Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research: New Applications and Explorations (Political Philosophy and Public Purpose) [1st ed. 2021] 3030705811, 9783030705817

Citation preview

MIGRATION, POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC PURPOSE DIASPORAS AND CITIZENSHIP

Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research New Applications and Explorations

Edited by Neal Harris

Political Philosophy and Public Purpose

Series Editor Michael J. Thompson, William Paterson University New York, NY, USA

This series offers books that seek to explore new perspectives in social and political criticism. Seeing contemporary academic political theory and philosophy as largely dominated by hyper-academic and overly-technical debates, the books in this series seek to connect the politically engaged traditions of philosophical thought with contemporary social and political life. The idea of philosophy emphasized here is not as an aloof enterprise, but rather a publicly-oriented activity that emphasizes rational reflection as well as informed praxis.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14542

Neal Harris Editor

Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research New Applications and Explorations

Editor Neal Harris Oxford Brookes University Oxford, UK

ISSN 2524-714X ISSN 2524-7158 (electronic) Political Philosophy and Public Purpose ISBN 978-3-030-70581-7 ISBN 978-3-030-70582-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: © Jose A. Bernat Bacete, gettyimages This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editor’s Foreword

Erich Fromm once asked from the vantage point of the mid-1950s, “can a society be sick?” The question was posed at the apex of the “affluent society”, an age of unprecedented social wealth and post-subsistence society was emerging. It was also a time when modern medicine, vaccines and other modern therapies for dealing with physical maladies were reaching unprecedented efficacy. But Fromm saw that, just as Marx had a century earlier, that modernity was ill, that it suffered from a de-humanising pattern of pathologies that could be diagnosed and cured. Today it is still not difficult, when skimming newspapers and popular journals, to discover evidence for the thesis that modern society is ill. Fromm believed that a critical, humanistic form of reason would be able to root out the causes of social pathology—of alienation, reification, personal psychic suffering—and usher in a new sense of freedom and humane existence. Although it was once at the origin of modern social science, the concept of social pathology has fallen out of favour in recent decades. Although thinkers such as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx and Durkheim remain the progenitors of the idea that societies as whole entities can suffer from pathologies, the ontological paradigms of much of mainstream social science have marginalised thinking about macro social entities as having distinct properties and features. As methodological individualism reshaped the social sciences and social theory, the idea that only individuals can suffer and that only individuals can be healed became prevalent. The idea that the origins of individual suffering was social, that there were systemic v

vi

SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

and social-ontological mechanisms—such as the way modern societies were organised and the kinds of values and norms that they made prevalent—responsible for the ways that individual suffering emerged in the first place, was gradually put out of sight. Methodological holism—the view that society as a whole could be understood as the explanatory unit of analysis—was increasingly seen as wishy-washy metaphysics, not suited to the world of analytic reason and modern science. This view has begun to shift. Emerging largely out of the critical theory tradition, the concept of social pathology persisted and was brought back into currency with the work of Axel Honneth and his attempt to diagnose social pathology as defects in recognitive relations. But we can now see that social pathology is expanding beyond these narrow concerns. Neal Harris’ work has been at the forefront of a new generation of critical theorists that have decided to go back to the original themes and theories of critical theory in order to refresh our thinking about the nature of social pathology and the kinds of defects that rationalised, capitalist society engenders. This collection of essays is rich as well as novel. Each paper in the volume seeks to move us towards a more holistic approach to social pathology, one not restricted to pathologies of communication or recognition alone, but also to the kinds of social irrationality that plagues modern capitalist forms of the social organisation no less than the psychological states of the self. Harris, himself an important emerging voice in critical theory with an expertise in social pathology theory, has been able to turn our attention to new themes and new questions. In doing so, he has placed critical social theory on a more politically engaged plane, a course that should inspire others who seek social change and continue the collective effort to make the world rational. Gramercy Park, NYC Winter 2020

Michael J. Thompson

Preface

In the summer of 2019, Heinz Sünker organised a conference at the University of Wuppertal to mark the 50th anniversary of Adorno’s passing. The event brought together an otherwise disparate band of Critical Theorists to reflect on Adorno’s life and work, and the continuing impact of his Critical Theory today. While of the final contributors to this volume only Gerard Delanty, Michael J. Thompson and I participated in the conference, the origins of this project truly lie in Wuppertal, and three particular themes were discussed at length. The first of these was the continuation of an ongoing dialogue with Gerard Delanty on the fading sociological core of Critical Theory. The Institute for Social Research, while heavily inflected with left-Hegelian philosophy, originated as a site for the analysis of the immanent contradictions within the social world: a primarily interdisciplinary-sociological consideration. Delanty’s panel at the conference spoke to these sociological roots, and the importance of the distinctly immanent-transcendent project Adorno advanced. In the face of the increasing swamping of the sociological component of Critical Theory by Rawlsian and neo-Idealist currents, it felt timely to produce a volume that sought to return social research to the centre of the conversation. This is not a territory marking exercise; Critical Theory has always aspired to be self-consciously interdisciplinary. Rather, this attempt to “re-sociologise” Critical Theory is presented to maintain this cross-disciplinary engagement. For it to remain

vii

viii

PREFACE

relevant, Critical Theory must always aspire to be more than another flavour of theory of justice. The second theme inspiring this volume is the increasing ‘domestication’ of Critical Theory, to use Michael J. Thompson’s turn of phrase. A joy of reading Adorno, and of discussing his work, is the true hostility and devastating negativity on display towards capitalist irrationality. Such political and philosophical commitments are ironically absent in the work of leading Critical Theorists, such as Honneth, even as we witness the impeding cataclysms of global warming and insurgent neo-fascisms. While Adorno’s “praxis” of combating reified consciousness through esoteric critique was (perhaps) reasonably snubbed as bourgeois pretension by the soixante-huitards, today it is almost as if the view from the Ivory Tower has become too ghastly to comprehend, and a self-protecting retreat has been sounded. While in the face of an increasingly unstoppable ecocide this is not necessarily a poor move from a clinical “defence mechanism” standpoint, many conference attendees felt Critical Theory still harboured a potency to challenge structures of domination and should not retreat to an opiate for the weary, defeated mind, facing insurmountable odds. Finally, in editing this volume I was conscious of the increasingly fractured nature of contemporary Critical Theory. A purported “Critical Theory” reader might today incorporate Foucault’s biopolitics, Debord’s psychogeography and Lacanian psychoanalysis, without mention of Social Pathology, Minima Moralia or Dialectic of Enlightenment. The increasing breadth and development of the field are only positive, and any attempt to restrict Critical Theory to the veneration of a first-generation German canon smacks of a futile conservatism. Rather, the fracturing of Critical Theory today is damaging in that it risks losing theoretical coherence: while Foucault and Debord offer much to the contemporary researcher, they cannot be conveniently integrated within the ambit of Erich Fromm and Walter Benjamin. These are theorists with clearly differentiated theoretical foundations; attempts at a synthesis, while often productive, require careful consideration. Further, with the increasing investment in poststructuralist theorisation, the centrality and unambiguity of a hostility to capitalist reification is lost: Foucault’s work (or perhaps readings of his work) is/are more amenable to neoliberalism than his myriad devotees admit. In this regard, the collection seeks to bring together disparate voices and new approaches while maintaining an immanent-transcendent

PREFACE

ix

methodology, seeking to anchor a broad, contemporary Critical Theory within a dialectical and pathology diagnosing imagination. Oxford, UK Winter 2020

Neal Harris

Contents

1

Introduction: Social Pathology and Social Research Neal Harris

Part I 2

3

4

5

Explorations in Contemporary Social Pathology Diagnosis

The Pathogenesis of Brexit: Pathologies of British Political Modernity Gerard Delanty Pathologies of Reason in Computational Capitalism: A Speculative Diagnosis of Our Computational Worldview James Stockman Pathologies of Digital Communication: On the Ascendancy of Right Populism Estevão Bosco and Wagner Costa Ribeiro

Part II

1

23

47

73

Ontological and Epistemological Considerations in Social Pathology Scholarship

An Ontological Account of Social Pathology Michael J. Thompson

113

xi

xii

CONTENTS

6

Who Is Ill When a Society Is Ill? Onni Hirvonen

7

A Biopolitical Account of Social Pathology: Viewing Pathology as a Political-Ontological Issue Yonathan Listik

Part III

Rawlsian Liberalism as a Failure of Critique Ane Engelstad

9

The Revolt of the Maladjusted: Defacing the Currency of Social Pathology Diagnosis in Contemporary Critical Theory Denis C. Bosseau

11

The Challenge of Postcapitalism: Non-Capitalist Temporalities and Social Pathology Onur Acaroglu The Future of Pathology Diagnosing Social Research Neal Harris and James Stockman

Index

163

Beyond Pathologies of Recognition: New Voices, New Directions

8

10

141

193

221

253 275

283

Notes on Contributors

Onur Acaroglu is an instructor at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey and a co-founder and tutor at the Free University of London (FUL), UK. He is assistant editor at the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books (MPRB) and author of Rethinking Marxist Approaches to Transition: A Theory of Temporal Dislocation (Brill, 2020). His interests include social theory and Western Marxism. Estevão Bosco is a Critical Social Theorist. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, a Fellow of the São Paulo Research Foundation, and the coordinator of the RedSars2 network at the Latin-American College of Global Studies (FLACSO/Brazil). Previously, Dr. Bosco was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, UK, and a Research Associate at the University of Campinas, Brazil. He is the author of multiple journal articles, book chapters, and the book Sociedade de risco: introdução à sociologia cosmopolita de Ulrich Beck (Annablume and São Paulo Research Foundation, 2016). Denis C. Bosseau is a doctoral student at the Research Centre for Social and Political Thought (SPT) at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. His research focuses on contemporary strategies of resistance with particular attention given to practices of whistleblowing and the emancipatory effects of acephalic social movements of contestation, like that of the Gilet Jaune in France, seeing how such forms of contestation can serve as sources of inspiration for a re-politicisation of critical practice within the

xiii

xiv

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

field of critical theory. He is co-editor on a proposed collection of crossdisciplinary essays in critical theory, indicatively titled Critical Theory in (A Time of) Crisis. Wagner Costa Ribeiro is Professor of Geography at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Dr. Ribeiro has held visiting appointments at the University of Barcelona, the University of Salamanca, the University of Seville, Spain, and the University of Caldas, Colombia. He is the author of several journal articles, book chapters, and books, including: A Ordem Ambiental Internacional (Contexto, 2001 and 2005) and Geografia política da água (Annablume, 2008). Gerard Delanty is Professor of Sociology and Social & Political Thought at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. His most recent publication is Critical Theory and Social Transformation (Routledge, 2020). His other publications include: The Cosmopolitan Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Formations of European Modernity, 2nd edition (Palgrave, 2019), Community 3rd Edition (Routledge, 2018), and The European Heritage: A Critical Re-Interpretation (Routledge, 2018). He has edited many volumes, including the Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, 2nd edition (2019) and, with Stephen P. Turner, the Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory (2011). His most recent volume is Pandemics, Society and Politics: Critical Reflections on Covid-19 (De Gruyter, 2021). He is also the Chief Editor of the European Journal of Social Theory. Ane Englestad is a philosopher working on the concept of injustice and critiques of mainstream political philosophy at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. She is the former editor of Marx and Philosophy Review of Books (MPRB). Neal Harris is a Lecturer in Sociology at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK. He has published research in the European Journal of Social Theory, Social Science Information, Thesis Eleven, International Sociology, the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, and Studies in Social and Political Thought. His work focuses on the Critical Theory tradition, past and present. He is currently working on two main projects: a monograph on the foundations of pathology diagnosing Critical Theory, to be published with Manchester University Press (2022), and a coedited volume with Onur Acaroglu, indicatively titled: Thinking Beyond Neoliberalism: Theorising Transition and Resistance (Palgrave, 2021).

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xv

Onni Hirvonen is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His research interests include the Hegelian philosophy of recognition, critical social philosophy, and contemporary social ontology. Hirvonen’s recent publications analyse collective responsibility, recognition and work, and populism. Yonathan Listik is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He was previously a researcher and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Essex, Colchester, UK. His research focuses on political philosophy, specifically on the connections between contemporary ontology in the continental tradition, political theory, and aesthetics. James Stockman is a Critical Theorist and doctoral candidate working in the field of Digital Media at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. He is a member of the editorial collective for the journal Studies in Social & Political Thought, and he works as a Doctoral Tutor in the Department of Media & Communications at the University of Sussex. Michael J. Thompson is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA. His most recent books are The Specter of Babel: A Reconstruction of Political Judgment (SUNY, 2020) as well as the forthcoming, Twilight of the Self: Cybernetic Society and the Eclipse of Autonomy (Stanford) and Perversions of Subjectivity: Public Reason and its Discontents (Routledge).

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Social Pathology and Social Research Neal Harris

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought dramatic changes to our social, economic and political systems. Hidden among the startling statistics from demographers and epidemiologists lies a predictable reality: the fortunes of the world’s billionaires ‘increased by more than a quarter’ between April and July 2020 (Neate, 2020). The crude dynamic of the rich disproportionately profiting, and the poor disproportionately dying, was replicated at both a global and a national level (Harvey, 2020). True to form, the popular press attempted to displace critical political economy with xenophobia (Ong & Lasco, 2020), yet such efforts met with only partial success. With COVID-19 disclosing the myriad irrationalities of neoliberal governance, social critique returned with a vengeance, increasingly framing capitalism itself within the language of pathology. Making this connection most explicitly was the ubiquitous activist banner

N. Harris (B) Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Harris (ed.), Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_1

1

2

N. HARRIS

declaring: ‘Capitalism Is The Virus’. At the same time as this resurgent challenge to neoliberal hegemony, the importance of considered government intervention is likewise being showcased globally (PickhardWhitehead, 2020). Political parties whose leaders had recently declared that there was ‘no such thing as society’, and who had triumphed the shrinking of the welfare state, suddenly competed to demonstrate their respective competence at centralised administration. The lie that an internationalist neoliberalism offers the optimal means of social organisation was instantly forgotten. As in wartime, protectionism and state intervention rapidly became the accepted orthodoxy. The spectacular failure of neoliberalism to offer meaningful solutions, and the comparative ease and joy with which solidaristic mutual aid networks flourished, provided a stark juxtaposition (see Nelson, 2020). The present conjuncture evinces both a renewed critique of capitalism as distinctly ‘pathological’, while enabling tangible alternatives to emerge. While the pandemic brought virological imagery to the fore, there has long been a rich tradition of anchoring socio-political critique within the framing of ‘pathology’ (Honneth, 2000, 2007; Fromm, 2010 [1991]; Neuhouser, 2012, inter alia). The development of pathology diagnosing social criticism can be tracked not only within the classics of Western philosophy, from Socrates’ attack on Glaukon’s ‘fevered’ ‘city of pigs’ in the Republic (371bff) through to Rousseau’s attack on civil society in the Second Discourse (1984 [1762]), but also within Indian ‘New World’ teachings, for instance, the Theosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti (2008). Political scientists (Mudde, 2010), criminologists (Sutherland, 1945; Best, 2007) and psychoanalysts (Freud, 1953) have likewise developed the heurism in various directions. However, while these diverse schools have all influenced what it means to diagnose social pathologies, the framing maintains a particular significance within Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Here, the language of ‘pathology’ has been mobilised to enable researchers to push beyond the liberal imagination of ‘justice’ and ‘legitimacy’, thus emboldening social research to identify a plethora of distinct, and often more foundational, challenges to the existing social order (Honneth, 2000). It is this Critical Theoretical understanding of social pathology which this volume seeks to extend.

1

1

INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL PATHOLOGY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH

3

Social Pathology and Critical Theory

Frankfurt School Critical Theory offers an interdisciplinary approach to social research that marshals concepts and methodologies from leftHegelian philosophy, Marxism, psychoanalysis, epistemology, sociology and aesthetics, to interrogate how socio-political structures shape the consciousness and behaviour of social subjects. Hegel’s critique of Kant’s Idealist philosophy is thus of central importance for Critical Theory. While Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (2007 [1781]) explored noumenal, universal Ideas, discoverable a priori, Hegel offered a conception of Reason which was distinctly socio-historical. For Hegel, Geist (‘reason’ or ‘spirit’) was emerging, or ‘unfolding’, within both the social and the natural world, working through its latent contradictions. Indeed, as Hegel would claim in both the Phenomenology of Spirit (1970 [1807]) and Science of Logic (2015 [1816]), the cognition of social subjects is fundamentally connected to this dialectical working through of the inconsistencies immanent within the social world. Reason, for Hegel, is thus a distinctly social reality, connected to the development of macro-social logics and processes: how one thinks, as much as what one thinks, is socially dependant. For Axel Honneth (2007), the ‘explosive charge’ of Critical Theory derives from its focus on the ‘pathologies’ manifest within this ‘thicker’, social understanding of rationality. While Honneth is one of the most prominent contemporary figures associated with the Frankfurt School today, Critical Theory is held to have passed through three distinct ‘generations’ (Jay, 1996 [1973]). At its inception in 1923, the Institute for Social Research [Institut für Sozialforschung ] practised an unremarkable orthodox Marxist economics. It was Max Horkheimer’s appointment as director of the institute in 1930 which brought methodological innovation and the idiosyncratic fusion of disciplines; welcoming psychoanalysts, sociologists, philosophers and literary theorists. First-generation Critical Theory is thus typified not only by the work of Max Horkheimer, but also by that of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and Walter Benjamin (see Jay, 1996). Working together, Adorno and Horkheimer developed a strikingly negative and dialectical account of society, culminating in their coauthored Dialectic of Enlightenment (1979 [1944]) and Adorno’s (2005 [1951]) Minima Moralia. Centring the left-Hegelian analysis of social rationality, the authors identified deep-seated pathologies within the foundations of contemporary thought. Free-market capitalism, Soviet

4

N. HARRIS

state capitalism and the horrors of the Nazi fascistic terror were held to be manifestations of a deformed, ‘pathological’ irrationality. Enlightenment thought itself, declared Adorno and Horkheimer, with selfconscious hyperbole, ‘has extinguished any trace of its self-consciousness’ and has become ‘ultimately self-destructive’ (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1979 [1944]: 4). Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse served to inject a Freudian-Marxian synthesis to these conversations. Fromm’s humanist Marxism (1963, 2010) spoke explicitly of the ‘insane society’ and a ‘pathological normalcy’, while Marcuse (1977 [1941]) brought a phenomenological lens with his critique of a pathological ‘onedimensionality’ to the modern social experience. Walter Benjamin’s (2008 [1935], 1978) work added yet further nuance and eclecticism, introducing the concerns of temporality, redemption and the messianic. While these theorists approached social research with differing inflections, they all shared a strong conviction in the need to conduct a deeper form of social criticism, to disclose the contradictions within the dominant form of life (Honneth, 2000). First-generation Critical Theory enabled incisive social critique, yet Adorno’s increasing emphasis on philosophical negativity, and his belief in the emancipatory potential of abstract art, failed to resonate with the dynamic political activism of the late 1960s (see Jarvis, 1998: 90–123; 124–147). As Fromm and Marcuse moved to develop Critical Theory in directions more in keeping with the zeitgeist, first-generation Critical Theory’s metaphysics seemed increasingly antiquated and paralysing. In this context, Jürgen Habermas (1972, 1984) attempted to offer radically new theoretical and normative foundations, forging what has since become known as the ‘second generation’ of Critical Theory. Developed in Knowledge and Human Interests (1972 [1968]) and extended in his Theory of Communicative Action (1984 and 1987 [1981]), Habermas offered a new grounding for Critical Theory, anchored less explicitly in left-Hegelianism. Synthesising insights from pragmatics, hermeneutics, analytic philosophy and developmental psychology, Habermas sought an unambiguously post-metaphysical Critical Theory (see Rasmussen, 1991). With Habermas, Frankfurt School social research increasingly focused on identifying pathologies of systematically distorted communication; instances where systemic logics overdetermine the possibilities for communicative exchange and deliberation within the lifeworld. While Habermas served to rehabilitate pathology diagnosing, normatively undergirded social research, his account was comparatively distanced

1

INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL PATHOLOGY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH

5

from the explicitly anti-capitalist agenda of his predecessors. Michael J. Thompson (2016) thus reads Habermas’ work as presaging the ‘domestication of Critical Theory’, sacrificing political radicalism at the altar of institutional credibility. While some Critical Theorists today retain a primary investment in a Habermasian methodology (see Bosco and Wagner’s contribution to this volume), Axel Honneth’s Critical Theory of Recognition is widely credited with providing the foundations for a ‘third generation’ of Frankfurt School scholarship. Honneth’s Struggle for Recognition accelerated Habermas’ post-Marxian, post-metaphysical approach to Critical Theory (Thompson, 2016), increasingly centring a micro-sociological intersubjective analysis. Developing the young Hegel’s Jena writings, Honneth argues that the subject’s affective experience(s) of ‘misrecognition’ can serve as an immanent entry point for social critique (Honneth, 1995 [1992]; see Delanty & Harris, 2021). This approach has been highly influential and has brought Frankfurt School theorists into dialogue with a variety of applied practitioners and traditionally more liberal disciplines (see Laitinen et al., 2015; see Hirvonen’s contribution to this volume). Yet, despite the undeniable proliferation of recognitiontheoretical approaches among social researchers, Honneth’s framework has been highly divisive, with philosophical (Thompson, 2016), feminist (McNay, 2007), decolonial (Coulthard, 2014; see Bosseau’s contribution to this volume) and political-economic (Fraser & Honneth, 2001) objections being raised. While scholars invested in a first-generation Hegelian-Marxism may lament the degeneration of the Frankfurt School programme into a neo-Idealist and politically quiescent irrelevance (Thompson, 2016; Kouvelakis, 2019), the centrality of pathology diagnosing social research persists, albeit in a drastically ‘domesticated’ form. Unlike Ideal theoretical approaches (see Engelstad’s chapter), social research employing a Frankfurt School methodology remains (theoretically, at least) anchored in the critique of the immanent contradictions manifest within the lifeworld. Pathology diagnosing Frankfurt School research is thus fundamentally an endeavour committed to offering a form of normative social criticism, probing beyond the empirically observable, to analyse structures, learning processes and socio-political dynamics (see the chapters by Delanty; Stockman; Bosco and Ribeiro; Acaroglu). As Strydom (2011) and Delanty (2020) have highlighted, the methodological commitment which undergirds this research is an investment in immanenttranscendence; identifying the possibilities for a less-contradictory form of social life that exist latent within the present social order.

6

N. HARRIS

2 Pathology Diagnosing Social Research Today: Three Existential Crises Despite the critical-explanatory potential of Frankfurt School research, and the potency of pathology diagnosing social critique, Critical Theory today sits in an increasingly precarious position within the academy. Three potentially existential crises can be identified, which threaten the future of Critical Theory as a distinctly Hegelian-Marxian interdisciplinary social research endeavour, capable of making an impactful critique of social and political life. The first challenge has been framed as the ‘domestication’ of Critical Theory (see Thompson, 2016). Following Honneth’s Critical Theory of Recognition, social pathologies are today increasingly framed through the optic of ‘pathologies of recognition’ (Laitinen et al., 2015; see also Zurn, 2011; Harris, 2019), with structural-relational Marxism displaced by a primarily intersubjective account of the social world. While this approach is credited with helping to expand the focus of Critical Theory from its perceived productivist-bias (Laitinen et al., 2015), the recognition-lens is viewed by its critics as being socio-theoretically, philosophically and politically problematic (Fraser & Honneth, 2001; McNay, 2007; Thompson, 2016, 2019, inter alia). Specifically, the dominant ‘pathologies of recognition’ approach seeks to apprehend all social problems through an exclusively intersubjective framework; and thus suffers from what McNay (2007) deems a ‘scholastic epistemocentricism’.1 In short, this means that every social problem, including maldistribution, is increasingly researched through an intersubjective perspective. For example, Schaub and Odigbo (2019) have recently presented the reliance on foodbanks as a manifestation of ‘consumptive need misrecognition’. For Nancy Fraser, such an exclusively intersubjective account fails to capture the central dynamics of neoliberal political economy, which extend far beyond the intersubjective register, to include:

1 By this rather ungainly term, borrowed from Bourdieu, McNay (2007) means that recognition theorists risk distorting their conception of the social world in order to retain the validity of their ‘recognition’ approach. For McNay, instead of admitting the obvious reality, that a monistic recognition lens is unviable, recognition theorists alter their understanding of the social world to fit within the parameters of their heurism.

1

INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL PATHOLOGY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH

7

…the supply and demand for different types of labor; the balance of power between labor and capital; the stringency of social regulations, including the minimum wage; the availability and cost of productivity enhancing technologies; the ease with which firms can shift their operations to locations where wage rates are lower; the cost of credit; the terms of trade; and international currency exchange rates. (Fraser & Honneth, 2001: 215)

In short, ‘pathologies of recognition’ approaches can be seen as sociotheoretically limited in their failure to adequately capture the true breadth of socio-political and economic dynamics at work within the social world. Furthermore, the ‘pathologies of recognition’ account can be read as evincing a neglect of central Marxian philosophical insights. For Thompson, social research which is predicated on a ‘pathologies of recognition’ framing is built upon an inescapably ‘neo-Idealist’ social ontology; it invests social subjects with cognitive capacities which they cannot possibly possess. As Thompson persuasively argues, scholars who hold there to be ‘a self-sufficiency to the powers of intersubjective reason, discourse, structures of justification and recognition’ fail to account for the ‘potency of social power, rooted in the material organisation of social life’ (Thompson, 2016: 15). Recognition scholars hold the intersubjective capacities of the subject to be infallible, detached from wider socialisation processes. A foundational tenet of first-generation Critical Theory, as we have seen, is that social power and knowledge are connected. This insight is not only crucial to Hegel’s ‘sociologised’ Kantianism, but also to Marx’s subsequent materialist inversion of Hegelian idealism. This central strand of Critical Theory can be seen to be ‘domesticated’ in that it has forgotten its central, radical insight: ‘the critique of society is critique of knowledge, and vice versa’ (Adorno, 2005: 250). Indeed, for Thompson, our capacity to engage intersubjectively, to know other subjects and their places in the wider social world, must be framed as a capacity that is vulnerable to the workings of constitutive power in a patriarchal, racist and capitalist society. Such a ‘domestication’ can also be seen in the politics of today’s leading Frankfurt School Critical Theorists (Thompson, 2016; Kouvelakis, 2019). This is perhaps best captured by Deutscher and Lafont’s (2017) co-edited collection, Critical Theory in Critical Times, which, instead of dealing with the impending cataclysm of capitalist-induced global warming, or the distortions to consciousness produced by the ascent of algorithmic rationality, opens with Habermas’ discussion of ‘dual sovereignty’ in the context of the European Union. Unlike Delanty’s chapter on Brexit in

8

N. HARRIS

this volume, which seeks to locate the referendum relative to broader social-political pathologies, regressions in social learning processes and displaced class antagonisms, Habermas’ text sits closer to Lockean liberalism than to dialectical Critical Theory. Frankfurt School Critical Theory thus risks becoming thoroughly domesticated as its leading voices have increasingly, ‘receded from the confrontation with the primary source of social domination and disfiguration of human culture: capitalist market society’ (Thompson, 2016: 2). Secondly, and relatedly, Critical Theory is increasingly retreating into competing abstract philosophical systems, a far cry from the rigorous interdisciplinary social critique of its prime. While Delanty (2020) and Schecter (2019), among others, have argued Critical Theory must retain a clear connection to its sociological roots, leading practitioners such as Habermas, Honneth and Forst, have retreated from direct sociological analysis. As Thompson puts it, much contemporary Critical Theory serves to ‘articulate an academicized political philosophy sealed off from the realities that affect and deform critical subjectivity’ (Thompson, 2016: 3). In essence, a flambéed Enlightenment Liberalism masquerades as Critical Theory when penetrating critique is needed more than ever. As Kouvelakis (2019) witheringly frames it, Honneth has brought Critical Theory to the precipice of Hegelian scholasticism. As Englestad’s chapter in this volume underscores, social and political philosophy desperately needs to embrace social critique; Critical Theory must not move in the direction of ideal theory. Frankfurt School Social Research can thus be seen to be at risk from an excessive ‘philosophisation’, blunting its capacity for critique and decentring the diagnosis of social pathologies. Lastly, the merit of Frankfurt School Critical Theory is also increasingly challenged by decolonial and post-colonial theorists (see Allen, 2016). To date, two principal criticisms have been raised. Firstly, that social research which draws on Frankfurt School concepts and methodologies has systematically ignored colonisation, slavery and the non-Western experience. Secondly, that the methodologies and concepts developed by Frankfurt School Critical Theory are themselves tainted by colonialising epistemes and must be urgently reconsidered. While a productive response to the first criticism can be to acknowledge the need to embrace a more reflexive cosmopolitan imagination (see Delanty, 2009), the second charge is harder to constructively imbibe. For Amy Allen, a commitment to decoloniality heralds the ‘end of progress’, that is, the belief in clear teleologies which are often complicit in coloniality. Reading

1

INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL PATHOLOGY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH

9

Habermas and Honneth (and, for different reasons, Forst) as saturated with such Eurocentric progress narratives, Allen argues for a return to the ‘epistemic humility’ of Adorno and Foucault. Yet, as Martin Jay (2018) argues, such a solution is not entirely satisfactory; for one reason, decolonising the normative foundations of Critical Theory à la Amy Allen retains a remarkably Eurocentric epistemic ensemble. Indeed, Allen can be read as failing to adequately integrate voices from beyond the Eurocentric canon, while (rightly) making Critical Theorists question their claims to universality. However, as Jay submits, one must be careful of a neo-nativist trend within post-colonial scholarship: Critical Theorists must not retreat from the critique of authoritarian neoliberalisms in post-colonies, many of which are simultaneously post-colonial and colonising in the present (Fanon, 1961; Osuri, 2017). In short, the current impasse might be read as a dangerously self-castigating paralysis, desperately requiring further critical scholarship.

3 The Structure and Contribution of This Volume It is within this context that this volume was conceived of as an opportunity to showcase the enduring merits of pathology diagnosing social research, notwithstanding the very real areas of reflexive analysis that are undeniably warranted. As the contributors demonstrate, now is a crucial time to advance a normative, post-liberal form of social research, focusing on the forms of rationality manifest within the social world. This volume thus seeks to showcase the contemporary relevance of pathology diagnosing social criticism as much as its analytic potency. The chapters gathered here demonstrate that the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism and widespread defacement of critical consciousness can be powerfully engaged through a pathology diagnosing, dialectical imagination. The volume is divided into three parts, grouping together applied research (Part I), philosophical reflections (Part II) and conscious attempts at forging new relationships between pathology diagnosing critique and other schools and traditions (Part III). The contributors also represent a diverse demographic; ranging from established professors from the Global South, North America and Europe, to early-career academics from across Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Turkey, France and the UK. The diverse spread of ideas and positions offers a chance to unite

10

N. HARRIS

established scholarship with potential future research emerging across Critical Theory. In the opening substantive chapter, ‘The Pathogenesis of Brexit: Pathologies of British Political Modernity’, Gerard Delanty interrogates ‘Brexit’ as a manifestation of social and political pathologies. Far from offering the British precariat a vehicle for progressive transformation, Delanty argues that Brexit should be simultaneously framed as a conservative cultural movement and an accelerant for neoliberal colonisation, both ironic projections of underlying class resentment. Brexit is thus framed as a manifestation of a pathology of social consciousness, a displacement of popular dissatisfaction, which has tragically imploded into an ultimately masochistic imperial nostalgia and xenophobia. Drawing on Adorno et al.’s Authoritarian Personality (1994 [1950]), Delanty argues that Brexit should be viewed as symptomatic of more widespread authoritarian tendencies emerging within Western liberal democracies. Connecting this with distortions of communication within the public realm, made possible through digital communication, Delanty charts how popular discourse was forced ever further to the right as social, cultural and political pathologies were elided. Delanty’s chapter demonstrates the utility of applying a pathology diagnosing lens to conduct research on the integration of political and social pathologies and underscores the continuing relevance of Adornian ideas for applied social research today. Delanty concludes that ‘Brexit has two faces: one an inward nationalistic one that draws its strength from imperial nostalgia, anti-immigrant xenophobia, anticosmopolitan resentment and a revival of nativist English nationalism; the other one is a neoliberal agenda to free the UK from EU regulation in order to become a global free-trading nation with its basis in the Anglosphere’. Written before the COVID-19 pandemic, Delanty’s analysis seems only more powerful in light of recent developments. Chapter 3, James Stockman’s ‘Pathologies of Reason in Computational Capitalism: A Speculative Diagnosis of Our Computational Worldview’, tracks the ascent of a distinct ‘network rationality’. Centring left-Hegelian themes in his analysis, Stockman argues that computational technology has shaped how we understand and deploy reason itself. Increasingly, subjects come to comprehend and value the social world solely through computational frames of reference. As such, social pathology functions as a crucial heuristic to facilitate research into our fractured and distorted world view. Matching Delanty’s engagement across social and political pathologies, Stockman explores the entanglements between

1

INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL PATHOLOGY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH

11

the constellation of computational rationality and right-wing political dynamics. In a world where humanistic reason is framed as inefficient and outmoded, legalistic and juridical considerations of data protection and anti-trust legislation are woefully impotent remedies. To contest the purported objectivity of ‘network rationality’, Stockman uses the framing of pathology to prosecute an epistemic engagement with the foundations of computational power and their distinctly material socio-political implications. Chapter 4, Estevão Bosco and Wagner Costa Ribeiro’s, ‘Pathologies of Digital Communication: On the Ascendancy of Right Populism’, uses a Habermasian framework to research how the social web’s systemic distortion of communication has facilitated the rise of right-populisms. Focusing on Brazil, but ranging more widely, the co-authors submit that the pathological colonisation of the lifeworld by systemic logics is manifest tout court with digital communication. The insurgent ‘attention economy’ is found to have undercut communication-oriented, intersubjective exchange, substituting meaningful dialogue for a system-oriented ‘attention-as-currency’ model, where ‘value’ is connected to constant content dissemination and consumption. While the authors acknowledge the ever-increasing integration of digital systems, their focus is particularly on private messaging services, which are identified as holding a primary role in the erosion of communicative reason. To facilitate their argument, the co-authors commence by providing a detailed sketch of a Habermasian pathology diagnosing social research framework, which they apply through a close reading of analyses of the cybernetic world. Part II, ‘Ontological and Epistemological Considerations in Social Pathology Scholarship’ addresses central philosophical concerns for pathology diagnosing social research. This section opens with Chapter 5, Michael J. Thompson’s, ‘An Ontological Account of Social Pathology’. Developing ideas expressed in his iconoclastic The Domestication of Critical Theory (2016), Thompson argues that the diagnosis of social pathologies must focus on the ways that our social relations are structured. In opposition to the dominant ‘neo-Idealism(s)’ of Honneth and Forst, Thompson submits that we must not critique our social forms solely on the basis of their intersubjective norms, but as a social totality; as a ‘synthetic whole of relations, practices, norms, institutions and purposes’. To enable such a critique, Thompson argues for a critical social ontology, so that the researcher can grasp the social totality as a distinct object of analysis. In keeping with Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts

12

N. HARRIS

(1844), Thompson submits that researchers must be attentive to the pathologies which are foundational in the structures of our social relationships. Namely, the ‘way that our social relations are shaped, as well as the collective goals and purposes towards which our institutions are oriented’. Thompson presents how such a structural, social-relational analysis, which focuses on the objective conditions of our social lives, is best achieved through a critical social ontology. In summary, for Thompson, the extent to which society is irrationally constructed, at the level of its relations, practices and goals, can be determined through a considered engagement with its socio-ontological reality. Drawing on Fromm (1963, 2010 [1991]), Rousseau (1984 [1762]), Zimbardo (2007) and Marcuse (1964, 1977), Thompson’s provocative chapter offers a new avenue for critical social research which will undoubtedly spark productive debate. Chapter 6, Onni Hirvonen’s, ‘Who Is Ill When a Society Is Ill?’ also explores key ontological questions for pathology diagnosing social research. However, in contrast to Thompson, Hirvonen is invested in a primarily intersubjective account of social pathologies, and thus sits closer to Axel Honneth’s Critical Theory of Recognition (1995, 2014) than to Thompson or Kouvelakis. Despite this foundational divergence, both Thompson and Hirvonen agree on the importance of developing a critical social ontology to further pathology diagnosing social research. In Hirvonen’s prose, ‘the stronger the ontological commitments … the easier it is to evaluate social orders on the basis of the concept of social pathology’. Hirvonen’s chapter follows Laitinen and Särkelä (2019), using their four-fold typology of distinct conceptions of social pathology as a springboard from which to outline the divergent social-ontological commitments corresponding to each framing. Hirvonen’s contribution to this volume thus showcases potential areas of productive dialogue across today’s increasingly divided academy. Chapter 7, Yonathan Listik’s, ‘A Biopolitical Account of Social Pathology: Viewing Pathology as a Political-Ontological Issue’, provides a nuanced post-structuralist-inflected critique of the pathology diagnosing framework. Yet, rather than merely seeking to deconstruct left-Hegelian themes, Listik works to ensure their immanent coherence, arguing that without ‘due sensitivity to the complicities and complications that a diagnosis of X as “pathological” precipitates, such research might end up inadvertently safeguarding the capitalist subject from the intrinsically capitalist deterioration that threatens it’. Listik powerfully argues that an implicitly capitalist ‘immunological’ ontology undergirds much pathology

1

INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL PATHOLOGY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH

13

diagnosing social research, in which the health of an isolated subject threatened by broader social modalities is the antecedent model behind the heurism’s appeal and longevity. Listik’s provocative chapter engages with Honneth (2008, 2015, inter alia), Dews (2007), Freyenhagen (2013) and Fromm (1963 [1955], 2010 [1991]), seeking to demonstrate that each approach relies, even if unintentionally, on problematic conceptions of normality and health. Drawing on Esposito (2008, 2010, 2011), Listik challenges the reader to ‘strive for a non-individualised social relation, one where immunisation is not in place, and therefore the pathological openness to the external is not mediated by an administrative relation’. In short, Listik argues that a considered awareness of the ontological assumptions undergirding pathology diagnosing social research is urgently required. Part III: ‘Beyond Pathologies of Recognition: New Voices, New Directions’, unites authors consciously trying to bridge traditions, schools and disciplines, deliberately seeking to push Critical Theory beyond its current neo-Idealist impasse. The contributors to this section thus seek to bring Critical Theory into dialogue with an explicit, self-aware historical materialism, feminist philosophy and decolonial theory. In Chapter 8, ‘Rawlsian Liberalism as a Failure of Critique’, Ane Engelstad draws on Critical Theory and feminist political philosophy to highlight the limitations of Rawls’ (1971) A Theory of Justice. Making the case for the importance of social critique, rather than abstract ideal theory, Engelstad’s chapter demonstrates the importance of transgressing disciplinary and school-based boundaries. Rawls’ A Theory of Justice has dominated political philosophy journals and lecture halls for nearly half a century, yet, methodologically, Rawls embraced none of the central insights of Critical Theory. As Engelstad draws out, Rawls’ famous ‘original position’ and ‘veil of ignorance’ presupposes autonomous subjects who are capable of rationally articulating an objective understanding of justice. As the social pathology diagnosing imagination discloses, and as Engelstad clearly presents, the forms of rationality that the subject enacts and reproduces reflect dominant social logics and dynamics. Thus, the self-interested autonomous Kantian subject of Rawlsian liberalism crumbles when located within the reality of patriarchal, capitalist, racist and ableist social relations. While retaining fidelity to the possibilities of analytic philosophy, Engelstad demonstrates the particular failings of the Rawlsian imagination, drawing on the work of Charles Mills (2005), Susan Moller Okin (1989) and Axel Honneth (2007).

14

N. HARRIS

Chapter 9, Denis C. Bosseau’s, ‘The Revolt of the Maladjusted: Defacing the Currency of Social Pathology Diagnosis in Contemporary Critical Theory’ provides a withering critique of contemporary pathology diagnosing social research. Integrating hitherto underexplored authors within mainstream Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Bosseau makes a clear, powerful argument: that the dominant understanding of social pathology fostered by contemporary Critical Theory is one where the subject is insufficiently adjusted to the mores and norms of the social realm. While for Honneth this is due to the failure of subjects to satisfactorily imbibe the (rational) social norms due to extant, yet malleable, (irrational) intersubjective relations, Bosseau presents a diametrically opposed account of social pathology. Drawing on Martin Luther King (2005), Fred Moten (Moten & Harney, 2013) and Franz Fanon (1952), Bosseau argues that ‘maladjustment’ is exactly what Critical Theory should aspire for: to disrupt the dominant norms and mores of racist, patriarchal neoliberalism. Categorically rejecting the approach of normative uplift anchored (implicitly or explicitly) to normative reconstructive critique, Bosseau, echoing Thompson (through Fanon), locates social pathologies within the dominant structures of the social world. Evoking Marx’s letter to Ruge (1844), Bosseau reminds us that the job of clarifying the struggles of the age is not one of persuading the ‘undercommons’ to see the disguised equity and rationality of their plight; rather it is to expose the manifest contradictions of a world in which multiply marginalised subjects find it ‘impossible to breathe’ (Fanon, 1952: 183). Chapter 10, Onur Acaroglu’s ‘The Challenge of Post-capitalism: NonCapitalist Temporalities and Social Pathology’, introduces a previously absent consideration in pathology diagnosing social research: temporality. For Acaroglu, ‘post- and non-capitalist temporalities are inscribed in the tendency to resist alienation’, an argument he presents in his recently published Rethinking Marxist Approaches to Transition (2020). Centring temporality within the diagnosis of social pathologies, Acaroglu’s chapter identifies a clear lacuna: that research into social pathology is locked into a singular present, blind to the multiple dissenting rhythms within social life. For Acaroglu, a historical materialist optic helps disclose the limitations of such a unilinear ‘march of time’ perspective. Acaroglu illustrates how the ‘time’ of accumulation is ‘distinct from that of social reproduction’, despite their substantial overlaps. Exploding the temporal monistic perspective of mainstream pathology diagnosing research, Acaroglu urges Critical Theorists to attend to the potential immanent departures from

1

INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL PATHOLOGY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH

15

capitalist processes. The presence of rival temporalities is thus identified as a crucial area for critical social research. Harris and Stockman’s co-authored, ‘On the Future of Pathology Diagnosing Critical Theory’ brings this volume to a conclusion. Reflecting on the preceding chapters, the co-authors comment on the importance of a continuing social research endeavour that pushes beyond the liberal horizon, and engages with the dominant forms of social reason constituted by, and which reinforce, today’s increasingly destructive authoritarian neoliberalism. Seeking to unite themes from across the volume, the co-authors argue that such social research is at its best when it combines an analysis of the structural-relational form of social existence, its impact upon the possibility for critical consciousness and broader social-political logics and contingencies. The contributions gathered in this volume not only speak to a variety of concerns, but are also written by theorists working within and across many different schools, traditions and locations; thus inducing constructive tensions with the potential to disclose productive future syntheses and relationships. In the face of unfathomable odds, Critical Theory still harbours the potential for a progressive, rigorous, impactful attack on social irrationality. In light of the manifold challenges facing a dialectical Hegelian-Marxist Critical Theory, both from internal and external parties, I hope this volume serves to champion the critical-explanatory potential of a form of critique which transcends both liberal ideal theory and the increasingly omnipresent neo-positivism(s). Over the next few decades, the socio-political and economic challenges that progressive social researchers will confront will likely be epic in scale as climatic catastrophe vies with insurgent neo-fascism as the leading horror expedited by neoliberal irrationality. It is thus crucial that social researchers remain sensitive to such destructive, terrifying potentialities. As Adorno (2005 [1951]: 235) writes in Minima Moralia, [S]he who relinquishes awareness of the growth of horror not merely succumbs to cold-hearted contemplation, but fails to perceive, together with the specific difference between the newest and that preceding it, the true identity of the whole, of terror without end.

The precise form that Critical Theory will take, in ten, twenty or fifty years’ time is extremely uncertain. The hope embedded in this volume is that it will contribute towards the safeguarding of a form of social research

16

N. HARRIS

that targets the impact of constitutive power on social rationality, led by researchers aware of their positionality. In other words, interdisciplinary Critical Theory.

References Acaroglu, O. (2020). Rethinking Marxist approaches to transition: A theory of temporal dislocation. Leiden: Brill. Adorno, T. W. (2005 [1951]). Minima Moralia: Reflections from damaged life. London: Verso. Adorno, T. W., and Horkheimer, M. (1979 [1944]). Dialectic of enlightenment. London: Verso. Adorno, T. W., et al. (1994 [1950]). The authoritarian personality. New York City, NY: W. W. Norton. Allen, A. (2016). The end of progress: Decolonizing the normative foundations of critical theory. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Benjamin, W. (2008 [1935]). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. London: Penguin. Benjamin, W. (1978). Reflections (P. Demetz, Ed., E. Jephcott, Trans.). New York, NY and London: Helen and Kurt Wolff. Best, J. (2007). Whatever happened to the social pathology? Conceptual fashions and the sociology of deviance. Sociological Spectrum, 26(6), 533–546. Coulthard, G. (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Minneaopolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Delanty, G. (2009). The cosmopolitan imagination: The renewal of critical social theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delanty, G. (2020). Critical theory and social transformation: Crises of the present and future possibilities. London: Routledge. Delanty, G., & Harris, N. (2021). Critical theory today: Legacies and new directions. In G. Delanty and S. Turner (Eds.), Routledge international handbook of contemporary social and political theory (2nd Ed.). Abingdon: Routledge. Deutscher, P., & Lafont, C. (2017). Critical theory in critical times: Transforming the global political and economic order. New York City, NY: Columbia University Press. Dews, P. (2007). Logics of disintegration: Post-structuralist thought and the claims of critical theory. London: Verso. Esposito, R. (2008). Bios: Biopolitics and philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Esposito, R. (2010). Communitas: The origin and destiny of community. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Esposito, R. (2011). Immunitas: The protection and negation of life. New York, NY: Polity.

1

INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL PATHOLOGY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH

17

Fanon, F. (1952). Peau Noir, Masques Blancs. Collection Points, Paris: Editions du Seuil. Fanon, F. (1961). Les Damnés de la Terre. Paris: François Maspero. Fraser, N., & Honneth, A. (2001). Redistribution or recognition: A politicalphilosophical exchange (J. Golb, J. Ingram, & C. Wilke, Trans.). London: Verso. Freud, S. (1953). Civilisation and its discontents (J. Riviere, Trans.). London: Hogarth Press. Freyenhagen, F. (2013). Adorno’s practical philosophy: Living less wrongly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fromm, E. (1963 [1955]). The sane society (E. Rotten, Trans.). New York City, NY: Rinehart and Winston. Fromm, E. (2010 [1991]). The pathology of normalcy. Riverdale, NY: AMHF. Habermas, J. (1972 [1968]). Knowledge and human interests. London: Heinemann. Habermas, J. (1984 and 1987 [1981]). The theory of communicative action (Vol. 1). London: Polity. Harris, N. (2019). Recovering the critical potential of social pathology diagnosis. European Journal of Social Theory, 22(1), 45–62. Harvey, F. (2020, April 21). Coronavirus crisis could double number of people suffering from acute hunger—UN. The Guardian. Available online at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/global-hun ger-could-be-next-big-impact-of-coronavirus-pandemic. Hegel, G. W. F. (1970 [1807]). Phenomenology of spirit (A. V. Miller). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (2015 [1816]). Science of logic (G. Di Giovanni). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Honneth, A. (1995 [1992]). The struggle for recognition (J. Anderson, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Honneth, A. (2000). The possibility of a disclosing critique of society: The dialectic of enlightenment in light of current debates in social criticism. Constellations, 7 (1), 116–127. Honneth, A. (2007). Pathologies of the social: The past and present of social philosophy. In Disrespect: The normative foundations of critical theory (J. Ganahal, Trans., pp. 3–49). Cambridge: Polity Press. Honneth, A. (2008). Reification: A new look at an old idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Honneth, A. (2014). Freedom’s right: The social foundations of democratic life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Honneth, A. (2015). Rejoinder. Critical Horizons, 16(2), 204–226. Jarvis, S. (1998). Adorno: A critical introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press.

18

N. HARRIS

Jay M. (1996 [1973]). The dialectical imagination: A history of the Frankfurt School and Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Jay, M. (2018). Martin jay reviews The end of progress. Critical Inquiry. Available online at: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/martin_jay_reviews_the_ end_of_progress/. Last accessed 4 Oct 2020. Kant, I. (2007 [1781]). Critique of pure reason. London: Penguin. King, M. L. (2005, January 1959–December 1960). The papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Volume V: Threshold of a New Decade. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kouvelakis, S. (2019). La Critique Défaite. Emergence et domestication de la Théorie Critique. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam. Krishnamurti, J. (2008 [1962]). Krishnamurti’s notebook. Ojal, CA: K Publications. Laitinen, A., & Särkelä, A. (2019). Four conceptions of social pathology. European Journal of Social Theory, 22(1), 80–102. Laitinen, A., Särkelä, A., & Ikäheimo, H. (2015). Pathologies of recognition: An introduction. Studies in Social and Political Thought, 25(1), 1–24. Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Marcuse, H. (1977 [1941]). Reason and revolution. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Marx, K. (1844, February). Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge, DeutschFranzosische Jahrbucher. Marx & Engels Archive Project. https://www.mar xists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm. Marx, K. (1992 [1844]). Economic and philosophical manuscripts. In Early writings (R. Livingstone & G. Benton, Trans.). London: Penguin. McNay, L. (2007). Against recognition. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mills, C. (2005). ‘Ideal theory’ as ideology. Hypatia, 20(3), 165–184. Moten, F., & Harney, S. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study. NY: Minor Compositions. Mudde, C. (2010). The populist radical right: A pathological normalcy. West European Politics, 33(6), 1167–1186. Neate, R. (2020, October 7). Billionaire’s wealth rises to $10.2 trillion amid Covid crisis. The Guardian. Available online at: https://www.theguardian. com/business/2020/oct/07/covid-19-crisis-boosts-the-fortunes-of-worldsbillionaires. Nelson, A. (2020). COVID-19: Capitalist and post-capitalist perspectives. Human Geography. Online First. Neuhouser, F. (2012). Rousseau und die Idee einer pathologischen Gesellschaft. Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 53(4), 628–745. Okin, S. M. (1989). Justice, gender and the family. New York: Basic Books.

1

INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL PATHOLOGY AND SOCIAL RESEARCH

19

Ong, J. C., & Lasco, G. (2020). The epidemic of racism in news coverage of the coronavirus and the public response. Media@LSE Blog. Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2020/02/04/the-epidemic-of-rac ism-in-news-coverage-of-the-coronavirus-and-the-public-response/. Osuri, G. (2017). Imperialism, colonialism and sovereignty in the (post)colony: India and Kashmir. Third World Quarterly, 38(11), 2428–2443. Pickhard-Whitehead, G. (2020). These socialist governments put the UK’s coronavirus response to shame. Left Foot Forward. Published 29 April 2020. Available at: https://leftfootforward.org/2020/04/how-these-socialist-gov ernments-put-the-uks-coronavirus-response-to-shame/. Rasmussen, D. (Ed.). (1991). Reading Habermas. New York, NY: Wiley. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rousseau, J.-J. (1984 [1762]). Discourse on the origins of inequality (M. Cranston, Trans.). London: Penguin. Schaub, J., & Odigbo, M. (2019). Expanding the taxonomy of (mis-)recognition in the economic sphere. European Journal of Social Theory, 22(1), 103–122. Schecter, D. (2019). Critical theory and sociological theory: On late modernity and social statehood. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sutherland, E. H. (1945). Social pathology. American Journal of Sociology, 50(1), 429–435. Strydom, P. (2011). Contemporary critical theory and methodology. London: Routledge. Thompson, M. J. (2016). The domestication of critical theory. New York, NY: Rowan & Littlefield. Thompson, M. J. (2019). Hierarchy, social pathology and the failure of recognition theory. European Journal of Social Theory, 22(1), 10–26. Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. New York: Random House. Zurn, C. (2011). Social pathologies as second-order disorders. In D. Petherbridge (Ed.), Axel Honneth: Critical essays: With a reply by Axel Honneth (pp. 345–370). Leiden: Brill.

PART I

Explorations in Contemporary Social Pathology Diagnosis

CHAPTER 2

The Pathogenesis of Brexit: Pathologies of British Political Modernity Gerard Delanty

The concept of pathology is a useful way to make sense of the negative aspects of a society.1 Social pathologies refer to the social illnesses and various kinds of social problems that bring about widespread social malfunctioning, alienation, malaise and atomisation. In many applications in social science, the focus is on specific vulnerable groups, the effects of poverty, unemployment, stress and so on. In this chapter, following the seminal work of Erich Fromm,2 I argue that the notion of pathology can be usefully applied in a more general sense to society as a whole in 1 I would like to acknowledge helpful comments from Neal Harris and a reviewer on an earlier version of this chapter. My thanks too to William Outhwaite and Patrick O’Mahony for comments. This chapter, it should be noted, was written in early 2020, just before the pandemic, with which Brexit was to become intermeshed. 2 See Fromm (1941, 1963 [1955], 2010 [1991]). See also Burston (1991) and Harris (2019).

G. Delanty (B) Sociology and Social & Political Thought, The University of Sussex, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Harris (ed.), Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_2

23

24

G. DELANTY

order to make sense of societal regression. There are relatively few studies on the pathogenesis of political modernity. Klaus Eder (1985) wrote a classic one on Germany. The idea of modernity engendering pathologies has been central to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, but has been rarely, if at all, developed in relation to current trends. In making this claim, I am not suggesting that there is a normal condition from which the pathological is a departure. Indeed, it can be the case that pathologies themselves become normalised. In this context, I am interested in major political pathologies, which are related to socio-cultural pathologies. The example I am taking is Brexit, which I argue is an event of considerable historical significance and that it can be seen as a political pathology that has nurtured a wider sociocultural pathology.3 I would like to make a strong claim and place Brexit in the context of the pathogenic formation of British political modernity. It is not my claim that Brexit was inscribed within the course of modern British history, but that certain historical conditions made it possible. The outcome was contingent in the end on specific circumstances, but it cannot be taken on its own as an aberrant event. I also argue that Brexit is not a specifically British phenomenon. While having Britishspecific features, it can be related to trends towards authoritarianism in other democracies, most notably the election of Trump in the USA. To this end, in order to try to understand it theoretically, I draw on one of the major works of social and political analysis in critical theory, namely the monumental Authoritarian Personality, published in 1950 as part of the Studies in Prejudice programme (Adorno et al., 2019 [1950]). I also draw on the work of Erich Fromm, who was closely associated with Horkheimer’s circle in New York in the late 1930s and wrote key works on social pathology (see Harris, 2019). One of my key arguments is that Brexit is a pathology of democracy: it is an elite-led project that disguises itself by populist rhetoric as the will of the people. It is also an example of a pathology of entrapment. One of the basic questions is this: why did an advanced democracy allow an event to take place that has inflicted major economic, social and political damage? The main argument for Brexit reflects a deep pathology, namely that Brexit must be implemented simply on the grounds that it was supposedly decided to do so and should

3 For a wider analysis on Brexit see Evans and Menon (2017), Haseler (2017) and Outhwaite (2017).

2

THE PATHOGENESIS OF BREXIT: PATHOLOGIES …

25

be implemented even if in the most undesirable way possible and regardless of the consequences. This is rather like a doctor giving a patient the wrong drugs because of a prior decision and not reversing the decision despite the harmful consequences.

1 British Political Modernity and the Pathogenesis of Brexit British democracy and the myth of the ‘mother of parliaments’, is often taken to be one of the models of democracy for many countries. But political longevity can also be nothing more than the survival of the ancien regime or long ossified political structures. As often noted, the constitutional settlement in Britain was much earlier than in most other countries and, as a result, its design reflected less the modern spirit of democracy than an accommodation of the interests of the ruling elites. The settlement of 1688 leading to the Bill of Rights shaped the later development of democracy in that it was an arrangement between the restored crown and parliament, whereby sovereignty shifted to parliament, but in a way that preserved the royal prerogative in the institution of the ‘crown in parliament’ and the prime minister as the representative of the monarch, who in constitutional theory appoints the prime minister. The strengthening of parliament—itself divided into two houses, one the representatives of the landed hereditary aristocracy, and the other the representatives of ‘the country’, in essence, the merchant class—against the crown in the second half of the seventeenth century meant that absolutism would be curtailed in a way that was not the case in much of Europe when it finally moved against absolutism. But this model was not fit for purpose in later times. It was itself the product of a failed revolution against the crown in the 1640s. The original English Revolution led by Cromwell established the short-lived English Republic after the execution of the despotic Stuart King Charles 1 for treason in 1649. The radical republican tradition was buried with the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the subsequent settlement of 1688, the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’, was in effect a counter-revolution that was never overcome, only constantly modified by Acts of Parliament, the most important being the Great Reform Act of 1832. The memory of the republican regicide was repressed in the new myth of parliamentary sovereignty bolstered by the Anglican state church and the imported Hanoverian monarchy to secure the Protestant succession. Republicanism

26

G. DELANTY

was expunged from the country that invented it. Henceforth it was associated with foreign and anti-colonial movements. Paradoxically, England imported its monarchies from abroad: France, Holland, Hannover. The 1534 Act of Supremacy can be seen as England’s break with the continent, with which it has been so closely imbricated in the middle ages (Black, 2019). If a break occurred, it was later with the need born of political necessity to repress the memory of republican regicide. However, the relation between Britain and Europe is much more complicated (see also Simms, 2017). The result of the ‘English Revolution’ and the subsequent constitutional arrangement—and the convenient absence of a written constitution—was that England entered the modern age with revolution silenced and disguised by the nascent Whig theory of history and the fiction of ancient liberties. There was never any questioning of this myth of parliamentary greatness since Britain was never defeated in war or occupied by a foreign power and therefore never forced to recreate its political institutions. Instead it did the occupying. The doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, it should be noted, does not pertain only to the House of Commons but to the two houses of parliament and thus preserves the monarch as the sovereign. It meant in practice that the Ancien Regime was preserved and only had to accommodate demands from civil society. This historical background is key to the pathogenesis of Brexit, which was predicated on the basis of a myth of sovereignty and a parliamentary tradition that was ill-equipped to deal with changed notions of what sovereignty means. Parliamentary sovereignty, adhered to for centuries, came face to face with calls for popular sovereignty and what resulted was a dysfunctional mixture of both, as reflected in the use of the arcane ritual of the prorogation of parliament and the royal prerogative to deal with parliamentary opposition to the government’s Brexit plans. British Eurosceptics rightly or wrongly criticise the political institutions of the EU, but fail to see the flawed design of their own political institutions. One consequence of what was a relic of the early modern period is the absence of a modern written constitution. The British Constitution (in effect a medley of documents and Acts of Parliament) did not provide what all modern constitutions provide, namely a written statement of the rights of the individual and a recognition of the people as the source of sovereignty. By investing sovereignty with parliament, British political modernity located the source of sovereignty in the crown, as represented

2

THE PATHOGENESIS OF BREXIT: PATHOLOGIES …

27

in parliament. Everything else is a matter of convention. In an era when the political establishment were members of the same male Oxbridgeeducated elite, convention was broadly functional for the working of the political system. But in the era of mass democracy and the fundamentally changed circumstances of the present when the masses are less diffident and respectful of the elites, that gentile class model ceases to be operational. There is one other legacy of history that needs to be brought into the discussion: the ambiguity of British history and English history. The formative period of British history was the history of England, which absorbed Wales after the Norman conquest of 1066. The Norman legacy was confined to England and Wales, which were organised around the Norman system of government. Part of this was extended to Ireland, but the conquest, which has been described as ‘internal colonisation’,4 was incomplete. Scotland lay outside the realm with only a Union of Crowns taking place after the death of Elizabeth in 1601 and the subsequent succession of the Scottish James VI as James I. By the time of the union of England and Scotland in 1707 and the later union of what had become Great Britain with Ireland in 1801, the course of history led to the dominance of England in the UK. This was in part due to its size— today containing 85% of the population of the UK—and the strength of its economy, but principally was due to its political dominance. The result was that the UK was formed on a fundamental tension between its constitutive parts. In 1922 the most troublesome element was removed. Today it is a matter of contention whether the union of Scotland and England is a voluntary union of equal nations or whether the union created an entity more in keeping with Hobbes’ Leviathan. What we have witnessed since the Brexit Referendum is the return of the repressed. The failure to develop federal structures and solve the basic flaw in the make-up of the UK simply postponed the problem of the lack of balance in the relation of England to the other regions. Devolution was one solution, but it was a case of too little too late and nurtured an appetite for more autonomy. The belief—sustained by propaganda and popular culture—in the Empire for a time bound the nations and the classes together (Mackenzie, 1984, 1986). This was the main expression of British nationalism and was also

4 See Hechter (1975) for the original theory. See also Bartlett (1993).

28

G. DELANTY

destined to require large doses of nostalgia made possible by the constant invention of the past. This situation of what was in effect a disunited kingdom has some longterm pathogenic consequences. These consequences should be seen less as causes than preconditions of later developments. The price paid for the departure of Ireland in 1922 was the partition of the island. The border erected as a result of the creation of the two states, the Irish Free State and the Orange State, has weighed like a nightmare on the history of the islands until the Good Friday Peace Agreement in 1998 (see O’Mahony & Delanty, 1998 [2001]). What seemed to be an enduring solution to the troubled history of Ireland and Britain received a shock in 2016 with the Brexit Referendum and the implementation of a selective interpretation of the Referendum that necessitated a reinstatement of the border. This was a shock that has also rekindled Scottish nationalism. Two other legacies of political modernity can be mentioned. Due to the predominance of England in the design of the UK, there was the curious absence of English nationalism. British nationalism as represented in the pageantry of the state, crown and empire, until recently, was a different matter and it was to this nationalism that most of the constitutive nations and classes subscribed. The Irish Home Rule movement of the second half of the nineteenth century under the leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party reconciled itself to much of this imperial nationalism, since it broadly accepted Ireland’s place in the empire and in the British-dominated kingdom. That of course changed after 1918 when republican nationalism usurped the older conservative nationalism. Scottish nationalism, and to a lesser extent Welsh nationalism, has regularly raised its voice, though not in the name of republicanism. In contrast, English nationalism had been silent, if not absent. Perhaps it never had to express itself, given that the state patriotism of Britain in effect represented England and when most English thought and spoke of ‘Britain’ they meant England.5 For the greater part, Englishness was expressed in cultural forms rather than taking an overt political form. That has all changed since 2016 with the rise of a virulent English nationalism. While 2016 was a watershed, a politicisation of English nationalism in the preceding ten years or so was on the rise (Kenny, 2016, 2017).

5 See George Orwell’s poetic portrait of the English and Englishness. See in particular the essay, written in 1941, ‘England Your England’.

2

THE PATHOGENESIS OF BREXIT: PATHOLOGIES …

29

Unlike Britishness, Englishness never adjusted to multiculturalism. Nonwhite British people did not identify with what had become the rallying call of the far-right, such as the National Front and the British National Party. Xenophobia, racism, anti-migration patriotism and an increasingly demonic Europhobia morphed into each other to produce a new and powerful culture of authoritarian nationalism that increasingly dominated the Conservative Party (see Kumar, 2003; Haseler, 2017). Finally, there is the legacy of empire, which defined Britain for some two hundred years, specifically from the mid-nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. What has rendered the post-imperial context susceptible to pathologies is that the loss of empire occurred at a time when two other developments unfolded. Britain emerged victorious from the Second World War and the myth of its victory—which was due to the USA and the USSR— sustained the sense of imperial grandeur even as the empire effectively disappeared. This was also the moment when the UK joined the then EEC, embracing the Europe it helped to defeat. Thus a national myth of greatness was sustained long after the reality on which the myth rested had disappeared. Membership of the EEC was broadly embraced by the political right and for a time met with some resistance from the left. Europe was not seen as an enemy. This was partly because European integration in the early 1970s was largely a matter of economic cooperation and because the British elites believed they could dominate the project while remaining sufficiently distant. It was only a matter of time before that optimism would be questioned. There were also limits to the capacity of the state and popular culture dedicated to nostalgia to produce it in sufficient quantity and to satisfy new demands that did not so easily fit into the received view of the British past. The declining significance of the two world wars, the reality of a post-imperial nation entering the post-industrial society and the growing confidence of the post-war project of European integration all provided the basic ingredients for a revival of British nationalism. The long-dormant English nationalism was slowly awakened and its target was Europe. I have outlined in the foregoing the basic elements of the cauldron that produced the pathogenesis of political modernity in Britain and which all came to a head in 2016 with the ill-fated Brexit Referendum, which marks the point at which Britain made its break with Europe. In doing so, I am stressing here the British specificity of Brexit, which was influenced by the course of British history. However, I emphasise that there was nothing in that history that foreclosed any specific outcome, which was always

30

G. DELANTY

determined by the circumstances of the present. As argued, the historical legacies served rather as established preconditions that made possible later movements, such as Brexit. From a sociological perspective, emphasis must always be placed on how social actors in a given situation interpret their times and their circumstances. If the circumstance had been different in 2016, there would no doubt have been a different outcome due to a different interpretation of the question posed by the Referendum. I shall return to this later and also to the other dimension of Brexit, namely that it was a British expression of wider societal trends that can be found in many other countries.

2

The Making of a Political Pathology: The Referendum and Its Aftermath

Like most countries today, the UK is a parliamentary democracy. Despite the arcane historical inheritance in the design of its political institutions, it is not unlike most other liberal democracies in that in practice elected governments rule rather than the people directly. Public participation in government is indirect, with public opinion organised in different ways as well as other inputs, such as from experts, pollsters and lobbyists. Laws are made by parliament. For these reasons, most liberal democracies have a difficult relationship with plebiscitary democracy, whereby the public make laws, or at least provide parliaments with the necessary decisions to make laws. Referendums are one of the main instruments of plebiscitary or direct democracy (Tierney, 2014). Countries that use this instrument need to do so with caution given the potential for Referendums to undermine the basic principles of liberal democracy. Referendums are also regarded with suspicion by the proponents of radical democracy, since they stifle and frustrate public participation and effectively service as a substitute for deliberation. Some examples can be given to illustrate the dangers of Referendums. Ireland regularly has Referendums, but these are normally for singleissue problems (amending a constitutional law, for example, such as legislating for Gay marriage or abortion). Switzerland makes more extensive use of Referendums where they are part of a political process and may take a more complicated format whereby a follow-up Referendum

2

THE PATHOGENESIS OF BREXIT: PATHOLOGIES …

31

may be required in the manner of a run-off election.6 There has been a general increase in the use of Referendums across European countries, but where they are used there is generally an acceptance of the need to define the rules governing majority-making, such as the specified requirement of a supermajority, or a required minimum turn out, etc. (see Hollander, 2019; LeDuc, 2003). The UK has had few and those were mainly for regionally specific issues. There were only three national Referendums, with the first two resulting in a no vote majority, so the status quo was not changed.7 The 2016 Referendum was the first to result in a vote for change. The result was tumultuous for several reasons. This was despite one protection built into it: it was an advisory Referendum, not a legislative one. In other words, the outcome did not have to be implemented; it was designed to inform government policy. That is why no other safeguards were built into it, such as a supermajority. Referendums, unless they are qualified in some way, are otherwise based on simple majorities. While this can be an instrument of democracy, for example, as a way of testing the public mood, as a method for public participation, they can easily become anti-democratic. This is because democracy is not only about decision-making by majorities; it also secures protections against what majorities can do, especially where they claim to be in the name of ‘the people’. Democracy is therefore as such about the protection of minorities from majorities as it is about the rights of majorities. Two other points need to be made. Unlike election outcomes, which can be reversed at the next election, Referendums that are not properly legislated for can lock a society into a course of action that cannot be easily reversed or subject to negotiation. Here the danger of a deep pathology is very great and happens when a tiny majority secures a decision that is binding for everyone but the outcome needs further interpretation due to a lack of clarity on the practical implications. This happens when a Referendum is called on a question that has no clear answer. The Brexit Referendum was momentous in that the outcome was not expected and was immediately co-opted by previously marginal groups who in effect brought about a conservative cultural movement that fed

6 On run-off Referendums see Henley et al. (2019). 7 These were in 1975 on European membership, 2011 on an alternative voting system,

and the 2016 Referendum.

