of the historical predicament, Rancière redefines "political subjectivation" solely in terms of the subject's polemical self-construction of their socially mediated appearance, in blithe indifference to the ill-suitedness of this concept to its (forgotten) object. In both cases, what is not self- constructed is denied political standing. In his reading of the Sardinian miners, it is the political relevance of the socially mediated dimensions of miner's self-relationality that is altogether disavowed. In the latter case, it is the bearing of the external social and political conditions upon the political significance of German Jews and post-war Refugees that are 'neutralized.' Domination in Rancière is thereby depoliticized, rendered a false problem, paradoxically, by Rancière's meta- aesthetic perspective, and its attempt to attend to the immanent stakes of politics through the lens of the competing logics of equality/inequality. In the moment that agential responsibility is dirempted from its dynamic and mutually constituting relation with social conditionality both fall into hardened abstractions that renders the former as contingent as the status quo it would aim to resist. This is the price of Rancière's attempt to affirmatively preserve the possibility of emancipation in the here and now by granting priority to the moment of subjective mediation in his rethinking of the agency-conditions relation. Suffering is conceived as neither socially

572 Even Woodford, one of Rancière’s most ardent defenders, acknowledges that this is a problem (Disorienting Democracy, 58, note 79).

250 conditioned nor politically induced and nor are dominated conditions taken to be something that is materially endured, but, revealingly, is conceptualized as self-imposed. In short, what disappears is an entire range of political problems related to the preponderance of social conditions in relation to the resistant agency the former both makes possible and necessary. This inability to articulate these problems from within Rancière's conceptual armature, and indeed the (aesthetic) insensitivity to the particularity of the specific historical conjectures, is produced, paradoxically, by the way his purportedly immanent account of political struggle nevertheless affirmatively forestructures what is at stake politically, and which, in order to make mute agency eloquent must depoliticize politically induced suffering. Far from breaking out of the Arendt's "quandry," Rancière's solution can be seen as the fulfillment of the very dynamic that the article warned against, namely, that "the more at home men feel with the human artifice – the more likely they will resent everything that they have not produced."573 The attendant dismissal of material suffering as a politically insignificant phenomenon – what Arendt warned would come to appear as the natural 'given' that intrudes into the closed immanence of human artifice – is its predictable corollary. Rancière claims that it is "the logic of the police to define the wrong on a pathological basis."574 The concern is that the "ambiguity" of political actors, the potential for political dissensus, will become obscured by a depoliticizing discourse that ties purportedly marginalized subject positions to the passive endurance of suffering – to a social 'fact' upon which (anti-political) ethical injunctions rely. At the basis of Rancière's objections to the politics of conditions is that it relies on a normalizing logic of consensus that aims at the "reduction of democracy to the way of life of a society, to its ethos meaning both the abode of a group and its lifestyle" which functions to enclose or limit politics to a pre-given form of life.575 Rancière claims that the "central aspect" of consensual logic underpinning the "ethical turn" is the "abolition of the division" or interval that potentially separates a political subject from their socially mediated identity that occurs with the subordination of all practical and political change to an ethical (teleological, idealized, futural, or Other) form of life.576 This calls into question, however, what Rancière seems to presuppose: is the only kind of interval, or practical excess one that occurs via a self-construction that operates

573 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 301. 574 Rancière, Recognition or Disagreement?, 126. 575 Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?”, 306. 576 Jacques Rancière. “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics,” Critical Horizons 7 no. 1 (2006): 5.

