“A free man would only be one who need not bow to any alternatives, and under existing circumstances there is a touch of freedom in refusing to accept the alternatives. Freedom means to criticize and change situations, not to confirm them by deciding within their coercive structure.”
– Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (p. 226)
“Practically committed resistance must preserve its theoretical wits, lest it fall into apologetics, theory must engage with the most emancipatory form of practice that is available in a coercive world lest the world move beyond not only the possibility of an emancipatory form of practice but also the possibility of emancipatory theory. Practice is required to keep critical theory alive for in the absence of oppositional practices that might staunch the movement toward the “totally administered society,” there will no longer be any space open for oppositional theories.”
-David Sherman, Dialectics of Subjectivity (p.259)
By R.C. Smith
Over the past few months I have received several responses concerning my essay The Age of Ideology: Contemporary Politics and the Meaning of Protest. In this essay I concluded that if mass protest is not foundational enough in its critique and if it limits itself solely to making concrete pragmatic demands without challenging the existing social order then the very manifestation of that protest will effectively be crafted to conform to the pre-existing course of ‘bad society’.
The argument here is quite simple. The very necessity of mass protest already implies a structural problem or, better yet, a structural antagonism within the very foundations of society. The fact that citizens of 21st Century society have to resort to protesting en mass for a more fair and just economy, for a more sustainable and environmentally conscious society, already expresses the structural antagonisms in the very make-up of society itself.
Furthermore, in the case of protesting for a more environmentally just form of social practice, what we need to ask is not only why we are protesting on a concrete pragmatic level but also why we are protesting on a concrete (non-abstract) conceptual level. Of course if we were to ask ourselves ‘why are we here protesting today?’ the most immediate answer would be something like: ‘we are here to protest against the systematic destruction of the natural environment’. While this answer is certainly true and obvious in its immediateness, it is not enough. It is not enough because while it addresses the proximate problem, it does not address the underlying issue from which environmental degradation is made possible in the first place. Hence the necessity of the conceptual dimension of critique.
What this conceptual level of critique entails is something I will address in a moment. For now it is satisfactory to suggest, for example, that to simply protest against environmental destruction and for a more environmentally just form of social practice without challenging the fundamental structures and processes of society which effectively manifest the problem of environmental degradation, is to slip into a psychology of treating the symptoms and not the cause.
How we approach and apprehend a problem (i.e., rampant deforestation around one’s community) and how we formulate our questions in the face of that problem – this is essential to whether we may come to truly understand the context, dynamic and fundamental roots of the problem we face.
A community may protest against the systematic destruction of the natural environment around them; or students may collectivize in protest against higher tuition fees. In each case there is an obvious, immediate, concrete problem that has motivated the act of collective protest. But the meaning of protest itself will not be realized unless the actual movement of collective resistance realizes the structural antagonisms that originally allowed or brought into being the destruction of the local countryside or an increase in tuition fees.
It is one thing to question the policy of the corporation or that of the politician. It is another thing entirely to question the social context from which those forms of destructive or antagonistic policy originally emerge.
If every instance of mass protest eventually fulfills itself by offering an alternative way of being, it is not enough for a community to simply say ‘the local habitat is being destroyed by this evil corporation; it’s not right and we must do something about it’. Surely there is some sense of meaning when a collective of people insist that they must take a stand against the increasing environmental destruction that is unfolding in their particular area of the world. But this specific statement of protest that is delivered as a direct response to a particular experience of a specific antagonistic reality – if it remains limited to the proximate and fails to fundamentally challenge the structurally-determined system of that destruction; it will not actually challenge the fundamental social context within which such ecologically devastating industrial practice was originally made possible.
What is needed, then, is not only collective demand that such a particular form of environmentally devastating practice must stop, but also a more general challenge against the systemic nature of such environmentally destructive practice in general.
Much of this discussion reminds me of Adorno’s theory of the colonization of the ego, and the subjects’ failure to realize its own efficacious potential. Analogously, an act of protest limited to the recognition of an immediate problem on the most proximate level of existence runs the risk of reproducing the very defunct structure that originally gave rise to that problem in the first place. If one fails to distinguish the immediate problem (i.e., poverty, environmental degradation, high tuition fees) from the structural and foundational source of antagonism itself (i.e., the structurally-determined system that requires if not necessitates social inequality, environmental exploitation and the commodification of education), not only does the act of protest cancel itself out as an agent and as a loci of systemic change, but also contributes toward the manifestation of the underlying social structure. It effectively contradicts itself. If the social world has been more or less colonized, which is the primary definition of hegemony in late-capitalist society, then the individual/collective whose confrontation with the social world is limited to the immediate structural effects of that ‘rotten social reality’ will more likely respond with pragmatic demands crafted from within the “brutal, total, and standardized” context of that social reality.[1]
My point in the previous essay was to therefore suggest that an increase in student tuition fees, for example, is a symptom of the very way society organizes, operates and manifests itself. To merely protest this increase without bringing into question the context, the structure, in which high tuition fees have become an actual problem, is ultimately tantamount to a failure to realize the actual meaning of the protest, which, in a more coherent form, would be geared toward the awareness of recognizing the immediate and “everyday antagonisms” of experience whilst grounding this awareness in a substantive, foundational critique of the very operation, structure, dynamic and manifestation of society.
