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The Metacritique of Epistemology
Abstract
The attempt to discuss Husserl's pure phenomenology in a dialectical spirit is particularly open to a suspicion of arbitrariness. Husserl's program aims at an “ontic sphere of absolute origins,” fully in view of that “organized spirit of contradiction” (organisierten Widerspruchsgeist), which Hegel once characterized as his procedure in a conversation with Goethe. The dialectic, as conceived by Hegel and subsequently turned against him, despite any similarities, is qualitatively different from the positive philosophies among which Hegel, as a system maker, is included. Even if Hegelian logic, like Kantian logic, may be “tied” to a transcendental subject, even if it may be an absolute idealism, it nevertheless points beyond itself as, according to Goethe's dialectical dictum, everything absolute (alles Vollkommene) does.
... Adorno further suggested, in accordance with his "radically sociological" perspective (Benzer, 2011, p. 72) that the social whole could be unearthed through minutiae, that the "seemingly individual" case or datum had "general value"-that is, a smaller sample could still serve to uncover the wider social context of the functions in question (Adorno, 2000(Adorno, /1968. However, these assertions prescribe for Adornoian thought a form of identity thinking he himself spited, failing to properly account for Adorno's fundamental negative position: non-identity thinking or "consciousness of nonidentity" (Adorno, 1973(Adorno, /1966 immanent to negation to highlight "the impossibility of capturing in subjective concepts without surplus what is not of the subject" (Adorno, 1982(Adorno, /1956. ...
... Adorno further suggested, in accordance with his "radically sociological" perspective (Benzer, 2011, p. 72) that the social whole could be unearthed through minutiae, that the "seemingly individual" case or datum had "general value"-that is, a smaller sample could still serve to uncover the wider social context of the functions in question (Adorno, 2000(Adorno, /1968. However, these assertions prescribe for Adornoian thought a form of identity thinking he himself spited, failing to properly account for Adorno's fundamental negative position: non-identity thinking or "consciousness of nonidentity" (Adorno, 1973(Adorno, /1966 immanent to negation to highlight "the impossibility of capturing in subjective concepts without surplus what is not of the subject" (Adorno, 1982(Adorno, /1956. ...
Qualitative methodological development has produced canonical tendencies that over-complexify and fix a fluid and lived social world. Meanwhile, critical theory has produced critiques on methodology but without enough attention to the qualitative tradition. I bridge these gaps by using an Adornoian position to interrogate the concepts of systematicity, rigidification, complexification, and their problems in ethnographic research and qualitative methodology. I conduct an urban ethnography and autoethnography of the metropolitan blasé as a public attitude of indifference to articulate an alternative, quotidian approach to ethnography that better captures social embeddedness, meaning-creation, and how contexts should drive data collection, analysis, and method-selection.
... Genuine refutation must penetrate the power of the opponent and meet him [sic] on the ground of his Thinking Geographically: Globalizing Capitalism and Beyond strength; the case is not won by attacking him somewhere else and defeating him where he is not. (Adorno [1970] 1982, 14, quoting Hegel [1841 Here, I want to set aside the possibility that European-style capitalism might not be the norm that it seems, to discuss how that norm is conceptualized. Mainstream theories of globalizing capitalism have been rooted in neoclassical economic theory since the marginalists' rejection of Marx's theory in late nineteenth-century England. ...
... Genuine refutation must penetrate the power of the opponent and meet him [sic] on the ground of his Thinking Geographically: Globalizing Capitalism and Beyond strength; the case is not won by attacking him somewhere else and defeating him where he is not. (Adorno [1970] 1982, 14, quoting Hegel [1841 Here, I want to set aside the possibility that European-style capitalism might not be the norm that it seems, to discuss how that norm is conceptualized. Mainstream theories of globalizing capitalism have been rooted in neoclassical economic theory since the marginalists' rejection of Marx's theory in late nineteenth-century England. ...
In the spirit of strengthening its intellectual foundations and clarifying its contributions to making sense of Earth, we should resist any inclination to treat geography as a club—a discipline with boundaries to be policed and defended. I advocate for the strengths of thinking geographically, a way of being in the world open to all. This means attending to the geography of knowledge production; how spatiotemporalities shape and are shaped by socionatural processes; the emergent more-than-human world; the variety of ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies underlying knowledge claims; and the world not only as it is but also as it should be. Thinking geographically about globalizing capitalism can problematize the particular sociospatial positionalities from which commonsense understandings of capitalism have metastasized. Europe did not invent capitalist practices but became globalizing capitalism's center of calculation, catalyzed by the spatial dynamics of colonialism elevating Europe relative to its predecessors. Thinking geographically undermines the mainstream account of globalizing capitalism emanating from Europe, that of a rising tide capable of lifting all boats and bringing prosperity to all hard-working and responsible individuals and well-governed territories. Indeed, such body- and place-based accounts obscure how asymmetric connectivities between places and interscalar dynamics, coevolving with uneven geographical development, coproduce unequal sociospatial positionality and conditions of possibility for those propagating and encountering globalizing capitalism. Capitalism also cannot be understood, or practiced, simply as an economic process; its economic aspects are co-implicated with political, cultural (gendered, raced, etc.), social, and biophysical processes, in ways that repeatedly exceed and undermine any “laws of economics.” Thinking geographically necessitates acknowledging space for alternative, more-than-capitalist experiments and trajectories, enriched by peripheral experiences of and encounters with globalizing capitalism.