32

G. DELANTY

off various kinds of class resentment. 52% voted Remain and 48% voted Leave, with the majority of the Leave vote in England (Clarke et al., 2017; Evans & Menon, 2017). It did not need to be called in the first instance. It was a high-risk calculation of the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, as a way to end dissent in the Conservative Party. However, it received parliamentary approval without extensive scrutiny and an act of parliament passed without any consideration of what might happen were the Leave Vote to win. The main parties canvassed, without great enthusiasm, for Remain, confident that the masses would be obedient and heed the advice of the elites to vote remain. Although it was a consultative Referendum, the government and opposition regarded it as legislative, though there was no constitutional reason to do so. Within months after the outcome, there was swift silencing of the legal status of the Referendum as consultative. It was repackaged as something that had to be implemented. Since it was consultative, the Act of Parliament did not define the vote share required for a determinate majority. The majority of 3.8% (c 1.2 m) was very small but was deemed to be decisive and ‘the will of the people’ and thus had to be implemented, despite no definition of what was to be implemented. Leaving the EU has multiple meanings and many adverse implications. Deadlock in the political system arose after an election, which left the governing party without a majority and dependent on support from a far-right Unionist party in Northern Ireland. Over a three-and-a-half-year period, until the general election of December 2019, a process of radicalisation took place in both the political system and in the wider society, especially in England. In this sense, Brexit was as much a cause of change as a consequence of changes that had occurred. Brexit became the mantra of the right and underwent ever new and darker interpretations as to what it might mean. Leaving the EU in 2016 could have meant a so-called ‘soft Brexit’, but due to the variety of interpretations as to what this might be, and the ascent of new and more radical interpretations, no consensus was reached. Meanwhile, the tide of opposition grew; but this was divided on the question of the preferred method to stop Brexit. There was a fierce debate between factions on whether a second Referendum was desirable. Those who favoured a second Referendum could not agree when it should be staged, or agree on the precise wording of the question posed. The Liberal Democratic Party’s proposal of a direct, unilateral revocation of Art. 50 triggered further divisions.

2

THE PATHOGENESIS OF BREXIT: PATHOLOGIES …

33

This was all the basis of a major political pathology, which led in turn to a social and cultural pathology. The legal and political system proved unable to deal with the full scale of the implications of Brexit, which has been widely regarded as the most serious crisis for the UK since 1945. Previous crises—the Suez crisis, the Iraq War—were not comparable to the magnitude of the implications of leaving the EU. Of the many problems was the contradiction between the Good Friday Agreement and the implementation of an interpretation of Brexit that required the UK to leave the EU’s Customs Union. The latter requires the reinstatement of a border between Northern Ireland (NI) and the Republic of Ireland, but this contradicts one of the main legal commitments of the UK and Irish governments to have no land border on the island of Ireland. After three years, at the time of writing, the eventual solution was to retain NI within the Customs Union. This, however, remains controversial as it will require a border between NI and Britain. The intractable issue of the Irish border is just one side of a wider problem that Brexit poses for the integrity of the UK. Aside from reopening the question of NI leaving the UK and joining the Republic, the more immediate problem is Scottish independence. Scottish nationalism, unlike English nationalism, is inclusive, pro-Europe and international in outlook. Europe has also been a way Scotland, like Ireland, could gain distance from England, always both present and absent in the political system and politics of the UK. The result of the Referendum led to new calls for a Referendum on independence for Scotland. The Referendum marked a fundamental clash between English and Scottish nationalism and their different concepts of sovereignty, one civic and one absolutist. Since the election of December 2019, which resulted in a majority of Westminster seats north of the border for the Scottish National Party (SNP), the prospect of what Tom Nairn, in a much-discussed booked in 1977, called ‘the break-up of Britain’ seems only a matter of time (Nairn, 1981 [1977]). It is thus one pathological outcome of the Brexit Referendum that instead of settling the question of Europe, it engendered greater uncertainty and conflict. The three years after the Referendum saw an on-going clash between the executive and the legislature, with the former attempting to censure the latter and on one controversial occasion in 2019 it sought to shut down parliament. The irony, which had a deep pathological dimension, was the motto of the Leave movement, the resonant ‘Take Back Control’ and the related mantra that the UK parliament must make its own laws without being subject to European law. To

34

G. DELANTY

implement Brexit, the government had to take control away from parliament, until the Supreme Court made a historic ruling in 2019 clarifying the limits of the royal prerogative (the royal power invested in the prime minister to dissolve parliament). An underlying aspect to the pathology is the attempt to unravel almost half a century of European integration and a deep historical connection with Europe. Brexit seeks to externalise what has become internalised. European integration is not an external force that can be cast off. This is perhaps the fundamental problem with Brexit in that it aims to reverse societal transformation through a process of withdrawal. The result is the generation of pathologies of regression. Brexit is by definition regressive in seeking to set the clock back and to return to an era that has long gone. Referendums are not designed to bring about major societal transformations, which can rarely be affected by a simple yes/no question, especially where there is little prospect of a determinate and clear answer. It seems to be incontrovertible that the Referendum was a mistake since it did not achieve its purpose. The declared objective was to return control to Britain of its own affairs and to release increased revenue. It is demonstrably the case that this has not happened and all economic forecasts predict decreased growth. In the election of December 2019, while the governing Conservative Party won a historic majority of seats, the majority of voters voted for parties with pro-European agenda. Yet, the dominant understanding is that Brexit cannot be reversed. The argument given is almost entirely based on the fact that a decision was made and that it needs to be implemented by whatever means the government of the days deems fit. It is by now agreed that the UK will need to strike an exit deal with the EU. But this deal cannot be put to a second Referendum. This reasoning is a pathology of democracy since it holds that a Referendum outcome cannot be questioned and that the deliberative process must end. This reflects not only a decisionist conception of democracy but one that truncates public discussion. In essence, the open-ended question posed by the ill-fated Referendum is finally answered by the governing party according to how it sees its interests. These may have nothing to do with the Referendum, which was rather the event that made possible new interpretations of the British nation. If the Referendum was a mistake, an even greater one was the reckless course to implement it, and above all in the decision of the government of Theresa May to formally initiate the exit from the EU without a plan for

2

THE PATHOGENESIS OF BREXIT: PATHOLOGIES …

35

what was the greatest exercise in restructuring the state in modern times. The triggering of Article 50 in March 2017 led to a course of exiting the EU without any provisions for the multitude of problems that need to be addressed. The result has been an on-going situation of delays, economic turmoil and chaos. This is where an additional set of factors come into play. Brexit has come to be seen as a political opportunity to pursue neoliberalism (through a political project of de-regulation). Brexit has two faces: one an inward nationalistic one that draws its strength from imperial nostalgia, anti-immigrant xenophobia, anti-cosmopolitan resentment, and a revival of nativist English nationalism; the other one is a neoliberal agenda to free the UK from EU regulation in order to become a global free-trading nation with its basis in the Anglosphere (see Wellings, 2019). Both exist in a relation of tension with each other, but they also complement each other in that the neoliberal face of Brexit recalls an age when Britain was a global power. That power has supposedly been diminished by EU membership. Resentment against Europe feeds into other kinds of resentment, as for example migrants and ethnic minorities. By 2020, Brexit had become the defining question of British politics and recast British national identity in ways that undermined the national unity. A conflict that had been confined to the Conservative Party had become a national conflict that at times, with the prospect of the UK exiting the EU without a trade deal, reached the level of the apocalyptical. A pathological fear gripped many people with the prospect of food and medical shortages. A government minister in 2019 admitted that emergency plans for a no-deal Brexit included the stock-piling of body bags (Williams, 2019).

3

Brexit and Authoritarian Democracy

How to make sociological sense of the shock of Brexit? Brexit has now become the principal lens through which Britons view the state of Britain and themselves, divided between Remainers and Leavers (see Delanty, 2017). It has redefined the relation with Ireland and the internal relations with the nations that comprise the UK. Brexit is not just about leaving the institutions of the EU, it is about leaving as an existential condition. The entirety of British society is now redefined as a condition of ‘leaving’. It is unclear what is being left and where the destination is. The result of the uncertainty and implications has been considerable anxiety that in itself

36

G. DELANTY

has pathological aspects for personal wellbeing, democratic deliberation and societal functioning. Brexit is a shock in the specific sense that it has now become a mode of governance in that there is a permanent preparation for the worst, as reflected in the leaked secret Yellowhammer report drawn up by the government in 2019 (Stewart & Walker, 2019). As an economy organised around imports largely from the EU, the implications for everyday life are serious. Much of the apparatus of government is dedicated to mitigating the negative consequences for trade, security, health care, travel, etc. The extent of emergency measures can be seen as in itself an order of emergency governance. The governance of shock reinforces the political and cultural shock of Brexit. I believe such shock treatment is itself a political pathology. One way to make sense of these developments is to revisit one of the great studies of critical theory, The Authoritarian Personality. I will not discuss the background and the complex theoretical and methodological design of the study.8 For the present purpose, the main points can be briefly summed up. According to the authors, and in particular to follow T. W. Adorno, who developed some of the key ideas in later writings, tendencies towards fascism are not foreign to democracy. Such tendencies are latent in the personality structure of many people but can be ignited when, for example, there is a new wave of prejudice, or political circumstances develop that lends support to fascism. With this work, the focus shifted from anti-Semitism, the concern of the earlier Studies in Prejudice, to authoritarianism as a phenomenon in its own right. Anti-Semitism came to be seen as a dimension of authoritarianism, even if it had independent causes. The Authoritarian Personality project was concerned with the formation of a specific kind of personality who is anti-democratic and potentially fascist. Fascism is a latent force, but letting aside the prospect of a full-blown fascist order, as in Europe in the 1930s, fascist orientations do not become manifest in normal conditions but can do so when the right conditions are present. The study sought to identify a set of characteristics that when combined constitute a specific ‘syndrome’. It is this syndrome that constitutes the ‘authoritarian personality’. Although this is referred to as a ‘personality’, it is not reducible to an individual as such but is manifest in a syndrome. A key argument is that fascist orientations in democracies are more likely to express themselves in authoritarianism. 8 See Roiser and Willig (2002), Stone et al. (1993), Gordon (2018). I have also discussed this in Chapter 11 of Delanty (2020).

2

THE PATHOGENESIS OF BREXIT: PATHOLOGIES …

37

What survives fascism is authoritarianism. As Adorno later wrote in 1959, ‘I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy’ (1998 [1959]: 90). As Adorno recognised, The Authoritarian Personality over-relied on social psychology and required a stronger sociological perspective (Adorno, 2019 [1948]; Gordon, 2018). He argued that authoritarianism does not reside in the final analysis in a personality system as such that could be accounted for by individual psychology. He also resisted the idea that authoritarianism is to be seen in terms of attitudes; it is rather an expression of social trends and resides in what he called ‘the general structure of society’. In other words, authoritarianism is a social phenomenon that is present to varying degrees in different groups and it can be related to the personality structures of specific groups whose social milieu tends to produce such characteristics. It is thus the case that individuals who exhibit authoritarian traits are more likely to share common opinions, have similar practices (as in child-rearing), social attitudes (to sexuality, foreigners, etc.), cultural preferences and political views. In this light, a social pathology is not reducible or explained by individual psychology; it is an expression of society in that social structures leads to regression and oppression. An important implication of this view is that democracy itself is not a protection from authoritarianism and, under certain conditions, democracy can nurture pathologies. Extrapolating from the authoritarian personality project, it can be suggested that liberal democracy can regress into authoritarian democracy. The latter should be distinguished from democratic authoritarianism, that is, political orders that are only nominally democratic. Authoritarianism is latent within democracy in so far as it comes to rest on ‘the will of the people’ and where demagogues interpret the will of the people (Weale, 2018). The authoritarian personality project and the wider Studies in Prejudice showed that authoritarianism is a powerful trend in democracies. It is not only a product of totalitarianism. Distinguishing between totalitarianism (including fascism) and authoritarianism is important to make sense of regressive developments within liberal democracy. Authoritarianism is a more general phenomenon that can survive the demise of totalitarianism and can readily adjust to democracy. In the age of social media and right-wing popular culture nurtured by electronic media, authoritarianism has many new channels to proliferate and can penetrate into

38

G. DELANTY

the psyche of the individual in far-reaching ways (Bridle, 2018; Seymour, 2019). The Brexit Referendum and its political aftermath with its posttruth linguistic culture and cast of pathological liars is a major example of neo-authoritarianism. I argue that this phenomenon as exhibited by Brexit constitutes not only an example of authoritarianism but is furthermore a significant pathology. We can sum up the dimensions of this: political pathologies, cultural pathologies and social pathologies. The political pathologies reside, first, in the extreme manipulation of public opinion through lying and the nefarious use of social media. The Leave campaign was based on the claim that people would ‘regain control’ and on other demonstrably false promises and claims, for example that the UK would be swamped by millions of refugees.9 Ironically, the Leave vote was almost certainly aided by groups in Russia seeking to destabilise western democracy (see Snyder, 2018). Second, as discussed in the foregoing, the faulty design of the Referendum on posing an open-ended question for which there was no clear answer provided fertile ground for numerous possible scenarios, for which none were voted. The result was an abuse of democracy since neither the plebiscitary instrument of the Referendum, nor the electoral system was able to deal with demands for the implementation of Brexit. Third, democracy was stifled in that the outcome was declared to be decisive when it was obviously not and opened up further questions. Four, Brexit ushered in a new wave of extreme right populist politics that translated the notion of a popular vote into the ‘will of the people’, which in turn became a dangerous and divisive act to drive a wedge between one half of the population against the other. Social pathologies were nurtured by the political pathologies. As widely reported, there has been an increase in hate crimes, death threats and xenophobia. Brexit has led to an increase in mental health stresses, which correlates with increased levels of anxiety and frustration and increased incidents of rage (Hughes, 2019). Many EU citizens living and working in the UK are seeking to leave because they no longer feel at home in their adopted country and have to fulfil new administrative hurdles to retain their previous rights. UK citizens living in other European countries face considerable uncertainty as to their future. Although Remainers and 9 I refer here to the infamous ‘Breaking Point’ poster, as discussed by Stewart and Mason (2019).

2

THE PATHOGENESIS OF BREXIT: PATHOLOGIES …

39

Leavers represent different social milieus, many families have been split over Brexit. Societal polarisation has been enhanced and the capacity of the society for cohesion is reduced. The result is a widespread societal fragmentation. This condition, it is worth recalling, the systematic breakup and undermining of social bonds in local and civic communities, was one of the chief structural causes that made possible National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s. As regards wider cultural pathologies, Brexit has brought about a fundamental cultural discord within the nations of the UK. It has weakened the cultural identity of Britain by an attempt to revoke, and in practice, weaken its European heritage. While its supporters claim the UK will be stronger outside of the EU, the reality is that this is highly unlikely to be the case. Higher education and science are widely viewed to be one of the UK’s most successful exports, but in view of the dependence on EU funding and cultural exchange they will be severely damaged for no apparent gain. Brexit, is in short, as Fintan O’Toole, has described it, a politics of pain based on a combination of self-pity and the sense of superiority: ‘One the one hand, Brexit is fuelled by fantasies of “Empire 2.0”, a reconstructed global mercantilist trading empire in which the old white colonies will be reconnected to the mother country. On the other, it is an insurgency and therefore needs to imagine that it is a revolt against intolerable oppression. It therefore requires both a sense of superiority and a sense of grievance. Self-pity is the only emotion that can bring them together’ (O’Toole, 2018: 3). As an attempt at major de-Europeanisation, Brexit is a radical project that seeks to reverse several decades of cultural, economic and political advancement. It seeks to return to a vision of the past that accords with no reality. As such it is an undoing of collective learning. The British society that existed before the early 1970s does not exist anymore. It has been irreversibly transformed by Europeanisation, and the wider processes of globalisation and collective learning that came with these developments, which of course also produced adverse consequences especially for those who did not benefit from the tremendous transformations of the past two decades. When presented as an antidote, Brexit is a project based on illusion and fantasy. The fact that it cannot be realised gives it all the more zeal. The result is that it morphs into a myriad of shapes such that everything is touched by it. In that sense, the phantasmagoria of Brexit is a project of neoliberal subjugation. The aim is not to realise it, but to use it to achieve other objectives. Brexit aims ultimately at the suffocation

40

G. DELANTY

of democracy by a pro-Trump elite determined to reshape the economy and society according to a radical neoliberal strategy driven by the allure of global markets. There can be no doubt that the staging of Brexit in 2016 when the neoliberal project was weakening due to the consequences of the financial crash ten years earlier was not a coincidence. Brexit has made possible the continuation of a particular model of capitalist accumulation around a new authoritarian cultural project that does not question neoliberalism. Authoritarian democracy appeals not to the public but to the people. The notion of the public is difficult to separate from deliberation and contestation; it is not in itself underpinned by a shared way of life or a collective identity. The notion of the people, in contrast, disguises an ambiguity between a culturally defined body of people and the shared public sphere. The idea of ‘the people’ in fact conceals a distruct of people, who are not allowed to deliberate. Rather like the prisoner who makes a forced confession, which cannot be recanted, the British people have made an irreversible decision. The people means what the symbolic codes deem it to mean. In the case of Brexit and radical right-wing populism, it means one section of the people, who supposedly represent the true values of the people. The idea of the people is therefore authoritarian in that it reflects a specific worldview that does not accept that the people might be diverse. This is precisely the essence of the pathological heart of such radical populist movements: their aversion to cultural diversity. In its dominant iteration, Brexit is a movement that seeks the reversal of cultural pluralisation and the assertion of a nativistic national community. It also feeds off anxiety. Gelfand, drawing on Fromm’s 1941 Fear of Freedom, argues ‘when people perceive an increase in disorder, they feel tremendous anxiety. Inevitably, this anxiety leads to a quest for security. To bring a sense of safety back into their lives, they latch on to authoritarianism and conformity’.10 This is accomplished, as Freud also recognised, through fantasies, which in turn nurture pathologies whereby the source of the anxiety is projected onto persons perceived as external to the collective ‘We’. This is reflected in the obsession with migration, which is generally exaggerated by authoritarian political figures who can tap into the psychopathology of fear that lurks within the authoritarian personality. 10 For example, Gelfand (2020) notes that Trump supporters believe 14% of the population consists of illegal immigrants while the correct figure is 3%.

2

THE PATHOGENESIS OF BREXIT: PATHOLOGIES …

4

41

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have attempted to analyse Brexit as a social pathology informed by critical theory. I am not claiming that every aspect of Brexit can be explained in terms of pathology. This is not least because Brexit is not a specific phenomenon that can be separated from the rest of British society. It permeates everything. Brexit was an event that did not have a specific form (due to the open nature of the Referendum). Since leaving Europe was not defined, it opened a Pandora’s box of interpretations. The most radical of these appears to have got the upper hand, and, as a result, latent pathologies have taken root. In making this claim, I am not suggesting that the EU does not have regressive aspects or that it represents a superior normative order that cannot be questioned. There are many defects with the very design of the EU, perhaps most notably the single currency, the dominance of Germany, the so-called democratic deficit. This is not the place to review these issues. In any case, one of my arguments is that the objectivity of the problem of Europe is not the primary causal factor in Brexit. The UK is not affected by the problems of the single currency and whatever way one looks at the UK today, it is difficult to avoid the reality of the deficit of democracy in the UK. Brexit is a right-wing movement driven by a radicalised English nationalism that knows itself only in that to which it is opposed. This perhaps explains the weakness of Remain: it does not offer the same conviction, since remaining in the EU is simply the status quo and all that goes with it. In a society that has witnessed extreme levels of inequality, it is hardly surprising that large segments of the population voted against the status quo. However, in view of the fact that large swathes of the Conservative voting middle class also voted for Brexit, my overall assessment, is that inequality was not the decisive factor, which I think, all things considered, was a cultural rendition of authoritarianism within English nationalism. In this sense, Brexit, while itself the product of major societal change and historical preconditions, is more significant in terms of its consequences in that it has made possible a major re-interpretation of national selfunderstanding and the gestation of a new social movement that seeks to reshape society and state. In effect, Brexit made it possible for the Conservative Party to reinvent itself around a culturally and politically authoritarian movement that, for now at least, allows it to escape the neoliberal legacy while at the same time pursuing the neoliberal project disguised by a new kind of conservatism.

42

G. DELANTY

I also stress that the basic orientations that come with Brexit— the polarisation of a nativist culture based on closure and an open cosmopolitan pluralist one—is now a cleavage in more or less all western societies (see Delanty, 2017). Brexit may be British, but all countries are at breaking point. Brexit is not just about leaving the EU; it is about leaving a particular idea of Britain. In my account, I have stressed how the formation of British political modernity—in particular the structures of the multi-national state— provided the basic structures for the current situation and the prospects of the break-up of the UK. A more complete account would need to engage with the class structure and transformation in the working class, both in terms of consciousness and in work, especially in the midlands and north of England. A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation documented that the poorest households with incomes of less than £20,000 voted in large numbers for Brexit, as did the unemployed, those in low-skilled and manual occupations (Goodwin & Heath, 2016). As a pathology of consciousness, Brexit can be seen as a substitute radicalness for economic deprivation in that the pro-Brexit vote in 2016 for many was an antiestablishment message. For many, the attraction of Brexit is that it hurts those who are seen to have better lives. While Brexit has had a transformational impact on British society as a whole, it has had a particular resonance in the remnants of the old working class. This class, once the bedrock of the Labour Party and the basis of progressive politics for generations, has undergone in significant numbers, a foundational change in their political identity, such that in the general election of December 2019 very large numbers voted for the Conservative Party, despite the fact that this party had been responsible for far-reaching austerity policies that had a detrimental impact of these communities. Class, nonetheless, is not everything, especially when its defining elements are fragmented. The generational difference is also highly significant: the typical Brexit voter who switched political allegiance from Labour is an over 50-year-old, non-university educated, white English male. Brexit more broadly draws its support from the older, nonuniversity educated people within England—more than 60% had such a profile. This has imploded approximately 30% of the Labour vote; while the Conservative Party retained support even from its leaver voters. This provides clear evidence that Brexit has been the primary determinant of change in recent times.

2

THE PATHOGENESIS OF BREXIT: PATHOLOGIES …

43

I think these are clear signs of social pathogenesis. The ill-informed decision to hold a Referendum that had no possibility of closure in the event of a leave vote gaining a majority became a fulcrum for a new divisive politics. The argument given in this chapter is that a political pathology has developed and that it has led to social and cultural pathologies. There is nothing emancipatory in this, as some left-wing proponents of Brexit like to claim.11 It is a fundamental misreading to see Brexit as the event of the multitude rebelling against the elites. The Referendum led to an exacerbation of divisions that already existed and has been orchestrated by elites to serve their interests. It was in every sense an event that made possible the re-interpretation of many assumptions about the nature of collective identity.

References Adorno, T. (1998 [1959]). What does coming to terms with the past mean? In Critical models: Interventions and catchwords. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Adorno, T. W. (2019 [1948]). Remarks on the authoritarian personality. In T. W. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswik, E. Levinson, & R. N. Sanford (Eds.), The authoritarian personality. London: Verso. Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, E., & Sanford, R. N. (2019 [1950]). The authoritarian personality. London: Verso. Bartlett, R. (1993). The making of Europe: Conquest, colonization and cultural change: 950–1350. London: Allen Lane. Black, J. (2019). Britain and Europe: A short history. London: Hurst. Bridle, J. (2018). The new dark age: Technology and the end of the future. London: Verso. Burston, D. (1991). The legacy of Erich Fromm. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clarke, H., Goodwin, M., & Whiteley, P. (2017). Why Britain voted to leave the European Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delanty, G. (2017). A divided nation in a divided Europe: Emerging cleavages and the crisis of European integration. In William Outhwaite (Ed.), Brexit: sociological responses. London: Anthem Press. Delanty, G. (2020). Critical theory and Social transformation. London: Routledge.

11 I refer to the so-called Lexit argument, that is, the argument in favour of a left-wing Brexit. See Smith (2019).

44

G. DELANTY

Eder, K. (1985). Geschichte als Lernprozess? Zur Pathogenese politischer Modernität in Deutschland. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Evans, G., & Menon, A. (2017). Brexit and British politics. Cambridge: Polity. Fromm, E. (1941). Fear of freedom. New York, NY: Farrar & Rinehart. Fromm, E. (1963 [1955]). The sane society. New York, NY: Rinehart and Winston. Fromm, E. (2010 [1991]). The pathology of normalcy. Riverdale, NY: AMHF. Gelfand, M. (2020). Authoritarian leaders thrive on fear: We need to help people feel safe. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentis free/2020/jan/02/authoritarian-leaders-people-safe-voters. Goodwin, M., & Heath, O. (2016). Brexit vote explained: Low skills, and lack of opportunities. Joseph Rowntree Foundation. https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/ brexit-vote-explained-poverty-low-skills-and-lack-opportunities. Gordon, P. (2018). The authoritarian personality revisited. In W. Brown, P. Gordon, & M. Pensky (Eds.), Authoritarianism: Three inquiries in critical social theory. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Harris, N. (2019). Reconstructing Erich Fromm’s ‘pathology of normalcy’: Transcending the recognition-cognitive paradigm in the diagnosis of social pathologies. Social Science Information, 58(4), 714–733. Haseler, S. (2017). England alone: Brexit and the crisis of English identity. London: Forumpress. Hechter, M. (1975). Internal colonialism: The celtic fridge in British national development. Berkeley, CA: California University Press. Henley J., Caroll, R., & Rice-Oxley, M. (2019). Referendums: Who holds them, why, and are they always a dog’s Brexit? The Guardian. https://www.thegua rdian.com/news/2019/mar/11/referendums-who-holds-them-why-and-arethey-always-a-dogs-brexit. Hollander, S. (2019). The politics of referendum use in European democracies. London: Palgrave. Hughes, B. (2019). The psychology of Brexit: From psychodrama to behavioural science. London: Palgrave. Kenny, M. (2016). The genesis of English nationalism. Political Insight, 7 (2), 8–12. Kenny, J. (2017). The politics of English nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kumar, K. (2003). The making of English national identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LeDuc, L. (2003). The politics of referendums in global perspective. Toronto, ON: Toronto University Press. Mackenzie, J. (1984). Propaganda and empire: The manipulation of British public opinion, 1890–1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

2

THE PATHOGENESIS OF BREXIT: PATHOLOGIES …

45

Mackenzie, J. (Ed.). (1986). Imperialism and poplar culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nairn, T. (1981 [1977]). The break-up of Britain (2nd ed.). London: Verso. O’ Mahony, P., & Delanty, G. (1998 [2001]). Rethinking Irish history: Nationalism, identity and ideology. London: MacMillan. O’Toole, F. (2018). Heroic failure: Brexit and politics of pain. London: Head of Zeus. Orwell, G. (2018). The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English genius. London: Penguin Classics. Outhwaite, W. (Ed.). (2017). Brexit sociological responses. London: Anthem Press. Roiser, M., & Willig, C. (2002). The strange death of the authoritarian personality: 50 years of psychological and political debate. History of the Human Sciences, 15(4), 71–96. Seymour, R. (2019). The twittering machine. London: Indigo Press. Simms, B. (2017). Britain and Europe: A thousand years of conflict and co-operation. London: Penguin. Smith, O. (2019). Face the facts, labour leftwingers: Lexit is dead. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/06/lab our-left-lexit-dead-members-leftwing-brexit. Snyder, T. (2018). The road to unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. London: Bodley Head. Stewart, H., & Mason, R. (2019). Nigel Farage’s anti-migrant poster reported to the police. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/ jun/16/nigel-farage-defends-ukip-breaking-point-poster-queue-of-migrants. Steward, H., & Walker, P. (2019). Yellowhammer: No-deal chaos fears as secret Brexit papers published. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/pol itics/2019/sep/11/operation-yellowhammer-fears-no-deal-brexit-chaos-for ced-to-publish-secret-papers. Stone, W., Lederer, G., & Christie, R. (Eds.). (1993). Strength and weakness: The authoritarian personality today. New York, NY: Springer. Tierney, S. (2014). Constitutional referendums: The theory and practice of deliberation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weale, A. (2018). The will of the people: A modern myth. Cambridge: Polity. Wellings, B. (2019). English nationalism, Brexit and the anglosphere. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Williams, Z. (2019). The country is stockpiling beans and body bags—but they won’t save us from Brexit’s bad politics. The Guardian. https://www.thegua rdian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/13/stockpiling-for-a-no-deal-brexitmight-make-you-feel-better-but-believe-me-it-is-pointless.

CHAPTER 3

Pathologies of Reason in Computational Capitalism: A Speculative Diagnosis of Our Computational Worldview James Stockman

In this chapter I argue that due to the rapid transformation of society effected by computational technology we are witnessing a change in how reason is both understood (from humanistic to calculative) and how it is used (algorithmically). The question is, how are we to theorise these changes and grasp the challenges presented by digital technologies? At the individual level we are all familiar with the changing forms of action we undertake in response to intimate digital devices (e.g. smartphones, laptops, and tablets). However, at a societal level, I am interested in attempting to track a shift in social rationality towards pathological forms. To this end, my aim is to use social pathology diagnosis as a heuristic through which to critique what I am calling a ‘computational worldview’. By computational worldview I refer to the widespread

J. Stockman (B) University of Sussex, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Harris (ed.), Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_3

47

48

J. STOCKMAN

belief that the world can be best understood and acted upon through computational categories and processes. Theorised by Golumbia under the rubric of ‘computationalism’ (2009) and by Berry as ‘computationality’ (2011, 2014), I want to suggest that this worldview has become entangled with a ‘networked’ constellation of right-wing thought and action. Reframed here with the Frankfurt School1 as a late modern articulation of socially deficient reason, I aim to embed this analysis within a critique of computational capitalism. While social pathology diagnosis is central to critical theory (Freyenhagen, 2015: 131), it has seldom been articulated in relation to computational capitalism.2 Indeed, we might say with Honneth that ‘[t]here is an atmosphere of the outdated and antiquated, of the irretrievably lost, which surrounds the grand historical and philosophical ideas of Critical Theory’ (2009: 19). However, in a world in which computational metaphors, methods, and categories increasingly inform how we live and think within society (Chun, 2011), I want to suggest the importance of social pathology diagnosis as a tool with which to both politicise computation and interrogate its claims to rationality. These objectives are of particular importance in the context of late modern societies. Firstly, a central component of post-Fordism has been the ‘softwarisation’ of the economy (Manovich, 2013). Here, rapid advances in computational power have been harnessed to enable the extraction of value based on the capacity to construct, visualise, analyse, and intervene in networked systems. Rather than ushering in a new age of decentralised liberation, network analytics and data-intensive science have today converged with capitalism in the formation of unprecedented constellations of corporate power. Secondly, the connecting up of multiple technologies—e.g. mobile devices, sensors, APIs, cloud computing, apps, and social media3 —has enabled the discretisation of 1 While reference will be made throughout this chapter to Critical Theorists from across the so-called ‘generations’ of the Frankfurt School, my primary interest here is in the firstgeneration critique of instrumental reason, in particular, the work of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. 2 The examples of David Berry, Andrew Feenberg, Christian Fuchs, and Bernard Stiegler go against this trend, with each offering incisive critiques of technology and the digital which explicitly draw on the Frankfurt School tradition. 3 While I have avoided the use of technical jargon where possible throughout this chapter, please see the following glossary if you are unsure of any computer-based terminology: https://pc.net/glossary/.

3

PATHOLOGIES OF REASON IN COMPUTATIONAL CAPITALISM …

49

the world into real-time data streams. This confluence of forces has not only enabled the rise of highly granular surveillance and persuasion-based architectures, but also the emergence of algorithmic and highly exploitative regimes of gig economy-based practices (e.g. Amazon Mechanical Turk, Appen, Uber, Deliveroo) (Irani, 2015), each of which have been furnished with justificatory discourses which converge on the promise to root out and obviate any and all inefficiencies. However, if we take the ideology of ‘smartness’ in the context of the city, it is evident that this cybernetic vision of human–machine interaction threatens to optimise away democracy (Halpern, 2014). Lastly, ‘principles from software engineering [are increasingly] offered up for social engineering, with open source identified as an exemplar principle of organisation, platforms as future models for governance, calculation substituted for thought, and social media networks replacing community’ (Berry, 2020). Taken together, these processes signal the computationalisation of society, whereby software ‘codifies the world into rules, routines, algorithms and databases, and then uses these to do work in the world to render aspects of everyday life programmable’ (Kitchin, 2011: 945). Theorised by some as evidence of our entry into a post-digital era, it no longer makes sense to pit the real (offline) against the virtual (online) (Berry, 2014: 47; Floridi, 2015). The lifeworld is a digital milieu. This novel situation raises serious questions regarding how best to approach the critique of computation. Thus far, in the political sphere this critique has tended to oscillate between legalistic debates on data and as of yet toothless calls for anti-trust legislation.4 While important, these approaches have often bypassed a critical engagement with the epistemic foundations of computational power and their social implications. It is here that I want to gesture towards the efficacy of social pathology diagnosis as an approach to thinking about these issues.

4 On anti-trust legislation, see, for example, Satariano’s recent article for The New York Times, Silicon Valley Heads to Europe, Nervous About New Rules, https://www. nytimes.com/2020/02/16/technology/europe-new-AI-tech-regulations.html. On datapolitics, see, for example, the DECODE project, https://decodeproject.eu/what-decode.

50

J. STOCKMAN

1

Social Pathologies of Reason

In a strange way the left-Hegelian insight which underpins the critique of social pathologies of reason, namely, that reason is at once cognitive and manifestly material, has today become a kind of common sense with the rise of artificial forms of intelligence. Indeed, the very functionality of our increasingly computational societies relies upon the successful execution of calculative processes and procedures which take place both out of sight and ‘out of mind’. That said, the hypothesis that computational ways of thinking are coalescing into a ‘pathological’ constellation of reason will likely be met with less familiarity. It is therefore useful to begin with the question of what constitutes a ‘social pathology’ in general before moving on to address the critique of pathologies of reason. The term ‘social pathology’ is used within critical theory to refer to ‘socially produced obstacle[s]’ to individual or cooperative self-realisation (Harris, 2019: 46). Often presented as a normatively weightier optic of critique than those offered by liberal—or what Horkheimer called ‘traditional’ ([1937] 2002)—theory, the concept implies the existence of ‘social circumstances [which] violate those conditions which constitute a necessary presupposition for a good life amongst us’ (Honneth, 2000: 122). Thus defined, the term social pathology may be used to cover a broad range of social maladies, the dominant framings of which are presented by Harris on the model of a ‘five-part typology of distinct and interlocking conceptions’: [1] obstacles present in ‘forms of life’ structurally inhibiting human flourishing; [2] negative self-perpetuating social dynamics; [3] instances of society failing to attain the highest standards of historically effective reason; [4] socially inculcated pathologies of normalcy; [5] social pathologies of recognition. (2019: 46)

In this chapter, I am concerned with the first three of these ‘interlocking’ conceptions of social pathology. I do not, however, wish to enter into this debate with the aim to contribute to technical discussions on social pathology as a subfield of academic philosophy. Instead, I want to gesture towards the utility of social pathology diagnosis as an optic through which to critique the advance of computational ways of thinking under conditions of computational capitalism.

3

PATHOLOGIES OF REASON IN COMPUTATIONAL CAPITALISM …

51

The critique of pathologies of reason can perhaps be best understood in light of critical theory’s tenet that the ‘[c]ritique of society is critique of knowledge, and vice versa’ (Adorno, 2005b: 250). To grasp the underlying logic of this claim, it is essential that we read it in light of critical theory’s indebtedness to Hegel. Specifically, the belief that knowledge is manifest within social reality, and that subsequently both institutional forms and ways of reasoning are conditioned by the prevailing social order. Implicit here is the suggestion that reason manifests in distinct, historical formations, which, on the one hand, may be conducive to human flourishing, yet, on the other, may lapse into ‘socially deficient’ or pathological formations (Honneth, 2009). In other words, the critique of pathologies of reason focusses our attention not only on the question of how the ways in which we come to know the world shape our relationship to it, but also on how these ways of knowing have arisen under specific social and historical conditions. The implication, as Schecter suggests, ‘is that epistemological issues have political ramifications’, ‘and, by extension, that an interdisciplinary approach is needed to examine the relations between knowledge, social communication, and the exercise of power’ (2019: 12–13). While pathologies of reason can thus be said to manifest in a plurality of distinct articulations, my interest here is in the Frankfurt School critique of instrumental reason. Briefly stated, their guiding thesis was that while the Enlightenment had promised to release human beings from traditional hierarchies and irrational belief systems, the generalisation of natural scientific and technologically exploitable forms of knowledge within the rationalisation process under capitalism had simultaneously precipitated the reduction of reason to mere calculation. Divorced from substantive ends and blind to qualities, the world was increasingly disclosed as a space of quantifiable and fungible entities, subject to technical forms of control and bureaucratic organisation (Adorno & Horkheimer, [1944] 2002; Marcuse, [1964] 2007). We are here confronted with one of the defining features of the critique of pathologies of reason. Namely, its shift in focus from liberal theory’s emphasis on issues of justice to a critique of the underlying logics and associated meanings which give shape to a particular social constellation. To draw out the stakes of this distinction, consider Jaeggi’s critique of commodification:

52

J. STOCKMAN

Even if, purely hypothetically, the deficiency of marketized institutions as regards justice could be made good through fair distribution at a basic level, this would not even touch upon, let alone answer, the question of whether there are goods that should not be marketized – irrespective of the distribution conditions. The issue here is what repercussions understanding certain goods as commodities and treating them in accordance with economic efficiency has for our understanding of ourselves as individuals and as a society and for the shape and functioning of our social practices. (2018: 5–6)

Translated into ‘digital’ concerns, we might say, for example, that while issues of algorithmic bias are in principle eradicable, this very real achievement would nonetheless fail to engage with the ‘repercussions’ of the generalised use of systems of algorithmic profiling with respect to how they mediate and shape our understanding of, and relation to, the world in their role as social-structuring technologies (Noble, 2018). Thus, with Fromm, the critique of pathologies of reason opens up the broader question of ‘whether there is not something fundamentally wrong with our way of life and with the aims towards which we are striving’ (1963: 10). The belief that the rise of instrumental reason under conditions of capitalism is entangled with a ‘damaged life’ is a central tenet of critical theory (Adorno, [1951] 2005a). What is specific to the critique of capitalism as a ‘form of life’ is that it ‘thematizes capitalism as a world- and self-relation; in particular, [addressing] capitalism’s influence on our full connection to life, our relation to ourselves and to the world’ (Jaeggi, 2016: 60). That capitalism as a ‘form of life’ must be understood in light of its technological mediation was already clear to the founding practitioners of critical theory, a position concisely captured by Marcuse when he wrote: Technology, as a mode of production, as the totality of instruments, devices and contrivances which characterize the machine age is thus at the same time a mode of organizing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behavior patterns, an instrument for control and domination. ([1941] 2004: 41)

In what follows, I do not intend to reconstruct and ahistorically deploy the related theses on one-dimensional reason or the totally administered society, etc. Indeed, given the emphasis placed by critical theory on the need for historical reflexivity and praxis-oriented modes of enquiry, this would arguably go against the very spirit of their project. Instead, I want

3

PATHOLOGIES OF REASON IN COMPUTATIONAL CAPITALISM …

53

to gesture towards the continuing relevance of several key moments in their critique of instrumental reason for engaging with the rise of computational ways of thinking under conditions of computational capitalism.

2

Computational Capitalism and Network Rationalities

With this in mind, I want to argue that today it is computational capitalism that needs to be rethought as a ‘form of life’. While this description arguably harbours a speculative moment, it invites a mode of critique that not only remains inclusive of a reflection on human action but also interrogates the ‘frame of reference within which we act and orient ourselves’ (Jaeggi, 2018: 7). With the so-called computational turn, I want to suggest that today’s ‘frame of reference’ cannot be adequately theorised without taking into account the insertion of computation into the fabric of everyday life. Indeed, to take just four examples, it is evident that late modern societies are increasingly mediated by a ‘computational worldview’: [1] the computational mediation of culture and therefore subjectivity by the ‘programming industries’ (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, etc.) (Stiegler, 2019); [2] the turn away from humanistic forms of knowledge (in particular, hermeneutics and critical reason) and towards algorithmic, data-intensive processes of knowledge production (Anderson, 2008); [3] the substitution of technical for political solutions to social problems (Morozov, 2013); and [4] the, albeit controversial, claim put forward by digital philosophy—a branch of theoretical physics—that existence itself is digital (Wolfram, 2002). Taken together, we are presented with a diverse picture of the extent to which computation has become paradigmatic both as a metaphor(s) with which to understand reality and as a tool to act upon it. Indeed, our computational worldview arguably constitutes ‘a new historical constellation of intelligibility’ (Berry, 2011: 27), one which increasingly mediates self-world relations in the twenty-first century. For the purposes of this enquiry, I want to develop the hypothesis that this worldview is indicative of a shift in social rationality, marking a ‘pathological’ break with humanistic ways of thinking. This is not to suggest that computational—or what I will later refer to as network—rationalities are inherently detrimental to society, nor is it a plea to protect an idealised notion of the subject ‘under siege’. In agreement with Stiegler; the human is always already a technical

54

J. STOCKMAN

being (1998). Rather, I am interested in the question of how epistemic deficits rebound back in the form of coercive social relations.5 The Eclipse of Reason The processual decoupling of humanistic forms of knowledge (e.g. critique, hermeneutics, intuition, insight) from reason, and the subsequent reduction of the latter to formalised, calculative procedures, was registered by Horkheimer in 1947 as the Eclipse of Reason (2004). For Horkheimer, what counts as knowledge had been progressively stripped of its qualitative—and thus valuative—dimensions, furnishing ‘whatever’ evades quantification with the appearance of ‘illusion or metaphysics’ (Held, 2004: 69). This process, Horkheimer claimed, had ‘reduce[d] the objective basis of our insight to a chaos of uncoordinated data’, culminating in the identification of ‘scientific work’ with ‘the mere organization, classification, or computation of such data’ (Horkheimer, [1947] 2004: 9). The eclipse of reason can thus be read as an epistemic shift indicative of a crisis of what Hofstadter called the ‘intellect’: Intellect […] is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole. (Hofstadter, quoted in Berry, 2011: 20)

It is with this in mind that I want to suggest that the rise of computation has precipitated the radicalisation of what Horkheimer termed the eclipse of reason. Indeed, as Stiegler notes: ‘[i]n the twenty-first century, we are witnessing the dawn of the age of the loss of savoirs théoriques, of theoretical knowledge […]. With the total automation made possible 5 Given that the line of thought pursued here may be interpreted as technophobic, even conservative, it is important to state: [1] human–machine interaction needn’t be dehumanising; [2] left-wing politics must not turn its back on computational technologies, but instead redirect their current development towards a post-scarcity society; [3] the network—as a concept, technosocial infrastructure, and imaginary—cannot be reduced to its current articulation. The resonance of ‘the network’ with left-libertarianism should not be disregarded.

3

PATHOLOGIES OF REASON IN COMPUTATIONAL CAPITALISM …

55

by digital technology, theories, those most sublime fruits of idealization and identification, have been deemed obsolete’ (2020: 17). Stiegler is here referring to Anderson’s widely read essay, The End of Theory (2008), which arguably captured the zeitgeist of the digital age with the words: Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves. (2008)

In agreement with Brooks, today’s ‘rising philosophy’ is ‘data-ism’ (2013). That is, the view ‘that everything that can be measured should be measured; that data is a transparent and reliable lens that allows us to filter out emotionalism and ideology; that data will help us do remarkable things – like foretell the future’ (2013). This ‘philosophy’ is perhaps best understood with Berry as a ‘cult of data-ism’, predicated on the ‘renunciation of the extended and important role of critical reason and theoretical thinking in modern society’ (2019: 44). In short, it embodies the contemporary tendency towards the abdication of human thought to the pattern matching capacities of statistical algorithms, with the result that ‘That’s-how-it-is ’ increasingly ‘stands where How so? once wavered’ (Han, 2017: 68).6 This blind capitulation to the ‘facts’ was a leitmotif of the Frankfurt School’s critique of positivism. Briefly stated, positivism was criticised by critical theory both for its ‘ahistorical appeal to raw facts’ and for its ‘construction of alleged laws from such data’ (Jarvis, 1998: 13). In its failure to connect the translation of the world into facts with the social process, social reality, they claimed, was grasped only at the level of appearance (Horkheimer, [1947] 2004: 56). As a result, they claimed, the ‘positivistic tendency produces a new kind of adjustment […] to the prevailing social order’ (Marcuse & Neumann, 2004: 103). The turn from humanistic to computational ways of thinking has also fed-back into our image of ourselves. As Weizenbaum writes in Computer

6 ‘This is […] reflected in contemporary paradigms of truthfulness. The five W questions of traditional inquiry—who, what, where, when, and why—have been replaced with the seven V’s of Big Data processing: velocity, variety, volume, veracity, variability, visualization, and value’ (Steyerl, 2018: 5).

56

J. STOCKMAN

Power & Human Reason: ‘the introduction of computers into our already highly technological society has […] merely reinforced those antecedent pressures that have driven man to an ever more rationalistic view of his society and an ever more mechanistic image of himself’ (1984: 11). Indeed, in the age of the algorithm, rational thinking itself is increasingly understood on the model of calculation. Here, we might point to the convergence of the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and neuroscience on the view that ‘intelligence’ has ‘computational foundations’ (Gershman et al., 2015). This shift is also mirrored at the level of the social with the turn to automation and anticipatory computing, whereby ‘[e]lements of subjectivity, judgement and cognitive capacities are increasingly delegated to algorithms and prescribed to us through our devices’ (Berry, 2014: 11). One of the risks, as Baudrillard suggests, is that human beings come to identify themselves as ‘the weak link in technological processes’—‘the more the performance gap grows, the more human beings compensate for this failure by expanding their technological park, even extending it to Sloterdijk’s “human park” and the biological modelling of the species’ (2010: 82–83).7 At the individual level, this is already visible, for example, in the idea of the ‘Quantified Self’. Here, ‘self-knowledge’ is not to be obtained through self-reflection, learning, or by being-togetherwith-others, but ‘through numbers’.8 In its most extreme articulation, it manifests as transhumanism, which seeks to augment the ‘inefficiencies’ and ‘inadequacies’ of human beings out of existence. Often advanced by the ‘boy kings’9 of Silicon Valley—e.g. co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel—transhumanism portrays human reason as inherently deficient: ‘[i]ntelligence wants to be free but everywhere is in chains. It is imprisoned by biology and its inevitable scarcity’ (Danaylov, 2016). At a societal level, this risk is also visible in the increasingly widespread view that computation is rendering democracy obsolete:

7 Baudrillard is here reflecting on Günther Anders’ notion of ‘the obsolescence of man’. For an English translation of some of Anders’ work on this topic, visit: https://libcom. org/tags/gunther-anders. 8 For more information on the ‘Quantified Self’, visit: https://quantifiedself.com/. 9 By ‘boy kings’ I am here referring to Katherine Losse’s 2012 memoir, The Boy Kings:

A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network, London: Free Press.

3

PATHOLOGIES OF REASON IN COMPUTATIONAL CAPITALISM …

57

Year after year, the average person is becoming more stupid and the politicians more deceptive […]. On the other hand, computers are becoming more intelligent […] [E]ventually it is going to be wiser to let them take the decisions and govern us. The advantages […] could be [1] complete information (or almost complete), while the humans called to decide are in possess[ion] of a fraction (if not NONE at all) of the information required to take a decision. [2] optimal decision given a specific target (i.e. the best decision from an economic perspective), while a human may - given the same objective - come to a different sub-optimal decision due to his inferior reasoning capabilities. [3] no bias from family/friends/party opinions. (Piergiacomi, 2016, numbers added—ex-Amazon software developer)

While both the prospect of an A.I-run government and the ‘destiny hacking’ visions of transhumanism will likely remain extreme and unsettling fictions, when placed alongside the rise of ‘data-ism’ they reflect what we might call an emergent computational-sensibility, one which is [a] highly technocratic in orientation, and [b] radically parts ways with the Enlightenment hope that autonomous political agents might reach collective decisions on the basis of a publicly debated criteria of judgement. Network Rationalities To develop this line of thought and offer a tentative critique of the politics attending this computational-sensibility, I want to gesture towards the critical utility of Marcuse’s notion of the ‘technological a priori’ ([1964] 2007). More specifically, I want to argue that with the shift from ‘mechanical-industrial’ to ‘digital-computational’ societies, Marcuse’s notion can be usefully rethought as a network a priori, which likewise ‘projects nature as potential instrumentality, stuff of control and organization’ (Marcuse, [1964] 2007: 157). Marcuse’s account of the ‘technological a priori’ is predicated on a critique of the relation ‘between science, technology, and capitalism as a system of domination’ (Feenberg, 2013: 604). Based in an analysis which at once connects with, yet departs from, Heidegger’s critique of technological ‘enframing’ (Gestell ) ([1954] 1977), Marcuse was concerned with the question of how technical–scientific forms of reason had come to mediate the disclosure of the world as a space of quantifiable, fungible, and instrumentalisable entities (i.e. Heidegger’s ‘standing-reserve’). Briefly stated, he argued that the abstract formalisation and quantification of reality, i.e. science’s a priori mode of experience and the basis upon which

58

J. STOCKMAN

it makes its claims to objectivity, had not simply come to dominate over valuative forms of rationality, but constituted ‘a specific mode of “seeing”’ in the lifeworld, one which ‘comprehends and shapes the world in terms of calculable, predictable relationships among exactly identifiable units’ ([1964] 2007: 168). In agreement with Heidegger, ‘the “project” of an instrumental world [thus] precedes […] the creation of those technologies which serve as the instrument of this […] ensemble (technicity) before attempting to act upon it as a technician’ (Marcuse, [1960] 2011: 137). Here, the term ‘project’ refers not to a ‘particular plan of action’ but is instead ‘based on what Heidegger called the “projection” of a world, that is, an ordering of experience around a certain way of being in the world’ (Feenberg, 2013: 606). Yet, while both philosophers were concerned with tracking a shift in the dominant mode of intelligibility attending the rise of the technological society, Marcuse sought to locate his critique of our ‘ontological’ understanding of entities in light of their historical mediation within the ‘ontic’ realities of capitalism. Indeed, Marcuse claimed, ‘when technics becomes the universal form of material production, it circumscribes an entire culture; it projects a historical totality – a “world”’ (Marcuse, [1964] 2007: 158). Embodied within and reproduced by the technical apparatus, this was a ‘world’ marked by the joining together of science, capitalism, and technology in a reified projection of society as an object of technical control: the degree to which this conception [the technological a priori] becomes applicable and effective in reality, the latter is approached as a (hypothetical) system of instrumentalities; the metaphysical “being-as-such” gives way to “being-instrument.” Moreover, proved in its effectiveness, this conception works as an a priori – it predetermines experience, it projects the direction of the transformation of nature, it organizes the whole. ([1964] 2007: 155)

Today, I want to suggest that ‘the potential for domination contained in scientific-technical rationality [increasingly] enters the social world as a civilisation project’ through the aperture of the network (Feenberg, 2013: 613). The diagram of the network is not only paradigmatic of our computational worldview, but also points both to the protocological infrastructure (e.g. TCP/IP) and the central mode of knowledge production (i.e. network analytics/data-intensive science) through which computational capitalism functions. Otherwise stated, it has been through

3

PATHOLOGIES OF REASON IN COMPUTATIONAL CAPITALISM …

59

the combined application of graph-theoretic principles (e.g. vertices and edges) and machine learning (statistical algorithms) that today’s reticular corporations (e.g. FAANG companies) have been able to formalise, model, and extract value from their respective networks. Moreover, the idea that we live in a world of networks has become a kind of common sense. From friendships to power grids, biological systems to ecosystems and the internet, networks, so we are told, are ‘everywhere’ (Barabási & Bonabeau, 2003). For Chun, the diagram of the network has provided neoliberalism with a ‘version’ of what Jameson called ‘cognitive mapping’ (2015, 2018), while Gansing suggests that the network ‘is ultimately about future models of sociality, technology, and politics, in societies after globalisation’ (2020: 8). Networks are thus not only ‘everywhere’, but also ‘ontologically slippery, approached simultaneously as objective things in the world – natural structures or infrastructural technologies – and as metaphors or concepts to capture emergent qualities of interconnection’ (Jagoda, 2016: 4). My interest here, however, is purely in digital networks and in their associated network rationalities. From the ARPANET to the World Wide Web, as well as the ‘capture’ of the social in today’s ‘industrialised’ social nets (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), the need to understand a network’s typology (e.g. distributed, decentralised, centralised, scalefree), formalise its properties, and explore its consequences has resulted in the elevation of network science to the status of a social-structuring technology. It is thus important to remember that ‘no image is ideologically neutral, for the image of the network is also a mediation between the subject and object that inscribes – or pre-programs – a certain conceptual apparatus onto the world, namely that of nodes and links’ (Hui & Halpin, 2015: 104). Briefly stated, the network as a ‘conceptual apparatus’ is based in the belief that the world can be adequately grasped on the basis of three key features: ‘individual elements; pair-wise relationships between those elements; and a global or macro-patterning that can be considered as network structure’ (Brandes et al., 2013: 5). Despite modelling connectivity, network science thus evinces a politics which ‘erases, or at the very least downplays, the role of communities’ (Chun, 2015: 295). Going further, Hui and Halpin have described the quantified version of social relations offered by network science as an ‘extreme form of social atomism’ (Hui & Halpin, 2015: 105). This version of ‘social atomism’ should not, however, be conflated with liberal individualism. Network science

60

J. STOCKMAN

does not address individuals as agents, but on the basis of their exchanges, which refer not to the content of social interaction, but to statistically inferred ‘patterns’ of engagement. As Burns and Rouvroy suggest, ‘individual subjects are in fact avoided’, replaced by ‘a sort of statistical “double” of both subjects and “reality”’ (2013: 5). Here, the subject is stripped of interiority and reduced to their behavioural or so-called ‘honest signals’ (Pentland, 2008). That is, their data traces, which are aggregated across data-bases and ‘cleansed’ both of their meaning and context. It is on the basis of this discretisation of the lifeworld that the tools of network science are mobilised in the production of predictive models designed ‘to extrapolate future behaviour from past and existing data’ (Apprich, 2020: 25). As a result of the current explosion of practices of data collection, our digital milieu has thus been rendered ‘an immense research laboratory’, ‘one that can be explored, predicted, and no doubt exploited’ (Barabási, 2010: 11). What I am proposing to call the network a priori is therefore as much about how the world sees us —i.e. through computational processes—as it is about how we see the world. It is not, however, my intention to disparage network science in all its applications. Rather, I am interested in its imbrication in new forms of power under conditions of computational capitalism. From Google’s PageRank algorithm to Facebook’s ‘social graph’, it is difficult to overestimate the extent to which computational capitalism has exploited the affordances of network science in the service of its data-intensive economy. Indeed, it is not hyperbolic to suggest that the platformisation of the economy is predicated on the industrialisation of network science. To shed some light on the sheer scale of its application, in 2018 just one of Facebook’s machine-learning frameworks, Caffe2, delivered over 200 trillion predications per day (Jia, 2018). Theorised by Zuboff under the rubric of ‘surveillance capitalism’ (2019), this new mode of accumulation has incentivised datafication, reinforcing the drive to render ever more aspects of our lives susceptible to quantification, commodification, and control. In short, by flattening the world into a map of nodes and edges, digital corporations have been able to extract structure—i.e. patterns—from out of the ‘noise’ of our data, enabling the rise of a pervasive regime of behavioural modification. Zuboff theorises this ‘new species of power’ under the rubric of ‘instrumentarianism’, ‘defined as the instrumentation and instrumentalization of

3

PATHOLOGIES OF REASON IN COMPUTATIONAL CAPITALISM …

61

behavior for the purposes of modification, prediction, monetization and control’ (2019: 28, italics removed). Based neither on violence nor on the want to change our ‘souls’, it instead embodies a digital articulation of behaviourism based on stimulus-response (2019: 29). At the centre of this new constellation of power lies what CheneyLippold calls our ‘algorithmic identities’ (2011). That is, the profiles attached to individuals ‘by algorithm and surveillance networks’ through their placement beneath ‘categories’ (2011: 176). Here, we might point to Han’s example of Acxiom, a US-based private data-company, which segments individuals into seventy categories, ranging from ‘waste’ (i.e. those of a low socio-economic status) to ‘Shooting Star’ (2017: 65–66). Indeed, the mobilisation of categorisation as a mechanism of ‘coercive’ integration points to new forms of what Adorno called ‘identity-thinking’ ([1966] 2007), whereby the ‘system imposes an identity upon its parts’, turning ‘individuals into moments of itself’ (O’Connor, 2013: 36). However, in the shift from what Adorno and Horkheimer called the culture industry to the ‘programming industries’ these ‘hard categories’ are not found from one crop of data, but are constantly (re)actualised. Each time a user moves from one web page to another, the identity categories are updated. […] In the same manner an artificial neural network, when applied to the ‘real’ world, is never effectively trained off, because with each interaction (e.g. a user request via a virtual assistant) the whole network – respectively its weights – re-adjusts. This also hints at the ‘social’ component of these systems, whose categories are actualised on the basis of not only one but multiple users. (Apprich, 2020: 31–32)

This form of profiling provides the basis of what Berns and Rouvroy call ‘algorithmic governmentality’, whereby ‘power’ ‘grasps’ the subject ‘no longer through their physical body, nor through their moral conscience – the traditional holds of power in its legal discursive form – but through multiple “profiles” assigned to them, often automatically, based on digital traces of their existence and their everyday journeys’ (2013: 11–12). As noted by Apprich, these profiles are also inherently ‘social’, often divined on the basis of the homophilic assumption that ‘birds of a feather fly together’. Otherwise stated, in ‘network science, differences and similarities – differences as a way to shape similarities – are actively sought, shaped, and instrumentalized in order to apprehend network

62

J. STOCKMAN

structures’ (Chun, 2018: 61). It is on this basis that individuals are herded into effective units, at once ‘homogenising’ and ‘segregating’ the social (Chun, 2018). Importantly, this has real-world consequences, ranging from deciding individuals’ chances of receiving a loan through to the deformation of public debate as a result of the so-called filter-bubbles. Indeed, as Steyerl notes, this ‘quantified version of social relations is just as readily deployed for police operations as for targeted advertising, for personalized clickbait, eyeball tracking, and proprietary feed algorithms’ (2018: 4). What is of great concern here is the ensuing crisis of critical reason. As previously mentioned, network rationalities do not broach individuals as ‘subjects’, but instead through a mathematised veil of abstraction. Based in processes of ‘capture’ (Agre, 1994), computational capitalism thus records, models, and instrumentalises interaction in ways that bypass the faculties of human reason. Moreover, as the case of ‘profiling’ suggests, these techniques constitute proprietary forms of knowledge production, which rebound back upon the subject in a myriad of ways. The Frankfurt School’s concern that societies with an overdetermining instrumental reason transform the subject from a ‘unit of resistance’ to one of ‘ductility and adjustment’ thus takes on renewed significance in the information age (Marcuse, [1941] 2004: 55). From Facebook’s experiments in ‘emotional contagion’ (Kramer et al., 2014) through to Cambridge Analytica, neuromarketing, and a whole swathe of persuasion-based technologies, the goal of computational capitalism is to 1. to liquidate the capacity to decide, that is, to dissolve it into the calculation of probabilities through a modelling theory that eliminates the bipolarity characteristic of psychic apparatuses; 2. to control any behaviour that might escape the stochastic laws of calculability (Stiegler, 2020: 219). Otherwise stated, the rise of the network a priori marks the advance of a set of self-world relations first theorised by Lukács, and later by the Frankfurt School, under the rubric of ‘reification’, whereby all human relations (viewed as the objects of social activity) assume increasingly the form of objectivity of the abstract elements of the conceptual systems of natural science and of the abstract substrata of the laws of nature. And also, the subject of this ‘action’ likewise assumes increasingly

3

PATHOLOGIES OF REASON IN COMPUTATIONAL CAPITALISM …

63

the attitude of the pure observer of these – artificially abstract –processes, the attitude of the experimenter. (Lukács, 1971: 131)

Network Politics The rise of computational capitalism and its associated network rationalities should not, however, be theorised purely on the basis of a critique of economy but must be located within the wider social totality. In particular, we must address the question of how computational capitalism is being positioned as a political project. To offer some context, we might briefly reflect with Schecter on the collapse of the post-45 consensus. Indeed, as Schecter suggests, ‘[c]ivil society, a vibrant public sphere, strong trade unions, Keynesianism, social democratic parties with clearly identifiable electoral bases, and what Habermas refers to as the lifeworld all played a crucial role in stabilising democracies in North America, Western Europe, and other parts of the globe during the years 1945– 1989’ (Schecter, 2019: 3). As is well known, a confluence of forces (e.g. neoliberalism, globalisation, computerisation) have come together in the destabilisation of this institutional framework and with it the key loci of social and political integration within nation-states. Whether liberal democratic institutions will survive this transition or be swept away by a tide of populism is one of the main concerns which animate current political debate. However, if we are to grasp our current political trajectory and, with it, the gravity of our situation it is essential that we incorporate a reflection on digital disruption. As Stiegler writes, ‘[d]isruption is the situation in which the speed of the evolution of technology is strategically exploited with the aim of creating legal and theoretical vacuums – which is to say, a structural lack of knowledge’ (2020: 30). Encapsulated by the Silicon Valley rhetoric of ‘move fast, break things, ask forgiveness later’, processes of disruption underpin the current shift from what Pasquale has termed ‘territorial’ to ‘functional’ sovereignty. Briefly stated, ‘digital firms’ […] are no longer market participants. Rather, in their fields, they are market makers, able to exert regulatory control over the terms on which others can sell goods and services. Moreover, they aspire to displace more government roles over time, replacing the logic of territorial sovereignty with functional sovereignty. In functional arenas from room-letting to

64

J. STOCKMAN

transportation to commerce, persons will be increasingly subject to corporate, rather than democratic, control. […] Who needs city housing regulators when AirBnB can use data-driven methods to effectively regulate room-letting, then house-letting, and eventually urban planning generally? Why not let Amazon have its own jurisdiction or charter city […]? (2017)

It is therefore no longer a matter of dystopian speculation to suggest that states and digital corporations are entering into new, networked forms of organisation. Indeed, private software companies are increasingly encroaching on domains ranging from border security and policing (Palantir) to healthcare (Google: Deep Mind) and the criminal justice system (Equivant). In a recent article, ex-CEO of Google and chair of both the Defence Innovation Board and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, Eric Schmidt, has even called for ‘unprecedented partnerships between government and industry’ (2020). Taken together with Silicon Valley’s push for Smart Cities (i.e. Google’s Sidewalk Labs), as well as the platformisation and thus centralisation of the internet, we might ask what is to become of democracy in a world in which ‘our every move, our every word, our every relationship is trackable, traceable and data-mineable by unprecedented collaborations between government and tech giants’? (Klein, 2020). While the tech adage of rejecting ‘kings, presidents and voting’ in favour of ‘rough consensus and running code’10 may well have incorporated a liberatory dimension, it already betrayed a suspicion of the public and, with it, the idea of the citizen. This anti-democratic inflection reaches new heights in declarations made by tech-billionaires such as Peter Thiel, who writes: I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. […] In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms – from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy”. (2009)

It is important here to note the ideological sympathies held by Silicon Valley with the Neoreactionary (NRx) ‘philosophies’ of Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land. Indeed, as Finley suggests, it ‘may be a small, minority world

10 The phrase ‘We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code’ was first used by computer scientist David D. Clark and later by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to describe its procedures for working groups.

3

PATHOLOGIES OF REASON IN COMPUTATIONAL CAPITALISM …

65

view, but […] one that […] sheds some light on the psyche of contemporary tech culture’ (2013). To briefly summarise NRx ‘philosophy’, Burrows helpfully distils their ideology into five core positions: [1] an opposition to democratic forms of governance; [2] an attempt to construct a new patchwork of (city-) state forms in which ‘exit’ is the only ‘human right’; [3] an attack on discourses that foreground notions of human equality; [4] a (welcoming) belief in the inevitability of an approaching singularity in which AI and bio-technologies begin to meld with the human form; and [5], for now, the necessity to undermine actors who promulgate ideologies of democracy, equality or who advocate for the regulation of science and technology. (2019, numbers added)

It is not my intention to suggest that ‘big tech’ is surreptitiously part of a broader NRx project, but instead to highlight the anti-democratic, even authoritarian, streak which runs throughout the computational industries. Indeed, this streak is also visible in more ‘mainstream’ visions of computationally engineered futures. Here, we might point, for example, to Pentland’s notion of ‘social physics’ (2015). With the explosion of available data—e.g. GPS, social media, credit card transactions, mobile devices, and sensors—Pentland claims that we can develop a ‘computational theory of human behaviour; a mathematical explanation of why society reacts as it does’ (2015: 6–7). Where once insufficient data and ‘simplistic’ concepts such as ‘markets’, ‘classes’, ‘capital’, and ‘production’ inhibited our comprehension of the social, social physics promises a quantitative theory of society mediated by the figure of the network (2015: 8, 21). Crudely summarised, Pentland’s aspiration is to build predictive, statistical models of human behaviour, with the aim to deliver ‘incentives’ designed to ‘tune’ what he calls the flows of ‘influence’. This is a vision, as Carr suggests, in which computers ‘not only register society’s state but bring it into line with some prescribed ideal. Both the tracking and the maintenance of the social order are automated’ (2014). Moreover, in the UK context, the former Conservative Party’s chief strategist, Dominic Cummings, ‘hypothesizes that the state of the future will need to function more like the human immune system or an ant colony than a traditional state – in other words, more like a network, with emergent properties and the capacity for self-organization, without plans or central coordination, relying instead on probabilistic experimentation, reinforcing success

66

J. STOCKMAN

and discarding failure, achieving resilience partly through redundancy’ (Ferguson, 2018: 112).11 It is here that I want to hypothesise that underlying this trajectory towards computational forms of authoritarianism lies the network a priori, which increasingly projects the direction of the transformation of the lifeworld. By viewing society as a calculable, algorithmically controllable milieu, the network a priori revivifies the allure of cybernetics, namely, the prospect of engineering stable, technosocial environments mediated by the soft-power of communications-based control-systems. Indeed, while network power has often drawn on a contradictory set of theoretical and philosophical resources, there has been a more recent attempt to provide a coherent ideological foundation, connecting rightist thought with cybernetics, conservative theory, and liberalism. To theorise this new ideological formation, I propose to place it beneath the rubric of network totalitarianism, gesturing both towards its historical positioning within computational ways of thinking and its links with a complete ideological worldview. Since its original formulation in Frankfurt in the 1930s, critical theory has attempted to interrogate the obstacles to ‘a radical transvaluation of values’, seeking ‘a break with the familiar, the routine ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, [and] understanding things so that the organism may become receptive to the potential forms of a nonaggressive, nonexploitative world’ (Marcuse, [1969] 2000: 6). Under conditions of computational capitalism, network rationalities serve to block this possibility. It is therefore essential that critical theory in the twenty-first century attempts to understand the ways in which our computational worldview is at once mirrored by, and imbricated in, software’s tendency to reduce the diversity of the world to a ‘unified, hierarchized, straited, [and] authoritative’ output (2009: 208), which, in turn, lends itself to a highly instrumentalised, that is, dehumanised, form of politics: The computer model eclipses the computer itself. Society must be managed and is being managed. Our best model for managing it is in the computer,

11 For more information on Dominic Cummings’ vision of a ‘networked’ politics, please see: Complexity, ‘Fog and Moonlight’, Prediction, and Politics II: Controlled Skids and Immune Systems (UPDATED), (2014) https://dominiccummings.com/2014/09/ 10/complexity-fog-and-moonlight-prediction-and-politics-ii-controlled-skids-and-immunesystems/.

