I take it whatever our politics, in the narrow party or factional sense, socialists can agree that what we must be about today is the building of a movement for socialism – in which socialism wins a cultural-intellectual hegemony, so that it becomes the enlightened common-sense of our age.

He adds that this project requires a philosophical basis,

We need to take philosophy seriously because it is the discipline that has traditionally underwritten both what constitutes science or knowledge and which political practices are deemed legitimate.

Finally, he leads up to the point at hand:

But they [critical realists] hold that we will only be able to understand – and so change – the social world if we identify the structures at work that generate those events or discourses. Such structures are irreducible to the patterns of events and discourses alike. These structures are not spontaneously apparent in the observable pattern of events; they can only be identified through the practical and theoretical work of the social sciences.

For the most part I’m with him. I’m even willing to overlook the strange locutions such as “among radical-chic intellectuals the dominant intellectual ‘fashionmeter’…”. But, where I get confused is when he says things – based on the foundation laid above – like “projects of human self-emancipation.” What could it possibly mean to speak of contrasting terms, like “non-human other-emancipation”? Perhaps Carl Schmitt’s space invaders are here to liberate us rather than to enslave us?

Here’s a short piece from the new Althusser, about America and trains.

Portrait of the Materialist Philosopher

[290] The man’s age doesn’t matter. He can be very old or very young. The important thing is that he doesn’t know where he is, and wants to go somewhere. That’s why he always catches a moving train, the way they do in American Westerns. Without knowing where he comes from (origin) or where he’s going (goal). And he gets off somewhere along the way, in a four-horse town with a ridiculous train station in the middle of it.

Saloon, beer, whisky. ‘Where d’ya hail from, bud?’ ‘From a long ways off.’ ‘Where ya headed?’ ‘Dunno!’ ‘Might have some work for ya.’ ‘Okay.’

And so our friend Nikos goes to work. He’s a Greek by birth who has immigrated to the USA like so many others before him, and he doesn’t have a penny in his pockets. He works hard and, a year later, marries the prettiest girl in town. He scrapes together a little stake and buys the first cattle in his herd. Thanks to his intelligence and knack for picking out young livestock (horses, cattle), he ends up with the best bunch of animals around – after ten years of hard work.

The best bunch of animals = the best bunch of categories and concepts. He competes with other landowners, but peacefully. Everyone admits that he’s the best and that his categories and concepts (his herd) are the best. His reputation spreads throughout the West, and then the whole country.

[291] From time to time, he catches the moving train in order to see, talk, listen – like Gorbachev in the streets of Moscow. Besides, one an catch the train wherever one happens to be!

More popular than anyone else, he could be elected to the White House, although he started out from nothing. But no, he’d rather travel, go out and walk the streets; that’s how one comes to understand the true philosophy, the one that people have in their heads and that is always contradictory.

This is when he reads the Hindus and the Chinese (Zen), as well as Machiavelli, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Cavailles, Canguilheim, Vuillemin, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and so on. Thus, without having intended to, he comes a quasi-professional materialist philosopher – not that horror, a dialectical materialist, but an aleatory materialist.

He attains the level of classical wisdom, Spinoza’s third kind of ‘knowledge’, Nietzsche’s superman, and an understanding of eternal return: viz., that everything is repeated and exists only through differential repetition. Now he can engage in discussions with the great idealists. He not only understands them, but also explains the reasons for their theses to them! The others sometimes come round to his views with great bitterness, but after all,

Amicus Plato, magis amica Veritas!

The inability to grasp in thought the unity of theory and practice and the limitation of the concept of necessity to inevitable events are both due, from the viewpoint of theory of knowledge, to the Cartesian dualism of thought and being. That dualism is congenial both to nature and to bourgeois society in so far as the latter resembles a natural mechanism. The idea of a theory which becomes a genuine force, consisting in the self-awareness of the subjects of a great historical revolution, is beyond the grasp of a mentality typified by such a dualism. If scholars do not merely think about such a dualism but really take it seriously, they cannot act independently. In keeping with their own way of thinking, they can put into practice only what the closed causal system of reality determines them to do, or they count only as individual units in a statistic for which the individual unit really has no significance. As ratiaonal beings they are helpless and isolated. The realization that such a state of affairs exists is indeed a step towards changing it, but unfortunately the situation enters bourgeois awareness only in a metaphysical, ahistorical shape. In the form of a faith in the unchangeableness of the social structure it dominates the present. Reflecting on themselves men see themselves only as onlookers, passive participants in a mighty process which may be forseen but no modified. Necessity for them refers not to events which man masters to his own purposes but only to events which he anticipates as probable. Where the interconnection of willing and thinking, thought and action is admitted as in many sectors of the most recent sociology, it is seen only as adding to that objective complexity which the observer must take into account. The thinker must relate all the theories which are proposed to the practical attitudes and social strata which they reflect. But he removes himself from the affair; he has no concern except — science.