251 by breaking from or separating itself from the prevailing social conditions? Why does irreducibility have to imply an interval, a separation from conditionality? Why does Rancière rule out responsive affinity for the object (constitutedness) as a dimension internal to political creativity? That Rancière conceives of the irreducibility of praxis to its conditionality on the basis of their interval that separates them, testifies to the skeptical kernel of his poetics (skepticism regarding the mattering of what is not subject). While it is important to avoid depoliticizing discourses of victimization, is this the only way to account for politically induced suffering? Is it not a political claim to object to the differing forms of material suffering undergone by the miners, the refugees, and the German Jews, to criticize the specific social conditions that made possible such forms of oppressions, deprivations and devastation, and that limited the potentiality for resistance? The possibility closed off by Rancière's approach is the ability to call in question – and so, potentially to transform – the way in which social conditions constrain and limit the ability of political subjects to speak, act and even to continue to persist without thereby shutting down the ability to acknowledge, in turn, the conditional and limited capacity of those subjects to act, transform, or simply manage, cope or endure the conditions with and against which they act. The reason this possibility is closed off is because the constitutive tension he establishes between the logics of dissensus/consensus, or equality/inequality, in granting priority to the self-construction of political subjectivity in relation to the de-differentiated and neutralized social conditions, prevents any recognition of their reciprocal mediation. The inability to acknowledge the mediation and interpenetration of these polarities, owing to the pre-given methodological affirmation of political subjects to exceed their social mediated conditions, renders the dynamic static and indifferent to the changing social, historical and political particularities of any given situation. Rancière's account of the egalitarian mediation of social forms does not allow for recognition of the ways in which subjectivity is constituted, shaped, mediated and limited by the social world that precedes it, because, in part, he conceives of given representations and conditions as inegalitarian, hierarchical, in short, as always predicated upon a 'miscount.' However, if the social forms and conditions that mediate and limit the words and actions of individuals are redefined as simultaneously enabling and constraining, it no longer follows, as Rancière fears, that acknowledgment of the social mediation of self-relationality will automatically produce a picture of self-domination, or that acknowledgment of the contrainst of a given predicament will occlude possibilities of resistant agency. Rather, it demands that such sites be approached as a political

252 predicaments, that is, as a historically sedimented, socially mediated and therefore always particular zones, in which the political stakes and possibilities will range dramatically. It means to take the measure of the 'excess' of politics in both directions: domination is a possibility, yet so is emancipation, though no longer as a break or separation from its mediating conditions but as the limited, revocable and conditional capacity to re-mediate or amend them. Furthermore, the 'openness' to both possibilities, rather than Rancière's blinding affirmation of equality, allows for acknowledgment of the ambi-valence of a each singular predicaments, to the ways in which domination and emancipatory praxis intermingle to varying extents and effects. For example, what is suppressed in Rancière's account of the miner's apparent missed opportunity to 'exceed' their socially mediated identities, by placing all of the focus on the self-construction of political appearances, is the possibility that the miner's already recognize the limitations of their the current predicament, of what the performative exercise of their equality effectually amounts to within the prevailing constellation of forces. Such an elucidation does not, pace Rancière, verify the 'inequality' of the miners nor the impossibility of transformation, but instead offers a sober acknowledgment of the limitations of the prevailing forms that the operation of political equality presently takes context – which can and often do fall below the threshold of transformative or dissensual political action – and to what the expenditure of finite political energy is able to amount to within the given predicament. The recognition of non-identity – the damage effectuated by the universal as it is perceived on the surface of particularity – dis-closes the politics of conditions, by by allowing the constitutedness of praxis (far from ‘determining’ the latter) to ‘point beyond itself.’

8.4 Conclusion

What is refused by both Rancière and his defenders is any acknowledgement of how social conditions come to both internally mediate – both constraining and enabling – how an individual takes up or appropriates the conditions that, in turn, sustain one's place within a political order. In short, for Rancière, equality constitutes a fracture in social mediation, or an im-mediacy, that establishes a priority of the individual’s active moment of 'taking up' or part-taking, as the condition of the possibility of the objective moment of social representation. Hence, this priority of subjectification in Rancière blocks any acknowledgment of the possibility of an excess in the reverse direction: that social conditions exceed subjectivity in the sense of serving as the prior,

