Transforming praxis

The contemporary relevance of the concept of practice developed in these pages should be the subject of another book, but I do want to offer some tentative thoughts here in conclusion. What I have called “transforming practice” is characterized by the following attributes:

1. Transforming practice is aimed at meaning.

2. Meaning is not subjective but is enacted in practice and “raised” to consciousness.

3. Meanings are entangled with each other in a cultural system that forms the horizon of thought and action.

4. Insofar as it is enacted, culture has system effects that are more or (often) less intended consciously by social actors.

5. Culture does not exhaust social reality but stands in tension with the forces it evokes.

In what follows I will summarize the formulations of this concept in Marx, Lukács, and the Frankfurt School, and consider how it might be applied to contemporary social movements.

We have seen how Marx and Lukács attempt to break through the barrier of alienated and reified cultural forms to a reflexive concept of transforming practice. Their attempts establish the foundations of philosophy of praxis but also lead to an exaggerated notion of activity. In Marx’s Manuscripts practice takes on the creative power of the divinity: untransformed nature is treated as mere matter awaiting the human touch. In Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness an ambiguity hangs over the concept of subject–object identity. In a metaphysical reading, it signifies the supremacy of the subject over all being. But in what I call a methodological or dialectical reading, his concept of mediation has much in common with the Frankfurt School’s concept of non-identity. This ambiguity is discussed in Chapter 6.

Paradoxically, the Frankfurt School’s emphasis on the liberating implications of reflection and restraint make possible a deeper understanding of transforming practice. The notion of a “non-exploitative relation to nature” is too easily caricatured as hippie nonsense, the flower child’s anthem. But the philosophers of the Frankfurt School do not advocate abandoning the idea of activity central to the Marxist conception of human being. Rather they attempt to conceptualize a different kind of activity that respects the object as bearer of potentialities, as possessed of a certain “wholeness” or self-relation. The previous chapter discussed this concept of the object in relation to nature, but it obviously applies also to human beings. To achieve such respect requires a break with the dominant instrumentalist conception of practice. Marcuse conceives the alternative as an “aesthetic” or “erotic” world relation. It too is a kind of practice, a self- and world-transforming practice of the sort imagined in earlier philosophy of praxis but left implicit in the emphasis on revolutionary activity.

This implicit practice appears passive since it is not characterized by manipulation and control, but it nevertheless has an effect on the world through a politics of meaning that, as Lukács argues, alters the functional place of objects in the totality. Even reified practice contains such a non-instrumental moment, a moment in which a horizon of meaning is posited under which the active work of change goes on. In his prescient reflections on technology, Francis Bacon famously defined the relation between this special type of passivity and activity, writing, “Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.”¹¹ The technical actor must obey the “commands” of nature, its laws; he can use the laws for his own ends, but to do so he must accept them. This could very well serve as an uncritical definition of reification. In their implicit self-understanding under capitalism the individuals define themselves as individuals rather than as members of a collective. This is the horizon they posit and under which they generally act. As a result they cannot act together; their “command” of society is strictly limited by “obedience” to the individualist capitalist framework that serves as the “law” of their practice.

Pace Bacon, this framework is not natural. Following Ian Angus, we can say it is “instituted.” He suggests “an expanded meaning of ‘institution’ in which it refers to the opening of a space from which a new temporal order comes forth and applies both to a formation of knowledge and an epoch of Being.”¹² This describes reification as an a priori basis of thought and action.

The worst harms of reification arise not from the instituting moment per se, but from its systematic misconstruction in class society as an ontological principle beyond all mediation by the subject. Thus practice is narrowed to its overtly active dimension, while the establishment of its horizon is conceptualized “contemplatively” as an unchangeable objectivity to which human beings must adapt. Since reified practice cannot act on its horizon, the more vigorous its exertions the more effectively it reproduces the very framework of assumptions within which it is condemned to operate. But this is not a fateful necessity. A non-instrumental action transforming the horizon is possible.