... Agamben's notions of example/exclusive inclusion/paradigm (1993, 9-12; 1998, 21-29; 2009, 9-32) 18 systematize Wittgenstein's loose remarks on the functioning of the grammar of language and generalize Foucault's 19 use of paradigms as a method for seeing and exhibiting analogies-or, widen the application for a paradigmatology that "methodologizes" what is first an ontological insight; similar to Heidegger's contention that ontology can only take place through phenomenology (method) (Heidegger, 1962, 61), or, indeed, that they are one and the same, Agamben takes the curious ontological structure of the paradigm and transforms it into method. But also akin to Adorno's (1982) implication that method in the human sciences is inevitably violent by molding the world according to its categories, 20 thus covering over the unique and singular, the paradigmatic method, is equally a non-method, an against methodology. Our understanding by means of paradigms is a way of escaping this violence, of seeing, thinking, and understanding outside of preestablished frameworks and concepts. ...
This paper is a contribution to a discussion in philosophy of technology by focusing on the epistemological status of the example. Of the various developments in the emerging, inchoate field of philosophy of technology, the “empirical turn” stands out as having left the most enduring mark on the trajectory contemporary research takes. From a historical point of view, the empirical turn can best be understood as a corrective to the overly “transcendentalizing” tendencies of “classical” philosophers of technology, such as Heidegger. Empirically oriented philosophy of technology emphasizes actual technologies through case-study research into the formation of technical objects and systems (constructivist studies) and how they, for example, transform our perceptions and conceptions (the phenomenological tradition) or pass on and propagate relations of power (critical theory). This paper explores the point of convergence of classical and contemporary approaches by means of the notion of the “example” or “paradigm.” It starts with a discussion of the quintessential modern philosopher of technology, Martin Heidegger, and his thinking about technology in terms of the ontological difference. Heidegger’s framing of technology in terms of this difference places the weight of intelligibility entirely on the side of being, to such an extent that his examples become heuristic rather than constitutive. The second part of the paper discusses the methodological and epistemological import of the “example” and the form of intelligibility it affords. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein (standard metre), Foucault (panopticism), and Agamben (paradigm), we argue that the example offers an alternative way of understanding the study of technologies from that of empirical case studies.
... Es fácilmente atendible que la epistemología ha procedido mediante una puesta en cuestión del conocimiento (ADORNO, 2015). Es decir, su valor ha sido también proporcionar las condiciones que permiten a quien se enfrenta al saber, el apropiarse de él a través de un paso previo consistente en interpelarlo. ...
... His critique of Husserl's phenomenology in particular sets the stage for the argument about sonic methods I'm making here. The problem with phenomenological approaches, for Adorno (2013b), is their search for immediate facts. In order to found philosophy as a rigorous science, Husserl relies on the self-givenness of experiential phenomena, which are immediately accessible to consciousness. ...
Sound has received much attention from human geographers in recent years. This paper opens a debate around the growing body of work on sound as a research method. Sonic methods have largely emerged as part of the so-called "affective turn" in geography, as efforts to attend to the performative, emotional, and pre-reflective aspects of experience. Drawing on the work of Adorno, I develop a critique of existing sonic methods, arguing that their focus on affect and immediate experience is unable to grasp "negative geographies": what and who fails to appear and remains silent to the researcher. These claims are grounded in two autoethnographic accounts of my own experimentation with sonic methods. The first is a GIS study of noise-monitoring data in King County, Washington. The second is a participatory mapping project that sought to record and collect "sound diaries" from migrants and refugees across the greater Seattle area. In both cases, I show how silences and failures in the research process make sonic methods useful tools for social critique.
... Adorno (1973) launched a vehement attack against Heidegger's Kierkegaardian Bfideism^, defending critical reason against a cultus of Bauthenticity^. But aside from polemics, Adorno (2013) engaged into a more thoroughgoing Bdeconstruction^ of the very foundations of phenomenology, viz., Husserl's notions of evidence, phenomenological reduction, and eidetic reduction. In particular, Adorno refuses the phenomenologist's assumption that experience can be the starting point of philosophical analysis; in Adorno's view subject and object mediate one another dialectically, always being transformed by the other. ...
This article focuses on the power of technological mediation from the point of view of autonomist Marxism (Hardt, Negri, Virno, Berardi, Lazzarrato). The first part of the article discusses the theories developed on technological mediation in postphenomenology (Ihde, Verbeek) and critical theory of technology (Feenberg) with regard to their respective power perspectives and ways of coping with relations of power embedded in technical artifacts and systems. Rather than focusing on the clashes between the hermeneutic postphenomenological approach and the dialectics of critical theory, it is argued that in both the category of resistance amidst power-relations is at least similar in one regard: resistance to the power of technology is conceptualized as a reactive force. The second part of the article reads technological mediation through the lens of the antagonistic power-perspective on class struggle developed in autonomist Marxism. The outline of a provisional autonomist philosophy of technology is developed using Foucauldian dispositifs of biopower in contrast to the hermeneutic and dialectical approach. It is thus argued that resistance should here be understood in terms of practice that subverts the technically mediated circuit of production itself.