253 unwilled, and opaque yet necessary structures that constitute dependent individuals into social existence. The difference dissensus makes is not to amend the conditions mediating social and political inter-relationality, but, in performatively exhibiting their failure, to verify anew the irreducibility of equality (the contingency of the social order). Rancière sustains the irreducibility of resistant subjectivity to the mediating social conditions by conceiving of the excessive- egalitarian potential of subjectivity as the condition of all social order. However, by instituting a necessary gap or miscount between the resistant subjectivity and its social inscription, Rancière pays a steep price: he can no longer critically account for the internally mediated character of this relation – for the mutability of the universal. His account is not critical because he has already presupposed, in advance, the primacy of resistant subjectivity to the existing social conditions – given his account of the politics of mediation – and so is confined to approach this relation as one of either dissensus, or its suppression, police. Without attending carefully to the reverse excess: to the ways in which resistant democratic subjectivity depends upon the social-historical conditions that exceed it – exceed subjectivity in the sense of constituting it into existence, supporting it, but also inhibiting, attenuating, and potentially destroying it one risks a dangerous misunderstanding of what can also come to be put at stake in political practice. The vulnerability of life lived socially, what Rancière refers to as the tension of 'being apart' and 'being together', is to conditions not of one's choosing or making, but which nonetheless compose the value or worth of that life, and which in the extreme expose one to the reduction or loss of life, that, as Rancière puts it "you are not where what decides your fate happens."577 Theorizing resistant forms of political agency through the lens of the preponderance of inherited social conditions and the complexity of their historically sedimented mediations, Judith Butler, argues that ""If we are formed in the context of relations that become partially irrecoverable to us, then that opacity seems built into our formation and follows from our status as beings who are formed in relations of dependency."578 Reversing this priority dramatically alters both how the political agency-social conditions relation is approached. This does not necessarily mean accepting an anti-political ethical perspective that forestalls the possibility of emancipation in the here and now – on the contrary, the supposedly ‘ethical’ responsiveness to the object only appears anti- political insofar as the skeptical kernel of the primacy of praxis is uncritically affirmed. Once the

577 Rancière, Figures of History, 33. 578 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 20.

254 constitutedness of praxis is acknowledged as a locus of exigent political attention, the problem of political non-identity is disclosed as the material anchor giving substance (meaning and stakes or ‘truth-content’) to creative political action, without which it recoils into nominalism. If equality is a capacity, it is one that can be neither 'manifested' nor 'condemned' solely by the resolute power of individuals – however equal – but is a practice that is carried out in a highly differentiated and pluralistic social context, and so at least partially through the existing terms of (self)mediation, and hence depends, however minimally, on the same conditions that it aims to change. However, if Rancière were to make this acknowledgment of the primacy of dependence at the core of democratic subjectivation he would not only be erecting another barrier to dissensual politics, he would also be forced to recognize that social mediation does more than oppose and confine excessive self-presentation. He would be forced to concede that the terms of inherited social mediation are more than a 'false necessity,' that in fact they constitutes the medium through which the recognition of our own opaque or 'mute' equality becomes intelligible to ourselves and potentially operative – but this would entail a level of indistinction between police/politics that Rancière could not accept without significant alteration to his account of equality. Confronting the mediation of agency-conditions in this way would require that politics no longer be figured in terms of a break from or a disruption in the instituted social identities and mediations. The meaning of political interventions would become arbitrary without a sense of how such change would amend or revise the prevailing political conditions and their mediations by lessening the inhibitions and damage they inflict and/or by enabling and supporting dependent individuals in their effort to alter the conditions contouring the inhabitability of social space. However, it is just Rancière's account of equality, as the chapter has shown, that precludes recognition of this reverse excess of social conditions. What would it mean to acknowledge both the irreducibility of political subjectivity to the terms of its mediation, but also (and at the same time) the reducibility of life by these conditions, to the social exposure of dependent agency to conditions not of its own making? A reworked and more critical account of resistance will not presuppose the primacy of praxis, but instead will attempt to elucidate the meaning of resistant praxis where the boundaries of agency and mediating conditions are less certain, and in fact extend into one another. The radical and unsettling consequence of acknowledging the complex mediations of praxis with the social and historical conditions that give rise to it, support and inhibit it, is that resistant or critical praxis is,