The hostility to theory as such which prevails in contemporary public life is really directed against the transformative activity associated with critical thinking. Opposition starts as soon as theorists fail to limit themselves to verification and classification by means of categories which are as neutral as possible, that is, categories which are indispensable to inherited ways of life. Among the vast majority of the ruled there is the unconscious fear that theoretical thinking might show their painfully won adaptation to reality to be perverse and unnecessary. Those who profit from the status quo entertain a general suspicion of any intellectual independence. The tendency to conceive theory as the opposite of a positive outlook is so strong that even the inoffensive traditional type of theory suffers from it at times. Since the most advanced form of thought at present is the critical theory of society and every consistent intellectual movement that cares about man converges upon it by its own inner logic, theory in general falls into disrepute. Every other kind of scientific statement which does not offer a deposit of facts in the most familiar categories and, if possible, in the most neutral form, the mathematical, is already accused of being theoretical.

The “preliminaries” section is designed as an introduction to (1) the invention of sociology and social theory, (2) the Enlightenment and modernity, (3) traditional and critical theory, (4) realism and the dialectic, (5) perspectivism and genealogy. The boundaries are, of course, largely artificial — why, for instance, include perspectivism with genealogy and not with dialectics? A matter of convenience.

The question I’ve arrived at runs mostly as follows: it seems that most people agree that critical theory in some sense ‘produces knowledge’. “On the Materialist Dialectic,” for instance, is a meta-theoretical model for the production of knowledge. Here, in Althusser’s approach, Generalities III (new knowledge) are produced by the work of Generalities II (models, theories) on Generalities I (the raw material of knowledge). Essentially, in the first instance, ideology is transformed into science and then, in the next instance, science is distilled and made more pure. Largely, the issue is one of a veridical discourse that takes the form of constantly purging error. In a sense, the problematic of science isn’t so much the production of new knowledge, but the elimination of erroneous knowledge.

We can see how this works in a more formalized science, such as physics or mathematics. It isn’t so clear, however, how the social sciences produce knowledge. As far as I can tell, no one I know is actively attempting to eliminate error for the sociological corpus. Sociology doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing in which truth is produced or error found. At the very least, traditional social science is a normalizing discourse — that is, it isn’t coincidental that the bell curve holds a privileged place in sociology.

While Habermas hates “poststructuralism” and “postmdernism” because, essentially, they are in his eyes “Nietzschean” or “crypto-normative”, I hate Habermas — or, at least, his work — because it is so pedantic and scholastic.

My goal for this afternoon was to read a significant chunk of On the Logic of the Social Sciences; I have, as of yet, made it a full seven pages into the book. Tortuous prose. Infinite digressions into the needlessly obscure. And then, what does he say? Essentially, “Well, really, we didn’t need to do all this. People aren’t neo-Kantians anymore. And, besides, most can’t even spell Rickert’s name.”

Section 1.2, however, begins with a neo-Kantian, viz, Ernst Cassirer. I’m sure it will end in the same way. “No need to have done this. People haven’t ever been and won’t ever be Cassirerian. They likely couldn’t find his books in the library.”

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy digression, detail and the obscure. I don’t, however, appreciate the scholastic pedantry of a pompous liberal who writes in the most turgid of Germanic prose.

And (finally!) a chunk from my second comprehensive examination entitled “Being Critical”. I’ve opted to do the second exam as “syllabus”, which is intended to (1) expedit the process of completing the examinations compared to writing a research paper and (2) force the student to have a “teachable” at the “senior undergraduate” level. This chunk is the “syllabus” part. Next I have to write the “academic rationale” (an introduction to administrative procedure?) and “the complete text of the final lecture” (an introduction to publishing what you’ve already said to hundreds of undergraduates). Incidentally, this is my first attempt at designing an “original” course. The course itself has a highly original title: “Advanced Introduction to Critical Social Theory”. Not that I intend to teach this (or anything else!) in the near future. [pdf]

Reflecting on the attempt to design the syllabus, it is surprisingly difficult to come up with (1) a topic for each week that (2) fits into a two or three hour lecture and (3) that has a reasonable amount of reading. I decided that for senior undergraduate students taking an elective that, on average, one and fifty pages isn’t too much to ask. Some weeks (collapsing Zizek and Deleuze into one week!? or realist epistemology!) are harder than others (say, The Second Sex — I’m not cruel enough to assign (in a fake course!) Hegel’s master/slave dialectic and Kojeve’s reading of it).