This paper discusses the phenomenological method’s reliance on imaginative procedures in view of ethnomethodological research. While ethnomethodology has often been seen in continuity with Alfred Schütz’ phenomenological sociology, it mainly parts ways with phenomenology by stressing that the decisive details structuring mutual understanding (gestures, bodily expressions, or the myriad trifles that regulate casual conversation) are „not imaginable, but can only be found out”. This paper reflects from a phenomenological perspective on what such a claim entails by first delineating this line of criticism from other objections raised against the use of imaginative procedures in phenomenology and by showing how this line of questioning departs from the core philosophical debates concerning imaginabilitiy and unimaginability in the Kantian tradition. Further on, the paper offers an in-depth interpretation of the aforementioned ethnomethodological claim in order not only to outline its methodological implications for phenomenology, but also to show that it involves possible key insights for understanding interaction, which phenomenology needs to take into account despite its eidetic scope.
Dealing with tensions between idealistic and realistic tendencies in Husserl's Phenomenology and arguing that Husserl's "supposed" turn towards idealism in some of his works goes against his genuinely phenomenological commitments.
The aim of this article is to frame Adorno’s concept of ‘nonidentity’ in the context of German idealism, namely, the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. The thesis to be defended is that “Secularization of Metaphysics” entails relinquishing, as well as prolongation of the German idealist tradition. The argument is developed in the following steps: 1) the constitution of an autonomous transcendental subject is shown to be rooted in the idea of Enlightenment; 2) by reconstructing Adorno’s conception of truth as non-adaequatio, I claim that Adorno’s philosophy is conducted from the perspective of the end of philosophy; 3) the sociohistorical character of the concept of ‘nonidentity’ is discussed in relation to Adorno’s understanding of history; 4) the concept of ‘nonidentity’ is discussed as implying a continuation of the Kantian project on a metacritical level; 5) Adorno’s critique of Kant is reconstructed in the context of Hegel’s Faith and Knowledge.
The work intends to reconstruct Theodor Adorno’s critique of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental idealism. The intended goal of Husserl’s phenomenology was to continue the Cartesian project of attaining certitude, and in the process, dismantle the alleged arbitrary division between subject and object. Despite sharing the latter’s goal of effecting a radical turn against traditional epistemology, Adorno, however, criticizes Husserl’s idealist position. The latter’s position asserts that objectivity is laden not only within the object, but is also reliant within the internal structures of consciousness, and its relation with the object. By virtue of the a priori, and transcendent nature of the Husserlian eidos, Adorno asserts that this idealism merely posits an abstract “philosophical First” that reveals nothing concrete about the object itself. Consequently, instead of taking a revolutionary approach, as Husserl would have it, it instead becomes an affirmation of the totalitarian nature of the classical notion of subjectivity. The paper will demonstrate how the abstract and dominating nature of Husserl’s philosophy fashions objectivity as its necessary instrument. Objectivity for Husserl only occurs once the transcendental subject exhausts the horizons of meaning of an object thereby implying the necessity of the subject’s participation in the creation of meaning for an object. Following this, I will demonstrate Adorno’s critique of objectivity in the backdrop of his confrontation of the crisis of philosophy, vis-à-vis his own proposed materialist dialectic method.
References
Primary Sources
Books
Adorno, Theodor. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Translated by Willis Domingo Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
__________. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford with an Introduction by Lydia Goehr. New York: Colombia University Press, 2005.
Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977.
__________. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Volume I. Translated by W.R. Boyce Gibson. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952.
__________. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910-1911. Translated by Ingo Farin and James Hart. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006.
__________. The Idea of Phenomenology. Translated and with an introduction by Lee Hardy. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999.
Essays
Adorno, Theodor. “A Metacritique of Epistemology.” Telos 38 (Winter 1978-79): 77- 103.
__________. “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism.” The Journal of Philosophy 37, no. 1 (1940): 5-18.
__________. “Subject and Object” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford and an Introduction by Lydia Goehr. New York: Colombia University Press, 2005.
__________ “The Actuality of Philosophy.” Telos 1997, no. 31 (1997): 120-133.
__________ “The Idea of Natural History,” Telos, no. 60 (1984), 111-124.
Secondary Sources
Books
Bryers, Damian. Intentionality and Transcendence: Closure and Openness in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.
Cambridge University Press. The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Edited by Berry Smith and David Woodruff Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Drummord, John. Historical Dictionary of Husserl’s Philosophy. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2007.
Gordon, Peter E. Adorno and Existence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
Hermberg, Kevin. Husserl’s Phenomenology: Knowledge, Objectivity and Others. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006.