255 paradoxically, only able to depart from and challenge the conditions maintaining the status quo by maintaining the closest possible proximity to them – through affinity to the constitutedness of praxis. It is only at the point where the 'excess' of political praxis encounters and acknowledges its own condition-ality or constitutedness – rather than affirming its unconditional equality – that the difference that politics makes becomes more than an arbitrary and contingent break and proves capable of living up to an immanent and critical account of emancipatory politics.

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Chapter Nine Berlant's Lateral Agency: Towards an Outline of Conditional Political Praxis

“The determination of the non-identical permits reflection on the subject as mediation” – Adorno 579

From the discussion of Rancière the challenge emerges: What would it mean to acknowledge both the 'excess' or non-reducibility of political praxis to the terms of its mediating conditions – its creative-critical potentiality – but also (and at the same time) the reducibility of agency through its exposure to these mediating conditions? A reworked and more critical account will not presuppose the primacy of praxis, but instead will attempt to elucidate the meaning of resistant praxis where the boundaries of agency and mediating conditions are less certain, and in fact extend into one another in ways that call for renewed conceptions of dialectical thinking. It is my argument that the work of Lauren Berlant, which has been described as contributing a "major development of Marxist theories of ideology and an advance on Foucault's work of subjectivation," offers political theory the rudiments of building a compelling response to this problem that avoids partial or selective acknowledgment of the limiting and constraining aspects of the conditionality.580 Berlant's explains her recent work as an attempt to "construct a mode of analysis of the historical present that moves us away from the dialectic of structure (what is systemic in the reproduction of the world), agency (what people do in everyday life), and the traumatic event of the their disruption, and towards explaining crisis shaped subjectivity amid the ongoingness of adjudication, adaptation, and improvisation."581 Berlant's approach subtlety reworks the post- structuralist themes of difference and contingency, and by withdrawing the presupposition of their affirmative role in social and political life, is able to open up a more ambivalent account of the historical normalization of crisis, uncertainty and dissonance and its effect upon subjectivity. In opening her analysis to the ambivalence of discontinuity, Berlant's work is better situated to grasp the importance of the social atmospheres and conditions mediating politics than either approaches predicated primarily upon disruption as well as those that "homogenize the world as disaster."582

579 Adorno, Ontology and Dialectics, 243. 580 Robbie Duchinksy and Emma Wilson, "Flat Affect, Joyful Politics and Enthralled Attachments: Engaging with the work of Lauren Berlant," International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 28 no. 3 (2015): 182. 581 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 54. 582 Lauren Berlant, "The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times" Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34 no. 3 (2016): 406.