Philosophy of praxis recognizes horizonal transformation in this sense, but that creates a certain tension with the Marxist concept of revolution. In what does transforming practice most essentially consist, action on the horizon of action or the action made possible by that action? Which practice fulfills the requirements of the principle of practice and resolves the antinomies, “material-semiotic” change or power-political change? The Frankfurt School resolves the ambiguity in emphasizing the aesthetic, a domain of activity in which the horizon is the essential object of action. With this emphasis it invokes a power more radical and thoroughgoing than anything dreamed up by industry or politics, what Adorno calls a “pacified technique.”¹³

The Frankfurt School’s emphasis on aesthetics is overly narrow but suggestive. The instituting moment of practice is most clearly a conscious and purposeful mediation in the case of aesthetics. This is so for several reasons. Aesthetic practice begins by freely positing a “form” as a horizon of the ordinary instrumental actions through which the work is created. The imaginative freedom characteristic of aesthetic practice enables idealizing strategies that signify unfulfilled potentialities of the social world. This is accomplished through the way in which the form incorporates aspects of the materials, and is thus not simply imposed but is in some sense emergent. As Lukács argues, the aesthetic form–content relation is dialectical; concept and object interact productively. One way of understanding this interaction is in terms of a limit, the independent logic of the object to which the form must adapt in forming its materials.

Marcuse generalizes these aspects of aesthetics beyond the realm of art. He conceives a technical practice that resembles art making in revealing potentialities and respecting its materials. In reaction against an overactive instrumentalism, he even proposes “letting be” as an ideal. Here the notion of limit is carried to the limit. This makes sense in an aesthetic context. I have found it most clearly exemplified by aspects of Japanese culture. It is beautifully anticipated in a Japanese Buddhist tale that has a particular relevance to this discussion because it concerns a reconciled technology, the swords of the legendary maker Okazaki Masamune. This account is from D. T. Suzuki:

Masamune flourished in the latter part of the Kamakura era, and his works are uniformly prized by all the sword connoisseurs for their excellent qualities. As far as the edge of the blade is concerned, Masamune may not exceed Muramasa, one of his ablest disciplines, but Masamune is said to have something morally inspiring that comes from his personality. The legend goes thus: When someone was trying to test the sharpness of a Muramasa, he placed it in a current of water and watched how it acted against the dead leaves flowing downstream. He saw that every leaf that met the blade was cut in twain. He then placed a Masamune, and he was surprised to find that the leaves avoided the blade. The Masamune was not bent on killing, it was more than a cutting implement, whereas the Muramasa could not go beyond cutting, there was nothing divinely inspiring in it. The Muramasa is terrible, the Masamune is humane. One is despotic and imperialistic, the other is superhuman, if we may use this form of expression.¹⁴

This tale is the mythological expression of transforming practice. The feeling that such a concept is self-contradictory only testifies to the persistent influence of reification. In the parable, the sword that cuts annihilates its object only to find another in the perpetual flow of the stream. Masamune’s sword is the more powerful because it acts not on things—on leaves or men—but on the horizon of its own practice, the assumption that killing is an inevitable fate.

The idea of letting be, or reconciliation as a positive mediation and a true positing, appears in Japanese culture in the more familiar form of “borrowed scenery.” The architectural style that leaves trees standing as natural ornaments of the house is as much a mediation of nature as a different style that begins by leveling them. From an aesthetic standpoint, the living trees are as surely chosen and incorporated into the lives of human beings as if they had been clear cut to make way for a real-estate development.¹⁵ Yet their independence as “subjects” facing the human subject is not overthrown by a violent identification. What is more, the letting be of the trees shows respect not only for outer nature, but also for that which in human nature requires trees. It is as much nature in the subject as without that is mediated in this reconciled practice; for, whatever human beings do to an Other, they simultaneously do to themselves in another mode. That is, in effect, the defining trait of a finite being.

This approach to practice may seem remote from Marxism, and certainly the concept of aesthetic practice, even generalized as it is in Marcuse, cannot fully explain radical political movements. But the emphasis on horizonal change is an implicit aspect of traditional Marxist politics. Marxism addresses not particular wrongs but the generalized wrong of capitalist civilization as a whole. A totalizing critique emerges through the positing of a horizon. That horizon is the life process of the proletariat, damaged by alienation and commodification. Marxism begins with “the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a degraded, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being.”¹⁶ This imperative establishes a limit: action begins in respect for the humanity of the worker. The “law” of that humanity commands the overthrow of all that violates it.¹⁷

A similar correlation of passivity and activity defines class consciousness in Lukács. The prior condition of struggle is the “self-consciousness of the commodity.” In it the worker posits her own needs as a limit violated by the commodification of labor. Unfulfilled needs motivate resistance not just to poverty but to its cause, the reification of the worker’s own self. This self too is a kind of “nature” to be defended against capitalist clear cutting. That defense is the source of the revolutionary act that overthrows the system. It begins with a self-transformation that is itself a social transformation.