3

PATHOLOGIES OF REASON IN COMPUTATIONAL CAPITALISM …

67

is the computer, and we manage it with computers and with computational understanding (Golumbia, 2009: 208).

3

Conclusion

In this chapter, I explored some of the cultural and political stakes of this circular mode of thought and action. Reframed in relation to the Frankfurt School critique of pathologies of reason, I attempted to develop this line of thought through the aperture of the network. While our computational worldview clearly cannot be reduced to a single concept, the ‘network has become the defining concept of our epoch’ (Chun, 2015: 289). Firstly, the network is today’s paradigmatic representation of our globalised and highly technologised societies. Secondly, the protocological, networked infrastructure of the internet has provided the technical foundation upon which the late modern restructuring of capitalist enterprise and governmental organisation rests (Galloway & Thacker, 2007). Thirdly, network analytics is the ‘motor’ of computational capitalism’s mode of value extraction and is increasingly mobilised more broadly as a science of governance (see Gansing & Luchs, 2020). Resonating with the Frankfurt School, the networkisation of society has also been attended by an increase in awareness among theorists of the digital that reason itself is somehow broken, reduced to crude varieties of statistical and other calculative forms of reason (Apprich, 2020; Berry, 2019; Han, 2017). Indeed, it is not hyperbolic to suggest that within late modern societies we have witnessed the capture of the social by the network rationalities of the digital. To further sketch the political risks posed by this situation, I want to point to Habermas’ account of the colonisation of the lifeworld by instrumental reason: As the networks of instrumental action increase in their density and complexity, so they gradually intrude into the lifeworld and absorb its functions. Strategic decisions are left to markets or placed in the hands of expert administrators. The transparency of the lifeworld is gradually obscured, and the bases of action and decision are withdrawn from public scrutiny and from possible democratic control. (Finlayson, 2005: 56)

These risks have only been amplified with the increased automation and obfuscation of decision-making processes under conditions of computational capitalism (Pasquale, 2015). Indeed, today, ever more spheres of

68

J. STOCKMAN

life are tracked, mapped, analysed, and shaped by networked technologies and their associated rationalities, which simultaneously modulate human thought and behaviour while bypassing the critical faculties of human reason. Rather than the much discussed promise of user-empowerment, computational capitalism has instead given rise to a regime of what Zuboff terms ‘epistemic inequality’, ‘defined as unequal access to learning imposed by private commercial mechanisms of information capture, production, analysis and sales’ and ‘best exemplified in the fast-growing abyss between what we know and what is known about us’ (2020). Thus, while narratives around technology often conflate its advance with the progress of scientific rationality, we might do well to remember Marcuse’s warning: ‘[i]n the construction of the technological reality, there is no such thing as a purely rational scientific order; the process of technological rationality is a political process’ (Marcuse, 2007: 172). This chapter has sought to contribute to what we might call a ‘critical theory of networks’, written with the aim of drawing attention to the mediation of epistemic forms of power within computational capitalism. While the issues raised undoubtedly require a far more subtle and in-depth series of reflections than offered here, I hope to have demonstrated the potential utility of social pathology diagnosis as an approach to engaging with these problems.

References Adorno, T. (2005a). Minima Moralia: Reflections on a damaged life. London: Verso. Adorno, T. (2005b). Critical models, interventions & catchwords. New York: Columbia University Press. Adorno, T. (2007). Negative dialectics. London: Continuum. Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments. CA: Stanford University Press. Agre, P. (1994). Surveillance and capture: Two models of privacy. The Information Society, 10(2), 101–127. Anderson, C. (2008). The end of theory: The data deluge makes the scientific model obsolete. Wired Magazine. https://www.uvm.edu/pdodds/files/pap ers/others/2008/anderson2008a.pdf. Apprich, C. (2020). The never-ending network: A repetitive and (thus) differentiating concept of our time. In K. Gansing, & I. Luchs (Eds.), The eternal network: The ends and becomings of network culture. Amsterdam and Berlin: Institute of Network Cultures and Transmediale.

3

PATHOLOGIES OF REASON IN COMPUTATIONAL CAPITALISM …

69

Barabási, A.-L. (2010). Bursts: The hidden pattern behind everything we do. New York: Dutton. Barabási, A.-L., & Bonabeau, E. (2003). Scale-free networks. In Scientific America. https://barabasi.com/f/124.pdf. Baudrillard, J. (2010). The agony of power. Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Berns, T., & Rouvroy, A. (2013). Algorithmic governmentality and prospects of emancipation: Disparateness as a precondition for individuation through relationships? Reseaux (English version), 177, 163–196. Berry, D. (2011). The philosophy of software: Code and mediation in the digital age. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Berry, D. (2014). Critical theory and the digital. London: Bloomsbury. Berry, D. (2019). Against infrasomatization: Towards a critical theory of algorithms. In D. Bigo, E. Isin, & E. Ruppert (Eds.), Data politics: Worlds, subjects, rights. Open Access Content: Routledge. Berry, D. (2020). Explanatory publics: Explainability and democratic thought. In B. Balaskas & C. Rito (Eds.), Fabricating publics: The dissemination of culture in the post-truth era. Open Humanities Press. Brandes, U., Robins, G., McCranie, A., & Wasserman, S. (2013). What is network science? Network Science, 1, 1–15. Brooks, D. (2013). The philosophy of data. The New York Times. https://www. nytimes.com/2013/02/05/opinion/brooks-the-philosophy-of-data.html. Burrows, R. (2019). On neoreaction. The Sociological Review. https://www.the sociologicalreview.com/on-neoreaction/. Carr, N. (2014). The limits of social engineering. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/04/16/173156/the-lim its-of-social-engineering/. Cheney-Lippold, J. (2011). A new algorithmic identity: Soft biopolitics and the modulation of control. Theory, Culture and Society, 28(6), 164–181. Chun, W. (2011). Programmed visions: Software and memory. London: MIT Press. Chun, W. (2015). Networks NOW: Belated too early. In D. Berry & M. Dieter (Eds.), Postdigital aesthetics, art, computation and design. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Chun, W. (2018). Queering homophily. In C. Apprich, W. Chun, F. Cramer, & H. Steyerl (Eds.), Pattern discrimination. London: University of Minnesota Press. Danaylov, N. (2016). A transhumanist manifesto. https://www.singularityw eblog.com/a-transhumanist-manifesto/. Feenberg, A. (2013). Marcuse’s phenomenology: Reading chapter six of onedimensional man. Constellations, 20(4), 604–614. Ferguson, N. (2018). The square and the tower: Networks and power, from the freemasons to Facebook (e-book version). New York: Penguin Books.

70

J. STOCKMAN

Finlayson, J. G. (2005). Habermas: A very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Finley, K. (2013). Geeks for monarchy: Rise of neoreactionaries. Tech Crunch. https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-monarchy/. Floridi, L. (Ed.). (2015). The onlife manifesto: Being human in a hyperconnected era. Springer Open. Freyenhagen, F. (2015). Honneth on social pathologies: A critique. Critical Horizons, 16(2), 131–152. Fromm, E. (1963). The sane society. New York: Rinehart and Winston. Galloway, A., & Thacker, E. (2007). The exploit: A theory of networks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gansing, K. (2020). Introduction: Network means and ends. In K. Gansing, & I. Luchs (Eds.), The eternal network: The ends and becomings of network culture. Amsterdam and Berlin: Institute of Network Cultures and Transmediale. Gansing, K., & Luchs, I. (Eds.). (2020). The eternal network: The ends and becomings of network culture. Amsterdam and Berlin: Institute of Network Cultures and Transmediale. Gershman, S., Horvitz, E., & Tenenbaum, J. (2015). Computational rationality: A converging paradigm for intelligence in brains, minds, and machines. Science, 349(6245). https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/dow nload?doi=10.1.1.720.2764&rep=rep1&type=pdf. Golumbia, D. (2009). The cultural logic of computation. London: Harvard University Press. Halpern, O. (2014). Beautiful data: A history of reason since 1945. London: Duke University Press. Han, B. (2017). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and new technologies of power. London: Verso. Harris, N. (2019). Recovering the critical potential of social pathology diagnosis. European Journal of Social Theory, 22(1), 45–62. Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology and other essays. London: Garland Publishing. Held, D. (2004). Introduction to critical theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. Great Britain: Polity Press. Honneth, A. (2000). The possibility of a disclosing critique of society: The dialectic of enlightenment in light of current debates in social criticism. Constellations, 7 (1), 116–127. Honneth, A. (2009). Pathologies of reason: On the legacy of critical theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Horkheimer, M. (2002). Critical theory: Selected essays. New York: Continuum. Horkheimer, M. (2004). Eclipse of reason. London: Continuum.

3

PATHOLOGIES OF REASON IN COMPUTATIONAL CAPITALISM …

71

Hui, Y., & Halpin, H. (2015). Collective individuation: The future of the social web. In G. Lovink, & M. Rasch (Eds.), Unlike us reader: Social media monopolies and their alternatives, INC Reader # 8. https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/unlike-us-reader-socialmedia-monopolies-and-their-alternatives/. Irani, L. (2015). The cultural work of microwork. New Media and Society, 17 (5), 720–739. Jaeggi, R. (2016). What (if anything) is wrong with capitalism? Dysfunctionality, exploitation and alienation: Three approaches to the critique of capitalism. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 54(Spindel Supplement), 44–65. Jaeggi, R. (2018). Critique of forms of life. London: Harvard University Press. Jagoda, P. (2016). Network aesthetics. London: The University of Chicago Press. Jarvis, S. (1998). Adorno: A critical introduction. New York: Routledge. Jia, B. (2018). Announcing PyTorch 1.0 for both research and production, Facebook engineering. https://engineering.fb.com/ai-research/announcing-pytorch-10-for-both-research-and-production/. Kitchin, R. (2011). The programmable city. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 38, 945–951. Klein, N. (2020). How big tech plans to profit from the pandemic. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/may/13/naomiklein-how-big-tech-plans-to-profit-from-coronavirus-pandemic. Kramer, A., Guillory, J., & Hancock, J. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. PNAS, 111(24). Lukács, G. (1971). History and class consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Manovich, L. (2013). Software takes command. London: Bloomsbury. Marcuse, H. (2000). An essay on liberation. Boston: Beacon Press. Marcuse, H. (2004). Some social implications of modern technology. In D. Kellner (Ed.), Technology, war and fascism: Collected papers of Herbert Marcus (Vol. 1). Taylor & Francis e-Library. Marcuse, H. (2007). One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. London: Routledge Classics. Marcuse, H. (2011). From ontology to technology: Fundamental tendencies of industrial society. In D. Kellner & C. Pierce (Eds.), Philosophy, psychoanalysis and emancipation: Collected papers of Herbert Marcuse (Vol. 5). London: Routledge. Marcuse, H., & Neumann, F. (2004). A history of the doctrine of social change. In D. Kellner (Ed.), Technology, war and fascism: Collected papers of Herbert Marcuse (Vol. 1). Taylor & Francis e-Library. Morozov, E. (2013). To save everything click here: The folly of technological solutionism. New York: Public Affairs. Noble, S. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York: New York University Press.

72

J. STOCKMAN

O’Connor, B. (2013). Adorno. London: Routledge. Pasquale, F. (2015). The black box society: The secret algorithms that control money and information. London: Harvard University Press. Pasquale, F. (2017). From territorial to functional sovereignty: The case of Amazon, law and political economy. https://lpeblog.org/2017/12/06/ from-territorial-to-functional-sovereignty-the-case-of-amazon/. Pentland, S. (2008). Honest signals: How they shape our world. London: MIT Press. Pentland, S. (2015). Social physics: How social networks can make us smarter. New York: Penguin Books. Piergiacomi, A. (2016). What would an AI government look like? https://www. quora.com/What-would-an-AI-government-look-like?share=1. Schecter, D. (2019). Critical theory and sociological theory: On late modernity and social statehood. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Schmidt, E. (2020). Eric Schmidt: I used to run Google. Silicon Valley could lose to China. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/ 27/opinion/eric-schmidt-ai-china.html. Steyerl, H. (2018). A sea of data: Pattern recognition and corporate animism (Forked Version). In C. Apprich, W. Chun, F. Cramer, & H. Steyerl (Eds.), Pattern discrimination. London: University of Minnesota Press. Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time, 1: The fault of epimetheus. CA: Stanford University Press. Stiegler, B. (2019). The age of disruption: Technology and madness in computational capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Stiegler, B. (2020). Nanjing lectures 2016–2019. London: Open Humanities Press. Thiel, P. (2009). The education of a libertarian. Cato Unbound. https://www. cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian. Weizenbaum, J. (1984). Computer power and human reason: From judgement to calculation. New York: Pelican Books. Wolfram, S. (2002). A new kind of science. https://www.wolframscience.com/ nks/. Zuboff, S. (2019). “We make them dance”: Surveillance capitalism, the rise of instrumentarian power, and the threat to human rights. In R. F. Jørgensen (Ed.), Human rights in the age of platforms. London: MIT Press. Zuboff, S. (2020). You are now remotely controlled: Surveillance capitalists control the science and the scientists, the secrets and the truth. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/01/24/opinion/sunday/surveillance-capitalism.html.

CHAPTER 4

Pathologies of Digital Communication: On the Ascendancy of Right Populism Estevão Bosco and Wagner Costa Ribeiro

Today, lies, deception, conspiracy theories and ‘bullshit’ undercut the online circulation of professional journalism (Freelon & Wells, 2020: 150).1 In 2016, a heavily armed 28-year-old man attacked a pizzeria in Washington, DC (#Pizzagate), where, according to online rumours, an international sex trafficking network was supposedly running under the auspices of the presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her husband (Aisch et al., 2016). Two years later, in Sri Lanka, residents, including Buddhist monks, led an anti-Muslim riot based on discriminatory Facebook posts by a young local (Fisher & Taub, 2018). The UK is leaving 1 We would like to thank Frédéric Vandenberghe, Neal Harris, and an anonymous reviewer for their many useful comments on earlier drafts.

E. Bosco (B) · W. Costa Ribeiro University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil W. Costa Ribeiro e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Harris (ed.), Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_4

73

74

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

the European Union after a flawed referendum, where Leave campaigners influenced public opinion by massively targeting portions of citizens with online disinformation (Cadwalladr, 2017; see also Delanty’s chapter in this volume). Cambridge Analytica and Facebook afforded the informational logistics to elect Trump and gave prominence to right-wing extremists in US politics (Benkler et al., 2018). In Brazil, WhatsApp, and broader social media, jumped Bolsonaro, a retired paratrooper known for his fascistic, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and now ‘ecocidal’ agenda, from the lower clergy of national politics right into the presidential office.2 The real-world consequences of the social web go far beyond the rantings of ‘idiots’ with digital megaphones, as Umberto Eco famously put it in a speech at Turin University in 2015 (see Renata, 2017). These events illustrate what has now become apparent: that the social web has changed the communicative infrastructure of social life. One of these changes consists of shaping a hybrid media ecosystem where the roles of content producer and consumer conflate as ‘prosumer’ (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010) as various media platforms integrate. Five years since Eco’s speech, digital communication has become ubiquitous, making the distinction between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ increasingly redundant (Delanty, 2018: 202–207). Digital communication and, in particular, the social web,3 have altered the way we use language, impacting subjectivation processes. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, with the social distancing and (self-)confinement it imposes upon large portions of humanity, consolidated the ‘real-virtual’ co-constitution of social life. However, despite the earthquakes it continues to cause, the social web has arguably not brought anything substantially ‘new’ to the political world as of yet: white supremacists, misogynists, and fascists existed long before Internet 2.0. As is well-known, technological development bears both positive and negative outcomes. While the Internet brings society to an unprecedented level of integration, enabling us to know more about

2 For a short biography of Bolsonaro, see Benites et al. (2019). 3 Each online social platform affords a particular design to digital communication. Given

that the particular, communicative affordances of Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc., are secondary to our argument, we only differentiate social media from private messaging communication, such as WhatsApp. Beyond this differentiation, every time we speak of ‘digital communication’ or the ‘social web’ we are broadly referring to technologically mediated communication.

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

75

each other and the world, it also scrambles the social fabric. In periods of transition, in this ‘interregnum’, as Gramsci famously put it, where ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born […] a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’ (1971: 276). In this chapter, we address the relationship between communication in the social web and social pathologies, not as causality, but as an ‘elective affinity’ (see Waisbord, 2018). Digital communication undergirds the current widespread disinformation4 and the ascendancy of (far-)right populism in the democratic world as a non-determinant pre-condition. It is not pathological per se. The issue here, as Nootje Marres remarks, lies in the fact that the social web is a ‘truth-less public sphere by design’ (Marres, 2018: 435). Thus, it forms the contemporary background of the deepening of the legitimation crisis we have been witnessing in many democracies since the 1970s (Habermas, 1976, 1986), whereby political institutions do not implement what citizens expect them to, and, increasingly, democratic politics regresses to old-fashion nationalisms and the tyranny of the majority. Our primary argument reads as follows: the ascendancy of (far-)right populism in the democratic world has some of its contextual roots in colonisation processes of the lifeworld unleashed by the social web. We are concerned here with the relationship between social processes running on/in the social web and the undermining of democracy. This process, as we hope to demonstrate, is social-pathological in nature. A normative tension running through the social web lies in the fact that digital communication is commonly associated with discourses of democratisation,5 while, conversely, by its very design, it promotes mistrust and authoritarian trends. Thus, pervading our argument is the understanding that, counter-intuitively, the social web jeopardises free communication, damages intersubjective understanding, and undermines democratic self-realisation.

4 Disinformation has been differentiated from other misleading online activities, such as ‘misinformation’ and ‘bullshit’. For useful conceptual definitions, see Benkler et al. (2018: 23–38). 5 As Mark Zuckerberg (2016) stubbornly, or opportunistically, insists, stating: ‘Our goal is to give every person a voice. We believe deeply in people […] Assuming that people understand what is important in their lives and that they can express those views has driven not only our community, but democracy overall’.

76

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

To develop this argument, we draw on Habermas’ social pathology framework as a resource to engage with empirical research on the attention economy, cyber-ethnography, socio-cybernetics and political communication. Far from being exhaustive, this bridging between critical social theory and social research merely aims at identifying developments whose clarification aids in seeing through the collective dizziness and the profusion of voices.6 Hence, our aim is more exploratory than explanatory. While this chapter’s broad contribution resides in furthering the diagnosis of social pathologies emanating from digital communication, our particular contribution lies in bringing insights on the increasing significance of private messaging services in the current conjuncture. Although we emphasise disturbances affecting social integration and the nature of the changes brought by the social web, as shall become apparent, both point towards disorders consistent with the deeper crises of the times. To that aim, we analyse both US and Brazilian politics, however, considering the unprecedented ascendancy of far-right populism in the latter, we engage with the Brazilian context as a primary illustration. Two reasons justify this focus. First, the Brazilian hybrid media ecosystem, which fully integrates the WhatsApp private messaging service and the social web, takes on an extreme shape,7 and may be indicative of disruptive developmental trends soon to emerge elsewhere.8 Second, because the political usage (i.e. propaganda) of the social web has led to a total crisis in the country, whereby historical and contextual systemic dysfunctionalities combine with a deep politicisation of the lifeworld, furthering sociomoral, economic, political, ecological and existential crises (see Vandenberghe, 2019; Pinheiro-Machado & Scalco, 2020; PinoCabral, 2020). Hence, we argue that the far-right populist ascendancy in Brazil is a political unfolding partially explainable by social pathologies triggered by how the social web effects communication.

6 In a broad sense, the implication of our argument echoes the need for recovering the relationship between critical theory and social research. 7 Similar developments are also occurring in India with Narendra Modi’s WhatsAppbacked Hindu fundamentalism (Mishra, 2019) and Myanmar, where public authorities and civilians are pushing for an ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minority Rohingya people (Mozur, 2018; Ebbighausen, 2018). 8 In the UK, William Davies (2020) notices this point in his analysis of disinformation around governmental, anti-pandemic measures that has spread in WhatsApp’s groups.

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

77

Like the psychological case of neurosis, social pathologies characterise a suffering about which, usually, one can only name symptoms, not causes. They exist in great diversity and may develop unnoticed (Harris, 2019). A critical dialogical endeavour is a crucial part of making them visible. By diagnosing the deleterious effects of digital communication upon the conditions of possibility for democratic self-realisation, we hope this chapter may shed light on the contours of the increasingly authoritarian, post-truth condition in which we live.

1

Habermas’ Social Pathology Framework

Since Rousseau, the framing of ‘social pathology’ has enabled sociologists and social philosophers to critique the harmful impact of technical developments on social life (Honneth, 2007: 3–48). Underpinning such diagnoses is a dialectical conception of history which brings forth the inherent ambivalence of our attempts at self-realisation: in the pursuit of the good life, we may end up adopting a (self-)objectifying attitude and externalising instrumental means which impede the realisation of our collective strivings. Habermas’ social pathology framework is anchored on such a dialectical understanding of the historical process. In particular, he opposes a ‘healthy’ or, what he terms, a ‘counterfactual’ conception of communication to external, outwardly precipitated destructive consequences of technical progress. In doing so, he brings twentieth-century developments in social philosophy and sociology to bear and grounds his framework on renewed insights on the social-theoretical significance of language. Boiling down the diversity of forms of reason into two universal embodiments, Habermas demonstrates how ‘communicative’ and ‘instrumental’ rationalities develop immanently in action orientations and coordination (Habermas, 1998: 307–342), giving shape to a double-edged, evolutionary conception of society as ‘lifeworld’ and ‘system rationalisation’ (Habermas, 1987: 113–198). His focus on both the actor’s intention and action coordination implies that the lifeworld, wherein communicative activity resides (e.g., the family, education, social movements), and the system, which is steered by strategic or cognitiveinstrumental activity (i.e., the state and the market), do not differentiate solely based on action orientations (like Weber), but also as a result of social and systemic integration; as coordinating processes of social relations which bear a logic of their own (see also Neves, 2018). In

78

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

crude summary, Habermas’ dialectical understanding of the historical process reads as follows: to neutralise the destructive side effects of technical development (system), corresponding cognitive and sociomoral developments have to form (lifeworld). Given that our primary aim is sociologically-invested, the following reconstruction of the theoretical architecture underpinning Habermas’ social pathology framework draws selectively on its formal-pragmatic foundation. Grounding social life on language-use precipitates an intersubjective conception of social action occurring through everyday communication. Habermas builds up his framework from the elementary experience of a ‘speaker’ coming to an understanding with a ‘hearer’9 about something. Ontologically, this means that the dialectical entwining of speaker, hearer and world foregrounds social life (Habermas, 1984: 275–279; 1992: 57– 79; see also Cooke, 1997: 51–94). To the extent that intersubjectivity is concerned, understanding the semantic meaning of what is said is not sufficient for action coordination to take place; the hearer must acknowledge the reasons justifying a speaker’s statement. Reasons, of course, do not emerge from nowhere; one evokes them in given conditions or, as Habermas further specifies, in ‘acceptability conditions’ (Habermas, 1998: 81–88). Taking on the perspective of participants, Habermas identifies three universal validity claims that a speaker and a hearer mutually raise, i.e. independent of context and culture. Together, these form the lineaments of communicative action: when one refers to something as a fact, she raises a truth claim about the objective world (i.e. ‘the totality of all entities about which true statements are possible’); when one wonders about the adequacy of one’s behaviour, she raises a claim to righteousness about the social world (‘the totality of all legitimately regulated interpersonal relations’); finally, when one expresses her intentions, she raises a subjective claim to truthfulness in the subjective world (experiences, emotional state, ‘to which one has privileged access’) (Habermas, 1984: 100; see also 76–94, 98–101). To speak of ‘claims’ to validity assumes that reaching understanding is a relational process whereby participants

9 When using the term ‘hearer’ instead of ‘listener’, which may seem more natural to the English ear, Habermas follows American pragmatists such as Austin and Searle in that to understand an utterance assumes not only processing semantic meaning but also context, i.e. who says something, how one says it and what one intends to convey in given conditions.

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

79

decentre their perspectives to access reasons they evoke to one another. It then characterises an intersubjective process of both critical dialogue and mutual recognition, whereby one reviews her previous position in light of the reasons offered by the other. The rationality embedded in such a process emanates from participants’ capacity to broaden their understanding about something which they previously held and, ultimately, to share an interpretation in the course of dialogue. Truth, righteousness and truthfulness constitute the conditions of acceptability which participants evoke simultaneously in their attempt to reach mutual understanding. In Habermas’ words: ‘Communicative action relies on a cooperative process of interpretation in which participants relate simultaneously to something in the objective, the social, and the subjective worlds, even when they thematically stress only one of the three components in their utterances’ (Habermas, 1987: 120– 121). Such simultaneity does not entail that the validity claims are on an equal footing. It means that these are interdependent in succeeded attempts at communication. The prominence of one of these depends on the theme under scrutiny in a given situation. Herein lies the normative core of communication: for meaningful interaction to happen, a hearer must assume the truth of what a speaker says, the righteousness of how she says it, and her sincere intentions, which both constantly review as dialogue unfolds. It is in this specific, pre-conditional sense that communicative action foregrounds a counterfactual form of a ‘healthy’ social interaction. Two formal assumptions may be drawn out from the above, which are of particular significance to our diagnostic intent. First, to state that communication is intersubjective in nature implies acknowledging that succeeded attempts at communication assumes intersubjective accountability or responsibility (Habermas, 2003: 93–99). If participants do not see each other as accountable for what they say, communication collapses. Second, participants must assume an objective world as ‘identical for all possible observers ’ and a social world ‘intersubjectively shared by members ’, otherwise their worldview would conflate with the world itself. When such assumptions are not sufficiently regulative, communication is ‘withdrawn from rational discussion and thus from criticism’, i.e. participants tend to adopt a dogmatic position towards social reality (Habermas, 1984: 50– 51; see also 2003: 88–93). It is only against the backdrop of an objective world taken as identical, and a social world assumed as intersubjectively

80

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

shared, both appearing as a common reference in interaction, that participants are capable of handling dissonances in their interpretations (see also Lafont, 2018: 54–55). Precisely because we are cognitively capable of referring to different worlds, action does not embody communicative reason alone. Instrumental interventions in the world bear a strategic attitude. Whereas a speaker and a hearer oriented towards reaching understanding coordinate their action based on a critical stance and a potentially shared interpretation about something, a speaker oriented towards utilitarian success might coordinate her action with a hearer based on means-ends calculation, seeking strategic influence (Habermas, 1984: 328–337; 1992: 78–84; see also Strecker, 2018). Strategic action then presupposes a (self)objectifying attitude and drains its motivating force from instrumental rationality, whereas communicative action runs through the performative attitude prompted by the ‘rationally motivating force of achieving understanding’ (Habermas, 1992: 80). Unlike communicative action, strategic action entails a purposive intervention ‘in the objective world alone’ (Habermas, 1992: 81). However mutually exclusive these motivations and coordination mechanisms may be, it does not follow that strategic attitudes cannot be borne out in lifeworld contexts. When this happens, Habermas submits that strategic action takes on a ‘parasitic’ status over communicative action: ‘The latently strategic use of language is parasitic because it only functions when at least one side assumes that language is being used with an orientation toward reaching understanding. Whoever acts strategically in this must violate the sincerity condition of communicative action inconspicuously’ (Habermas, 1992: 82). In so far as utilitarian success carves up strategic action’s motivating and coordinating force and is conducive of profit-seeking or powerladen contexts, it is intimately connected to systemic integration. In turn, communicative action’s motivating and coordinating force lies on intersubjectivity and mutual understanding, thus prevailing in social integration (lifeworld). In the latter context, it follows that, at least counterfactually, participants recognise each other and coordinate their actions on the basis of the better argument, without the interference of strategic, success-oriented interests, i.e. in a domination-free context. As we argue below, the social web bears a strategic-like mode of action that parasitically encroaches upon communicative action and distorts social integration.

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

81

The lifeworld forms the symbolic background and horizon of communicative action. As a reservoir of knowledge that participants acquire from the given fact of having inherited language and culture from those who preceded them (Habermas, 1987: 136–137), the lifeworld provides participants with a horizon through which they are able to access the world and move within every changing thematisation in a given situation (Habermas, 1987: 119–124). Hence, it equips participants with communicative resources which underpin their experience of a historically and socially pre-structured world. In principle, the lifeworld is non-problematic in so far as it embodies acting subjects with taken-for-granted assumptions about the truth of entities constituting the objective world, the righteousness of social norms, the truthfulness of subjective experiences. By internally connecting the lifeworld to communicative activity, Habermas situates all social activity whose coordination runs through reaching understanding within lifeworld contexts, be these institutional or not (see Neves, 2018). However, in determinate situations or contexts, elements of the lifeworld may be dragged to the surface. Whenever a changing situation evokes validity claims that participants do not share, or that ‘defamiliarises’ taken-for-granted assumptions, the lifeworld may become a source of misunderstandings, disjunctions, or conflicts. When participants, equipped with communicative resources of their own, recurrently fail to reconcile social bonds, all sorts of dissonant experiences ensue. Substantially, communicative action then reproduces the lifeworld. In Habermas’ social-theoretical architecture, this internal connection accounts for society’s symbolic reproduction. Every time we communicate, be it with others or with ourselves, symbolic reproduction is at work. Arguing that the lifeworld embeds participants in social solidarity when providing them with intersubjectively shared meaning and communicative competences, Habermas derives three components that define its structure: culture encompasses the ‘stock of knowledge’ and ‘interpretation schemes’ at participants disposal; society consists of ‘legitimate orders’ which provide participants with stable ‘social memberships’ and ‘solidarity’; and personality comprises ‘competences’ or ‘interactive capabilities’ that participants acquire throughout personal experience (Habermas, 1987: 138, 142). In short, these lifeworld components ‘lay down the forms of the intersubjectivity of possible understanding’ (Habermas, 1987: 126). Communicative action reproduces these components through three interdependent processes: cultural reproduction

82

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

renews inherited knowledge; social integration reasserts social solidarity and membership; and socialisation enables building up personal identities. ‘[E]ach of these reproduction processes contributes to maintaining all the components of the lifeworld’ (Habermas, 1987: 142). The lifeworld-communicative-action connection embeds subjects in the continuity of a symbolic reproduction that runs through the intercrossing affordances of meaning (culture), social solidarity (society), and communicative competences (personal identity). Altogether, the capacity to raise differentiated, world-referred validity claims at the action level and the structural differentiation of the lifeworld constitutes social integration and the practical-symbolic embodiment of the rationalisation of the lifeworld. A crucial manifestation of the latter is the sociomoral development towards deontological ethics and post-conventional morality: rather than being aprioristically defined, intersubjectively shared conceptions of the ‘good life’ emerge out of argumentative praxis as opposed to being prescribed by traditions (Habermas, 1990: 105–109). However, symbolic reproduction does not occur independently of the material embeddedness of social action. To symbolic reproduction, one must link society’s material reproduction. In the latter context, needs prompt the subject’s motivation, thus requiring one to intervene strategically in the world. Historically, the symbolic-structural differentiation characterising communicative action and the lifeworld overlaps with the gradual formation and differentiation of instrumental action in functionally stabilised subsystems, constituted by the market and the state. Success-oriented, systemic integration foregrounds cognitiveinstrumental rationality and has evolved as bureaucratisation and monetarisation. Unlike lifeworld contexts, the market and state do not require values and norms to reproduce. Instead of mutual understanding, the ‘delinguistified’ media of money and power steer action coordination in systemic integration (Habermas, 1987: 179–185). Systemic rationalisation then manifests as increasing functional differentiation, whereby reality-objectifying patterns of activity neutralise and progressively autonomise subjects’ subjectivity. To put it succinctly, Habermas defines the system as an autonomous, self-regulating sphere of society reproduced by purposive-rational activity (see Neves, 2018). To the extent that systemic functioning detaches from norms and values, subsystems exist as an external sphere to the lifeworld. Habermas’ (evolutionary) reasoning can be summed up as follows: developments in the lifeworld enable, in the first instance, the abstraction of action into

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

83

functional subsystems which, in the end, excessively autonomise from and threaten the lifeworld on which they depend, thereby forcing sociomoral changes (in the lifeworld) that ultimately lead back to systemic changes. Pathological consequences erupt when bureaucratisation and monetarisation invade or excessively determine contexts of social activity (in the lifeworld) that are dependent on the communicative use of language to run properly, be these located in the private sphere or the public sphere. In Habermas’ words: ‘Unlike the material reproduction of the lifeworld, its symbolic reproduction cannot be transposed onto foundations of system integration without pathological side effects. Monetarization and bureaucratization appear to overstep the boundaries of normality when they instrumentalize an influx from the lifeworld that possesses its own inner logic’ (Habermas, 1987: 323). In Habermas’ framework, social pathologies boil up from the ideologically veiled mechanisms of systemic integration that the lifeworld internalises. In broad terms, when systemic, ‘delinguistified’ steering media (money and power) overtakes mutual understanding in lifeworld contexts, a colonisation process unfolds, the primary symptoms of which are the impoverishment or ‘technicisation’ of communication and, ultimately, the reification of social relations (see Iser, 2018). System rationalisation is pathological insofar it disturbs reproduction processes of lifeworld components. Within cultural reproduction, crises manifest as a ‘loss of meaning’ (culture), ‘legitimation withdrawal’ (society), and disturbances in ‘orientation and education’ (personality). In social integration, it destabilises ‘collective identities’ (culture), ‘legitimately ordered interpersonal relations’, which become anomic (society), and alienates ‘social memberships’ (personality). Finally, crises in socialisation provoke the ‘rupture of tradition’ (culture), ‘withdrawal of motivation’ (society), and ‘psychopathologies’ (personality). For each of these disturbances, Habermas associates a dimension of evaluation: the ‘rationality of knowledge’ for cultural reproduction, the ‘solidarity of members’ for social integration, and ‘personal responsibility’ for socialisation (Habermas, 1984: 142–143). Distortions of communication become systematic when systemic, selfsteered functional differentiation (or evolution) unleashes unintended consequences which destabilise the rationality of legitimate knowledge, social solidarity, and personal identities. At the action level, these occur when subjects internalise (self-)objectifying categories from the culture industry, or from their employment, and understand themselves, interpret

84

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

the condition they find themselves in, and coordinate their actions in lifeworld contexts through them (see Hartmann, 2018). When this occurs, technical development reifies the communicative process through which subjects make sense of themselves and the world. Pervading distortions lie in reason becoming instrumentally one-sided, the fragmentation of consciousness, and the depleting of sources of meaning and legitimation. From the above, one concludes that argumentative praxis constitutes the ideal background that technical development may distort, when the latter’s non-normative, alien steering media ‘technicise’ the former’s normatively oriented and counterfactual, domination-free use of language. In what follows, we interplay the social web’s effects as a technical development against the background of normalcy of communicative action. We first connect the critique of the attention economy with some core tenets of the social web’s propagation dynamic to show changes that digital communication has brought to face-to-face communication and social integration. The broad sociological form these shifts take is an externally-governed and information-based social integration that levels down to propagation. Distortions then ensue, which we analyse in Sect. 3 of this chapter.

2

Communication and the Social Web

Based on Habermas’ framework, the social web can be grasped as a market-originated technical development that unleashes unintended consequences, which neither the state, nor the market itself, stabilise. However, as we argue below, the social web cannot be adequately understood as a conventional development of means for material reproduction in so far as it effects the ontological relationship between language and reality in a particular way: digital communication changes the way we externalise meaning when inserting a new social-psychic technique into speaker, hearer, and world entwining. It is in this fundamental sense that the social web alters the communicative infrastructure of social life. Habermas’ theory of society assumes a face-to-face model of communication. With the invention of the smartphone and the personal computer, as well as the Internet and its global, hyperlinked structure, ‘face-toscreen-to-face’ communication is now as frequent as face-to-face communication. As Michael Meyen et al. (2010) argue, digital communication has become formative of one’s habitus . This means that the social web inserts a functional differentiation at the level of discourse, one that,

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

85

as it were, hitches the ‘virtual’ to the ‘real’. When altering the techniques of communication, the social web impacts on subjectivation, and, accordingly, the reproduction processes of the lifeworld. To address these changes, we first need to understand how the social web’s communicative infrastructure shapes social interaction. In broad terms, we argue that it does so by framing social integration as propagation. We develop this argument by first navigating recent literature on the critique of the attention economy and the algorithmic governance of social networks. Based on this, we emphasise four infrastructural features that frame social integration as propagation. Finally, we analyse how digital communication effects the formation of political opinion. This reconstruction of the core impacts of the social web on social integration and the formation of political opinion paves the conditions within which crisis phenomena erupt in social solidarity. The Social Web’s Algorithm-Governed Attention Economy In a 1997 conference paper, Michael Goldhaber anticipated that the Internet, with the interconnectivity it affords, would change motivational and social organisational patterns. The implication of this is nothing short of a ‘whole new set of economic laws’, which would ‘replace the ones we all have learned’ (Goldhaber, 1997). As an economist, Goldhaber first addresses value and its definition under this new, informational condition. At first glance, one would think that information is key for defining value in the social web. Information abounds as never before. However, as Goldhaber remarks, economics does not concern itself primarily with abundance, but with scarcity: ‘There is something else that moves the Net, flowing in the opposite direction of information, namely attention’ (Goldhaber, 1997). One can only pay attention to one thing at a time, entailing that, in a context where information overloads, actors tend to compete for it. In economic terms, scarcity then relates to attention rather than money. Here, a key difference lies in that, unlike money, attention does not come in ‘[interchangeable] units’, i.e. money for ‘standardised goods’ (Goldhaber, 1997). In an attention-based economy, value is defined by content dissemination and authenticity. It follows that the understanding of wealth as a property also shifts (Goldhaber, 1997). As the advertising industry demonstrates, attention is highly variable but can nonetheless last. This sets into motion a distinct logic of accumulation: whereas in conventional capitalism one

86

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

accumulates by means of private ownership, in the attention economy accumulation runs through making content public, by sharing it, and getting others’ attention. This does not entail the redundancy of material providence; instead, it means that commodification has reached a cognitive capacity: attention bears value per se and becomes an exchange currency. The Internet foregrounds an economy running through content abundance where attention has to last as much as possible. Succinctly put, Goldhaber submits that attention generates money, not the other way around. To accumulate requires one to develop cultural technologies as means to produce or stimulate attention in a determinate direction. All media resources that the social web puts at users’ disposal (sharing posts, comments, photos, videos, in-built apps, hyperlinks, among many others) aim at fostering engagement. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s grammatological approach, Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley argue that, by providing psychic and social techniques which translate human behaviour into codes and symbols, cultural technologies exert a ‘form of power’ on subjects ‘[consisting] in the tendency towards the displacement of “attentional” techniques, which produce “deep” attention, by industrially mass-produced “attentional technologies” that are modelled to generate one particular kind of attention – to consumption’ (Crogan and Kisnley, 2012: 12). Such power is both biopower (as it takes on the body) and psycho-power (mentality): it governs users’ cognitive capacity to pay attention and induces the ‘interiorisation of the attention commodification logic’ (ibid.). In the social web’s attention economy, Facebook has particular significance. It is by far the largest social network, connecting over 2.8 billion people,10 and operates as an integrated platform. It provides a ‘model for the infrastructure of the social web itself’ (Bucher, 2012: 5; see also Benkler et al., 2018: 10). To address the logic of the attention economy running through Facebook and, by extension, the social web, one must understand two internally connected dimensions constituting its social space: how attention has overtaken money as a currency and how algorithms govern users’ attention so as to shape a consumption-oriented social integration.

10 See Facebook Earnings Presentation at: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/ doc_financials/2020/q4/FB-Earnings-Presentation-Q4-2020.pdf.

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

87

To make social interaction economically meaningful, it has to be mathematically translated. Facebook’s Open Graph protocol11 performs this translation through two procedures (Bucher, 2012). It establishes a universal coding through which semantic content can be recognised by, and converted into, Facebook’s ‘graph objects’ (Bucher, 2012: 5).12 To do so, an additional, ‘meta-level mark-up code’ is inserted ‘[...] which functions as a form of cross-reference. This mark-up code turns external websites and digital objects into Facebook graph objects, understood as entities made legible by the Facebook platform’ (ibid.). By establishing such universal translatability in the web, ‘[the] Open Graph protocol describes a way to build a semantic map of the Internet’ (ibid.). The second procedure evolves around participation tools on Facebook, such as the ‘Reaction’ or share buttons or spaces for posting or commenting on someone’s post, which operate as inputs for modelling ‘topological structures consisting of nodes (points or objects in the graph) and edges (the lines connecting nodes)’ (ibid.). Among the defining features of such a topological structure that Taina Bucher identifies, we emphasise three that interest us directly. First, Facebook’s topological structure, which is designed by the Open Graph protocol, is a ‘centralised architecture that generates value by decentralising social action’ (Bucher, 2012: 6). In this way, it converts social action into an individual map of preferences based on users’ behaviour. Such conversion is a pre-condition for converting attention into a currency, for it enables casting a specific set of content to be displayed to the user. Here, attention is both a cognitive capacity and ‘a relational construct that emerges from the interactions between the technical support and the various nodes in the system’ (ibid.). Second, being constantly updated with data on users’ activity, the topological structure enables personalized typification based on the recurrence of both content (nodes) and connections (edges) and feeding users back with what is likely to catch their attention and keep them engaged. Third, the topological structure establishes social differentiation based on ‘social 11 Open Graph protocol is a programming language that enables the translation of any content in the web into metadata. By doing so, it homogenises content as objects recognisable by various devices (a cell phone, a tablet, a PC) and platforms (social networks, websites, etc.). 12 For Facebook’s algorithm, every item that users see in the newsfeed is an object (e.g. a text, image, video, inter alia) that forms a topological structure.

88

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

contexts’, which assemble users based on their interaction (edges) with content (nodes). As such, patterns of social differentiation emerge that are particularly suited for advertising: it provides ‘websites and brands’ with ‘socially [contextualised] content’, i.e., a target population (Bucher, 2012: 6–7). Altogether, these features imply that the formation of social groups and communities tends to be content self-referred, that is to say, ‘social bubbles’ are created. We return to this below. For now, we would like to emphasise the following: universal coding, the mathematical translation of social activity, the centralised architecture, content recurrency,13 and social context, enable the conversion of social interaction into attention-based value. What is crucial here is how such a topological structure can function to foster engagement, i.e. to support a mode of governance aimed at attention accumulation. This is where Facebook algorithm(s)14 come to the fore. Facebook’s algorithm hierarchises edges and nodes based on users’ behaviour (Bucher, 2018). Its elementary function is ‘gatekeeping’: it evaluates the significance of connections among users and/through objects so as to determine the visibility and ‘share-ability’ of content according to recorded activity and trends. It does so by implementing a ranking logic of nodes and edges that harvests ‘profile objects’ (personal information a user provides in her profile), ‘action logs’ (apps activity, liking something, check-ins, and so on), and ‘edge objects’ (connections through objects) (Bucher, 2018: 78). Such logic runs through at least three principles. Users’ activity and content recurrency determine degrees of affinity between objects (nodes) and connections (edges) (ibid.: 79). How one interacts with another user or an object typifies the weight of her engagement, which is measured by ascribing comparative value to edges and nodes: for instance, an inbox message weights more than a comment on a post about the same topic (ibid.; see also Bucher, 2012: 9). Finally, determining when one sees a particular kind of content accounts to the ‘right time’, as opposed to the ‘real-time’: timing involves weighting an edge and a node in a given period (e.g. the number of likes, views, 13 We use recurrency in the sense of the number of times a user interacts with another user or content comparatively to other users and content. 14 At first, Facebook’s governance of attention was performed by two main algorithms. EdgeRank and GraphRank provided a global score of a user’s online activity (Bucher, 2012). Today, these have been replaced by the somewhat mysterious notion of ‘Facebook algorithm(s)’ (Bucher, 2018: 77).

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

89

and shares through time) and context (elections, a terrorist attack, a user planning a trip) (ibid.: 80–81). By determining affinity, weight and timing, Facebook’s algorithm enables grasping individual and collective tastes and trends. It achieves this by tracking taste variations (such as watching a video of a different genre) and suggesting content to which users are likely to pay attention according to past and present activity. The aim here is to stimulate individual engagement by anticipating and directing one’s interests based on patterns and convergences of recorded behaviour: ‘[…] the type of content that is more likely to generate an interaction or prompt users to take action is made more visible and given priority’ (Bucher, 2018: 79). Facebook’s algorithmic governance of attention then bears a ‘circular logic’ (Bucher, 2018: 79) that weaves a personalised, ‘object-centric’, and ‘trend-oriented’ global score map of social relations (Bucher, 2012: 9– 11). Thus, Facebook establishes the ‘rationale for an attention economy [that] could be seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it seeks to actualize its predictions through its representation and mechanisms to reward participation’ (Bucher, 2012: 14). From the above, one can boil down Facebook’s governance of attention to two complementary procedures: while it translates and sorts users’ behaviour as information (affinity, weight, timing), it also stimulates users’ engagement by capturing preferences ‘in the making’. Combined, these procedures manage attention through an ever-updating, anticipatory, and highly personalised newsfeed, which determines what, how, and when users see a determinate content. The driving principle is the ‘influenceability of users’ (Marres, 2018: 436): attention technology does not predict social behaviour in the strict sense; it models it (Bucher, 2012). The algorithmic conversion of attention into an exchange currency implies that attention functions as a technically supported and accumulation-oriented psychic-social medium of action coordination. Facebook shapes social interaction as an externally, and technically mediated thematisation, immersing subjects into ever-changing situations (as the index finger scrolls down the newsfeed). Because it is anchored on a cognitive capacity, this business model frames social interaction unnoticeably, without users realising the commodification of their body, their mentality, and the relationships they establish. Aimed at fostering engagement, attention commodification impacts social integration by making

90

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

the social bond ephemeral, superfluous, interchangeable.15 It has become apparent by now that the social web is not designed for promoting the democratisation of discourse; it is at core an attention-based market. In this market, content-propagation is a function of attention accumulation: algorithmic selection propagates contents that are likely to keep users engaged. At least four ontological features can be drawn out to understand how the attention economy of the social web encroaches upon communication. First, attention governance captures what one can perceive, either psychic or social. Second, attention precedes communication in that no intersubjective understanding can be reached if participants are not attentive to one another. Third, attention can be induced: it involves someone or something exerting a directive power on a person to a certain degree (such as the way a leader influences people’s behaviour). Four, insofar as attention is externally and surreptitiously governed by the market, strategic influence and utilitarian goals coordinate action in the lifeworld as if it were domination-free communication. Broadly speaking, the social web then alters the conditions of possibility for speaker and hearer to understand each other and to access and make sense of the world, i.e. the conditions of possibility for intersubjectivity. Social Integration as Propagation In sociological terms, the social web’s attention economy alters the communicative infrastructure through which social reality is construed. The social web implements a relatively anonymous, self-overlapping, ideologically segregated dynamic of social integration that emphasises content-propagation over intersubjective understanding and social solidarity. Key to understanding this is what we referred to previously as the hybrid media ecosystem, where the roles of content producer and consumer become interchangeable, and social platforms, websites, professional journalism news, and, in the Brazilian case, private messaging services, fully integrate. In what follows, we draw on four features of this hybrid media ecosystem that characterise social integration as propagation, namely: anonymity, multiplatform linkage, the feedback loop, and the formation of echo chambers.

15 See, for instance, Bucher’s remarks on online friendship (2018: 8–15).

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

91

Unlike Facebook, WhatsApp users do not have a public profile, and there is no algorithmic governance of content. As communication is private, anonymity is legally protected and technologically secured through ‘end-to-end encryption’ (Santos et al., 2019: 309, 313–314). Either users do know each other or are just a phone number in a group. Groups are limited to 256 participants, and one can share a piece to up to five recipients at a time, be these a person or a group. Whereas Facebook forms an object-centric network, the WhatsApp network is ‘polycentric’ (i.e. user-to-user and group-based design), ‘segmented’ (limited membership to each group), and ‘integrated’ (user-to-user and intergroup linkage) (Santos et al., 2019: 317). The reader may now be wondering: given this anonymous, private design of the WhatsApp network, how does content propagate? First, one must consider multiplatform linkage: thanks to universal coding, hyperlinks enable the sharing of content from across the whole web through WhatsApp. This is how this app has become widely used, extending far beyond interpersonal communications, but also now incorporating business activity and news consumption in Brazil (Santos et al., 2019: 310; see also Carro, 2017). Second, the maths is quite simple: a user shares a piece (e.g. an article, post, photo, link, banner, meme, video) with one group (× 255 people, i.e. 256 minus the sharer), and if everyone in that group, in turn, shares it with another group, in a matter of seconds that piece reaches 65,536 (256 × 256) people (and so on). WhatsApp user-group networks set in motion a geometric, propagation dynamic—just like an epidemic. An additional resource is software content dissemination by private companies (see Arnaudo, 2017; Mello, 2020). To the extent that propagation is concerned, such network design imparts WhatsApp with social media-like functions (Santos et al., 2019), despite being intended for private messaging in the first place. A further differentiating characteristic of WhatsApp’s propagation dynamic compared to Facebook, which is algorithm mediated, is that users themselves run the selection and the dissemination of content. We return to this later. Given that multiplatform linkage integrates WhatsApp with Facebook and the social web more broadly, one must also include algorithmmediated propagation to understand the impact of the hybrid media ecosystem on social integration. This is where the feedback loop and echo chamber formation are particularly significant.

92

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

As we have pointed out, when updating the newsfeed based on users’ past activity and trends, Facebook algorithms tend to enmesh users into a self-referred, content recurrency (see also Knight, 2018). This is what a feedback loop is all about.16 It takes place within user–platform interaction and consists of amplifying a narrative solely based on algorithm-mediated engagement recurrence; that is, a narrative may become socially hegemonic regardless of truth (Benkler et al., 2018: 75–103). As described by Yochai Benkler and collaborators, the process is initiated by a user introducing content either in her timeline or a group’s, and, next, by being shared more widely. Users, ‘sockpuppet accounts’, and bots may participate in the amplification process till a narrative occupies users’ attention and the algorithmic selection of what a large audience sees. It merely takes one to feed up users and amplify content artificially to set the feedback loop into motion. Hence, one can manipulate it as an informational tool or a weapon: it may be targeted at persons, ideas, organisations, even communities, downgrading or promoting the social significance of a narrative. The feedback loop is then crucial to understand the social web’s propagation dynamic and, in particular, the overwhelming spread of disinformation. When instrumentalised for propaganda purposes, feedback loops display a network dynamic in which media outlets, political elites, activists, and publics form and break connections based on the contents of statements, and that progressively lowers the costs of telling lies that are consistent with a shared political narrative and increases the costs of resisting that shared narrative in the name of truth. A network caught within such a feedback loop makes it difficult for a media outlet or politician to adopt a consistently truth-focused strategy without being expelled from the network and losing influence in the relevant segment of the public. (Benkler et al., 2018: 33)

Within this, a crucial, cognitive-derived infrastructural feature is also at play: the formation of echo chambers. As we have argued, the social web 16 Here, we focus on the social characteristics of the feedback loop. However, it is pertinent to note that it also has a biological substrate. Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook vice-president, points out that social media offers short-term gratification through the user’s engagement (e.g. the Like-button) triggering a dopamine feedback loop (see Wang, 2017).

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

93

encourages users to compete for one another’s attention. The upshot is an overload of information and an increase of sensationalist, affect-laden content in social integration. As Marres remarks: Online platforms, then, reward messages that spread instantly and widely with even more visibility, and, as tabloid newspapers invested in maximizing advertising revenue also found out in previous decades, sensational rather than factual content turns out to satisfy this criterion of maximal “share-ability” best. A commercial logic here gives rise to a circular content economy, one without referent: content that gets shared a lot is rewarded with more visibility, thereby increasing its share-ability. (Marres, 2018: 430–431)

Flooded with attention-catching content, the dynamic of social integration running in the social web is conducive of information bias: the constant reassertion of one’s attitudes, ‘beliefs, convictions, fears, and prejudice’, personal and group identity; in sum, one’s ‘engagement with news and the world’ (Waisbord, 2018: 8). Recurrency-based algorithm selection immerses subjects into a personal, self-overlapping symbolic chain. Echo chambers therefore mean ideological insularity. Insofar as one tends to pay attention to something that either reasserts her worldview or provokes outrage, the social web is highly fertile terrain for amplifying biased, groundless narratives. The consequence of the feedback loop and echo chambers for social integration resides in the corrosion of the intersubjective basis of the social fabric when steering an individual-group cultural and political selfreferentialism. Social integration as propagation then involves significant shifts in social solidarity. At the cultural level, collective identities tend to narrow as feedback loops and echo chambers fragment social solidarity to ‘like-minded’ people. At the level of society, the scope of legitimate ordered interpersonal relations undergoes an entrenching process whereby assumptions over universally valid social norms and moral principles tend to become interpretatively one-sided, i.e. being affect-bound and seen as exclusive to a group or community and in opposition to others. Finally, ideological insulation sets tendencies towards a sense of social membership that is simultaneously narrow and diffuse, for it forms out of symbolic forms that are more or less homogenous and detached from social conditions.

94

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

Propagation and the Manufacture of Political Opinion It goes without saying that these infrastructural changes in communication and their impact on the dynamic of social integration raise significant issues to democratic will formation. Benkler et al.’s (2018) comprehensive account, Network Propaganda, demonstrates how feedback loops and echo chambers lead to a hybrid media ecosystem where ‘the right’ isolates from ‘the rest’. While ‘the rest’ of the ecosystem shows high connectivity among a variety of media outlets, thereby bearing ‘dynamics of information propagation and correction’ and ‘[imposing] high reputational costs’ to rumour propagators, ‘[the] right wing of the media ecosystem behaves precisely as the echo chamber models predict – exhibiting high insularity, susceptibility to information cascades, rumour and conspiracy theory, and drift toward more extreme versions of itself […] The insular right-wing of the media ecosystem creates positive feedbacks for bias-confirming statements as a central feature of its normal operation’17 (Benkler et al., 2018: 74; see also Giglietto et al., 2019). In sum, American right-wing activists and politicians succeeded in making social media algorithms work for them: users, sockpuppets accounts, bots, all acted in concert to strategically amplify their political narratives by gearing feedback loops and the formation of echo chambers. Such a right-rest divide also shapes the Brazilian hybrid media ecosystem. However, it exhibits additional difficulties to democratic will formation. What aids in explaining this is that, unlike in the US, where the first step of amplification is to make content public, either in a website or social media, amplification in Brazil starts in the privacy of the WhatsApp network. Here, the first step of amplification is to share content privately, which means that Bolsonaro’s far-right propaganda went undetected in the public sphere while moving from phone to phone. Because the infrastructure of the Brazilian hybrid media ecosystem includes WhatsApp as a social media-like platform, feedback loops and echo chambers take shape first within the private sphere. Accordingly, political opinion forms in the shadow of public debate. Bolsonaro’s exploit of political communication clearly illustrates this: he succeeded electorally despite having only eight

17 The dynamic of the hybrid media ecosystem also has implications for the practice of journalism in so far as it changes the regime of journalistic truth: journalism now takes the thread of trend topics, not verification—or, ‘tweet first, verify later’ (Freelon & Wells, 2020).

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

95

seconds of television broadcast (see Shalders, 2018) and having attended just two out of the nine TV debates during the whole electoral period (Maia, 2018). The above implies that the Brazilian hybrid media ecosystem enmeshes a two-level propagation dynamic. Weaving private messaging services with the social web, this special kind of hybridity is particularly suited for propaganda and disinformation. There are at least four features of Brazil’s propagation dynamic that are significant for understanding the political instrumentalisation of digital communication. Feedback loops and echo chambers take shape on an anonymous and private basis. Since such propaganda first spreads within the private sphere, it is legally protected, entailing that, in principle, no one can be held to account for creating or disseminating lies. Second, WhatsApp affords politicians and marketeers direct access to the private sphere, without the intermediary of the institutions of the public sphere. Third, WhatsApp masks propaganda as interpersonal communication. It follows that propaganda decontextualizes from the political public sphere right into the private sphere, where rational standards of truth and righteous claim-making do not necessarily prevail over subjective claims. Fourth, Facebook’s algorithmic ‘gatekeeping’ combines with ‘gatekeeping’ performed by WhatsApp’s users, which affords political actors control over propagation to some extent. That is, propagation is partially oriented by political actors’ strategic interests. This enables them, for instance, to manipulate Facebook’s propagation dynamic by first disseminating content in the private sphere. How the social web and private messaging propagation dynamics relate to one another still has to be analysed in depth. Provisionally, one could assert that combining these makes possible the manufacturing of public opinion as if it were an organic process of will formation emanating from the private sphere.18 In such a process, these integrated dynamics bolster ideological fragmentation19 by strategically promoting a politicisation of the lifeworld and concealing political matters from public debate. What we have discussed in this section re-asserts Marres’ argument that the social web has turned information ‘social’, that the latter’s quality, or truth-content, has become less prominent in public discourse than ‘how it

18 Letícia Cesarino (2020) also makes this point from a different approach. 19 On populism, social media and ideological fragmentation see Engesser et al., (2017).

96

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

circulated, how messages spread and gained influence by engaging people and communities’ (Marres, 2018: 426). This indicates that between social integration as propagation and the receptiveness of the public to (far)right ideas, one finds a new informational logistics particularly suited for propaganda, one that is a distinctly pathological phenomenon.

3

Social Pathologies of Digital Communication

The social web is an industry that runs along the lines of attention commodification and accumulation. According to what we have discussed above, the result is a technically directed modelling of communication and social integration. To the extent that the social web is a technical activity that rests on communication, it impacts the whole edifice of the lifeworld and its reproduction processes. Taking the perspective of participants, we outline two sets of social pathologies: the first one comprises two general types, namely, alienation and reification (“The Alienation of Attention and the Reification of Social Solidarity”); the second focuses on disturbances in social integration at all three components of the lifeworld: society (“Disturbances in Social Integration 1: Anomic-Communication”), personality, and culture (“Disturbances in Social Integration 2: Decontextualisation”). The Alienation of Attention and the Reification of Social Solidarity Attention governance is a technical development that affects, from the outside, the intimate relationship between language use and intersubjectivity, action coordination, and social integration. Ontologically, this entails that meaning, as emanating from the experiential entwining of speaker, hearer, and world, has become significantly mediated by technical activity. Given that content is pre-given and subjects appear to one another merely as an object on the screen (as a profile, a post or, at best, a message), the social web characterises a precarious intersubjectivity: digital communication bears a first and a third person structure. In the absence of a second person, interpersonal relationships struggle to emerge. One could then assert that the social web implements an objectified model of communication whereby intersubjectivity is systematically fragmented and insulated, individual subjectivities proliferate, eroding possibilities for mutual recognition. Undergirding this distortion is the alienation of subjects’ attention. Here, the social-pathological consequence resides

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

97

in the alienation of subjects’ communication capabilities and in the systematic denial of the possibilities for mutual recognition. According to Habermas’ framework, the alienation of attention would be symptomatic of a technical rationalisation that expands and replaces mutual understanding by systemic integration mechanisms in lifeworld contexts. The social web is arguably a technical development taking place in the market that political actors instrumentalise, one that invades the lifeworld. However, if one agrees with the argument we have undertaken thus far, it becomes apparent that there is something peculiar to it. While Habermas frames colonisation processes as the intrusion of external, functional media of power and money into the lifeworld, the social web takes on communication itself. Technicisation occurs through the commodification and political instrumentalisation of one’s cognitive capacity to pay attention to something. Hence, social pathologies do not stem from the internalisation of an alien action-coordinating entity into the lifeworld, but rather from the colonisation of a cognitive substrate of communication. Communication in the social web is substantially contentpredetermined. Users interact with one another primarily based on what algorithms or economic or political actors judge tendentially relevant. Here lies the politics of the social web: its power resides in the affordances of ‘gatekeeping,’ in deciding what, how, and when users see a determinate content (Beer, 2009; Napoli, 2015). This means that the parasitic character Habermas ascribes to strategic action over communicative action appears to have been institutionalised in the lifeworld: action coordination through mutual understanding transfigures or trans-substantialises into attention-based exchange-value. Under the regime of propagation, communicative action’s medium of direction transfigures into an exchange currency built in communication. To the extent that one exists in the social web as long as one shares content, social integration as propagation does not pick up the thread of mutual understanding and the making of a shared intersubjectivity: attention takes over linguistic understanding and functions as a steering medium of action coordination in lifeworld contexts. It follows that the attention economy of the social web also manifests as the reification of social solidarity: the subject thinks about herself, the other and the world through attention-measured categories: popularity and authenticity, prestige and authority (as in the case of ‘influencers’ on Instagram), ‘followers’, ‘likes’, ‘shares’, ‘views’, ‘comments’. Herein,

98

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

reification is the corollary of a social integration technically designed for influence-ability. Consequently, social solidarity, which embeds in collective identities (culture), legitimate orders (society) and social membership (personality), takes the thing-like shape of a ‘share-countability’: a liminal, momentary visibility. Disturbances in Social Integration 1: Anomic-Communication In Habermas’ framework, anomie manifests as disturbances at the interface of the reproduction of the lifeworld’s component of society and social integration. It erupts when our communicative capabilities do not renew social solidarity through legitimate social norms and orders. Causes for this vary to a great extent. Following the thread of the above argument, anomic communication is a by-product of both the alienation of attention and the reification of social solidarity: the social web impoverishes communication when modelling social integration through a predetermination of content aimed at the influence-ability of users. In a broad sense, the social web gives shape to a social formation where communication itself has become partially self-regulated due to market expansion and political instrumentalisation. The consequence is that reaching understanding loses its binding force in coordinating action toward social integration. Paradoxically, while subjects in the social web find themselves simultaneously connected with an unprecedented number of people, social integration as propagation deprives them of meaningful interaction. This is the deprivation subjects experience when the social web engulfs them into feedback loops and echo chambers. In what follows, we identify two sociological manifestations that characterise anomic-communication: the hypertrophy of affection in action coordination and disorientation. (i) The hypertrophy of affection. In so far as the social web shapes a dynamic of social integration drenched with sensationalist content, it can be conceived as a ‘network of affection’ (Johnson, 2018; see also Hassel & Weeks, 2016; Waisbord, 2018). Experienced as an infinite newsfeed filled with affect-overloaded information, the social web frames social integration in an unreflexive way: affect cannot be judged as right or wrong. Precisely because of this, it may support misleading or false interpretations: ultimately, anything fits under the rubric of ‘personal opinion’, as long as one is deemed truthful or authentic. It follows that ‘action coordination via intersubjectively recognized validity claims’ (Habermas, 1987: 144) becomes one-sided: the intersubjective embodiment of collective

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

99

identities and social institutions, prestige and authority, social belonging and orientations, weaken when framed solely by one’s subjective state. Substantially, communication in the social web is anomic as subjective claims to validity tend to overshadow claims to truth and righteousness. It is in this specific sense that affective hypertrophy in social integration involves an impoverishment of communication with anomic consequences. In a context of affective content overload, mutual understanding tends to downgrade to subjective dualisms such as funny/dull, like/dislike, pretty/ugly (Cesarino, 2020). The populist discursive strategy illustrates this quite clearly. Both in the US and in Brazil, the complexity of public matters simplifies into a ‘slogan-based language’ loaded with radical claims that opposes ‘formal language as “boring”, “too serious” and distant from the realities of common folks’ (Cesarino, 2020: 407). The upshot is that a ‘hit and run’ confrontation replaces public debate or argumentation, tensions scale-up, and the public sphere divides into two enemy fields (ibid.). A further feature of affective hypertrophy regards the trend towards the flattening of public discourse to entertainment. As long as one feels thrilled, excited or amused, questions of truth, ethics, and morality lose significance in public discourse. When references to social reality level down to entertainment, anything, even lies and deception, is warranted. Two implications may be outlined from such a combination of the insufflation of subjective claims with the flattening of everything to entertainment in public discourse. First, it obscures the acceptability conditions of communication: the objective implications of one’s claims, even the most violent ones (e.g., genocide), subsume within emotions and become hardly discernible. Second, all perspectives are, in principle, legitimate as personal; accordingly, even immoral stances, such as racism, xenophobia, misogyny, drains of their historically known authoritarian, life-threatening consequences (Safatle, 2018). This leads us to the second sociological manifestation of anomic-communication: disorientation. (ii) Anomic disorientation. When analysing the profusion of appellative content in the social web in the form of farcical, right-wing narratives with propagandistic intent in the US (e.g. the #Pizzagate affair), Benkler et al. (2018) insightfully remark that the spread of nonsensical conspiracy theories levelled at opponents may not serve to convince the public. Instead, it may merely serve to strategically scramble the distribution of epistemic authority in the public sphere: no one ‘actually “knows the truth”. Left with nothing but this anomic disorientation, audiences can no longer

100

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

tell truth from fiction, even if they want to. They are left with nothing but to choose statements that are ideologically congenial [to them], or [which] mark them as members of the tribe. And in a world in which there is no truth, the most entertaining conspiracy theory will often win’ (Benkler et al., 2018: 37). Cesarino identifies similar symptoms of disorientation when analysing the populist instrumentalisation of the social web, both in the US and in Brazil, while also emphasising the role anonymity plays within it: On social media, catchphrases, images, logos, slogans circulate fast, with no reference to an original source. Ambiguity is part and parcel of its performative efficacy […] Impossibility to discern between irony and sincerity, a joke and a serious statement, fake and authentic content allows populists such as Trump and Bolsonaro wide scope for tactical reversals, withdrawals and “easy deniability” […] whenever the situation requires it […] in platforms such as Twitter and Facebook it has become increasingly difficult to differentiate individual from collective, authentic from automated, human from non-Human language and behavior. Like populist politics itself, the current architecture of social media complicates and challenges previously-held assumptions about agency and individuality, spontaneity and manipulation, freedom and control. (Cesarino, 2020: 421)

Subjects experience such anomic disorientation as an insulation, as a retreat to a world of personal opinion. This is accompanied by the presupposition that every thematisation, in every changing situation, is potentially conflictive. As such, the lifeworld becomes problematic in principle. The possibility of an intersubjectively shared social world becomes subsumed within the subjective world of personal opinions. Accordingly, no secure line can be drawn between the private and the public, morality and politics, doxa and episteme, ethos and pathos. It follows that a radical, individualised cultural relativism floods into social life. Anomic communication thus means that the social web blurs cognitive and social patterns through which participants refer to the objective, the social, and the subjective worlds. Such blurring erupts as affect-laden social integration frames communication in an unreflexive way and flattens it as personal opinion and entertainment, while social norms and knowledge fragment into a subjective relativism. In the absence of meaningfully shared claims to validity, communication becomes anomic as it merely enables a narrow sense of intersubjective accountability to emerge;

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

101

one predicated on the one-sidedness of subjective stances. By encroaching upon action coordination in the lifeworld through the facilitation of the self-assertion of personal beliefs, convictions, and worldviews, the social web fosters a trend towards the de-differentiation of interpretation and world: enabling a movement towards an affect-governed dogmatism. Disturbances in Social Integration 2: Decontextualisation By decontextualisation, we refer to the disembedding of digital communication from broader social conditions. Such decontextualisation is a consequence of the fact that subjects experience a proclaimed horizontality in the social web (Brym et al., 2018; Cesarino, 2019, 2020). Two social pathologies ensue from this, which emerge at the intersection of social integration with personality and culture: respectively, the alienation of social membership and the unsettling of collective identities. A crucial implication of this is the redrawing of the ideological spectre of the public sphere. To grasp these social pathologies, we connect the hypertrophy of affection in social integration (as discussed above) with the distinctive anonymity and sense of direct communication the social web affords, through its suspension of the intermediary of the institutions of the public sphere. This connection between affection, anonymity, and direct communication, is apparent in, but not exclusive to, hybrid media ecosystems which foreground private messaging services. Given that subjects are ‘levelled out’ to the condition of users (anonymity) and entrapped within a self-overlapping symbolic chain (affection, echo chambers), an abstract egalitarianism emerges that prompts the alienation of social membership. Subjects are stripped of sociological referents such as class, gender, race, age, authority, and reunite under an ideologically homogenous and affect-bound sense of social community. In this sense, the social web can be read as favouring the emergence of a liminal condition (Cesarino, 2020), where one’s social membership loses contextual significance in social interaction. However, the formation of such liminal social communities is not solely dependent on the dynamics of the social web, rather such developments are crucially politically triggered. As Cesarino notes when analysing the Brazilian 2018 electoral period: ‘[whenever] online opposition overflowed to street demonstrations, group members were indeed levelled out, all in green-and-yellow uniform, sometimes performing synchronic chants and choreographies created especially for the campaign by voters

102

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

themselves, which circulated widely in video form on WhatsApp and social media platforms’ (Cesarino, 2020: 413). By affording a sense of direct communication among users (horizontality), regardless of one’s social condition or position (be one a politician or a film star), the social web fosters a sense of unstructured social order whereby the redrawing of the distribution of political authority in the public sphere becomes possible. Horizontality and direct communication provide, respectively, the subjective and social-technical conditions through which populists can channel citizens’ dissatisfaction.20 The decontextualisation of sociological referents entails that political opinion emerges regardless of public debate over the social condition in which citizens find themselves: political affiliation becomes partisan and a matter of affective belonging. The alienation of social membership then goes hand-in-hand with the unsettling of collective identities. Insofar as the decontextualisation of sociological referents equates subjects as users, it creates a ‘chain of equivalence connecting all of them anew and around the centralizing figure of the leader’ (Cesarino, 2020: 411). As the Brazilian case illustrates, the social web galvanises an egalitarian sense of social community that, paradoxically, is born out of a highly functionally differentiated and, to use Durkheim’s term, ‘segmentally formed’, discursive space. This helps in explaining the redrawing of political identities following Bolsonaro’s ‘weaponising’ of WhatsApp groups. Being a ‘conservative was not a common self-assigned political identity’ till Bolsonaro’s ascendancy (Cesarino, 2020: 412). Perhaps one of the reasons for this may be that conservatism became commonly associated with the military dictatorship (1964–1985). Through WhatsApp networks, Bolsonaro’s team implemented a kind of political ‘pedagogy’ that reshaped the meaning of being a conservative through recurse to a Manichean dichotomy with the left: patriotic/communist, honest/corrupt, ‘good citizen’/criminal. Structurally, the unsettling/resettling of this new, far-right political identity redrew the public sphere between an ‘inner’ (digitally based) social space, where truth, rightness, and truthfulness are met, and an ‘outside’ where ‘lies, hypocrisy, and conspiracies’ run freely (ibid.: 413). Slowly, anonymously, and surreptitiously, Bolsonaro and his supporters have carved up an encompassing ideological reshaping: the redrawing of the public sphere 20 On the right-populist channelling of social dissatisfaction more broadly, see: Spruyt et al. (2016), Salmela and von Scheve (2017).