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In this way Berlant's work offers a promising avenue for developing what J.M. Bernstein has referred to as "a political philosophy proper to critical theory," in which the authority of critical praxis would reside in the creative acknowledgment of the ineliminable moment of dependency in praxis, that praxis always occurs "within a world always already constituted by dependencies social and political."583 Berlant, in attending to predicaments in which contemporary life is lived in the mode of perpetual crisis and uncertainty, shows how the prevailing approach to agency in contemporary political theory aimed at the transformation or 'unsettling' of the existing state of affairs, or even that of 'world-building,' can no longer be taken for granted. Under conditions of pervasive uncertainty and duress the role played by the imaginary component of praxis can shift from those of dissensus and world-building to something much less sanguine, namely to the more basic function of serving as the "sustenance that makes life bearable."584 The ambivalence of her account of the labile praxis-conditions relation, what she describes as involving "an analysis of indirection," breaks with the tendency to oppose the creative-critical potential of the marginal, novel or contingent to the dross of everyday life and its constricting weave of habits and conformities. Berlant is therefore able to both acknowledge the indeterminacy of praxis and the creativity of social-historical imaginaries, while also attending to the mediation of these imagined futures by the conditions of the present, and hence to begin the work of elucidating the paradox of "an enabling object [promise, fantasy, imagination] that is also disabling."585 It is Berlant's rethinking of dialectical negativity that allows her to develop a non-reducitve account of conditional agency that avoids the hypostatizing affirmation of that capacity that was shown to follow from Rancière's approach. Furthermore, in approaching negativity through particular "scenes of ambivalence" – and so always confronting the praxis-conditions relation as a predicament – Berlant's social theory is able to elucidate the mutable and conditional stakes of political praxis.586 Negativity, for Berlant, is what emerges from relations or mediations that are always marked by a certain excess and that belongs neither to subjects or conditions, but emerges between them in the course of their mutual (re)constitution. Berlant's "nonsovereign relationality,"

583 J.M. Bernstein, "Political Modernism: The New, Revolution, and Civil Disobedience in Arendt and Adorno," in eds. Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha, Arendt and Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012): 58, 72. 584 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 14. 585 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 25. 586 Berlant, "The Commons," 395.

258 therefore, approaches "individuality as a genre carved from within the dynamics of relation rather than a state prior to it or distinct from it."587 The "double valence of negativity" refers to both to the 'excess' of agency, which not unlike Rancière's account of the egalitarian appropriation of social forms entails the "undoing of the stabilizing frameworks of coherence imposed on thought and lived experienced," and simultaneously to the 'excess' of conditionality. This latter excess refers to the social constitution of subjectivity, to the (at least partially) inherited and thereby opaque structure of self-relationality and desire, as well as to the unequal and differential social conditions whose mediations variously support, enable, limit, constrain, overwhelm and frustrate the trans-formations undertaken by 'excessive' agency, and what they are able to amount to. The negativity of conditions refers not only to the fact of their precedence or preponderance in relation to individuality, but to their dynamic, uncertain, changing and variable character. Unlike Rancière's conception of police, which presents the mediation of identity in the form of static and contingently congealed circumscriptions and thereby prefigures 'politics' as the practice of breaking out from or contesting the limitations of these 'orders,' for Berlant the political function of conditions cannot be established outside of the specific predicaments or "genres" whose mediations contour the various strategies, trans-formations and adaptations for dealing with the "historical present."588 In approaching conditions as "genres," Berlant is placing them at the blurred intersection that links creative expressions of agency – especially the capacity to rework and re- imagine given 'frameworks of coherence' – with the exposure to often uncertain and overwhelming social conditions and social forms, the management of which is ongoing, unending, difficult, and unclear. Berlant’s genres are political constellations that effectuate a disclosures of her objects – the agency of the everyday – in two simultaneous yet entwined directions: through the micrological interpretation of the creative survival strategies employed in everyday life the agential potentiality that might have been deployed for transformative political praxis is disclosed in promissory form; at the same time, the salvaging of this promissory potential illuminates the damaged effectuated by the conditions, and thereby works against their normalization. Berlant's analysis of the genre of "slow death" provides a reworking of Adorno's thesis on the "withering of experience."589 She defines slow death as the "physical wearing out of a

587 Berlant, "The Commons," 394. 588 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 52. 589Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. (New York: Verso, 2004): 40. The concept of experience, for Adorno, must be understood at an arms length from the existential-phenomenological tradition. It