Clearly, these Marxist conceptions of practice go beyond Marcuse’s “letting be,” and even Marcuse only mentions this notion to emphasize the contrast between emancipatory technique and the dominant exploitative instrumentalism. The link between meaning and enactment implies active engagement with reality, even if in the extreme case of “letting be” that engagement takes the form of adjustment to the independent potentialities of the materials. More commonly activism involves overt interventions into social and political processes. What characterizes such interventions as transformative is not the degree of violence they exhibit but their relation to the totality, i.e., to the cultural system as a whole.

The Marxist conception of practice depends on a specific historical configuration of the proletariat but its structure survives changes in that configuration. The underlying problem Lukács attempts to solve with his notion of class consciousness is the possibility of totalizing critique. Since critical agency is itself empowered by the system it criticizes, is there not a contradiction in its stance? This was the insuperable obstacle in Horkheimer and Adorno’s futile dialogue. The answer Lukács proposes is the dialectic of form and content. A modified version of that dialectic applies even after the decline of the revolutionary proletariat.

Societies impose forms on contents they activate and shape, evoke and channel. There is no guarantee that the forms will effectively contain the contents. The culture of rule in every society addresses the gaps with prescriptions and solutions of various sorts, such as religious ideology and administrative initiatives. The conditions of critique are fulfilled where tensions between form and content become conscious as such at the level of content, i.e., the subordinate social actors. Then a resistant subjectivity forms and counter-ideologies and initiatives challenge the system. Lukács identifies this unique situation with capitalism and its proletariat. We now know that it has a wider reach.

Although we do not have many equivalents today of the militant class struggles that inspired Marx and Lukács, a deep transformation of the horizon of contemporary practice is gradually emerging. This transformation takes place in scattered regions of society in response to a critical awareness of the harms of a destructive way of life. Awareness liberates the individuals for political activity most visibly in movements around gender issues, struggles against exclusion, the environmental movement, and the defense of the Internet against commercial domination, surveillance, and censorship. Economic and environmental crises weaken the grip of reification. The horizon of practice shifts with the realization of the contingency of the world created by technocratic neoliberalism.

The movements to which this gives rise are still quite weak and lack an overall strategy of change. They do not fulfill the conditions of revolution as Lukács explains them. But the unfavorable comparison with earlier proletarian movements should not blind us to subtle changes taking place in the conduct of politics and the nature of the public sphere that may yet shape a new era. Of the figures discussed here, Marcuse understood this best.

He proposed two different strategies in the struggle against the one-dimensional society. The “Great Refusal” was an aesthetic principle generalized as a total rejection of the system.¹⁸ This strategy recapitulated old debates that opposed reform to revolution. Uncompromising and absolute critique was an attractive stance in the context of a dystopian society rich enough to co-opt every demand in any case. But ironically the search for the unco-optable demand led to Marcuse himself becoming an icon in the mass culture of 1968, a fact from which his reputation suffers to this day.

A new configuration emerged in the 1970s that Marcuse called the “preventive counter-revolution.” Co-optation continued but became supplemented by recession and repression. The New Left disintegrated, but left behind a large critical public and a sense of suppressed possibilities. Marcuse now echoed the German slogan, “A Long March through the Institutions.”¹⁹ In a time of political eclipse one must find a place in the institutions of society. But it is still possible to bring contestation to bear on those institutions, accepting the likely ambiguity of the outcome. Demanding the overthrow of the system is not the touchstone of resistance it might be in a time of revolutionary ferment.

These two strategies exemplify two different versions of the dialectic. The Great Refusal is a disappointed response to the failure of the metaphysical version in which a substantialized revolutionary agent such as the proletariat resolves the contradictions and establishes a socialist state. The Long March reflects the dialectic of permanent mediation of rational institutions by their members. I argue for the disruptive thesis—disruptive for traditional Marxism, that is—that only the second version makes sense today as a theory of progressive social change.

