Exploration of ideas is part and parcel of the process by which the social field is gradually transformed

On May 4, 2007 at 3:45 pm larvalsubjects Said: Rich, I’m on the same page with you with the need for a closer relationship to fact or the world. I think this is a problem across the board in continentally influenced forms of theory, whether we’re talking about literary theory, political theory, philosophy, and so on. Often I find myself reading texts that are pervaded by some grand vision of revolutionary political transformation and I find myself thinking of my neighbors, my students, family members, existing infrastructure, etc., and I just wonder how such a grand vision can even be enacted concretely in practice. I then find myself suspecting that these political theories are more about ego and being superior, than about enacting any sort of real world change and are more about shoring up one’s academic standing and cred than the world.

If theory isn’t working from the concreteness of a situation, then I just don’t see what good it can be. I think Marx was working from the concreteness of his situation. Throughout his work he shows a sensitivity to reigning historical conditions and the potentialities within those historical conditions. Somehow much of that seems to have been lost in many quarters. To make matters worse, we now get macho heroic visions of political engagement vis a vis the likes of Zizek and Badiou, preaching dogmatic commitment hell or highwater, but we’re given little that is concrete as to what is to be done, just platitudes about fidelity. Chances are the reason for this is that, well, details are boring.

With that said, I wonder if your perspective here isn’t a bit myopic. Ideas effect change in the world too. While it’s difficult to directly demonstrate the relationship between transformations in ideas and transformations in political and economic structures, certainly these intellectual transformations produced through writing and teaching play a deeply important role in historical dynamics, no? The work of the Rennaissance humanists and their return to antiquity in the form of the Greeks and the Romans wasn’t directly political (mostly the continued to accept the authority of the church and its twin the monarchy), but the cultivation of this new conception of the human being as a free and reasonable being that cultivates itself is what allowed for the Enlightenment conception of the social and humanity that did yield massive political transformations. And so on with the rise of Marxist thought out of the Enlightenment, etc. In my view, then, the exploration of ideas is part and parcel of the process by which the social field is gradually transformed, allowing for new possibilities to emerge that are not yet present.

larvalsubjects Says: April 13th, 2007 at 10:21 pm Great post. This seems to be taking place in political theory as well, where each text you read leaves you wondering if there isn’t some hidden trap in it that you’ve missed constituting some reactive core… Or maybe I’ve just read too much Zizek and been submitted to too many clever twists showing how what is up is down and what is left is right, and now suffer from a sort of post-traumatic Zizek syndrom where I find myself second-guessing everything.

Maybe you could say a little bit more about what you take “American civil religion” to be. It sounds like one of your primary concerns here is American exceptionalism and the way this has increasingly become tied to certain strains of American religiosity. Difference and Givenness Levi Bryant