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

103

into left and right, transmuted into supporters of the leader versus ‘the rest’. Hence, while the social web promotes a false egalitarianism (horizontality, anonymity), it unfolds the condition of, and the means for (direct communication), the impoverishment of public discourse: absolute standpoints (affection, partisanship) prevail over argumentative praxis.

4

Conclusions and Further Considerations

The development of the social web has brought forth large-scale qualitative transformations in daily communication. These changes can be seen to be connected to the conditions under which populist movements in Brazil and the US have emerged as forms of collective organisation of personal aspirations, i.e. as expressions of distorted democratic selfrealisation. The transformation we have identified through connecting Habermas’ framework with the critique of the attention economy and social research on the cybernetic world may be summarised as follows: having attention rather than money as an exchange currency, the social web commodifies communicative action by creating the appearance of domination-free communication. Such commodification can be read as a development of technical activity of a particular kind in so far as its pathological effects stem from the alienation of a cognitive substrate of communication. Technical activity has thus developed towards the colonisation of communicative constituents of the lifeworld. This ascribes to the social web a singular and concerning disruptive potential. The ascent of anomic communication and decontextualisation (as described above) entails more than just disturbances in processes of social integration. It also affects cultural reproduction in all three components of the lifeworld. For instance, the loss of authentic intersubjective accountability and the decontextualisation of sociological referents, jeopardises possible mutual agreement on the rationality of knowledge. This is because there has been a fundamental distortion of the communicative process through which participants are capable of clarifying acceptability conditions to one another. The prevalence of subjective claims over claims to truth and righteousness has entailed a degradation of the rationality of knowledge. Moreover, it is entirely reasonable to assume that related crises in social solidarity, and the degraded rationality of

104

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

knowledge, may also affect dynamics of socialization and personal identity creation, leading to psychopathologies. Broadly speaking, our intuition is that the extent of these crisis phenomena points toward qualitative structural changes within the public sphere. As has now become apparent, the social web poses real threats to democracy. From the course of our argument, one may deduce that these threats indicate we have entered into a new phase of the structural contradiction between capitalism and democracy. By defining what one-third of the world’s population sees, and how and when it sees it, big tech CEOs outperform the power of politicians (Freedland, 2020). Paraphrasing Habermas (2001: 78) in another context, the problem this poses to democracy resides in the fact that the power of CEOs is based on wealth accumulation; thus, it has a private fundament and, unlike political power, it cannot be democratised. Substantially, the social web then bears an authoritarian trend. To counter the social web’s destructive consequences, institutional and legal developments alone are insufficient. A sociocultural development, coeval to the ‘real–virtual’ co-constitution of social life, also has to flourish. A critical point here is that the temporality of sociocultural changes, which is predicated on the reflexive flux of generations, is slower than the temporality of technical changes, which ramps forward through the improvement of the efficiency of instrumental means. If technical development keeps its prolific pace and systematically distorts, or represses, sociocultural development, we would be marching towards a social order much like Aldous Huxley’s vision of a totalitarian world society, where systemic forces completely uncouple from the lifeworld and draw out legitimacy from a ‘pasteurisation’ of individual and collective subjectivities, be it rooted either in technically-tempered outrage, languid happiness, or apathy.

References Aisch, G., Huang, J., & Kang, C. (2016). Dissecting the #PizzaGate conspiracy theories. The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/int eractive/2016/12/10/business/media/pizzagate.html. Retrieved May 30, 2020. Arnaudo, D. (2017). Computational propaganda in Brazil: Social bots during elections. In S. Woolley & P. N. Howard (Eds.), Working Paper. Oxford, UK: Project on Computational Propaganda. Available

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

105

at: https://iscs-conference.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ISCS_2019 ConferenceProceedings.pdf#page=3. Retrieved March 17, 2021. Beer, D. (2009). Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious. New Media and Society, 11(6), 985–1002. Benites, A., Betim, F., Becker, F., Oliveira, R., Bedinelli, T., Avendaño, T. C. (2019, January 1). Retrato de um extremista: o homem que conquistou o Brasil. El País Brasil. Available at: https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2018/10/ 19/politica/1539969259_171085.html. Retrieved in May 25, 2020. Benkler, Y., Faris, R., & Roberts, H. (2018). Network propaganda: Manipulation, disinformation, and the radicalization of American politics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Brym, R., Slavina, A., Todosijevic, M., & Cowan, D. (2018). Social movement horizontality in the Internet age? A critique of Castells in light of the Trump victory. Canadian Review of Sociology, 55(4), 624–634. Bucher, T. (2012). A technicity of attention: How software ‘makes sense’. Culture Machine, 13, 1–23. Bucher, T. (2018). If…Then. Algorithmic power and politics. New York: Oxford University Press. Cadwalladr, C. (2017, May 7). Thegreat British Brexit robbery: How our democracy was hijacked. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.thegua rdian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hij acked-democracy. Retrieved August 2, 2020. Carro, R. (2017). Digital news report—Brazil. Available at: http://www.digita lnewsreport.org/survey/2017/brazil-2017/. Retrieved August 5, 2020. Cesarino, L. (2019). Identidade e representação: corpo digital do rei, bivalência conservadorismo-neoliberalismo e pessoa fractal. Revista de Antropologia, 62(3), 530–557. Cesarino, L. (2020). How social media affords populist politics: Remarks on liminality based on the Brazilian case. Trabalhos Em Linguística Aplicada, 59(1), 404–427. Cooke, M. (1997). Language and reason: A study of Habermas’ pragmatics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Crogan, P., & Kinsley, S. (2012). Paying attention: Towards a critique of the attention economy. Culture Machine, 13, 1–29. Davies, W. (2020, July 2). What’s wrong with WhatsApp? The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/02/wha tsapp-groups-conspiracy-theories-disinformation-democracy?CMP=Share_iOS App_Other. Retrieved July 2, 2020. Delanty, G. (2018). Community. London: Routledge.

106

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

Ebbighausen, R. (2018). Inciting hatred against Rohingya on social media. Deutsche Welle. Published on the 25th of August 2018. Available at: https://www.dw.com/en/inciting-hatred-against-rohingya-on-socialmedia/a-45225962. Retrieved October 21, 2020. Engesser, S., Ernst, N., Esser, F., & Büchel, F. (2017). Populism and social media: How politicians spread a fragmented ideology. Information, Communication and Society, 20(8), 1109–1126. Fisher, M., & Taub, A. (2018, April 25). How everyday social media users become real-world extremists. The New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/world/asia/facebook-ext remism.html. Retrieved June 10, 2020. Freedland, J. (2020, July 31). Who will choose the next US president— The American people, or Facebook? The Guardian, 2020. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/31/choose-uspresident-mark-zuckerberg-american-people. Freelon, D., & Wells, C. (2020). Disinformation as political communication. Political Communication, 37 (2), 145–156. Giglietto, F., Iannelli, L., Valeriani, A., & Rossi, L. (2019). ‘Fake News’ is the invention of a liar: How false information circulates within the hybrid news system. Current Sociology Monograph, 67 (4), 625–642. Goldhaber, M. (1997). The attention economy and the net. First Monday, 2(4). Available at: http://firstmonday.org/article/view/519/440. Retrieved June 10, 2020. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York, NY: International Publishers. Habermas, J. (1976). Legitimation crisis. London: Heinemann. Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action (Vol. 1). Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1986). The new obscurity: The crisis of the welfare state and the exhaustion of utopian energies. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 11(2), 1–18. Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action (Vol. 2). Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (1990). Moral consciousness and communicative action. Boston: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1992). Postmetaphysical thinking. London: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (1998). On the pragmatics of communication. Boston: Polity Press. Habermas, J. (2001). The postnational constellation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Habermas, J. (2003). Truth and justification. Boston: MIT Press. Harris, N. (2019). Recovering the critical potential of social pathology diagnosis. European Journal of Social Theory, 22(1), 45–62.

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

107

Hartmann, M. (2018). Social pathology. In H. Brunkhorst, R. Keide, & C. Lafont (Eds.), The Habermas handbook (pp. 623–627). New York: Columbia University Press. Hassel, A., & Weeks, B. (2016). Partisan provocation: The role of partisan news use and emotional responses in political information sharing in social media. Human Communication Research, 42(4), 641–661. Honneth, A. (2007). Disrespect. In The normative foundations of critical theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Iser, M. (2018). Colonization. In H. Brunkhorst, R. Keide, & C. Lafont (Eds.), The Habermas handbook (pp. 494–498). New York: Columbia University Press. Johnson, J. (2018). The self-radicalization of white men: “Fake News” and the affective networking of paranoia. Communication Culture and Critique, 11, 100–115. Knight, M. (2018). Explainer: How Facebook has become the world’s largest echo chamber. The Conversation. Published on the 5th of February 2018. Available at: https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-facebook-has-bec ome-the-worlds-largest-echo-chamber-91024. Retrieved August 25, 2020. Lafont, C. (2018). Hermeneutics and the linguistic turn. In H. Brunkhorst, R. Keide, & C. Lafont (Eds.), The Habermas handbook (pp. 49–57). New York: Columbia University Press. Maia, G. (2018). Bolsonaro decide não participar de novos debates com adversários. UOL. Published on the 22nd of August. Available at: https:// noticias.uol.com.br/politica/eleicoes/2018/noticias/2018/08/22/bolson aro-decide-nao-participar-de-novos-debates-com-adversarios.htm. Retrieved October 22, 2020. Marres, N. (2018). Why we can’t have our facts back. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, 4, 423–443. Mello, P. C. (2020). Operação contra fake news reforça suspeita nas eleições de 2018. Jornal Folha de São Paulo. Available at: https://www1.folha.uol. com.br/poder/2020/06/operacao-contra-fake-news-reforca-suspeitas-das-ele icoes-de-2018.shtml. Retrieved July 15, 2020. Meyen, M., Pfaff-Rüdiger, S., Dudenhöffer, K., & Huss, J. (2010). The Internet in everyday life: A typology of internet users. Media, Culture and Society, 32(5), 873–882. Mishra, P. (2019). How Narendra Modi seduced India with envy and hate. The New York Times. Published on the 23rd of May. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/opinion/modi-india-ele ction.html. Retrieved October 21, 2020.

108

E. BOSCO AND W. COSTA RIBEIRO

Mozur, P. (2018). A genocide incited on Facebook, with posts from Myanmar’s militray. The New York Times. Published on the 15th of October. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-fac ebook-genocide.html. Retrieved October 21, 2020. Napoli, P. M. (2015). Social media and the public interest: Governance of news platforms in the realm of individual and algorithmic gatekeepers. Telecommunications Policy, 39(9), 751–760. Neves, M. (2018). Lifeworld and system. In H. Brunkhorst, R. Keide, & C. Lafont (Eds.), The Habermas handbook (pp. 632–636). New York: Columbia University Press. Pina-Cabral, J. (2020). When ethics runs counter morals. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 10(1), 50–53. Pinheiro-Machado, R., & Scalco, L. (2020). From hope to hate: The rise of conservative subjectivity in Brazil. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 10(1), 21–31. Renata, M. K. (2017). Umberto eco and emotions in the time of Internet. International Journal of Social and Educational Innovation, 4(7), 51–58. Ritzer, G., & Jurgenson, N. (2010). Production, consumption, prosumption: The nature of capitalism in the age of the digital ‘prosumer’. Journal of Consumer Culture, 10(1), 13–36. Safatle, V. (2018). O que é fascismo? Revista Cult. Available at: https://revist acult.uol.com.br/home/o-que-e-fascismo/. Retrieved December 20, 2018. Salmela, M., & von Scheve, C. (2017). Emotional roots of right-wing political populism. Social Science Information, 56(4), 567–595. Santos, J. G. B., Freitas, M., Aldé, A., Santos, K., & Cunha, V. C. C. (2019). WhasApp, política mobile e desinformação: a hidra nas eleições presidenciais de 2018. Comunicação and Sociedade, 41(2), 307–334. Shalders, A. (2018). Eleições 2018: propaganda estreia na TV com força em xeque. BBC Brasil. Published on 31 August. Available at: https://www.bbc. com/portuguese/brasil-45364384. Retrieved December 22, 2020. Spruyt, B., Keppens, G., & Van Droogenbroeck, F. (2016). Who supports populism and what attracts people to it? Political Research Quarterly, 69(2), 335–346. Strecker, D. (2018). The theory of society: The theory of communicative action (1982): A classic of social theory. In H. Brunkhorst, R. Keide, & C. Lafont (Eds.), The Habermas handbook (pp. 360–382). New York: Columbia University Press. Vandenberghe, F. (2019). Sociologie de la conjoncture, de la structure et de la démocrature au Brésil. Problèmes d’Amérique latine, 115 (4): 129–144. Waisbord, S. (2018). The elective affinity between post-truth communication and populist politics. Communication Research and Practice, 4(1), Special Issue: ANZCA 2017—Communication Worlds: Access, Voice, Diversity, Engagament, 17–34.

4

PATHOLOGIES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION …

109

Wang, A. (2017). Former Facebook VP says social media is destroying society with ‘dopamine-driven feedback loops’. Available at: https://www.washingto npost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/12/former-facebook-vp-sayssocial-media-is-destroying-society-with-dopamine-driven-feedback-loops/. Retrieved May 2020. Zuckerberg, M. (2016). Facebook post. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/ zuck/posts/10103253901916271. Retrieved July 2020.

PART II

Ontological and Epistemological Considerations in Social Pathology Scholarship

CHAPTER 5

An Ontological Account of Social Pathology Michael J. Thompson

1

Introduction

The idea that a society can be sick, that it can suffer as a biological organism, is one that goes back to antiquity. As metaphor, it has been used in literature from Sophocles to Camus to indicate the idea of cultural and moral degeneracy. In Book II of Plato’s Republic, Socrates invokes the image of two kinds of city: one characterised by justice and the other by injustice. After describing the outline for what he deems to be a just city, one where each member of the city has what they need to enjoy the pleasures of a simple life rooted in sufficiency and mutual cooperation, Glaukon castigates Socrates’ plan as a ‘city of pigs’ before asking about the pleasures of life that the city ought to provide. Glaukon insists on the idea that the city should provide comfortable couches, fine foods and delicacies, elegant tables and tapestries, relishes, cakes, incense, myrrh and girls. Pleasure should be the defining trait of the good city. Socrates shows how this ‘inflamed’ or ‘feverish’ (ϕλεγμα´ινoυσαν) city differs from

M. J. Thompson (B) Department of Political Science, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Harris (ed.), Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_5

113

114

M. J. THOMPSON

his ‘healthy’ city or, as he puts it, the city that is ‘agreeable with truth’ ´ where justice is constitutive of the relations, practices and (¢ληθινη), goods of the community well-ordered towards the Good. Whereas the latter is characterised by relations of reciprocity and sufficiency, the ‘feverish’ city is defined by personal gain, by the consumption of surplus and by the instrumental use of others for one’s own pleasure and benefit. The feverish city, Socrates finally tells Glaukon, leads to endless want and, in time, to war (Plato, Republic 371b ff). In a similar vein, Erich Fromm argues that the affluent, technologically advanced economies of the twentieth century also suffer from systemic pathologies from suicide, alcoholism and war that can only be understood through developing an idea he calls a ‘socially patterned defect’. Fromm’s approach to social pathology is similar to the insights of Plato insofar as he sees that the general patterns of objective social conditions and the forms and functions of social relations that any society manifests are determinative of the relative health or pathology of the individual. Fromm asks whether a society can be ‘sick’ in the way that individuals can suffer from pathologies. But this is more than a mere medical analogy or metaphor. Fromm begins from a similar place to that of Plato and Marx before him: with the implicit thesis that it is the structures and dynamics of the social reality that one inhabits that fundamentally shapes the subject. One of the core phylogenetic features of the species, for Fromm, was our essential capacity for relatedness with others—a relatedness that is shaped by the organisational imperatives that pattern the social world. But even more, there seems to be a more complex and more unexplored thesis lurking behind these approaches. Stated most succinctly, there is a sense that certain rational forms of social reality need to be distinguished from those that are irrational and, so, pathological. Although Plato was able to get around the thorny nature of this problem by collapsing this rational form of social reality into a static concept of nature, Fromm takes a more Marxian position by arguing that there are natural features (namely psychic drives) that each member of the species possesses that are shaped and formed by social conditions—shaped and formed in ways that either maximise self-determined agency and mutual, empathic relatedness with others, or negate that kind of individual and group-agency and subjectivity. But in both cases, the position is that there are forms of sociality that are more rational and hence less pathological than others. This position is one that I see to be under-developed in much critical social theory, not to mention political philosophy.

5

AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

115

The approach to social pathology I would like to develop here has its roots in the ideas of both Plato and Fromm. Put briefly, it is my contention that social pathology diagnosis must focus on the ways that our relational lives with one another are shaped and structured; it must centre on the kinds of practices and norms that are constitutive of such relational structures as well as the kinds of emotional and psychic states that they produce. Pathological forms of sociality are dialectically linked to pathological forms of self and, in this sense, the question of social pathology raises questions that confront in uncomfortable ways the trends of much of contemporary social and political theory, not to mention ethical and moral philosophy. We must be able to critique our social forms not merely on the basis of their intersubjective norms, but as a totality: as a comprehensive synthetic whole of relations, practices, norms, institutions and purposes. I suggest that the proper means to achieve such an approach to social pathology diagnosis will be via a critical social ontology that is able to grasp the social totality as a distinct object of critical cognition and to be able to articulate value premises that can help us overcome such pathologies and begin grounding a modern form of ethical life that allows for the developmental self-determination of its members. Contemporary critical theory has been almost exclusively concerned with an approach to social pathology as a distortion of intersubjective forms of practice. Generally construed, this has meant looking at social pathologies as defects or failures of social rationality where what is ‘social’ is consonant with some form of social action. Social pathologies are those that inhibit or distort our rational capacities to reflect on the actual practices that are constitutive of our social world. These ‘secondorder’ pathologies, as Christopher Zurn (2011) and others refer to them, are therefore viewed as cognitive and motivational disconnects from the world that block critical relation to it and its effects. This view essentially sees our pathologies in terms of the reflexive operations of our sociality, as ‘constitutive disconnects between first-order contents and second-order reflexive comprehension of those contents, where those disconnects are pervasive and socially caused’ (Zurn, 2011: 345–346).1 In this sense,

1 For an insightful and important critique of Zurn’s position, see Laitinen (2015). Laitinen suggests that a more satisfying approach to social pathology can be found in the exploration of the social reality rather than the second-order phenomena that Zurn describes. I will take this approach here toward a social-ontological account of social pathology, but in a way different from Laitinen.

116

M. J. THOMPSON

social pathology denotes the faulty processes of reason that emerge in our cognitive and intersubjective domain as processes of reflexivity; Zurn does not see pathologies as ontological in any genuine sense, but rather as restricted to the domain of social action and cognition, namely as defects in reflexivity. Any time forms of social reflexivity are repressed, we find a social pathology. It does not refer to the actual social substance as pathological, since these approaches reduce the social to our sociality: i.e., to the structural relations and the ends and purposes and social artefacts that govern the logics of our sociality. Whether it is communication, discourse, recognition or whatever, the basic thesis is that any blockages or distortions of what are considered these fundamental or basic forms of social action result in pathologies of society and of self. For contemporary critical theorists, social pathologies are defects in forms of social action and rationality that disables our ability to obtain critical relation to our social world. Overwhelmingly, this refers to disruptions in intersubjective patterns of social action rather than directly to pathologies in our objective social conditions. But not entirely. Axel Honneth (2011) proposes that social pathologies be construed as embodied in social institutions. But Honneth then falls back into a neo-Idealist position by understanding rational institutions as essentially reflexive and those that fail this reflexivity as pathological. The problem now becomes again reduced to reflexivity, to the pragmatic forms of social action alone, not to the deeper structures that give shape and function to the social reality itself.2 This again rests on the problematic thesis that a social pathology is a second-order phenomenon: that it consists in the inability of members of a community with supposedly rational institutions and norms to properly enact or be socialised into them. How can radical critique really be enacted if we see that existing world of modernity, as Honneth construes it, as largely already rational? The answer is that the problem lies with our own inability to properly absorb the normative core of modern social institutions.3 2 For an insightful critique of Honneth’s position, see Freyenhagen (2015). Also see the more comprehensive critique of these approaches by Neal Harris (2019). 3 Jörg Schaub points out this weakness in Honneth’s theory of social pathology, specif-

ically that this is a problem for a more radical and transformative approach to critique: ‘Social pathologies are presented as aberrations related to relationships of individual freedom, whereas social misdevelopments denote aberrations of social freedom. Both forms of aberrations are characterised as socially caused misunderstandings of the norms that are already underlying existing, reproductively relevant social practices, which, in turn, lead to

5

AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

117

But this neo-Idealist and pragmatist position misses what thinkers like Marx saw as central: namely that social pathologies are to be understood as the structured ways that our social reality has been constructed; that the ways our social relations are shaped as well as the collective goals and purposes towards which our institutions are oriented and the collectiveintentional rule-sets that are constitutive of these relations and purposes constitute the domain where social pathology exists. Power—specifically the power to shape and transform our social relations, processes and purposes—is missing from the pragmatic-Idealist account that Honneth endorses. My suggestion here is that social pathology is a feature of our social ontology, a matter of how our world is formed institutionally as well as normatively. This is resonant with Marx’s diagnosis of social pathology in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts which is rooted in the ways that labour has been structured and the ways it deforms the relational capacities and structures of the development of the person, and so on. The key problem with emphasising pragmatic and normative modes as the locus of social pathology is that it does nothing to address the ways that the ontic forms of social reality into which we are socialised have the capacity to reify consciousness and naturalise or at least distort our self-conceptions and the possibility of a more rational way of organising our collective lives together as well as the social artefacts that we should consider worthy of our normative allegiance. Neo-Idealist approaches to social pathology like those rooted in recognition misconstrue the essential issue at hand. For once we restrict ourselves to cognitive and epistemic defects of the subject, we sidestep the problem of pathologies in the objective conditions and features of our social reality. Defects in consciousness and social action are clearly important, but they alone cannot grant us a satisfying account of social pathology nor lead us to more fruitful normative questions about social critique and social transformation. Indeed, the key idea seems to me to be that a successful critical theory of society will be one that is able to (i) diagnose the objective structures, processes and ends that give shape to our social reality thereby (ii) granting us a critical theory of judgement that calls into question such defective social forms while (iii) providing the groundwork for alternative ideals and conceptions of social value a failure to realise the norms that are underlying them more adequately. For this reason, the link between both forms of social aberrations, on the one hand, and radical critique and normative revolution, on the other hand, is severed’ Schaub (2015: 107–130, 113).

118

M. J. THOMPSON

that can lead to social transformation. After all, the core question is whether a society as a social form, as a totality, is fulfilling its potential for rationality.4 As I see it, we must see social reality as a totality of structures, norms, practices, processes and ends. We cannot restrict social pathology to pragmatic domains of social action alone if social criticism is to have transformative potency.5 One core reason for this is that pathological social forms have constitutive power over consciousness thereby imbuing pragmatic forms of action and intersubjective practices with pathological residues. The assumption that recognition, justification or discourse can operate within a pathological social ontology seems to me to be counter-productive. It is also something that Marx saw as essential to social criticism: to uncover not only defective modes of cognition (such as ideology or false consciousness) but the ontological social structures and processes that produce pathological human states: alienation, exploitation and so on. The real question should therefore be: how is a social pathology a feature of the objective conditions of our collective lives. This, as I will argue here, is the core question that an ontological approach to social pathology will seek to address. This means forging a different framework for understanding and critiquing social pathology. The approach I sketch and defend here conceives of social pathology as patterned defects in our social ontology: in the ways our congealed collective practices and relations as well as the social purposes that organise these ensembles of practices and relations are defective in promoting and realising self-determining personhood. This means conceiving of social reason as the ways that our social relations, processes and purposes are able to realise freedom-enhancing forms of social agency and collective forms of life that engender robust forms

4 Fabian Freyenhagen (2018) also gestures toward such an approach to ‘macro-social entities.’ 5 Again, I differ here with thinkers such as Honneth in that we must inquire into the ways that social power shapes the material and ontological structures of society because these have constitutive power over the normative structures of consciousness. What this entails is that the norms and practices of capitalistic life will infiltrate the recognitive and discursive forms of social action that neo-Idealists see as the vehicle for immanent critique and social transformation. In essence, they subscribe to a thin interpretation of reification. See my discussion of this problem of the power of reification over the normative structures of consciousness (Thompson, 2020a).

5

AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

119

of interdependence oriented towards the cultivation of individual selfrealisation. This thesis entails that there is a way to understand society itself as an ontological entity, one that has distinctive features that can be the object of judgement, critique and transformation. It means that there is more to social reality than norms and practices, more than the pragmatic dimension, and that there are rational ways to conceive of our ontogenetic processes of development. The ontology of social facts is a dense complex of norms and practices that produce specific social facts and social artefacts that have causal power over the contents of our lives.6 Critical social ontology sees human essence as rooted in our phylogenetic capacities for relatedness and for practical intentionality. It also views this social essence as itself historical: that the cooperative and collective forms of practice change over time and take on different shapes or forms. The underlying idea is that if there is to be an objective account of social reason, it will need to be grounded in this ontology of human sociality, that it will need to emerge in and through these shapes and forms of sociality and cooperation. This does not mean seeing objective value in some transcendental-metaphysical scheme, but, rather, as a property governing the relational forms of life and the norms and practices that sustain them as well as the ends and purposes towards which they are oriented to realise.7 Social reason, on this view, is not to be reduced to intersubjective theories of social action, but must be seen as properties of the ontology of our social reality itself. Again, this is not meant to imply in any sense that there are some ideal forms of sociality from which we deviate, or some forms that are set by nature, but rather that social reason be understood in terms of the capacity of any social-ontological scheme to maximise self-determining social agency. This latter term itself

6 As Frederick Neuhouser (2016: 31–48, 47) has argued, referring to a more materialist

interpretation of Hegel and social pathology: ‘social pathology must be theorised not simply as false consciousness but, at the same time, as false material practices —social practices that embody false, or unsatisfying ways of negotiating the opposition between self-consciousness and life.’ 7 Erich Fromm gives us a sense of what a Marxian approach to social ontology would look like where the essence of human life is seen in concrete, objective terms rather than crude ‘materialist’ terms: ‘In our attempt to define the essence of man, we are not referring to an abstraction arrived at by the way of metaphysical speculations like those of Heidegger and Sartre. We refer to the real conditions of existence common to man qua man, so that the essence of each individual is identical with the existence of the species’ (Fromm, 1973: 27).

120

M. J. THOMPSON

describes a form of agency and self-consciousness that has in view the essential cooperative inter-relatedness that serves as the framework for all forms of distinctly human life and culture. This social ontology is critical because it is more than a merely descriptive enterprise, it is also, at the same time, a theory of value, or an evaluative theory enabling us to employ judgement concerning that which makes our social relations either rational or irrational. Once we grant that there is an ontological framework that makes even our communicative and recognitive capacities possible and gives them shape, we can begin to delve into the deeper structures of social reality and the ways that it is constituted. The key problem in the neo-Idealist shift in critical theory has been the turn towards forms of social action and pragmatic forms of relations which view them as the core essence of sociality.8 My proposition is that this is a partial and insufficient way to conceptualise the social. My view is that we must understand the social as an ontological category with various types of features and dynamics that can be discerned as causal on individuals and the site of social pathology diagnosis. But at the same time, the point of a critical social ontology is to articulate ethical and evaluative categories that can address the social schemes that are constitutive of our collective lives—as features of the optimal forms of cooperative relations that will secure self-realisation and self-determining life forms. This means articulating criteria for diagnosing the extent to which social schemes are rational as opposed to pathological, and for understanding that social reason itself is not merely a matter of mental states, but of the metaphysical features of the social world as well. The point here is that properly grasping a social pathology entails thematising the social totality in order to understand the ways that defective social relations operate and pattern other dimensions of social reality. As I see it, emphasis on second-order pathologies, although important, is not sufficient for social critique nor to grasp a more compelling theory of value requisite for social transformation. This is not a defense of some sort of anachronistic metaphysical or ideal theory. Quite to the

8 Essentially, neo-Idealism is a mode of critical theory that has been dominant since Habermas’ break with Marxism and the positing of pragmatic modes of social action as the central framework for establishing social criticism and ethical validity of norms. See my (2016) The Domestication of Critical Theory.

5

AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

121

contrary, it is an attempt at granting immanent critique a firmer foundation as well as clarify a more critical framework for judgement and a critical framework for value and the rationalisation of modern ethical life. Since the expansion of techno-administrative forces in modern society entails a more pervasive and trenchant form of reification over modern self-consciousness, it is even more essential to provide critique with the immanent power and transformative potential.

2 A Basic Framework for Critical Social Ontology As a matter of prerequisites, it is important to clarify the theoretical framework that forms the basis for the approach I am advocating.9 As I see it, the concept of a critical social ontology is concerned with the various ways that our sociality is enacted according to the constraints imposed by social structures and the governing regimes of power that embed normative and constitutive rules within the collective forms of life that we inhabit. In order to lay out the basic framework of a critical social ontology, we should begin by stressing the two-fold character of this ontology. It refers to two interrelated aspects of human social reality: first to the innate phylogenetic capacities that human individuals possess, and, second, the shapes of sociality that are produced by, and which in turn shape and determine, these essential phylogenetic capacities. So, for example, we can say that some essential phylogenetic features such as intentionality or relatedness which are common to each member of the species, morph into cooperative and joint forms of action that in turn become congealed into ontological forms of life. These phylogenetic capacities are therefore shaped in different ways by institutions and sustained forms of practices that have their own logic and dynamics—their own ontology, as it were. Adding to this, these ontological forms have causal powers over the further development of individuals through socialisation and integration mechanisms thereby mediating the ontogenetic processes of concrete individuals.

9 Because of space constraints, what follows here is a mere sketch. I elaborate a more systematic theory for a critical social ontology in The Specter of Babel: A Reconstruction of Political Judgment.

122

M. J. THOMPSON

Any individual’s innate capacity for intentionality and relatedness, for instance, gives rise to more complex forms of cooperation and joint planning. As these cooperative and joint forms of action become sustained practices, collective forms of intentionality, norms and social structures emerge and mechanisms of social integration also shape future cohorts of the community. These collective patterns of cooperation and joint activity congeal into ontological forms of life; that it is to say, they become responsible for shaping these phylogenetic capacities that are innate, if not inchoate, transforming them into concrete expressions of social being. Hence, the second feature of the basis for any social ontology, the socioontogenetic forms of social reality that have constitutive powers over the integrative and developmental processes of the individual.10 Social ontology therefore refers to this complex of social forms that possess definitive shapes, or, to be more precise, specific patterns of norms, practices, collective-intentional rules that produce social structures (stable and enduring relational patterns), as well as collective ends towards which those patterned relations and practices are oriented, and for which they are organised. In its most basic form, a critical social ontology wants to be able to understand the ways that our social reality is shaped, in other words, to be able to grasp what relations and purposes our collective forms of life are organised to realise. The reason for this is that these become the determining features of any historically given social scheme. So, we can say that the ontology of any given society’s schools is fundamentally constituted by certain relations between students and teachers, norms and practices that are constitutive of those specific structural relations, and that those relational structures as well as the attendant constellation of norms and practices are defined by the end of that institution: to ‘educate’ the youth, in whatever sense that is meant. But any schooling system itself is embedded in broader contexts of social reality. Hence, understanding how schools are organised is a function of the value or purpose that the broader society places on its function. In societies that depend on subsistence agriculture, the role of education and schools may be different from an industrial society and a more technologically complex society. The key here is to see that the social totality, or social whole, is the defining framework for grasping the sub-systems or social schemes that it frames.

10 For a more developed discussion, see Thompson (2019).

5

AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

123

Relations between people are constituted by certain norms and practices, and so these relations are not static, they are processual in the sense that they are active, require some degree of socialisation and integration for the absorption of such norms, and insofar as these relations seek to achieve some kind of end or purpose—they are teleological in some basic sense. These three elements of social ontology are also mutually interdependent on one another in terms of their causal powers. Relations shape social processes including developmental processes, but so too do they affect the ends or purposes of those processes. But the kind of ends that our associations are oriented towards also define the kinds of relations and processes that are instantiated. It matters that an economic association is oriented towards profit or non-profit purposes since these will also affect the relations of ways work is organised, and so on. A family that has as its purpose the humane development of its children is quite different from one that has paternal power as its directive ideal. The point here is that the telos of associational structures of relations is not natural but ethical: it is posited by collective norms that organise and enact forms of social reality. But these values that govern collective norms are determined by us, by human rationality, and the question now becomes what kinds of social reality qualify as rational and which do not, which warrant our rational obligations and which do not. What makes this approach to social ontology distinct from more mainstream approaches is that it leads us to a thesis about the nature of value and social rationality that departs significantly from analytic and intersubjectivist approaches. Critical social ontology is concerned with the ways that social reality manifests specific features that we can judge as rational, or freedom-enhancing on one hand, or defective and pathological, on the other—pathological, in the sense that they are freedom-reductive, causing other negative forms of personal and social consequences. In this sense, social pathologies are not merely pathologies of reason, in some intersubjective, second-order sense, but more fundamentally, they are pathologies of the social world itself , the product of defective forms of social-relational, processual life that are organised towards ends and purposes that we can characterise as irrational. Suicide, drug addiction, alienation, aggression, destructive behaviour, the search for profit and particular gain at the expense of common goods, among so many other pathologies become the product of a social ontology that is shaped in ways that are not beneficial for human needs.

124

M. J. THOMPSON

The ontological approach to social critique now can be seen to begin with fundamental cooperative and social-relational essence of human existence, but then to proceed into broader frames of social reality such as institutions and inter-institutional logics and dynamics. It is at this level that we can grasp the constitution of the social totality: in modern societies, for example, the ways that capitalist logics of social purposes and relations come to determine the sub-logics of different institutional spheres of life. In this way we are able to have society as an object of critical investigation rather than merely sociality and social action. Any social scheme can be understood as consisting of a specific structure of relations that are organised according to a set of ends or purposes that define those relations as well as the norms and practices to which participants in that scheme must adhere and which form the basis of their collectiveintentional rule-sets. But again, each social scheme—a school, religious institution, economic life, political and cultural institutions and forms— are themselves always in relation to the social totality which, in modern societies, has the capacity to redefine and embed smaller social schemes into its logic (technological, administrative capitalism can be seen as the structure of the totality, for instance). The importance of this cannot be over-emphasised: that without the capacity to judge any social scheme with relation to the logic of the totality, the danger for reification becomes increasingly real.

3 Grounding Evaluative Criteria for Social Pathology My discussion thus far has been to defend the idea that an ontology of society can serve as an object for social critique. This lays a foundation for the next thesis I want to explore: namely that there exist criteria for social rationality that are themselves ontological. What I mean by this is that a society is pathological to the extent that it is irrationally constructed, to the extent that it exhibits relations, institutions, practices, norms and purposes that are not organised for the common benefit of the members of the association but instead shape these socio-ontological forms towards some particularist, extractive, destructive, ends and purposes. If we pick up from the discussion I was exploring above concerning the viability of social reason, then we can see social pathology as consisting of defects in the relations, practices and ends and purposes that give shape to our cooperative lives with others. The beginning of this insight can be found

5

AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

125

in Rousseau’s thesis about the nature of the relation between self and other as well as the defective features of unequal society. Rousseau’s basic claim is that once humans discovered their powers of cooperation, this opened us up to the possibility for pathological relations, both of selfrelations as well as relations with others. The key to understanding defective social forms is the ways that the drive for inequality, particular gain or self-aggrandisement (amour propre) is able to achieve the power to shape unequal and even extractive relations with others. Rather than being an object of care, the self and the other become instruments for conspicuous status; for propping up the false self that is merely the means for competing with others for material gain or for self-glorification. Either way, the power exerted is a function of a fundamental weakness of the individual who then irrationally uses relations with others for defective and pathological ends. Cooperative forms of life, according to Rousseau, emerge to solve certain problems that individuals in the state of nature cannot solve as isolated beings. These forms of cooperation, according to Rousseau’s genealogy of social inequality, are initially sought out for mutual benefits and the good of each member of the association, but then soon devolve into extractive relations of inequality once amour propre is able to achieve organisational power over the relations and cooperative practices of the community: ‘the instant one man had need of the services of another, perceived that it would better to have provisions for two to himself, equality vanished, property was introduced, labour became necessary, and vast forests were transformed into smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops’ (Rousseau, 1964a: 167). This is accompanied by a transformation of the collective-intentional norms that make up the consciousness of members of this defective sociality. ‘The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it upon himself to say, “this is mine”, and found people who were simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society’ (Rousseau, 1964a: 164). The pathological depth of these developments begins to be seen in the beginning chapters of his Social Contract, where he introduces us to a world where man is ‘born free, yet everywhere in chains’ (Rousseau, 1964b: 351). The problem of domination means the degeneracy of the individual. Rousseau diagnoses social pathology, then, as a kind of corruption of our relational bonds with others; it is caused by the kinds of inequality that is itself spawned by defective psychic drives

126

M. J. THOMPSON

for surplus, for gain and for dominance. Corrupted relations give rise to corrupted patterns of the self. The cognitive and emotional structures of the self now become impressed with the defective patterns of norms, practices and conventions (moeurs ) that sustain the pathological community.11 Rousseau’s solution to this problem is one of a new form of social reason, a form of cognition that is able to grasp the fundamental mutuality and social relatedness that underwrites socialised human beings. In his Emile, we see the training for this kind of social practical reason where Emile’s capacity for empathy and relatedness to others is taken as a kind of psychological foundation for the more mature thinking required for civic reason, one needed in order to uphold the general will —that form of social cognition that allows the individual to think in terms not of his own particularity, but rather in terms of the common interest of its members. Social reason in the form of the general will is not merely a formulaic procedure, however. Rousseau is suggesting that it is closer to what we would understand as a kind of collective-intentional rule-set that would be capable of articulating a new form of political and social reality: a genuine, free republic.12 The project of conceiving of a more robust form of social rationality is taken further by Hegel for whom social rationality is not a product of subjective or particular interests nor is it possible to find it through mere forms of agreement with one another. Hegel proposes that social rationality is tied with freedom. This is because the nature of the concept is such that freedom is a property of self-determining reason. So, relations take on different forms before maximising their highest, most rational potential. Mechanistic relations, for instance, do not manifest freedom because the parts of such a relation are acted upon from the outside, they are based on power or force (Gewalt ) rather than self-determination, freedom. Parts of such an order are dependent on one another, like the parts of a clock. Similarly, with relations he terms ‘chemism’, where the relation between parts of the whole are interdependent, but lack self-consciousness of their functions and roles and the purpose of their 11 See the insightful discussion by Nicholas Dent (1988), Rousseau: An Introduction to his Psychological, Social and Political Theory (1988) as well as Katrin Froese (2001). 12 Elsewhere (Thompson, 2017) I have suggested this reading of Rousseau’s general will. Also see the superb discussion by John B. Noone, Jr. (1980), Rousseau’s Social Contract: A Conceptual Analysis.

5

AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

127

collective action (Hegel, 1969: 402–486). (The cells of an organism, for instance, are not conscious of anything, let alone a higher purpose of life of which they are the building blocks.) It should be emphasised that Hegel views these kinds of relations not as empirical objects nor as a priori formulae. Rather, his thesis is that these are metaphysical structures of reason, dimensions of the concept (Begriff ) itself. Since freedom for Hegel is the feature of concepts that are self-determining rather than dependent on something else for their existence, his systemic and holistic understanding of rationality requires that the internal relations of objects achieve this self-determination in order to be rational and free. Truly free relations, Hegel seems to suggest, are those that act out of interdependence where the particular components of the relational order possess conceptual grasp of the ends and purposes of the actions of that relational order. And these ends and purposes will not simply be those that have been posited heteronomously, or according to dependent relations, from the outside, as it were.13 Rather, the idea here is that if we see human life as essentially social and relational, then we must also see that the ends of human society must be more than mere life itself, it must also be constituted by, and for, freedom. Social rationality is not met by formal criteria, but by, or through, the actual ontology of our social forms and both the concepts of self-understanding we employ, as well as the actual concrete practices that instantiate our collective lives. Individuality becomes robustly rational and ethical only once it has been able to absorb into its self-consciousness the systematic holism that underwrites our shared social reality: that our essential relatedness is a constitutive dimension of our freedom as persons.14 Pathologies in the institutional world—i.e., in the ontology of our social schemes—are therefore irrationalities in the metaphysics of our social world: they are defective ways of relating, acting, practicing, that are framed by ends and purposes that do not seek the cultivation of the common life of its members. 13 Elsewhere, (Thompson, 2018) I have developed the relation between Hegel’s logical categories and his political and ethical theory Also see Kevin Thompson’s (2019), Hegel’s Theory of Normativity: The Systematic Foundations of the Philosophical Science of Right. 14 Frederick Neuhouser argues on this point: ‘Full spiritual satisfaction, in contrast,

requires that life be elevated to freedom and that self-consciousness be filled with the aims of life. On this view, social pathology exists whenever the basic conditions of society prevent its members—in their self-conceptions, in their recognitive relations to others, and in their material practices—from bringing together their membership in both the realm of freedom and the realm of necessity’ (Neuhouser, 2016: 47).

128

M. J. THOMPSON

Much of the work on Hegelian ideas about social pathology take their starting point from the Lord and Bondsman section of the Phenomenology. But this is not exactly the best way to enter into Hegel’s ideas about social rationality and social pathology. Indeed, both Lord and Bondsman exist in a pathological relation for many reasons, but the key problem is in the particular ways that the ‘ethical life’ of any community is shaped and structured. The reason for this is that Hegel views social reason as emergent in the ontology of our institutional forms. The relations, processes, norms, practices and ends of our social schemes must be directed towards common goods and be directed by rational agents that have their interdependence on others as the basis of their own ethical agency. For Hegel, this rationality also has freedom at its core since it is only through freedom that members of a community can self-determine their own lives as developmental, processual beings. If we return to the fundamental ontological properties of human sociality, we find that relationality, cooperation and intentionality are core species-specific, phylogenetic features. These can be “worked up”‚ or developed historically via the production of more complex forms of sociality, more elaborate relational structures and institutions that in turn require more complex normative rules. But the key idea here is that we can evaluate these various forms of sociality based not on spontaneous reflection or intersubjective consensus alone, but, rather, according to certain objective features of those social forms themselves. This means seeing our evaluative categories, our ethical concepts, as ontological as opposed to merely formal or pragmatic in that they refer to actual social states—i.e., relational structures, practices, norms and purposes—that have ontological status in the world. Indeed, they in fact shape the very contours of our social reality. We can begin to distinguish between what I will refer to as anabolic and katabolic (or pathological) forms of social reality by referring to a cluster of ontological features of sociality and evaluating them based on the character of the basic ontological categories I explored above, namely: relations, processes and ends or purposes.15 These terms describe the ways that any structure of relations, or relatum, acts on its relata: put 15 The distinction between anabolic and katabolic drives in the personality is first pointed out by Freud in his The Ego and the Id. I am borrowing these terms from Karl Menninger’s (1938), Man against Himself . Menninger employs these concepts to refer to tendencies within the personality, but extends them to patterns of human

5

AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

129

more specifically, each term refers to the ways that relational forms and processes of social reality either act creatively to enhance and develop the capacities and functionings of its members (anabolism) or act to frustrate, negate or destroy their capacities and functionings (katabolism).16 These terms are not only to be understood in terms of the biological levels of life (i.e., of nutrition, and so on) but in ethical terms as well, as the reduction of the creative, rational, moral and aesthetic capacities of the self.17 In this sense, anabolism and katabolism describe the socioontological patterns that underwrite our social world—but they are also ethical criteria in the sense that they describe social structures and practices that articulate social reality. The key idea behind the critical power of social pathology diagnosis has to be that it refers to the kinds of ontological structures and practices that we could otherwise change that do not enhance or cultivate the highest possible capacities of our collective efforts as well as our individual potentialities. But what makes any given relatum pathological? Why will some engender katabolic structures and others anabolic structures? An answer can be coherently given by understanding the broader ontological shapes that these structures can take. A given relatum is not in and of itself the cause of pathological tendencies. Rather, the key needs to be found in the nature of social power and the ways that it is able to shape not only relational structures but also the ends and purposes of those relations. The end that is posited defines not only the structure of the relations, it also circumscribes the practices that enact those relations and the norms that guide subjective actions within that social scheme. An example can behavior as responses to social forces. ‘Freud makes the . . . assumption that the life— and death-instincts—let us call them the constructive and destructive tendencies of the personality—are in constant conflict and interaction just as are similar forces in physics, chemistry, and biology. To create and to destroy, to build up and to tear down, these are the anabolism and katabolism of the personality, no less than of the cells and the corpuscles—the two directions in which the same energies exert themselves.’ (Menninger, 1938: 5). Although Menninger employs these categories to describe aspects of the personality, I use them to describe the effects that relations have on the individuals who constitute them. Pathology is now a concept that describes both the ontological relational structures and the subjects within and affected by them. Also cf. Fromm (1973: 102ff.). 16 It should be emphasised that pathological social schemes also produce pathological personalities and that the categories of anabolism and katabolism become features of pathological personal drives and tendencies (cf. Fromm, 1973: 246). 17 Frederick Neuhouser (2020) describes this aspect of social pathology through Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the decadence of life and as a cultural pathology.

130

M. J. THOMPSON

be found in the Stanford Prison Experiment by Philip Zimbardo (2007). In his experiment, Zimbardo arbitrarily placed volunteers in the roles of guards and prisoners in a simulated prison. Guards were then told their roles and the purposes of what they were there to do. They were instructed that they were there to control and contain the prison population. Guards became increasingly abusive towards the prisoners as the experiment went on. The dehumanisation of the prisoners by the guards accelerated to the point that Zimbardo had to shut the experiment down. When the experiment was replicated years later, it was found the guards were not acting in a dehumanising manner until the researchers realised that they had not included the instruction session for the guards. Once this was added to the experiment, the guards became dehumanising and sadistic, manifesting katabolic attitudes and imbuing the experimental social scheme with katabolic features.18 The importance of this seems to me to be that it shows that roles and practices within a social scheme require the positing of ends and purposes by some hierarchical authority in order for them to take on either anabolic or katabolic tendencies. Social schemes and the shapes they take, have an efficient cause: they require some kind of power to organise them and assign norms and collective-intentional rules that make the scheme what it is. Prisons, in this example, were defined and assigned a teleological function according to the ends set by the organisers of the study who assigned roles to the guards as well as, implicitly, to the prisoners. The relations between guards and prisoners were defined retrogressively in accordance with the purpose (or telos ) of the institution of the prison itself.19 Pathology here comes to describe not the psychological features of the individuals involved per se, but rather the ontology of the social 18 This also holds for the famous Milgram (1974) experiments where participants were told by an authority figure to obey commands for shocking other participants for errors in an enacted learning experiment. One of the key findings of the study seems to me to be that the more authority is present and appears legitimate, the more likely that the roles of the participants would be enacted and fulfilled. The structural relations between the participants is again necessary but insufficient. What is crucial is that there be some kind of efficient cause, power, that provides the structure with coherence and allows for the enactment of prescribed structural roles and practices. 19 Applying Aristotle’s metaphysical categories of causation, we can therefore say that any social scheme in social ontology have: (i) a material or substantive cause: the relational capacities of the species; (ii) a formal cause: the relations that are enacted in any scheme; (iii) an efficient cause: the guiding power that assigns the roles and purposes of that scheme; and (iv) a final cause: the purpose or end, the telos, of that scheme and its power

5

AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

131

scheme itself: the relations, norms, practices and purposes of the scheme as set out by some directing intelligence. As such, the formal cause of the relatum is necessary but insufficient to determine whether a social scheme will be rational or irrational. It requires that purposes and intentions be set for the collective efforts of all involved and that roles be defined as a function of the collective purpose of that scheme. What this shows us is that social schemes can be pathological and irrational. That there is evidence for the thesis that the ontology of any given form of sociality can exhibit pathological or irrational features and this is not reducible to the personality structures of the individuals involved. Katabolic ontological forms of social reality exhibit forms of self- and other-destructiveness in their most malignant forms and, in less malignant modes, frustrates or even outright negates the developmental, self-determining capacities of individuals. But since it is ultimately we who are the creators of these social forms, it is central to see that the moment of emancipatory critique can only come about once the first step towards de-reification is made: that is, towards the idea that there is an essential, cooperative and social-relational essence to human life and that the ends of those cooperative, interdependent forms of life are not defined by ‘nature’ but by us. A community that exhibits anabolic life forms and selfdetermining individuals is therefore the product of an ethical life whose members are self-conscious of the capacity to articulate such a social reality—an ethical life that is saturated by reason and rational institutions. This implies not only that our ethical and political categories such as freedom or justice, need to be seen not in a priori, formal terms but as rooted in actual social structures. But it also means that these categories are themselves composed of certain ontological features that define the relations, practices and purposes of those social forms. The ways that our relations are structured also become causal in terms of the subjective forms of consciousness and the personality structure of the self. So, any relation that is to any significant degree exploitive, oppressive, exclusionary or which marginalises others, is defective because it is irrational: its irrationality lies in its abuse of the social bond, which exists for mutual benefit. Aggression, sadism, masochism and so on—these are also pathological drives because they do not exist or function to expand

to retrogressively define the boundaries of the scheme itself as well as the parameters of the roles, norms and practices that constitute the scheme.

132

M. J. THOMPSON

the freedom or the developmental aspects of those involved in the relation, but rather satisfy inflamed drives for dominance or control. Social pathology embraces both the whole and the part, both the society and the individual. The two are fundamentally in dialectical relation: our interdependence on others is systematic and therefore takes on holistic features. As Erich Fromm insightfully notes on the evaluative concepts of rational versus irrational: ‘I propose to call rational any thought, feeling or act that promotes the adequate functioning and growth of the whole of which it is a part, and irrational that which tends to weaken or destroy the whole’ (Fromm, 1973: 295).20 Assume that our phylogenetic capacities for joint and cooperative forms of relations are the basis for any higher forms of consciousness, moral reasoning and cognition.21 Now, consider further that the social world into which we are born consists of a certain number of social integration mechanisms meant to instill within its members the essential constitutive rules that will maintain the collective-intentional rule-sets that will sustain and reproduce the social institutions and practices of that society. The process of ontogenesis is therefore one that is a function of just such a procedure. The problem here now is two-fold. First, is the social reality into which I am socialised itself pathological or in some fundamental sense sub-rational; and, second, will my cognitive and psychological capacities be able to perceive them where they exist. Here is where my account becomes more complex. As I see it, there is no fundamental divide between these, as if they were first- and second-order phenomena. Quite to the contrary, I see them as unified into a more complex ontological structure. The key now is to understand what makes them pathological, and that means seeing social reason as consonant with the systemic ontological complexes that instantiate our social reality. Far from this meaning that we need to posit some natural basis from which pathology is a deviation, we must see our ethical life as a construct that is guided by reason; and if social reason is to be seen in ontological terms, then this means characterising pathological social structures, norms, practices, ends and so on as those that do not maximise the selfrealisation of its members; that there exists a purpose to any basic kind of cooperative activity, relation or structure and that it be beneficial to all

20 Also cf. Laitinen and Särkelä (2019: 80–102). 21 See Tomasello (2019) for a more complete treatment of this thesis.

5

AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

133

members of that association. The idea here is not a natural one, but an ethical one: it expresses the thesis that human social reality is a product of the directing ideas that shape our collective forms of activity, practices and institutions. Only by positing anabolic relational structures and practices, and common goods and purposes for our collective institutional lives can we strive to displace pathological expressions of social and cultural life. The types of personalities spawned by katabolic relations and practices, institutions defined by particular over common goods will inevitably suffer from the misshapen drives, the neuroses and psychoses that result from a community that is shaped inhumanely and unjustly.

4

Macro and Micro Katabolic Dynamics

Thus far my discussion has been relatively abstract and theoretical. I have been trying to lay a basic groundwork for understanding the dynamics of social pathology and to show that they can be understood as irrationalities in the ways that our collective forms of life are shaped and the kinds of norms and purposes that they instill. Key to this is the issue of social integration, or the various ways that these ontological shapes of social reality socialise and shape the individuals that will, in turn, sustain them. Social pathologies may be rooted in our collective social ontology, but it manifests most acutely in the individuals it produces. As Rousseau had initially pointed out, and Freud much later, the problem of how certain basic impulses or drives within the individual are shaped by the social-relational world is the key issue. As I have been pointing out, social pathology denotes not only the objective irrationalities of the forms of social reality, but also, because of the dialectical nature of the concept, of the personal character structure as well. Neoliberal society can be seen as particularly prone to pathologies of society and self. The atomisation of secular and traditional forms of social life, the embedding of all dimensions of human society into the framework of market dynamics, the vertiginous nature of social inequality, as well as the absorption of non-economic spheres of life into capitalistic and techno-administrative imperatives, have made alienation, reification, aggression, ego-withering and self-destructiveness particularly acute in modern cultures. For individuals to succeed in any material sense, they must increasingly abandon their own self-development to the needs and prerequisites of the marketplace. The expansion of necessary labour time,

134

M. J. THOMPSON

due in large part to the decline in wages and unionisation, as well as deskilling, means longer working hours and multiple venues of employment. The resulting anxiety from insecure labour positions, the rise of extractive finance capital, as well as the demise of autonomous spheres of cultural life, has meant an almost total absorption of the catallactic norms and practices of capitalist market relations. Social integration into these forms of life requires the individual to repress anabolic drives: desires for creation and play become displaced by norms of necessity and conformity to workplace norms. At the same time, they are replaced with what Herbert Marcuse (1964) properly called ‘repressive desublimation’: the alienated quest for satisfying erotic derives in escapist forms of sexuality and other expressions of pleasure. The erosion of robust social relations is a consequence of the inequality and intensified work-life of neoliberal society. Consequently, individuals interact with one another on an increasingly reified basis. The reification of others can become a pathological outgrowth of these dynamics where others as mere objects for your own gain, pleasure or as obstacles to your will or desire, means the diminution of agapic and empathic forms of relatedness, of the fulfilment of Aldous Huxley’s (1945) description of modernity as ‘organised lovelessness’. Social solidarity with others, with the ‘other’, more specifically, is replaced by in-group and out-group forms of self-identification. The moral cognition that this leads to becomes increasingly simplistic and Manichean and tendencies towards political authoritarianism and racism become ever more prevalent. As such, the tendency for conflict and intolerance increases even as corporate forms of media are able to extract profits by stoking collective fears and anxiety. At the same time, older models of autonomy that were rooted in the rational-reflective capacities of the subject devolve into forms of group narcissism and ideological self-identification. The capacity for a more open-relatedness with others, to critique encrusted value systems and norms, now becomes more difficult to achieve. The anxiety produced by a world that has so rapidly changed and which leaves few options for personal security (material and emotional) means that forms of aggressiveness and intolerance will also rise and grip more members of society.22 Of course, at the same time, these pathological social conditions can lead to frustration and a loss of legitimacy of those institutions, particularly

22 See the excellent discussion of this theme by Thorpe (2016).

5

AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

135

among younger cohorts. But the extent to which this can lead to actual social change will be largely dependent on the extent to which new forms of social relatedness and practices can displace the pathological ones and new social purposes and ends can achieve collective-intentional embeddedness. Only if anabolic relations, processes and purposes eclipse the defective katabolic relations, norms, values and institutions, can genuine, radical social change occur and achieve the rationalisation of society.

5 Phronetic Criticism: Judgement as Immanent Critique Ethical life can now be seen as the central locus of transformative critique. I believe that the ontological approach to social pathology diagnosis can, in dialectical fashion, lead us to rethink the ways that modern ethical life can be rationalised, and the Hegelian-Marxist legacy be sustained. By now we can see that conceiving of critique in ontological terms brings us to the point where we see values not in neo-Kantian terms, or as abstract, subjective and formalistic, but rather as embodied in the relational, structural, teleological forms of life that are constituted by our material practices and embedded and guided by forms of collective intentionality. An ontological theory of value therefore describes how a given social reality is the product of collective mental states and material practices that serve as guides for our conceptions of the good or valued form of life.23 The value concepts we have in our minds shape the practices we enact in the world. Friendship is not only a value, it is an ontology in the sense that it suggests certain norms, relations and practices as well as purposes. If there exists a collective value within the fabric of ethical life about the nature of friendship, then there will be general collective-intentional rules that are constitutive of relations and practices and purposes of friendship. These values can change and their relative validity should be derived not from abstract or formalistic criteria, but rather from the ontological holistic perspective I have been suggesting here: a value is rational when it

23 The ontology of value can therefore be seen as the constitutive interplay between

concepts and practices and the enactment of this practices within congealed ensembles of broader social schemes. As Sally Haslanger has argued about the nature of our concepts: ‘our concepts and our social practices are deeply intertwined. Concepts not only enable us to describe but also help structure social practices, and our evolving practices affect our concepts’ (Haslanger, 2012: 368 and passim).

136

M. J. THOMPSON

enhances the self-realisation of the members involved in that association. Ethical life now can be seen as both mental orientations to the world as well as embodied social states—an ontology of practices that congeal into structures and institutions and with the power to routinise and socialise its value concepts. It is defined by particular directive ideas that organise and legitimate those same practices and institutions. The diagnosis of social pathology therefore also entails a dialectical need to articulate valid or good forms of life that ought to command our rational obligations. Social rationality therefore is a feature of the extent to which our collective lives are genuinely self-determining, and this, in turn, requires that the concept of autonomy be transposed into a new register. Once we see ourselves in de-reified terms, we can grasp the fundamentally interdependent ontology that serves as the infrastructure to our own lives. This is a new, expanded form of autonomy that requires us to think in terms of the relational, structural, processual and teleological substrates of our essentially associational lives. Reification becomes an important pathology once we see that it obfuscates this capacity and actively shapes not only our cognitive stance towards social reality, but also the kinds of practices we enact and the social reality they sustain.24 Phronetic criticism is therefore the capacity to shatter the effects of reification. It relies on the thesis that values and norms govern our practices and that practices are the sustaining, active cause of the social world. But even more, it posits that social reason is measured by the extent to which our self-determining lives are the product of specific kinds of relations and social structures. Immanent criticism now can be recast as opening up the features of our social schemes to judgement—judging how they either promote or negate forms of associational life that cultivate and exhibit freedom. We obtain this kind of immanence by achieving ontological coherence: a cognitive grasp of the directive ideas that organise our social schemes, how our social relations are shaped, and the ends and purposes towards which they are organised. This is the site of social pathology in the sense that these constitute the constitutive parameters and dynamics for the articulation of persons and for rational self-consciousness. Since ethical value is now to be seen as ontological instead of merely cognitive or pragmatic, it acts as a

24 See the important discussion by Kavoulakos (2018).

5

AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

137

recursive phenomenon. By this I mean that value is at once mental, practical and a feature of our organisational reality. It emerges as a social fact in terms of the unification of subject and object, but not merely in the sphere of intersubjective noumenalism, but in the concrete institutions and the directive ideas that underwrite them. And since the social ontology that is constitutive of any institutional or social scheme requires specific patterns of relations, practices, and ends, this means that value should be seen as manifesting itself ontologically—not only in terms of our pragmatic practices but also in terms of the social artefacts that we produce and for which we organise our collective activities. For ethical life to be rational means that the objective features of our world are freedom-enhancing and self-determining. The criteria for the rational validity of these social schemes and institutions are rooted dialectically in the pathological expressions of our social forms. Here immanent critique becomes essential: for it is only by dialectically exposing what a pathology represses that we can begin to uncover the rational pulsating beneath the veneer of irrationality. The medical metaphor is one of knowing why an organ is ill or defective based on its inability to perform its function. We know cancer cells to be pathologies of an organism not because those cells are weak or in some way defective in and of themselves. They are defective with respect to the higher purposes of the system (the organ and the organism as a whole) of which they are a part. Of course, the supreme limit of the medical metaphor is that healthy cells and organisms are not free in the sense that ethical life can be free. We do not have specific purposes or functions that make us free, but we can say that certain relational forms of life enhance selfdetermining agency more than others; that interdependence rather than dependence, reciprocity rather than exploitation, common rather than particular goods and ends; and that the rational purposes of our associations with others should be for the development and self-realisation of self-determining forms of personhood. All of these broad claims entail ontological categories about our social world that can be seen as rational or irrational, as being robustly fulfilled or defectively enacted. A critical social ontology can now be seen to provide critical reason with a firmer and, I think, more powerful framework within which to operate. It is critical as well as constructive, it can inform empirical social science as well as political and moral philosophy. At its centre is the idea that consciousness and being can be sublated into a more satisfying and organic form of life. For not unlike Rousseau’s ‘general will’, we

138

M. J. THOMPSON

can glimpse a kind of de-reifying mode of reflection that forces us to think outside and against the ontic forms of life that confront us. Social pathology, viewed as a defect in the ontological properties of our relations, practices, institutions and the aims and purposes of our social world, is the ultimate confrontation with forms of social reality that have not undergone any form of rational or reflective endorsement. The problem, as I have been trying to demonstrate, is that rational reflection on its own or merely via intersubjective practices, is not up to the task. The powers of reification to shape consciousness render these approaches ineffective. The framework I have sketched here can be used to articulate a more robust mode of critical rationality and, with hope, a more satisfying and humane conception of ethical life and human value as well.

References Dent, N. (1988). Rousseau: An introduction to his psychological, social and political theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Freud, S. (1990). The ego and the id. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Froese, K. (2001). Beyond liberalism: The moral community of Rousseau’s social contract. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 33(3), 579–600. Freyenhagen, F. (2015). Honneth on social pathologies: A critique. Critical Horizons, 16(2), 131–152. Freyenhagen, F. (2018). Critical theory and social pathology. In P. Gordon, E. Hammer, & A. Honneth (Eds.), The Routledge companion to the Frankfurt school. New York, NY: Routledge. Fromm, E. (1973). The anatomy of human destructiveness. New York, NY: Henry Holt. Harris, N. (2019). Beyond recognition: A critique of contemporary social pathology diagnosis. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. Haslanger, S. (2012). Resisting reality: Social construction and social critique. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1969). Wissenschaft der Logik (Vol. 2). Frankfurt: Surkamp. Honneth, A. (2011). Das Recht der Freiheit. Grundriss der demokratischen Sittlichkeit. Frankfurt: Surkamp. Huxley, A. (1945). The perennial philosophy. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Kavoulakos, K. (2018). Georg Lukács’s philosophy of praxis: From Neo-Kantianism to Marxism. London: Bloomsbury. Laitinen, A. (2015). Social pathologies, reflexive pathologies, and the idea of higher-order disorders. Studies in Social and Political Thought, 25, 44–65. Laitinen, A., & Särkelä, A. (2019). Four conceptions of social pathology. European Journal of Social Theory, 22(1), 80–102.