Jarvis, Simon. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Zahavi, Dan. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Articles
Aoyagi, Masafumi. “Phenomenological Antinomy and Holistic Idea: Adorno’s Husserl- Studies and Influences from Cornelius.” Investigaciones Fenomenologicas 4, no. 2 (2013): 23-38.
Dallmayr, Fred. “Phenomenology and Critical Theory: Adorno*.” Cultural Hermeneutics 3 (1976): 367-405.
Follesdal, Dagfinn. “Noema and Meaning in Husserl.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50, Supplement (1990): 263-271.
Gibson, W.R. Boyce. “The Problem of Real and Ideal in the Phenomenology of Husserl.” Mind 34, no. 135 (1925): 311-333.3
McIntyre, Ronald and Smith, David Woodruff. “Husserl’s Identification of Meaning and Noema.” The Monist 59, no. 1, The Philosophy of Husserl (1975): 115-132.
Molts, Andreas. “Adorno and the Myth of Subjectivity.” Contempts 3 (2002): 109-121.
Soffer, W. “Husserl’s Neo-Cartesianism.” Research in Phenomenology 11 (1981): 141- 158.
Originated in a philosophical questioning on the French-Algerian postcolonial situation, this thesis focuses on Sartre’s philosophy as an attempt to answer the theoretical conflicts inherited from the French Revolution. I conceptualise the post-revolutionary era as a conflict between ethics and aesthetics that gave birth to positivism, which was on the road to challenge political philosophy in the twentieth century. I show that, at the very same time, Sartre was finding a solution to the challenges posed to political philosophy by criticising positivism thanks to his pursuit of a reconciliation of existentialism and Marxism. I analyse this pursuit as his own attempt to reconcile ethics and aesthetics, that the French Revolution had pulled apart. In Chapter 1, I lay down my interpretation of the meaning of the French Revolution for political philosophy, and enunciate the premise of the role Sartre has in solving the theoretical conflicts that emerged from it. It leads me to assess the role of subjectivity for him in Chapter 2, where I suggest to shed light on it thanks to the unvoiced Sartrean concept of collective past. From this original understanding of the connection between subjectivity and history, emerges an interpretation of intersubjectivity that leads to a theory of recognition very specific to Sartre, that I present and rebuild in Chapter 3. I the fourth and last chapter, I make the hypothesis that the concept of recognition stands as the connecting link between ethics and aesthetics, and I also give a full account of what aesthetics means for Sartre’s political philosophy. Sartre was involved in this enormously ambitious philosophical work at the very same time that he was politically involved in the anticolonial fight; throughout the thesis, I build a Sartre-inspired network of concepts apt for understanding of the French-Algerian situation.
Whereas classical Critical Theory has tended to view phenomenology as inherently uncritical, the recent upsurge of what has become known as critical phenomenology has attempted to show that phenomenological concepts and methods can be used in critical analyses of social and political issues. A recent landmark publication, 50 Concepts for Critical Phenomenology , contains no reference to psychiatry and psychopathology, however. This is an unfortunate omission, since the tradition of phenomenological psychiatry—as we will demonstrate in the present article by surveying and discussing the contribution of Jaspers, Minkowski, Laing, Basaglia, and Fanon—from the outset has practiced critical thinking, be it at the theoretical, interpersonal, institutional, or political level. Fanon is today a recognized figure in critical phenomenology, even if his role in psychiatry might not yet have been appreciated as thoroughly as his anticolonial and antiracist contributions. But as we show, he is part of a long history of critical approaches in psychopathology and psychiatry, which has firm roots in the phenomenological tradition, and which keeps up its critical work today.
Our contemporary moment is a moment of crisis of epistemology as a part of the wider and deeper crisis of modernity and the human condition. The crisis of epistemology emerges from the limits of the epistemic as it is tied to epistemology of procedural certainty and closure. The crisis of epistemology also reflects the limits of epistemology closed within the Euro-American universe of discourse. It is in this context that the present essay discusses Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. It also discusses some of the limits of de Sousa Santos’ alternatives especially his lack of cultivation of the ontological in his exploration of epistemological alternatives beyond the Eurocentric canons. It then explores the pathways of ontological epistemology of participation which brings epistemic and ontological works and meditations together in transformative and cross-cultural ways. This helps us in going beyond both the limits of the primacy of epistemology in modernity as well as Eurocentrism. It also explores pathways of a new hermeneutics which involves walking and meditating across multiple topoi of cultures and traditions of thinking and reflections which is called multi- topial hermeneutics in this study. This involves foot-walking and foot-meditative interpretation across multiple cultures and traditions of the world which help us go beyond ethnocentrism and eurocentrism and cultivate conversations and realisations across borders what the essay calls planetary realisations.
This response to Asger Sørensen’s paper From Ontology to Epistemology: Tong,
Mao and Hegel is made on the basis of a reflection on the author’s
intellectual development with special reference to the idea of ‘dialectics’.