Due perhaps to my background being so heavily influenced by the Frankfurt School, I come from the perspective that historical and modern society is inherently antagonistic – that is to say, the very structure of society itself is antagonistic. For me, this gives context to how structurally and historically sedimented practices (and social phenomena, more generally) in historical and modern societies create and often manifest in directly antagonistic ways.
For me, too, my interest is in sketching out a foundational ideology critique as rooted in the historical unfolding of capitalism’s institutional structures as well as to work toward some of my theories in epistemology, especially as it they become increasingly integrated with systems theory and Adorno’s theory of the ‘deformation of the subject’ and ‘colonization of the ego’.
From this perspective one might suggest that while the structurally antagonistic context of society may very well determine that an act of mass protest is necessary – given the existence of the phenomenon of protest in society – generally speaking mass protest movements rarely collectivize around a structural critique of the social phenomena which originally provide them with both possibility and meaning.The reason for this is because the problem of a colonized lifeworld and, more troublingly, the problem of a colonized language suggests the difficulty for the individual/community to concretely express its own colonization in a truly foundational way.
The very problem of colonization, moreover, represents the closing down of the space between imminent critique and the possibly of foundational critique on the level of the individual subject. Therefore, as we witness time and again, not always is the conceptual dimension of a particular act of protest clear or given to us. Due to the problem of colonization, not always is a more foundational critique of the proximate problem understood or already elucidated.[2]
But while colonization is a problem, it does not mean that an immanent critique is not always at our disposal. If it weren’t than we can be sure that the phenomenon of protest would cease to exist in contemporary society.[3]
This is what led me to conclude in my previous essay that if an act of protest does not begin by protesting against the emerging fact that it is necessary to protest in the first place, it will miss its moment of realization. It will fail to realize itself more fundamentally, and to realize the closing down of the space between imminent critique and foundational critique. This moment of realization, in other words, is the instance in which the collective may formulate a fundamental series of challenges against the hegemonic structure of its more total present social context, which lay at the root of all the surfacing antagonisms on its most immediate level of experience.
Ultimately, then, what is needed in order for an act of protest to give meaning to itself in its greater social context is to challenge its own structurally-determined necessity. For this reason I concluded that:
“…the most concrete form of protest today is one which protests against the fact that it is necessary to protest in the first place. On this view, we no longer run the risk of slipping back into the circuit of hegemonic ideology. Rather we direct the energies of our protest toward the very social structure which doesn’t allow for an emancipatory state of affairs in the first place. Our only demands at the beginning is that we have a social circumstance which would be able to genuinely listen and interact with our concrete pragmatic demands in the future.
In protest we must therefore openly challenge, without deifying our own commitments and ideas, the very status of society, its political dynamic, and its underlying social structure; and we should do so with the aim of achieving fundamental, structural change. If we don’t, and if we concede to make our demands from within the existing social circumstance, then our protests will be condemned to the same economic and political verdicts which originally brought us together.”
Notes
[1]Adorno, Theodor W. Sociology and Psychology, p. 95
A link to the original essay: The Age of Ideology: Contemporary Politics and the Meaning of Protest published 10 May, 2012
Did you find this publication valuable? Please consider donating.
R.C. Smith
Latest posts by R.C. Smith (see all)
- Heathwood Journal of Critical Theory – Issue 3: Reclaiming Walter Benjamin for Revolutionary Times - May 22, 2016
- Strategies Moving Forward: Social Movements and Progressive Governments – A Round Table Discussion - March 10, 2016
- Heathwood Journal of Critical Theory – Issue 2: Critical Theory and Emancipatory Politics - February 28, 2016
- Call for Papers – Developing a Radical, Alternative Philosophy of Education in Theory and Practice [Heathwood Journal, Issue 4] - February 19, 2016
- Society, Social Pathology and the (De)Formation of the Subject: Toward a Radical Philosophy of Psychology (Part 1) - February 4, 2016