5

AN ONTOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

139

Menninger, K. (1938). Man against himself . New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and World. Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. New York, NY: HarperCollins. Neuhouser, F. (2016). Hegel on social ontology and the possibility of pathology. In I. Testa & L. Ruggiu (Eds.), I that is we, we that is I: Perspectives on contemporary hegel. Leiden: Brill. Neuhouser, F. (2020). Geistige Gesundheit und kulturelle Pathologie bei Nietzsche. Deutsche Zeitschrift Für Philosophie, 68(1), 1–27. Noone, J. (1980). Rousseau’s social contract: A conceptual analysis. London: George Prior Publishers. Rousseau, J. J. (1964a). Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité. Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 3. Paris: Gallimard. Rousseau, J. J. (1964b). Du contract social. Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 3. Paris: Gallimard. Schaub, J. (2015). Misdevelopments, pathologies, and normative revolutions: Normative reconstruction as method of critical theory. Critical Horizons, 16(2), 107–130. Thompson, K. (2019). Hegel’s theory of normativity: The systematic foundations of the philosophical science of right. Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press. Thompson, M. J. (2016). The domestication of critical theory. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Thompson, M. J. (2017). Autonomy and common good: Interpreting Rousseau’s general will. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 25(2), 266–285. Thompson, M. J. (2018). The metaphysical infrastructure of Hegel’s practical philosophy. In M. Thompson (Ed.), Hegel’s metaphysics and the philosophy of politics (pp. 101–141). New York, NY: Routledge. Thompson, M. J. (2019). Critical social ontology as a foundation for ethics: Marx, Lukács and critical judgment. Studies in Social and Political Thought, 29: 8–26. Thompson, M. J. (2020a). Verdinglichung und das Netz der Normen: Wege zu einer Kritischen Theorie des Bewusstseins. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 68(2): 217–240. Thompson, M. J. (2020b). The specter of Babel: A reconstruction of political judgment. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Thorpe, C. (2016). Necroculture. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Tomasello, M. (2019). Becoming human: A theory of ontogeny. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. New York, NY: Random House.

140

M. J. THOMPSON

Zurn, C. (2011). Social pathologies as second-order disorders. In Danielle Petherbridge (Ed.), Axel Honneth: Critical essays. Brill: Leiden.

CHAPTER 6

Who Is Ill When a Society Is Ill? Onni Hirvonen

The past few decades have seen the rehabilitation of the concept of social pathology in critical social theory. After all, what is the purpose of critical theory if not diagnosing the sicknesses of contemporary society? However, it is still very much unclear how to understand the concept of social pathology. Who is really ill when a society is ill? Are some members of the society sick, or perhaps a large proportion of the population? Or is it groups, institutions, or the society as a whole who have fallen ill? What would it even mean for these entities to be in a pathological state? This chapter analyses the ontological commitments of different conceptions of social pathology. Following Arto Laitinen and Arvi Särkelä 2019, this text outlines four accounts of social pathology which are divided into two camps. The ‘thin sense’ of social pathology offers an individualistic view, which focuses on the socially caused and pervasive suffering of individual human beings. The ‘thick sense’ of social pathology takes literally the medical sense of the word pathology and aims to apply it to society as a whole. The aim of this chapter is to give a short overlook

O. Hirvonen (B) University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Harris (ed.), Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_6

141

142

O. HIRVONEN

of the various senses of social pathology present in contemporary critical social theory (Sect. 2), and to give an analysis of the social-ontological commitments that the different conceptions of social pathology hold (Sects. 3 and 4). Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the central claims of the chapter is that the social-ontological commitments between different accounts of social pathology are different. The disclosure of the ontological commitments of the conceptions of social pathology is the main task of the chapter, but it is done in order to highlight what difference, if any, these commitments make in relation to the critical potential of a social theory. The hypothesis is that the stronger the ontological commitments to functional or structural wholes are, the easier it is to evaluate social orders on the basis of the concept of social pathology. However, this comes at a cost: stronger social-ontological commitments will require stronger philosophical defences that are not readily available, or easy to accept. With this in mind, the chapter finishes with a short outline of a critical social ontology (Sect. 5).1 However, before all that, we will start with a brief overview of the general idea of the concept of social pathology in critical social philosophy (Sect. 1).

1

Social Pathologies, Critical Theory, and Emancipation

If one were to look for the general goal of critical theory, one would most probably come up with the goal of emancipation (see, e.g. Honneth, 2017). The preferred method in achieving, or at least getting closer to, emancipation is not that of giving a definition of it through necessary and sufficient conditions. Instead, critical theory aims to give an analysis of those conditions that work against emancipation. This, quite obviously, requires some understanding of what emancipation entails, but it is commonly spelled out in terms of a historically developed understanding of emancipation—not in terms of the metaphysical conditions of emancipation. In short, at the centre of analysis are the internal or immanent potentials for emancipation that are inherent in the current way of life of the society in question. While any essentialist, or metaphysical, strictly defined utopias are rejected, critical social theory nevertheless 1 A much shorter version of similar ideas has been published in conference proceedings as Hirvonen (2019b). This chapter presents an updated and much more detailed argument.

6

WHO IS ILL WHEN A SOCIETY IS ILL?

143

points beyond the current social order. A key role in this process is the conceptualisation and diagnosis of those contemporary conditions that work against emancipation, as it is understood in any particular historical situation. Considering the pluralist nature of contemporary societies, how is it possible to identify even ‘immanent’ senses of emancipation? One strategy would be to identify as broad and agreeable a ground as possible. This is what, for example, Axel Honneth’s (2014a) work on freedom as the core modern value can be understood to do. His critical theory has focused on analysing the conditions that obstruct freedom from being realised—be it certain institutional settings, work conditions, or individual dispositions to misunderstand the conditions of one’s personal individual freedom.2 It is within this circle of critical theorisation that the concept of social pathology finds its most prominent use. The critical diagnosis of a society can be said to point out the illnesses of the society and, when possible, it tries to provide cures for these illnesses. Institutional dysfunctionalities and social suffering are sicknesses that stay in the way of freedom and emancipation, and it is the task of critical social theory to pinpoint and eradicate these, mostly by giving conceptual tools for social agents. But what is the point of bringing in the medical term ‘pathology’ if the real interest lies in the social emancipation? Furthermore, even if the pathologies of the social do exist, is the analysis of them all that critical social theory is good for? In the medical context, the concept of pathology also assumes, as a counterpart to pathological states, normal states, and reproductive biological wholes. According to Georg Henrik von Wright’s analysis of medical ‘goodness’, the talk of medical goodness of an organ or a faculty presupposes ‘the existence of an essential connexion between the kind (of organ or faculty) and some function. […] An organ which performs its proper function well is said to be good or well’ (von Wright, 1963: 52, 54). However, to give strong substantial definitions of normal states of a society is dangerously close to submitting to anti-historical essentialism or ossification of the current institutional

2 Laitinen et al. (2015: 11) identify authors from Hegel to Durkheim and Adorno to use the pathology-diagnosis type of social analysis. It could be stated that the concept of social pathology has found most purchase in the Hegel and Marx inspired critical social theory.

144

O. HIRVONEN

setting. Is it even possible to find a normal state of a society? In his influential analysis of the concept of pathology, Georges Canguilhem (1991: 256) warns against any easy extensions of it into the social realm: it is enough that one individual in any society question the needs and norms of this society and challenge them - a sign that these needs and norms are not those of the whole society - in order for us to understand to what extent social need is not immanent, to what extent the social norm is not internal, and finally, to what extent the society, seat of restrained dissent or latent antagonisms, is far from setting itself up as a whole.

On the other hand, failing to give any critical standards for evaluation of society is close to an equally un-appealing strong value relativism. There are of course many ways to thread this (not-so-thin) line between essentialism and relativism, as well as there are multiple conceptualisations of the meaning and role of social pathology within critical social theory. Much depends on how one sees the basic building blocks of society, and, accordingly, of social theory, to be arranged. In the next section, four distinct accounts of social pathology are introduced—each of them offering different views of the basic structure of a society.

2

Four Conceptions of Social Pathology

Even the medical sense of the concept of pathology is notoriously difficult to pinpoint precisely (see, e.g. Canguilhem, 1991). It is often taken to mean a dysfunctional biological system or a body whose continued functioning or even existence is threatened because of the dysfunctional state. This being the case, it is no wonder that the concept of pathology has also found use in the sphere of social analysis. Seeing society as a functional body, prone to illnesses and other malaises, is an idea that is as old as western philosophy itself. Plato’s Republic gives such a description; from that point onwards the idea has come up from routinely in philosophy, social theory, political practice, and fiction (Honneth, 2014b: 683–684). Despite the difficulties in giving an exact definition of a pathology, the conceptual pair of the corresponding states of ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ is present in many accounts (see Canguilhem, 1991: 35, 41; von Wright, 1963: 61). In an ideal case, a medical doctor is able to diagnose an illness

6

WHO IS ILL WHEN A SOCIETY IS ILL?

145

and propose the needed measures to get back into a healthy state. Similarly, a social theorist would be able to spot the illnesses of a society and suggest those measures (for example, right kinds of policies) that would enable the society to get back to normal. However, despite the general shared features of medical and social theories, it is unclear how strong the analogy is and what it commits us to. Here a helpful starting point is a recent analysis by Arto Laitinen and Arvi Särkelä (2019) who lay down four main conceptions of social pathologies that are present in contemporary critical social theory. It is suggested that these conceptions come in two main camps: (A) thin (or normativist) and (B) thick (or naturalist). Whereas the thin sense of pathology takes the term to be only metaphorical, the thick sense claims that the state–body analogy should be taken quite literally. Both camps include different theoretical iterations, and the analysis below (A.1, A.2 and B.1, B.2) follows loosely the conceptions outlined by Laitinen and Särkelä. (A) The thin sense of social pathology A.1 Pathology as a deviation from social norms. The thin senses of pathology are called thin because they are mostly metaphorical in their use of the concept of pathology. In the most general and abstract formulation, a ‘normal state’ means that there are certain social norms that are followed and, correspondingly, the pathological or ‘unnormal’ is a deviation from these norms. Examples of this sense of social pathology include, for example, conservative claims in the marriage equality discussions where one of the arguments is that if certain norms are not followed (e.g. that marriage is meant to be between men and women only), then the moral core of society itself crumbles. In short, the conservative argument is that certain normative orders need to be followed as they are believed to be constitutive of the society. The deviation from social norms model of social pathologies is not necessarily conservative in the above sense. However, it does face the challenge of spelling out the core norms of a society. What are those norms that define normal and pathological? It is clear that for any critical or revolutionary thinkers, holding the current normative order as definitive ‘normal’ is unacceptable. John Dewey (1973: 51–53) goes as far as saying that in fact this sort of conservative project of retaining the singular normative core of institutions is in fact futile. Institutions and normative orders are products of their time and as circumstances change, their norms

146

O. HIRVONEN

and practices are not as applicable anymore. In short, the ‘normal’ of the normativist account might a historically changing and contested. Furthermore, there is a need to distinguish between accidental individualistic deviations from the more reoccurring and systematic deviations. A single deed against, or beyond, the prevailing norms does not seem to constitute a social pathology as such. The norm-centred sense of pathology also presents a dangerous totalitarian potential—although this is by no means necessarily entailed by the view—that individuals, or their individual actions, would be judged as sick. Although this sense of social pathology retains the conceptual connection to normality and normativity, something needs to be added to it in order to capture the functional or systematic nature of social pathologies. A.2 Pathology as a deviation from social norms, with a common structure. While the A.1 faces the challenge of qualifying the central norms and distinguishing individual deviations from actual social cases of pathology, according to the A.2 sense of a social pathology, there is a common structure that designates certain behaviours, dispositions, and tendencies as socially pathological. In one sense, this could help to demarcate social pathologies from other accidental deviations from norms. However, at the same time this conception might prove to be too limited. Christopher Zurn’s (2011) account of social pathologies of recognition as second-order disorders is perhaps the most well-known account to adopt this approach. According to him (or his reading of Axel Honneth’s work) social pathologies are pervasive, socially caused, cases of lack of a reflexive second-order understanding of social life. Multiple issues such as ideological recognition, maldistribution, invisibilisation, distortions of rationality, reification, and problems in institutionalised self-realisation all are based on a similar disconnect between our experiences and our second-order understanding of them and of how we relate to others (Zurn, 2011: 345). Arguably, and similarly to the deviation from social norms conception (A.1), Zurn’s account leaves behind medical or organic connotations of the concept of social pathology (Laitinen et al., 2015: 11). This, in itself, is not philosophically suspect (as far as one is happy to accept a metaphorical sense of social pathology). Nevertheless, the ‘the common structure’ models have a deeper problem: it is unlikely that they capture all the relevant phenomena we want to designate social pathologies. For example, as Laitinen (2015) points out, there might be obstructions to social recognition that are not necessarily related to issues with

6

WHO IS ILL WHEN A SOCIETY IS ILL?

147

second-order capabilities. If Zurn’s model is meant to capture all the forms of possible deviations from social norms, it should be able to explain why some interesting cases should not be counted as pathologies. In other words, if there is only one form of social pathology, it seems that we are potentially overlooking multiple other forms of social suffering. In response, Zurn could claim that he is merely describing pathologies of recognition but that it is entirely possible that there are also other social pathologies. In any case, it is highly doubtful that there is only one structure of pervasive social suffering, and thus limiting the concept of social pathology to merely one kind of pervasive social suffering seems like an unnecessary limitation of the concept. It seems that any ‘common structure’ model will suffer from the same problem, unless the structure is formulated in such an abstract and broad fashion that we are back at the even thinner A.1 conception of pathology. (B) The thick sense of social pathology B.1 Pathology as an illness of society. The thicker senses of social pathology take seriously the medical connotations of the term pathology. If we understand society as an organism or a body, it becomes easier to think of that social organism as ill. This is not completely outlandish thought as from Plato onwards it has been part of philosophical practice to describe society as a more or less unified body (Honneth, 2014b: 683–684). The thick sense of social pathology takes this comparison quite literally: a society is a whole with reproductive goals and its own social organs. In Canguilhem’s terms, social organisation, and the creation of institutional worlds, is ‘above all, the invention of organs’ (Canguilhem, 1991: 253). In a strong parallel to medical pathologies, social pathologies are dysfunctionalities of the social organs. It is pathological when a social organ fails to contribute to the continued reproduction of the society. A view of this kind has been recently supported by Honneth (2014b) who argues that any serious use of the term pathology would require rehabilitation of the concept of social organism. However, the organicist view of societies has been challenged on multiple fronts. Firstly, the socioontological background assumptions (more of these in the next section) remain questionable as it is unclear in what sense a society is a whole with its own goals and reproductive ends (Laitinen et al., 2015: 13). Secondly, the organicist model can be claimed to be both conservative and morally irrelevant: placing social reproduction at the epicenter of social

148

O. HIRVONEN

diagnosis merely preserves the current social order, and if social reproduction overrides individuals’ rights or their suffering, the moral worth of the theory is questionable at best. In other words, the well-being of individuals becomes subordinate to the collective reproduction of a functional social whole. Any strong defence of organicist theory would thus need to explain the connections between the problems of the social whole and individuals’ social suffering. B.2 Pathology as a disturbance in the process of social life. The processual model of social life and social pathologies (presented, for example, by Laitinen et al., 2015: 13; Laitinen & Särkelä, 2019) aims to avoid falling into a static picture of a healthy society (B.1) by arguing for a dynamic conception of social life. Within this picture, the society is still understood as a functional whole. However, this ‘whole’ is a process, which can develop and evolve and, thus, the focus is shifted from static reproduction into the processual development of the society. As the name suggests, in this account the disturbances of the developing process of social life constitute social pathologies. These could be, for example, hindrances to public sphere that block new ideas and institutions from being developed. According to Särkelä (2017), this view can be found from both Hegel and Dewey. Although this model avoids the conservative tendencies of searching for a static normal state, focusing on development does not yet guarantee that enabling social change and social progress will necessarily lead to a better society. Thus, the processual model of social pathology will also need a supporting theory of social suffering of individuals that is then anchored in social theory in order to give it the required normative weight. The following analysis will not strictly argue for any particular conception of social pathology. Instead, the aim is to highlight the various socio-ontological commitments that are needed in order to defend any of the positions introduced above. The analysis also aims to unveil the ontological commitments that would best enable the serious use of the concept of social pathology in critical social theory. Namely, the commitments that enable non-conservatism and have an explanatory connection to social suffering and social structures. The claim in the following sections is that these can, in fact, be achieved with different socio-ontological commitments about the basic structure of a society.

6

3

WHO IS ILL WHEN A SOCIETY IS ILL?

149

Social-Ontological Toolbox

What is meant by the examination of socio-ontological commitments here is the attempt to find out the units and agents that are at the so-called fundamental level of the theory in question.3 To illustrate, an example can be drawn from the classic social theories of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Weber famously holds to methodological individualism where all social actions can be ultimately analysed as individuals’ actions (Weber, 1971: 77–78). Durkheim, on the other hand, claims that social facts are things that are largely independent of the particular individuals who manifest them (Durkheim, 1968: 45). While Weber aims to assume nothing more than individual agents and their interactions, Durkheim has to include social facts into his ontology as separate entities. It is these kinds of commitments and their relations to the possibilities of critique that we are after in the following analysis. However, to begin an analysis of social-ontological commitments, it is useful to distinguish between different social-ontological questions. Philip Pettit and David Schweikard’s influential tripartite division of different debates in social ontology is most helpful for this task. These are atomism-holism debate, individualism-collectivism debate, and singularism-nonsingularism debate. According to Pettit and Schweikard (2006: 35; see also Pettit, 1996: 138), the first debate focuses on the constitution of social agents. Holists argue that agents are necessarily dependent on others (and their relations to others) whereas, in what resembles extreme libertarian thought, atomists state that is no such dependence. The individualism-collectivism debate concerns the relationships between agents and social structures (Pettit & Schweikard, 2006: 35; Pettit, 1996: 111). Individualists defend the position that social structures do not compromise individual intentionality and free will—even 3 Even if one does not want to commit to ontology as a project that maps out how things actually are, it does not make ontological mapping futile. Instead, ontology can be understood as a conceptual enterprise. Ota Weinberger takes this stance when he describes ‘ontology not as a description of entities and their relationships as facts, but as a matter of stipulation: ontology provides a framework theory for the development of different fields of knowledge by formulating their basic concepts. […] Our knowledge and impressions of objects and the relations among them is human knowledge, and explanation is a product of human thought within the pragmatic realm of human existence, but the categories and the framework of our knowledge and of our thinking are based on stipulation’ (Weinberger, 1985: 309). Nevertheless, an ontology still needs to provide an effective orientation for our practices and for our experiences.

150

O. HIRVONEN

though they might have a role in the constitution of the individual psychology. According to collectivism, individual psychology is in fact predetermined by social (or structural) regularities. The final debate, between singularism and nonsingularism, pertains to the possible existence of collective agents (Pettit & Schweikard, 2006: 36). The singularist position is that only individual human beings can be agents or persons, whereas non-singularism accepts that there can be collective agents or group agents as well. These three issues are logically separate and giving an answer to one question does not commit one to any answer in relation to another question. A Weberian methodological individualist can easily be either an atomist or a holist. The same goes for those Durkheimians who would emphasise structures in their explanations of the social world. Furthermore, there is not only one kind of atomism, holism, individualism, and so forth, but rather different iterations of the broader positions, which might vary greatly in detail. The social-ontological distinctions give a conceptual toolbox that helps to answer the question of ‘who is ill when a society is ill?’. The analysis below aims to clarify what kinds of entities make up the social world and in what sense they might be ill. The answers differ from one conception of social pathology to another. In some accounts the relevant entities are singular individual human beings, whereas others commit also to larger wholes like social structures or collective agents. The atomism-holism issue is largely ignored in the analysis as the interest is mainly on the status of social structures and the status of the possible supraindividual collective agents. Thus, although all three debates are cornerstones of social ontology, not all of them are equally relevant to the current discussion.

4

An Analysis of Ontological Commitments

What are the necessary social-ontological elements needed for different conceptions of social pathology? In this section we see that the thin conceptions can get by with a rudimentary commitment to there being social norms, whereas the thicker conceptions also need supporting ontological commitments. A.1 Pathology as a deviation from social norms. When a social pathology is constructed as a persisting deviation from social norms, there is no need to assume that there exists a separate society or a social entity that would be ill in itself. In the most minimal sense, what is needed for this sense

6

WHO IS ILL WHEN A SOCIETY IS ILL?

151

of pathology is a normative framework and social agents. While this sense of pathology does not assume that society is an entity over and above individual agents themselves, some sort of explanation of the ontological status of the normative framework ought to be given. There are a variety of theories of social norms, but here the idea is merely to outline the minimal conditions that ought to obtain for there to be any social norms. Wolfgang Detel argues that the most basic notion of social norms requires that there are agents with minds and sanctioned regularities of behaviour: ‘A basic social norm enforced in a community or a collective S is a practice enforced in S which is handed down to members of S by correcting behaviour by using positive or negative sanctions’ (Detel, 2008: 476). This basic notion is open to various historical accounts of how and why any particular norms arise and how and why they are upheld. Detel’s notion gives an individualistic—although admittedly also interactionist—interpretation of social norms. Norms consist of controlling or guiding individual behaviour in relation to other individuals. The normative system, as a whole, can be understood as an aggregation of individuals’ controlled/guided behaviour and attitudes. Thus, the normative system does not have any ontological status over and above the collection of individual behaviours and attitudes. If the attitudes change, the framework will change too. It is good to note that this is not so because there is a causal connection between the two. They change at the same time because the normative framework is the aggregate of individuals’ attitudes and behaviours. As noted in the previous section, individualism does not entail a commitment to atomism about norms.4 Norms could be considered as a holistic result of the actions and the attitudes of multiple individuals. In this view, the normative framework emerges from the interaction of individuals, but it does not exist mysteriously over and above them. The normative framework does not override or dominate individuals, but it is also clear that no single individual could create or determine a normative framework either. This kind of individualist-interactionist account combines neatly with Weinberger’s insights about the existence of normative institutions. First

4 Furthermore, although a view might be holistic regarding norms, it does not need to be holistic regarding the agents that constitute the norms.

152

O. HIRVONEN

of all, norms have to be expressible in suitable language but they do not need to be explicitly expressed. However, as Weinberger states: The real existence of normative regulative systems is based on their institutionalization. Norms are real in so far as they determine behavior. They are connected with institutions and institutionalized in society in people’s minds, in the existing social organizations, and in the working of social institutions. So-called institutional facts - as opposed to brute facts - can be understood only through their normative characterization, which forms their core. (Weinberger, 1985: 322)

While institutionalisation of the social patterns of behaviour might be taken as the core of normative frameworks, this core, according to individualist-interactionist accounts, can be stated solely in terms of the interconnected actions of individuals. In the case of a social pathology, the society is not in any literal sense sick in itself, ‘as a society’. Instead, illnesses of societies are constituted of practices that deviate from its social norms. This sort of account is ontologically parsimonious but, as stated before, the downside of the bare-bones normativist account of social pathologies is that it does not offer many tools to go beyond the current normative order. The sense of pathology as a deviation from the norms is clear, but the normative orders themselves are left beyond questioning. It is also difficult to motivate the attribution of pathologies to the normative order itself.5 A.2 Pathology as a deviation from social norms, with a common structure. The above analysis for the A.1 cases also holds largely for the account of social pathologies as normative deviations with a common structure. There is obviously the added element of having a common structure, but this is not a structure in the sense of a Durkheimian social structure, but instead a shared form of deviation from the normative framework that individuals as individuals share. For example, in Zurn’s account, social pathologies are defined as ‘constitutive disconnects between first-order

5 One possible way of attributing illnesses to the normative order itself would be to try to identify some sort of core norms behind the apparent social regularities. For example, Honneth’s (1995) idea of recognition as something that provides a philosophicalanthropological normative grammar for social conflicts goes deeper than surface-level normative orders. Honneth’s theory of recognition could be thought of as a theory that aims at a more fundamental normative grounding, which reaches beyond the surface level appearances.

6

WHO IS ILL WHEN A SOCIETY IS ILL?

153

contents and second-order reflexive comprehension of those contents, where those disconnects are pervasive and socially caused’ (Zurn, 2011: 345–346). In practice, this means that our understanding of the various reasons for our social behaviour is somehow veiled. For example, ideological consciousnesses do not have a second-order understanding of the way in which ideology distorts their first-order beliefs (Zurn, 2011: 348). Zurn identifies similar structures at play with maldistribution, invisibilisation, disorders of modern rationality, reification, and paradoxes of individualisation. These deviations are ‘possessed’ by the individuals as they pertain to individuals’ reflexive abilities. However, there can be variation in the social-ontological accounts of the causes of the pathologies. Structuralistcollectivist social theories could aim to explain the causes of the pathologies by referring to independent or ‘supraindividual’ social structures and regularities. Methodological individualists could, respectively, try to find the causes of the social pathologies from individuals’ social attitudes and behaviour. In this sense, although the pathologies are ultimately realised at the level of an individual agent, the notion of social pathology as a deviation from social norms with a shared structure can draw from individualist, collectivist, singularist, and nonsingularist resources. The common structure account is neutral with regard to these questions and it does not strictly require pre-conceived social-ontological commitments. However, this makes it clear that the defenders of this account should take care to make it clear which commitments they actually do hold. B.1 Pathology as an illness of society. While the thin senses of social pathology (A.1 and A.2) are possible with individualistic—singularistic ontology—although they do not necessarily require a commitment to it—, taking the medical connotations of the illness of society seriously requires a change of the view on what really exists. In other words, it requires society to be seen as a singular entity. This could be a living organism or—perhaps in more neutral terms—a functional whole (that is not reducible to its individual members and their interactions). As stated before, the organicist view is not new: Plato’s city-state was modelled after the idea of a soul (Szanto, 2015: 296), while the likes of Hobbes and Rousseau argued that the social contract constitutes a new person (see Hirvonen, 2017). But how literally should we take this analogy? What sense does it make to say that a society as a body is in some sense ill? And further, what socio-ontological commitments does the idea of a society as a functional whole entail?

154

O. HIRVONEN

There are (at least) two possible ways to understand what kind of entity the society, that is the alleged target of an illness, is: (1) a structure or (2) an agent. With the structural view of society, the pathological element is naturally the dysfunctional social structures. But what exactly are these structures and what is their relationship to agents? Are structures some sort of social facts, institutions, or mechanisms, and can these in some senses dominate individuals? These kinds of questions are directly related to the individualism-collectivism question. In principle, individualistic explanations of social structures are available. Structures could be understood as institutionalised normative frameworks, patterns of individual sanctioned behaviour, and habits. However, with this move, the special nature of society being ill as a society is reduced back to the thin conception of social pathologies where the illnesses were described as violations of norms—or the norms of interaction were in some manner systematically violated in current social practices. Collectivist and non-metaphorical accounts, in turn, give structures a more independent and central role. For example, in Michael Thompson’s account, social(-economical) structures come to dominate even the conceptual understanding of individuals. According to him, ‘there is an essential primacy of functional forces of social organization to those of consciousness ’ (Thompson, 2016: 92, original italics). Here social pathology can be seen either as some structural feature that is connected to the individuals’ inability to realise individual freedom and emancipation, or as a dysfunctional structure in the sense that it undermines its own continued existence. In both cases the social structure has an independent dominating role in relation to individuals. One worry with structural accounts of pathologies is that it is hard to see how the critical element can be introduced into the picture, because individuals are literally at the mercy of social structures and the formative processes within these structures. In short, the collectivist position takes away room from individual agency and this—while being a defensible philosophical position—goes strongly against the emancipatory goals of critical social theory. Secondly, the analogy of social pathology and individuals’ illnesses is stretched as, although social structures can be understood as functional wholes, it is unclear how much structures have in common with living biological agents. The second option was to consider society as a collective agent. Although this might sound metaphysically extravagant, the history of

6

WHO IS ILL WHEN A SOCIETY IS ILL?

155

philosophy is ripe with examples of group agency and group personification,6 even at the state level. To return to the famous philosophers mentioned above, Hobbes (1998: 108) states that ‘inanimate objects, as a church, an hospital, a bridge, may be personated by a rector, master, or overseer’. Rousseau, on the other hand, takes the personification and group agency to apply at the state level. For him it was self-evident that in making a social contract, individuals also constitute a new collective person: Instantly, in place of the particular person of each contracting party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body made up of as many members as there are voices in the assembly, which receives from this same act its unity, its common self, its life, and its will. This public person thus formed by the union of all the others formerly took the name city. (Rousseau, 2012: 173)

Similarly, in Hegel—who in turn has had a major influence on critical social theory—we find the claim that the social order in itself is a selfdetermining and self-reproducing rational entity (see Neuhouser, 2000: 121). If society is understood as an agent (or a person), the analogy with individual agents becomes stronger. Furthermore, the collective agent accounts avoid some of the problems that collectivistic structuralism faces. Namely, nonsingularism and individualism are compatible accounts (see, for example, List & Pettit, 2011) and thus understanding societies as nonsingular group agents would enable social theorists to hold on to the individual freedom while supporting the existence of a collective entity (i.e. the society as a group agent) that could have its own pathologies. However, one challenge is that the contemporary defences of group agency tend to focus on corporate-like entities which are smaller than states or societies.7 Thus, even if the idea of robust group agency 6 Here one might note a terminological shift. While first there has been talk of mere agency, here groups are already taken to be persons in themselves. It is clear that agency and personhood are not completely equivalent concepts but at the same time, those defending group personhood are making even stronger claims than those defending group agency (see, for example, Rovane, 1998; List & Pettit, 2011). Only agents can be persons, and personhood can be taken as a subcategory of the broader notion of agency. 7 For a short summary of the contemporary discussion on group personhood, see Hirvonen (2017).

156

O. HIRVONEN

would be philosophically sound, it might not apply at the level of the whole society. Accounts that require something along the lines of shared intentions or mutual understanding of everyone’s roles in the collective enterprise are hardly suitable for large-scale entities with various internal groups and multitudes of non-organised individuals, who have no connection to each other or knowledge of each other. While theories of group agency might apply to governments and parliaments, it is much more questionable if they can be extended to citizens and the society as a whole (see Lawford-Smith, 2019). Rephrasing Canguilhem’s (1991: 256) warning, even one person shouting ‘Not in my name!’ seems to be enough for the social whole to collapse. Or if this sounds too strong, one could easily imagine societies with many competing groups that might not share any strong sense of a greater whole that they would be part of. In short, arguments that defend full-blown group agency at the corporate level may not extend well to the societal level. Perhaps seeing society as a more or less functional whole with certain goals might be enough, but if the conditions of ‘agency’ are loosened, then the analogy to individual pathologies might not hold up that well anymore. Then again, perhaps the analogy does not need to be strong. An irreducible social whole with its own goals and own functions might give an intelligible enough sense of social pathologies—dysfunctions of that particular whole. However, any theory relying on this kind of idea of a functional whole should also explain how the whole is related to the individual members of the society. After all, why should Canguilhem’s dissident care about the well-being of the whole if she does not see herself as being part of its functionality (or benefiting from its functions). In other words, from the perspective of critical social theory, organicist models of society need to connect the social dysfunctionality to the (social) suffering of the individuals. B.2 Pathology as a disturbance in the process of social life. As argued above, the organicist model (B.1), in its structural interpretation, presents a static picture of a society, assuming that the structural functional features that are necessary for a society’s reproduction are defined and already known. The processual account adds to this picture a dynamic and developing element. However, this addition comes with its own challenges. Namely, we can easily attribute all kinds of self-defined changing and evolving aims to a collective agent, but it is not clear that this can be done with non-agential social structures. However, in the processual picture, the aim is to avoid a static view of a society by doing precisely that: by attributing some of the evolving features to the structural levels of

6

WHO IS ILL WHEN A SOCIETY IS ILL?

157

the society as well. This sets the processual view into the middle ground between the society-as-an-agent and the society-as-a-static-structure theories. The ontological standing of the structures can be understood similarly with (B.1), but unlike in the static picture of the structures having a certain function, the structures are changing and evolving in their healthy state. Saying that structures are processual does not bring in any new ontological commitments, but it qualifies the nature of the social structures. ∗ ∗ ∗ The figures below illustrate the ontological frameworks that have been analysed above. In the case of the thin conceptions of social pathology (A.1 and A.2), the basic structure of society does not need anything else than interrelated agents (Fig. 1a). Though these conceptions need some account of normativity, this too can be understood as merely sanctioned regular patterns of interaction. The common structure sense of social pathology (A.2) does make a further claim that there is a certain shared deviation from the interrelations (↔) that constitutes a pathology. In principle, both

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Fig. 1 (a) Depicts interrelated individual agents (symbolized by i) and group agents (symbolized by g). The arrows symbolize their horizontal interrelations (b) Places groups (g) above the individual agents (i). The horizontal relations between individuals are symbolized by the horizontal arrow, whereas the vertical relations between groups and individuals are symbolized by the vertical arrow (c) Shows interrelated individuals (i) and groups (g), which are within a normative framework (symbolized by the bracket and n) (d) Includes individual (i) and group agents (g) within a differently qualified normative framework (symbolized by the bracket and ne )

158

O. HIRVONEN

conceptions are open to the idea of collective agents. However, as Pettit and Schweikard (2006) have argued, the existence of such nonsingular agents is an independent philosophical issue. Even if group agents would exist, they would be, so to speak, on the same level with the individual agents. Pathologies could still be understood as located in the interactions between agents and in the agents’ relations to the norms of interaction. The thicker conceptions of pathology have more complex socialontological commitments. In the organicist view of social pathology (B.1), we can understand the society either as a group agent (g) that is ill (Fig. 1b), or as a normative framework (n)—a non-reducible functional whole—(Fig. 1c) that is ill (or dysfunctional). The first version makes a slight deviation from the nonsingularistic versions of A.1 and A.2 in that the group agent exists in a vertical relation, over and above the individuals (or that the individuals are subsumed within a group agent as members of it). In the thinner senses of pathology, group agents are agents on the same horizontal level of interrelations. If we see society as a normative framework (n), or non-agential structure instead of an agent, then we can understand social pathologies literally as dysfunctionalities of that framework or structure. These dysfunctionalities can be relatively independent from the individual or group agents that fall under its sway. B.1 and B.2 differ in their characterisations of the normative framework. The organicist conception (B.1) has a static picture of the framework, whereas the processual conception (B.2; Fig. 1d) sees the normative framework (ne ) as dynamic and evolving. Thus, although there is no great difference between the accounts with regard to what exists in the social words, there is a great difference how the ‘normal’ state of the society is seen.

5 Conclusion: Sketching a Critical Social Ontology Is there a lesson to be learned in the analysis of social-ontological commitments of different conceptions of social pathology? Firstly, it must be stated that making the social-ontological commitments in social philosophy explicit and visible is but one of the possible ways to evaluate critical social theories. As shown above, different theories have different ontological commitments, but instead of the ontological perspective it is possible

6

WHO IS ILL WHEN A SOCIETY IS ILL?

159

to evaluate them also from the perspective of their explanatory power or usefulness for actual social critique and social research. Earlier it was hinted that the more literal views of pathologies, which make a commitment to the existence of real collective entities, offer stronger standards for evaluating societies. They present a clearer referent for the evaluation of the functionality of a society and as such they give a clearer focus for social philosophy or philosophy of society. What is at stake is the reproduction of the society or the processual life of the society as a collective entity. However, the stronger ontological commitments are also philosophically more extravagant. What is needed in support of a non-metaphorical theory of social pathology is, at least, a socialontological answer to the individualism-collectivism issue as well as to the question of nonsingularity. If we want to explain what social pathologies (as their own, separate from individual or socially caused pathologies) really are, then we ought to have strong and believable accounts of the myriad interrelations of individual agents, potential group agents, institutions, and structures. Furthermore, if we set emancipation and freedom of individuals as central interests of critical theory, this sets theoretical limits to the ways in which the above relations can be formulated. For example, critical social philosophy should avoid strongly collectivistic explanations of structures, which are incompatible with individual freedom. With this in mind, we can now sketch a task for critical social ontology: explaining the relationships between individuals, groups, and structures with only such socio-ontological commitments that are compatible with individual agency and freedom. Agency and freedom can obviously be relational, intersubjectively dependent, and so forth. Nevertheless, the structural elements of the theory cannot be accounted for in a collectivist sense if one wants to retain the possibility of individual emancipation and critical agency. On the other hand, straying too far into the individualistic side would lose sight of the social and structural elements that are deemed central in the tradition of critical social philosophy. From this perspective it seems that the critical potential, understood here as upholding the possibility of individual emancipation, can be found from all of the four views on social pathology. However, as described above, they differ on where exactly the society can go wrong and where exactly individual freedom is threatened. This is again a place where critical social ontology can provide clarity. On the one hand, the thin conceptions centring on individual agency have their challenges in giving

160

O. HIRVONEN

accounts of the structural causes of social suffering. On the other hand, the more literal conceptions of social pathologies need to give a plausible explanation of the connection between sicknesses of the society and individual suffering. Thus, we have a second aim for a critical social ontology: it should connect the social suffering of individuals and the critical understanding of institutional structures of the society under one theoretical enterprise. In short, in addition to ontologically accommodating freedom, critical social ontology should also aim to provide an understanding of social structures and their connection to individual life. A mere descriptive social ontology fails to fulfil the political (or critical) function of critical theory—although it can be helpful in pointing out what sort of elements one needs to consider within a critical social theory. Therefore, as the third aim of critical social ontology, the theoretical understanding of the nature of the social world should include an emotive (or motivational) element that is connected to the social suffering. This is of course a difficult task as it is clear that a mere disclosure of the structural causes of social suffering does not necessarily transform into a social movement that aims for a change for better. Although this is not the place to argue for it,8 I believe that one of the most potential theoretical frameworks that can insightfully combine holistic constitution of individuals, social freedom, and institutional mediation of everyday life is the Hegelian recognition theory with its understanding of the institutionally mediated psychological-anthropological grounding of social suffering in misrecognition.

References Canguilhem, G. (1991). The normal and the pathological. New York: Zone Books. Detel, W. (2008). On the concept of basic social norms. Analyse & Kritik, 30, 469–482. Dewey, J. (1973). Lectures in China, 1919–1920 (R. Clopton & O. Tsuin-Chen, Trans. and Ed.). Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii. Durkheim, É. (1968 [1895]). The rules of sociological method (8th ed., G. E. G. Catlin, Ed., S. A. Solovay & J. H. Mueller, Trans.). New York: Free Press. Hirvonen, O. (2017). Group personhood in the contemporary social ontology. In P. Salis, & G. Seddone (Eds.), Mind, collective agency, norms: Essays on social

8 See Hirvonen (2019a) for a more detailed argument for the proposed position.

6

WHO IS ILL WHEN A SOCIETY IS ILL?

161

ontology. Berichte aus der Philosophie (pp. 80–83). Germany: Shaker Verlag GmbH. Hirvonen, O. (2019a, April). Grounding social criticism: From understanding to suffering and back. Digithum, 23, 1–10. Hirvonen, O. (2019b). On the ontology of social pathologies. Studies in Social and Political Thought, 28, 9–14. Hobbes, T. (1998). Leviathan (J. C. A. Gaskin, Ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Honneth, A. (1995). The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts (J. Anderson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Honneth, A. (2014a). Freedom’s right: The social foundations of democratic life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Honneth, A. (2014b). The diseases of society: Approaching a nearly impossible concept. Social Research, 81(3), 683–703. Honneth, A. (2017). Is there an emancipatory interest? An attempt to answer critical theory’s most fundamental question. European Journal of Philosophy, 25(4), 908–920. Laitinen, A. (2015). Social pathologies, reflexive pathologies, and the idea of higher-order disorders. Studies in Social and Political Thought, 25, 44–65. Laitinen, A., & Särkelä, A. (2019). Four conceptions of social pathology. European Journal of Social Theory, 22(1), 80–102. Laitinen, A., Särkelä, A., & Ikäheimo, H. (2015). Pathologies of recognition: An introduction. Studies in Social and Political Thought, 25, 3–24. Lawford-Smith, H. (2019). Not in their name. Oxford: Oxford University Press. List, C., & Pettit, P. (2011). Group agency: The possibility, design and status of corporate agents. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Neuhouser, F. (2000). Foundations of Hegel’s social theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pettit, P. (1996). The common mind: An essay on psychology, society and politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pettit, P., & Schweikard, D. (2006). Joint actions and group agents. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 36(1), 18–39. Rousseau, J.-J. (2012). The major political writings. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Rovane, C. (1998). The bounds of agency: An essay in revisionary metaphysics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Särkelä, A. (2017). Degeneration of associated life: Dewey’s naturalism about social criticism. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 53(1), 107–126. Szanto, T. (2015). Collectivizing persons and personifying collectives: Reassessing Scheler on group personhood. In T. Szanto & D. Moran (Eds.), The phenomenology of sociality: Discovering the ‘We’ (pp. 296–312). New York: Routledge.

162

O. HIRVONEN

Thompson, M. (2016). The domestication of critical theory. London: Rowman & Littlefield. von Wright, G. H. (1963). The varieties of goodness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Weber, M. (1971). The interpretation of social reality (J. E. T. Eldridge, Ed.). Exeter: A. Wheaton & Co. Weinberger, O. (1985). Freedom, range for action, and the ontology of norms. Synthese, 65, 307–324. Zurn, C. (2011). Social pathologies as second-order disorders. In D. Petherbridge (Ed.), Axel Honneth: Critical essays (pp. 345–370). Brill: Leiden.

CHAPTER 7

A Biopolitical Account of Social Pathology: Viewing Pathology as a Political-Ontological Issue Yonathan Listik

In this chapter, I argue that the study of social pathologies is not solely a sociological concern. Rather, I submit that it is crucial to offer an assessment of the ontological implications of this distinctive approach, and equally, those of its implicit opposite, social ‘normality’. In arguing for this shift to a more pronounced ontological analysis, I will employ a biopolitical framework. When one considers that the social pathologies manifest within capitalism are entwined within its ontological conditions and assumptions, it is apparent that what one frames as ‘the pathological’ cannot be described as merely contingent, or as isolated from broader discourses. It is thus not merely theoretically inadequate, but also politically problematic to frame capitalist rationality as a pathological intrusion into what would otherwise be a ‘healthy’ subject.

Y. Listik (B) University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Harris (ed.), Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_7

163

164

Y. LISTIK

The motivation behind this argument comes from the awareness that some of the challenges tackled within the scope of social pathology scholarship cannot receive a full response without a meticulous unpacking of the conditions under which something is characterised as being pathological. Without due sensitivity to the complicities and complications that a diagnosis of X as a ‘pathological’ precipitates, such research may end up inadvertently safeguarding the capitalist subject from the intrinsically capitalist deterioration that threatens it. This argument focuses on four approaches to social pathology as presented in the critical theories of Axel Honneth, Peter Dews, Fabian Freyenhagen and Erich Fromm. I demonstrate that their theories rely, even if unintentionally, on conceptions of normality and health. I argue that these conceptions are invariably tied to a capitalist framework of normality. In addition to the negative assessment of these established approaches, I will also sketch out a positive criterion for advancing social pathology diagnosing social research, furnished with a more secure ontological foundation. In summary, I submit that antagonistic research into social pathologies must fully account for the way in which the capitalist conception of life, i.e. its ontological foundation, appears as a natural condition that must be preserved, hence establishing a mechanism that reinforces capitalist logics. Alternatives emerge only by revisiting the notions of pathology and normality to explore the manner in which capitalist ontological implications ground these, often implicit, conceptions. The central argument here will be that without such an analysis, an investigation into social pathologies becomes a mechanism for mitigating the situation into a neutralised status quo where the problematic conditions leading to the pathological are naturalised as the accepted norms. In such a way, the central argument in this chapter will be that, without attending to the ontological dimension of pathology diagnosing social research, one is bound to reproduce the same mechanisms originally leading to the pathological. As such, this would inadvertently restrict any possible response to such conditions; thwarting, rather than abetting, the transition to an alternative society. Capitalism is not merely the economic rationale of distribution and administration organising social life. It also preconditions our specific worldview, containing an ontological conception of individuality and autonomy. Capitalism is thus not just one way of administrating individuality among others. Rather, it is, in a deeper sense, the conception

7

A BIOPOLITICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY …

165

of individuality that grounds such administration, making it the ‘sensible’ hegemonic mode of governing. The capitalist notion of individuality emerges from an immunological operation through which selfhood is created and maintained biopolitically. ‘Immunological’ here refers to the mechanism where pathologies must be neutralised to safeguard individualised private entities. Thus, the effort to identify the pathological is accompanied by the effort to remediate it: to circumscribe it as something that should be avoided or controlled. The immunological foundations of capitalism thus present as follows: a pathological presence is tolerated only under the condition that it is neutralised or ineffective against the built immunity. Social research and critique drawing upon the framing of social pathology must be sensitive to avoid reproducing this immunological dynamic, which reinforces capitalist ontological foundations. In short, such critique must surpass the dichotomy presented above, which, when transposed into Critical Theory, would result in framing capitalism as an evil corrupting force parasitic upon healthy social bonds. I argue that capitalism is most pathological when it operates as a supposed force of preservation and progress: an intrinsically positive and violent/oppressive regime constructing a ‘healthy’ social sphere. From such a biopolitical perspective, capitalism does not oppose a successful fulfilment of life, but instead aims to administer life towards its upmost realisation within a distinct immunological-ontological paradigm. In that sense, one finds that ‘normality’ is the most pathological scenario possible. It is the configuration of immunological neutralisation; a condition of hygienic individual self-realisation that can only be accomplished through the implementation of a medicalised power over life. A more pronounced ontological approach states that in order to confront social pathologies, any normalising administrative configuration should be understood as pathological: ‘The uninterrupted production of positivity has terrifying consequences. Whereas negativity engenders crisis and critique, hyperbolic positivity engenders catastrophe. […] Any structure that hunts down, expels and exorcizes its negative elements risks catastrophe […] Anything that purges the accursed share in itself signs its own death warrant’ (Baudrillard, 1993: 121). Given that today’s ontological conditions of individuality are invariably grounded in capitalism, the option of reconciling social pathologies towards a healthy condition would not escape the conditions of capitalism at a foundational level. With that in mind, the ontological perspective

166

Y. LISTIK

advanced here argues that the pathological aspects of capitalism are not to be healed but rather to be understood as breaking points of its logic. Indeed, pathologies should be considered as the inevitable rupture of capitalism, as the opening from which this logic of health and individuality break as a model of life and an alternative ontological perspective appears. There is no conciliation between capitalism and the societal pathologies it manifests which does not neuter the critical potential of their sublation. In opposing the normalising endeavor of ‘healing’ pathologies, it will become evident that there is a second-level pathological status where the attempt to avoid the pathological appears as the most pathological scenario. In this chapter, I will thus argue that the only way to combat the dominant pathological form of capitalism, is to challenge its definition of ‘health’/‘normal’ as itself pathological. The alternative account offered here does not implore an avoidance of pathology, but rather its embrace. The argument advanced here will affirm that one must strive for a nonindividualised social relation, one where immunisation is not in place, and therefore the pathological openness to the external is not mediated by an administrative relation.

1 Biopolitics of Capitalism: The Paradigm of Immunisation The central argument explored in this section is the connection between fundamental notions of capitalism, such as individuality and autonomy, and biopolitics, where one finds that those notions are grounded on problematic ontological presumptions of control and administration of life towards normality. In Lorey’s prose, ‘Biopolitics strives to reduce the vulnerability of an existential precariousness by way of specific techniques of self-formation, in order to ensure on average an economically productive life for the population’ (Lorey, 2015: 27).1 Following Canguilhem (1966: 14), one finds that any conception of normality is invariably tied to its pathological opposite. The notion of pathology emerges as any negative deviance from the ‘healthy’, creating the scenario where normality is defined by the absence of pathological factors. The healthy condition of being ‘intact’ from the pathological is

1 See Lorey (2015: 30) for a discussion on the way this self-sovereignty is invariably rooted in capitalist notions of freedom and autonomy.

7

A BIOPOLITICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY …

167

not an innate ‘natural’ original position, existing pre-discursively, but is instead one which is achieved via a medicalised intervention on life. The biological status quo is the consequence of an operation of controlling the pathological. In this context ‘medicalization’ refers to the medical rationale directing biology as a project to preserve and heal the body2 : biology, as a ‘pure’ field of science, is a project of knowing as a means of intervening. What is presented as pure knowledge appears within a structure that presupposes a specific metaphysical ground of overcoming a threat and establishing normality. Biological knowledge is embedded with the responsibility to preserve: to operate in/on life. In this way, medicalisation invariably implies the convergence of epidemiology and immunology.3 While under the discourse of medicalisation, the pathological is a natural aspect of life, this normality exists under a surveilling gaze that must control the pathological. Although absolute control is not possible; one should employ all means necessary to maintain the normality of a configuration. Medicalisation is the dual process of transforming existence into the struggle for survival by all possible means and providing the technical means to guarantee it. In other words, even if the possibility of a hermetically enclosed monad is unrealistic, the process should envision and aim at a hygienist approach to social relations. Social bonds are in this sense, a necessary evil that must be mediated by the power to guarantee the immunity of the entity at all costs. Health emerges within the presupposition that lifeforms are individuals constantly battling otherness in order to construct an integral structure of ipseity (Esposito, 2011: 175–176). Health means that beings are ontologically determined to preserve themselves via everlasting processes of self-enclosure against any possible threat to their existence. This notion of an integral entity that must be protected against external or intruding elements is the fundamental immunological structure grounding the capitalist understanding of pathology and privatised subjectivity. The concept of ‘immunity’ thus refers to the status of unaffectedness. Something is immune when the possibility of it being transformed or 2 Unlike Lemke et al. (2011), I do not see a positive or optimistic unfolding of this logic. As much as there are undeniable ‘improvements’ resulting from this logic, my approach is to deny any optimistic outcome of this logic. I will explain my aversion to such optimism later in the text. 3 See Esposito (2008: 55).

168

Y. LISTIK

influenced by an external factor is non-existent (Esposito, 2011: 10–11). The presence of the pathogenic factor is always presupposed, but immunity is the attempt to neutralise its effect against a possible anaphylaxis (i.e. a complete breakdown of bodily integrity). In the immunological state of surveillance and control, the best defense is often to tackle a problem before it even manifests itself. Vaccination becomes the paradigm of immunity because one must always be one step ahead of any possible pathological threat. Immunity detains the complete loss of control by gathering/creating a controlled configuration: the preservation of individuality is equivalent to its privatisation (Esposito, 2008: 66). The term ‘preservation’ is fundamental here because there is no return to a healthy state, life is not reversible so ‘health’ which is lost cannot be recuperated. Instead, the issue at hand concerns governing life and pathology towards a healthy balance. Under this logic, the mechanism of prevention is employed against the constant possibility of an immunological breach. Pathology is the hidden threat constantly prowling under the vigilant preservation of health. According to Esposito (2011), the founding idea of a self-identical agent results from an immunological operation where identity is constructed rather than given. The individual agent is an object of constant political-ontological operations preserving and securing its status as a subject. More specifically, this subject is understood as a social being whose privatised individuality exists with an immunised status against its invariable openness to the world. The biopolitics of normalisation presupposes the constant opposition to anomaly/anomie by a norm and, so, is invariably connected to the power to normalise indirectly or directly relying on some sort of administrative power over life (Esposito, 2008: 85). As Braun (2007) demonstrates, individuality is the aim and focus of medical-biological research from mapping the specific genetic material to constructing organic material that is precise and individual. He calls this process ‘molecularisation’ to refer to the situation where advancements in biopolitical procedures turn towards objects that are smaller and more particular. This should be understood as demarcating ever more rigid frontiers between the private individual and the external social world. In this way, one presupposes the individual only to reinforce its atomistic self-identity. This can be read as a capitalist imposition of selfreferential privatisation in the sense that the medicalised intervention

7

A BIOPOLITICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY …

169

makes it imperative for you to become yourself given that it can determine that reference. Privatised individuality is achieved and imposed via this everlasting demarcation of its limits. Normality is thus equivalent to the immunological neutralisation of alterity, enabling the secure and unaffected relation with alterity, one that ensures the private being. Difference is tolerated but conditioned on the preservation of this model of individuality (Esposito, 2008: 61). Within such a configuration, pathology is chronologically second to health since it is only from a sharp position of individuality that one can determine the pathological. Nevertheless, it appears as the condition of individuality itself, so somewhat primordial, since it is only by enclosing itself that the notion of individuality is constructed. This medicalisation of the self means that it is only through the sharpening of the distinction between the normal and the pathological that self-formation is possible: the self exists only inasmuch as it is the object of this capitalist operation.4 Esposito (2008: 51) argues that such private individuality is constantly reinforced because it is impossible to sustain. It exists only as a fetishised object of capitalist immunological biopolitics. This neutralised normality covers over the profound instability of being: its existence at the liminality of this interaction between interior and exterior. One finds that the self is that which does not trigger an immunological reaction, so it is that which stands in-between, while being included in the act of self-recognition that permits selfhood to be integral. At the same time, there is the neverending possibility of estrangement, of the non-tolerated invasion of the self in itself, of this mediated interaction failing. As Han (2017b, loc 1582) argues, in the situation where exteriority is lacking, such as the privatised individuality, violence is turned inwards: self-identity is immunity’s violent preservation of sameness. The sole presence of this threat already marks the imminent possibility of failure and fragility. In that way, selfhood appears as a vulnerable and instable object whose pathological condition precedes its ‘normality’.

4 In the recent COVID-19 crisis an interesting debate appeared: the response to the eco-fascist argument that ‘we are the virus’ was ‘capitalism is the virus’ which seems to forget that we are capitalist subjects. Any attempt to reflect on the two concepts that does not considers the way this We is a capitalist concept (relies upon antecedent capitalist ontological foundations) is bound to fail.

170

Y. LISTIK

Under the immunological paradigm, violence is employed against destruction in order to maintain life. Han (2017a), in a chapter entitled ‘Healing as Killing’,5 explores this logic when he argues that ‘The term [healing] refers to the self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance. […] But the violence of positivity is just as destructive as violence of negativity’. Rather than offering life, immunity offers the avoidance of death as the salvation of life. In that way, violence is always remedial under the guise of revitalisation against the death threating degeneration. In other words, one must impose death towards that which carries death. It is for this reason that Nazism is often associated with the immunological approach to politics: extermination was not an act of death; it was presented as the purification from death. One would humanely reinforce life through cleansing the degenerative pathology. This is the rationale behind their employment of the term ‘euthanasia’ to refer to the genocide they set in place. It is not just a cruel and cynic bending of the notion: the attempted extermination of the Jewish people was presented as ‘humane’ in the sense that it eliminated that which was purportedly already impregnated by death. This discussion over the appropriate administration of life (i.e. immunology) is evidently a political concern: ‘Western modernity, along with its conceptions of sovereignty and biopolitics, is unthinkable without a “political culture of danger”, without the permanent endangerment of the normal, without imaginary invasions of constant, everyday threats such as illness, filth, sexuality, criminality or fear of “racial” impurity, which must be immunized against in various ways’ (Lorey, 2015: 37).6 Besides the already mentioned debates over the formation of the self, this issue has ramifications in terms of food distributions and production, science and research, and even household consumerism.7 In other words, this ontological conception of individuality is articulated within a set of social norms and operations to construct and determine a specific mode of living. The concern with health is equivalent to the concern with governing life as a whole. The mark of biopolitics is that health is no longer an issue of personal preferences but falls within an overarching

5 Or ‘Healing is the immunological negation of negation’ (Han, 2017b, loc 1558). 6 See also Lorey (2015: 33). 7 See Braun (2013) and Memmi (2003, 2006, 2010) for instances of this relation.

7

A BIOPOLITICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY …

171

normative structure of life. Despite still operating within the realm of choice, biopolitics should be viewed as a new form of authoritarianism: a dictatorship of the should rather than the must. Arguing that democracy and enlightenment remain to a large extent immunological does not mean that everything is fundamentally equivalent to Nazism. It does, however, mean that Nazism was not a deviation, or at least not as radically deviant as we would like to present it, from capitalist modernity (see also Adorno & Horkheimer, 1997 [1944]). It continues a logic that to a large extent grounds political reflection to this day. Moreover, it also means that we have yet to overcome the challenge it imposes on us. The traces of Nazi biopolitics are still relevant, undeniably in different variations, without a proper response. So, in stating that modern democracy and Nazism share a common immunological paradigm, one is fundamentally challenging the extent to which the logic of modern democracy defies Nazism as a possible alternative to it. This is the way to make sense of Foucault et al. (2008) course on biopolitics where he seems to avoid the subject of biology and life to occupy himself with the genealogy of what he calls ‘liberal governmentality’. Governmentality is the mentality grounding and enabling a specific line of thought, in this case, the liberal political approach. The connection to biopolitics appears when considering that liberal politics assumes that government intervention is pathological to the ‘natural’ development of life in its individualised private sense. Since the individual is absolute and society is formed by a collective of free autonomous agents, government is always already overabundant and impeding in its presence. Politics, within liberal governmentality, is the task of keeping government at bay. The fundamental issue that Foucault calls attention to is that this configuration creates the immunological conception of self-development via the administration of administration: active and, if necessary, forceful resistance to administration can only come via the constant regulation of deregulation. The remedial approach of arguing that government is fundamentally bad and dominating so one must enforce government over government to guarantee it remains within its boundaries is biopolitical. In other words, liberal politics is biopolitics because in its aims to immunise social relations from pathological interventions, it employing a fully enforced administration of social relations. The sole task of politics is fostering the best (either in terms of efficiency or ethics), mode of un-governing to allow the ‘natural’ development of life. But, as previously mentioned, such conception of the ‘natural’ results from an imposed administration of life. This is

172

Y. LISTIK

perhaps most evident in the neo-liberal radicalisation of liberal logics, but one could also find it in theories that supposedly challenge that perspective, such as within the Frankfurt School’s distinctive framing of social pathology.

2

Critical Theory and Social Pathology

Before exploring this important limitation within Frankfurt School Critical Theory, it is fundamental to establish the motivation behind the enquiry. The enquiry will not be a direct confrontation with that model, but rather an attempt to overcome its restrictions in order to provide a more radical response to what they correctly identified as a problematic configuration. The argument will not challenge their diagnosis. It will focus exclusively on the responses they offer. The argument here could be formulated as stating that: capitalism does create social pathologies, and considering the seriousness (and ontological foundations) of this condition, the response offered needs to be a bolder claim than superficially ‘saving life from capitalism’. It needs to actually reclaim a new form of life: a new biology that does not rely on the same medicalised operations inherently tainted by capitalism. In that way, the criticism presented here aims to extend Critical Theory’s approach to social pathology, rather than to restrain it. The intention here is also not to present the Frankfurt School strand of Critical Theory as homogeneous. Still, the authors I investigate consistently refer to the first generation in an effort to present their projects as coherent developments from the initial motivations. For example, Honneth (2009: 21–22) argues that his project is not a novel direction within Critical Theory, but shares the initial logics and desires of the school’s conception. Despite not fully endorsing their approaches to some of the first-generation authors (as I will demonstrate towards the end of this section), I believe their readings remain loyal to the original impetus. In other words, I will not engage in a discussion on the limitations of their readings and will present their readings of the first generations as pointing in the direction that they wish to take it. The central argument advanced here is that despite its best efforts, Critical Theory fails to offer an alternative to the status quo because it fails to recognise the ontological ramification of this configuration. In not accounting for it, they reproduce the same ontological presuppositions of the capitalist immunological relation that was previously laid out (above).

7

A BIOPOLITICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY …

173

My investigation will highlight where these ontological presuppositions come about. More specifically, this will be a demonstration that the alternative offered by the relevant authors aims at ‘healing’ or ‘administering’ the capitalist pathological configuration rather than overcoming it. Social pathologies are thus presented as occurrences/dynamics that must have their presence reduced to the bare minimum. In this, they adopt the assumption that it is possible to separate capitalism from its problematic ontological ramifications. Even if this separation is not present in their assessment of capitalism, it is evident in their response to the problem. Honneth (2008, 2009) argues that social pathologies result from misrecognitions or misconceptions. According to Honneth, social pathologies are the consequence of either a misunderstanding of what political rationality should be, or an improper implementation of policies that could otherwise be properly implemented. Despite being seemly distinct approaches, both options share the presupposition that the function of Critical Theory is to amend this wrong and replace it with a proper political model. Thus, social pathology refers to this pathological intervention into what would otherwise be a healthy social bond.8 His response also varies but it retains a normalising impetus. Honneth often advocates for normative revolution or normative reformulation which aims at tackling, through normativity, the limitations of the current pathological configuration. His project argues that the implementation of a normalising force controls social pathologies: normative expansion immunises against the pathological presence. Such normative intervention is equivalent to the administration of life towards the reconciliation of anomie/anomaly in that it aims at neutralising its anormal characters. Social pathologies result from deviant social structures (be it misunderstanding, misjudging, misrecognition or mistreatment) that must be regulated into a normal standard. Social pathologies are thus manifestations of a degenerative normativity and should be confronted with an appropriate normativity aimed at redeeming social bonds and establishing proper normality (unlike the capitalist normality that is unhealthy).

8 This can be traced back to previous Frankfurt School scholars as, for example, Adorno (1973) where he states that the subject is prevented from becoming itself. Still, within the first-generation one finds that the situation is less clear as they also present arguments that would challenge this conception.

174

Y. LISTIK

This is a similar account, in terms of their ontological commitments, to Fromm’s (2010) investigation of social pathology.9 Fromm argues that the capitalist conditions alienate humans from their true nature. What is presented as ‘normal’ under capitalism is fundamentally pathological since it is in contradiction with human’s natural autonomous individuality. In that way, normalcy is the most pathological condition possible since it is the neutralisation of human nature into conformity. Fromm recognises that this normalcy is pathological but, in his attempt to move from a negative standard of health (being merely free from pathology) to a positive definition (self-realisation), he reproduces the capitalist logic.10 He observes that society should abolish the capitalist interference camouflaged as normalcy and a more productive and saner conceptualization of humanity should take its place. What Fromm misses is the fact that capitalism fundamentally accepts his criticism. Capitalism is not a limitation of human impetuousness into an appeased passive state. It is quite the opposite; it is precisely the promise of a fulfilled life of autonomy and self-realisation. It promotes creativity via healthy competition and allows for non-administered social interactions. Capitalism too opposes the mechanical and overly comfortable life that does not dare to be more. It fully endorses Fromm’s objective humanist approach of dictating ‘shoulds’ as a doctor does (Fromm, 2010: 18–19): an authoritative command grounded on the neutral violence of nature and progress. Both Honneth and Fromm advocate for the possibility that rationality will cure rationality. They do not deny that capitalism and enlightenment have led to this chaotic point, but they argue that it is possible to separate the consequences from the causes. Moreover, by pointing at the contradictions within such a stance, a reconciliatory posture emerges. One reflects the logic on itself in order to present the contradiction. Critical

9 Harris (2019) argues that the two accounts are distinct. According to him while the standard engagement with social pathology is limited to social-economic issues, Fromm makes a broader argument that engulfs the structure of subjectivity as well. Perhaps he is correct in terms of the diagnosis presented in both theories, but in the argument here I will demonstrate that both share the normalising impetuous in their response. 10 In that way he differs from the argument that in being advanced here despite sharing the same original intuition.

7

A BIOPOLITICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY …

175

Theory’s focus should be on reconciling those contradiction into recuperating a normal posture that overcomes the pathological unfolding of the original logic. This is evident in Honneth’s (2015) and Fromm’s (2010)11 defense of the notion of some form of market. According to them, capitalism is just one permutation of the market structure. Admittedly, one prone to undesired consequences, but merely an inadequate deviation. The principles inherent to the notion itself should not be disputed on this account since the proper employment of the idea could be profitable. In fact, it is hasty to denounce the notion per se since it mistakenly throws away the baby with the water, that is, it abstains from articulating notions of exchange, transparency and reciprocity that are essential to a healthy social bond. In other words, the capitalist market is a pathological deviation from the values of the market itself. Once this becomes evident one can strive to propose a normative operation that regulates the market and guarantees its orderly function. Foucault’s conception of biopolitics is fundamental to understand the problematic connection between Critical Theory, as presented in Honneth and Fromm, and capitalist ideology. Their project aims to cleanse the market of pathological interventions. In that manner, it proposes a version of the ‘free market’ parallel to the one advocated by the liberal and neo-liberal theorists. Obviously Honneth seems to propose a market that is free precisely of such neo-liberal interventions but, nevertheless, the immunological structure is reflected in his normative interventions: it is still a project that can receive the name: ‘free market’. This market would be a ‘normalised’ social bond, one where the administration of administration would guarantee the natural and healthy development of social relations via a regulation of the conditions required for it to flourish. As demonstrated previously, normality is not given or in any way the ‘natural’ status of being, it is achieved through the medicalised suppression of disruptive factors. This biopolitical relation is also present in the pharmacological relation to rationality. Honneth clearly recognises that rationality and its

11 See the chapter ‘Alienation and the problem of mental health’ where he comments on a ‘non-consumeristic’ and ‘meaningful’ market on the molds of what he found in some Mexican villages (a theme reinforced in ‘The axiom of man’s inherited lazyness’, specially the section C). A relationship where the exchange of goods abides to a non-capitalist logic.

176

Y. LISTIK

problematic ramifications are responsible for the oppressive developments capitalism has furthered. In this sense he fully adopts Adorno and Horkheimer’s denouncement of Enlightenment rationality as a compromised logic engendering capitalist political reality. Still, Honneth’s response does not offer an escape from this structure. Instead, it offers a hyperbolic commitment to it as a way to press it on its contradictions and resolve them. As Esposito (2011) points out, following Derrida (1969), the pharmakon is this biopolitical principle where something is taken to be both the cure and the venom. For Honneth, rationality is both the cause and the cure of societal pathologies, depending on its administration. Honneth argues that control itself is not problematic, it is the uncontrolled control that turns pathological. As a response, he offers the liberal biopolitical solution of governing government: ensuring the right amount kills the pathology without compromising life and consequently establishing the conditions of its natural development. Again, he does not explicitly triumph capitalism as ‘good’, but he establishes it as the ultimate inescapable logic (Honneth, 2015: 209). The pharmacological approach implies that it is possible to separate the consequences from capitalism, so it presents social pathologies as resulting from a specific permutation of capitalism, rather than an invariable element of it. In other words, even though the pathological potency is inherent to capitalism, it can be administered in a way that provides the opposite outcome. The emphatic insistence on the polemic formulation ‘free market’ serves to demonstrate that it is easy to conceive of capitalism as an evil corrupting force while a true confrontation with it is one that challenges it on its most generous ramification. Considering that the function of the ‘free market’ within capitalism is to oppose monopolies and cronyism, it is possible to say that capitalism denounces and even offers a way of suppressing the undeniable greed of capitalist subjects (or at least turning it into a productive force within a context of unmediated/‘fair’ competition). An answer to capitalism as a whole should be one that takes into account the problems inherent to any possible comprehension of ‘market’ and demonstrates that even (or perhaps especially) in its well-intended permutations capitalism remains immanently sordid.