This development is mainly composed of three periods, in which the author
formed his strong antipathy toward dialectics as a mere tool of power (in
the 1970s), learnt to understand the importance of ‘dialogical logic’ in
providing conceptual tools for human knowledge of a type of reality which is
both objective and subjective - human practices (in the 1980s) - and
attempted to understand the ‘dialectics of rationalization’ by integrating
‘dialectics’ in the Western tradition of Critical Theory with the Chinese
tradition of ‘dialectics’ systematically interpreted by Feng Qi (1915-1995)
since the 1990s.
jats:p>While the twentieth-century Confucian thinker Mou Zongsan (1909–1995) has left behind one of the most thought-provoking and intensively studied bodies of philosophical writings in modern Chinese intellectual history, his own life and its relation to his philosophy (or “learning”), a theme at the centre of his Autobiography at Fifty from the mid1950s, has so far remained largely unexamined. After some introductory remarks on the context and outlook of the Autobiography, my paper turns to the close relation between Mou’s conception of life and his approach to the “cultural life” of China as a nation. In doing so, I examine the notion of a distinctly Chinese (more precisely, Confucian) “learning of life” in his writing and explore the motif of “life in itself ” running through the Autobiography. I argue that this motif is crucial for gaining a better understanding of Mou’s relation to his teacher Xiong Shili (1885–1968), his own father, the social conditions of his childhood in rural Shandong, as well as his overall approach to subjectivity as a space for articulating socio-political concerns.</jats:p
Resumo: No espírito de fortalecer seus fundamentos intelectuais e esclarecer suas contribuições para dar sentido ao mundo, devemos resistir a qualquer inclinação a tratar a geografia como um clube — uma disciplina com fronteiras a serem policiadas e defendidas. Advogo pelas forças de se pensar geograficamente, uma maneira de ser no mundo aberta a todos. Isso significa lidar com a geografia da produção de conhecimento; com como as espaço-temporalidades moldam e são moldadas por processos socionaturais; com o mundo mais-que-humano emergente; com a variedade de ontologias, epistemologias e metodologias que estão na base das alegações de conhecimento; e com o mundo não só como ele é, mas também como pode ser. Pensar geograficamente sobre o capitalismo globalizante permite problematizar as posicionalidades socioespaciais particulares a partir das quais houve a metástase dos entendimentos de senso comum sobre o capitalismo. A Europa não inventou as práticas capitalistas, mas se tornou o centro de cálculo do capitalismo globalizante, catalisado pelas dinâmicas espaciais do colonialismo que a fizeram ascender em relação a seus predecessores. Pensar geograficamente mina as considerações convencionais sobre o capitalismo globalizante que emanam da Europa, que se referem a uma maré crescente capaz de levantar todos os barcos e trazer prosperidade a todos os indivíduos responsáveis e que trabalham duro e a todos os territórios bem governados. Na verdade, essas considerações fundadas no corpo e no lugar obscurecem o modo pelo qual as conectividades assimétricas entre os lugares e as dinâmicas interescalares, que co-evoluem com o desenvolvimento geográfico desigual, coproduzem uma posicionalidade socioespacial e condições de possibilidade desiguais para aqueles que propagam ou se deparam com o capitalismo globalizante. O capitalismo também não pode ser compreendido, ou praticado, simplesmente como um processo econômico; seus aspectos econômicos estão co-implicados com processos políticos, culturais (de gênero, raciais etc.), sociais e biofísicos, de maneiras que repetidamente superam e enfraquecem quaisquer “leis da economia”. Pensar geograficamente torna necessário conceder espaço para trajetórias e experiências alternativas e mais-que-capitalistas, enriquecidas por experiências periféricas do capitalismo globalizante e por encontros com ele na periferia.Palavras chave: capitalismo; geografia; globalização; posicionalidade socioespacial. THINKING GEOGRAPHICALLY: GLOBALIZING CAPITALISM AND BEYONDAbstract: In the spirit of strengthening its intellectual foundations and clarifying its contributions to making sense of Earth, we should resist any inclination to treat geography as a club—a discipline with boundaries to be policed and defended. I advocate for the strengths of thinking geographically, a way of being in the world open to all. This means attending to the geography of knowledge production; how spatiotemporalities shape and are shaped by socionatural processes; the emergent more-than-human world; the variety of ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies underlying knowledge claims; and the world not only as it is but also as it should be. Thinking geographically about globalizing capitalism can problematize the particular sociospatial positionalities from which commonsense understandings of capitalism have metastasized. Europe did not invent capitalist practices but became globalizing capitalism’s center of calculation, catalyzed by the spatial dynamics of colonialism elevating Europe relative to its predecessors. Thinking geographically undermines the mainstream account of globalizing capitalism emanating from Europe, that of a rising tide capable of lifting all boats and bringing prosperity to all hard-working and responsible individuals and well-governed territories. Indeed, such body- and place-based accounts obscure how asymmetric connectivities between places and interscalar dynamics, coevolving with uneven geographical development, coproduce unequal sociospatial positionality and conditions of possibility for those propagating and encountering globalizing capitalism. Capitalism also cannot be understood, or practiced, simply as an economic process; its economic aspects are co-implicated with political, cultural (gendered, raced, etc.), social, and biophysical processes, in ways that repeatedly exceed and undermine any “laws of economics.” Thinking geographically necessitates acknowledging space for alternative, more-than-capitalist experiments and trajectories, enriched by peripheral experiences of and encounters with globalizing capitalism.Keywords: capitalism; geography; globalization; sociospatial positionality.