259 population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence," and "where life building and the attrition of human life are indistinguishable, and where it is hard to distinguish modes of incoherence, distractedness, and habituation from deliberate activity, as they are all involved in the reproduction of predictable life."590 On the one hand, her account works against Adorno's exaggerated or totalizing construal of 'wrong life' by emphasizing the local or genre-al character of slow death, while on the other, it inherits an element of Adorno's conception of mediation by refusing, for its point of departure, to invoke the primacy of political subjectivity as the potential to exceed, resist, or contest the inhibiting forces of social conditionality, and in approaching this relation from a posture of ambivalence, opens up a space to elucidate the question of praxis from the perspective of its entanglement, rather than from the need to affirm the possibility of escape from damaging conditions. Berlant's discussion of slow death attends to the ways in which the variations of conditionality, normativity and agency are interlinked in order to "recast" the latter and so to call into question accounts that "inflate" agency and so "persist in an attachment to a fantasy that in the truly lived life emotions are always heightened and expressed in modes of effective agency that ought justly to be and are ultimately consequential or performatively sovereign."591 Her conception of "lateral agency" seeks to make visible norms of agency other than those that presume effective action, self-control or 'sovereignty' in the active and visible transformation of the world. It does so by attending to the micrological and affectively laden processes of taking up and creatively handling the predicament of one's worldly relations. Lateral agency, by foregrounding the conditionality inherent in agency – which has too often been depicted as an opposition, encumbrance, or heterogeneous barrier to agential control – opens up the space for acknowledging that "agency can be an activity of maintenance, not making," and that expressions of agency can take the form of coping, adapting, surviving and self-interrupting. Lateral agency possess a

refers to the capacity of critical subjectivity to recognize that which differs from its own conceptual categorization/mastery of the world, not by directly or immediately experiencing the object or thing-in-itself, but through critical reflection on the non-identity of existing concepts. With the claim that experience is "withering" Adorno is not making a descriptive-predictive claim that critical-transformative experience is impossible, rather, he is attempting to bring into relief opaque yet exigent social problems through a series of models that invite us to acknowledge the social ineloquence of particularity, and to see this damage as inflicted historically. The present connection is supported by Berlant's avowal that her critical affect theory constitutes "another phase in the history of ideology theory" (Cruel Optimism, 52). 590 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 96. 591 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 99.

260 different temporality than traditional norms of agency predicated on more salient expressions of change or transformation, and as implicated "within the space of ordinariness," it is often lived out within a context of "endemic" or ongoing crisis.592 The specific "genre" or predicament of "slow death" takes shape around a "cluster of factors" (availability and affordability of nutritious/unhealthy food, overworking and part-time labor, urban development, among many others) whose slow rhythm of attrition characterizes the socio-historically conditioned experience of obesity in the United States. This genre can only be characterized as an 'epidemic' from a "certain distance" – objectivating, medicalizing, actuarializing distances, for example – where "argument about classification, causality, responsibility, degenerancy," not to mention the "racializing" of obesity, coagulate into narratives of responsibility that presuppose norms of agency that render invisible the agential strategies for living out the daily experience of obesity.593 Attending to lateral agency, then, is not only a way of highlighting the dramatic extent to which the latent potentiality of praxis is entangled with (inter)dependency, but is, not unlike Rancière's account of equality (albeit without its axiomatic affirmation), a recasting or recovery of the fragmented potential of praxis in places and at levels where traditional norms of agency have only seen passivity, heteronomy and culpability. Berlant's micrology aims at the recovery of fragments of praxial potentiality from social and political mediations – such as those objectivating perspectives referred to above – that have only discerned the relinquishment or abdication of agency yet without preceding in such a manner that the presupposed or methodological affirmation of that excessive agency would blind her to its conditionality. Her critical micrology, in contrast to Rancière's "method," opens itself to the ambivalence and complexity of the particular situation, not unlike Adorno's call for dialectical thinking to immerse itself unreservedly in the matter itself, and is thereby is able to acknowledge both the moment of excessive agency as well as the conditional, limited and potentially (self)damaging nature of a given action, attitude or disposition. Hence, Berlant's micrological ambivalence to the genre of "slow death" allows her to discern within the eating practices responsible for contemporary obsetity in the US as "a kind of self-medication through self- interruption."594 In order to conceive of an act of self-interruption as an act of lateral agency, rather

592 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 99-100. 593 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 103, 114. 594 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 115.