7

A BIOPOLITICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY …

177

This is the premise presented by Freyenhagen (2013, 2014)12 in his investigation of Adorno’s deep and absolute distrust in a progressive horizon (i.e. the possibility of articulating the good). Still, once again, the response to this diagnosis relies on an indirect adoption of a problematic structure since it still relies on the possibility of safeguarding some, even if very minimal, conception of normality.13 His formula ‘living less wrongly’ indicates that there is a possibility of avoiding some of the pathological consequences. According to him, under capitalism, the possibility of a good and fulfilled life is closed, but the fact that life is invariably tainted by capitalist immorality does not deter us from being able to identify such immorality and denounce it. In fact, using the formulation ‘oughts without cans’, he argues that despite being unable to be morally good, one should act in the best manner possible. This he extracts from Adorno’s motivation to retain the possibility of judging a monstrous act. Freyenhagen argues that one does not need to be able to articulate the meaning of the good life in order to know the bad. This diagnosis serves to circumscribe the pathological in order to avoid it. This means one can still operate towards the neutralisation of pathology aiming merely to ‘strengthen our immune system’ (Freyenhagen, 2013: 181),14 albeit never being fully immune to it. Freyenhagen calls this the ‘Ethics of Resistance’ which entitles the construction of a medicalised mechanism where knowledge is imbedded with the legitimation to operate towards the sheer preservation of the bare minimal human functioning: in its most biological and animalistic sense (not unlike the principles guiding a zoo or a wildlife reserve). It is ‘vaccination’ or ‘homeopathic treatment’, rather than a confrontation with capitalism. It presents capitalism as a pathological disturbance that can be separated from its naturalised preconditions; a disturbance that is perhaps omnipresent and ultimately unavoidable, but one that can, at least analytically, be identified and immunised against. In addition to the medicalised operative approach of identifying as a means of containing, it operates within a second ramification of the 12 In Freyenhagen (2014: 883) the formulation is more ambiguous since he seems to

argue that Adorno does accept the separation into level of evil which would somewhat contradict the idea that everything is invariably corrupted. 13 Honneth (2009: 25) seems to make the same points regarding Adorno’s argument in Minina Moralia when he argues that as minimalistic as Adorno’s objectives are, he must still presuppose some moral grounds. 14 A formulation he returns to in Freyenhagen (2014: 875).

178

Y. LISTIK

pharmacological principle: choosing the bad in order to avoid the worst. Within this logic, two immunological conditions are presupposed. Firstly, there is something to be saved, i.e. intact life as a naturalised object. Secondly, that the way to do it is via a remedial approach: all options are bad since they are all tainted by the poison of capitalism, but there is a way to govern the poisoning where the damage is reduced. As in Honneth approach, the capitalist administrative logic appears as both the remedy and as the venom. The question remains the one of administrating immunity. The avoidance of the worst possible scenario might seem intuitive, but the notion of life is not given and should be revisited in order to challenge capitalism. Freyenhagen seems to adopt the pessimistic view that capitalism is inherently incapable of fulfilling its promise of self-realisation, nevertheless, he never challenges the promise as desirable in the first place. He accepts that since capitalism closes the possibility of an autonomous self-realised life, it also denies the proper conditions of life as a whole as if there were no other possibility. This model takes the capitalist ontology and its immunological conception of life as given. While Freyenhagen does not hold a total cure to be achievable, the phantasm of a normalised healthy state remains present and with it the politics of immunological administration. In a more generous reading, his project would be the equivalent of offering chemotherapy for terminally ill patients, and in a less generous reading, it would be just making them ‘as comfortable as possible’ (which is most often a euphemism for providing substances to mitigate excruciating pain). Both sounds awfully close to the mantra that capitalism is the worst system except all the others. In both cases one reproduces the same acknowledgement that capitalism is fundamentally evil, while also taking the best possible outcome it can provide. This amounts, directly or indirectly, to recognising its inevitability: if one must prepare for the damage, it makes it to some extent unavoidable. While Freyenhagen (2014) explicitly mentions that Adorno argues that society is un-administrable so one should fully abandon any recuperating endeavours, he offers no alternative other than the conservative/reactionary act of ‘surviving’. This is further reinforced by Dews (2007) reading of Adorno in his Logics of Disintegration. There he compares and contrasts Critical Theory’s and post-structuralist’s common suspicious approach to Enlightenment. In both projects, he finds that the aim of disintegrating/deconstructing the subject of Enlightenment has a vital role: the

7

A BIOPOLITICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY …

179

hyperbolic capitalist individual subject is an absolutely privatised particularity while being merely an indistinguishable specimen submissive to its social role. The twofold administrated subject appears in both projects as alienated and pathologically narcissistic.15 At the same time, Dews alerts to the danger of confronting this pathology by overemphasising the opposition towards a collective account of subject on behalf of particularity and difference as in the post-structuralist account. This approach is prone to abolishing all accounts of selfhood and individuality resulting in the condition of indifference fundamentally equivalent to the capitalist administrative project only through the implementation of a regime of absolute difference.16 As a response, Dews offers Adorno’s argument from ‘Subject and Object’ where Adorno states the subject must be preserved since the alternative of an subjectless society would be a regression to a barbaric state of total determination and, in that way, a more radicalised version of the capitalist administrative totality already in place. For Dews, via his reading of Adorno, the only existing options are either adopting the model of subject advanced in the Enlightenment, which he acknowledges is invariably tied to capitalism, to preserve some form of agency, or deny it and regress into a subjectless totality.17 So, in other words, there is no alternative to the current model. This is fundamentally an indirect recognition that enlightenment capitalism represents the end of history: that there is no alternative to the private individual other than regression to preenlightenment notions of totality.18 In that way, Dews argues that despite Adorno’s fundamental criticism of enlightenment and capitalism, he advocates that one should adopt a pharmacological approach to selfhood in its current form by attempting to salvage as much autonomy as possible since the alternative is invariably worst. 15 This line of argument is also present in Fromm’s (2010) account of indifference. 16 Harris (2019) makes a similar argument against post-structuralists in his defense of

Fromm. In that way, his argument shows the same limitations as Dews’ argument. 17 Freyenhagen (2014: 876–877) reinforces this reading that Adorno valued individu-

ality. 18 Honneth (2015: 209) explicitly defends this impossibility of an alternative to be

his understanding of Hegel’s concept of end of history and Fromm (2010: 21) argues that there is not space for radical criticism of current society. In the three theories the argument is not limited to the descriptive formula that ‘there is no alternative’ but also move towards the normative defense that any alternative ontology would constitute a regression.

180

Y. LISTIK

For Dews, Critical Theory, unlike post-structuralism, postulates that the notion of the subject is not invariably connected to domination. Nevertheless, he does not offer an alternative conception of the subject that is not just a different permutation it can receive under the same capitalist enlightenment ontology. There is no alternative non-capitalist model of subjectivity, i.e. one that challenges the notion of subjectivity on the ontological level. The argument remains limited to the non-dominating possibilities of an essentially dominating configuration.19 In all theories presented, Critical Theory adopts the capitalist conception that pathology is anomaly/anomie rather than the rule. Pathology appears as a foreign agent of catastrophe: as the object that must be avoided. Despite offering different approaches, the common ground is that pathogenic agents must be withheld in order to preserve or safeguard a possibly neutral condition.20 Even if recuperation is not directly offered, the shared presupposition that finds in an intact non-pathological state the normal conditions of existence remains the underlying thesis.21 If pathology is mere deviance from the norm, the normativity of capitalism remains unchallenged. This is present more clearly in Honneth’s (2015) Rejoinder to the criticisms raised against his Freedom’s Right. Honneth argues that any call for revolution is in vain since Critical Theory cannot surpass the normative constructions already in place.22 Its aim is merely the conservative preservation of the logic via reconciling the conflict between conceptualisation

19 I fundamentally agree with Dews and Adorno that some sphere of selfhood and singularity is vital. A configuration of absolute difference that completely abandons a notion of selfhood creates the same situation of indifference found in administrative capitalism, if not a worse one: its new disguised model. Still, I will advocate that without an ontological revision of subjectivity, this is not possible. If capitalist/enlightened subjectivity is absolutely corrupt and a subjectless configuration is just a permutation of the capitalist/enlightened one, one must reclaim an alternative subject that is neither. For instance, I will argue this alternative does not need to be non-dominating (non-pathological) since once the current situation is corrupted beyond salvation, the measurement between bad and worst is no longer relevant: the replacement does not need to ‘prove’ anything. 20 This presupposition of normality is indirectly denounced even by members of the school but nevertheless it remains present in their argument. See Freyenhagen (2015: 133) and Schaub (2015: 112–113). 21 See Honneth (2015: 216). 22 This is also the argument in Fromm (2010: 21).

7

A BIOPOLITICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY …

181

and reality. Preservation is the continuation of a system via the neutralisation of its pathogenic element. This is an immunological reaction because it requires the absorption of pathological factors and their control under an administrated relation. Immunisation is not the absolute elimination of foreign disturbance(s). Immunity signifies precisely the inability to cleanse and the necessity of administrating common existence. This fundamentally amounts to integrating the pathological elements into normality. This integral relation is characterised by the hygienic administration of social relations. ‘Hygienic’ does not mean abstaining from a relation, it means ensuring the relation is necessarily secure against pathology. It is conditioning social relations on immunity without limiting it absolutely. This control is aimed at making social bonds innocuous: the relation occurs, but it must not have any repercussion. It is a contactless contact that generates no effects on either part. Considering injustice or oppression23 as manifestations of broader social pathologies, Critical Theory offers an alternative where those are neutralised as problematic presences within capitalism social fibre. Instead of being indices of capitalism’s inevitable decay, they become harmless factors that need to (and can) disappear. Critical Theory’s project aims at restoring the social body to its fullest integrity; ‘fullest’ not in the sense of an absolutely healthy state, but in the sense of maximising the preservation of individual autonomy. As mentioned before, that is the logic employed/established by capitalism. In that way, those theories offer mechanisms of tolerance and not transformation. Tolerance refers to the possibility of appeasing a previously conflictual situation into a neutralised status quo: disabling the disturbing factor without removing it. Tolerance is conditioned acceptance. It establishes a neutral normality by creating an innocuous situation where pathology is no longer disturbing. Capitalist pathology is not overcome, only kept at bay: society is protected and immune against capitalism but never free from it. Or in other words, Critical Theory tolerates capitalism since it aims at neutralising it without replacing its ontological grounds.

23 Social pathology entitles a ‘thicker’ understanding of capitalism’s ‘wrongs’. Injustice and oppression are not equivalent to social pathologies, but they are among the elements that constitute it. They are emblematic (not exhaustive) aspects of what constitutes social pathology.

182

Y. LISTIK

In that sense, the challenge Critical Theory presents to capitalism is a dispute over the extension of the logic rather than its nature. Critical Theory argues that the logic of rights and autonomous individuality is not extended to the whole social collective. Capitalism makes a promise of self-realisation that it does not fulfil creating a pathological configuration. Critical Theory’s approach to social pathology is directed towards guaranteeing that this promise is fulfilled. Again, regardless if one states that the institutions need to be reformed to comply to their original mandates or if one states that one should reformulate the whole social fabric in order to guarantee everyone their rights, this discussion is limited to the appropriate policy to be implemented rather than challenging the mode of conceptualisation of ‘rights’ and ‘individuality’.24 Critical Theory challenges the capitalist means, but it does not challenge its ontological presuppositions. The fundamental question when thinking about the paradigm of social pathology is: from what is one excluded? It is not enough to argue that one should have access to consumer goods and appropriate education or health system since it gives into the misleading idea that if regulated properly, capitalism is able to provide social wellbeing. The idea that capitalist rights can and should engulf everyone leads to blurring the way its fundamental principles invariably lead to social pathologies. If at a certain point exclusion was a mechanism of creating cheap labour, progress is not achieved in becoming a reserve army of consumers (Winlow & Hall, 2013). The challenge here argues that mechanisms of guaranteeing employment security might remediate employment insecurity, but they are not alternatives to it. It is the reactionary implementation of an immunological response of safeguarding without overcoming. In other words, the engagement with social pathology should not be limited to the fact that socialisation is not being implemented properly therefore creating unrealised social bonds. The investigation of social pathology should refer to the fact that within capitalism, its conception of politics and society, social bonds are inherently pathological beyond any possibility of remediation. Even in places where Honneth (2008) seems more radical, like Reification, by positing himself against a limited epistemological reading and 24 See Schaub (2015: 117). This is also clear in Freyenhagen (2015: 146) where the individual becomes the mark of pathology. There he argues that ultimately, the individual’s inability to self-realise is the criteria for social pathology.

7

A BIOPOLITICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY …

183

explicitly arguing for an ontological understanding of the problem, his understanding of such politico-ontological pathology remains limited to the failure to grasp the proper ontological stance. In other terms, how we fail to recognise that other subjects are also entitled to rights and self-fulfilment rather than providing a deconstruction of how those ontological presuppositions are fundamentally problematic. He is concerned with assessing the causes and logic of the capitalist failure to recognise given that it is ontologically necessary that we should be able to. His concern there is recuperating remembrance against a capitalist pathological intrusion impeding the access to the ontological truth. The logic remains trapped in the medicalised attempt to ‘return’ to a neutral stance: a recuperation of a healthy social bond. It becomes evident that rather than overcoming the capitalist ontology, the ontological grounds presented by Honneth remain the individual agent. This configuration is especially relevant when contrasted with Adorno and Horkheimer’s (1997 [1944]) central argument in Dialectics of Enlightenment,25 that enlightenment values of individuality and rationality cannot be taken apart from the capitalist ramifications developed from them. Capitalism is not a mere contingent aftermath of the enlightenment, so critical social research should not be restricted to the specific social configuration of capitalism, but should target the idea of ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’ as a whole.26 The power of capital is directly connected to a specific conception of reality where the individual in her almighty judgement is able to know and submit reality to their will: as in the medicalised discourse, knowledge is embedded with the power to

25 My reading of Adorno and Horkheimer here is at odds with the readings presented earlier. Even if both authors explicitly avoid the ontological realm, I believe my argument for an ontological revision to capitalism is greatly indebted to their work. This is clearly distinct from the consensual reading of their text. I recognise that the authors themselves are not absolutely clear on the subject if one considers, for example, their arguments against identity together with their insistence on preserving a subject as it was presented by their interpreters. In order to avoid the debate over the ‘proper’ meaning of their texts I presented them as the leading figures did. Still, I find that their arguments are profoundly enriching on an ontological level, so I am still interested in enlisting them to my argument. 26 Esposito (2008: 115) goes in the same direction when he argues the Nazi extermination was not the result of a lack of medical ethics but, rather, its overbearing presence. Esposito highlights the vital role medicine played in the Nazi regime.

184

Y. LISTIK

control. In that sense, notions of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘rights’ are indistinguishable from the capitalist logic upholding them: rights are based on ownership both in terms of propriety and self-property. Unlike what is proposed in the theories investigated, an alternative conception of ‘surviving’ capitalism would not be a defiance of death itself (as if the capitalist life was the only one given to us)27 but one that requests the possibility of another death: another life not determined by the capitalist structure. In reaffirming the importance of ‘survival’ in its commonsensical conception, Critical Theory, even if unwantedly, points us in the direction of capitalism rather than its Aufheben.

3

Conclusion

Critical Theory might present an optimistic perspective but the option of progressive improvements remains insufficient as a critical posture. Optimism amounts to the belief that normative advances lead us further away from capitalism and its pathologies, where, in fact, those advancements are operations reinforcing the fundamentals of the capitalist framework. The notion of optimism is invariably tainted by the presupposition of a neutral reified status quo: the assumption that there is a norm/normality one can appeal to. Optimism is the limited belief that the same means that cause pathology could provide the inverse outcome. Or in other terms, that one might be able to confront the pathologies of capitalism via the same structure that created them. This optimism is not only naïve but, more importantly, it interrupts the possibility of a hopeful alternative to capitalism. In upholding that the issue is limited to implementation, i.e. merely sociological, rather than an ontologically rooted problem, one portrays social pathologies as being simply contingent. Social pathologies are thus reduced to a misstep that is not radically problematic. The capitalist logic itself is not corrupted, only its implementations are. This limited non-ontological scope implies that optimism accepts the Enlightenment as the end of history: as the achievement of an ultimate conception of reality that must be properly accessed. Without a challenge to the ontological foundations of capitalism, any conflicts one might expose are limited to the scope of the capitalist’s classic formulation of

27 See Fromm (2010: 96) for his discussion on death and necrophilia.

7

A BIOPOLITICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY …

185

‘creative destruction’ or ‘shock doctrine’: they are the ‘natural’ recycling of the system towards its progressive improvement via the reinforcement of its established principles. Even if the theorists absolutely denounce the specific conception of normality in place, they still necessarily rely on a non-pathological configuration where some level of normality is safeguarded.28 Optimism presupposes a cure at hand, it presupposes the integral existence and its quest for plenitude: ‘[Our era’s] exemplary illnesses are not viral or bacterial infections but rather psychic ailments such as burnout, hyperactivity, and depression, which are caused not by viral negativity but rather by excess positivity and the violence of positivity’ (Han, 2017b, loc 1558). In that sense, optimism is always grounded on the preservation of the biopolitical immunological structure denounced earlier. As in Honneth’s argument about the market, the principles of capitalism are indirectly reified as the universal economic logic that might, and should, suffer variations without changing in principle. Hope, on the other hand, comes only from the realisation that an end is inevitable. Once everything is corrupted beyond salvation, the only perspective is one of an alternative. Maybe the current permutation of capitalism is not (yet) the worst possible, but capitalism itself is the worst possible configuration. In fact, the fact there is always the possibility of it getting worse at evermore surprising levels and speed, while any possibility of the slightest improvement requires almost drug-like fantasy, already points at that direction. If one can still retain something from Critical Theory it is that the horrors do not occur despite Enlightenment, but to a great extent they are due to an enlightement posture. In other words, suffering is not the result of a lack of knowledge and rationality but, inversely, the result of the medicalising nature of knowledge as it was presented earlier. In that way, medicine cannot cure medicine, as pathology cannot cure pathology. Rosset (2012) make a distinction between incurable and inguérrissable which would both be translated to incurable in English. While the first is very close to the English sense of not having a cure, the second refers to the impossibility of being healed. According to the author, the first refers to the condition where a cure is not yet available, but it remains an open possibility and even an aspiration. The second, refers to the condition

28 As in the assessment of Fromm’s approach.

186

Y. LISTIK

where there is nothing else to be done, the subject is already ‘healed’ but it remains incurable of its condition. Capitalism is the understanding that existence is incurable when it should be understood as inguérrissable.29 It is not a lack of means that makes it incurable/inguérrissable for capitalism is precisely the dominance of means. Still, despite its absolute control over life, it remains incapable of delivering on its promise of self-realisation since existence remains inguérrissable: improper, corrupt, degenerate. Capitalist pathology is incurable/inguérrissable because there is nothing else it could do: no procedure or technological improvement that can actually lead to a less pathological structure. The conception of societal pathology advanced here wants to utilise this second sense (inguérrissable) against the first (incurable): considering that the attempt to cure that which is inguérrissable turns pathological. Opposing capitalism is opposing the conception of health and cure in its totality. In order to truly realise Critical Theory’s objective of opposing the authoritarian control inherent to capitalism, one should embrace pathology30 for its corruptive power. That is, adopt a posture of being pathologically inguérrissable rather than incurable. Esposito (2008: 132) explores the fact that degeneration leads to sterility to argue that the immunological reaction of preventing pathology’s reproduction is to large extent an artificial intervention under pretense of fulfilling and caring for natural development. One could expand his argument to point out that it is capitalism which is degenerate since it does not reproduce itself to generate new modes of life. Capitalism infinitely repeats itself in an immunological procedure of selfpreservation31 ; it is unable to generate any alternative, so it is to some extent sterile. Pathologies, on the other hand, are unstoppable. Immunity is precisely the never-ending struggle to sterilise pathologies that is destined to fail.

29 This could be understood as a form of alienation but this argument will not be developed here. 30 Schaub (2015: 119) seems to hint at the fact pathology has a revolutionary potential since it refuses any form of reconciliation or reconstruction and instead erodes the system in place by making it irreproducible. 31 This is often assessed via the concept of reproduction, but I am offering an alternative conceptualisation to this process that could perhaps elucidates to a deeper extent the logics behind capitalism’s reproduction.

7

A BIOPOLITICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY …

187

It should be clear that this is a new approach to pathology. One that is grounded in an ontological understanding of being’s fundamental ungovernability. Canguilhem (1966: 122) argues that the pathological is that which cannot be normalised: that which insists on recognising a norm and not abiding to it. It is not the absence of norms but the impossibility of their realisation that makes the norms pathological. No amount of control or norm would instal normality. This conception is perhaps the inverse of the one presented until this point. It asserts that health and normality are pathological states of being since being is essentially pathologically ungovernable/‘un-normalizeble’ (Esposito, 2008: 105). In other words, being is open to the world, it is the fragile condition of being on the liminality of degeneration. The immunological attempt to reinforce the limits and safeguard a privatised being creates the political-ontological issue of the biopolitical control over life. This control, under the new conception, is fundamentally pathological since it is an administration of death: it is a medical approach of constantly administrating life by means other than life. This domesticated and hygienic life denies the ontological indetermination of being since it attempts to restrict its liminality. Death has two antonyms: birth and life (Esposito, 2008: 181). If one considers that the immunological approach is a response to the fear of pathological death, it takes the logic of life’s self-preservation to its extreme. The alternative proposed is one of an everlasting birth. One where a definite and rigid conception of life is not presupposed and translated into a political structure but, rather, from the indeterminacy of birth, from its openness to the other/exteriority of being, one is able to dismantle politics. If Critical Theory aims for nonpathological socialisation, the alternative should aim for a pathological full de-socialisation.

References Adorno, T. (1973 [1966]). Negative dialectics. New York: Continuum. Adorno, T., & Horkheimer, M. (1997 [1944]). Dialectic of enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. London: Verso. Baudrillard, J. (1993). The transparency of evil: Essays on extreme phenomena. London: Verso. Braun, B. (2007). Biopolitics and the molecularization of life. Cultural Geographies, 14(1), 6–28.

188

Y. LISTIK

Braun, B. (2013). Power over life: Biosecurity as biopolitics. In Biosecurity (pp. 59–72). Routledge. Canguilhem, G. (1966). Le normal et le pathologique (3e ed.). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Derrida, J. (1969). La Dissémination. Paris: Le Seuil. Dews, P. (2007). Logics of disintegration: Post-structuralist thought and the claims of critical theory. London: Verso. Esposito, R. (2008). Bios: Biopolitics and philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Esposito, R. (2011). Immunitas: The protection and negation of life. New York: Polity. Foucault, M., Davidson, A. I., & Burchell, G. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Freyenhagen, F. (2013). Adorno’s practical philosophy: Living less wrongly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freyenhagen, F. (2014). Adorno’s politics: Theory and praxis in Germany’s 1960s. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 40(9), 867–893. Freyenhagen, F. (2015). Honneth on social pathologies: A critique. Critical Horizons, 16(2), 131–152. Fromm, E. (2010). Pathological normalcy. New York: Lantern Books. Han, B. (2017a). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and new technologies of power. London: Verso. Han, B. (2017b). Topology of violence. Cambridge: MIT Press. Harris, N. (2019). Reconstructing Erich Fromm’s ‘pathology of normalcy’: Transcending the recognition-cognitive paradigm in the diagnosis of social pathologies. Social Science Information, 58(4), 714–733. Honneth, A. (2008). Reification: A new look at an old idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Honneth, A. (2009). Pathologies of reason: On the legacy of critical theory (A. Allen, Ed.). New York: Columbia University Press. Honneth, A. (2015). Rejoinder. Critical Horizons, 16(2), 204–226. Lemke, T., Casper, M. J., & Moore, L. J. (2011). Biopolitics: An advanced introduction. New York: New York University Press. Lorey, I. (2015). State of insecurity: Government of the precarious. London: Verso. Memmi, D. (2003). Archaïsme et modernité de la biopolitique contemporaine: l’interruption médicale de grossesse. Raisons Politiques, 1, 125–139. Memmi, D. (2006). Du gouvernement des corps par la parole. Spirale, 1, 51–55. Memmi, D. (2010). L’autoévaluation, une parenthèse? Les hésitations de la biopolitique. Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 1, 299–314. Rosset, C. (2012). Le réel. Traité de l’idiotie. Paris: Minuit.

7

A BIOPOLITICAL ACCOUNT OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY …

189

Schaub, J. (2015). Misdevelopments, pathologies, and normative revolutions: Normative reconstruction as method of critical theory. Critical Horizons, 16(2), 107–130. Winlow, S., & Hall, S. (2013). Rethinking social exclusion: The end of the social? London: Sage.

PART III

Beyond Pathologies of Recognition: New Voices, New Directions

CHAPTER 8

Rawlsian Liberalism as a Failure of Critique Ane Engelstad

1

Introduction

Analytic philosophy, as a distinctive discipline, developed from logical positivism, and its antecedents in the work of Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein (Jones, 2009). While today the analytic tradition is much more diverse and sprawling than it was in its origin, the various branches can still be unified by a general methodological commitment to the idea that logical principles and conceptual clarity should be given philosophical priority. The analytic tradition is often contrasted with the continental tradition of philosophy, which developed from a range of European philosophical traditions, exemplified by figures like Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Sartre (Jones, 2009). The Marxian tradition of Critical Theory can be said to fall under the bracket of continental philosophy. Although, as a tradition, it too is by no means any more homogenous, or any less sprawling, than analytic philosophy, a generalising feature is that it tends to focus on various forms of critique of social life, and aims to explore the deeper philosophical implications that they reveal.

A. Engelstad (B) University of Sussex, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Harris (ed.), Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_8

193

194

A. ENGELSTAD

While the analytic/continental divide within philosophy is deeply entrenched, and the relationship between the two traditions is often acrimonious (Akehurst, 2011), in recent years there have been an increasing number of attempts by analytic political philosophers to engage more closely with continental philosophy, and the insights of Critical Theory in particular.1 While this has had some success in the field of feminist philosophy, and in epistemology, with the emergence of political epistemology as a significant and productive subfield, analytic political philosophers have generally not explored what lessons can be learnt from attempting to bridge the disciplinary divide.2 In this chapter, I provide what I take to be the clearest explanation for this. Moreover, I argue that analytic political philosophy is left vulnerable to become the mouthpiece of dominant ideologies in its failure to engage with key insights of Critical Theory. However, while this is a serious charge against the analytic political tradition, I do not take it to undermine the core features of analytic philosophy as such, but rather the current dominant tradition of Rawlsianism within analytic political philosophy. This chapter is structured in the following way: in Sect. 1, I discuss why analytical political philosophers do not tend to engage in investigations and critiques of how we presently organise society. I identify John Rawls’ theory of justice as providing the main reason for this, and I present the core tenets of Rawls’ political philosophy, which forms the foundation of an ‘ideal theory’ methodology. Ideal theory, in the Rawlsian sense, is the method of working out what principles of justice would look like if we did not have to consider possible obstacles for their implementation, such as the non-compliance of citizens, and the present existence of injustices (Rawls, 1971: 216). In Sect. 2, I discuss a range of critiques of Rawls for failing to account for the existence of various injustices within his theory of justice. In Sect. 3, I discuss why, despite this range of critiques, the Rawlsian is able to withstand each in turn without making too many concessions. However, in Sect. 4, I discuss what I take the implications of these critiques to be, as seen together, and I argue that they highlight a serious issue with the Rawlsian methodology, leaving it prone to implicitly perpetuate an unjust status quo. Moreover, I argue that Rawlsian ideal 1 See, for instance, Dotson (2014), Haslanger (2012), Fricker (2007), Srinivasan (2019), and Stanley (2015), to mention a few. 2 An honourable exception to this rule would be Raymond Geuss (2008) and other proponents of political realism, such as Finlayson (2015), and Raekstad (2016).

8

RAWLSIAN LIBERALISM AS A FAILURE OF CRITIQUE

195

theory is too narrowly focused on the concepts of justice and injustice, meaning that it fails to engage with other system-wide critiques of society, orienting political philosophy away from other crucial political concerns. This outcome can only be avoided within analytic political philosophy if ideal theory is abandoned, and a critical investigation of social life is taken as a theoretical starting point instead.

2

Analytic Political Philosophy as Rawlsianism

Within analytic political philosophy, it is often argued that once we have a good and clear understanding of what justice consists in, it is assumed that we can adequately use it to diagnose society’s ills, by virtue of having a standard of perfection against which to measure society’s shortcomings. Thus, instead of critically examining our social and economic structures, and using this as a platform from which to develop a positive theory of what needs to be done, and what our societies should be like, analytic political philosophers tend to be suspicious of these kinds of theoretical endeavours. This is because it is unclear where our ability to criticise a social structure comes from; what parameters are we using? Are they justified? The fear is that in undertaking theoretical projects that directly engage with real world issues and concerns, prior to answering these questions, we lose objectivity, and end up endorsing biased political views, rather than a theory that holds, irrespective of one’s particular vested interests. Justice cannot be a concept that privileges one group or one set of interests over another. It is important to clarify that taking justice to be the primary political concept from which everything else follows is not a requirement of analytic political philosophy. Instead, these ideas are advocated in particular by John Rawls, whose theory of justice has dominated the field of analytic political philosophy since the 1970s (Mills, 2005: 168). Although there has been an emergence of theories that are critical of Rawls within the analytic tradition,3 focusing on Rawls and his relative dominance within the field allows me to explain how analytic political philosophy is generally oriented away from questions about injustice, social struggle and social pathology, as well as the wider literature of political thinking and critique that stems from the tradition of Critical Theory.

3 For an overview, see Valentini (2012), and Rossi and Sleat (2014).

196

A. ENGELSTAD

a. Rawls’ theory explained John Rawls positions himself in a tradition of contract theorists who aim to determine what justice would look like in the hypothetical scenario that people come together to reach an agreement on how society should be structured for the self-interest of each. His theory has two key components; the original position and the reflective equilibrium. Rawls introduces the idea of the original position in order to specify specific principles of justice through which we may judge some social structure more or less just. The original position is a device of representation that helps us ‘define more clearly the standpoint from which we can best interpret moral relationships. We need a conception that enables us to envision our objective from afar’ (Rawls, 1971: 19). The original position functions in the following way: we imagine all members of society are asked to determine what principles for ranking social structures we would choose on a self-interested basis under a veil of ignorance, where we leave all knowledge about our present situation behind (Rawls, 1971: 11). This is so that our decisions benefit everyone impartially, rather than ourselves personally. For instance, if we know that we are wealthy, we might oppose progressive taxation, and, conversely, if we know that we are poor, we might demand that the rich give away all their money (Rawls, 1971: 17). However, if we imagine that we could be any kind of person, Rawls argues that we would all choose in accordance with the following principles of justice: first, each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others. Secondly, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all (Rawls, 1971: 53). Rawls argues that part of the second principle should be specified as a difference principle. Inequalities should be accepted insofar as they make the most worst off less worse off than within any other social structure, and the first principle of justice is not violated (Rawls, 1971: 72). According to Rawls, we would all agree to this under the original position, as we would want to ensure that in case we were the least well off, we would be as well off as possible. The second key mechanism of Rawls’ theory of justice is the reflective equilibrium, through which we are meant to justify the principles

8

RAWLSIAN LIBERALISM AS A FAILURE OF CRITIQUE

197

generated by the choices made in the original position. A reflective equilibrium is achieved when the totality of our considered judgements of justice, including the principles arrived at in the original position, cohere (Rawls, 1971: 18–19). If a new claim about morality enters our reflective equilibrium, it either already coheres with our overall set of moral convictions and principles, it is not accepted as a moral claim, or we modify our existing judgements in light of this new claim. This includes the principles arrived at in the original position (Freeman, 2010: 56). Thus, Rawls is a coherentist about moral justification; he does not attempt to ‘ground’ moral principles in other principles or judgments that we take to be axiomatic, and thereby not open to revision (Rawls, 1971: 19). However, that does not mean that all our moral convictions are constantly up for revision. Rawls allows for the fact that we may have more confidence in the moral status of certain judgements, which means that they are thereby less likely to go up for revision, and instead it is other beliefs that must conform to these (Rawls, 1971: 43). b. Rawlsianism is not critical There are several reasons why Rawls’ theory of justice has dominated political philosophy since A Theory of Justice was published in 1971. First, his theory shows how it is possible for people to maintain their preferences and self-interest, even if these differ widely across a population. Thus, his theory is seen as properly accommodating for value pluralism, which is a core tenet of liberal democracies. Secondly, Rawls shows this is doable without impeding on our ability to reach an agreement about what a just society consists of. The veil of ignorance facilitates arriving at this balance between self-interest and objectivity that makes this agreement possible. Thirdly, Rawls’ theory is seen as compelling as he argues that whatever agreement reached about what justice consists in for a given society, simply is what justice means for that society. In other words, he grounds the normative force of his conception of justice in the fact that it is an acceptable conception of justice to the people for whom it is meant to apply. In so doing, he bypasses various controversial meta-debates about how a concept such as justice has value for us, such as debates about the fact-value distinction, what it means for human beings to flourish. Instead of being distracted by meta-philosophy, then, his theory is directly focused

198

A. ENGELSTAD

on what purpose a concept such as justice can usefully serve within a specific society. A final reason for Rawls’ stranglehold on analytic political philosophy is that his theory is hard to disagree with. The strength of his theory is that it shows how we can reach agreement about what justice consists in, even within a pluralist society. Thus, the core tenet of his theory still stands, even if we were to modify or complement the principles of justice that Rawls himself argues will be identified under the veil of ignorance. What matters is that the method of the original position and reflective equilibrium remains relatively intact. Thus, the point of Rawls’s theory of justice is not to solve specific social problems, or create a fully fleshed out conception of what justice will look like in practice, for a specific society. Instead, his method is meant to allow us to produce principles of justice against which we can objectively judge any social structure. This is what Rawls means when he names his theory ‘ideal theory’ (Rawls, 1971: 216). In order to establish a Rawlsian ideal theory, we must establish our principles of justice prior to investigating what injustices exist (Rawls, 1971: 245). If we focus too much on our knowledge about society and its ills, this will prevent us from properly considering what an ideally just society consists in. This is what the original position is meant to facilitate; in not knowing what our actual social position is, we are able to strike a balance between self-interest and objectivity that isolates shared interests across members of a pluralist society. This commitment to ideal theory, as opposed to non-ideal critical engagement with actual social concerns, is what facilitates the features of Rawls’ theory that makes it so compelling to analytic philosophers. Indeed, as a result of this commitment, Rawls’ theory is remarkably robust in the face of criticism. As I will show in the following section, although Rawls has by no means been spared his share of critique, it seems that each critique launched against Rawlsianism has either some form of rebuttal, or Rawlsian ideal theory as a method can be modified to accommodate for the critique.

8

RAWLSIAN LIBERALISM AS A FAILURE OF CRITIQUE

199

3 Rawls’s Theory is Robust in the Face of Individual Critiques a. Critiques of Rawls In this section, I present some of the most common critiques of Rawls. They stem from feminist philosophy, philosophy of race and philosophy of disability. They all argue that Rawlsian ideal theory ignores the existence, needs and demands of various marginalised groups. I go on to show that despite these being fair claims, they have not had much effect in shifting the analytic discourse away from Rawlsian ideal theory as such, as they do not directly undermine ideal theory as a methodology. I then, finally, argue that if we see these critiques as related, and if we take on board certain lessons from Critical Theory, this provides a more effective critique of the Rawlsian paradigm. Feminist philosophers have criticised Rawls for ignoring gendered injustice. The most central and acknowledged feminist critique of Rawls comes from Susan Moller Okin, who argues in her book, Justice, Gender and the Family (1989), that Rawlsian ideal theory discriminates against women because he fails to take into account the power imbalances that typically exist within the family as a relevant consideration under the veil of ignorance. One of the main insights of the second wave feminist movement that arose in the early 1970s was that male power is kept in place not only in the public sphere, but crucially also in private relations, hence the slogan ‘the personal is political’ (Okin, 1989: 124). Indeed, the family is often where the worst or most pervasive forms of gendered violence and discrimination take place.4 According to Okin, Rawls fails to consider whether the family is a just institution, as he simply assumes that it is (Okin, 1989: 94). Okin argues that Rawls makes this assumption because he fails to scrutinise what is meant by the traditional liberal idea that people have a right to not be interfered with in their private matters, unless this impedes on the rights and welfare of others. Since Rawls, when 4 In 2018, it was estimated that 1.3 million women in the United Kingdom, compared to 695,000 men, were subject to domestic abuse (Office for National Statistics, 2018). In 2018 a third of murdered women were killed by their partner, while only 1% of men died at the hands of a partner (Office for National Statistics, 2019). A further remarkable statistic of the gendered inequalities of the household, is that women do 60% more unpaid domestic labour than men, even in double income households (Office for National Statistics, 2016).

200

A. ENGELSTAD

forming his theory of justice, does not engage directly with the concerns of women who suffer under this power imbalance, or with women who struggle to make the injustices that happen within the realm of the family visible, he fails to notice that power imbalances that exist within the public sphere take on their own form within the private sphere, and within the family in particular. The next injustice that Rawls is accused of ignoring also tends to be gendered. As mentioned, Rawls’ original position relies on people making decisions purely according to their own self-interest. However, good and effective self-advocacy cannot be treated as a given unless one already enjoys a large range of privileges. To illustrate how this is the case, Lisa Schwartzman borrows the example of the ‘deferential wife’ from Marilyn Friedman. This example presents the not uncommon scenario of a woman who has been so conditioned to not respect herself, or her own needs, that she consistently prioritises her husband’s needs, and undercuts her own agency (Schwartzman, 2006: 576). Schwartzman argues that if the deferential wife is asked to theorise about what an ideally just society would consist in for her, she would not take her own needs, or the needs of people like her, into account; she would focus on what a society that fully represents the interests of someone like her husband may look like. This connects to a foundational left-Hegelian insight advanced by Critical Theory, namely that the very rationality of individual social subjects are connected to the dominant logics and values which structure, and are inscribed within, social institutions (Harris, 2019: 50). In his earlier work, Axel Honneth referred to this approach to social critique as diagnosing ‘pathologies of reason’ (Honneth, 2004). Another key critique of Rawls comes from the feminist ethics of care, in which it is argued that Rawlsian ideal theory devalues care labour. Child care, elder care, care of disabled and ill people, or simply the care for family and friends in need, all counts as care labour. Care labour is required because someone depends on the care labourer. The dependency may be more or less all encompassing. A newborn child entirely depends on a primary carer for their survival and flourishing. Although the same is less true of an older child, they will still be dependent on good parenting if they are to thrive. Similarly, the degree of dependency of a disabled, ill or elderly person will vary. Care labour is mostly done by women, and is often done for free, or for much less money than the strain and importance of the work involved should merit. Women often do not actively choose to be carers, but instead end up with caring responsibilities.

8

RAWLSIAN LIBERALISM AS A FAILURE OF CRITIQUE

201

Rawlsian ideal theory, by virtue of being a theory of justice designed so that individuals with differing interests may come to agree on it, takes key social relationships to be between autonomous independents who are focused on promoting their own self-interests. Any power that one person holds over another is thereby treated as arbitrary unless it adheres to his principles of justice. This means that relationships of dependency are mainly treated as negative; one person has control over the wellbeing and interests of another. However, philosophers like Sara Ruddick (1990), Virginia Held (1993, 2006), Onora O’Neill (1990), and Eva Kittay (1999), all argue that human relationships are not, and cannot ever be, between equally informed and equally powerful persons, but are, by necessity, between unequal persons who stand in chains of dependency. Although many relationships of dependency can be exploitative, they argue that non-exploitative dependency relationships are crucial to human beings as a locus of emotional investment, and also essential to a functioning society, as all human beings are dependent throughout their infancy and childhood, as well as in illness, disability and in old age. Had Rawls engaged with the voices of women and care labourers directly, before designing his theory of justice, his theory might well be better focused on how any well-functioning society is structured along chains of dependency, and that standing in dependency relationships is not necessarily a bad thing, unless the care labourer is not properly supported and compensated for the work. Another critique of Rawls is that he treats disability as a fringe case (Sen, 1979, 1995), rather than as part of the normal spectrum of human needs and capabilities. Rawls assumes that people in general have no particularly costly or taxing needs to fulfil, such as unusual medical requirements (Rawls, 1992: 272 n.10). This is so that he can establish a basic conception of fairness, assuming that all citizens are able to give and get in equal measure. He thereby sets a standard of normalcy which means that disabled people are seen as defective in failing to meet this standard, and therefore should either be brought up to the normalcy standard, or be treated as an unfortunate aberrance. Apart from the sheer stigma of being treated as an anomaly, this also has the implication that disabled people will not necessarily be provided the space to flourish on their own terms; either they must force themselves to reach an arbitrary standard, or they are seen as inherently sub-par citizens. Elisabeth Barnes (2017) argues that we must stop treating the disabled body as defective, and rather treat disabled bodies as existing within a spectrum of similarity

202

A. ENGELSTAD

and difference. For instance, a person with autism will lead a happier life if she is allowed to live in the world on her own terms, without being constantly pressured to conform to all sorts of social codes and expectations. While some are necessary for a functional coexistence with others (non-violence, following norms of hygiene and decency, etc.), many are less essential (e.g. enjoying parties, eating at a dinner table, etc.). The point being made here is not that the Rawlsian could not expand his conception of normalcy; the problem is that he operates with a conception of normalcy in the first place, against which there is always someone who will fall short, or conform at the cost of their own well-being. Finally, I turn to critiques of Rawlsian ideal theory from the perspective of the philosophy of race, and in particular, the work of Charles Mills. Race gets even less of a mention than gender by Rawls (Mills, 2014: 35). Mills argues that this is the case because part of Rawls’ methodology consists in assuming that an ideally just society is more similar to society as it is presently structured than it actually is (Mills, 2005: 168). This is because Rawlsian ideal theory focuses on determining principles of justice for a society in which they may be straight-forwardly implemented, and that we can then use these principles as a standard against which to judge the extent to which any other society is just. Rawls takes it in meeting present challenges of non-compliance with these principles, these principles can be straight-forwardly modified to suit the less than ideally just society at hand (Rawls, 1971: 245). Mills argues that this means that when it comes to race, Rawlsian ideal theory fails to acknowledge the main claims to racial justice that exists in American public discourse, namely reparations for slavery. Reparations for slavery would require an entirely different set of distributive principles than those Rawls provides; a modified set of Rawlsian distributive principles would not suffice. Specifically, the motivation for reparations is not simply to make the least well off the best off they can be. Awarding reparations is primarily a moral point, rather than a distributive one. The difference principle, although it would redistribute wealth to marginalised African American communities, would not be a sufficient principle to go by in making this moral point. Reparations for slavery is meant to provide a formal recognition of the injustice that took place, and its consequences (Thompson, 2018; Coates, 2017). This recognition provides a necessary step towards healing both for the African American community, as well as a way for the white community to properly reckon with the consequences of their actions and their privilege. In addition, through awarding reparations

8

RAWLSIAN LIBERALISM AS A FAILURE OF CRITIQUE

203

for slavery it becomes possible to go some way towards resetting the score of history, at least insofar as African American communities have been systematically deprived of resources for racist reasons. For all these reasons, reparations are due to African Americans in general, and irrespectively of whether the individual African American finds herself among the least well off within a society. This is not a retributive conception of justice that is being argued for, but rather a reparative conception of justice. A reparative conception of justice takes it that it is not possible for society to move forwards unless certain systematic and historical injustices are adequately reckoned with. b. The impact of these critiques is indecisive The above survey of critiques of Rawlsian ideal theory is by no means comprehensive, but I take it to be representative of the debate. All the above findings show that Rawlsian ideal theory has a blind spot when it comes to acknowledging the existence of various structural injustices, or fails to adequately consult the people who suffer that injustice, such that these injustices are permitted to persist within a society that the Rawlsian would judge just. However, as I will show in what follows, these critiques have not efficiently undermined Rawlsian ideal theory. There are two reasons for this; the critiques vary in aim and scope, and they fail to adequately target ideal theory as a methodology. A first defence of Rawls against several of the critiques presented is that he acknowledges that his theory may struggle to identify what injustices exist, and who suffer them (Rawls, 1971: 84). However, he argues that race and gender are not discussed in A Theory of Justice because ‘we are mainly concerned with ideal theory: the account of the well-ordered society of justice as fairness’ (Rawls, 1985: 65). In short, he argues that learning what injustices exist in present society, and how to ameliorate them, is a fundamentally different theoretical project from determining what an ideally just society consists in. In an ideally just society, we can assume that no injustices exist apart from those that may arise spontaneously despite the full implementation of the principles of justice. While native ability and luck-based twists of fate may be examples of such kinds of injustice, gender and race are not, as they exist for historically contingent reasons (Rawls, 2001: 55). Thus, Rawlsian ideal theorists are not in the business of determining how to eradicate historical and structural

204

A. ENGELSTAD

injustices themselves; this is the concern of those who theorise about how to improve society so that it eventually may become ideally just. This is a project that complements ideal theory, rather than conflicts with it. Charles Mills acknowledges this in his critique of ideal theory as ignoring reparations for slavery. Mills argues that reparations for slavery are not required of a society that is already ideally just, but it is required of a society that has not yet achieved racial justice. Mills takes the primary problem with Rawlsian ideal theory to be that it does not recognise the centrality of what Rawls calls non-ideal theory, i.e. how to improve present society so that it may eventually become just, and that the Rawlsian version of non-ideal theory is not adequately developed or suited to meet the demands of present social struggles (Mills & Pateman, 2007: 106). In short, Rawlsian ideal theory draws attention away from dealing with pressing demands for social justice in a way that means these demands are rarely, if ever, discussed within the Analytical philosophy canon (Mills, 2005). However, to Mills, Rawlsian ideal theory may remain unchanged, as long as it is complemented by a much richer nonideal theory than Rawls envisages, and this non-ideal theory is given more attention than Rawls gives his own (Mills, 2013: 12). Rawls’ second defence against the critiques launched against him is that as long as the key mechanisms of the original position and the reflective equilibrium are intact, the force of his theory should remain intact too. Susan Moller Okin acknowledges this. Her critique of Rawls is not concerned with the lack of a properly centred and fleshed out non-ideal theory, but rather with Rawls’ ideal theory itself. Still, she argues that Rawlsian ideal theory can overcome its failure to adequately account for injustices within the family (Okin, 1989: 101). Okin argues that this can be done, first, by letting sex be a social position that must be taken into account in the original position, and secondly by ensuring that the family is seen as a domain where justice as fairness should also apply, so as to undo the false dichotomy between political public spheres and nonpolitical private spheres (Okin, 1989: 101–109). These measures widen the scope of who and what should be considered as falling within the domain of Rawls’ conception of justice. However, they do not challenge the basic mechanisms of Rawlsian ideal theory, namely justice as fairness as arrived at from the point of personal disinterest through imagining oneself under a veil of ignorance. The other critiques of Rawlsian ideal theory I have presented yield inconclusive results about whether their complaints could be accommodated

8

RAWLSIAN LIBERALISM AS A FAILURE OF CRITIQUE

205

without undermining Rawlsian ideal theory. For instance, Eva Kittay takes Rawlsian ideal theory to be incapable of adequately structuring itself in a way that acknowledges the moral and practical centrality of care labour and dependency relationships (Kittay, 1999: 113). However, the extent to which Rawlsian ideal theory falls short in this way is up for debate, and so is the significance of Kittay’s critique. Asha Bhandary, for instance, argues that although Rawls does ignore dependency as a basic fact of human life, his theory is not hostile to incorporating this fact under the veil of ignorance, such that it can address the majority of issues raised by dependency work, like reciprocity and self-authentication (Bhandary, 2010: 153). However, Bhandary concedes that Rawlsian ideal theory is incapable of addressing cases of total dependency, i.e. where no reciprocity is possible whatsoever, such as in cases of profound cognitive impairment. People who find themselves in this position will simply not be considered as moral equals by Rawls. Yet, the Rawlsian is able to address the majority of the political concerns that arise from the necessity of dependency work (Bhandary, 2010: 154). Thus, this is not a critique that is seen as too damning by many Rawlsians, given the other perceived benefits of Rawlsian ideal theory. A similar argument can be made in light of Sen’s critique of Rawlsian ideal theory as enforcing a restrictive standard of normalcy. It might be possible to argue that Rawls could widen the scope of what we count as a normal range of needs and capacities under the original position, with everyone knowing the likelihood of at some point or other needing special and expensive medical care, and various forms of disabled access. This would supposedly yield approximately the desired results in choosing between more or less just social structures for disabled people. Although this is not a fully satisfying reply if one has moral and political qualms of operating with a standard of normalcy in the first place, it is not impossible to imagine that the Rawlsian could enforce such a weak standard of normalcy that it approximates the desired outcome of operating without a standard of normalcy. Thus, this too is not a critique that is seen as sufficiently damning by many Rawlsians, given the other perceived benefits of Rawlsian ideal theory. What about Schwartzman’s discussion of the deferential wife? Again, here, although the individual may be incapable of determining what would be in their self-interest, the veil of ignorance is merely a hypothetical thought experiment; actual people are not required to undergo it. Instead, the veil of ignorance as a thought experiment simply allows

206

A. ENGELSTAD

us to imagine that irrespectively of who might undergo it, because they are stripped of their social identities, they would choose approximately the same basic principles of structuring society, as a form of insurance policy that if they happened to be worst off within that specific society, they would still be flourishing. Moreover, if we were all actually asked to enter the veil of ignorance, and come to conclusions which indicate that we are not really stripped of our social identity because it shapes our cognitive capacity to identify our basic needs, this should be treated as a procedural failing rather than a theoretical one. What the deferential wife example does highlight, then, is that it is important that the needs of deferential people are actually identified so that this is knowledge that can be accessible under the veil of ignorance. This kind of critique is not damning of Rawlsian ideal theory either. Instead, it simply points out a blind spot of Rawlsian ideal theory which can be accommodated for without compromising ideal theory as a methodology. In summary, it looks as if none of these critiques individually undermine Rawls’ theory of justice; as long as ideal theory as a method is intact, there are no strong reasons why the content of his theory could not be modified as new information comes to light. This explains how, despite the spate of critiques launched against Rawls’ theory of justice, it has maintained its stronghold on analytic political philosophy. However, in what follows, I show how, if we take these critiques together, rather than individually, and pair them with two key insights of Critical Theory, these critiques are indeed damning of Rawlsian ideal theory.

4

What is the Force of These Critiques as Seen Together?

In this section, I discuss the key lessons to be taken from the range of critiques of Rawlsian ideal theory. In 3.a, I show that if we explore the implications of these critiques, as seen together, despite the comebacks available to the Rawlsian, it becomes clear that a Rawlsian framework allows socially invisible injustice(s) to exist on a framework that the theory judges just. I draw on two key insights from Critical Theory in doing so, namely that we cannot assume that knowledge about injustices are readily epistemically available, and that victims of injustice may be better placed to identify and understand injustices than non-victims. In 3.b, I argue that these critiques highlight how focusing on identifying justice through an ideal theory methodology prevents us from asking a larger array of

8

RAWLSIAN LIBERALISM AS A FAILURE OF CRITIQUE

207

potentially more pressing political questions. Both arguments in 3.a and 3.b show how Rawlsian ideal theory is status quo biased, and is thereby prone to reproduce existing injustices. a. Rawlsian ideal theory allows socially invisible injustices to persist A central lesson from the Critical Theory tradition is that knowledge about social problems is not always easily epistemically accessible.5 First, this is because by virtue of being members of a specific belief community, responding to the specific forms of material conditions and social habits of a society, we may be oriented towards certain questions and epistemic resources, and away from others. Our position in the world thereby gives us both epistemic advantages and epistemic limitations; shared knowledge practices allow us to build on a wide range of knowledge that others have discovered, and to make quick and useful practical decisions about how to navigate our surroundings. However, similarly, it also means that there are features of the world that we are less disposed to notice or take seriously, and we may, wittingly or unwittingly, be participating in a system that actively discriminates against certain types of people.6 For instance, in a patriarchal society, theories that affirm the naturalness of current sex roles are endorsed more quickly than theories that question them. This is because these are the sex roles we are familiar with, and organise our lives around. Thus, while a claim challenging the idea that these sex roles are necessary may be truthful, we may still feel inclined to dismiss it because the claim seems alien, and does not nicely align with our other beliefs, values and social practices. In short, what would explain such epistemic behaviour is that social structures, such as gender relations, are not only imposed on us; we also reinforce them with our beliefs and everyday behaviour (Pohlhaus, 2002). Our knowledge practices, such as where we look for knowledge, how we interpret the content of a knowledge claim, what knowledge claims we take to be plausible, align with other types of everyday practices. Thus, our knowledge practices are part 5 See Rosen (1996) and Eagleton (2007) for a general overview of the literature. I am making generalised claims in this section, rather than expounding on one specific theory or theorist. This is because I take the insights at hand to be generally uncontroversial. Debates occur in how the details are fleshed out. For my purposes, I only need to allude to the general insight to show that Rawls and Rawlsians fail to acknowledge them. 6 See, for instance, Haslanger (2007, 2011).

208

A. ENGELSTAD

of, and underpin, the social systems that we inhabit, and we thereby also contribute to its survival. These dispositions may not only result from explicit cognitive commitments. Even when we aim to not perpetuate a state of affairs we take to be unjust, we may have unconscious biases, happening ‘under the radar’ of conscious decision making, that make us act in support of an unjust state of affairs (Holroyd, 2015). Another barrier to accessing knowledge about injustices is that we often lack the conceptual framework that allows us to detect and express that a certain state of affairs is unjust. A standard example is that the concept of sexual harassment allowed women to understand that sexual advances they were subjected to in the workplace were indeed harmful and discriminatory, and expressed this in a way that made sense not only to the women who had first-hand experience of sexual harassment, but within society at large. This was not possible until the concept of sexual harassment was developed.7 As a result, we cannot rule out that presently other people are experiencing injustices that go undetected because we do not have the conceptual framework that allows us to pinpoint them. In light of these epistemic barriers, do we ever have reliable access to knowledge about injustices? It is in answer to this question that the second lesson, namely the idea that first-personal experience may provide the best epistemic access to knowledge about oppression, becomes central. While victims of injustice might not necessarily have the capacity to detect whether what they experience counts as unjust or as oppressive, the experience itself is detectable, and often acutely real. The story of Carmita Wood, as retold by Susan Brownmiller (1999) illustrates this. Carmita Wood experienced sexual harassment in the work place that produced such a stress reaction that she became physically incapable of doing her job and had to quit. However, because she did not have the concept of sexual harassment through which to express what was being done to her, she could not explain to herself or others why she quit, and she could not find any avenue to seek justice for what was done to her. However, her experience was palpable, and with real world consequences. It was in taking Carmita’s experience seriously that women’s discussion groups began to investigate how to make better sense of what had happened to her, and as a consequence coined the term ‘sexual harassment’ (Brownmiller, 1999: 280). Moreover, it is also worth recognising 7 See Brownmiller (1999) and Fricker (2007) for a full account of how this happened, and why this was the case.

8

RAWLSIAN LIBERALISM AS A FAILURE OF CRITIQUE

209

that most movements for social justice have been struggles for the recognition of a certain state of affairs as one of injustice. Often the injustice is clear to the victims, when it is not evident within society at large. Thus, despite all the potential epistemological pitfalls, it is through attending to victim testimony and testimony about first-person experiences that we may gain the most direct access to information about injustices. However, there is little to no space for marginalised voices to express their perspectives or experiences within the process of reaching consensus about what justice should consist in within Rawls’ ideal theory. Within the original position, this is because those under the veil of ignorance cannot draw on the experiences they might have as victims of injustice in determining what social structure appears best suited for them. Although facts about certain kinds of injustices could be available under the veil of ignorance, there is no access to first-personal resources about them. However, as discussed, sometimes we do not have the right vocabulary to turn a certain kind of injustice into a piece of generally accepted knowledge about injustice; instead what we may have is a certain experience of some situation not being right. However, this is not information it is possible to draw on under the veil of ignorance. Thus, although it is exactly those injustices that we do not have direct conceptual access to that may be the most deeply ingrained in our social structures, the veil of ignorance provides no way to directly challenge them, as it does not allow us to draw on personal experiences. Thereby, some of the most pernicious injustices that may exist within a social structure are not possible to detect, acknowledge and theorise under Rawls’ veil of ignorance. The reflective equilibrium, however, is also likely biased in favour of maintaining the present structure of society, whether it is just or unjust, as it relies on our existing moral convictions. As shown, we have a tendency to endorse the values of an unjust status quo, either because we are not properly aware of alternatives, or because we are in various ways invested in things remaining the way they have always been. This diminishes the likelihood of victim testimony about what counts as just or unjust being attended to. This is the case for two reasons: first, victims of injustice are often marginalised as part of the public debate. Axel Honneth argues that one explanation for this is that ‘the social strata that participate in the exercise of political and economic power on the basis of having completed highly qualified educational programs acquire a monopoly on the acquisition of a society’s cultural tradition’ (Honneth, 2007: 11).

210

A. ENGELSTAD

Secondly, victims of systematic injustice are victims because the status quo is structured in a way that disadvantages and harms them. Thus, victim testimony about the existence of some injustice, and what it is like to suffer this injustice, is likely to drastically challenge our most general shared beliefs about justice within a political status quo, and this challenge is put forward by voices that are marginalised. Thus, instead of us adapting our general and deeply held moral beliefs to accommodate victim testimony, we end up not incorporating it into our reflective equilibrium at all, as it likely conflicts with our moral beliefs. I do not thereby take it that the Rawlsian method of reflective equilibrium, in and of itself, is necessarily a bad method for moral justification; I only claim that in practice it will tend to exclude the victim’s judgements of justice. Here, I could also mention a later additional feature of Rawls’ theory of justice, the ‘overlapping consensus’, which is meant to replace the moral homogeneity of the reflective equilibrium as described in A Theory of Justice. However, it does not yield a fundamentally different result in Rawls’ attitude towards attending to victim testimony. The overlapping consensus consists in intuitions about justice that we share qua members of a specific society. For instance, in a society where many people of different religions live together, people may not agree on religious and moral doctrine, but may find common ground in agreeing that they should not personally be discriminated against on the basis of their religion. This means that everyone will endorse the idea that no one should face religious discrimination (Rawls, 1987: 14). Victims of injustice, on Rawls’ account, in order to not prevent agreement, must relinquish what they may take to be claims to justice, or refuse to endorse the majority conception of justice, meaning that their demands will be seen as unreasonable to other members or society. In sum, to the Rawlsian, attending to victim testimony is seen as standing in the way of reaching a conception of justice that is endorsable within a pluralist society (or any kind of society, for that matter), and it does not play a role in determining whether such a conception is justified. As a result, Rawlsian ideal theory as a methodology is vulnerable to status quo bias; it inherently directs our attention towards the needs and concerns of the already powerful. Insofar as Rawlsian ideal theory has the capacity to take on board knowledge about injustices, these are the ones that do not profoundly rattle the key features of his theory, and moreover, these are likely to be injustices that are already commonly known about. In short, there is no guarantee that Rawlsian ideal theory does

8

RAWLSIAN LIBERALISM AS A FAILURE OF CRITIQUE

211

not continue to marginalise the voices of those we are least likely to be attuned to in the first place, even after implementing all the modifications required by the critiques presented in Sect. 2. Moreover, as argued, Rawlsian ideal theory relies heavily on agreement about justice to be a sufficient condition for an adequate conception of justice to be established. However, although his theory emphasises our ability to reach agreement despite potential differences in beliefs and values, it turns out his theory of justice cannot handle certain types of dissenting voices. The voices of those who are the most marginalised are not heard, and the input of those who are most status quo critical are most likely discarded. Thus, in Rawls’ failure to investigate the ways in which knowledge practices operate, and may itself be a factor in marginalising groups, his agreement-based account of justice remains woefully naive about the conditions that enable this agreement to be reached. b. Prioritising ideal theory has led to the neglect of a proper analysis of the social world A second line of argumentation that Rawlsian ideal theory is status quo biased is also possible to raise here: as established through the range of critiques of Rawlsian ideal theory presented in Sect. 2, it consistently fails to adequately identify and attend to a wide array of present injustices. If we see these critiques together, rather than separately, it makes it pertinent not only to ask whether there might be an intrinsic flaw in the Rawlsian framework, but also simply to ask why we should be concerned with Rawlsianism. Even if it was the case that each critique of Rawls could be satisfactorily accommodated for, we might still wonder whether his theory directs our attention to the questions that actually matter within political philosophy. Indeed, we might ask why we necessarily take justice to be the main focus of political theory. Understanding what a just society consists in is an important theoretical project, but is it the only one? Is it the most important? Critical Theorists who are invested in the social pathology framework would answer both questions in the negative (Neuhouser, 2012; Freyenhagen, 2015; Harris, 2019). Generally, Critical Theorists would focus on disclosing negative social dynamics and contradictions, and how this interplays with how we come to form beliefs and acquire knowledge (Honneth, 2004, 2007), over understanding what justice might mean as an isolated term.

212

A. ENGELSTAD

Supposedly, the need for a proper analysis of the concept of justice arises from social conditions that we wish to call unjust, and the need to envision what would constitute a genuine and fair improvement on these structures. It seems a fair assumption that justice is only a useful concept to us if we are clear on what issues we wish to resolve with it. Why else bother making the effort to structure society in a manner that we judge just? Yet, as argued, Rawls does not see the need for basing his theory of justice in a critical investigation of specific societies and their problems, in the manner of the ‘critique’ advanced by Critical Theorists. First, as shown in discussing the original position, this is because he takes it to be the case that we can only adequately judge the extent to which a society is just if we have an unbiased conception of justice that we can use as an impartial standard against which we can measure social structures. Secondly, as argued, Rawls assumes that our attempts to understand what an ideally just society must consist in is a fundamentally distinct theoretical endeavour from determining what injustices actually exist, and how to ameliorate them. In what follows, I show that both of these arguments are fundamentally misconstrued. Political philosophy directs us away from the conversations that matter if we are concerned with justice, if it does not at the very least start from a position of aiming to understand actual social problems, which require interdisciplinary social research. Moreover, the focus on justice in and of itself directs our attention away from other crucial socio-political questions. The first argument, that we can only determine what injustice consist in if we have an objective standard of justice that we can operate with, is problematic in and of itself. First, as demonstrated in the previous section, Rawls’ own attempt at determining what a theory of justice consists in prior to examining what injustices exists, is status quo biased. The original position does not accommodate certain kinds of information about injustices, and the reflective equilibrium does not allow for dissenting voices to shape it. As a result, his theory does not produce outcomes that we would objectively judge just; instead it allows for injustices to persist under the radar of a society Rawls’s theory would judge just. In short, his theory produces specific, political outcomes, rather than an objective standard of justice. However, secondly, it is important to note that Rawls’ failure to determine an objective standard of justice is not merely a design failure of Rawlsian ideal theory, but a problem with relying on a standard of objectivity in the first place. As argued in the previous section, the judgements

8

RAWLSIAN LIBERALISM AS A FAILURE OF CRITIQUE

213

we make about the world, the way it is, and the way it should be, are always tied up with the way the world makes sense to us, given our experiences and social position. Our knowledge about the world is shaped by what access to information about the world that we have, and this access is always limited. Our judgements about the world are based on this limited knowledge set. In short, we, including Rawls, are not omniscient beings, and are likely to have perspective dependent views, as well as blind spots both in our value judgements, and when it comes to understanding society as a whole. However, while Rawls himself could never aspire for omniscience, and thereby an objective point of view, the supposed genius of Rawls’ theory is that he allows for people to act in entirely self-interested ways, while maintaining that the outcome is objective, through operating under the veil of ignorance. The veil of ignorance allows us to imagine all members of society, from their variety of social positions, coming to agree on a standard of justice that suits them. This aggregation of perspectives supposedly approximates the sort of omniscience that must be a condition for objective judgement. However, as shown, much relevant input is lost when Rawls demands of those under the veil of ignorance to not draw on their knowledge of being a specific kind of person in a specific society, such that it is possible for them to find common ground. As a result of this condition, we are denied access to knowledge about injustices that is not commonly acknowledged within that society, and these injustices may thereby be allowed to persist under conditions that the Rawlsian would judge just. In short, in narrowing what information is made relevant under the original position, he is compromising any possibility for determining an objective standard of justice. I will not make a final judgement about whether genuine objectivity is ever achievable. However, it seems much more realistic to accept that this is a standard that is at best highly unlikely. Indeed, for decades, feminist Critical Theorists have argued that inquiry that is explicit about its normative commitments is more productive and insightful.8 Instead, if we are open about the limits of our perspectives and normative commitments, it is easier to clarify the limits of our knowledge and judgements about the world. If we attempt to feign objectivity, this is not possible, and we are prone to overestimate the reach of our claims. Thus, if we aim

8 See Anderson (1995) for an overview.

214

A. ENGELSTAD

to determine the best possible conception of justice for a given society, we are better served to aim to understand the power structures of that society, the injustices they produce, and how this is intertwined with how we come to acquire knowledge, belief, and value judgements. In response to Rawls’ second argument, it is not clear why we should treat understanding what justice consists in as a theoretically distinctive endeavour from investigating what injustices exist and how to ameliorate them. Rawls might be correct in his worry that if we focus too much on our knowledge about society and its ills, this will prevent us from properly considering what an ideally just society consists in, as it will force us to focus on how to remedy individual injustices rather than on how to develop a society that is structurally just. However, it is equally clear that without a sense of what purpose our concept of justice serves, and a sense of what gives rise to the need for a concept of justice, our concept of justice may be oppressive rather than emancipatory. If we first operate with a concept of justice without any regard for what social issues the concept is meant to resolve, we simply employ it to develop social structures that regulate and control citizens, rather than to emancipate them. What is required, then, for a concept of justice to be emancipatory, is to strike a balancing act between investigating what states of affairs we presently judge unjust (critique), and a utopian vision of a society that does not reproduce these injustices. A theory that is too one-sided in this respect may become oppressive. In short, Rawls’ reasons for prioritising determining what a concept of justice consists in in the abstract, prior to undertaking a critical investigation of the social and political world in its present form, do not hold up to scrutiny. This opens the door to a final line of questioning about the consequences of the dominance of Rawlsian ideal theory within analytic political philosophy. First of all, even if it was the case that Rawlsian ideal theory can withstand any specific charge of failing to accommodate for the existence of some injustice, it is worth asking how far Rawls’ ideal theory can be modified before it loses its force. If anything, the array of accusations against Rawls for failing to acknowledge various injustices may be indicative of Rawlsian ideal theory falling under the definition of a ‘degenerative research programme’, as described by Imre Lakatos (1976). A research programme is degenerating, according to Lakatos, if it fails to deliver novel predictions, or if the novel predictions turn out to be false. This does not necessarily mean that the theory is not falsifiable. Instead,

8

RAWLSIAN LIBERALISM AS A FAILURE OF CRITIQUE

215

a research programme is degenerating if it only predicts familiar facts, or if novel predictions are never verified. While I do not hold the definitive evidence to determine the extent to which one might call the Rawlsian research programme degenerative, drawing a comparison to Lakatos’ philosophy of science allows us to ask the simple question; is Rawlsian ideal theory merely rehashing basic principles that we may arrive at through other means? Moreover, is Rawlsian ideal theory, in systematically failing to pick up on what injustices exist merely reinforcing the values that are acceptable within a political status quo, rather than operating at the frontier of how we should define justice in light of the challenges the concept is meant to resolve? To simplify, in drawing on Lakatos, we may be compelled to ask at what point is Rawlsian ideal theory simply not the most fit theory of justice in light of the challenges such a theory is required to meet? This does not necessarily mean that Rawls’ theory is straight-forwardly false or bad. Instead, it may simply be the case that it does not provide an adequate or appropriate theory of justice if we examine how it translates from theory to practice, as a tool for judging whether a state of affairs is more or less just. There might be other theories of justice out there that do not force us to constantly revise our theory as soon as a new fact about injustices is uncovered. Finally, a reason to take social critique as a theoretical starting point is that if we, as political philosophers and theorists, actually examine genuine social problems, it becomes clear that not all of the problems at hand amount to questions of justice or injustice. There are many problems of human coordination that are pathological and harmful, but do not make sense within a justice framework. For instance, climate change cannot merely be reduced to a question of injustice. Already marginalised groups are likely to bear the brunt of the worst effects of climate change, and this is an injustice. However, the problem at hand is bigger than that; it is a problem of social patterns of behaviour, production and consumption that are interlocked in a way that makes it difficult for individual agents or institutions to set out to rectify them. Structural injustices and social pathologies may well be intertwined, but we should be careful not to reduce one to the other (Neuhouser, 2012). Thus, Rawls’ emphasis on understanding the concept of justice, prior to any critical engagement with the social reality such a conception of justice is meant to benefit, does not have the benefits he purports that it has. It also means that Rawlsians do not pay sufficiently attention to pathologies within the social world

216

A. ENGELSTAD

that do not slot neatly into a justice framework, but nevertheless merit the attention of political philosophers. This also means that by extension, analytic political philosophy has been largely blind to political questions that do not fit into a justice framework. In short, the discourse has, as a result of failing to engage with social critique, been too narrow to be of sustained practical utility.

