Political Theory

H11(c) - Reimagining Critique: Utopia, Praxis, and Reason

Date: Jun 4 | Time: 10:15am to 11:45am | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : Michael Ziegler (University of Western Ontario)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Michael Ziegler (University of Western Ontario)

Democracy and Damaged Life: On the Dialectics of Praxis and Critique: Matthew Hamilton (University of Winnipeg)
Abstract: The critical philosophy of Theodor Adorno, notorious for its difficulty and often poorly understood, has been the target of a series of influential criticisms which have all pointed to his failure to provide an adequate account of (revolutionary or democratic) praxis. In Part I of the paper, I reconstruct the constellation of concepts at work in Adorno’s negative dialectics (natural-history; preponderance of ‘the object’; guilt of the non-identical) that led him, to the rightful dissatisfaction of his critics, to denounce “pseudo-activity” and to proclaim (revolutionary) “praxis is blocked.” The purpose of this reconstruction is twofold: 1) to reframe the discussion of Adorno’s relation to politics by thematizing the predicament at the heart of negative dialectics: the constitutive unintelligibility of domination and the obstacles this presents to those who seek to contest it; 2) to demonstrate the necessary idealist/ideological consequences that derive from side-stepping this predicament (the assumption of deliberative democracy that problems of domination can be satisfactorily addressed via communicative power; the radical democratic axiom that marginalized actors already posses the capability of transforming inegalitarian orders). In Part II, I argue that Adorno draws the wrong conclusion (‘praxis is blocked’) from the right account of the predicament of praxis (the dialectical dependence of praxis on the conditions it both makes yet is called upon to resist). I conclude by presenting an alternative synthesis of critique of radical democracy – one that undoes the uncritical (undialectical) stopping points of both Adorno and his democratic critics – condensed in the image of damaged praxis (a counter-concept to Habermas’s image of his ideal speech situation as ‘undamaged intersubjectivity’).

The Inverted Panopticon: The Ontological Implications of Jeremy Bentham’s “Psychological Dynamics”: Tom McDowell (Toronto Metropolitan University)
Abstract: This paper advances the claim that Jeremy Bentham’s self-preference principle (SPP) caused him to break from his earlier ontological individualism in his mature thought toward a theory of social ontology. As a universal axiom explaining behaviour across all times and places, the SPP unified the individual and society within a single theory of “psychological dynamics” linked to one’s role within a structural and institutional context. Individuals are understood to shape their mode of being through their concrete engagement with a community’s social structures, institutions, customs, and categories. This perspective led Bentham to develop an institutional/social theory of ontology, in which the self-making logic of the panopticon is inverted and applied to society as a whole, placing rulers and public officials under continual scrutiny through a system of representative democracy. Viewed from this perspective, Bentham serves as a bridge between Enlightenment-era classical liberalism and modern liberalism, marking a shift from individual-centered views to a more complex theory of subjectivity.

The Normativity of Utopia: Critical Theory and Levitas’s “Utopia as Method”: Thilo Schaefer (University of Toronto), Margaret (Peggy) Kohn (University of Toronto)
Abstract: There is a rich tradition in the history of political thought of using stories of fictional, idealized societies to explore social problems and imagine possible solutions. Yet, as Rainer Forst explains, this large and important body of ‘utopian’ literature has been marginalized in the contemporary study of political theory and political philosophy. Looking to this tradition, and especially to Thomas More’s "Utopia", Forst explains how utopian literature expresses a unique form of critical ‘double normativity’: utopias denaturalize the practices and institutions of the present while also making clear that the imagined alternative society is itself deeply flawed. Ruth Levitas, one of the leading scholars of utopia, reconstructs this utopian normativity in a way that is not tied to a particular literary style. Levitas argues that utopianism should be understood as a ‘method’ of political and sociological analysis. This method involves critically analyzing existing social norms and institutions, constructing imagined alternatives that appear preferable, and then comparing these imagined alternatives to the present and to each other. This provisional and self-reflexive methodology strongly resembles critical theory. In “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Horkheimer argues that the distinguishing purpose of critical theory is social transformation. Yet, Horkheimer came to reject utopia for what he perceived as its latent authoritarianism. By analyzing the arguments of Forst and Levitas, this paper explains how critical theory can approach utopia while maintaining its provisional and self-reflexive character.

The Difference Reason Makes: Adorno, Foucault, and Critique: Omar Garcia (University of Toronto), Peggy Kohn (University of Toronto)
Abstract: This paper examines the critical enterprises of Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault. It challenges some recent trends in the scholarship that suggest that their perspectives participate in a common critical enterprise, broadly construed, and that these can be mobilized jointly. The paper makes the case that while their descriptive or diagnostic accounts of modern forms of domination are organized around common themes, their divergent methodological and substantive approaches to the role of reason, the philosophy of history, and the ideal of truth in the conduct of critique place decisive limits on efforts to pair their works together as a common critical resource. The paper then mobilizes Adornian insights to interrogate the kind of fluid power relations that Foucault suggests should be the goal of an emancipatory politics, suggesting that, absent an evaluative standard in which to ground his propositions, a Foucauldian approach cannot offer resources with which to judge between better and worse kinds of power relations, no matter how fluid these might be.