I situate Adorno's 1931 inaugural lecture in the context of German philosophy in the 1920s. The crisis of idealism in the early twentieth century is explained in terms of the new emphasis in capitalist society on the role of impersonal, scientific knowledge. I demonstrate that Adorno, in the lecture, rejects the neo‐Kantian goal of aligning philosophy with the new scientific culture, but also dismisses the positivist idea of dissolving philosophy into natural science, as well as the irrationalist currents such as life philosophy and existentialism. Adorno's lecture argues instead for a version of dialectical philosophy that is rooted in the practices and techniques of early aesthetic modernism.
Justin Rosenberg’s proposal of ‘multiplicity’ as a new grounding concept for IR aims at liberating the international from the perceived constraints of its dominant framing by Realism. Viewed from within the singular political entity, the international can only appear as absence and negativity, traditionally thematised in IR as ‘anarchy’. Recasting it instead as ‘multiplicity’, through a move from politics to sociology, is intended to change the understanding of the international from negative to positive: from conflict, tragedy and repetition to interaction, combination and development. This move, however, does not succeed in grasping the negativity of the international, and so as a result it remains within the limits that Realism enunciates: multiplicity complements anarchy sociologically rather than transcending it theoretically. A new concept of the international would result not from rejecting the negative in favour of the positive but from recognizing them as dialectically contained within each other.
In this paper, the author considers the implications of refusal in the context of dialectic and depth psychology. What does it mean to refuse? What are the personal and psychological costs of refusal? Marcuse suggested that refusal could lead to greater possibilities for action. The author suggests that those in the field of public administration can participate in the “Great Refusal” by learning to think more dialectically, thus disabling the Western principle of non-contradiction and permitting the simultaneous acceptance of contradictions, in both theory and practice.
This paper focuses on 3 features of Freyenhagen's Aristotelian version of Adorno. (a) It challenges the strict negativism Freyenhagen finds in Adorno. If we have morally relevant interests in ourselves, it is implicit that we have a standard by which to understand what is both good and bad for us (our interests). Because strict negativism operates without reference to what is good, it seems to be detached from real interests too. Torture, it is argued, is, among other things, a violation of those interests. (b) Freyenhagen identifies the “impulse” in Adorno as an untutored yet moral reaction to morally demanding situations. The plausibility of this primitivism and its compatibility with Adorno's general worries about immediacy are considered. (c) The disruptive character of Adorno's version of the categorical imperative, its willingness to complicate action through wholesale reflection on the norms of what we are committing ourselves to, is set in contrast with Freyenhagen's Aristotelian claim that certain notions, such as “humanity,” cannot be intelligibly questioned.
One of the most interesting strands of twentieth-century German philosophy is what has come to be known as the Frankfurt School, a group of philosophers and social scientists whose work revolved around the Institute for Social Research, which was founded at the University of Frankfurt am Main in 1923. The common interest of those scholars was a critical engagement with the philosophies of Kant, Hegel and Marx, but also Nietzsche, Freud and Weber, and an attempt to combine philosophy and social scientific research. The idea of ‘Critical Theory’ that is inextricably linked to the Frankfurt School, a new kind of social critique opposed to dogmatic forms of theory, was first established by Max Horkheimer in his 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory. The central claim of Critical Theorists is that it is impossible to understand the world and the society one lives in without taking into account the ideological context framing one’s thought about that very society. Critical Theorists thereby put themselves into opposition to what they called ‘dogmatic’ or ‘traditional’ social theories, which they accuse of deriving (false) generalizations about the world by imitating the logico-mathematical methods of the natural sciences.
Dissertation consists of six internationally published articles which were originally
published as book chapters and journal articles. Three articles were written by the
author of the dissertation (Max Horkheimer on the Mimetic Element in Education, What it
means to be a Stranger to Oneself, and As Heard in Silence – Listening and to-be-heard in
Education) and two (Hope and Education in the Era of Globalization, Critical Pedagogy and
Ideology Critique as Zeitgeist Analysis) were joint articles with professor Juha Suoranta
(University of Tampere) and one (Don’t You See, How the Wind Blows?) with Suoranta
and lecturer Robert FitzSimmons (University of Lapland). In each joint article, Moisio
was the first author. To frame the point of reference in this dissertation we can use the
concept of critical analysis of our times (critical Zeitgeist analysis). It is argued that in
education we need an attitude that is sufficiently open to the given historical situation.
One question that educational sciences should address is the question of the potential of
education in addressing various social maladies of the present era. Methodologically,
critical Zeitgeist analysis is argued to be of value in demonstrating how to both utilize
and expand the possibilities of writing normative social and educational theory. One of
the central themes in critical analysis of the given times is to reflect critically on the state
of the present historical world. In this task it has always combined analytical, political
and moral languages, as well as the languages of critique and hope. It is argued that
education should be aimed at change and this is methodologically done in the form of
critical knowledge of the present age. This means that the relationship between teacher
and student should be seen from the viewpoint of care and respect of student’s person
and corporeal being. Also teaching material becomes practical when teaching and
learning are seen as fundamentally cooperative processes. With these we are able to
promote autonomous and critical thinking. But as the articles show this aim of critical
educational philosophy is filled with paradoxes that must be met when thinking about
the possibility to promote the autonomy and full development of an individual human
being.
