Disclosing Possibility: The Past and Future of Critical Theory1

Abstract In this paper I indicate the reasons why critical theory needs an alternative conception of critique, and then I sketch out what such an alternative should be. The conception of critique I develop involves a time‐responsive redisclosure of the world capable of disclosing new or previously unnoticed possibilities, possibilities in light of which agents can change their self‐understanding and their practices, and change their orientation to the future and the past. Keywords: critiquepossibilitymodernityreasonscepticism Notes 1 This paper, with minor modificiations, is drawn from the final chapter of my forthcoming book, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory Between Past and Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 2 Whether it is observed in the reactions to 'political correctness', identity politics, feminism, affirmative action policies, or protests against globalization, what we find is widespread cultural fatigue with social criticism, a fatigue manifesting itself spontaneously in the form of impatience, dismissiveness, and outright hostility, as well as in forms of highly organized backlash. More recently, the events of '9/11' harnessed this resentful energy in a particularly intolerant manner, making the United States the democracy most 'sensitive' to self‐criticism, making self‐criticism nearly equivalent to treason. 3 One could trace the philosophical history of this form of scepticism by reading Hegel on the 'unhappy consciousness', Kierkegaard on 'despair', Nietzsche on 'the historical sense', 'romanticism', and 'nihilism', Heidegger on Nietzsche and 'nihilism', and, more recently, Charles Taylor on naturalism and Stanley Cavell on scepticism. I provide a synopsis of this philosophical history in 'Reorienting Critique: From Ironist Theory to Transformative Practice', Philosophy and Social Criticism, 26 (4) (2000), pp. 23–47. 4 Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) p. 178, my italics. 5 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 5. Hereafter cited as PDM in parentheses. 6 Only the much too knowing ideologues of modernization and globalization continue to recommend as the cure to all that ails the modern world large‐scale processes of change whose scope and unintended consequences they can neither understand nor foresee. In the same breath, however, they proclaim that these processes are as irresistible as they are necessary, that they represent 'progress'. With this exhortation to accept and adapt to what is inevitable, they unintentionally attest to and intensify our doubts. 7 Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), pp. 50–1, my italics. Hereafter cited as NC in parentheses. 8 Similarly, Nancy Fraser in her discussion of the 'post‐socialist condition' also refers to the exhaustion of utopian energies, but she too fails to develop its implications for the practice of critique. Moreover, I believe that she errs in amending Habermas's diagnosis as referring not to an exhaustion of utopian energies tout court, but to the exhaustion of 'left‐wing' utopian energies in particular. This error is a consequence of conflating political with utopian energies. While right‐wing political energies are far from exhausted, they can hardly be described as utopian. Indeed, they are anti‐utopian. They are motivated by ressentiment, by the urge to destroy the 'welfare state' rather than by the urge to create something genuinely new. See, Fraser's Justice Interruptus (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1–6. 9 This talk of dried‐up utopian oases is, of course, a reference to Nietzsche's characterization of modern nihilism as a growing desert (die Wueste wächst). Perhaps what we have now is not any new form of obscurity or opaqueness (Unübersichtlichkeit), but the belated recognition of the ever‐increasing momentum with which it spreads – an ever‐widening and encompassing swath of obscurity that accelerates with each and every loss of sense‐making possibilities. 10 Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, p. 177. 11 Habermas, 'Consciousness‐Raising or Rescuing Critique?', in Gary Smith (ed.) On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 123. 12 Although the endorsement of its addressees is a necessary condition of the validity of any critical insight, it is not a sufficient condition of validity. For various independent reasons and social circumstances, the collective addressees of social critique may not be ready or inclined to accept it. Conversely, mere acceptance is also not a sufficient condition of validity. Once again, independent reasons and social circumstances may play a role in the acceptance of social criticism that turns out to be incorrect. Nevertheless, diagnostic social critique can never become an effective instrument of democratically achieved social change unless those to whom it is addressed reflectively endorse it. 13 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 100–1. Translation slightly altered. 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 38. 15 On this issues, see Reinhard Koselleck, Critique and Crisis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), especially Ch. 8, pp. 98–126. 16 For a fuller account of the exhaustion of unmasking critique, see Nikolas Kompridis, 'Reorienting Critique: From Ironist Theory to Transformative Practice', Philosophy and Social Criticism, 26 (4) (2000), pp. 23–47. See also 'So We Need Something Else for Reason to Mean', International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 8 (3) (2000), pp. 271–95. 17 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 246. 18 John Dewey, Art as Experience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), p. 38. 19 Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 18. 20 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 38. 21 Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), pp. 22–3. 22 Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 60. 23 James Bohman, 'Participants, Observers, and Critics: Practical Knowledge, Social Perspectives, and Critical Pluralism', in William Rehg and James Bohman (eds.) Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn: The Transformation of Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 100. 24 Ibid., p. 100. 25 Jürgen Habermas, The New Conservatism, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 69. 26 See Chapter 4 of my Critique and Disclosure for a full statement of my view of the role of philosophy and critique. 27 Bohman, 'Participants, Observers, and Critics', p. 107. 28 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated by Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 252. 29 Ibid., p. 276. 30 Ibid., p. 275. 31 Ibid., p. 275. 32 Here I am paraphrasing an observation of de Tocqueville's in the closing pages of Democracy in America. Anticipating the condition Habermas would diagnose almost a century and a half later, he writes: 'Since the past has ceased to throw light upon its future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.' Cited by Hannah Arendt in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 7. 33 Hannah Arendt, 'What is Freedom?', Between Past and Future, p. 151. 34 For alternative ways of conceptualizing the new, see Stanley Cavell, 'The Future of Possibility', and Nikolas Kompridis, 'The Normativity of the New', in Nikolas Kompridis (ed.) Philosophical Romanticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 35 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 263. 36 Ibid., p. 285. 37 Ibid., p. 286. As examples of Begriffe turned into Vorgriffe, into future‐directed 'concepts of movement', Koselleck points to Kant's concept of Völkerbund, 'league of nations', and to now exhausted or still highly contested concepts such as 'democracy', 'liberalism', 'socialism', 'communism', 'fascism', 'progress', and 'revolution'. 38 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 11. 39 Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Section 13, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 516. 40 Herbert Marcuse, Negations. Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 154–5, my italics. 41 Ibid., p. 158. 42 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 5–6. 43 Max Horkheimer, 'Materialism and Metaphysics', in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 1986), p. 26. 44 Christian Lenhardt, 'Anamnestic Solidarity: The Proletariat and its Manes', Telos, 25 (Fall 1975), pp. 133–154. 45 For an instance of this 'conservative' attitude in connection with questions concerning the political claims of culture, see Nikolas Kompridis, 'Normativizing Hybridity/Neutralizing Culture', Political Theory, 133 (3) (June 2005), pp. 318–343. 46 Lenhardt, 'Anamnestic Solidarity', p. 154. 47 Ibid., p. 154. 48 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken, 1969), p. 255. 49 Ibid., p. 262. 50 Regrettably, normative theorizing continues to think within the idea of homogeneous, empty time, time that proceeds unbroken towards an ever‐receding point in the future. And although we have developed a deeply sceptical attitude towards the notion of progress, in our theorizing we nonetheless retain the conception of time upon which it depends. We seem to be theorizing in a prison house of time, a prison house of our own making, hurtling forward towards a 'future' from which we seem unable to escape – a 'future' without a future.