Walls Come Tumbling Down!* Emancipating Critical Theory
by
Lorna Finlayson
Presented in the session "Alienation and Ideology"
Emancipation Conference,
Technical University Berlin, May 26, 2018
I. Ways of seeing
Critical theory belongs to a tradition that is suspicious of absolutes, of rigidity, of fixed points. Part of what it means to look critically on the social world, according to this tradition, is to see and to show that much of what presents itself as solid or unalterable is not so, but is in fact contingent, constructed, and potentially open to transformation. By contributing in the right way to the right kind of transformation – by helping to break down the walls that keep us in (or out) – theory may be considered ‘emancipatory’. While for mainstream political philosophy (which basically belongs to what Horkheimer called ‘traditional theory’), any such contribution would be regarded as a happy side-effect or at most a successful application of theoretical insights discovered, a disposition to contribute to a real-political process of emancipation is a central criterion for the success of critical theory as theory.
To take this seriously is to set a series of internal theoretical walls crumbling into dust. Theory cannot be set apart from practice, for theory is to be understood as an intervention in the world. Truth and utility cannot have nothing to do with each other, as the traditional approach would have it, when the explanatory and conceptual adequacy of a theory is to be evaluated in the light of its practical force. The theorist cannot be a figure that stands apart from the world that is theorised, but is one that stands and moves inside it and as a part of it. To recognise this is not to renounce the practice of distinction-making, which would anyway be inconceivable (even asserting the unity of theory and practice makes no sense without a distinction being made between them). It is, however, to shift away from an understanding of distinctions as carving the world up into portions, towards an acknowledgement that many of the distinctions which purport to erect border walls between fundamentally different kinds of thing actually trace the edges of alternative ways of looking. In another context, this is precisely the point that ‘speech act theory’ makes: there are not two species of entity, sayings and doings; rather, one and the same event – whether the emission of vocal sounds or the building of a wall – can be looked at through one or the other lens, i.e. in terms of what it says and in terms of what it does. The point about theory and practice is the same: these are not separate and non-overlapping classes of thing; instead, a given body of activity and expression can be looked at either as theory or as practice, while being always both. The same goes for the oppositions between ‘descriptive’ and ‘normative’, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’. The world cannot be divided into cantons.
II. Emancipation
In framing the goal of theory and practice in terms of emancipation, critical theory offers some resistance to one way of looking which has become all-pervasive in contemporary academic and popular discourse about politics. From this dominant perspective, every problem and solution is framed in terms of distribution: there are various things, good and bad (‘benefits and burdens’), which have to be distributed somehow among a population; a given distribution can be criticised (e.g. as unjust, unfair, unequal, or inefficient), and re-distribution may be demanded in order to bring reality closer to an imagined ideal. The adherent of this framework can point out that nothing that she says about distribution excludes the possibility of saying that people are unfree and in need of emancipation. She may even claim to be able to translate propositions about freedom and emancipation into the language of distribution. Freedom itself can be cast as a ‘good’ belonging to the broader class of distribuenda: the 1% are hogging it all, it may be said, while the 99% go without. If that doesn’t quite seem to do justice to the sort of thing that freedom is (if we can think of it as a ‘thing’ at all), or to capture the inherently relational quality of phenomena like subjection and emancipation, then perhaps the relevant relations can simply be converted into distribuenda too: I have, in my bundle of resources, a nice little number called ‘dominion over you’; and you don’t have anything like that (how unfair). But this is to strain against the limits of the distributive way of seeing. If I am your slave or otherwise subject to domination by you, then the problem is not plausibly cast as one of distributive inequality or injustice – e.g. you got the slaveholding rights and I didn’t – much as the asymmetrical relationship between us will very likely be accompanied by bone fide distributive inequalities of such goods as money, food and leisure. The problem is that you get to do what you want with me: my life is not my own.
With enough ingenuity, it will always be possible to translate claims about who does what to whom into claims about who gets what. In reply to my point above, for example, it may be said that nobody should get to have a slave, and nobody should ‘get’ a life of slavery or servitude (or not get freedom) – so the problem is still one of people either not getting what they should or getting what they shouldn’t. In a similar way, “A punches B” can be translated into: “A has the property of being a puncher of B”, plus “B has the property of being punched by A”. This sort of effort not only results in some quite unnatural ways of thinking and speaking, but encourages us to take our eyes off the actual processes that account for and connect the different things that different people ‘get’: in the latter case, A’s act of punching B (compare the way in which the phrase ‘battered woman’ diverts attention from what is actually done to her, and by whom, and transforms this into a static property or identity which she ‘has’).
But the translation effort can also run the other way: from statements in terms of distribution, to statements about power. The distributive approach discourages attention to questions of power not only by side-lining the crucial question of who gets to do (and enforce) the distributing – so that in practice, ‘the market’ and ‘the liberal state’ are enshrined, without questioning, as the great distributor and re-distributor respectively – but also by papering over the make-up and complexity of the state of ‘having’. What it means for me to ‘have’ a car, for example, is for it to be the case that if you try to take or use it without my consent, I can call the police and they will come and get you and do things to you, by force if necessary, that you don’t want done.
By the same stroke as it obscures the depth of a given mode of ‘having’, the distributive framework also tends to gloss over the differences between the various modes. Someone who has a regular income from the state in the form of incapacity or child benefit, for example, ‘has’ this in a very different sense both from the sense in which I ‘have’ the car and from that in which a landlord ‘has’ an income from property.[1] All of these ‘havings’ are shorthand for descriptions of power relations, but those relations differ greatly. The person reliant on the state for an income may have the right to complain or appeal if, perhaps through some administrative error, her benefits cease to be paid. But in the UK at least, the process is likely to take many months and to require conformity to bureaucratic procedures that are often extremely costly in terms of both time and sanity – and even then, the outcome is uncertain. The landlord, on the other hand, can evict the non-paying tenant. This may involve some inconvenience, but likely far less than the benefits claimant will face (and the landlord is far less likely to be in danger of starving in the interim). Theoretically, of course, the state could always seize a landlord’s property and income; but this possibility is under normal circumstances immeasurably more remote than the possibility that the same state will decide – as recent UK governments and others in the grip of the logic of ‘austerity’ have repeatedly done – to abolish a given ‘benefit’ altogether (against which there is no right of appeal). In sum, nobody ‘has’ anything in a way that is invulnerable to fundamental shifts in relations of power; but there are vast differences in what it would take for what we have to be taken away, depending on our position within the power relations that constitute ‘having’ for a given case, place and time.
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