Keywords: radical pedagogy, critical pedagogy, philosophy of education, critical theory,
pedagogical paradox, zeitgeist analysis, concept of hope, Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst
Bloch, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer.
The notion of a network society was popularized in the 1980s with the rise of novel information and computer technologies. According to Castells, a network society is one “whose social structure is made of networks powered by microelectronics-based information and communication technologies.” The explosive growth of the Internet, mobile devices, and microprocessors over the past several decades has helped to make the term “network” commonplace. In addition to media systems, workplaces and even familial relations are now commonly described as having the character of networks. This imagery is propelled further by economic, political, and migratory flows within a more globalized world. This network imagery suggests that institutions, practices, and relationships are structured on a new social model, and various monikers, such as lattice, matrix, system, and web, have been used to describe this emerging social formation. All of these metaphors intend to highlight new social conditions of decentralization, flexibility, and interconnectivity that characterize twenty-first-century society. Networks, in particular, are thought to offer an alternative to traditional, “centered” models of social order. Yet, in ways that are increasingly evident, this network imagery actually justifies the violence of global market relations. Despite its popularity and conceptual development, less attention has been paid to unraveling the ontology of the network society. In particular, basic assumptions about the nature of individuals, social organization, economies, and ethics are not necessarily forthcoming in conceptual descriptions of the network society. Investigating the ontological assumptions implied by network imagery is important because such analyses alert us to remaining challenges on the path to an open society.
Die herrschende Rechtsordnung als ein Teil der unternehmensspezifischen Umwelt gewinnt für die betrieblichen Entscheidungen ständig an Bedeutung. Vor allem der Einsatz des absatzpolitischen Instrumentariums wird mehr denn je von rechtlichen Determinanten beeinflußt.
It is argued that the epistemology proffered by the SSM advocates does not provide a practical basis upon which to conduct team-based systems development; this is because the SSM advocates over-emphasise the need for subjective certainty and meaning, thus rendering their epistemology over-idealistic. It is concluded that the need for effective communication between team members necessarily implies abandoning the search for subjective certitude and supplanting it with the search for practical “working knowledge” of the actual situation in which IS development occurs.
Clemens Nachtmann’s aesthetics avoids tonal associations. Together with the composer we arrived at a system by which we computationally determined significant criteria matching Nachtmann’s choice of chord materials and aesthetic practice and verified by Nachtmann in various stages of evaluations. The system combines a method of exclusion with complete enumeration of all solutions.
This article proposes and explores a hypothesis about some
claims made by Adorno. The claims at issue appear to allege,
in a way that is hard to understand, that beings in modernity
are deformed. The hypothesis is that Adorno’s conception of
mediation illuminates that idea. For Adornian mediation
seems to bode an account of the determination of beings – of
how beings are as they are – that will explicate his claims about
beings’ deformation. Acting on that hypothesis, the paper
explores Adorno’s views about conceptual mediation (and
thereby that which Adorno calls ‘the priority of the object’) and
his views about social mediation. I find that those views do
not in fact explain the type of deformation at issue. But I argue
that there is more than one way in which one might interpret
that negative result.
The paper interprets phenomenology as a mode of inquiry that addresses fundamental questions of first philosophy, beyond the limitation of the practice by its leading theorists to the study of mere appearances. I draw on Adorno's critique of phenomenology to show that it has typically functioned as a mode of first philosophy, but I part with Adorno to argue that it ought to be practiced as such, to address consciously a sceptical worry about the gap between appearance and reality that Husserl modestly claimed to have bracketed. Noting Husserl's and Adorno's shared worries about the project of first philosophy, to know the world beyond appearances, I draw on Nietzsche to argue phenomenology ought nonetheless to address real matters of concern.
‘Immanent criticism' has been discussed by philosophers of quite different persuasions, working in separate areas and in different traditions of philosophy. Almost all of them agree on roughly the same story about its origins: It is that Hegel invented immanent criticism, that Marx later developed it, and that the various members of the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno, refined it in various ways, and that they are all paradigmatic practitioners of immanent criticism. I call this the Continuity Thesis. There are four different claims that interest me. (i) Hegel is the originator of immanent criticism. (ii) Hegel's dialectical method is that of immanent criticism. (iii) Adorno practises immanent criticism and endorses the term as a description of his practice. (iv) Adorno's dialectical method is fundamentally Hegelian. In this article, I offer an account of immanent criticism, on the basis of which, I evaluate these four claims and argue that the Continuity Thesis should be rejected.