261 than a failure of agency, the conditions mediating this act – the 'cluster of factors' composing endemic crisis – must themselves be conceived as integral and internal to what resistance of them could mean, that is, as intrinsic component of the response that emerges. She is only able to discern the creative and irreducible dimension of lateral agency by engaging in a non-dominating or mimetic relation to a particular social act – by exhibiting affinity for the constitutedness with which agency is (responsively) entwined – that had previously been figured as determined or lacking in response-ability. Once these mediating conditions are taken as an integral element of the sense and orientation of agency, it becomes possible to perceive the human forms of agency inhering in conditions where deferral, survival and living on counts as a triumph. Berlant’s conception of lateral agency, which operates by mobilizing the extremes of the praxis-condition relation, does not collapse their difference, but in attending to the particularity of the dynamics of their reciprocal permeation, in recovering expressions of agency amidst conditions of its ostensible disappearance, discloses the conditionality of praxis in its entanglement with the politics of conditions. Her constellations do not presuppose (nor verify) that unreduced equality exists here and now, as Rancière had. Living within damaged conditions the creativity or 'excessiveness' of agency is sometimes unable to manifest itself through the positive transformation of those conditions and instead exhausts itself in the course of adapting or surviving them. Turning Rancière on his head, 'excessive' agency comes to appears not as triumph but as critique: disclosure of the conditional character of praxis illuminates the need to amend the present world and its damaging mediations. The intimate linking of mediating conditions and conditional agency shifts the critical question. It can no longer be characterized by a relation of change and stability because agency is not only operative in moments of transformation, it is continually mediated – both enabled and inhibited – by the multitude of forces that limit the form and effectuality of its expressions. The critical question concerns the qualitative experience of agency in everyday life – not the oscillation of its appearance and disappearance. Adorno's epigraph, "life does not live", or Berlant's more precise formulation of agency under conditions of slow death that "people do live, just not very well," are not descriptive (or prescriptive) accounts of the possibility of effective agency, but critical-normative (re)countings of the temporary, temporal, mutable state of that relation.595 What is disclosed as damaged in Berlant's account is not fundamentally the creative-critical potentiality of agency itself – her micrological critique

595Adorno, Minima Moralia, 19; Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 119.

262 reveals the persistent and enduring quality of agency amidst conditions demanding a whirl of adaptation, extenuation and creative forms of coping – but the way in which the mediating force of those conditions diminish, miniaturize and frustrate the political promise that inheres in the most meager acts of 'taking up' the world, translating it, and in so doing to make it more than it merely is. Berlant's mimetic portrait of slow death, then, should not be read as a redemptive or celebratory revisioning of the ineliminable character of agency. To the contrary, the point of her engagement with the genre of 'slow death' is to bring into relief what is at stake in the open, temporal and mutable nature of the agency-conditions relation: that agency is not an ontological power residing outside or in excess of its entanglements with concrete socio-historical conditions. The arrangement of socio-historical conditions might be described as contingent – even if it contains the element of truth that it could be otherwise – harbors far too much indifference, even coldness, because mediating social conditions are not extrinsic material manipulated and contested by agency, but constitutive of the qualitative condition of the agency that practices the re-visioning of them. Effective political agency cannot be presupposed because it is not a power independent of the conditions it resists, but is simultaneously constituted by them, and hence the possibility exists that practical agency can be damaged and it is only this possibility that makes sense of the stakes of praxis. Following Adorno and Berlant, I am arguing that the affirmation of contingency, difference or novelty in political theory distorts what is at stake in the agency-mediating conditions relation. If this relation is subject to change, and if agency is not to be defined as indifferently excessive in its relation to these conditions, but as both mediating and mediated by them, then this means that this relation – its mutability, and hence the exposure to the possibility into damaging modalities – is itself what matters. In Berlant's political ‘genealogical particularism’ proceeds by tracing the remnants of irreducible praxis to the point at which there are disclosed as non-identical . For Adorno, non- identity is the waste product of a prevailing socio-historical mediation, the muting of particularity, whose ineloquence attests to the relation of violence and damage that marks the present mediation of the heterogeneous (i.e. the social ineloquence or political imperceptibility of human suffering). In order for what is ineloquent to attest to anything, however, the mark of its ineloquence must become a perspicuous feature of its mediation, and this must strike as urgently wrong. Lateral agency, like non-identity, is a waste product of its socio-historical mediations in that the very