The system as a whole is not an object of resistance at this time, and may only become so in the future through the horizonal changes underlying contemporary resistances, challenging fundamental assumptions and institutions. Thus these resistances are neither revolutionary nor reformist in the usual sense of the term; they differ from minor reforms internal to the normal functioning of the institutions since they restructure the context within which the system operates. This too is a kind of transforming practice that affects the totality. For want of a better term, I will call them “radical reforms.” They are not to be conceived as merely deficient by comparison with true revolutionary practice. Even if the system could be abolished, many reified institutions would continue to exist and inspire resistances and radical reforms similar to those we see today.

Traditional Marxism recognized this reality to some extent. It supported the growth of a labor movement demanding economic reforms, and it proposed a gradual transition to socialism. But labor struggle and the transition were conceived as temporary phenomena, the one preparing the revolution and the other following it and ending with the advent of communism.²⁰ In reality, reform and transition are always already engaged in modern society and will never end. They are inherent in the structure of modernity, not just in a particular economic system. The failure to recognize this has doomed revolutions in the name of socialism. Having overthrown capitalism, they reproduced its reifying consequences in other institutional forms while blocking mediation in the name of the revolution. The contemporary significance of the philosophy of praxis appears clearly in the light of this history.

 

1 The operative word here is “foreseeable,” but obviously philosophical conclusions cannot be based on events that might occur despite being unforeseeable.

2 Karl Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. and ed. L. Easton and K. Guddat (New York: Anchor, 1967), 402.

3 For my position on Habermas’s famous critique of Marcuse’s concept of nature, see Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (New York: Routledge, 1999), Chapter 7.

4 For the example of video games, see Sara M. Grimes and Andrew Feenberg, “Rationalizing Play: A Critical Theory of Digital Gaming,” in A. Feenberg and N. Friesen, ed., (Re)Inventing the Internet: Critical Case Studies (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012). The concept of social rationality underlying this discussion is explained in Andrew Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), Chapter 8.

5 Is it still necessary to point out the failure of Habermas’s system theory to deal with the bias of rational systems? See Feenberg, Questioning Technology, Chapter 7.

6 HCC, 208, 313–14.

7 Feenberg, Questioning Technology, Chapter 6, especially 142–7.

8 For a discussion of the Internet on these terms, see Feenberg and Friesen, eds., (Re) Inventing the Internet: Critical Case Studies (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2012). See also Brian Wynne, Rationality and Ritual: Participation and Exclusion in Nuclear Decision-Making (London: Earthscan, 2011).

9 Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Chapter 3.

10 Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience, Chapter 1. The temptation to dismiss this logic as reformist or co-opted must be resisted. A similar attitude would have led to the dismissal of the struggles of the early labor movement. The problem of reform versus revolution only arises in what Lukács called the period of the “actuality of the revolution.” We are not there. Here is how J. M. Bernstein makes a similar point: “I argue that the best we can hope for … is that rationalizing processes are repeatedly challenged and transformed by social practices that create havens of symbolic renewal … that nonetheless cannot themselves be fully incorporated into those rationalized systems. Hence, the suggestion is, rather than looking for rational, stable, and systematically reproducible social forms … we should be operating with a suitably adjusted anti-utopian (albeit thereby utopian) conflict model of ethics and society.” J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 19 n33. It is noteworthy that Lukács called his own approach a “post-utopian attitude to history” (HCC, 78).

11 Francis Bacon, “Aphorisms Concerning the Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of Man,” in E. A. Burtt, ed., The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill (New York: Modern Library, 1939), 28.

12 Ian Angus, Primal Scenes of Communication (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), 5.

13 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 1997), 47.

14 D. T. Suzuki, “Zen and Swordsmanship I,” in D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton, NJ: Bollingen, 1959), 91–2.

15 Frank Lloyd Wright translated this idea of borrowed scenery into modern architecture. For the influence of this idea on Wright, see Anna Whitsun, “Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect of Landscape (Part II),” Frank Lloyd Wright Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4, (Fall 2000), 4–25.

16 Marx, ‘‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction,’’ 257–8.

17 On the concept of limit (peras), see Feenberg, Between Reason and Experience, 191, 213–15.

18 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 149–50.

19 Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 55.

20 Feenberg, Transforming Technology, Chapter 2.