5

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have provided the reasons why Rawlsian ideal theory has dominated and shaped the discourse within analytic political philosophy since the 1970s, as most critiques of the Rawlsian paradigm have not been seen as sufficiently persuasive to outweigh the benefits of Rawls’ ideal theory methodology. However, I have shown that if we treat the criticisms launched against Rawls as symptomatic of a deeper issue, and that if we pair this with two lessons from Critical Theory about how knowledge of injustices is obscured to us, it becomes clear that Rawlsian ideal theory is a methodology that actively reproduces an unjust status quo. This has allowed me to show that analytic political philosophy needs to be more open-minded towards social critique, and to adequately engage with projects that seek to critically understand the material and epistemological mechanisms by which the world presently operates. In addition, I have shown that if we operate with a utopian or ideal conception of justice that is not developed from a thorough investigation of why we need such a concept, this theory is likely to implicitly allow current injustices to persist under conditions that it judges just. Moreover, I have shown that in properly attempting to understand the social world, and through this, what injustices exist and how they operate, this provides us with better, richer, and more relevant principles for action, and a better understanding of what a just society should consist in. In short, in not relying on an abstract concept of justice in determining what states of affairs should legitimately count as unjust, this enriches rather than impedes our positive project. Finally, I have shown that it may be the case that justice and injustice are no longer relevant concepts in talking about social harms. Few analytic philosophers are questioning why we are talking about justice over other values, principles and concerns. However, this is all second nature to the tradition of Critical Theory, where epistemology, social critique and political theory go hand in hand.

8

RAWLSIAN LIBERALISM AS A FAILURE OF CRITIQUE

217

However, I have not argued that analytic political philosophy is irredeemable as such. The demands for conceptual clarity and rigorous investigation that analytic philosophy triumphs remain crucial for debunking bad social science, and to burrow underneath the facade of ideological language, especially if we are also bearing the above-mentioned concerns in mind. Thus, what I have argued is that it is specifically the present dominance of Rawlsianism that directs analytic political philosophy away from useful insights from the tradition of Critical Theory, and that it is this trend, specifically, that has led to a narrow and status quo affirming discourse.

References Akehurst, T. (2011). The cultural politics of analytic philosophy: Britishness and the spectre of Europe. London: Continuum. Anderson, E. (1995). Knowledge, human interests, and objectivity in feminist epistemology. Philosophical Topics, 1 October. Barnes, E. (2017). The minority body: A theory of disability. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bhandary, A. (2010). Dependency in justice: Can Rawlsian liberalism accommodate Kittay’s dependency critique? Hypatia, 25(1), 140–156. Brownmiller, S. (1999). In our time: Memoir of a revolution. New York: Random House Publishing Group. Coates, T.-N. (2017). We were eight years in power: An American tragedy. New York: Random House Publishing Group. Dotson, K. (2014). Conceptualizing epistemic oppression. Social Epistemology, 28(2), 115–138. Eagleton, T. (2007). Ideology: An introduction. London: Verso. Finlayson, L. (2015). The political is political. London: Rowman and Littlefield International. Freeman, S. R. (2010). Rawls. London: Routledge. Freyenhagen, F. (2015). Honneth on social pathologies: A critique. Critical Horizons, 16(2), 131–152. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geuss, R. (2008). Philosophy and real politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Harris, N. (2019). Recovering the critical potential of social pathology diagnosis. European Journal of Social Theory, 22(1), 45–62. Haslanger, S. (2007). “But mom, crop-tops are cute!” Social knowledge, social structure and ideology critique. Philosophical Issues, 17 .

218

A. ENGELSTAD

Haslanger, S. (2011). Ideology, generics and the common ground. In C. Witt (Ed.), Feminist Metaphysics (pp. 179–207). Springer. Haslanger, S. (2012). Resisting reality. New York: Oxford University Press. Held, V. (1993). Feminist morality: Transforming culture, society, and politics. University of Chicago Press. Held, V. (2006). The ethics of care: Personal, political, and global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holroyd, J. (2015). Implicit bias, awareness and imperfect cognitions. Consciousness and Cognition, 33(May), 511–523. Honneth, A. (2004). A social pathology of reason: On the intellectual legacy of critical theory. In The Cambridge companion to critical theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Honneth, A. (2007). Pathologies of the social: The past and present of social philosophy. In A. Honneth (Ed.), Disrespect: The normative foundations of critical theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Jones, K. (2009). Analytic versus continental philosophy. Philosophy Now, 74. https://philosophynow.org/issues/74/Analytic_versus_Continental_Phi losophy. Kittay, E. F. (1999). Love’s labour (1st ed.). London: Routledge. Lakatos, I. (1976). Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes. In S. G. Harding (Eds.), Can theories be refuted? Essays on the Duhem-Quine thesis (pp. 205–259). Synthese Library. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. Mills, C. W. (2005). “Ideal theory” as ideology. Hypatia, 20(3), 165–184. Mills, C. W. (2013). Retrieving rawls for racial justice? A critique of. Critical Philosophy of Race, 1(1), 1–27. Mills, C. W. (2014). WHITE TIME: The chronic injustice of ideal theory 1. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 11(1), 27–42. Mills, C., & Pateman, C. (2007). Contract & domination. Cambridge: Polity. Neuhouser, F. (2012). Rousseau Und Die Idee Einer “pathologischen” Gesellschaft. Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 53, 628–645. Office for National Statistics (ONS). (2016). Women shoulder the responsibility of ‘unpaid work’. Available online at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmen tandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/articles/womens houldertheresponsibilityofunpaidwork/2016-11-10. Last accessed 20 Oct 2020. Office for National Statistics (ONS). (2018). Domestic abuse in England and Wales: Year ending March 2018. Available online at: https://www.ons.gov. uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/domestica buseinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2018. Last accessed 20 Oct 2020. Office for National Statistics (ONS). (2019). Homicide in England Wales: Year ending March 2018. Available online at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/people

8

RAWLSIAN LIBERALISM AS A FAILURE OF CRITIQUE

219

populationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/homicideinenglandandw ales/yearendingmarch2018#which-groups-of-people-are-most-likely-to-be-vic tims-of-homicide. Last accessed 20 Oct 2020. Okin, S. M. (1989). Justice, gender and the family. New York: Basic Books. O’Neill, O. (1990). Justice, gender and international boundaries. British Journal of Political Science, 20(4), 439–459. Pohlhaus, G. (2002). Knowing communities: An investigation of Harding’s standpoint epistemology. Social Epistemology, 16(3), 283–293. Raekstad, P. (2016). Realism, utopianism, and radical values: Realism, utopianism, and radical values. European Journal of Philosophy, 26(1), 145–168. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. (1985). Justice as fairness: Political not metaphysical. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 14, 223–252. Rawls, J. (1987). The idea of an overlapping consensus. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 7 (1), 1–25. Rawls, J. (1992). Political liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Rawls, J. (2001). Justice as fairness: A restatement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rosen, M. (1996). On voluntary servitude: False consciousness and the theory of ideology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rossi, E., & Sleat, M. (2014). Realism in normative political theory. Philosophy Compass, 9(10), 689–701. Ruddick, S. (1990). Maternal thinking. Hypatia, 5(3), 125–131. Schwartzman, L. H. (2006). Abstraction, idealization, and oppression. Metaphilosophy, 37 (5), 565–588. Sen, A. (1979). Equality of what? In The Tanner lectures on human value at Stanford University. http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/ s/sen80.pdf. Sen, A. (1995). Inequality reexamined. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Srinivasan, A. (2019). VII—Genealogy, epistemology and worldmaking. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 119(2), 127–156. Stanley, J. (2015). How propaganda works. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Thompson, J. (2018). Should current generations make reparation for slavery? Cambridge: Polity Press. Valentini, L. (2012). Ideal vs. non-ideal theory: A conceptual map. Philosophy Compass, 7 , 654–664.

CHAPTER 9

The Revolt of the Maladjusted: Defacing the Currency of Social Pathology Diagnosis in Contemporary Critical Theory Denis C. Bosseau

1

Introduction

In the midst of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr1 repeatedly endeavoured to bring to the attention of his growing 1 Martin Luther King Memorial and his speech at APA in 1967—The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement. The words he spoke that Sept. 1, as the convention’s Invited Distinguished Address, were reprinted in the Journal of Social Issues (Vol. 24, No. 1, 1968). The following passage from his speech is here of particular importance and worth citing in length: ‘You know there are certain technical words in every academic discipline which soon become stereotypes and clichés. Every academic discipline has its technical nomenclature. Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is the word maladjusted. It is the ring and cry of modern child psychology and certainly we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. We all want to live a well-adjusted life in order to avoid the neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But I must honestly say there are some things in our nation and the world to which I am proud to be maladjusted and wish all men of goodwill would be maladjusted until the good society is realized’ (King [1967] 1968: 10–11).

D. C. Bosseau (B) University of Sussex, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Harris (ed.), Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_9

221

222

D. C. BOSSEAU

audience what he saw as the debilitating effect of an homogenised academic practice which increasingly appealed to the language of ‘social pathology’ to account for the maladjustment of individuals and communities to established society and the norms of its liberal institutions. Made fashionable both in socio-political sciences and psychology after the publication of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), the notion of social pathology quickly became a valuable currency in the academic market of ideas. As King argued, while the general economy of the most oppressive mechanisms of domination of liberal society were being blatantly ignored, if not outrightly dismissed by academic circles and policy makers (systematic racism and structural violence directed at the poor for instance), the scholarly language of maladjustment was increasingly being used to pathologise black lives. According to the latter, it did so by recurrently suggesting that societal progress or institutional reform around expandable civil rights was itself impeded by these communities’ failure to properly ‘assimilate’ to the moral fabric of established society and the proper rules of democratic discourse. As Jeanne Theoardis (2020) remarked, critical voices like King’s ‘were met [over and over] with resistance from politicians, local citizens, and a national news media who denied the problem, acted surprised at Black anger, demonized Black activists, and framed the problem as [one of] “social pathology” and “cultural deprivation” (that could only be remedied by correcting Black culture and values)’. Today, the circulation of this ‘scientific’ currency of social pathology diagnosis is being heightened once again, its terminology increasingly echoed in academic conferences and has now even become a fashionable ideal at the very centre of the tradition of Critical Theory (Laitinen & Särkelä, 2019). And as we are again today witnessing intensified efforts of resistance against police brutality, issues of systemic racism, and increased widening of the gap between the richest and poorest members of western democratic liberal societies, it appears urgent to seriously re-evaluate the critical valence of this problematic language of social pathology. With that in mind, what I propose in this paper is to take a page from Dr. King’s own critical contribution to this enduring discussion by appealing to his concept of ‘creative maladjustment’.2 Through this notion, I would like to propose the following hypothesis: The burning 2 See Ware Lecture: Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution, Delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly Hollywood, Florida May 18, 1966.

9

THE REVOLT OF THE MALADJUSTED: DEFACING THE CURRENCY …

223

amber and creative energy of indignation and resistance which marks the history of struggles is not soluble in the tepid waters of consensual resignation and mutual recognition. This implies that effective social change cannot be expected to come through the gradual adjustment of a population to society’s established institutions. Instead, what I would argue is that effective social change comes through the political strategic mobilisation of creative forms of ‘maladjustments’ to established society and the increasingly regulative-administered dimension of its norms. That it comes through as the result of the sustained pressure and resistance of those who refuse to be governed according to existing terms that the institutional organs of present society propose and the pressures of a collective will which demands that which does not yet exist. Now, if the King’s message is to have any resonance for contemporary efforts to revive the critical theory of society today, I would argue that it would be in posing the following problem: contemporary forms of ‘creative maladjustment’ need to be revealed, amplified and actualised today if radical social change is to arise tomorrow. Thus, I argue that a political mobilisation of creative maladjustments to homogenised society are precisely what is required, and what critical thinking needs to learn from, if some of the most pervasive societal mechanisms of domination are ever to be overcome and if new forms of life are to emerge from the convulsions of the present. Mobilising the latter’s incitement towards creative maladjustment vis a vis present society, my intention is to show that a transvaluation of the language of social pathology diagnosis is today necessary if the critical tradition is to be rescued from its present conformism and domestication (see Thompson, 2016; Kouvelakis, 2019). The task at hand is then not to try to put this fashionable academic currency out of circulation, but rather—to borrow an expression from ancient cynicism—to deface it (Allen, 2020: 41–67). That is to say, to unsettle its current use and signification, in order to re-evaluate its sense and actualise its critical valence for critical thought. Now, anticipating the rebuke of critical theorists who would see in this approach a renewed appeal to what is often seen as the melancholic negativism of the earlier ‘first’ generation of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory—which today’s representatives accuse of hurting any attempts of inserting normative content in critical thought—I would like to insist on the fact that this appeal to ancient cynicism in no way implies an attack against Critical Theory’s efforts to construct normative theoretical systems of communicative action and mutual recognition per se. However, I would argue that its reified language comes at a cost—i.e. the unconscious reproduction of discursive mechanisms of domination as its users refuse to

224

D. C. BOSSEAU

admit that their language is itself inescapably tied to regulative relations of power. As for the argumentative trajectory of this chapter, I must admit that I have no intent to partake in the type of conversational convention which aim would be to demonstrate ‘the strength of better argument’ with the tradition’s self-appointed custodians. Why? Because, it would suppose a resignation to the idea that contemporary critical thinking can only acquire value within the parameters of the dominant discursive framework of its most current and recognised representatives. Hence, the task will rather be to creatively resist, or exceed, Critical Theory’s prevalent doxa by attempting to forge a different perspective, a different phrasing, which can resist assimilation to the disciplinary conventions of dominant Critical Theory. Of course, it goes without saying that to deface a currency supposes that one must first come to terms with its current usage so that defacing it can open the possibility of creating a different value for it. I here take this critical form of cynicism to be akin to what Nietzsche referred to as an ‘experiment’ in critical ‘transvaluation’. Thus, responding to King’s incitement to re-think the liberating potential of practices of creative maladjustment is not only meant to help me explore the possible rehabilitation of critique’s transformative potential as theory, but as an effective praxis; one that is capable, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘to have an untimely effect on the time, hopefully, for the benefit of a future time’ (Nietzsche, 1995: 87). In fact I would argue that the very renewal of social critique is itself dependent upon its capacity for ‘untimeliness’; which is to say, on the ability of its practitioners to actively learn from the history of subjugated knowledges, from historical instances of creative maladjustment to contemporary society. In this spirit, this paper will draw upon philosophical conceptions of such practices of ‘maladjustment’ to illuminate what I consider to be some of the most debilitating failures of the current explicative order that Critical Theory—particularly under the influence of the (ordo)-liberal theories3 of Habermas and Honneth— increasingly deploys to explain the supposedly immanent ‘moral grammar’ and rational logic of social struggles today.

3 Here, a deliberate rapprochement is being made between the theoretical approaches of

Honneth and Habermas to social integration and the German school of Ordoliberalism. For further discussions of the connections between the Frankfurt School of thought and German Ordoliberalism, see: Foucault, M. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, p. 105; also Kouvelakis. S. (2019) La Critique Défaite: émergence et domestication de la Théorie Critique. Amsterdam ed. Amsterdam.

9

THE REVOLT OF THE MALADJUSTED: DEFACING THE CURRENCY …

225

The first section of this paper focuses its attention on the organicistic dimension of Honneth’s discourse of social pathology diagnoses. By putting into perspective some of the most recurrent claims advanced by Critical Theory’s most notable representative today, I want to show how Critical Theory reveals its worst failure as a critical practice when its appeal to social pathology diagnosis becomes invested with the authoritative role of a science of maladjustments to a pre-supposed universal process of intersubjective-recognition. What I want to do here, is to show how social philosophy’s current tendency to turn to functionalist arguments to both justify its use of the language of social pathology and the ideological basis of its normative-reconstructionism ends up doing the opposite of what it often claims to be doing—which is to work against all forms of domination. By exposing its medicalised framework of interpretation of social pathologies, I thus want to show how its attempts to foster progressive social change through an ideology of normative uplift ends up reproducing the mechanisms of domination it claims to oppose. The second section of the paper takes aim at what is today commonly referred to as the recognition paradigm—inherited from Hegel—which current Critical Theory often deploys to justify its ontological claims about the reconciliation of social conflicts. Turning to the early work of Frantz Fanon in the Antilles, I want to show how the latter’s critical perspective can help to reveal the extent to which a reductive interpretation of social struggles through the prism of Hegelian mutual recognition can effectively mask (i) structural forms of domination in the social, (ii) as well as any possibility of thinking about how to actively respond to pervasive conditions of domination. Ultimately, the aim is to show how the ideological basis of the recognition paradigm—which social philosophy uses to diagnose and address social pathologies—simply cannot hope to foster effective change to the contemporary conditions of the real without also reproducing existing forms of domination. That being said, my intentions are not purely negative and I hope to show how Fanon’s early work in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) offers valuable insights regarding the possible re-orientation of critical thought as he contemplates the possibility of leaping beyond the bourgeois ideology of mutual recognition and towards a revolutionary philosophy of the oppressed whereby the maladjustments of individuals to established society is not a pathology to be cured but something to be creatively mobilised to foster revolutionary becomings and the possibility of abolishing the most pervasive structures of domination that established social order produces and reproduces.

226

D. C. BOSSEAU

2

From Sickness onto Health: Stabilising the Social Order, Curing Pathologies

In this section of the paper I draw the reader’s attention to a specific aspect of the ‘scientific’ currency of social pathology diagnosis which circulates today in Critical Theory: it concerns the problematic reformulation of the project of Critical Theory as a normative one based on the idea of ‘social integration’. A formulation which—most notably in the works of Honneth—tends to fuse together a philosophico-anthropologic notion of communicative intersubjectivity as the foundation of human inner nature, and a organicistic sociological perspective—of Durkheimian and Comtean inspiration—which conceives of socialisation as the natural articulation of organic solidarity. In this view, social critique is devoted above all to the stabilisation of social relations and preservation of the institutionalised body politic via the ethical education of the population through ascetic moral ideals which are supposedly already embodied in present social institutions as the organic result of intersubjective relations. In Honneth’s work for instance, while re-accommodating Hegelian principles of moral ‘progress’ and societal (ethical) reconstruction, a particular accent is placed on the idea that the self-preservation of the integrity of the body politic supposes that each of its cells, or social agents, ought to learn to communicate effectively (i.e. rationally) to adjust to and work towards the healthy functioning of its organs, or institutions (Wilhelm, 2019: 129– 171; Honneth, 2014a: 128; b: 683–702, 700–702). Thus, the otherwise explicitly Durkheimian optic one finds for instance in Honneth’s project inserts itself in a peculiar interpretation of Hegel’s notion of ‘Ethicity’ (Sittlichkeit ) as the articulation of the differentiated spheres which are thought to secure the integrity of the social whole and its smooth functioning. Here, as Kouvelakis recently suggested in relation to Honneth’s work, it is important to highlight that the paradigmatic objective of social integration—which is derived from the aforementioned Hegelian notion of ‘ethical life’—must be understood in a dual sense: (i) as the improvement of society, via supple institutionalisation of principles of mutual recognition; and (ii) as a more advanced form of integration and adjustment of the individual to society, via a stabilisation of the individual’s self-regard as he/she constitutes him/herself intersubjectivity by opening him/herself to others (Kouvelakis, 2019: 491). It is this dual aspect of the liberal doctrine of social integration that allows Honneth and his acolytes to argue that the normative process of social integration is not a vector

9

THE REVOLT OF THE MALADJUSTED: DEFACING THE CURRENCY …

227

of domination but one of cooperative adjustment or consensus finding through the expansion of the public sphere, at least ideally. In other words, social integration is meant to result from the internal work of each of the social spheres of society according to the normative resources it already possesses and embodies, rather than being dependent on external coercive forces from above, as it were. Thus, according to Honneth, social integration is a process of inclusion through stable forms of recognition which (teleologically) assures the moral progress of society. As he put it himself, ‘the normative integration of society only emerges through the institutionalisation of principles which, in an intelligible manner, govern the forms of mutual recognition through which individual members are integrated in the context of social life’ (Honneth, 2013: 173). Here, a dual problem could be posed with regard to such an organicistic normative conception of the social: how does it inform the social function of critical theory, and to what effect?

3

Diagnosing and Curing Social Abnormalities

In 1994, Axel Honneth (2007 [1994]) suggested that the task of social philosophy—his preferred term for his attempt at a critical theory of society—can be defined as the diagnosis and curing of social pathologies. Here, one might also note that the diagnostic-therapeutic function of social criticism is to be understood as underpinning an affinity with the psychoanalytic model more than anything else. As Verovsek (2019) points out, though any explicit commitment to psychoanalysis has largely disappeared in recent critical theory, there remains at the core of the school of thought a degree of ‘faith in a rationalised “talking cure”’4 whereby the individual(s) affected by pathological social conditions is expected to cure himself through his adhesion to consensually agreed institutional standards of proper, rational, communication and exchange. Thus, if there is talk of identifying pathologies of the social through social criticism, Honneth (2007: 35) would for instance suggest that: What these approaches [i.e. in Social Philosophy] regard as a deplorable social state of affairs are not merely violations of principles of justice; instead, they seek to criticize disorders that, like psychic illnesses, limit 4 A similar remark is advanced by Robin Celikates in Critique as Social Practice: Critical Theory and Social Self Understanding. Rowman and Littlefield, London, 2018.

228

D. C. BOSSEAU

or deform possibilities of living taken to be “normal ” or “healthy”. This social-philosophical purpose is served by the development of concepts that indicate the same thing in relation to social life that the concept of “pathology” characterizes in relation to the individual’s psyche.

Conversely, Honneth more recently argued that when it comes to diagnosing patterns of pathological dysfunction in society, one simply has to pay attention to anything that appears ‘odd or irritating about social life’ (Honneth, 2014a: 687). As such, the diagnosis of social pathologies would seem to rely on the identification of ‘behavioural abnormalities ’ in the social, or ‘cases of merely vague indications of a social discontent, or even simply a diffuse prevailing social atmosphere’ (Honneth, 2014a: 690). One also finds such concerns about behavioural abnormalities in Habermas’ early 1980s reflections on a nine fold list of pathologies of the social which include: loss of meaning, withdrawal of legitimation and crisis in orientation and education as disturbances of cultural reproduction; unsettling of collective identity, anomie and alienation as disturbances of social integration; or ruptures of established tradition, withdrawal of motivation and psychopathologies as disturbances of socialisation (Laitinen & Särkelä, 2018). Now, while the general drive to diagnose societal ills appears harmless on the surface and justifiably in line with philosophy’s long standing concerns with the illumination of the pervasive mechanisms of domination in society, there remains in these philosophical conducts the problem of an unchecked overvaluation of the medical language of the normal and the pathological and its ambiguous transposition onto the social as a regulative ideology of normative uplift. This problem was already rigorously studied by Canguilhem in Le Normal et le Pathologique (1966) and expanded upon by Foucault as each, respectively reminded their readers of the history of oppression which underpins such unchecked normalising conceptualisation. Mindful of their warning, I would argue that a Critical Theory that fails to reflectively address the neutralisation of its medical language is at risk of reproducing a particular specious and debilitating form of ideological justification of its aims which I would characterise as a pursuit of identifying and rectifying social ‘abnormalities’ by paving the way for an institutionalisation of corrective moral norms (which I would refer to as the ideology of normative uplift). In fact, I would go further by suggesting that current Critical Theory and its sanitised language of social pathology diagnosis—if left unchecked by criticism of the value of its values—can all too quickly become complicit

9

THE REVOLT OF THE MALADJUSTED: DEFACING THE CURRENCY …

229

in the normalisation of oppressive technico-institutional forms of social control while it exculpates itself by sheltering behind illusions of liberal progressive benevolence. Which is to say, one which mission is primarily to defend society by ‘curing’ it of its sick, its maladjusted, its abnormals by normalising their institutionally mediated adjustment to the rule of general consensus and majority opinion. As I have suggested, in current trends of Critical Theory, this starts with the specious argument that society can legitimately be understood as a homeostatic self-regulating organic system. One that can fall ill, exhibit pathologies, which is in the interest of the whole to cure as these are but deviances and undesirable abnormalities from an otherwise ‘normally’ functioning and healthy social body. In this metaphor of the body politic in organicistic and functionalist terms, moral conduct (Honneth) and communicative reason (Habermas) become synonymous with what drives the immune system of the social organism. Nowhere is this tendency towards a renewal of an organicistic conception of the body politic more evident today than in the work of Axel Honneth, for whom the possibility of ascribing an internal principal of intact or normal organic functioning to the social body—as drawn from Plato in Republic (
oλιτε´ια)—becomes the central goal of a Critical Theory in need of relevance (Honneth, 2014a: 683). In the latter’s work, a central contention is that the object of social critique reveals itself when social institutions—as the organs of the body politic—fail to function properly and when social integration, as a result, ceases to run smoothly (Verovsek, 2019). From this perspective, critique endows itself with the function of elaborating and consolidating methodological normative standards for establishing if a society suffers from a functional disorder or pathology, that is to say, of diagnosing a malfunctioning of its organs. Fortunately, still haunted by the spectre of Marxism, such a perspective does admit that diagnosing the functional disorders of social life could not be appropriate without a careful considerations of the contingent development of these anomalies in the organism. As Honneth (2014a: 695–696) puts it: ‘determining the functional requirements of social life and, with it, getting to the bottom of what a potential systematic disorder might consist in, involves restricting oneself to the current self -understanding of a historical epoch’ and its recognisable socio-cultural norms. Unfortunately however, this timid appeal to a sanitised Marxism is not enough to rescue it from its debilitating inadequacies as a critical model with pretentions of scientific legitimacy. Honneth indeed maintains that his social philosophy, and

230

D. C. BOSSEAU

accompanying scientific pretention of a social pathology diagnosis, is itself limited to socio-ontological matters. As he insists in The Diseases of Society (2014a), the social pathologies, or disturbances, he is interested in must be understood to only take place ‘on the level set principally above that of the subjects’, and thus, it is not the role of the social pathologist to suggest correctional measures to cure individual abnormalities, nor is it to provide remedies for society’s management of the maladjusted, or victims of abnormal social conditions (Honneth, 2014a: 700). If it did so, then the social pathologist would have to admit to be working towards the (re)-production of mechanisms of domination, which would indeed be very problematic for a social philosophy which deems itself critical and opposed to all forms of domination. So without pretending to offer normative standards, rules of conduct or ethical norms for healthy social life, the task of social pathologists appears limited to the task of diagnosing malfunctionings of the social so as to make them visible to the public sphere which can in turn address them in its own terms by appeal to its moral and communicative reason. It would do so by adjusting the societal institutions it relies on so as to resolve pathological conditions and offer higher degrees of recognition and respect to ‘infected’ members of the social body; e.g. by instituting new rights or expending social freedoms through its judicial apparatus for instance. Transposed in the organicistic terms Honneth seem to favour, the task is then to expose the pathologies of the social organism through the use of a diagnostic ‘critique’ so that it can appropriately respond to it itself as dictated by its supposedly natural homeostatic immune system, its ‘moral grammar’ or governing rationality. The problem is that even beyond Honneth’s insistence on organicistic conceptions of the body politic, social philosophy still relies, unreflexively I would argue, on the assumption that objective, or natural rules of human conduct—e.g. a ‘moral grammar’ (of social conflicts’) (Honneth, 2013 [1992])—exist independently, or with immunity from, ‘contaminating’ constitutive relations of power in everyday life. In Honneth’s work, this is associated with his belief in an innate human potential to exercise unconstrained forms of reciprocity in the public sphere. What deeply concerns me here is Critical Theory’s apparent inability or unwillingness to confront and attempt to dispel this myth that all eager ‘improvers of Mankind’—to borrow Nietzsche’s expression (1982: 501–505)—tend to shelter behind: an ideology of normative uplift which presupposes that there exist pre-theoretical forms knowledge which govern the living while remaining immune to the effects of social forces or

9

THE REVOLT OF THE MALADJUSTED: DEFACING THE CURRENCY …

231

exogenous relations of power. As Foucault (2001 [1974]: 1438) put it, ‘It is this myth which Nietzsche began to demolish by showing that, behind all knowledge, behind all attainment of knowledge, what is involved is a struggle for power. Political power is not absent from knowledge, it is woven together with it’.

4 The Pathological Dimension of the Ideology of Normative Uplift In his essay The Abnormals (1975), Foucault notes that the emergence of this tendency in the sciences—which is to establish theoretical expert frameworks of justification of moral or healthy norms of conduct based on universal principles—has indeed a long and disturbing pre-history; one that has informed long lasting traditions of social engineering and discriminatory regimes of knowledge such as social Darwinism. But this ideological tendency also informed and continues to inform liberal and supposedly progressive conceptions of normative uplift sustained by ideals of ‘social integration’ and social stabilisation. Such expressions however, often become synonyms for social homogenisation under the guise of liberal codes of mutual respect and recognition. Myrdal’s (2017) An American Dilemma, and its characteristic use of the language of social pathology diagnosis, is a good example of how the good intentions of a liberal ideology of normative uplift can still exhibit—admittedly unconsciously—all the signs of ideological reproduction of existing mechanisms of domination in its insistence on the corrective value of ‘instrumental norms’ which he, like Honneth today, identifies as ultimate unifying societal values which are supposedly embedded in established institutions. Indeed, the point of departure of Myrdal’s voluminous study, subtitled, The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, rests on the presupposition that racial conflicts in America could be reconciled through the recognition that all Americans ultimately share the same core values or ‘American creed’. The idea being that this ultimate creed of human equality—as expressed in their constitution—can form the moral basis upon which a successful process of mutual recognition can enfold whereby the oppressed can finally be fully recognised as equals. In Myrdal’s logic, social-racial conflicts only endure because these values are only partially realised in existing institutions, and no healthy process of mutual recognition can ensue as long as these institutions are not reformed to better reflect the American Creed. In this context, sociological ‘critique’ is

232

D. C. BOSSEAU

deployed to serve or pave the way for the comprehensive realisation of these fundamental values across the public sphere so that a governing code of respectability and mutual recognition beyond discrimination can take root and evolve; thus cultivating a sense of moral progress in American society. The project of the book itself was seen as an effort to undertake a ‘wholly objective’ study of social conflicts between dominant white America and the still segregated Black communities (Myrdal, 2017: xlix). As Theoharis notes in a recent re-examination of the impact of Myrdal’s work, the problem of racism was framed by the latter as a ‘vicious circle’ in which racial discrimination produced Black ‘social pathology’, which in turn reinforced further racial discrimination. The glaring issue at the heart of this study, however, as Theoharis (2020) puts it, is that ‘central to how Myrdal cast the problem of racism in the United States were the “peculiarities of the Negro community [that] could be characterised as social pathology”’.5 In this view, the failures in the Black community to curb their supposedly ‘abnormal’ behaviours—and thus to be more adequately recognised by the dominant social order—were ultimately seen as problems linked to Black cultural values rather that the product of structural violence at the national level. This focalisation on the apparent ‘maladjustment’ of the Black communities to established societal standards was represented as the root of the perpetuation of educational inequality, exclusion in the job market, housing inequalities and police brutality. In this logic, which marked a large portion of liberal thought at the time, the key to successful social integration and stabilisation of social conflicts primarily lied not in the radical challenge of established societal norms and values, but in the assimilation, or ‘integration’, of these dominant values by the pathologised communities; the belief being that already existing liberal institutions already embodied the necessary ‘ultimate’ values and moral norms for healthy reconciliation of social conflicts. Unfortunately, this is a trend of thought which one can still see today in much of the current literature on social pathology and its crowning paradigm of mutual recognition as it ignores the uncomfortable reality that systemic mechanisms of oppression are historically weaved in the very fabric and functioning of these institutions. As Martin Luther

5 See also Nikhil Pal Singh on Myrdal’s tendency to ‘inscribe racism as a negative “effect” that was primarily manifested in Black individual and communal behaviour’ (Singh, 2005: 14–146).

9

THE REVOLT OF THE MALADJUSTED: DEFACING THE CURRENCY …

233

King Jr would remark in 1959 concerning the systemic issue of employment discrimination, no abolition of such mechanisms of domination will come in sight as long as they continue to be ‘shamefully widespread (…), particularly in great urban communities which often pride themselves as liberal and progressive centres in government and economics’.6 King’s warning is clear, domination is bound to prevail as long as minorities continue to be pathologised as victims of dysfunctional social conditions which are themselves rationalised as symptoms of ‘maladjustment’ to or misunderstanding of the liberating capacities of institutionalised societal norms. I argue that there is something particularly pernicious in both the past and current tendencies of scholarly social critiques that pin their hopes for progressive social change, not in any rigorous analysis of the dynamics of power relations which entrench oppression and domination in society, but in lofty ideals of universal principles of moral and communicative action. Why? Because it diverts one’s eyes from the realisation that their very ideals are themselves the product of complex relations of power. Furthermore, if one takes the example of Myrdal’s attempt to produce a critical science of social pathologies, one observes a debilitating lack of critical self-regard when it comes to the question: who speaks for the maladjusted? Appealing to universalising standards of morality, reason, or indeed to culturally specific yet unifying regimes of morality—as Myrdal does with his notion of an ‘American Creed’—only allows the critical theorist to justify his distanciation, lack of interest and desire to give a voice to subjugated knowledges. Conversely today, notions of ‘universal pragmatics’ of communicative action (e.g. Habermas), of a ‘universal moral grammar of social conflicts’ or of a universal principle of ‘mutual recognition’ (Honneth, 2013 [1992]) also allow for such forms of disinterest, if not outright denigration of subjugated knowledges. These techniques of power/knowledge—to borrow Foucault’s apt expression—allow contemporary Critical Theory to effectively continue to reproduce mechanisms of legitimisation of supposed healthy, normal societal functions; whereby eventual dysfunctions only lie in people’s mis-recognition of the selfregulatory capacities of the social organism. A normality which supposedly remains immune to all forms of contamination from external social forces. 6 ‘Address at the Religious Leaders Conference on 11 May 1959’, published in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Volume V: Threshold of a New Decade, January 1959– December 1960. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005.

234

D. C. BOSSEAU

In Honneth’s work for example, this technique of power/knowledge is pushed to the extent that if there are diagnosable mis communications, mis developments or social maladjustments in present society, these only emerge because social actors have misrecognised the homeostatic capacities of the social organism which lie in the proper functioning of its organs. Alternatively, it will also seek to argue that these homeostatic capacities are being masked from them by dysfunctional institutions and societal diseases which the scholastic guardians of liberal morality can help reveal through their expert diagnostic skills. Thus in the Freedom’s Right, Honneth eventually come to elaborate on his characterisation of ‘societal diseases’ by distinguishing what he now considers to be ‘social aberrations’ into two different categories: ‘social pathologies’ and ‘misdevelopments’. As J. Schaub notes, both forms of aberrations are presented as ‘socially caused misunderstandings’ of the norms that are already underlying ‘actual’ or socially ‘relevant’ practices (Schaub, 2015: 113; Honneth, 2014b: 86, 128). In organismic terms, which remain present throughout the latter’s philosophy, these underlying practices and social norms become actual or relevant when they help in the reproduction of the supposed normal state of health of the social organism (Genel, 2019). Of course, anyone desiring to give a progressive and liberal tonality to this language of social pathology can always cherry pick instances of social relations which could illustrate its good intentions in a solipsistic manner. Thus, specific instances of fascistic politics or more mundane forms of reactionary political stances that threatens current democratic institutions—and the civil liberties and rights they imply—could justifiably be regarded as pathological and harmful, just as Myrdal sought to present institutional segregation in the US as pathological. But it remains that unreflexive attempts to use or re-adapt this (ideal) interpretative framework of social pathology diagnosis can also lead one to become woefully uncritical of the ubiquitous implication of its discourse of ‘The normal ’ that is recurrently presented as the dialectical opposite of ‘the pathological’ —and to which a presently rekindled faith in psychoanalytic ‘talking cures’ is supposed to remedy.7 In Honneth’s Freedom’s Right for instance, ‘pathologies’—taken as violations of ‘the normal’, understood as a stabilised form of social integration and mutual recognition—are therein

7 We could here think of Habermas attempt to forge a universal theory of communicative reason.

9

THE REVOLT OF THE MALADJUSTED: DEFACING THE CURRENCY …

235

represented negatively as a denial, a lack of, or a forgetting of, recognition (Kouvelakis, 2019: 495). But here too, the presupposition of a damaged normal state of health—or of the existence of social relations of recognition that could remain unaffected by relations of domination in everyday life—reveals a deeply uncritical stance. Transposed in political terms, this discourse all too easily slides into a debilitating narrative in which any violations of ‘normal’ communicative standards of democratic exchange will be seen as pathological, as aberrations of the established code of respectability that ‘ethical life’ supposes. Consequently, the adoption of such a viewpoint risks giving legitimacy to any claim seeking to portray the rebellious actions of lawbreakers and criminals as pathological, as maladjusted and worse, as in need of adjustment. This is a slippery slope that could see any experimental attempt to bring about radical social change as an aberration and a mark of disrespect vis a vis the well-adjusted dominant sections of civil society. Conversely, as Schaub also pointed out, it supposes that the only kind of progressive social change the current method of normative reconstruction fosters is a timid form of gradual progress through law abiding reformation. This is because the supposedly ‘critical’ currency that Honneth circulates is ‘exclusively concerned with how norms that are already operative in reproductively relevant institutions can be realized in a “better, more perfect or comprehensive way”’ (Schaub, 2015: 114, citing Honneth, 2014b: 4). If the very integrity, actuality and health of the body politic, in such a view depends upon the proper recognition of a ‘moral grammar of social conflicts ’ by the individuals involved in them; this supposes that individuals or groups seeking to destabilise the established order in any social sphere could be pathologised and pressured to adjust or conform. Such individuals or collective would not be deemed immoral, no, but would simply be held to have misunderstood, or failed to grasp, the liberating potential inherent in respectful or ‘normal’ discursive exchange with established institutions. Just as Hegel suggests that ‘a hand which is cut off still looks like a hand, and it exists, but without being actual’ (Hegel, 2015: 258); one similarly sees in Honneth’s conception of the body politic and ‘ethical life’, a tacit denial of actuality regarding all practices which are transgressive or fail to adjust their actions within the consensually accepted contours of civic norms and laws. In this fashion, we could argue that Honnethian Critical Theory becomes strangely reminiscent of the logic of Myrdal’s own paternalistic perspective in An American Dilemma as it came to systematically pathologise Black lives and the poor

236

D. C. BOSSEAU

for their supposed incapacity to grasp and adjust to societal norms that are already operative in relevant institutions. Like the disembodied parts or phantom limbs of a mutilated and diseased body, heterogeneous practices and maladjusted lives are at risk of seeing their ‘actuality’ being denied by an increasingly dominant ‘social philosophy’ whose primary concern is the stabilisation of social struggles through an appeal to the moral codes of respectability of established society. Now, of course, I do not intend to suggest that Honneth himself and his philosophy actively plays a role in the pathologisation of subjugated knowledges and practices in the exact same terms as Myrdal.8 I do, however, intend to point out the problematic nature of his method of inquiry and the debilitating consequences it brings when pressed to its limits. Good intentions never go unpunished. And I would also insist that there certainly is something deeply troubling and paternalistic at the heart of a discourse in which ‘pathology’ systematically refers to someone who is responsible for impeding the ‘normal’ recovery of the social body by being ‘unable to comprehend the purpose of a certain socially institutionalized practice’ and by having supposedly ‘(…) lost the ability, due to social causes, to practice adequately the normative grammar of an intuitively familiar system of action’ (Honneth, 2014b: 86). As least, contrary to Myrdal, Honneth knows that his own use of the language of the normal and the pathological is problematic when transposed to the social. This is what recently led him to refer to ‘social pathology’ as an ‘almost impossible concept’ (Honneth, 2014a). But this does not stop scholars like him from shying away of any reflexive effort to transvaluate its conventional use in philosophy. Honneth’s inflexible use of the doxic language of normality, upon which he articulates his discourse of ‘ethical life’, could justly be interpreted as symptomatic of the work of a grammarian for whom any deviations from the norms of the proper and proposed is to be regarded as inadequate, deviant and indeed pathological. Shaped by the rigid grammar lessons of Habermas and the works that emerged from the linguistic turn in Critical Theory, normative re-constructivism presupposes that social relations and political tensions in everyday life are necessarily auto-regulated by a fundamental grammar which successful reconstruction solely relies on the diagnosis of deviations from it. Social 8 Although, one notes that some have indeed sought to reveal in flattering terms, the affinity that exists between Myrdal and Honneth’s work, particularly when it comes to the latter’s Freedom’s Right. See Heidegren (2015: 212–236).

9

THE REVOLT OF THE MALADJUSTED: DEFACING THE CURRENCY …

237

pathologies, in this explicative order, become ‘errors’, misspellings, misinterpretations or misrecognitions of the rules of proper rational linguistic exchange. Such overvalued scientific authority comes to resemble that of a rigid school master for whom the proper respect of grammar is the fundamental rule to obey and recognise if healthy communication and proper social engagement is to be restored in the classroom. Under such a regime, poetic expression and its subversion of grammatical rules have little to no place. As a result, any change inducing creative resistance is suffocated by the exigency of order and adjustment to the already established. I argue that if there is indeed a pathology to be diagnosed in the current discourse of social pathology diagnosis—as found in Honneth’s work or Habermas’—it would lie in the fact these discursive techniques continually fail to consider that no system of knowledge escapes power relations, that there is no outside of power, only working possibilities within relations of power. As a regime of knowledge, current appeals to universalising principles of intersubjective-recognition or communicative action are not ineffectual or neutral; these do affect the way some can come to perceive solutions to social conflicts and authentify themselves as autonomous subjects. Any explicative order of knowledge, has it becomes normalised, can powerfully shape one’s eyes and one’s response to social tensions, it becomes a filter of intelligibility for the social world, a framework of reference, an all-encompassing world view. Pretending that social conflict can be solved on the ‘pure’ dialogical basis of consensual reasoned agreement and mutual recognition is misguided and reveals both a profound disinterest in subjugated knowledges, and a glaring misunderstanding of power relations in everyday life (McNay, 2007). Taking heed of Foucault’s notes in the aforementioned essay The Abnormals (1975), one can justifiably conceive of current Critical Theory’s medicalising appeal to social pathology diagnosis as part a long tradition of legitimisation of a scientific form of knowledge which endows itself with the paternalistic responsibility of establishing a normative theoretical framework aimed at the social and moral justification of all the techniques of localisation, of classification and of intervention on the deemed ‘abnormals’ and the socially ‘maladjusted’. A striking critical deficit lies at heart of a Critical Theory which today reduces its social function to the normative reconstruction of a complex institutional network which ‘simultaneously serves as a structure of integration for the abnormals and as an instrument for the defence of [established] society’

238

D. C. BOSSEAU

(Foucault, 1965, 1975). And it is in this sense that I would argue that the current use of social pathology diagnosis, by certain Critical Theorists, can itself be revealed as pathological through its recourse to an ideology of normative uplift which—far from leading to the ‘ruthless criticism of the existing order’—9 leads it to its continued defence at the detriment of the subjugated knowledges of the oppressed. Critical Theory faces a pivotal moment today and it must seriously come to consider whether it is ready to overcome its pathological insistence of the pathological. But what could lead it to do so? What could lead it to deface its own currency and adopt the viewpoint of those it unwittingly pathologises as it seeks to defend homogenised society?

5

The Leap Beyond Regognition

I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. I am in solidarity with Being only to the degree that I go beyond it. And, through a particular problem, we see the outline of the problem of Action. Placed in this world, in a situation, “embarked,” as Pascal would have it, am I going to gather weapons? —Fanon, F. Peau Noir, Masques Blancs. 1952, p. 186 (My translation)

While no single remedy could redress the contemporary failings of Critical Theory, I have tried to highlight so far, there are certainly a wealth of alleyways that one could explore to attempt their destabilisation and overcoming. One such path, I would argue, leads to the decolonisation of critical theory. Decolonising Critical Theory is here not to be reduced as an effort to simply ‘recognise’ the critical value of previously neglected literatures and an effort to integrate them into existing philosophical methodologies, discourses and academic debates; it must instead be apprehended as an attempt to sensitise the academic community regarding its dominant and dominating discourses as well as the powerful effects these dominant discourses have on the way researchers choose and justify what, who and how they conduct their research. Today,

9 See, Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge, Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher, February 1844.

9

THE REVOLT OF THE MALADJUSTED: DEFACING THE CURRENCY …

239

I argue, any genuine effort to decolonise Critical Theory would necessitate a serious confrontation of the effects that its gradual normalisation of social pathology diagnosis, and accompanying theories of recognition, can have as dominant and dominating discourses. And it is with that in mind that I would like to invite the reader to consider the critical actuality of Frantz Fanon’s early work on Blackness and creative disidentification in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) as an exemplary instance of critical decolonisation. Central to this discussion is the impact of the latter’s confrontation of the debilitating effects that a normalisation of the recognition paradigm can have on one’s interpretation of social conflicts. Here the hypothesis I would like to propose is that Fanon’s perspective in Black Skin, White Masks successfully reveals the extent to which reductive interpretations of social struggles through the prism of Hegelian mutual recognition diverts one’s eyes from (i) enduring structural forms of domination, (ii) as well as from novel ways of thinking about political action in response to pervasive conditions of domination in the social. Indeed, central to Fanon’s critique is an effort to overcome the debilitating level of abstraction that Hegelian recognition supposes from matters of actual ‘lived experience’ and the historical relations of power that shape it. What Fanon’s critique aims to reveal is that authentic identity is a trap that fuels processes of alienation and domination; and that there is no identity but only identifications. Ultimately, Fanon’s early work is of particular importance today as it tackles the profound inadequacy of the Hegelian paradigm of mutual recognition. For him, the central failure of the recognition paradigm lies in its naive assumption that individuals have the innate ability to realise themselves intersubjectivity on equal terms, that is, to autonomously form their identity through a process of mutual recognition in which all parties have the possibility to be recognised according to their own sense of self-worth and abilities. In Fanon’s work, such assumptions are shown to effectively mask the extent to which imperial history’s cultivation of anti-Black racism has permeated collective consciousness to such depths as to lock white people in their ‘whiteness’ and Black people in their ‘Blackness’. And while Fanon endeavours to show that this predicament is not insurmountable, the primary task remains to show how obliviousness to such an uncomfortable reality can lead theoreticians to overlook the extent to which deeply rooted structures of domination actually inform their theories and ontological claims about the human. In the end, Fanon’s early work comes as an important reminder that

240

D. C. BOSSEAU

sociological structures inform all ontological claims; and that no emancipatory social change or human emancipation from mental slavery can occur without first coming to terms with this ‘basic’ problem that today still fuels contemporary illusions regarding the possibility of mutual recognition of individuals and their integration in the social on equal terms. And when it comes to his consideration of revolutionary action as an antidote to domination, I am also convinced that as far as he is concerned, the revolt of those who are maladjusted to an unjust society is not to be confused for a narcissistic desire to be recognised ‘correctly’ as it were; it is rather the expression of a striving to become other, to disidentify from dominating structures of social recognition which leave too many unable to breathe. I think it is in this sense that Fanon sees the revolt of the maladjusted as emancipatory, because instead of seeking recognition, it seeks to abolish the image that the other reflects back onto the subject by creating a different one that can resist identitarian preconceptions. In this sense, Fanonian revolt is to be conceived as an education in counterpolitics, a passage into political action in ways that transgress conventional political practice. And while this can imply violence and the breaking of laws, moral and civil, such transgressive gestures can justifiably become necessary. It becomes necessary when social conventions and laws come to inhibit heterogeneous conduct and when these circumscribe both individual and collective becoming. In these terms, to resist dominant forms of individuation is also to resist a form of violence, albeit a structural or systemic form of violence.

6 Revolutionary Becomings: Fanon on Introducing Invention into Existence C ontrary to the pervasive assumptions that currently circulate in much of dominant contemporary ‘recognition theory’—which supposes that undistorted forms of mutual recognition and communicative agreement serve as the fundamental grammar that governs the ever-expanding horizon of a public sphere of autonomous, mutually affirming equals— Fanon’s early work in Black Skin, White Masks endeavours to demonstrate how, in the colonial context of the French Antilles, the only recognition the colonised can receive is one that is dictated according to the coloniser’s own terms, according to fixed social categories. As such, the colonised is forced into a struggle for recognition in terms that are always foreign to him. As Judith Butler puts it, in circumstances where the subject is…

9

THE REVOLT OF THE MALADJUSTED: DEFACING THE CURRENCY …

241

(…) bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent. Social categories signify subordination and existence at once. (Butler, 1997: 20)

Here, it is important to understand that Fanon’s critique is not limited to the problem of recognition alone but extends to a critique of academic, and indeed bourgeois, tendencies to privilege the pursuit of (theoretical) ontological theorisation over contextual experience and practice in order to interpret the world. Tendencies which, as Fanon’s repeated references to both Marx and Nietzsche suggest, also lead to a debilitating distanciation from all considerations of the possibility of actually changing the world as it is. In sharp contrast with current appeals to ontological conceptions of universal principles of mutual recognition, Fanon’s early work seeks to reveal this most ‘basic’ and actual problem which is that ‘ontology, once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside – does not permit us to understand the being of the black man’. There is of course, Fanon writes, ‘the moment of “being for others ”, of which Hegel speaks, but every ontology is made unattainable in a colonised and civilised society’ (Fanon, 1952: 88). Why? Because, according to Fanon, the colonised experience, like that of all who suffer from domination and oppression, implies that one is at all times pressured to adjust to dominant and dominating forms of life that restricts and condemns (pathologises) all behaviours and conducts which established society sees as improper to normal, healthy civilised life. It is for this very reason that colonial rule in the Antilles outlawed and abolished the customs and instances of Black lives that it deemed abnormal or pathological, that is, non-assimilable to white liberal society. The very conduct of others, in public spaces, Fanon explains, would come to reflect back onto him the intolerable image that colonial society had pressed on him as a Black man, as ‘a nègre’; an image that would eventually permeate collective imagination and become internalised in the day to day conduct of all, an embodied image that ‘habits’ everyday perceptions. As Fanon continues, ‘on the train I was given not one but two, three places’ (Fanon, 1952: 90); without uttering a word, one is recognised only in the terms that the history of colonisation has crafted for him. At this point, one understands why Fanon argues that the ontological pretences of the Hegelian ideal of mutual recognition collapse irreparably. No reconciliation is possible, only an agonal asymmetry which

242

D. C. BOSSEAU

Nietzsche had called relations of power and resistance; a perpetual interplay of forces of affect which shapes one and the other continually in the social. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon thus argues that it is then only by exceeding the debilitating limits and ontological pretentions of Hegelian recognition that one could make sense of Black experience and invent new ways to overcome the mark that colonial rule had left on it. Effectively the book makes it clear that rethinking the very possibility of emancipatory action and resistance requires this ‘leap’ away from the ontological doctrine of recognition. As David Marriott put it, it is this leap that allows Fanon to outline his political-ethical task ‘to show how blackness, as a stereotype – idea, affect, fantasy – functions as a source of traumatic energy in the ideological life of the colony’ (Marriott, 2018: 125). As Fanon’s book demonstrates, there can be no ‘outside’ to sociological structure; subjectivation is coeval with power. The process of mutual recognition is at all times permeated by power relations. At first, this might seem to imply that there is no escaping domination, and as Fanon (1952: 91) writes, ‘where can I hide (?)’ when no gesture can remain immune to these relations, when language itself and one’s very presence in the eye of the other entraps one in pre-existing social, or in this case, racial categories? As he further demonstrates in the section ‘l’expérience vécu du Noir’, language must itself be understood as a vehicle of power which is also productive of particular forms of knowledge. Words from the mouth of the white reflects back onto him the image of ‘le nègre’ and all the stigma that have been attached to it. Fanon’s message is clear, mutual recognition on equal terms is made impossible by the epidermal racial scheme that the history of colonisation has imposed on collective consciousness. And at first glance, it seems one is fated to alienation at every turn. That being said, Fanon also suggests the powerful effects of socialisation do cut both ways: Black people are locked in blackness just as white people are locked in whiteness. Fanon’s crucial insight here is that sociological structures do, in effect, generate ontology and the understanding one makes of oneself and others. It is not that there is no ‘way out’ of domination, rather, it simply means there is no escape from the power relations that social life implies and circulates. Conversely, this also implies that the balance of these relations of power are always susceptible to strategic destabilisation and renegotiation. And this means that emancipation remains a possibility. In such terms one could argue that Fanon here joins Sartre in insisting that existence, or lived experience, does

9

THE REVOLT OF THE MALADJUSTED: DEFACING THE CURRENCY …

243

indeed precede essence. Most importantly, this also means that the lived experience of the oppressed and the maladjusted cannot be understood as long as one does not come to terms with this basic problem. Anticipating the writings of Foucault and Bourdieu on the topic, Black Skin White Masks already successfully argues that language is far from being this neutral means of communication, impervious to power, which could guarantee any reconciliation or restoration of mutual recognition. Language is the means by which the whole frame of reference one acquires through experience and through which one sees reality is communicated. As Fanon writes, ‘to speak (…) means above all to assume a culture, to bear the weight of a civilisation’ with all the prejudices it inculcates, suggests, implies and imposes (1952: 13). In a similar vein, Bourdieu would eventually argue that language is to be analysed as a vehicle of ‘symbolic power’ which is itself productive of knowledge (Bourdieu, 1991). Of course, when it comes to the colonial context, as Anita Chari (2004: 117) notes, far from any possibility of an ‘ideal speech situation’, language is always saturated by structures of domination. Thus, if one is to conceive of intersubjective relations in terms of a struggle, it is one that is not reducible as being to the death—as Hegel puts it—; it is rather a struggle away from death and towards life. Acknowledging the inescapability of power relations in social life, one could argue the following: linguistic mediation of recognition indeed secures social intelligibility for the individual, but only at the price of a new form of subjection which he or she will in turn have to overcome through struggle (Moten, 2018: 24–25). Moreover, in this existential struggle, language can also be the powerful means by which one or another’s framework of interpretation of social reality can be challenged and resisted. And so to speak, ‘to do language’ is not something which can ever be done from any neutral position in social life, it always carries value, it is always pregnant, productive, it can silence just as it can make previously unspoken things heard. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon’s references to Aimé Césaire are testaments to his acknowledgement of the emancipatory power of language as a means to resist oppressive forms of recognition and individuation. With Césaire, the poetic exclamation of ‘Négritude’ for instance, emerges as a revolutionary attempt to transvaluate the stigmas of Blackness, opening it to different significations than that imposed by White society. As Diagne explains, for Césaire, ‘Négritude’ was less an attempt to entrench Blackness into a recognisable social category, than a creative attempt to reclaim a heritage and identity in order to regain initiative. As Diagne further

244

D. C. BOSSEAU

notes, what Césaire created for Black lives was a revolutionary [poeticpolitical] means to re-appropriate one’s self from the clutches of slavery, oppression and domination. As the poet remarked in an address delivered in Geneva in June 1978, the revolutionary impact of Négritude came not just as a call to reclaim a lost stolen heritage but as a veritable call to action: (…) a voice was raising up, with no interpreter, no alteration, and no complacency, a violent and staccato voice, and it said for the first time: “I, Nègre.” A voice of revolt A voice of resentment No doubt But also of fidelity, a voice of freedom, and first and foremost, a voice for the retrieved identity. (Césaire, 2000: 28)

While one quickly gets the sense in Black Skin, White Masks, that Fanon is left uncomfortable by Césaire’s idea of a reclaimed Black heritage and its essentialist undertone, it must also be noted that the emancipatory potential of the movement is not lost on him; and despites its limits, the creative impetus of Négritude remains for him a tantalising antidote to an always rigged and illusory struggle for recognition Hegel proposed. And despite Sartre’s criticism10 of the movement’s inclination towards identitarianessentialist claims related to a stolen heritage to be reclaimed, Fanon sees in the inventive (poetic) ‘mechanism’ of Négritude the promise of new possibilities of action to counter the mechanisms of domination of established society (Sartre, 1976). As Fanon (1952: 112) writes in Black Skin, White Masks, I defined myself as an absolute intensity of beginning. And so I seize this Négritude, and with tears in my eyes I re-assemble its mechanism. What had been broken to pieces was rebuilt, reconstructed by the intuitive lianas of my hands.

The subtleties of Fanon’s remarks on Négritude are here not to be overlooked. If there is a retrieval of identity, it is not that of

10 Cf. Sartre, J-P. Black Orpheus. Trans. S.W. Allen, Présence Africaine. Paris: 1976.

9

THE REVOLT OF THE MALADJUSTED: DEFACING THE CURRENCY …

245

something authentic, of a single being or authentic self. Rather, Fanon sees in the poetic impetus of Négritude the possibility of bringing invention into existence, the possibility of retrieving and intensifying this human capacity for creative identification and disidentification. Through the poetics-politics of Négritude, Fanon sees the possibility of strengthening one’s ‘will to power’. And this also implies the retrieved possibility of escaping the false ontology of mutual recognition. Forgetting this, as Fanon writes, means than one risks sinking again into the quicksand of this powerful illusion that one can correctly be recognised by the other on equal terms. In which case, one opens himself up to a ‘damned’ life— bound to suffer from the effects of a struggle for recognition which only guaranteed outcome is alienation; a familiar feeling Fanon expresses in his conclusion as he writes—‘Here is my life caught in the noose of existence. Here is my freedom, which sends me back to my own reflection’ (Fanon, 1952: 185). For Fanon then, overcoming this intolerable feeling and wretched condition does demand ‘fidelity’—as Césaire would put it—but fidelity in one’s ‘will to power’11 or capacity to create something new, and to act in unsuspected ways. This ‘fidelity’ is not linked to anything authentic or lost in the catacombs of history which one could retrieve as a gravedigger, as it were. If there is any fidelity to be had in Fanon’s mind, it is to one’s creative capabilities or will to power, this affirmation and striving towards that which is yet to exist and to begin… Wretchedly, This attitude, this behaviour, this shackled life caught in the noose of shame and disaster rebels, hates itself, struggles, howls, and, my God, others ask: “What can you do about it?” “Start something!”. (Césaire, 1956: 56; cited by Fanon, 1952: 77)

The trap of recognition thus lies in the illusion that one can retrieve and be recognised according to who one truly is; and in turn it blurs one’s vision of what can be, what and who one can become. In this spirit, a revolutionary becoming must then be an escape from crushing the weight of history, of fictionalised authentic identity, as well as a fugue from an oppressive present fuelled by racial fetishism. Nietzsche seems here, as it often is in Black Skin White Mask, ever present in the author’s thought. 11 A Nietzschean expression which recurrently mobilised by both Césaire and Fanon.

246

D. C. BOSSEAU

For both thinkers, the unbridled desire for social integration and recognition can all too often become the harbinger of one’s own subjugation. Instead, a different future supposes the affirmation of one’s ability and will to act in an untimely manner vis a vis the conventional ordering of social life. As Fanon (1952: 186) reminds himself at the end of the book: I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.

It is then by turning to the untimeliness of Nietzsche’s thought, that Fanon eventually suggests that if conventional norms and means of communication fail to provide one with the necessary means of escape from the intolerable conditions of a present in which one is either bound to submit to oppressive, self-limiting and mutilating forms of individuation (i.e. resignation to being a ‘nègre’) or to seek and accept recognition from the coloniser by wearing a ‘white mask’;—then the only solution lies in a different form of struggle: active revolt. This implies an active transgression of the established order of things—its morals, conventions and customs. Not a reactionary refusal of current reality but a veritable ‘act’ of resistance through which one can find the initiative to invent a different mode of being for oneself by short-circuiting normal conventions and expectations. It supposes a passage into politics which does not lead away from one’s past, nor the present, but seeks to overcome that which in them holds one’s life back. In a language that I find reminiscent of that of Camus in L’Homme Révolte (The Rebel, 1951), Fanon’s expresses his revolt in a sense which does not simply says ‘No’, it is not a mere reaction, or an act of ressentiment; rather, it is also to become a resounding ‘Yes’. Here, the revolutionary act simultaneously supposes the active refusal of recognition and the attempt to break apart, tear down and dismantle that which inhibits one’s becoming Other—other than what the coloniser expects or imagines, other than what the colonised has so far contemplated as his sole repertoire of possible action, identity and expression. Revolutionary becoming in Fanon, like in Nietzsche, thus implies an affirmative dimension and a passage à l’acte which is to operate on a different script than the habitual one, a different phrasing of political action. It suggests the creation of new values which can exceed the limits of preestablished and recognisable ones. Revolt in this sense, is to become an

9

THE REVOLT OF THE MALADJUSTED: DEFACING THE CURRENCY …

247

exemplary transgression of the proper and the proposed; not a selfish act of reactionary refusal, but the starting point of a counter-political education in becoming other. As Fanon (1952: 180) writes, Man’s behaviour is not only reactional. And [while] there is always resentment in a reaction. Nietzsche had already pointed that out in The Will to Power. To educate man to be actional, (…), is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act.

Taking the liberty to transpose onto Fanon’s argumentation the language of Martin Luther King Jr I previously mentioned in the introduction of this paper, I would argue that if any emancipatory struggle is possible according to Fanon, it will have to be enacted on the strength that lies in one’s maladjustment to an unjust situation; it supposes one’s ability and will to act upon the wretchedness of one’s situation and introduce invention into it. What I would here like to call Fanon’s invitation to the revolt of the maladjusted could indeed also be transposed in Fanon’s own singular language as a call for the revolt of the ‘damned’ or the ‘wretched’;—a language which the latter would eventually deploy in Les Damne de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961). Ultimately, what Fanon already demonstrates in Black Skin, White Masks, is that the incentive to act has to rely not on the pre-dictated terms of a struggle for recognition, but on the strength, tension and malaise that emerges out of one’s maladjustment to an intolerable situation. And where Césaire had opened the path to such a revolt in poetic terms, Fanon here extends this revolutionary path towards political action and emancipation. Thus, from the psycho-political viewpoint that characterises much of Fanon’s work, the pathological states one inherits from oppressive circumstances [e.g. inferiority complex white supremacy induces in Black lives] can only be overcome by learning to act on the ‘traumatic energy’ it causes. In Black Skin, White Masks one ultimately sees Fanon breathing new life into Nietzsche’s memento vivere to the untimely ones and the damned which affirms that: for he/she who prepares to act: ‘vigour grows through a wound’.12 And indeed, the sense of any revolutionary becoming in Fanon’s work, as Marriott notes, has nothing to do with political sovereignty or recognition. Rather, it is about the affirmation of one’s 12 Translated from ‘Increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus’ (the spirit increases, vigour grows through a wound).

248

D. C. BOSSEAU

capacity to resist, to turn traumatic energy into strength, so as ‘to be able to look the enemy in the eye without trembling’—without breaking down amidst the tepid waters of consensual resignation that the phantasm of mutual recognition implies (Marriott, 2018: xv).

7

Conclusion

As was shown in the first section of the paper, one can observe in current trends in Critical Theory, typified by the recognition turn, a tendency to classify social pathologies on the basis of what are perceived to be instances of maladjustment to the established social order. As was discussed in relation to Honneth’s work on pathologies of the social, one of the main problems of normative reconstructionism is that it can lead to the specious argument that any public action which has the potential to injure the conventional process of social integration and public adjustment to institutionalised social and moral norms is to be diagnoses as pathological or as an aberration. In such perspectives, if there is question of pathologies of the social, these supposedly imply socially caused misunderstandings or a misrecognition of the relevant norms that constitute popularly accepted conventions of practice and discourse. And as I have argued, this is deeply problematic on several fronts: (a) it supposes that emancipation and social progress can only arise through the stabilisation of the social order; a process which itself depends upon that of diagnosing misdevelopments and pathological misrecognitions of conventionally agreed values of freedom and equality which are supposedly already reflected in established institutions. (b) It presupposes that consensual agreement and mutual recognition is a foundational human need and ontological drive which can be understood as immune to the effects of relations of power in the social. Here, as societal institutions are seen as the actualised formalisation of this ontological impulse, Hegelian social philosophy comes to argue that it would be an aberration, and indeed a pathological response, to revolt against them or seek their abolition. As I have suggested in this paper, this renewed appeal to Hegelian idealism unfortunately exposes its dark underbelly as it ends up unwittingly promoting a sort of ordoliberalism which seems more preoccupied with the stabilisation of established society than with any attempt to understand the lived experience of those who are maladjusted to it demands. And conversely, it also withdrawals from any consideration of possibly changing society.