263 expression of the problem, living on as slow death, is inexpressible within available language and norms for figuring agency and it is this inexpressibility that makes lateral agency such an intractable problem. As a waste product of its socio-historical mediations, however, lateral agency also "points beyond itself."596 That there is no means of expressing this problem, that lateral agency is non-identical, also speaks against the present state of social mediation – the present and revocable state of the universal – giving a concrete and affectively colored sense to the wrongness of the present and producing a puncture-hole in the dense fabric of prevailing forms of political mediation. In the moment when lateral agency becomes synonymous with non-identity what lights up, negatively, is the mattering of conditions that mediate agency. When the mattering of these conditions is brought affectively into relief, the question of "whether and how loss might make an opening," that "politics itself is a lost object," becomes itself a potential source of praxial orientation amidst the pervasive, debilitating conditions of normalized disorientation.597 What is at issue in Berlant's reworked negativism are the limitations of mediated agency to stand a-part from the conditions that both enable and inhibit it. Far from the polar extremes of conceding determinism or abstractly trumpeting the indeterminancy or unpredictability of praxis, Berlant offers a vivid portrait of the emaciated, yet surviving, figure of agency grappling with travails of the overwhelming, excessive, uncertain and ultimately damaging forms of contemporary political mediation. Berlant problematizes the overly simplistic association of practical indeterminacy with hope and change, and by offering a nuanced account of agency below the threshold of effective political action, is able to elucidate the extent to which the conditions mediating agency matters to politics in ways and at times that go far beyond the rarified moments of discontinuity and change. Berlant's work is attempting to express the price of inherited conceptions of effective political action, which hollow out and undermine the role of supporting and mediating conditions of agency, without falling into the equally suspect position of reducing agency to those conditions. If mediation matters in this way, what kind of critical route or pathway for praxis does Berlantian mediation open up? It begins, as we have seen, from the refusal to presuppose or insistent upon the potentiality of political subjectivity, or what has been referred to as an ambivalent relation to socio-historical mediation condensed in Adorno's formulation that

596 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 102. 597 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 232-233.

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"universal history must be construed and denied," and that the present age is one of "both utopian and absolutely destructive possibilities."598 The point of departure is the ambivalent present. That there is a path leading from the present to a transformed future cannot be assured in advance, and if such a path is to exist as more than exceptions and interruptions, the route will not be direct. Instead, the route will have to take the form of a detour, or more precisely, of finding the present and the routes it makes available to be disappointing or even unlivable, and from this acknowledgment, and without any assurance of its possibility, setting out to creative-critically repair this damaged relation to the future. This is the meaning and stakes of negativism. 'Negative' does not refer to the absence of a normative framework or ground, nor to a lack of any practical telos, but to the route to a transformed future that praxis strives to bring about in the process of subjecting itself, along with its mediating conditions, to reproach and repair. The route to amending and revisioning these conditions, to critical-creative praxis, takes its starting point, finds its motivation, and grounds its mattering upon the experience of their withering and loss.

598 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 320; "Progress," in ed. Rolf Tiedemann Can One Live after Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003: 126.

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