Adorno sees experience as intrinsically interpretative. As interpretation requires normative constraints, in order to guide and channel this interpretative engagement, this opens the question of how experience acquires its motivating criteria. If experience is from the first criterially structured, how are these criteria acquired? Moreover, as these criteria are acquired in isolation from experience – as they are the precondition of that experience – are these criteria sensitive to the particularity of the experiences they produce? In order to address these questions, and the problems they threaten to create for Adorno’s epistemology, I look at Adorno’s theory of impulse and cognition. I argue that Adorno grounds the criterial structure of experience and reason in self-preservation. This provides both a motivation and a determining constraint on the criterial structure of experience. It is also a determining influence which is epistemically flexible and compatible with Adorno’s project of tracing the ‘non-identical’.
Socio-political life in Malawi reveals immense security threats stemming from neopatrimonial aspects such as the big-man syndrome. This paper takes a critical theory approach in exploring this phenomenon in Malawi with examples from the university sector and the July 2011 country-wide demonstrations. A critical theory perspective aims at revealing distortions in society in order to effect positive or emancipatory social change. Similarly, in this paper, a critical theory stance is employed to show how the big-man syndrome has in recent years posed as a security threat in Malawi so as to suggest social change. The paper starts by conceptualising the notion of the big-man syndrome and providing recent examples of security threats posed by the syndrome with examples from the university sector and the recent country-wide demonstrations. Finally, the paper proposes a model of social change based on philosophical notions of dialectical reasoning and communicative rationality.
Contrary to much research that describes governance problems in African universities within lenses of positivism, this article takes a critical theory approach. Based on insights from in-depth interviews with university administrators, academics and student union leaders, the article reveals tensions among these university actors, which stem from the neopatrimonial aspect of the big-man syndrome. The big-man syndrome poses as the taken-for-granted aspect that facilitates misuse of power among university actors. Thus, the article demonstrates that in Malawian universities most governance problems result from misuse of power among actors facilitated by the big-man syndrome. A proposal is presented for actors to contain the big-man syndrome and allow for democratic governance by employing dialectical reasoning and the Habermasian theory of communicative rationality.
This article explores a series of issues that arise in relation to the methodology of conducting a critique of legal ideologies. It addresses the attempt by the Sheffield School of public law to formulate and apply an 'immanent' model of critique that builds upon the position developed by the Frankfurt School of critical social theory. We address difficulties that arise with the Sheffield School's interpretation of this model of critique, not least the problems with its attempt to apply a clear-cut distinction between wholly internal, immanent and external modes of critique. Our overall aim is to formulate a more adequate model of ideology critique that is able to overcome the various difficulties we have discovered within the Sheffield School's model. We argue that this can be achieved without relapsing back into the no less serious contradictions which can arise with external modes of critique. These merely superimpose ready-made criteria of assessment upon the object of their analysis, without first establishing their appropriateness.
Raises the initial problem of what is meant by the term critical theory and discusses some common misconceptions that have arisen about the meaning of this term. The dialectic logic that was championed by the group of scholars collectively known as the Frankfurt School is outlined and it is noted how dialectics transcends binary oppositional thinking. It is argued that the body of work of these scholars has a strong contemporary relevance to issues in the management of change in organizations. The other papers in the issue are introduced.
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) stands on the shoulder of giants – different giants – in order to answer how its critique, its ethico-moral stance, is theoretically grounded and justified. Concerning this question, this article explores the role of the Frankfurt School in the discourse–historical approach (DHA). Although references to the Frankfurt School can regularly be found in the DHA's canon, I argue that an even more comprehensive discussion would help in combating accusations of the DHA being unprincipled and politically biased, and further enrich the DHA's toolkit for empirical analysis. After reviewing existing references to the Frankfurt School, I discuss this intellectual tradition – from Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's The dialectic of enlightenment to Jürgen Habermas's language-philosophy – showing to what extent it can(not) ground the DHA's emancipatory and socially transformative aims. Thereby, I illustrate how the DHA's critical standard is not simply based on a coincidental, though progressive, consensus but theoretically justified.
Based on critical theory and dialectical thought, discusses and outlines a framework for understanding corporate culture as corporate hegemony. First, offers the relevance of critical theory to the study of corporate culture as a managerial praxis and organizational discourse. Second, examines three aspects of the dialectics of corporate culture: the dialectical tensions between corporate and individual identity; the conflicting pressure for uniformity and diversity; and the dialectics of empowerment and disempowerment. Third, discusses the mechanisms for the hegemonic perpetuation of corporate culture by researchers and practitioners and for resisting a critical stance in the discourse of corporate culture. Fourth, and finally, the article examines possible ways for overcoming the problem of cultural hegemony in organization theory and praxis.
This paper provides a criticial interpretation of the theme, point, and methodological status of Adorno’s so‐called negative dialectic. The theme at issue, ‘non‐identity’, comes in several varieties; and the point of Adorno’s dialectic, namely reconciliation, is multifaceted. Exploration of those topics shows that negative dialectic seques into substantive doctrines, including a version of transcendentalism and a claim about deformation. The peculiar methodological status of negative dialectic explains that adumbration. In the appraisive register, my principal contentions include these: Adorno’s transcendentalism makes some sense of the aforementioned deformation claim; and negative dialectic qua method avoids mystery and metaphysical excess.
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