I’ve said it before a number of times, but I hope to have the essay on ‘the political and the social’ (my first comprehensive) finished one of these days. Problem is, in retrospect I don’t like much of what I’ve written! Not especially surprising, of course. Who actually likes what they write? Especially in retrospect?

The manual for the doctoral programme in sociology at York University defines the meaning and intent of the comprehensive examinations as follows:

The comprehensives are intended to prepare the student for the dissertation, to do research and to teach in a field. Outside the structure of a course, the comprehensive provides the student with the challenge of examining and synthesizing a body of theory, and usually related empirical research. Comprehensiveness in a field combines breadth, depth and synthetic ability, without necessarily entailing exhaustive knowledge of the field. Students are expected to have a broad understanding of the major theoretical perspectives in the field and key debates. In most fields, comprehensiveness also requires a good knowledge of the alternative approaches relevant to empirical research, key findings and their interpretation in relation to theoretical approaches, and gaps in current research.

The tasks I have set out for myself in my second comprehensive examination is to take up the question of contemporary attempts to articulate a “critical social science” in light of “critical social theory”. By my reading, this entails a number of separate, yet related, activities:

• develop a coherent understanding of the meaning of ‘critical’, especially in relation to ‘theory’ (“What is critical theory?”)
• articulate the difference between a ‘traditional social science’ and ‘critical social science’ (“What is social science?”)
• define the object of ‘social science’ (“What is the social?”)
• explain why it matters if social science is ‘traditional’ or ‘critical’ (“Why does this matter?”)
• the relation of the investigator to their object (“What is being critical?”)

In my view, one of the best ways to do such an activity is to re-apprehend to so-called ‘classical’ and ‘formative’ texts of social science (i.e., sociology) in light of recent work in social theory and the philosophy of social science. Such a move enables one to compare the result of the ‘application’ of contemporary critical approaches to classical texts with what emerges from the account given in traditional social science.

A tentative reading list is appended below.

Althusser, Louis (1998) “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy” and “The Object of Capital” in Reading Capital. London: Verso.

Althusser, Louis (1969) “Contradiction and Overdetermination” and “On the Materialist Dialectic” in For Marx. London: Penguin.

Arendt, Hannah (1998) The Human Condition, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bhaskar, Roy (1989) Reclaiming Reality. London: Verso.

Bourdieu, Pierre (2000) Pascalian Meditations. Stanford: Stanford UP.

Bourdieu, Pierre (2004) Science of Science and Reflexivity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre (2005) The Social Structures of the Economy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Durkheim, Emile (1997) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.

Durkheim, Emile (1982) The Rules of the Sociological Method. New York: Free Press.

Durkheim, Emile (1997) The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Free Press.

Foucault, Michel (1994) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault, Michel (2002) The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge.

Habermas, Jurgen (1987) “The Uncoupling of System and Lifeworld” and “The Tasks of a Critical Theory of Society” in Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System. Boston: Beacon Press.

Habermas, Jurgen (1988) On the Logic of the Social Sciences. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Hacking, Ian (1975) The Emergence of Probability. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP.

Hacking, Ian (1990) The Taming of Chance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP.

Heidegger, Martin (1977) “Science and Reflection” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row.

Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno (2002) “The Concept of Enlightenment” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum.

Horkheimer, Max (1998) “What is Critical Theory?” in Critical Theory. New York: Continuum.

Kant, Immanuel (1970) “On the Common Saying: ‘This May Be True In Theory, But It Does Not Apply In Practice” in Political Writings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP.

Marx, Karl (1992) Capital, vol. 1. New York: Penguin.

Marx, Karl (1964) “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” in Early Writings. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Marx, Karl (1973) Grundrisse. New York: Penguin.

Mills, C. Wright (2000) The Sociological Imagination. Oxford UP.

Parsons, Talcott (1964) “The Present Position and Prospects of Systematic Theory in Sociology” and “The Prospects of Social Theory” in Essays in Sociological Theory. New York: Free Press.

Simmel, Georg (1990) The Philosophy of Money. New York: Routledge.

Tonnies, Ferdinand (1988) Community and Society. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Weber, Max (1978) “Basic Sociological Concepts” in Economy & Society, vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Weber, Max (1949) Methodology of the Social Sciences. New York: Free Press.

Weber, Max (2001) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Routledge.

Zizek, Slavoj (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

Zizek, Slavoj (2002) “Forward to the Second Edition” in For They Know Not What They Do, 2nd ed. London: Verso.