9

THE REVOLT OF THE MALADJUSTED: DEFACING THE CURRENCY …

249

Attempting to further expose the detrimental effects of Critical Theory’s neglect of the lived experience of the maladjusted—and in the hope of providing a possible antidote to it—I have suggested that Critical Theory could today benefit from careful considerations of Fanon’s contribution to social and political thought. Turning to the latter, I proposed that in a society where one is continually made to feel inferior, maladjusted or oppressed (e.g. because of the colour of their skin), active struggle or revolt against the established social order (i.e. whether as armed struggle against colonial rule or resistance against specific institutions in the public sphere of liberal society) should not automatically be conceived as pathological. Quite on the contrary, active struggle on the part of the maladjusted can simultaneously become practical strategies of self-empowerment and mental emancipation. Appealing to King’s words once again, I would say that Critical Theory today fools itself in thinking that it works against all forms of domination as long it fails to come to terms with the idea that there will always be things in society to which maladjustment is the only reasonable response for anyone who wants to see social change. Conversely, I would argue today that the only possible path towards a subversive critique of society lies not in the pursuit of transcendental normative claims of justice and morality, but in the willingness of its representatives to learn from the unassimilated voices of the maladjusted, and unbound space of ‘the Undercommons’ who do not want what established society already proposes, and cries: (…) we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls. We cannot say what new structures will replace the ones we live with yet, because once we have torn shit down, we will inevitably see more and see differently and feel a new sense of wanting and being and becoming’. (Halberstam, 2013: 6 in Moten & Harney, 2013: 6)

And today, as tensions regarding police brutality, and the systemic nature of racism and economic inequity intensify in Western liberal societies, it becomes all the more justified to say that it is high time for those Critical Theorists—who stubbornly reduce social maladjustments as symptoms of misrecognition—to be reminded that in many instances,

250

D. C. BOSSEAU

people revolt not because they are denied mutual recognition in established society, but ‘quite simply because it becomes —in more than one way—impossible to breathe’ in this society (Fanon, 1952: 183).

References Allen, A. (2020). Cynicism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler, J. (1997). The psychic life of power: Theories in subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Canguilhem, G. (1999 [1966]). Le Normal et le Pathologique. Quadrige/ Presses Universitaires de France. Paris. Césaire, A. (2000). Discours sur l’art africain. In A. Thébia-Melsan (Ed.), Aimé Césaire, pour regarder le siècle en face. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose. Chari, A. (2004). Exceeding recognition. Sartre Studies International, 10(2), 110–122. Fanon, F. (1952). Peau Noir. Masques Blancs: Collection Points, Paris; Editions du Seuil. Foucault, M. (1974). La vérité et les formes juridiques. Dits et Ecrits, I, 1954– 1975. Paris: 2001, Quarto Gallimard, pp. 1406–1514. Foucault, M. (1975). Les Anormaux. In Dits et Ecrits I. 1954–1975 (pp. 1690– 1696). Paris: 2001, Quarto Gallimard. Genel, K. (2019). The norm, the normal and the pathological: Articulating Honneth’s account of normativity with a French philosophy of the norm (Foucault and Canguilhem). Critical Horizons (Online articles), Routledge, pp. 1–19. Halberstam, J. (2013). The wild beyond: With and for the undercommons. In S. Harney & F. Motern (Eds.), The undercommons: Fugitive planning & black study (pp. 5–12). NY: Minor Compositions. Hegel. (2015 [1952]). Hegel’s philosophy of right. Sir Thomas Malcolm Knox (Ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press Online. Heidegren, C.G. (2015). Ultimate values and immanent critique—On Axel Honneth’s Das Recht der Freiheit and Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemna. In Recognition and freedom in Axel Honneth’s political thought (pp. 212–236). Boston, MA: Brill Publishing. Honneth, A. (2007). Disrespect: The normative foundations of critical theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Honneth, A. (2014a). The diseases of society: Approaching a nearly impossible concept. Social Research, 81(3), 683–703. Honneth, A. (2014b). Freedom’s right: The social foundations of democratic life. New York: Columbia University Press.

9

THE REVOLT OF THE MALADJUSTED: DEFACING THE CURRENCY …

251

Honneth, A. (2013 [1992]). La Lutte pour la Reconnaissance. Collection Folio essais, Paris: Gallimard. Kouvelakis, S. (2019). La Critique Défaite: émergence et domestication de la Théorie Critique. Paris: Editions Amsterdam. King, M. L. (1968 [1967]). The role of the behavioral scientist in the civil rights movement. Journal of Social Issues, 24(1). King, M. L. (2005). The papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Volume V: Threshold of a new decade, January 1959–December 1960. Berkeley: University of California Press. Laitinen, A., & Särkelä, A. (2018). Analysing conceptions of social pathology: Eight questions. Studies in Social & Political Thought (SSPT), 28, 21–30. Laitinen, A., & Särkelä, A. (2019). Four conceptions of social pathology. European Journal of Social Theory., 22(1), 80–102. Marriott, D. (2018). Whither Fanon? Studies in the blackness of being. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Moten, F. (2018). Stolen life. Consent not to be a single being. London: Duke University Press. Moten, F., & Harney, S. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning & Black study. NY: Minor Compositions. Marx, K. Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge, Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher, February 1844. Marx & Engels Archive Project. https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm. McNay, L. (2007). Against recognition. Cambridge: Polity Press. Myrdal, G. (2017). An American Dilemma—The Negro problem and modern democracy (Vol. II). New York: Routledge (Ed.). Nietzsche, F. (1995). The complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. II. Translated, with an Afterword, by R.T. Gray. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nietzsche, F. (1982 [1888]). Twilight of idols. In The portable Nietzsche (pp. 501–505) (W. Kaufmann, Ed. and Trans.). London: Penguin Books. Sartre, J.-P. (1976). Black Orpheus (S.W. Allen, Trans.). Paris: Présence Africaine. Schaub, J. (2015). Misdevelopments, pathologies, and normative revolutions: Normative reconstruction as method of critical theory. Critical Horizons, 16(2), 107–130. Singh, N. P. (2005). Black is a country: Race and the unfinished struggle for democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Theoardis, J. (2020). Martin Luther King Jr.’s challenge to Northern liberalism and US social science. Items, Insights from the Social Sciences, Social Science Research Council. https://items.ssrc.org/insights/martin-luther-king-jr-s-cha llenge-to-northern-liberalism-and-us-social-science/. Thompson, M. J. (2016). The Domestication of critical theory. London: Rowman and Littlefield.

252

D. C. BOSSEAU

Verovsek, P. J. (2019). Social criticism as medical diagnosis? On the role of social pathology and crisis within critical theory. Thesis Eleven, 155(1), 109–126. Wilhelm, D. (2019). Axel Honneth: Reconceiving social philosophy. London: Rowman & Littlefield International.

CHAPTER 10

The Challenge of Postcapitalism: Non-Capitalist Temporalities and Social Pathology Onur Acaroglu

The 1993 film Groundhog Day, more than twenty-five years on, appears more prescient than ever (Ramis, 1993). The film depicts Phil Connors, a cynically detached weatherman, and his journey to the small Pennsylvanian town of Punxsutawney to cover an annual event. To his dismay, he gets stuck in an inexplicable time loop, wherein he wakes up to the same day over and over. And no matter what he does during the day, the slate is wiped clean the following morning, whence the alarm clock turns on with the same song, in the same hotel room, at six o’clock. It has become a cliché to use the title to refer to repetitive, dull and unpleasant processes since the film was released, appropriately at a time when history had supposedly not only come to a standstill, but ended altogether with neoliberalism confining all scope of thought and action. The film’s enduring relevance cannot be explained solely as a convenient

O. Acaroglu (B) Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Harris (ed.), Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_10

253

254

O. ACAROGLU

cultural shorthand. It has more profound and troubling implications, since the predicament of the frustrating monotonous grind with no alternatives in sight is too familiar to many. In other words, the film strikes a chord with viewers who recognise its socially pathological temporal suspension. This chapter seeks to explain this relationship between social pathology diagnosing critique and temporality, and to draw attention to the conceptual limitations of the former in face of the latter. Post- and non-capitalist temporalities are inscribed in the tendency to resist alienation and innovatively produce, a discernible feature of all human societies. The discussion first considers social pathology and sketches a definition (I). The intention is to avoid targeting strawmen and to set the stage for an analysis through the lens of temporality. Thereafter, I turn to the notion of plural temporalities and justify this postulate through a historical materialist optic (II). Based on this discussion, I argue that a consequence of the ontology of multiple temporalities is the undercurrent of post-capitalism, but that the explanatory ambit of social pathology falls short of illuminating this and requires conceptual elaboration and development (III).

1

Social Pathology, Capitalism and Temporality

Groundhog Day is a comedically overblown depiction of social pathology par excellence. As per Neuhouser’s (2012) understanding, (1) there is a negative self-perpetuating dynamic, (2) it works behind the backs of the social actors, (3) it is an opaque process (the reason of the loop is unexplained) and (4) it is almost impossible to halt (Connors even attempts suicide, yet wakes up again to the same morning). Additionally, the situation of always returning to the drawing board aptly captures how, despite environmental and humanitarian catastrophe, and unceasing economic tumult, we return to the same policies (i.e. bailouts for the culprits and austerity for the rest), and relive the same consequences seemingly ad infinitum. In the meantime, these cycles return with a more pressing urgency. This predicament merits inclusion in a wide definition of social pathology as a negative self-perpetuating dynamic. Policies leading to undesired results such as poverty and oppression become their remedies. As Zurn (2011: 348) maintains, these are unwanted outcomes. But notwithstanding Zurn’s cognitivist bias, they are emergent properties of overlapping knots of social relations, beyond the subjective

10

THE CHALLENGE OF POSTCAPITALISM …

255

attitudes of social and political actors. Rather, an impersonal process is at place, without necessarily diminishing individual responsibilities. On this account, diagnosing pathologies implicates a critical attitude towards society, despite its ambiguity about assigning blame. The nature of this criticism is not a straightforward denunciation. Issuing from a Hegelian heritage, social pathology analyses indicate the gap between what ought to be, what could be and what is. In other words, it is shot through with the premise Horkheimer (1972: 246) set out for critical theory in a rare attempt at a definition, in that it seeks ‘to create a world which satisfies [people’s] needs and powers’. This critical dimension is echoed in Honneth’s (2000, 2007: 10) argument that there are ‘structural limitations… on the goal of human self-realization’. The use of the ‘social pathology’ framing thus necessitates an ‘ethical partisanship’ (Harris, 2019: 48) and an investigation of what has ‘gone awry’ (Honneth, 2007). It is important to underline that the term ‘social pathology’ is used in a plurality of contradictory ways (Harris, 2019). My focus here is on those conceptions that identify pathologies as social wrongs, inflicted primarily by certain parts of society on themselves, and on to the rest of society. These approaches carry a critical thrust against those institutions and groups in society whose interests and actions marginalise and exploit others. Laitinen & Särkelä (2018, see also Laitinen, et al. 2015: 12) demonstrate, among other framings, a ‘naturalist’ corollary which draws a literal parallel with medicine by conceptualising society as a body that can fall ill. From a Critical Theory perspective, this approach risks leaning towards functionalist sociology, presuming an initial state of harmony, or homeostasis, between complementary elements making up the whole, thus confining social criticism to a straightforward malfunction. As such, parts can be perfected as long as their pathologies are excised. Such an approach would lose the differentiation which separates pathology diagnosing social criticism from a liberal position that contents itself with critiques of ‘injustice’ which can be rectified through the same mechanisms that miscarry justice (Harris, 2019: 48). However, issues run deeper because, as the conception of social pathology advocated for here suggests, certain pervasive mechanisms function as they should, and their analysis falls within the ambit of critical social science (Fromm, 1963). The identification of social maladies often involves an originary explanation: seeking the original cause of the pathological state. For this reason, Rousseau is held up as a social pathologist avant la lettre, in light of his narrative of civilisation as a progressively corrupting process

256

O. ACAROGLU

(Honneth, 2007; Neuhouser, 2012; Harris, 2019). We can see this in the famous lines of A Discourse on Inequality (Rousseau, 2002: 113): ‘The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society’. Here Rousseau points to the emergence of private property and accumulation as the spark that has created untold ‘crimes, wars, murders … miseries and horrors’ (ibid.). Similarly, Neuhouser (2012) refers to passages explaining the sui generis development of structural limitations that ultimately reproduce discontent and suffering for all involved. For example, Rousseau (1997: 28–29) writes about a historical scenario where tillers are taken off the land to raise armies which creates a shortage, which then leads to discontent among the peasantry, prompting further military fortification to quell a potential jacquerie. This is not to say that the powerful are as inconvenienced by these processes as the masses whom they plunder, but it goes to show how social pathologies take on lives of their own, binding livelihoods to their ends. From this angle, exploitation can be seen as a social pathology that many depend upon. The quote attributed to the economist Joan Robinson, that the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited, is apposite in our time (e.g. in Warren, 2015: 303–306). In the context of insecurity and rollback of welfare, a stably exploitative occupation appears preferable to the alternative: having no occupation. By definition, the working class is deprived of the resources and means of production. They are thus compelled to sell labour-power to be entitled to a livelihood, making exploitation the lifeblood of the value-creation processes that characterise capitalism. Furthermore, labour, a universal activity all societies carry out, is harnessed to enable profit-maximisation. This reveals exploitation as a relation twisted deep into social reproduction. It is a structural impediment, and to the extent that it is normalised, as Fromm (1963: 6) would argue about ‘pathologies of normalcy’, it is hardly recognised as a historically specific form of the servitude of one group of people to another. It follows that pathologies also, and perhaps especially, include mechanisms that blend into the background in daily social life, and cannot be recognised as such. It is the task of social pathology diagnosis to de-naturalise these limitations on human flourishing. Considering the aspects of social pathologies covered thus far, they can be defined as relatively opaque, negative self-perpetuating dynamics, with

10

THE CHALLENGE OF POSTCAPITALISM …

257

the proviso that this is one definition among many. Moreover, a socially pathological mechanism tends to proliferate insofar as it can dominate practices of social reproduction. With the original sin of the historical inauguration of private property, and ongoing capitalist logics driving humanity towards self-immolation, social pathology diagnosis is an effective heuristic of grasping what has ‘gone awry’. However, in line with its critical theoretical roots, it is not forthcoming about positive proposals for change, ways to dismantle capitalism, or whom to blame. Focusing on the structural limitations does not a fortiori translate into the case for human flourishing. The very recognition of negative processes implicates their prevalence over other, potentially positive, empowering processes. Enlightening these alternatives can help to create a ‘thicker’ social critique and reveal in starker relief how societies hinder their members’ access to a dignified livelihood. This blind spot is the result of an inadequate consideration of temporal complexity; namely, the single-dimensional temporality inscribed in diagnoses of said negative mechanisms. To elaborate through the example of exploitation, we have seen that it meets the criteria of a social pathology. However, while formidable, exploitative relations do not totalise all social reproduction. Instead, social life needs to be continuously brought under its rubric. To use Marx’s (1990: 247–258) basic formula, the circuit of Money-Commodity-Money generates capital, wherein the capitalist seeks to gain more than their initial input through the sale of commodities. Thus, the real process becomes M-C-M’, where the difference between M’ and M is the exploitative surplus-value extracted from labour-power. Marx uses the term labour-power—arbeitskraft —in this distinct sense of the capacity to work incarnated as a peculiar commodity, and subject of Capital, as opposed to labour—arbeit —or what can be termed productive activity (Fine & Saad-Filho, 2010: 20). The normative charge of the term ‘exploitation’ stems from the special status of labour-power as the alienated form of productive activity under capitalist auspices. The capacity to produce and innovate is confined to the temporal rhythm of a singular process, which mainstream economics fetishizes to the point of missing sight of the sociological realities that precede and shape its categories. And the exploitative nature of the wage-labour and capital relationship comes into focus when considering productive activity as more than a purely economic factor of production. Instead, labour is a culturally and historically specific and universal attribute of human societies. Its practice is mediated through cultural norms and social relations which may also

258

O. ACAROGLU

involve its minimisation. In fact, as Caffentzis (2013: 145–162) observes, it is the capacity of labour to refuse work that sets it apart from other factors of production, beyond a mere value or commodity. Building on this, a critique of exploitation cannot be fully expounded with a negative focus on its mechanisms, but also through a discussion of the alternate temporalities that are suppressed at every turn. An account of potential flourishing embedded in social life can substantiate such a critique. This supplement to social pathology can be explained with a theorisation of temporal multiplicity.

2 Multiple Temporalities: A Historical Materialist Approach The capitalist processes alluded to above are profound and pervasive social pathologies. They also embody distinct temporal frames, such as the one encapsulated in M-C-M’. The ‘time’ of accumulation is distinct from that of social reproduction, despite their wide overlaps. Here ‘time’ is used in an Aristotelian sense, linking its passage to movement in terms of the ‘number of movements in respect of the before and after’ (Morfino & Thomas, 2018: 1). In social terms, this refers to variegated social relations to historical time. Rather than an absolute, abstract process, relativizing time as a social relation within and among parts of society helps to incorporate it into social critiques. Broadly conceived, society reproduces itself primarily along evolutionary-survival needs. At a smaller scale, societies are fragmented along class lines. The productive activity that needs to be undertaken for evolutionary-survival needs has economic instantiations particular to each society. This economic parameter covers one axis of culturally mediated survival. These practices take place along distinct temporalities, complicating straightforwardly linear—or circular— conceptions of temporal progression. Rather than a complete relativism of multiple times, I seek to situate a trans-historical temporality of productive activity over its local variations in particular historical periods, which are further temporally branched out. The contention here is that a central facet of human nature can be located in the tendency towards productive activity, which takes place in historically specific forms, and within the parameters of, particular modes of production. It is a common and exasperating experience to encounter sterile debates on the complete fixity or malleability of ‘human nature’, often respectively advocated by right- and left-wing perspectives. It is to be

10

THE CHALLENGE OF POSTCAPITALISM …

259

expected for conservative opinion to naturalise the status quo as the perennial social arrangement, the telos of all historical development, and most in accord with human nature. However, while understandable, it is also hasty to counter such arguments with an assertion of complete malleability through socialisation, even though this has a decisive impact. As Norman Geras (1983) has elegantly demonstrated, there is a false dichotomy at play here. The misunderstanding about Marx’s allegedly categoric opposition to human nature stems from a partial reading of an extract from the sixth thesis on Feuerbach (quoted in ibid.: 29): ‘[T]he essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations’. Here Marx critiques, among other things, Feuerbach’s simple abstraction of religion from any social formation or history, locating it in a human essence. Marx argues for a dynamic nature that can be extracted from social and historical realities. What is opposed is the isolation of any single institution—including the economy—as a unidirectional emanation of an essence, hindering an outlook that takes up social relations in their totality as the overall factor of people’s general tendencies and dispositions. Moreover, this is a historical and social account of the individual, emphasising the fact that individualities are crafted with cultural implements, in the midst of society. It could be argued, based on the above, that Marx favours historical specificity. Yet this does not take into account what may be termed his broader philosophical anthropology that accords a special status to productive activity. Due to various evolutionary factors, humans need to productively engage with nature, and socially orchestrate this engagement, in order to survive and flourish. This involves the manipulation of nature to create forces of production, as well as particular arrangements to use said forces, or relations of production. These combine to make up the mode of production as an objective benchmark of social analysis. Productive activity is a primal condition reflecting the physical weakness of humankind compared to other animals, even its primate cousins. From the primitive communal hunter-gatherer societies onwards, people have had to innovatively produce anthropological ‘cultures’, in the sense of knowledges and tools learned after birth, like the fur coat or the crossbow. Productive activity is an innate attribute and frames all historical societies. Marx therefore (1959: 82) postulates human natural beings, whose natural composition and drives are instantiated through cultural mediations, marking longitudinal temporal divergences.

260

O. ACAROGLU

A second aspect of productive activity is the necessarily conscious engagement with nature, the variegation of which gives shape to its local manifestations. Marx (1990: 465) explains this with a comparison: ‘What distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax’. People build their sustenance and satisfy their needs—vital and otherwise—according to preconceived blueprints, using implements ranging from the spade to the supercomputer. While there are stagnant periods, there are also innovations and breakthroughs, such as the invention of gunpowder or the internal combustion engine. Here it is worthwhile to recall Marx’s (1962: 122) (in)famous point about the productive forces: ‘The handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist’. This passage, penned as part of a polemic, is the smoking gun for accusations of technological determinism. Yet in multiple instances Marx and Engels (1974: 87–88) show an awareness of degrees of ‘determination’. Accordingly, the development of forces of production, and their transitive imprint of social relations, can be spontaneous and flexible. Their determinations can occur as hard barriers, impediments, gravitational pulls or insignificant nudges, providing some explanation for the emergence of capitalism in Western Europe when this could have taken place at different times and locations. In sum, productive activity is a subterranean temporal current intertwined with the historical directions that societies take, capitalism being one of these. Under capitalist auspices, productive activity ceases to correspond to the intrinsic need and desire for self-realisation and fulfilment. On the whole, even when primal needs are met, people are driven by various factors, such as straightforward boredom or creativity, to seek out novel activities to expend mental and physical labour on. Capitalist production does not tolerate such activities as ends in themselves and subordinates them to its instrumental logic. Therefore, the exercise of labour-power does not meet the drive to interact with, and learn from, nature and society in line with one’s interests. Harnessed to capital accumulation, productive activity takes the alienated form of wage-labour (Marx, 2000: 271–295; Ollman, 1971). Protracted processes of dispossession lead to the emergence of the working class on the historical scene. Composed of people with only labour-power to sell, workers enter exploitative relations, enriching those who own and regulate the means of production (Marx, 2000: 281). As a result, toiling majorities are atomised from one another as sellers of labour-power in the market, alienated from the proceeds of

10

THE CHALLENGE OF POSTCAPITALISM …

261

their labour which confront them as distinct commodities with exchangevalues once they are produced. The creators are thus expropriated of control over the means—involving both forces and relations—of production they create and maintain (Marx, 1973, 1991). The importance of recognising the essentialness of productive activity lies in its revelation of the historically contingent nature of exploitation and the pathological alienation that facilitates it. Ollman (1971: 132) has argued that alienation is best understood as the ‘absence of unalienation’. Rather than a positive process constituting society, alienation and its mechanisms are pathological structures interpellating human natural beings as lifeless economic categories. Capitalism has self-referential temporal patterns and rhythms which grate against other modes of doing things, both antediluvian and anticipative of different futures. Marx (1973: 150) has not directly theorised multiple temporalities and their incongruities, yet he does intimate their presence when he argues for the co-existence of multiple modes of production: In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it.

This passage has destabilising connotations for approaches to historical progression as a unilinear, monolithic march of time. ‘Capitalist society’, based on this, is shorthand for a society in which capitalism reigns supreme as the dominant mode of production, casting a long shadow over the others. This can be seen in the hybridised social formations of the majority world, where the historical development of capitalism went hand-in-hand with a brutal regime of slavery, tore apart and forcefully restructured social relations. It was an exogenous shock, in contrast to the incremental, organic proliferation of capitalist relations in the core countries. Aside from carrying out creative destruction for accumulation, capitalism also gave colouring to the local modes of production such as feudalism. At times, these feudal powerholders were capable of existing alongside of, and grafting themselves onto, the dominant mode of production, all the while carrying over a pre-capitalist ‘time’ (Duzgun, 2019).

262

O. ACAROGLU

As the ‘transition debate’ of twentieth century Marxist historiography has shown, and continues to do so in recent discussions, the entrenchment of capitalism across the world had many false starts and defeats, and took root as part of a complex historical permutation of modes of production (Wood, 2002; Lafrance & Post, 2019). The point here is not to lapse into a relativism of ‘times’; there is an objective progression of periods where particular modes of production reign supreme before they atrophy. An inspection of the past and its survivals in the present rather show that temporal multiplicity is ontologically ingrained in social reproduction. This dissonance is not solely a simultaneous social differentiation, but a temporal lag, or what Balibar (2015) has termed décalage. It refers to differential relations to historical time centred on various modalities of access to the socially created wealth, and as a particular lag, it involves advances and anticipations as well as regression. Concurrence and non-simultaneity traverse Marx’s analyses, indicating alternate temporal patterns as a factor of societal development. Morfino and Thomas (2018: 7) note that the young Marx considered Germany with reference to a European temporality, strained with the reconfigurations imposed by the 1848 revolutions. ‘We are philosophical contemporaries of the present without being its historical contemporaries’, Marx (1970: 135) argues. This is a reference to the conservatism of the German states, which took shape as a reaction to popular rebellions across the continent. These reactionary states conformed to the European pensée unique, adapting themselves to the counter-revolutionary institutional arrangements and ideological dispositions; though on social terms, German society remained at a pre-1848 standing. On the other hand, Germany was ahead of its time with regard to ‘criticism’, or philosophy, as its mostly exiled philosophers had made significant advances. A second observation on Marx’s theoretical trajectory reinforces this notion of copresence among modes of production. Focusing on Russia over the last years of his life, Marx makes striking observations to the Russian intellectual and politician Vera Zasulich. According to Marx (cited in Shanin, 1983: 97–123), the ancient communal village arrangement of the mir has the potential to be more than a hangover of past epochs. In a potential transition, the mir can be activated as a socialist institution after having resisted assimilation to commodity production, thereby transforming its temporal location with respect to the prevalent mode of production. These observations are supported and further explored in Marx’s more recently published Ethnological Notebooks. Including notes on non- and

10

THE CHALLENGE OF POSTCAPITALISM …

263

pre- capitalist societies, these notebooks show that Marx was increasingly attuned to temporal complexity, and opposed to the unilinear stagism often attributed to him, mostly based on his earlier writings on India (Anderson, 2006; Achcar, 2013). These intimations of a temporal contradiction are symptomatic of the explanatory insufficiency of what might be called the ‘unitemporal’ paradigm. The assumption of a monolithic temporal flow that encompasses all elements of society is a product of Hegel’s influence on Marx. Louis Althusser and his collaborators are accused of illegitimately demarcating the young Marx from the mature Marx, but Althusser nevertheless touches upon a key departure. At the risk of oversimplification, Hegel (1991: §347, §352) theorised historical progression as an autogenesis, in movements of the contradiction between the notion of the Idea of freedom and its partial realisations in each stage. Each historical period is a social whole, or an ‘expressive totality’ in Althusser’s (2015a: 583) vocabulary. This refers to the expression of an ‘essence’, or a Spirit (Geist ), not to be confused with the ‘subjective spirit’ of personal cognition (Hegel, 2018: 253–390). In short, for Hegel, the Spirit can be gleaned from every part of the social whole, such that, crucially, there is a temporal cohesion to his teleological account of historical time. Historical epochs progress in a linear movement and towards an endpoint. Althusser (2015b: 182– 183) challenges this expressive totality because it belies a misleading unity of the present, represented in what he has called an ‘essential section’: [A]n intellectual operation in which a vertical break is made at any moment in historical time, a break in the present such that all the elements of the whole revealed by this section are in an immediate relationship with one another, a relationship that immediately expresses their internal essence.

As Gordy (1983: 4) suggests, the continuous and homogenous present is analogous to the single frame in a roll of film. It is a cross section along a linear progression. Gordy’s analogy can be taken further since the self-enclosed ‘film’ is also an apt metaphor for teleological history with a beginning and an end, the question being not ‘if’, but ‘when’, it is to occur. Althusser (2015a: 28) maintains that ideological misrecognition operates by presenting a misleading ‘fullness’ where a theory or science ‘sounds hollow’ to the attentive ear. Such fragile spots are glossed over as a ‘non-omission’ which may ‘seriously hinder the development of a

264

O. ACAROGLU

science or of certain of its branches’. The assumption of the temporal unity of the present is one case in point. The difference between ‘capitalist society’ and ‘a society in which capitalism is in dominance’ is not solely a subject of theoretical debate, but key to charting departures from capitalism. The real tendency towards post-capitalism is at once made possible by the immanent capacities within capitalist production and a footing in a different temporality that haunts capitalism. Going back to the capitalist dynamic of exploitation sketched above, a capitalist society would imply that this mode of exploitation and its temporal axis has subsumed all alternatives. However, this would contravene the underlying principle of all exploitation: to place the yoke of labour-power on productive activity. It is the capacity of labour-power to be otherwise that makes its exploitation possible. This is a pathological process that suppresses unalienated, life sustaining and nourishing activity in line with needs and interests. The suppression of such non-market tendencies does not amount to their abolition. As such, the worker, as more than a mere factor of production, can choose to withhold labour from the capitalist. This reality lies at the core of surplus-value extraction. The pervasion of capitalist relations would nullify themselves if they could manage to reduce human productive activity to a cog in production. Social reproduction takes place along predominantly capitalist lines, but resists temporal colonisation. This complexity gives shape to the social formation, where negative mechanisms must constantly prevail and renew their hold. While this is a resilient pathology, it is also conditioned and shaped by a push in the other direction, that of post-capitalist impulses. The enclosure of historical time as a teleological process guided by a Spirit fails to account for contingencies, regressions and unpredictable turns that history takes as a lived praxis of social reproduction. It also easily lends itself to elitist readings of historical agency, if such agency can be discerned at all. Marx’s philosophy of history has been a settling of accounts with these assumptions, advancing alternate temporalities and their interconnections. In a draft of a letter to Zasulich, Marx (1989: 358) likens the histories of primitive societies to geological formations. This perspective lays bare the one-dimensional inadequacy of the Hegelianinspired linear progress, wherein every epoch is a monolithic whole. Like geological formations, social formations have layers which may at times subsume, reinforce or annihilate each other (Tomba, 2018: 77). There are layers of deeply ingrained tendencies and calcified roots, wherein novelties can hardly find soil to grow. Or they may present fertile opportunities to

10

THE CHALLENGE OF POSTCAPITALISM …

265

cultivate embryonic modes of production where, like the Russian mir, the past activates and catalyses future transitions.

3

Social Pathology and Post-Capitalism

The subject of post-capitalism has seen a spike in interest over the last decade. Since Mason’s (2015) book PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future was published, debates have intensified, with new work regularly being produced. This undoubtedly reflects a widespread sense of the finitude of neoliberal governance. A nihilistically punitive void has come to characterise faltering austerity regimes, ‘dead yet still dominant’ despite the lack of recovery from the 2008 crash (Smith, 2010: 56; Davies, 2016). The paradigm of social pathology similarly faces a crossroads, resembling, and entailed by, its ongoing debates on redistribution and recognition (Fraser and Honneth, 2003; Harris, 2019). Equally, post-capitalism has been a subject of interest as a response to these times of emergency. In contradistinction to the prevailing mechanisms of atomisation and competition, burgeoning social movements and political organisations continue to assert the importance of solidarity and association. In keeping with the definitional outlines presented above, this section seeks to supplement social pathology diagnosis by invoking temporal pulls which need to be acknowledged. Also, in line with the mapping of the multi-temporal historical philosophy above, this section develops the alternate paths of productive activity in the other direction, turning from their past and present towards the future. The Critical Theoretical diagnosis of social pathologies has retained a strong left-Hegelian inflection (Honneth, 2004). Accordingly, the outlook of ‘pathologies of reason’ focuses on instances where social practices fail to attain the highest possible standards of rationality made possible by the broader social constellation. This resonates with Marx’s (1990: 799) critiques of capitalism, most simply that, that accumulation of wealth on one end being secured through accumulation of misery on the other, even though productive forces can ensure equality and prosperity for all. This mode of critique therefore goes beyond negation, and teases out the gap between what society does, and what it is capable of. In Hegelian terms, the actual fails to meet embedded rational standards, ergo pathologies of reason (Honneth, 2004: 340; Marcuse, 1969). Indeed, leading scholars of social pathology have formulated unorthodox accounts of Hegel’s notion of Spirit vis-à-vis recognition and failures thereof,

266

O. ACAROGLU

evincing both Hegel’s lasting imprint on social theory and innovative potentials under a new light (Honneth, 1995; Ikäheimo & Laitinen, 2011). It is notoriously difficult to arrive at a definition of ‘reason’ central to some social pathological accounts that espouse the recognition frame. This is related to the contested nature of Hegel scholarship (Houlgate, 2012). Honneth has continuously revised his formulation of the concept in the development of his account (Harris, 2019: 101; Freyenhagen, 2015). It is however possible to address the lowest common denominators of advocates of this Hegelian approach. Pathologies of reason take a left-Hegelian view. They oppose the complacent position of its right-wing variant, that the existing state of affairs represents the final unfolding of the Spirit (Hardimon, 1992: 165–167; Harris, 1958). For Hegel, this was his contemporary Prussian state, though it remains an open question how literal he was about this, and whether this was a pragmatic decision (Desmond, 1984: 173). Left-Hegelians, the young Marx among them, took a critical view of their society, and argued that the unfolding of Spirit and the realisation of the Idea of freedom were far from over. After all, oppression, violence and misery were prevalent, and this could not have been what Hegel had in mind as the telos of history. In social pathological terms, persistent pathologies should be grasped in an immanent-transcendent manner, as the failures of the rationality immanent within society to come to fruition. The transcendental aspect of this perspective argues for the internal movement of the contradiction between the Idea and its partial realisation at a further point of resolution, such that its teleological endpoint has been realised. The approach to social pathology in question takes ‘reason’ as a thick concept that is socially immediate and prior to subjective conceptions. Reason is monolithic and self-enclosed as part of the historical narrative guided by the Spirit. This philosophically dense conception is internally consistent, yet it subjects history to a preconceived, linear process of eventual realisation. On the other hand, once the temporal unity of the present is dismissed in favour of a complex unity of ‘times’, history is once again animated as a contradictory, improvised and overall messy process of social struggles. And rather than a reduction to a metaphysical determinism, which may have characterised left-Hegelian approaches, the course of historical change can be better understood as a perennial settling of accounts with social pathologies. These take place along relatively autonomous ‘times’, considered here as a permanent displacement

10

THE CHALLENGE OF POSTCAPITALISM …

267

as some progresses gather momentum and others are left behind. It is apposite here to consider the different ways Hegel and Marx analysed German society: a monolithic, frozen representation of the latest turn of the Spirit in the former, and a temporally fragmented, contradictory unity for the latter. The displacement in this latter understanding is constitutive of all social formations, and cannot be fully resolved to pave the way for a social life that is transparent to itself. Moreover, this complexity is incompatible with social pathological approaches of a Hegelian bent. As Marx’s historical materialism took shape as a confrontation with expressive totalities and the social whole, so can social pathology find a source of rejuvenation in complicating the simultaneity of aspects of social life. In this way, this paradigm can benefit from delineations of budding futures. A shortcoming of social pathology comes through at this point. As a diagnostic principle, social pathologists retrospectively identify negative mechanisms, but this renders the approach myopic with respect to those processes that push back against such mechanisms. In fact, it could be argued that social pathologies are as reactive as they are constitutive of social relations. To put it more directly, capitalist pathologies are not partial realisations of an unfulfilled idea, nor the totalising constituents of social life. They are rather grinding repetitions of a past temporality. Mechanisms of exploitation, poverty and inequality need to update themselves in a renewed need to suture fuller expressions of productive activity, in a process which moulds history not as a straight line, but a geological formation. Contemporary social pathology scholarship is thus limited in its focus on the temporality of singular mechanisms, losing sight of their interrelations with crosscutting influences that originate in other points of social reproduction. This temporal isolation renders these diagnoses bereft of a sharper analytical acumen that can be gained from acknowledging and elaborating temporal alternatives. The preceding discussion has elaborated on an ontological temporal stratification that makes up the social struggles driving historical change. This is grounded in the primordial human capacity and drive to strive for improvements to the quality of life, despite its staggeringly varied real historical outcomes. Productive activity is subsumed under the singular temporality of capitalist processes, but it is never fully colonised in this way. This can be glimpsed in the proliferation of voluntary association and non-market activities that maintain a footing outside of circuits of accumulation, ranging from the local aid networks that sprung up with the Covid-19 emergency, to more historically monumental episodes such

268

O. ACAROGLU

as Communes from Paris to Beijing (Springer, 2020). Socially constructed and maintained reaches for non-capitalist temporality thereby dot the social and political landscape, no matter how bleak it may be. These flashes of non-capitalist impulses are nurtured by spontaneous mass creativity that is manifest in the culturally rich tapestry of human civilisations and the political struggles waged across centuries to restore productive activity to its full capacities. These aspects of society all make up an array of post-capitalist temporalities, the futuristic counterparts to the hangovers of the past that parcellise the present. Pathologies are, by definition, signs of things having gone wrong, and imply that there are correct, or at least less wrong, modes of life that can be extracted from their wreckage. The immanent-transcendent method through which Critical Theorists diagnose social pathologies thus needs to be developed to incorporate an understanding of multiple temporalities. This can reveal pathological processes in sharper focus. Aside from this gain in explanatory power, the incorporation of such alternatives can allow this paradigm to name names, pass judgments and hold power to account more powerfully. Social pathologies are diagnoses of negative mechanisms that lie behind the immediately observable phenomenon. As such, they explain a difference between the status quo and its potential alternatives. This is a paramount feature of Critical Theory. It is thus set apart from traditional theories, such as contemporary positivist social science, which content themselves with ‘objective’ description and proclaim normative pronouncements beyond the theoretical purview. The political and economic structures that sustain social problems pose a blind spot to traditional theory, that the pathology approach effectively addresses. In turn, however, social pathology is also loaded with a pejorative connotation, and focuses on unitemporal occurrences. To use a medical metaphor, this commitment overlooks the factors that are conducive to overall social well-being. As a result, social pathology diagnosis also risks stopping at portraying issues when it could go beyond this step by indicating alternative temporal patterns that do not produce, or even just mitigate, such issues. In sum, an engagement with the notions elaborated here can develop the social pathological conceptual apparatus and further enable the identification of post-capitalist forces present within the social order.

10

THE CHALLENGE OF POSTCAPITALISM …

269

4 Conclusion: Enhancing the Social Pathology Paradigm While it can effectively capture the discord between the existing state of affairs and the alternative ways they should be, social pathology scholarship does not fully capture post-capitalist temporalities. This chapter has identified the assumption of a homogenous, unified temporal backdrop to social pathological processes, along with the assignment of a singular temporal logic to each pathology, as an impediment to its critique and provision of remedies. This has involved laying the foundation of a historical materialist case for multiple temporalities, and the chapter has engaged with a widely defined understanding of social pathology. Building on this I have argued that along with the repetition of the past, anticipations and tendencies of a germinating future also exist and maintain a spark, no matter how dim, that can further destabilise the temporal lags at the centre of social reproduction. Mark Fisher’s (2011: 11–22) oft-quoted ‘slow cancellation of the future’ was a reference to the incapacity of the late neoliberal period to produce new artistic movements or literary achievements, while compulsively recycling the past. This was symptomatic of the difficulty in imagining alternate social arrangements, where time appeared to stand still. This cancellation has now taken a more literal form. Considering the looming threat of global warming, the resurgence of nationalist sabrerattling around the world, and the Covid-19 pandemic causing hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, the literal future appears to be on the line. The economic, social and political scripts that perpetuate these dynamics are also intact and formidable. However, it is also helpful to be reminded that even Phil Connors in Groundhog Day managed to leave the vicious cycle of waking up to the same, dreary situation. After many self-destructive and fruitless attempts to leave that day, Connors begins to consider others, and treat people around him as ends-in-themselves rather than accessories to his cynical desires. This break from an atomised and alienated existence leads Connors to identifying with the community he initially despised, and aligning his well-being with those around him. When Phil Connors begins to take a genuine interest in those around him, particularly the most vulnerable, his ‘days’ become infinitely more variegated and fulfilling. Even though the film takes place across iterations of a single day, we see Connors taking up the piano, reciting French poetry, getting to know and

270

O. ACAROGLU

love a woman for herself, and on each day leading a more exhilarating existence than ever before. In fact, the predicament of the loop demonstrates to the viewer that had it not happened, Connors’ ordinary life would have followed a more profoundly nefarious loop until it expired, without a revelation of its numbing monotony. The positive mechanisms he has led off return to Connors, making him happier and more invested in his life, which had consisted of a homogenous going through the motions. Connors’ day in the loop is more temporally heterogenous than the entirety of his biographic existence. Groundhog Day viscerally captures the differences that relating to each other beyond pathological loops can make. Beyond a wholesome, fantastic film sequence, the film attests to tendencies in society that can break repeated, impersonal and seemingly opaque processes. While this is not easy, it is also not impossible. Social pathology diagnosis can, and should, take cognisance of the countercyclical mechanisms to those under its investigative focus. In this way, Critical Theorists can substantiate their social critique with traces of the temporality outside of the here and now.

References Achcar, G. (2013). Marxism, orientalism, cosmopolitanism. Chicago: Haymarket. Althusser, L. (2015a). From capital to Marx’s philosophy. In L. Althusser & E. Balibar (Eds.), Reading capital: The complete edition. London: Verso. Althusser, L. (2015b). The object of capital. In L. Althusser & E. Balibar (Eds.), Reading capital: The complete edition. London: Verso. Anderson, K. (2006). Marx’s late writings on non-Western and precapitalist societies and gender. Rethinking Marxism, 14(4), 84–96. Balibar, E. (2015). Elements for a theory of transition. In Reading capital: The complete edition. London: Verso. Caffentzis, G. (2013). Why machines cannot create value: Marx’s theory of machines. In G. Caffentzis (Ed.), In letters of blood and fire: Work, machines, and the crisis of capitalism (pp. 139–163). Oakland: PM Press. Davies, W. (2016). The new neoliberalism. New Left Review. 101. Desmond, W. (1984). Hegel, art, and history. In R. L. Perkins (Ed.), History and system: Hegel’s philosophy of history (pp. 173–193). Albany: State University of New York Press. Duzgun, E. (2019). The political economy of the transition to capitalism in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey: Towards a new interpretation. In X. Lafrance & C. Post (Eds.), Case studies in the origins of capitalism (pp. 265–290). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

10

THE CHALLENGE OF POSTCAPITALISM …

271

Fine, B., & Saad-Filho, A. (2010). Marx’s ‘capital’ (5th ed.). London: Pluto Press. Fisher, M. (2011). Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures. London: Zed Books. Fraser, N., & Honneth, A. (2003). Redistribution or recognition? A politicalphilosophical exchange. London: Verso. Freyenhagen, F. (2015). Honneth on social pathologies: A critique. Critical Horizons, 16(2), 131–152. Fromm, E. (1963). The sane society (E. Rottentrans, Trans.). New York: Rinehart and Winston. Geras, N. (1983). Marx and human nature: Refutation of a legend. London: Verso. Gordy, M. (1983). Time and the social whole. History and Theory, 22(1), 1–21. Hardimon, M. O. (1992). The project of reconciliation: Hegel’s social philosophy. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 21(2), 165–195. Harris, H. S. (1958). Hegelianism of the ‘right’ and ‘left’. The Review of Metaphysics, 11(4), 603–609. Harris, N. (2019). Recovering the critical potential of social pathology diagnosis. European Journal of Social Theory, 22(1), 45–62. Hegel, G. W. F. (1991). Elements of the philosophy of right. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (2018). Phenomenology of spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Honneth, A. (1995). The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts. Cambridge: MIT Press. Honneth, A. (2000). The possibility of a disclosing critique of society: The dialectic of enlightenment in light of current debates in social criticism. Constellations, 7 (1), 116–127. Honneth, A. (2004). A social pathology of reason: On the intellectual legacy of critical theory. In F. Rush (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to critical theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Honneth, A. (2007). Pathologies of the social: The past and present of social philosophy. In A. Honneth (Ed.), Disrespect: The normative foundations of critical theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Houlgate, S. (2012). Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit: A reader’s guide. London: Bloomsbury. Horkheimer, M. (1972). Critical theory. New York: Seabury Press. Ikäheimo, H., & Laitinen, A. (Eds.). (2011). Recognition and social ontology. Leiden: Brill. Lafrance, X., & Post, C. (Eds.). (2019). Case studies in the origins of capitalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

272

O. ACAROGLU

Laitinen, A., Särkelä, A., & Ikäheimo, H. (2015). Pathologies of recognition: An introduction. Studies in Social and Political Thought. Laitinen, A., & Särkelä, A. (2018). Four conceptions of social pathology. European Journal of Social Theory, 22(1), 80–102. Marcuse, H. (1969). Reason and revolution: Hegel and the rise of social theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Marx, K. (1959). Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, K. (1962). The poverty of philosophy: Answer to the philosophy of poverty by M. Proudhon. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Marx, K. (1970). Critique of Hegel’s ‘philosophy of right’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, K. (1973). Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy. London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1989). First draft of letter to Vera Zasulich in Marx and Engels collected works (Vol. 35). London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1990). Capital: A critique of political economy (Vol. I). London: Penguin. Marx, K. (1991). Capital: A critique of political economy (Vol. III). London: Penguin. Marx, K. (2000). Wage-labour and capital. In D. McLellan (Ed.), Karl Marx: selected writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1974). The German ideology. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Mason, P. (2015). Postcapitalism: A guide to our future. London: Penguin. Morfino, V., & Thomas, P. (2018). Tempora Multa. In V. Morfino & P. D. Thomas (Eds.),The government of time: Theories of plural temporality in the Marxist tradition. Leiden: Brill. Neuhouser, F. (2012). Rousseau und die Idee einer pathologischen Gesellschaft. Politische Viertel-Jahresschrift, 53(4), 628–745. Ollman, B. (1971). Alienation: Marx’s conception of Man in capitalist society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ramis, H. (1993). Groundhog day. Columbia Pictures Corporation. Rousseau, J. [1755] (1997). A discourse on political economy. In: The discourses and other early writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rousseau, J. (2002). The social contract and the first and second discourses. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shanin, T. (1983). Late Marx and the Russian road: Marx and the ‘peripheries of capitalism’. New York: Monthly Review Press. Smith, N. (2010). The revolutionary imperative. Antipode, 41, 50–65. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00716.x.

10

THE CHALLENGE OF POSTCAPITALISM …

273

Springer, S. (2020). Caring geographies: The COVID-19 interregnum and a return to mutual aid. Dialogues in Human Geography, 10(2), 112–115. Tomba, M. (2018). Layers of time in Marx: From the grundrisse to capital to the Russian Commune. In V. Morfino & P. D. Thomas (Eds.), The government of time: Theories of plural temporality in the Marxist tradition. Leiden: Brill. Warren, P. (2015). In defense of the Marxian theory of exploitation: Thoughts on Roemer. Cohen, and Others Social Theory and Practice, 41(2), 286–308. Wood, E. M. (2002). The origin of capitalism: A longer view. London: Verso. Zurn, C. (2011). Social pathologies as second-order disorders. In D. Petherbridge (Ed.), Axel Honneth: Critical essays. With a reply by Axel Honneth (pp. 345–370). Leiden: Brill.

CHAPTER 11

The Future of Pathology Diagnosing Social Research Neal Harris and James Stockman

Over forty years ago, Susan Buck-Morss wrote that Critical Theory is ‘a term which lacks substantive precision’ (1977: 65). When one considers the plurality of traditions, disciplines and schools which have been imbibed by Critical Theorists in the intervening years, a concern with the programme’s coherence and specificity remains apposite today (Delanty, 2020). Indeed, such considerations are particularly pertinent to the formulation of a concluding reflection on the present volume, specifically in light of its attempt to consciously unite disparate Critical Theorists with the aim to demonstrate the breadth and efficacy of pathology diagnosing social research. This brief co-authored chapter thus proposes to lightly sketch the contours of the pathology diagnosing Critical Theories

N. Harris (B) Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. Stockman University of Sussex, Brighton, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Harris (ed.), Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_11

275

276

N. HARRIS AND J. STOCKMAN

presented in this volume, foregrounding the coherence and value of the pluralist approach pursued within. While acutely aware of the very real potential for fracture induced by increasingly ideal-theoretical and neo-Idealist scholarship (Thompson, 2016; Kouvelakis, 2019), our intention is neither to outline a grand theory/sacrosanct methodology, nor to wearily repeat the unheeded caution against the transition to an exclusively intersubjective account of social pathology (Harris, 2019). Rather, by drawing on the preceding chapters, we attempt to identify complimentary themes, insights and methodologies, which serve both to foster and nourish pathology diagnosing social research and maintain a programmatic coherence in spite of the increasing bifurcation of Critical Theory. To this end, we briefly comment on three key moments in Critical Theory’s dialectical approach to pathology diagnosing social research: (i) the methodological significance of immanent-transcendent critique, (ii) the political imperative to combat reified consciousness, and (iii) the left-Hegelian notion of the historically contingent social subject.

1

Immanent-Transcendent Critique

To claim that social critique is foundational to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School may, at first, appear tautological (Hoy & McCarthy, 1994). However, in light of Critical Theory’s more recent ‘philosophisation’ (Introduction; Chapter 8), this point is increasingly worth restating. Indeed, Critical Theory is predicated on a sociological-philosophical form of immanent critique, which, ‘in direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth’, ‘ascend[s]’, as Marx put it in The German Ideology, ‘from earth to heaven’ (Marx and Engels, 1970 [1846]: 47). Otherwise stated, the social world is critiqued by Critical Theorists on its own terms, that is, according to its own standards of reference (Antonio, 1981), which serve to anchor the social researcher within the immanent realities of the present. By analysing the fundamental incoherence of the social conjuncture, its institutions, forms of knowledge, norms, personality types, neuroses and political economy, it seeks to uncover flawed mediations immanent to the social totality and illuminate real-existing possibilities for their future transcendence (Delanty, 2011). Critical Theory thus offers a fundamentally distinct social research programme in that its methodology is essentially forward-looking, while

11

THE FUTURE OF PATHOLOGY DIAGNOSING SOCIAL RESEARCH

277

remaining faithful to the historical specificities of the present (Strydom, 2011: 9). Despite their divergent inflections, the various approaches to pathology diagnosing social research explored in this volume are united in being predicated on such an immanent-transcendent methodology (Strydom, 2011). Be it Bosco and Ribeiro’s (Chapter 4) neo-Habermasianism, or Thompson’s (Chapter 5) and Hirvonen’s (Chapter 6) reflections on critical social ontology, the contributors analyse the social world with the aim to expose contradictions, identify potential areas of crisis and locate the rational potential latent within the mediated disunity of late modern societies. In keeping with the tradition’s left-Hegelian heritage, the contributors’ immanent-transcendent approach is predicated on an understanding of the social world as a manifestation of a form of rationality and as a development of societal learning, thus offering a fundamental challenge to orthodox positivist social science (Horkheimer, [1937] 1975). Indeed, it is our belief that pathology diagnosing social research must continue to be anchored to the rational potential latent within the existing social world, and we submit that this critical-dialectical meta-methodology unites pathology diagnosing research and connects the otherwise disparate framings and approaches gathered in this volume.

2

Combatting Reified Consciousness

If immanent-transcendence functions as a unifying meta-methodology underlying Critical Theory’s approach to pathology diagnosing social research, then its most immediate political objective is the rupturing of reified consciousness through ‘world-disclosing’ social critique (Honneth, 2000). Once again uniting left-Hegelian and Marxian themes, this approach to social research positions a critical social epistemology at the centre of its research programme. The way subjects think in, and especially about, their social world is here grasped as a crucial part of the social domain and thus as a site of power, whereby the very process of disclosing the pathological state of the social conjuncture is deemed an essential form of political praxis (see Rush, 2004; Thomson, 2016). Critical Theroy is thus how consciousness fights back again reification, a position memorably expressed by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness when he writes:

278

N. HARRIS AND J. STOCKMAN

Our intention here is to base ourselves on Marx’s economic analyses and to proceed from there to a discussion of the problems growing out of the fetish character of commodities, both as an objective form and also as a subjective stance corresponding to it. (Lukács, 1972 [1923]: 84—our italics)

Lukács’, and later the Frankfurt School’s, guiding concern is that capitalism serves to impede critical cognition, which, in turn, demands a form of critical social research attuned to the dynamics and objective mechanisms which shape consciousness (see Thompson’s Chapter 5). Such a materialist social epistemology can be seen explicitly in various contributions to this volume. Stockman (Chapter 3), for instance, claims that humanist understandings of reason have been superseded by the hyper-calculative ‘networked rationalities’ of computational capitalism, precipitating the reduction of society to an experimental milieu and enlivening new, right-wing visions of a post-democratic future. Similarly, Bosco and Ribeiro (Chapter 4) contend that communicative rationality has been displaced by systemic logics, whereby intersubjective communicative praxis has been overtaken by the socio-cybernetic logics of vast technosocial-infrastructures such as Facebook to the benefit of populist demagogues. Yet, as Horkheimer said of Critical Theory in his inaugural lecture as Director of the Institute for Social Research (1975 [1937]), Critical Theorists must also remain aware of their own positionality within ideology, aware that their research is always political. Unlike the ‘savants’ of bourgeois positivism, the Critical Theorist must constantly question their own terms of reference so as to prevent the naturalisation of even their own conceptual apparatus. Listik’s Chapter 7 is exemplary in this regard, forcing Critical Theorists to challenge the immunological inflections of pathology diagnosing research itself as reflecting reified logics. Similarly, Hirvonen (Chapter 6) claims that Critical Theorists must firmly establish their ontological commitments when attempting to evaluate the pathological dimensions of society. Lastly, Acaroglu’s Chapter 10 serves to remind Critical Theorists that the innate, ‘natural’ linearity of chronological progression is a politically problematic framework, one which reinforces Enlightenment narratives of unilinear temporality. While all the contributors to this volume are united in opposing reified forms of consciousness, Bosseau’s Chapter 9 is particularly striking in its criticism of contemporary Critical Theory in this crucial objective. For Bosseau, today’s leading Critical Theorists (principally Honneth) have

11

THE FUTURE OF PATHOLOGY DIAGNOSING SOCIAL RESEARCH

279

induced a protracted normative crisis, saturated (perhaps precipitated) with/by a reactionary politics, in which the subject’s capacity for assimilation to the normative order is held to be an unquestionable ethical good. As Bosseau sharply writes, the ‘maladjusted’ are neither ‘pathological’ nor in dire need of ‘adjustment’ to the reified consciousness of today’s racist, patriarchal, neoliberal form of capitalism. Indeed, for Critical Theory to have any vestigial trace of its original commitment to transformative praxis, surely the sole meaningful requirement of its existence as a political project is to challenge dominant norms, embrace those maladjusted to them, and further a materially grounded battle with the overbearing normative grammar of the day.

3

The Historically Contingent Social Subject

While all forms of Hegelian-Marxism challenge the heroic, autonomous subject of liberalism, Critical Theory’s rejection of the Cartesian subject is central to its research project, a unifying horizon which cuts across otherwise disparate methodologies and disciplinary conventions (Hoy & McCarthy, 1994). Recently explored in Durkin and Braune’s edited volume, Erich Fromm’s Critical Theory (2020), the essays collected in this volume likewise underscore the contingent nature of the social subject, identifying how regressions in social learning processes, the ascent of authoritarian populisms, and the ubiquity of computational forms of reason, serve to shape and reshape today’s neoliberal subject. Yet, while Durkin and Braune’s volume focussed on Fromm’s fusion of Marxism and depth-psychology, this volume has sought to extend these reflections by bringing figures from across the ‘generations’ of Critical Theory into dialogue with political sociology, digital media studies, feminist philosophy, decolonial and critical race theory, post-structuralism, and analytic philosophy, with the aim of charting the impact of the social world on the social subject in the twenty-first century. The belief that an interdisciplinary sensitivity is required to disclose the contingent cognitive capacities of the subject is foundational to Critical Theory. Deemed crucial to any substantive account of ‘the relations between knowledge, social communication, and the exercise of power’ (Schecter, 2019: 12–13), the authors presented in this volume consider a break with artificial disciplinary boundaries to be a prerequisite for the critique of neoliberalism’s impact on subjectivation. Typifying this approach, Delanty’s Chapter 2 presents the pathogenesis of Brexit as

280

N. HARRIS AND J. STOCKMAN

connected to, but not path-determined by, constitutional and governmental fictions and narratives, failures of social learning processes, political economic irrationalities and politically stoked social cleavages. In a distinct, yet not unrelated vein, Engelstad’s Chapter 8 claims that the failure of the Rawlsian tradition to engage in substantive social critique has served to buttress a status quo affirming discourse, one which remains blind to the historical mediation of the subject along the lines of gender, race, and disability. In summary, pathology diagnosing social research elides disciplinary boundaries and conventions to track the relationship between material social-constitutive power, social epistemology and reified consciousness.

4

Conclusion

For Critical Theorists, pathology diagnosing social research is an essential prerequisite for a considered political praxis. As the chapters in this volume have demonstrated, the categories of orthodox-liberal sociopolitical analysis and the confines of traditional disciplinarity fail to capture the dynamic, power-mediated relationships of the social world. In contrast, and as this brief conclusion has charted, pathology diagnosing critical social research centres: (i) an immanent-transcendent methodology that seeks to disclose the rational potential of the social world lying dormant in the present; (ii) a critique of reified consciousness tasked with enabling social subjects to break with the petrified identity-thinking of late capitalism and (iii) an awareness that power, knowledge, and subjectivity are historically mediated and are thus deeply interconnected dimensions of the social totality. Such insights, we suggest, offer hope for an understanding of the social world sensitive to the complexity of the subject’s relationship to power, one which remains rooted within the immanent messiness of the social domain. Today, we are confronted with an apocalyptic constellation, from climatic destruction to right-wing populism, militarised borders and emboldened racisms, through to new, networked forms of power and capitalist exploitation. It is this context itself which we believe demands a recalibration of the project of Critical Theory. Thus, the essays gathered in this volume have been brought together with the aim to signal the necessity of an interdisciplinary yet philosophically undergirded critical social

11

THE FUTURE OF PATHOLOGY DIAGNOSING SOCIAL RESEARCH

281

research project, one which seeks not a communion with dominant social norms, but rather their Aufheben.

References Antonio, R. J. (1981). Immanent critique as the core of critical theory: Its origin and developments in Hegel, Marx and contemporary thought. The British Journal of Sociology, 32(3), 330–345. Bronner, S. (2002). Of critical theory and its theorists. Abingdon: Routledge. Buck-Morss, S. (1977). The origin of negative dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt institute. New York, NY: Free Press. Delanty, G. (2011). Varieties of critique in sociological theory and their methodological implications for social research. Irish Journal of Sociology, 19(1), 68–92. Delanty, G. (2020). Critical theory and social transformation: Crises of the present and future possibilities. London: Routledge. Durkin, K., & Braune, J. (Eds.). (2020). Erich Fromm’s critical theory: Hope, humanism, and the future. London: Bloomsbury. Harris, N. (2019). Recovering the critical potential of social pathology diagnosis. European Journal of Social Theory., 22(1), 45–62. Honneth, A. (2000). The possibility of a disclosing critique of society: The dialectic of enlightenment in light of current debates in social criticism. Constellations, 7 (1), 116–127. Horkheimer, M. (1975 [1937]). Traditional and critical theory. In Critical theory: Selected essays (pp. 188–244, Herder & Herder, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum. Hoy, D. C., & McCarthy, T. (1994). Critical theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Kouvelakis, S. (2019). La Critique Défaite. Emergence et domestication de la Théorie Critique. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam. Lukacs, G. (1972 [1923]). History and class consciousness: Studies in Marxist dialectics. (R. Livingstone, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1970 [1846]). The German ideology. Edited and with an introduction by C. J. Arthur. New York, NY: International Publishers. Rush, F. (2004). Introduction. In F. Rush (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to critical theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schecter, D. (2019). Critical theory & sociological theory: On late modernity & social statehood. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Strydom, P. (2011). Contemporary critical theory and methodology. Abingdon: Routledge. Thompson, M. J. (2016). The domestication of critical theory. New York: Rowan & Littlefield.

Index

A Accelerationism, 5, 130 Adorno, T.W., 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 15, 24, 36, 37, 48, 51, 52, 61, 143, 171, 176–180, 183 Algorithms, 49, 55, 56, 59–62, 86–89, 91–94 Allen, A., 8, 9, 223, 244 Althusser, L., 263 Anabolism, 129 Analytic philosophy, 4, 13, 193, 194, 217 Anxiety, 35, 38, 40, 134 A.P.I., 48 Authoritarianism, 24, 36–38, 40, 41, 66, 134, 171 Awakening, 29

B Barnes, E., 201 Baudrillard, J., 56, 165 Benjamin, W., 3, 4

Berry, D., 48, 49, 53–56, 67 Biopolitics, 166, 168–171, 175 Bolsonaro, J., 74, 94, 100, 102 Brexit, 7, 10, 24, 26–36, 38–43, 279 Brownmiller, S., 208 Bucher, T., 86–90

C Canguilhem, G., 144, 147, 156, 166, 187, 228 Cesarino, L., 99–102 Chun, W., 48, 59, 62, 67 Communicative action, 78–82, 84, 97, 103, 223, 233, 237 Computationalism, 48 Corona Virus/Covid-19, 1, 10, 74, 169, 267, 269 Critical social ontology, 11, 12, 115, 119–123, 137, 142, 159, 160, 277 Culture industry, 61, 83

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 N. Harris (ed.), Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4

283

284

INDEX

D Debord, G., viii Decoloniality, 8 Delanty, G., 5, 7, 8, 10, 28, 35, 42, 74, 275, 276, 279 Democracy, 10, 24, 25, 27, 30, 31, 34, 36–38, 40, 41, 49, 56, 63–65, 75, 104, 171, 197 Dews, P., 13, 164, 178–180 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3 Disability, 199, 201, 280 Domestication (of Critical Theory), 5, 6 Domination, 8, 52, 57, 58, 80, 90, 103, 125, 180, 222, 223, 225, 228, 230, 231, 233, 235, 239–244, 249

E Eder, K., 24 EdgeRank, 88 Esposito, R., 13, 167–169, 176, 183, 186, 187 Ethics of Resistance, 177

F FAANG, 59 Facebook, 53, 59, 60, 62, 73, 74, 86–89, 91, 92, 95, 100, 278 Fanon, F., 9, 14, 225, 239–247, 249, 250 Fascism and neo-fascism, 15, 36, 37 Fisher, M., 73, 269 Foucault, M., 9, 171, 175, 224, 228, 231, 233, 237, 238, 243 Freud, S., 2, 40, 128, 129, 133 Freyenhagen, F., 13, 48, 116, 118, 164, 177–180, 182, 211, 266 Fromm, E., 2–4, 12, 13, 23, 24, 40, 52, 114, 115, 119, 129, 132,

164, 174, 175, 179, 180, 184, 185, 255, 256, 279

G Gelfand, M., 40 Governmentality, 61, 171 Groundhog Day, 253, 254, 269, 270

H Habermas, J., 4, 5, 7–9, 63, 67, 75–84, 97, 98, 103, 104, 120, 224, 228, 229, 233, 234, 236, 237 Habitus, 84 Han, B., 55, 61, 67, 169, 170, 185 Harris, N., 5, 6, 15, 23, 24, 50, 73, 77, 116, 174, 179, 200, 211, 255, 256, 265, 266, 276 Hegel, G.W.F., 3, 5, 7, 51, 119, 126–128, 143, 148, 155, 179, 193, 225, 226, 235, 241, 243, 244, 263, 265–267 Held, D., 54, 201 Honneth, A., 2–9, 11–14, 48, 50, 51, 77, 116–118, 142–144, 146, 147, 152, 164, 172–180, 182, 183, 185, 200, 209, 211, 224–231, 233–237, 255, 256, 265, 266, 277, 278 Horkheimer, M., 3, 4, 24, 48, 50, 51, 54, 55, 61, 171, 176, 183, 255, 277, 278 Huxley, A., 104, 134

I Ideal theory, 15, 120, 194, 195, 198–206, 209–212, 214–216 Immanent critique, 118, 121, 137, 276

INDEX

Immunity, 165, 167–170, 178, 181, 186, 230 Intersubjectivity, 78, 80, 81, 90, 96, 97, 226, 239

J Jaeggi, R., 51–53

K Kant, I., 3 Katabolism, 129 King, M.L., 14, 221–224, 233, 247, 249 Kittay, E., 201, 205 Kouvelakis, S., 5, 7, 8, 12, 223, 224, 226, 235, 276 Krishnamurti, J., 2

L Laitinen, A., 5, 6, 12, 115, 132, 141, 143, 145–148, 222, 228, 255, 266 Land, N., 64 Lorey, I., 166, 170 Lukács, G., 62, 63, 277, 278

M Maladjustment, 14, 222–225, 232, 233, 247, 249 Marcuse, H., 3, 4, 12, 48, 51, 52, 55, 57, 58, 62, 66, 68, 134, 265 Markets, 3, 8, 40, 63, 65, 67, 82, 84, 90, 97, 133, 134, 175, 176, 185, 222, 232, 260 Marx, K./Marxism, 3–7, 11, 14, 114, 117, 118, 120, 143, 193, 229, 238, 241, 257, 259–267, 276, 278, 279 M-C-M’, 257, 258

285

McNay, L., 5, 6, 237 Messiah/messianic time, 4 Mills, C., 13, 195, 202, 204 Modi, N., 76 Molecularisation, 168 Mudde, C., 2 Myrdal, G., 222, 231–236

N Nationalism, 10, 27–29, 33, 35, 41, 75 National Socialism, 37, 39 Negativity/negativism, 4, 165, 170, 185, 223 Neo-Idealism, 11, 120 Neoliberalism, 2, 9, 14, 15, 35, 40, 59, 63, 253, 279 Networks, 2, 10, 11, 48, 49, 54, 58–63, 65–68, 73, 85–87, 91, 92, 94, 98, 102, 237, 267 Neuhouser, F., 2, 119, 127, 129, 155, 211, 215, 254, 256 Nietzsche, F., 129, 193, 224, 230, 231, 241, 242, 245–247 Normative reconstruction, 235, 237 Normative uplift, 14, 225, 228, 230, 231, 238 NRx, 64, 65

O Okin, S.M., 13, 199, 204 Open Graph Protocol, 87 Outhwaite, W., 23, 24

P Pharmakon, 176 Plato, 113–115, 144, 147, 153, 229 Populism, 11, 40, 63, 75, 279, 280 Positivity, 165, 170, 185

286

INDEX

Pragmatism, 4, 78, 116–120, 128, 136, 137, 149, 233, 266 Programming industries, 53, 61 Psychoanalysis, 3, 227 R Rationality, 3, 7, 9–11, 13, 14, 16, 47, 48, 53, 58, 59, 62, 63, 66–68, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 115, 116, 118, 123, 124, 126–128, 136, 138, 146, 153, 163, 173–176, 183, 185, 200, 230, 265, 266, 277, 278 Rawls, J., 13, 194–207, 209–216 Recognition, 5–7, 12, 13, 26, 50, 79, 97, 116–118, 146, 152, 160, 169, 179, 202, 209, 223, 225–227, 230–235, 237, 239–249, 257, 265, 266 Republic, The, 2, 113, 114, 144, 229 Rosset, C., 185 Rousseau, J.-J., 2, 12, 77, 125, 126, 133, 137, 153, 155, 255, 256 S Särkelä, A., 12, 132, 141, 145, 148, 222, 228, 255 Schecter, D., 8, 51, 63, 279 Schwartzman, L., 200, 205

Sloterdijk, P., 56 Social physics, 65 Socrates, 2, 113, 114 Stiegler, B., 48, 53–55, 62, 63, 86 Strategic action, 80, 97 Strydom, P., 5, 277 Surveillance capitalism, 60 Sutherland, E., 2

T Thompson, M.J., 5–8, 11, 12, 14, 118, 122, 126, 127, 154, 202, 223, 276–278 Transition, 63, 75, 164, 262, 265, 276 Trump, D., 24, 40, 74, 100

W Weizenbaum, J., 55 WhatsApp, 74, 76, 91, 94, 95, 102 Wood, C., 208

Z Zasulich, V., 262, 264 Zimbardo, P., 12, 130 Zurn, C., 6, 115, 116, 146, 147, 152, 153, 254